A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic

For Jim, who has never expected anything less than bravery.

For Roz, without whom this book would not be.

For Livia: Go forth.

And for Dad, in fond remembrance of our own real-life Antarctic adventure.

ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION FEARED LOST!

Staff Editorial, London Daily Times

1 November 1914

Amidst the carnage of the Great War, another strike against hope: Sir Douglas Henderson’s much-anticipated crossing of the Antarctic continent is presumed doomed, with all crew members assumed deceased. As there has been no communication from the expedition ship The Resolute since mid-October, one must assume the worst.

The news from the expedition was already bleak, with colder-than-usual temperatures in the Antarctic spring setting the timeline back by weeks. The ship became locked in sea ice a mere hundred miles from their desired destination on the Antarctic continent. Then the oil for the engines that were meant to propel the expedition sledges across Sir Douglas’s beloved Blue Continent was reported hopelessly frozen, rendering the sledges useless even if the crew could manage to make shore. Who knows what other bad luck has befallen the expedition since it last sent word?

Among the missing crew is Canadian Clara Ketterling-Dunbar, the only woman on crew and first-ever woman on any polar expedition. This newspaper has found fact that she is a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union, that group of dangerous suffragettes angling for a voice in what is rightfully a man’s world!

Sir Douglas would have been well advised to not overlook the old truism that women on board are bad luck to begin with.

Imperial Cross-Antarctic Expedition, 1914

Diary of Clara Ketterling-Dunbar

18 November 1914

(Day two marooned on the ice.)

Wind E x SE. Visibility good.

Biscuits and berry preserves for breakfast.

Patience poker with Higgins.

Read some of R volume of encyclopaedia.

Two days since the sinking of The Resolute, and already there is the frisson of panic among our crew, only barely masqueraded by light boredom. The Boss says we must wait until some leads open up for our lifeboats to make a move, but all around there is nothing but solid ice, interrupted by more ice: ridges, hummocks, and hillocks.

19 November 1914

(Day three marooned on the ice.)

Winds calm. Visibility middling.

Tinned ham, tinned peas for dinner. Tinned Victoria sponge for pudding. No. Not really. In my admittedly limited knowledge, no one has yet invented tinned Victoria sponge.

Surely, the leads will open as we head into the Antarctic summer. But Wilson says this is the coldest year yet. He is not hopeful.

Spoke briefly to Figgy whilst between chores.

Figgy: We’re doomed, aren’t we?

Me, fighting down my own panic, loudly: Don’t be ridiculous.

Figgy, staring angrily all around him, flinging arms up in the air: Ugh! What would a woman know about an expedition, anyway?

What he doesn’t know is that I can’t ever betray the extent of my fear.

Never was a wide open space so terrifying.

20 November 1914

(Day four marooned.)

Winds easterly. Floe is, damn it all to hell, holding very firm.

Predict will be here for some time yet—not even the tiniest lead to be seen anywhere.

Trying to keep my counsel, because God knows what would happen if the crew saw a woman getting hysterical.

21 November 1914

(Day five marooned.)

If one is to keep a diary, one must ensure that it will be of use to someone. Billings is already keeping the wind log; Wilson is tracking the floe; Higgins is still taking pictures despite the fact that many of his glass lantern plates are God knows where on the seabed of the Weddell by now; Givens is painting pictures, just in case Higgins runs out of film, and also for those patrons of the expedition who would rather look at paintings than photographs or glass lantern slides; Cook has all his recipes written down. Whatever is the point of one more voice among the many?

Perhaps a new project will distract me from my rising fear.

Hang it all; diaries be damned; I am now writing:

A SUFFRAGIST’S GUIDE TO ANTARCTICA.

Hello. I am Clara Ketterling-Dunbar, and I’ll be your guide through the Antarctic. I am one of twenty-eight crew members of The Resolute, rest her mast and timbers, and I write to you from a for-now-warmish tent sat on a large ice floe roughly one hundred miles from the shore of the Antarctic continent itself. I am American. I am eighteen, although I have told the crew I am twenty-one. This is the first time I have admitted these two facts on the page.

