On 20 July 1911, in the few minutes of twilight that the Antarctic winter allows at midday, two men dropped twelve feet from an ice-foot on to the frozen sea at Cape Crozier, the eastern corner of Ross Island, and walked towards about a hundred emperor penguins standing in one compact group under the ice-cliffs of the Great Ice Barrier. One of the two was Edward Wilson, the chief of the scientific staff of Captain Scott’s expedition, who had been trying to reach these birds at this season for nine years. The other was Lieutenant Henry Bowers of the Royal Indian Marine. The third man of the party stayed on the ice-foot with the Alpine rope, because he could not see: Apsley Cherry-Garrard was so short-sighted that the expedition’s doctors had nearly refused him, and in this cold his spectacles were useless. “We collected six eggs,” Wilson wrote in his report to Scott, “and killed and skinned three birds, and went back to the ice foot where Cherry was waiting to help us up with the rope.”

The eggs went up in fur mitts hung round the men’s necks on lamp-wick lanyards, and the party started back through the pressure ridges in a failing light with two eggs apiece. At the sledge, left under the cliffs where a hole in the ice was only just big enough to crawl through, there were four. At the stone hut on the mountain that night there were three. Those three were the result of the experiment, and the whole of it. They had cost nineteen days of walking in the dark at temperatures below minus 60, and they would cost a blizzard, a lost tent, a roof, and the twelve days home.

Two years later the three eggs were carried into the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, and the man who brought them waited most of a day in a corridor for a receipt. Twenty-three years later the Museum published what it had found inside them, in ten pages, price two shillings.

Who ran it

Edward Adrian Wilson was born in Cheltenham on 23 July 1872, the son of a doctor. He read natural science at Cambridge, qualified in medicine at St George’s Hospital in London, and painted birds, and in 1901 he sailed south in the Discovery with Scott as junior surgeon and vertebrate zoologist. The ship wintered in McMurdo Sound for two years. On 18 October 1902 a sledge party under Lieutenants Royds and Skelton found, on the sea ice in the little bay where the Barrier’s ice-cliff meets the rock cliffs of Cape Crozier, the only breeding place of the emperor penguin that anyone had seen, and brought three frozen chicks back to the ship. Wilson skinned them and left two days later with Scott and Shackleton for the far south.

In 1903 he went to the rookery himself, twice. On 12 September there were about a thousand adult birds, dead chicks frozen on the ice, deserted eggs, and no eggs hatching. From the size of the chicks he reasoned backwards: “the date for the laying of the eggs must be put back to the beginning of July. From seven to eight weeks seems a reasonable estimate for incubation, and the eggs are all hatched out by the first week in September.” He had found a bird that laid its egg in the middle of the Antarctic winter, in the dark, on sea ice, and held it on its feet under a fold of skin for two months. Of fourteen eggs the expedition brought home, all were deserted, and only one held an embryo that was not fully incubated.

His report on the birds of the expedition came out in 1907, and one paragraph of it is the plan for everything that follows, written four years before he had the chance to act on 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.” The expedition had not been able “to procure a series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest can be worked out”, and to do so would need “a party of three at least” to cross “about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface in the dark”, early in July, with a shelter of snow blocks on the sea ice in which to cut the embryo out before the egg froze. “The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it would not be quite impossible.” The paragraph is given whole in The custodians.

In 1910 Scott took him south again, as chief of the scientific staff of the Terra Nova. Some fifteen months before the journey, in “a dusty, dingy office in Victoria Street”, Wilson said to Cherry-Garrard, “I want you to come,” and then, “I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I’m not saying much about it—it might never come off.”

Cherry-Garrard was born on 2 January 1886 and was twenty-four when the ship sailed. He had been taken on as assistant zoologist although “the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.” In the first winter, Scott’s journal says, he was out of doors “making trial stone huts and blubber stoves, primarily with a view to the winter journey to Cape Crozier”. Henry Robertson Bowers was born at Greenock on 29 July 1883, a lieutenant of the Royal Indian Marine lent to the expedition, and in charge of its stores. Wilson asked him at Hut Point in the autumn of 1911. “Of course he was mad to come.” He kept the meteorological log of the journey, and Wilson’s report says that “this report must be considered as much his as mine”.

