Hell with a Capital H - an Epic Story of Antarctic Survival: xv - Softcover

Katherine Lambert; Peter King

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0712679952 ISBN 13: 9780712679954

Publisher: Pimlico, 2002

Synopsis

On 29 March 1912, as Scott and his two companions lay dying in their tent, elsewhere on the polar ice-cap six members of his ill-fated expedition were fighting for their lives. This was the so-called Northern Party, hand-picked by Scott to undertake his most significant programme of scientific research. The unsung hero of this group was Dr Murray Levick, whose attention to diet and mental and physical fitness played a major part in their survival. The doctor was a sensitive recorder and a talented photographer, it is on his previously unpublished diaries, monographs, photographs and sketches that this book is based. The six men were landed by Terra Nova in January 1911 at Cape Adare, 450 miles north of Scott's base camp at Cape Evans. They spent nearly a year there, living in a rudimentary hut, surveying and collecting specimens from the beautiful but inhospitable bay and shoreline fringed by inaccessible mountains. They were then dropped off mid-way between the two Capes to continue their work. The ship was due to pick them up on 17 February 1912. A month later she still hadn't come, and the men were forced to face the Antarctic winter in an igloo dug out of a snowdrift on 'Inexpressible Island'. After spending six-and-a-half months entombed in their underground ice-cave,in conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship,

About this title

Review

"Hell with a Capital H is a wonderful book and the result of painstaking research. Katherine Lambert has produced a well-balanced analysis of Scott and of many of his expediiton team. The main focus of her gripping story centres on the horrendous tribulations of the isolated Northern Party. Better than any of the many Scott biographies I have read, this book brings out the real characters of the participants and the interplay between them as they dally in their icy and all but fatal Hell." (Ranulph Fiennes)

From the Author

‘Hell with a capital H’ is an adventure story, pure and simple. That it was not better known at the time – and in fact has been relegated in all books about Scott’s Last Expedition to a mere footnote – is pure bad luck. If Scott and his companions had survived, I believe that the officers and men of the Northern Party would have felt free to tell their story to their contemporaries in all its harrowing detail, and they might in their lifetimes have been folk heroes. As it was, they kept quiet or glossed over the horrors they had endured. Then, as the First World War unfolded, their adventures must have seemed paltry by comparison with the overwhelming tide of death and mutilation.

But looking back from a distance of some 90 years, their story still stands as a triumph of survival. Here were six men of very different rank, class and background. When they opted to join a polar expedition, they were already laying themselves open to experiences that would be wildly removed from their normal home and service lives. What they actually experienced in Antarctica was light years away even from that. Take diet for example – food at base camp or on sledging trips was inevitably monotonous, often unpalatable. Food in the igloo was always disgusting and occasionally life-threatening. Ditto hygiene, ditto exercise, ditto ‘social life’. All polar explorers of the period expected bouts of discomfort, pain and danger. The Northern Party experienced prolonged bouts of all three.

One recent example of incarceration and survival bears comparison. Peter Shaw has just made a dramatic escape from his Georgian captors. He had been kept, in truly appalling circumstances, for five months in a hole in the ground measuring 8 feet by 5 feet. Campbell, Levick, Priestley, Abbott, Browning and Dickason spent nearly seven months in an underground room measuring 9 ft by 12 (roughly the size of a billiard table). Although Shaw’s captivity was infinitely more brutal and brutalising, men with lesser reserves of mental toughness than those of the Northern Party might have been driven to madness, suicide or murder. At the end of it all they had to stagger 230miles back to a base camp they might very well have found abandoned. Scott’s strengths and weaknesses have been discussed endlessly since his death, but if six of the apparently perfectly ordinary men he was instrumental in picking could display such astonishing mental and physical reserves, it does vindicate at least one vital aspect of his leadership.

About this edition

• Publisher: Pimlico
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0712679952
• ISBN 13: 9780712679954
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224