Of the crew, only The Boss and MacTavish know of my origins. Everyone else believes me to be Canadian; the sentiment toward Americans is not of the most favorable caliber, shall we say. And, probably most importantly, no one knows much of my activities in England before we embarked on this accursed expedition.

I am far too aware of everyone’s feelings toward Americans; much as we have dragged our feet in getting women the vote, we have also shamefully been incapable of providing leadership in the Great War, which, so far as we know, is either still ongoing or has ended in the time since we have been away from civilization—and therefore, from most news of the world apart from what we were able to receive on our wireless before we went out of range. We had just pulled away from Liverpool when the order came for England to go to war; pulling into Portsmouth we had readied the ship to be turned over to war concerns, but the King himself encouraged us to proceed for God and Country.

(I am still parsing this; for the life of my American soul, I cannot quite comprehend the import this seems to carry for everyone else on this ship. Even our Aussie, Higgins, seems besotted with the phrase, although he’s just as likely to use it when he wins a poker hand as he is for matters as weighty as world war.)

One day soon I hope this will actually be a guide to Antarctica for women. For now, we may generously refer to it as a guide to the Antarctic area, as our expedition has yet to reach our goal of the Antarctic continent. One mustn’t be too fussy when one is talking in such grand scales: Antarctica is a very, very large place, expanding and shrinking according to the whims of the ice pack and floes clustering near its shoreline.

Our ship’s geologist, Wilson, would argue with me here. He would say land is land and should not be confused with ice, but I much rather prefer the imagery of a place breathing and growing and shrinking with the seasons. Anyway, this is not a geologist’s guide.

Antarctica is so large, in fact, that we had planned to take four whole months to walk from shore to South Pole, where we would meet another crew and restock our rations and then all together complete the trek across the continent, but our lack of ship seems to have scuppered that plan. I hope our other crew will not hang about too long, like a sad suitor waiting for a date that will never come.

I digress. Let me begin by saying that, should this diary be found without me, you would do well to disregard everything before this entry. What comes before now seems to my eyes to be a hackneyed, homely recounting of life aboard The Resolute. Plenty of other diaries on this expedition will recount the card games, our monthly haircutting nights, the lantern-shows of life in exotic locales….

From here on in I will endeavor to provide you with an honest recounting of everything you need to know to survive here.

Let us begin with the most important item of all.

The Ship.

Ours is called The Resolute. Although she has left us for her watery grave, I will speak of her in the present tense, because I do not much feel like admitting her departure.

Your ship is your home. Treat her well. Her various parts will become living room, sitting room, bunks. Her decks may become gaming areas on the days, say, when one is locked in ice and cannot go anywhere. Her decks are also housing for our many, many dogs, which I will come to a little later.

We are now six days on the ice, since our Resolute went down, and I fear I will never be able to unhear the shrieking and groaning of her keel as it was slowly crushed by sea ice, the booming cracks of her hull as great shards of floe pressed their ways into her belly. It resonates in my sleep.

Oh, I’ll never forget it. As our beautiful barquentine—our home for the last four months—went down, the ice floes that had worked so hard to stave in her hull just closed over where she’d gone down, knocking against one another like so many dominoes, as if they’d finally defeated their nemesis and were celebrating. The gently rippling water made it apparent there would be nothing left to mark that she’d been there, that she’d protected us from the elements so gracefully, without asking anything in return but that we take care of her.

I am reminded of our rage, in the days after our letter box–bombing campaign, to see no coverage in the press whatsoever: so much had happened, and yet, there seemed to be no evidence of our actions. Everything seems fruitless then, doesn’t it, if there is no public record? It would be weeks yet before we heard from a well-placed source that Parliament had gone so far as to direct the press to delay all mention of the actions of the suffrage movement whilst they gauged our impact; it was a far cry from the days when we were press darlings—a most abrupt, unwelcome shift. (Is it churlish for me to want the battle for women’s rights to have just as much coverage as impending war? Is it not, after all, a civil war of sorts?)

I stayed to watch the place where The Resolute had gone down for some time, even when the floes stopped making their eerie racket and had gone on to float placidly, in desultory fashion, to other waters. I wanted to somehow mark with my eye—take a picture with my memory, as Mama has encouraged me to do so many times—of the place where our home had gone down. But of course, water does not allow for that. Everywhere one looks it is the same now; the patterns in the floes move constantly, and if you take your eyes off a spot for just one second, you cannot find where you were looking again.