Scott consented, and not easily. “It seems that Scott had twice gone for a walk with him during the Winter,” Cherry-Garrard wrote of Wilson, “and tried to persuade him not to go, and only finally consented on condition that Bill brought us all back unharmed: we were Southern Journey men.” On the night they left, Scott wrote: “This winter travel is a new and bold venture, but the right men have gone to attempt it. All good luck go with them.”

What they were trying to find out

Cherry-Garrard put the hypothesis in a paragraph, and it is two claims. “It is because the Emperor is probably the most primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so important. The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives. The embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the reptiles from which birds have sprung.”

The first claim is about the bird. On 15 May 1911 Wilson lectured to the hut on penguins, and Scott took notes: the primitive arrangement of the feathers, the wing muscles, the foot. “He pointed out (and the subsequent discussion seemed to support him) that these birds probably branched at a very early stage of bird life—coming pretty directly from the lizard bird Archeopteryx of the Jurassic age. Fossils of giant penguins of Eocene and Miocene ages show that there has been extremely little development since.” The second claim is about embryos: that a developing animal passes again through the forms of its ancestors, so that an embryo taken early enough would show the step by which a reptile’s scales became a bird’s feathers. Professor Cossar Ewart, who had the embryos a decade later, put the question in one sentence: “Do the papillae which in birds develop into the first generation of feathers correspond to the papillae which in lizards develop into scales?”

Neither claim could be tested on a grown penguin, or on the deserted eggs and frozen chicks the Discovery had brought home. What was wanted, in Wilson’s words of 1907, was “a series of early embryos”: a series, at different ages, and early. The emperor laid in July, and the eggs had to be opened before they froze.

There was a third claim, which nobody wrote down as one, because it was a matter of transport rather than of science: that three men could go sixty-seven miles across the Barrier in the dark of winter and come back. Scott made the journey carry other trials as well. “The Crozier journey is to be made to serve a good many trial ends,” he wrote in June. “Each man is to go on a different food scale, with a view to determining the desirable proportion of fats and carbohydrates.” There were a double tent, eiderdown bags inside the reindeer ones, new crampons and a blubber stove to try. And Wilson’s report names the last thing the journey would do, almost in passing: it “afforded an opportunity of obtaining an exact knowledge of the winter conditions on the Barrier at its western end”.

What they built

Bowers reckoned the weights before they started, and the list is in The ledger: six weeks’ food, which was pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea and nothing else; six one-gallon tins of paraffin; a double tent; three reindeer sleeping-bags and three eiderdown linings; rope, ice-axes and a pickaxe; a venesta case “full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving”; and a large sheet of green Willesden canvas and a plank to make the roof and the door of a hut of stones. It came to 757 pounds, 253 pounds a man, on two nine-foot sledges, one toggled behind the other. Scott, seeing the oil lashed to the second sledge, said, “Bill, why are you taking all this oil?” The rations were the experiment Scott had asked for: Wilson “was all for fat”, eight ounces of butter a day; Bowers went for protein, sixteen ounces of pemmican; Cherry-Garrard “should go the whole hog on carbohydrates”, twenty ounces of biscuit, and did not like it, “since I knew I should want more fat”.

They left the hut at Cape Evans shortly before eleven on the morning of Tuesday 27 June 1911, five days after Midwinter Day. “It is mid-day,” Cherry-Garrard wrote of the first halt, “but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.” The next evening they came to the edge of the Barrier and met “a stream of very cold air which we felt first when we were only a few yards from the foot, and lost very soon after reaching the top”; the thermometer that had read minus 26 at Hut Point read minus 47. Cherry-Garrard took his hands out of his mitts to haul the sledges up the drift and started on to the Barrier with all ten fingers frostbitten.

