The entry says that three eggs reached the hut on Mount Terror on 20 July 1911, that they were carried into the Natural History Museum in 1913, and that the first report on them was the opposite of what they had been collected to show. This piece follows the embryos through those first eleven years, in the words of the people who had charge of them. The Museum’s own report of 1934, and what has been learned since, are in Two shillings.

The plan, 1907

Edward Wilson’s report on the birds of the Discovery expedition was published by the British Museum in 1907 as part of the expedition’s Natural History volumes. Its account of the emperor penguin runs to some thirty pages, and the paragraph that set the winter journey in motion is this one, given here in full because the entry quotes only parts of it.

“The possibility that we have in the Emperor Penguin the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of a penguin, but of a bird, makes the future working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible importance. It was a great disappointment to us that although we discovered their breeding ground, and although we were able to bring home a number of deserted eggs and chicks, we were not able to procure a series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest can be worked out. To have done this in a proper manner from the spot at which the ‘Discovery’ wintered in McMurdo Sound would have involved us in endless difficulties, for it would have entailed the risks of sledge travelling in mid-winter with an almost total absence of light. It would at any time require that a party of three at least, with full camp equipment, should traverse about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface in the dark and should, by moonlight, cross over with rope and axe the immense pressure ridges which form a chaos of crevasses at Cape Crozier. These ridges, moreover, which have taken a party as much as two hours of careful work to cross by daylight, must be crossed and re-crossed at every visit to the breeding site in the bay. There is no possibility even by daylight of conveying over them the sledge or camping kit, and in the darkness of mid-winter the impracticability is still more obvious. Cape Crozier is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted, by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror, into a regular drifting blizzard full of snow. It is here, as I have already stated, that on one journey or another we have had to lie patiently in sodden sleeping bags for as many as five and seven days on end, waiting for the weather to change and make it possible for us to leave our tents at all. If, however, these dangers were overcome there would still be the difficulty of making the needful preparations from the eggs. The party would have to be on the scene at any rate early in July. Supposing that no eggs were found upon arrival, it would be well to spend the time in labelling the most likely birds, those for example that have taken up their stations close underneath the ice cliffs. And if this were done it would be easier then to examine them daily by the moonlight, if it and the weather generally were suitable; conditions, I must confess, not always easily obtained at Cape Crozier. But if by good luck things happened to go well, it would by this time be useful to have a shelter built of snow blocks on the sea-ice in which to work with the cooking lamp to prevent the freezing of the egg before the embryo was cut out, and in order that fluid solutions might be handy for the various stages of its preparation; for it must be borne in mind that the temperature all the while may be anything between zero and − 50° F. The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it would not be quite impossible, and it is with a view to helping those to whom the opportunity may occur in future, that this outline has been added of the difficulties that would surely beset their path.”

Set against the journey as it happened, the paragraph is a list of the things that could not be done. The party was three, as he said, and it went in the dark, as he said. But there was no labelling of birds and no daily examination by moonlight: there was one visit of a few minutes, in failing light, on the second attempt. There was no shelter of snow blocks on the sea ice: the hut was 800 feet up the mountain and four miles off, and the eggs were carried to it frozen in fur mitts. The “series of early embryos” became three eggs of nearly the same age. The paragraph had foreseen all of this, and said it was not quite impossible, and the difference between what it asked for and what came back is the whole result.

At Cape Evans

The eggs reached the hut at Cape Evans on the night of 1 August 1911. Ponting, the expedition’s photographer, measured and described them: “They were 10½ centimetres long, by 7 centimetres in diameter, and appeared to be of a bluish white shade, much discoloured by stains; but beyond their scientific value they did not look of any special interest. Only those who had risked all to find them could realise their import.” He photographed them standing on a rule, and the picture is in the entry. “The biological value of the eggs was greatly enhanced when Wilson found, on examination in the Hut, that they were in an advanced stage of incubation. Information as to the birds’ past history and development, unobtainable in the adult, might be acquired by study of the embryo. When, therefore, Uncle Bill found the eggs were in the very condition he had hoped for, his joy was great, for he now looked forward to being able to prove something about the evolution of this strange creature.” Ponting’s “advanced stage” is a photographer’s phrase; what Wilson found, as the later reports show, were embryos at an early stage, with the feather rudiments just appearing. Scott wrote on 2 August that the eggs “have not yet been examined”. By the Museum’s account, what went home in 1913 were “the embryos and eggshells”: the shells blown, with holes made in them, and the embryos preserved in the fluids the venesta case had carried out and back.