I must leave this for later. Cook is calling for me.

(Nota bene: Cook stomps everywhere, such that we joke that he may one day posthole himself into the water, and then where would we be? Time for dinner, Clara, is his normal call, followed closely by, Come help me with the biscuits? as if he is asking, but we all know by now that he isn’t asking. Cook does not ask when it comes to matters of the stove.)

Biscuit duty calls, damn the biscuits. I am weary of them.

22 November 1914

I feel a renewed sense of purpose upon recasting this diary as something useful. May it prove of service to any woman who comes after me. Let me resume with some good information about some of the people you may encounter on the ice.

Your expedition boss. We actually do call ours The Boss, but your moniker may vary depending on your feelings. Ours obviously also has a Christian name; he is called Douglas Henderson, and he speaks not very much and moves like silk. One can never hear him coming. Extent of this trait yet to be fully gauged, as everything sounds louder on the ice, out in the open.

When The Boss speaks, one pays attention. Your expedition leader will likely command the same attention, although this may be entirely due to his—or her!—level of experience and the British love of all things hierarchy. Ours has been to the Antarctic twice and the Arctic once, twice as assistant expedition leader and once as expedition leader. No word on what qualifies one to be an assistant or leader. One does not ask such questions. Indeed, if one is to believe the seasoned members of the crew, one should never have a need to ask questions of The Boss, ever.

This is familiar territory. At the Women’s Social and Political Union, Emmeline Pankhurst, the founder of the organization and until recently my hero in all matters suffrage, would have nothing other than total obedience to her methods, which made her unilateral decision to lay down arms in favor of serving the British war effort truly infuriating. You can see how a young woman could be so frustrated that she signs on to a cockamamie expedition to the Antarctic!

But I digress. We are still speaking of bosses and their usefulness.

I don’t yet know if The Boss’s apt command of our crew is due to his style of delivery or his message. The Boss’s favorite message to me is Leave it, Clara. He delivers this command quietly but sternly, as he does most of his commands. It comes out of the side of his mouth, like I’m a toddler underfoot and he can only be half-bothered to address me. The first time he did it, I had to pause to make sure I had heard correctly. It had been some time since I let anybody talk to me like that, and he had that pipe sticking out of the side of his face, so I didn’t truly believe he’d said it. But then he beetled his eyebrows and took the pipe out of his mouth and said it again, clear as crystal glasses: "Leave it, Clara."

Well, I blushed clean to the roots of my hair, which was unfortunate. I always blush when I’m angry, and everyone mistakes it for something other than what it is. Tate, who was standing nearby when it happened that first time, turned his head away, like he couldn’t stand to see me blushing. Good man, that Tate. The suffragists would have liked him. They’d have called him sympathetic, and for a man, that’s the highest praise one can give.

I remember very clearly what I did that first time to make The Boss tell me to leave it. We were on the deck of The Resolute, although really, where else would we be?

Figgy was making an absolute shit of getting the dogs squared away in their kennels for our voyage. How hard can it be? The dogs have different faces, different bodies, different moods even, and you can tell them apart like day and night, but there was Figgy, looking at the names painted above the kennels and vainly trying to search in the dogs’ shaggy scruffs for the names stitched onto their collars, all while they nuzzled and yipped and made their racket.

I was coiling up the ropes then, and I watched him glancing back and forth, back and forth, until I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

I dropped the end of the rope midcoil and was about to go over and just do it for him, and that’s when The Boss said it. Leave it, Clara.

I jumped. The man moves so quietly. If you’re lucky you’ll catch a whiff of his pipe before he gets to you; it’s the best way to tell when he’s near. I stared at him for a second, and that’s when he said it again, unmistakable.

By then I’d figured out that one does not cross The Boss without very good reason, so I went back to working the rope. Ever since then, his voice rings in my head whenever I think of taking something into my own hands. Leave it. I bite the inside of my cheek and think quick of something workmanlike to distract myself with.