On 30 June the surface changed, and with it the arithmetic of the journey. They were entering the windless bay of the Barrier between Hut Point Peninsula and Terror Point, where nothing sweeps or hardens the snow, and at these temperatures a sledge runner cannot melt the crystals but only roll over them, so that pulling is like pulling through sand. They could not move both sledges together. From then on they relayed: one sledge forward, then back along their own footprints for the other, three miles walked for every mile gained. Between eleven and three there was light enough to see the holes their feet had made; after that they went back for the second sledge carrying a naked candle, “the weirdest kind of procession, three frozen men and a little pool of light”, and steered by Jupiter. That day they made three and a quarter miles. Under the sledge that night the minimum was minus 69, and on the sledge minus 75.

“It was the darkness that did it,” Cherry-Garrard wrote. “I don’t believe minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight, not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food.” In the dark everything was slower. “In these days we were never less than four hours from the moment when Bill cried ‘Time to get up’ to the time when we got into our harness. It took two men to get one man into his harness, and was all they could do, for the canvas was frozen and our clothes were frozen until sometimes not even two men could bend them into the required shape.” “Do things slowly, always slowly, that was the burden of Wilson’s leadership: and every now and then the question, Shall we go on? and the answer Yes.”

On 6 July, their tenth day out, it was minus 70.2 at starting, minus 76.8 at noon, and at a quarter past five in the afternoon, when they camped for lunch, “− 77° exactly” by Wilson’s report. Bowers’s log has two readings at that hour, one under the other: “− 77 (carefully checked by Wilson)” and “− 77.5 (other thermometer)”. In the expedition’s way of counting, from the freezing point of water, that was 109 degrees of frost. “The day lives in my memory,” Cherry-Garrard wrote, “as that on which I found out that records are not worth making.” They advanced a mile and a half. “This was quite a good march—and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape Evans!” The butter, Wilson noted, “when stabbed with a knife, ‘flew’ like very brittle toffee.” Bowers kept the log through all of it, though “as soon as you breathed near the paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the pencil would not bite”. “Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and always we said no.”

Then the fog, four days of it, as they came under the slopes of Mount Terror, and on the night of 10 July, lost among pressure ridges with the ice booming under the tent, a blizzard from the south. The temperature rose from minus 36 to plus nine, and the wind to force ten, and for three days they lay in their bags while the ice in their clothes turned to water. “From that point of view these blizzards were a perfect Godsend.” They revised the rations while they lay there: Cherry-Garrard was hungry, more frostbitten than the others, and wanted fat, and he and Wilson came to the same diet, twelve ounces of pemmican, sixteen of biscuit and four of butter. “This is an extremely good ration.” The oil was another matter. They had kept the primus burning after meals to thaw their feet, and by 13 July four of the six tins were gone.

On the morning of Saturday 15 July they could see the Knoll, the hill whose seaward cliffs are Cape Crozier, and they pulled three miles up the great cup of wind-polished snow that joins it to Mount Terror, on crampons, to a moraine shelf about 800 feet above the frozen Ross Sea. It was their fifteenth camp and their nineteenth day. “We had arrived.”

They built the hut over the next five days. Bowers gathered rocks, “nothing was too big for him”; Wilson banked up outside; Cherry-Garrard built the wall. The snow was blown so hard that the blocks came out like paving-stones, and there was no soft snow to fill the cracks between them. A nine-foot sledge went across the top for a ridge beam, with the green canvas over it, and the plank over the door. By 18 July they were into the fifth tin of oil and taking two hot meals a day. Without blubber for the stove they could not stay, and the blubber was down on the sea ice with the penguins.

Six eggs

On 19 July they went down with an empty sledge, two ice-axes, the rope and the skinning tools, and the daylight was two-thirds gone when they came into a cul-de-sac among pressure ridges sixty feet high. “Here we had the mortification,” Wilson wrote, “of hearing the cries of Emperor penguins echoed to us by the rock cliffs on our left.” They turned back.