Wilson left for the Pole on 1 November 1911 and did not come back. Cherry-Garrard, who was in the search party that found the tent in November 1912, took the eggs home with the ship in 1913.

South Kensington, 1913

Cherry-Garrard’s account of delivering the eggs, at the end of the Winter Journey chapter of The Worst Journey in the World, is written as a short play, and he says of it that he “did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows”. The entry gives the doorkeeper and the Chief Custodian. What follows is the sequel. “Some time after this I visited the Natural History Museum with Captain Scott’s sister. After a slight preliminary skirmish in which we convinced a minor custodian that the specimens brought by the expedition from the Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying on some of them, Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the penguins’ eggs. Thereupon the minor custodians flatly denied that any such eggs were in existence or in their possession. Now Miss Scott was her brother’s sister; and she showed so little disposition to take this lying down that I was glad to get her away with no worse consequences than a profanely emphasized threat on my part that if we did not receive ample satisfaction in writing within twenty-four hours as to the safety of the eggs England would reverberate with the tale. The ultimatum was effectual; and due satisfaction was forthcoming in time; but I was relieved when I learnt later on that they had been entrusted to Professor Assheton for the necessary microscopic examination. But he died before he could approach the task; and the eggs passed into the hands of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University.”

Cherry-Garrard wrote this in 1922, and it has been read ever since as the Museum not wanting the eggs. What the record supports is narrower: that the man who brought them was received without thanks and had to wait for a receipt, that a few years later the junior staff did not know the eggs were in the building, and that the Museum then did what museums do with such material, which is to give it to a specialist. The specialist it chose was a good one. Richard Assheton, born in 1863, had been a lecturer in biology at King’s College London and was an embryologist at Cambridge, elected to the Royal Society in May 1914. Parsons’s report of 1934 shows what he did: “Dr. Assheton prepared sections of the head and body of embryo No. 1, and also cut and mounted a sagittal series of embryo No. 2. The head of this embryo was embedded in paraffin wax, but it was never cut into sections. Some notes and drawings of all three specimens were also left by Dr. Assheton.” He died on 24 October 1915. Cherry-Garrard’s “before he could approach the task” is not quite right; he had approached it, and had cut two of the three embryos into the sections that every later worker depended on. What he had not done was write.

Ewart, 1922

James Cossar Ewart, born in 1851, was professor of natural history at Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and known for his breeding experiments with horses and zebras; he had also worked on the moult of the king penguin. The embryos came to him after Assheton’s death, and his report was printed by Cherry-Garrard as the appendix to the first volume of The Worst Journey. It is about 1,200 words, and its argument runs as follows.

He began by granting the premise. “It is admitted that birds are descended from bipedal reptiles which flourished some millions of years ago—reptiles in build not unlike the kangaroo. From Archaeopteryx of Jurassic times we know primeval birds had teeth, three fingers with claws on each hand, and a long lizard-like tail provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true feathers. But unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, nor yet the fossil birds found in America, throw any light on the origin of feathers. Ornithologists and others who have devoted much time to the study of birds have as a rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that the scales along the margin of the hand and forearm and along each side of the tail were elongated, frayed and otherwise modified to form the wing and tail quills, and that later other scales were altered to provide a coat capable of preventing loss of heat. But as it happens, a study of the development of feathers affords no evidence that they were made out of scales.”