The second time it happened, watch was changing over and I was frustrated at having to actually go wake up the next watchmen. The third time, it was my turn at poker and I’d already lost two lumps of sugar and a chocolate square to squirrely old Cook and our keen carpenter, Amos, respectively, and I believe I may have been thinking of accusing one of them of cheating. The fourth through nineteenth, who knows what I turned back to? It hardly matters.

The last time it happened was when our Resolute was cracking up. Wood was splitting right below our feet; we could feel it through our soles. We were all passing boxes in a line so they could be dropped over the side and down the chute Marvin and Hayes had rigged up at the side of the ship, and then I remembered the glass lantern plates Higgins had brought down to The Ritz for an evening’s entertainment just a few days before the very cold snap, before the ice started growing, like the devilish beast it is, and closing in on us. (In those fraught days, The Ritz went from being just a place we gathered in the belly of The Resolute to a place of great comfort and even joy. How I wish we could recreate it on the ice!)

I stepped out of line to go fetch them, and wouldn’t you know it, The Boss was right there. Leave it, Clara.

But Boss, Higgins’s plates…

He shook his great shaggy head. None of us had had a haircut in some time. Everyone had been worried The Resolute would crack, and one does not want any of your mates near your head with shears when they are on edge. Whatever it is, leave it. You shouldn’t abandon your place.

Sure enough, the line had backed up. To my left, Per was piled up with three boxes already, since the men on his left hadn’t quite noticed I’d left the queue. And to my right, Hotchkiss was sniggering, like he couldn’t wait to blame the breakdown of our operations on me or Per. Really, Hotchkiss would blame anything on anyone else. He’s that kind of man. But he’d have been right to blame it on me, so I stepped back into line then.

I still think of those beautiful glass lantern slides, sitting in The Ritz, where we had our last joyful night within the embrace of our Resolute, slowly degrading in seawater, just waiting for someone to collect them.

Higgins tried to be cheerful about it, but I know he thinks of them too. A photographer, he told me, is the sum of his output. He has his camera still, but these particular slides were of back home in Australia, and I know he relished showing them and sharing a piece of his history with us.

I can leave it. I have had some practice since joining up with this lot. Why, just this morning, I have had to bite my tongue multiple times, as some of the men were arguing over who would get to read which volumes of the encyclopaedia. Twenty-eight crew members. Twenty-six volumes of the encyclopaedia. Surely not everyone wants to read at the same time, or even read Q or X at the same time, but it seems they are both very popular, perchance because they are short and interesting at the same time.

The Boss is calling a meeting. I hope it is to tell us what our literal next forward steps are. We have been living on the ice for near a week now, on a kind of semi-permanent knife’s edge as we speculate The Boss’s next move for us. Stern, our expedition’s second-in-command, reminds us that The Boss does nothing without deliberation, but this seems to be taking a little longer than one would expect.

23 November

On days when there’s very little wind and the blubber stove is belching black smoke into the air, I long for the open campfire Mama and I cooked over while we were camping.

Mama was perhaps unusual for her preferences whilst in the woods; where the fashion of the day was to bring as many accoutrements as might remind you of home, Mama chose always only to bring a frying pan and something to turn the fish and our forages with. She preferred even to not bring seasonings. She said the point of eating out-of-doors was to taste the flavor of the woods, the river, the earth. We only ever caught what we thought we could eat.

This is a good place to talk to you about rations, since The Boss has just now informed us that we are to be leaving some of ours behind for a hundreds-mile-long march to Paulet Island in a few weeks.

In truth, I was surprised at the kind of eating that was to be had on board a ship; I think I had prepared myself for biscuits, tinned gravy, and Kendal Mint Cake all the way, or something equally frugal. But our rations, up until fairly recently anyway, were something very closely approximating luxury, especially for life on an expedition. In fact, it’s better than Mama and I ate on our many, many camping trips, although there is so much to be said for fried brook trout over an open fire and wild garlic scapes. There had not been much hunting in our first two months on board, as we were busy sailing. Fishing has not been entirely worthy, especially in these very cold waters, and I think it is this aspect of meat that had me the most intrigued: To open the larder and see a vast wall of jugged hare, tinned hams, to say nothing of all