They were up at three the next morning to get the roof on the hut in calm weather, and away again before daybreak, by a narrower slope that took them down under the old ice-cliffs on the southern face of the Knoll. Where one of the largest pressure ridges had been thrown end on against the rock Wilson found a hole between the ice and the cliff, “big enough, and only just big enough, for us to crawl through one by one”. “Well, here goes!” he said, and put his head in. They left the sledge at the hole, cut fifteen steps out of a snow pit on the far side, and came out on the ice-foot with the light already going. And there they stood, “three crystallized ragamuffins, above the Emperors’ home.”

There were not thousands. “We saw also that there were only about 100 Emperor penguins,” Wilson wrote, “instead of a couple of thousand as in 1902 and 1903. They were all standing in one compact group under the ice cliffs of the Barrier a few hundred yards from where we had emerged. We decided to get three penguin skins with their blubber and a few eggs.” Wilson and Bowers jumped. The birds crouched with eggs on their feet and tried to shuffle away without losing them; hustled, “a good many eggs were dropped and left lying on the ice, or were picked up again by the unemployed birds that saw and took their opportunity to seize an egg.” Wilson would not drive every bird off its egg to count; it looked to him “as though every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this is only a guess”.

Twice, in the failing light, he and Bowers picked up an egg and found it was a lump of ice, rounded, dirty, “of the right size”, which a bird had been holding on its feet under the fold of its belly. “I had a real egg in my hand, so I put it down on the ice close to this bird, and the bird at once left the lump of ice and shuffled to the real egg and pushed it in under its flap on to the feet. It apparently knew the difference, and it shows how strong is the desire to brood over something.”

They passed up the eggs and the three skins, and got themselves up the ice-foot, Wilson on Bowers’s back and Bowers, with one leg already through a crack into the sea, by cutting steps where the rope had jammed. Then they went, “as hard as we could go, two eggs each in our fur mits”, roped, over the ridges and through the holes in the dark. “We found the sledge, and none too soon. We had four eggs left, more or less whole. Both mine had burst in my mits.”

The counts do not agree, and the disagreement is instructive. Wilson’s report, written for Scott, says six were collected. Cherry-Garrard’s diary, written that night, says four at the sledge; his book, eleven years later, says five were collected and that the two in his mitts broke. Scott’s journal says six collected, “three of which alone survived”. Three is the number every account agrees on, and it is the number that reached the hut. “The examination of the three eggs we have brought back with us,” Wilson wrote, “may throw some light on the question” of why the rookery was so small; the only other way to decide it was another visit, “next year, preferably in August”.

They moved into the hut that night, to save oil, and lit the blubber stove, and its first act was to spit a blob of boiling oil into Wilson’s eye. He lay all night unable to stifle his groans and thought the eye was gone. “I was incapacitated for the time being,” his report says. “Things must improve,” he said next day. “I think we reached bed-rock last night.”

What it looked like from inside

They spent 21 July packing soft snow into the cracks between the blocks, laying slabs of hard snow on the canvas to hold it down, and pitching the tent close under the lee end of the hut, where the blubber stove inside the double lining dried socks in minutes. They left the cooker, their finnesko and much of their gear in the tent and slept in the hut on the tent’s floor-cloth. Soon after three in the morning it began to blow from the south.

By half past six on the morning of Saturday 22 July it was force nine to ten with heavy drift, “and when Bowers turned out he found the tent had disappeared, legs, lining, cover and all, leaving the cooker and all the gear we had left in it over night on the ground”. “Bill, Bill, the tent has gone,” was what Cherry-Garrard heard, shouted through the door again and again. He and Bowers fought their way the few yards to where the tent had been and passed in to Wilson what they could find, and nearly everything was there; only two flat parts of the cooker were never seen again. The shelter they had chosen was the trouble: the hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over their heads “and appeared to form by suction a vacuum below”, which had lifted the tent and was now lifting the roof. Someone proposed getting the rope over the roof from outside. “You could never ask men at sea to try such a thing,” Bowers said, and was up and out of his bag continually, pressing the canvas down and stuffing the holes with socks and mitts and pyjama jackets. They cooked one meal that morning and decided, with the oil so short, not to eat again for as long as they could.