Then the embryos. “There are neither rudiments of scales nor feathers in very young bird embryos. In the youngest of the three Emperor embryos there are, however, feather rudiments in the tail region,—the embryo was probably seven or eight days old—but in the two older embryos there are a countless number of feather rudiments, i.e. of minute pimples known as papillae.” The question was whether the papillae that become a bird’s first feathers “correspond to the papillae which in lizards develop into scales”. Assheton’s drawings showed the number, size and timing of the feather papillae but, Ewart wrote, “in the notes left by the distinguished embryologist there is no indication whether the feather papillae were regarded as modified scale papillae or new creations resulting from the appearance of special feather-forming factors in the germ-plasm.”

Ewart’s own observation was about order and place. “When eventually the three Emperor Penguin embryos reached me that their feather rudiments might be compared with the feather rudiments of other birds, I noticed that in Emperor embryos the feather papillae appeared before the scale papillae. Evidence of this was especially afforded by the largest embryo, which had reached about the same stage in its development as a 16-days goose embryo. In the largest Emperor embryo feather papillae occur all over the hind-quarters and on the legs to within a short distance of the tarsal joint. Beyond the tarsal joint even in the largest embryo no attempt had been made to produce the papillae which in older penguin embryos represent, and ultimately develop into, the scaly covering of the foot.” Either the scale papillae were “fundamentally different from feather papillae” or their development had for some reason been held back, and nothing in lizards suggested the second. He went to the embryos of Chinese geese to check, because their legs are longer. In a 13-day goose the skin below and some way above the tarsal joint was smooth while the rest of the leg was studded with feather papillae; in an 18-day goose scale papillae had appeared on the foot and between the roots of the feather filaments on the leg; in a 20-day goose “a number of the papillae situated between the feather filaments of the leg were actually developing into scales each of which overlapped the root (calamus) of a feather just as scales overlap the foot feathers in grouse and other feather-footed birds.”

His conclusion: “As in bird embryos there is no evidence that feather papillae ever develop into scales or that scale papillae ever develop into feathers it may be assumed that feather papillae are fundamentally different from scale papillae, the difference presumably being due to the presence of special factors in the germ-plasm. Just as in armadillos hairs are found emerging from under the scales, in ancient birds as in the feet of some modern birds the coat probably consisted of both feathers and scales. But in course of time, owing perhaps to the growth of the scales being arrested, the coat of the birds, instead of consisting throughout of well-developed scales and small inconspicuous feathers, was almost entirely made up of a countless number of downy feathers, well-developed scales only persisting below the tarsal joint.” And the last sentence, which Cherry-Garrard let stand as the last words of his first volume: “If the conclusions arrived at with the help of the Emperor Penguin embryos about the origin of feathers are justified, the worst journey in the world in the interest of science was not made in vain.”

It should be said plainly what this is. The journey had been made on the supposition that an early emperor embryo would show feathers forming out of scales. Ewart’s finding, from the three embryos and from geese, was that feathers and scales arise separately, from different papillae, in a different order and in different places, and that the old supposition “affords no evidence”. The experiment’s result was a negative, and he reported it as one, and then said that a negative was worth having. Ewart died on 31 December 1933. The material went back to the Museum, and what it did with it is in Two shillings.

Sources

• Edward A. Wilson, “Aves”, National Antarctic Expedition 1901–1904, Natural History, Vol. II, British Museum, 1907, pp. 1–31 on the emperor penguin, with the plan on p. 31. archive.org
• Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South, Duckworth, 1921, pp. 154–156, on the eggs at Cape Evans. archive.org
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, vol. 1, Constable, 1922, the end of chapter VII and the appendix, “Professor Cossar Ewart’s Report”. archive.org
• C. W. Parsons, “Penguin Embryos”, British Antarctic (“Terra Nova”) Expedition, 1910. Natural History Report. Zoology, Vol. IV, No. 7, pp. 253–262, September 1934, for what Assheton did with the material. archive.org
• The Royal Society’s record of Richard Assheton, and the King’s College London archive’s note of his lectureship, for his dates; Wikipedia for Cossar Ewart’s. royalsociety.org, kingscollections.org
• Katie Pavid, “A journey through the largest egg collection in the world”, Natural History Museum, March 2018, for the delivery of “the embryos and eggshells” in 1913. nhm.ac.uk