In a word, we are trying to get away from the false standards by which men live under more civilized conditions. The Antarctic is a new world for all of us which requires its own
standards, and these are materially different from those set up in civilization, whereby we venerate prestige, influence and associated characteristics and ignore the inconspicuous, but equally valid properties. Now that vital
operations have ceased for the winter, the hand is quite as important as the brain, and the digging out of house entrances and windows after a storm, the care of fires, etc., are prime factors in keeping alive. They are the essential things. This fact I have tried to drive home, not always with success.
(...)
Because the sun would disappear in eight days, we decided to conserve daylight as much as possible. So at taps that night we ordered the clocks set ahead one hour. We had been operating
on 18oth Meridian Time, and by this device gained another hour of daylight. It was no doubt the first experiment with daylight saving time in the Antarctic.
The days shortened perceptibly, in spite of artificial opposition, and the twilights lengthened. There followed perhaps the most beautiful days of our visit. For as the sun rolled
lower and lower about the horizon, becoming a dull, red orb that gave off little heat, the hues in the sky deepened and became intensified, and a rain of radiant iridescence seemed to drop softly upon the chill gray of the
Barrier, warming and nourishing it into flame. It was a frigid world aflame with frigid colors. The cliffs surrendered none of their color as twilight approached, the somber sweep of Ross Sea none of
its darkness: and the effect of night marching over the scene was inexpressibly strange.
We last saw the sun on April 17th, but its beauty remained behind. Its official departure was not set until the 19th, but the following days were cloudy and we saw no more of it.
This last time it rolled like a burning disc around the northern horizon, touching off in a final burst of radiance the scene it would quit for four months. It poised for a while on the western horizon, and a long, tantalizing
twilight began to spread gray tendrils over the Barrier. Then it dipped suddenly below the horizon. An eruption of green, blue, red and yellow diffused the entire southern horizon, and stayed for
a time the descent of night. But night advanced with deepening power, and soon was in full sway of his empire.
That night the zenith was aflame with the aurora australis, the temperature dropped to 40° below, and from the bay came muffled explosions as from pistol shots, the sound of
ice contracting in the intense cold. We began a new and mysterious life. Until August 22nd, a pale moon would be our intermittent companion.
We fell into our new existence with little change and with little sense of change. We attained it imperceptibly. For many the gradually deepening cold and twilight slowly cut off
all outside venture. Lights burned all day. The windows, indeed the roofs, were covered with snow and the twilight that persisted for some days after the disappearance of the sun gave little light. Now that work had slackened,
we slipped into old habits and imposed them on the others. We evolved a routine.
For months and months we had planned how we should be prepared to endure the winter. It can be a dangerous thing to throw a number of men into an Antarctic winter, and let them work
out their own salvation. They may work together with perfect equanimity in the bright sun, when labor absorbs their energies and conditions allow them to withdraw to one side if some momentary incident happens to irritate
or discompose them. A wise man and a shrewd man can mask his real feelings, even his character, under such conditions. And he is assisted in the deception by the fact that his fellows have neither the time nor the desire to
penetrate the superficial. But the winter night will quickly expose all of us.
Escape, in the wider meaning of the word, is impossible. Except for a quick, freezing walk the four walls limit one’s world; and everything that one does, or says, or even
thinks, is of importance to one’s fellows. They are measuring you constantly, some openly, other::; secretly—there is so little else to do!—and with, ten, twenty, thirty and, in our case, forty-two personalities
of varying force in a state of flux, there must necessarily be impacts of a kind, not necessarily physical, but rather psychological. Deception, under these conditions, becomes impossible. Sooner or later the inner man comes
into the open. He is the man that is important. It is he who is judged. It is this inescapable process that makes the winter night terrible for some men. For them it can be purgatory.
Still another insidious quality lurks in the winter night. The Antarctic is the last stronghold of inertness. And it is the almost irresistible tendency of inertness to draw all
inorganic matter to itself. It is a phase of the whole cosmical process—the struggle between what is alive and what is dead, with life striving to extend itself into immortality, and inertness tending to pull all things
unto itself. On this continent, whence all life has been driven, save for a few very primitive or microscopic forms, inertia governs a vast empire. It has the power to subjugate those who do not arise to resist it; and men
who are limited and lazy, when denied free scope for the play of mind and body, find themselves slipping, as if drawn by centripetal action, into a dull, stupid, dispirited monotony.
Of course it is not a clear-cut thing. It is largely a condition of the mind. Certain men of a phlegmatic disposition can pass through such an experience with the facility of a duck
shedding water: it leaves no mark. But other men find it real and powerful. Each day becomes a struggle for control. And finally each hour.
There are no doubt many ways in which the winter night may be opposed, but we seized upon the most obvious and practical one. Of course it was our inevitable associate—work.
We gave him an ally, routine. These were our weapons, and I dare say we made effective use of them.
After all, it is not the Antarctic that is dangerous. It is the man, as nearly always, who makes it dangerous, through the natural expression of his vitality and his proneness to
err. Impatience increases the destructive power of the Antarctic; patience draws its claws. The uncertainty here, as elsewhere, only here to a greater degree, comes largely from man himself. Because he is impatient and self-assured,
he often steps beyond the limits suggested by prudence, and the blow falls.
At times it would seem that there is a malignant consciousness operating in that void, seeking man’s undoing. But it is only that men have over-estimated their capacity.
On the temple of Apollo at Delphi there is written: “Avoid excess in all things.” This we tried to impose as the guiding rule in everything. With that in mind, a definite
routine was established, and it became impossible for a man to eat, sleep, dawdle or work too much.
Failure to observe a routine is, I think, the cause of much of the unhappiness that overtakes a wintering expedition. Without it the days and nights lose their lines of divisions,
and the months prolong themselves into a monotonous, unending period.
Our days began promptly at 8 o’clock, once winter set in. At that hour Dr. Gould, with an unswerving fidelity to his office that was the despair of all, would lift a tousled
head from his bunk, and boom in a voice that must have awakened the sleeping walls: “All hands out for breakfast.” It was not compulsory that every one arise at that moment.
The bitter cold that seized the first bit of exposed flesh (the doors had not been long shut by the night watchman) was enough to cause the hardiest man to withdraw hastily into
the warmth of the sleeping bag again, to screw up courage for the final upheaval. But it behooved one to get up in a very few minutes, lest he give some malicious tormentor the opportunity of dumping him bodily from the sleeping
bag. Except with the hardier spirits, the morning wash was a very casual affair.
Breakfast was served on the dot of 8:30 o’clock, and here there was no compromise.
Richard Evelyn Bird Jr., Little America
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