Sunday 23 July was Wilson’s thirty-ninth birthday. Bowers logged the wind at force eleven, “blowing with almost continuous storm force, with very slight lulls followed by squalls of great violence”. At Cape Evans, sixty-seven miles away, the expedition’s anemometer that evening reached 82 miles an hour, the highest it ever recorded. About noon the roof went. Wilson was helping Bowers jam the stones over the door “when the canvas suddenly ripped, and in a moment I saw about six rents all along the lee wall top, and in another moment we were under the open sky with the greater part of the roof flapped to shreds”. The highest rocks of the walls fell in on them, and a sheet of drift. Cherry-Garrard, half into his bag, turned to help Wilson. “‘Get into your own,’ he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned over until his mouth was against my ear. ‘Please, Cherry,’ he said, and his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was he who had brought us to this ghastly end.”

“The next I knew was Bowers’ head across Bill’s body. ‘We’re all right,’ he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement was helpful.” They turned the bags over so that the flaps were beneath them, and lay, and the drift came over them. Wilson and Bowers sang hymns. “I could occasionally thump Bill,” Bowers wrote, “and as he still moved I knew he was alive all right—what a birthday for him!” Wilson’s report is one sentence on the day: “It happened that this was my birthday—and we spent it lying in our bags without a roof or a meal, wishing the wind would drop, while the snow drifted over us.”

Cherry-Garrard did not think they would live. The tent was gone, “one tin of oil left out of six, and only part of our cooker”, and it took more than an hour of struggle to get into a sleeping-bag even with a tent over it. “No! Without the tent we were dead men.” He resolved to stop trying to keep warm, that it might not take too long, and then he fell asleep. What he wanted, he wrote, was peaches and syrup.

In the early hours of Monday 24 July the wind began to lull, and they made, under the floor-cloth drawn over their heads, “the weirdest meal eaten north or south”, their first food for forty-eight hours. When light came they went down the slope, Bowers ahead. “Everywhere we found shreds of green canvas roof the size of a pocket-handkerchief, but not a sign of the tent, until a loud shout from Bowers, who had gone more east to the top of a ridge than Cherry and I, told us he had seen it.” It had gone up shut, like an umbrella, and come down in a hollow a quarter of a mile away by Wilson’s reckoning, half a mile by Cherry-Garrard’s, with two pole ends broken and the silk untorn. “Our lives had been taken away and given back to us. We were so thankful we said nothing.”

“I think he (Wilson) thought he had landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home,” Bowers wrote, “though I was for one other tap at the Rookery. However, I had placed myself under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next day for home.” They left the second sledge in a corner of the hut, with a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.

They started down on 25 July into a rising wind. That night Bowers tied the cap of the tent to himself inside his bag, so that if it went again he was going with it, and Cherry-Garrard, “feeling as if I should crack”, accepted at last the eiderdown lining Bowers had carried unused for four weeks. On the twenty-sixth, in the dark among the pressure under Terror, they travelled, Wilson wrote, “by the ear, and by the feel of the snow under our feet”. On the twenty-seventh Bowers went down a crevasse to the length of his harness. “My helmet was so frozen up,” he wrote, “that my head was encased in a solid block of ice, and I could not look down without inclining my whole body.” Wilson asked, “What do you want?” He asked for the rope with a bowline in it for his foot, and came up inch by inch, at minus 46.

After that there were no more crevasses. They were back on the soft snow of the windless bay, minus 66 one night, marching six and seven miles a day where going out they had made a mile and a half, and sleeping as they walked. “The day’s march was bliss compared to the night’s rest, and both were awful.” On the afternoon of 31 July they ran the sledge off the Barrier edge on to the sea ice, through the same stream of cold air that had taken Cherry-Garrard’s fingers five weeks before, and the thermometer rose from minus 57 that morning to minus 27 at Hut Point. They were away at eleven the next morning, Tuesday 1 August, and as they packed up for the last time after lunch Wilson said quietly, “I want to thank you two for what you have done. I couldn’t have found two better companions—and what is more I never shall.”

They came round Cape Evans in the dark at ten or eleven that night. “‘Spread out well,’ said Bill, ‘and they will be able to see that there are three men.’” Nobody saw them. They pulled up the bank to the door of the hut without a sound, and stood there trying to get one another out of frozen harness. “The door opened—’Good God! here is the Crozier Party,’ said a voice, and disappeared.” It was, by Wilson’s count, the thirty-sixth day.

What happened

Ponting saw them come in “with helmets encrusted with ice, and with pounds of ice massed around their mouths”; someone suggested a can-opener. “Their looks haunted me for days.” Scott wrote the next morning that they “looked more weather-worn than anyone I have yet seen. Their faces were scarred and wrinkled, their eyes dull, their hands whitened and creased with the constant exposure to damp and cold … The main part of their afflictions arose, and very obviously arose, from sheer lack of sleep.” The sleeping-bags, which had gone out at seventeen or eighteen pounds each, came back at between 39 and 45; the tent had gone from 35 pounds to 60. Wilson had lost three and a half pounds, Bowers two and a half, Cherry-Garrard one.

The eggs, Ponting noted, “did not look of any special interest” beyond their scientific value. Wilson opened them in the hut and found embryos in them, “the very condition he had hoped for”. Scott, writing the day after the return, was careful about what the journey had and had not proved. “Wilson is disappointed at seeing so little of the penguins,” he wrote; and then: “the material results are by no means despicable. We shall know now when that extraordinary bird the Emperor penguin lays its eggs, and under what conditions; but even if our information remains meagre concerning its embryology, our party has shown the nature of the conditions which exist on the Great Barrier in winter. Hitherto we have only imagined their severity; now we have proof.”

The rest of what the journey had measured was put to use at once. “For our future sledge work several points have been most satisfactorily settled,” Scott wrote: the three had found a ration that suited them all, “and in this way we have arrived at a simple and suitable ration for the inland plateau”; the double tent was “an immense success”; and of the clothing, “all Wilson can say, speaking broadly, is ‘the gear is excellent, excellent.’” Simpson, the expedition’s meteorologist, took Bowers’s figures and found in them something nobody had proved: that in winter the surface of the Barrier is 20 to 25 degrees colder than McMurdo Sound a few miles away, and that the stream of cold air at the Barrier edge is that pool of cold spilling over. The figures, day by day, are in The thermometer.

On 1 November 1911 the polar journey began. Wilson and Bowers went to the Pole with Scott on the ration the winter journey had settled, and died with him on the Barrier about 29 March 1912, on the way back. “No one then dreamed,” Cherry-Garrard wrote, “that harder conditions could be found in the middle of the Barrier in March than on the Plateau, ten thousand feet higher, in February.” He was in the party that found the tent the following November.

The eggs went home with the ship. In the summer of 1913 Cherry-Garrard, “the sole survivor of the three”, took them to South Kensington, and set down the spirit of his welcome as a play. The man at the door: “Who are you? What do you want? This ain’t an egg-shop. What call have you to come meddling with our eggs?” The Chief Custodian, “a man of scientific aspect, with two manners”, took the eggs “without a word of thanks” and turned back to a Person of Importance. Cherry-Garrard asked for a receipt. “It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn’t wait.” He waited in a chair in a passage outside, telling the officials who passed that he was “waiting for a receipt for some penguins’ eggs”, until “it becomes clear from the Explorer’s expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a receipt but to commit murder”. The receipt came.

What happened to the embryos is told in The custodians and Two shillings, and can be given here in its dates. They were entrusted to Richard Assheton, an embryologist at Cambridge, who cut sections of two of them, made notes and drawings, and died on 24 October 1915 before he had reported. They passed to James Cossar Ewart, professor of natural history at Edinburgh, whose report Cherry-Garrard printed as an appendix to The Worst Journey in the World in 1922. Ewart’s finding was the opposite of what the journey had been made to find: in the three embryos, and in goose embryos he studied beside them, the feather papillae appeared before the scale papillae, and in different places. “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.” He closed with a conditional: “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.” Ewart died on 31 December 1933.

The Museum’s report came out in September 1934, in the Natural History Reports of the Terra Nova expedition, Zoology, volume IV, number 7, “Penguin Embryos”, by C. W. Parsons, lecturer in zoology at Glasgow, ten pages, price two shillings. “Unfortunately the preservation of the material is unsatisfactory,” he wrote; in the smallest embryo “the brain is almost entirely absent”. The three were close in age, the equivalent of a hen’s egg at about ten and thirteen days; the second and third differed “probably by not more than a day of incubation”. On the question the journey had been made to answer: “Feather papillae and scale papillae must still be regarded, then, as being distinct from one another from the beginning.” And in his concluding remarks: “it must be stated that neither has greatly added to our knowledge of penguin embryology.” The advantage of priority “was lost owing to the death of two investigators into whose hands the material had been given”. Nothing decisive, he wrote, “could be expected from the collection of three Emperor embryos so close to one another in development as those that Dr. Wilson and his comrades obtained at such cost.”

After

The first claim went the same way. In 1946 George Gaylord Simpson of the American Museum of Natural History went through every fossil penguin known and concluded that they were the descendants of flying birds. In 2006 four skeletons from New Zealand, named Waimanu, put the oldest known penguin at 61 to 62 million years, already flightless, already a diver, and nowhere near the root of the birds. The question of where feathers came from was answered from the rocks rather than the egg: from 1996 onwards feathered dinosaurs that were not birds came out of the Yixian Formation in China, and the developmental biologists who looked again at the feather in 2002 concluded that it was not a frayed scale at all but a new structure, grown from a new kind of follicle.

The eggs are at the Museum’s bird collection at Tring, among more than a million eggs, and an emperor penguin egg “collected during Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expedition” is on show in the Treasures gallery at South Kensington, with holes in the shells where the embryos were taken out. Cherry-Garrard, who was twenty-five on the ice-foot, published The Worst Journey in the World in 1922, and died on 18 May 1959.

What it taught

Start with the instrument. The three men carried two of them. One was a venesta case of pickling gear and the eggs it was to hold, and the other was a thermometer swung by Bowers, who read it at every halt and wrote it down with a pencil on paper that iced over as he breathed. The eggs could not say what they were asked, and the log said what nobody had asked it, and the log was read first.

The hypothesis assumed what the experiment was meant to find. Wilson’s plan rested on the emperor being “the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of a penguin, but of a bird”, and the embryo was to confirm a chain, from reptile scale to bird feather, that embryology was then thought able to replay. The journey could not test the first part; it could only bring home material to test the second, and what it brought was three embryos within a day or two of one another in age, where the plan of 1907 had asked for “a series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest can be worked out”. The sample was fixed by the twilight. Two men had the few minutes of light on the sea ice, and they did not drive the birds off their eggs to count them, and the number that reached the hut was the number that did not break in a mitt in the dark.

The thing the journey measured exactly and continuously was the thing nobody had set out to prove. The temperature of the Barrier in winter had been imagined; Bowers’s log made it a fact, and Simpson built on it, and Scott used the ration and the gear within three months to equip the journey to the Pole. That is the complication the entry has to carry. The ration and the tent that had been tested at 77 below in July were the ration and the tent the two of them died in on the Barrier in March, in cold that the test had been designed on the assumption would be found somewhere else.

Sixteen Reindeer is the experiment whose count answered the easy question and was read for forty years as the answer to the hard one. This is the opposite case. The eggs could not answer the hard question, and nobody at the Museum read them for twenty years; the log answered a question nobody had set, and was read within a day. What the two have in common is the reading, and who does it. Ewart’s conditional sentence of 1922, “if the conclusions … are justified, the worst journey in the world in the interest of science was not made in vain”, is a careful man saying that the value of the result depended on what was made of it afterwards, by other people, in a building where the man who brought it waited most of a day for a receipt.

Sources

• Edward A. Wilson, “Aves”, in National Antarctic Expedition 1901–1904, Natural History, Vol. II: Zoology (Vertebrata: Mollusca: Crustacea), British Museum, 1907. The discovery of the rookery on 18 October 1902, the 1903 visits, the laying date, and the paragraph setting out the plan for a winter journey. archive.org
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910–1913, 2 vols, Constable, 1922. Vol. 1, chapter VII, “The Winter Journey”, with the sledge weights, the rations, the temperatures, the eggs, the blizzard and the return, the museum scene, and Professor Cossar Ewart’s report as an appendix; vol. 2 for the Adélie embryos and “where the penguins come in”. Bowers’s words in the entry are quoted from his diary as Cherry-Garrard printed them. vol. 1, vol. 2
• Scott’s Last Expedition, Vol. I: Being the Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, R.N., C.V.O., Smith, Elder, 1913. Wilson’s lecture of 15 May 1911, Cherry-Garrard’s stone huts, the trials planned for the journey, the departure of 27 June, the gales of 22 and 23 July, and the entries of 2 to 5 August on the party’s return, the rations and the equipment. archive.org
• Scott’s Last Expedition, Vol. II: Being the Reports of the Journeys and the Scientific Work Undertaken by Dr. E. A. Wilson and the Surviving Members of the Expedition, Smith, Elder, 1913. “The Winter Journey, June 27, 1911, to August 1, 1911”, Wilson’s official report with extracts from Cherry-Garrard’s diary in square brackets, and the appendix “Meteorological Log kept by Lieut. Bowers on the Winter Journey”. The plates of the departure, the eggs and the return are reproduced from this volume. archive.org
• Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South, Duckworth, 1921. The party’s arrival on 1 August, the eggs’ dimensions and appearance, and Wilson’s examination of them. archive.org
• G. C. Simpson, British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913, Meteorology, Vol. I: Discussion, Calcutta, 1919, pp. 21–26, on the Cape Crozier party’s temperatures and the cold air of the Barrier; and Vol. III: Tables, 1923, which prints the register kept on the winter journey. vol. I, vol. III
• C. W. Parsons, “Penguin Embryos”, British Antarctic (“Terra Nova”) Expedition, 1910. Natural History Report. Zoology, Vol. IV, No. 7, pp. 253–262, British Museum (Natural History), September 1934. The history of the embryos, the state of the material, the comparison of the three, the scales and the feathers, and the concluding remarks. archive.org, in the bound volume IV
• Katie Pavid, “A journey through the largest egg collection in the world”, Natural History Museum, March 2018, on the delivery of the embryos and eggshells in 1913 and the collection at Tring; the Museum’s collection page “Bird egg and nest collections”; and its Treasures gallery page on the emperor penguin egg. nhm.ac.uk, eggs and nests, treasures
• The Royal Society’s record of Richard Assheton, FRS 1914, for his death on 24 October 1915; Wikipedia for the dates of Wilson, Bowers, Cherry-Garrard and Cossar Ewart. royalsociety.org
• George Gaylord Simpson, “Fossil Penguins”, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 87, article 1, 1946. AMNH library
• Kerryn E. Slack and others, “Early Penguin Fossils, plus Mitochondrial Genomes, Calibrate Avian Evolution”, Molecular Biology and Evolution 23 (2006), 1144–1155, for Waimanu. doi.org
• Pei-ji Chen, Zhi-ming Dong and Shuo-nan Zhen, “An exceptionally well-preserved theropod dinosaur from the Yixian Formation of China”, Nature 391 (1998), 147–152, on Sinosauropteryx; and Richard O. Prum and Alan H. Brush, “The Evolutionary Origin and Diversification of Feathers”, Quarterly Review of Biology 77 (2002), 261–295. doi.org, doi.org