From Antarctica with Love

Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to Antarctica captivated the world. But hiding within the legend was a story that has never been told—a love affair between two of the crew who survived. The post From Antarctica with Love appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.

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From Antarctica
with Love

Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed journey to the South Pole captivated the world. But hidden within the legend was a story that has never been told—a love affair between two of the crew who survived.

By Allegra Rosenberg

The Atavist Magazine, No. 160

Allegra Rosenberg is a writer and researcher based in New York City. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Slate, Wired, Atlas Obscura, MIT Technology Review, and other publications. She is the founder and director of the Terror Camp polar conference.

Editor: Jonah Ogles
Art Director: Ed Johnson
Copy Editor: Sean Cooper
Fact Checker: Emily Injean
Illustrator: Eoin Ryan

Published in February 2025.

Devon in the summer of 1913 was beautiful. Green fields rolled until they met the blue of a low-hanging sky dotted with fair-weather clouds. Sheep milled about on the hillsides, and the breeze smelled faintly of the sea. But what Lieutenant Harry Lewin Lee Pennell loved most was the birds. How he’d missed them: the shrikes and song thrushes, the warblers and sparrows, and somewhere up above, the skylarks.

Pennell was relieved to be home after an eventful three years away. A Royal Navy officer, he’d taken command of a ship for the very first time, the Terra Nova, and navigated dangerous storms in distant latitudes. He had close calls with icebergs and death by misadventure. He was called captain by men whose respect and admiration he’d earned through hard work.

The Terra Nova had docked ten days earlier in Cardiff, amid throngs of well-wishers, but Pennell quickly escaped on a train to the market town of Honiton, and from there traveled on foot to the village of Awliscombe, his home. Coming up its winding main street, he spotted his mother and sisters. It was the first time he’d been with his family since 1910. Long absences were nothing unusual for a Royal Navy man. What was unusual was where Pennell had spent those years: on an expedition to the Antarctic, the Great White South.

As the Pennells headed home together, a voice called out. It was Pennell’s friend Edward Leicester Atkinson—or Jane, as Pennell often called him. Pennell had met Atkinson onboard the Terra Nova, on the way down to the Antarctic. Atkinson was a commissioned Royal Navy surgeon and parasitologist. As both doctor and scientist, he spent two years on the forbidding continent, on the same expedition as Pennell, under the command of Captain Robert Falcon Scott. But while Pennell wintered the Terra Nova in New Zealand, disaster struck in Antarctica, and Atkinson was forced to take charge of the entire expedition. The weight of the world had been on his shoulders.

Now that they were both back in England, the two men hoped to spend as much time together as possible, which is why Atkinson had come all the way to Awliscombe after arriving home on a different ship. It was a deep relief for Pennell to see his mother take to Atkinson at once, although of course she would: He was an eminently likable chap, personable and kind and stubbornly good. “[I] look forward to seeing him again, if only a day or two parted, with quite amazing keenness,” Pennell wrote in his diary later that week.

The romance hidden inside Pennell’s letters and diaries was a gift waiting for the right moment to be discovered.

By the time Pennell and Atkinson found themselves aboard the Terra Nova with 63 other men in 1910, the era of Antarctic enthusiasm was in full swing. In 1895, the Sixth International Geographical Congress had passed a resolution declaring that “the exploration of the Antarctic is the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken.” Expeditions were duly planned by Belgium, Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott first went south in 1901 as the leader of Britain’s National Antarctic Expedition, for which a ship, the Discovery, was custom-built. Equipped with state-of-the-art scientific facilities and a flexible, fortified wooden hull to battle the ice, the Discovery carried a team of men to McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea. They lived aboard the ship, in the long tradition of Victorian polar exploration, and ventured from there into the unknown interior of the continent.

No one had ever reached the South Pole, and many men were determined to be first. Accompanied by dogs they didn’t know how to drive let alone feed properly, Scott and his companions, Edward Adrian Wilson and Ernest Shackleton, made it to within 530 miles of the Pole before conditions forced them to turn back, scurvy-ridden and disappointed. Shackleton made another go of it on his private Nimrod expedition in 1907, getting as near as 112 miles from the Pole before turning his party back for lack of supplies.

In 1910, Scott left once more to claim the Pole for the British. He aimed to do it alongside a team of experienced scientists, legitimizing his mission and dispelling the accusations of dishonorable pole seeking. Pole seeking, however, was Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s business, and he was shameless about it. In the end he won the race, reaching the Pole on December 14, 1911, while Scott and his supply parties were still struggling across the ice. When Scott reached the Pole a few weeks later, he was dismayed to find remnants of Amundsen’s camp. He and his men turned for home, heading back to their base. They never arrived. By April 1912, Scott and the four other members of his party were dead, victims of bad luck, hubris, and poor planning.

The story of Scott’s expedition is filled with iconic images and immortal lines. The frozen, starving Scott, writing with shaking hands in his diary what would be his last plea: “For God’s sake, look after our people.” The laconic and brave Captain Lawrence Oates, stepping into a blizzard as he uttered his legendary final words: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” The discovery of the men’s bodies in their snow-buried tent, Scott’s arm outstretched as if to clutch at his best friend, Edward “Bill” Wilson.

All but lost to history, however, are Pennell and Atkinson, and the other men lurking just outside the central narrative. In accounts and debates about what happened, these other expeditioners are often reduced to bit players. They are responsible for fuel deposits and transport orders, the victims of vitamin deficiencies and lost nerve. Atkinson occasionally reaches the foreground: Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic 1922 book, The Worst Journey in the World, makes glowing mention of the stoic doctor who commanded the expedition during the winter after Scott’s death, and subsequently oversaw the quest to retrieve the bodies of the lost men. As captain of the Terra Nova in Scott’s absence, Pennell was also vital to the expedition, but he appears only briefly in Cherry-Garrard’s record, which mainly follows the story of the shore party.

In the end, neither man made it into the popular mythology about Scott’s journey. Pennell left a trove of letters and diaries behind, but they sat largely unconsulted for a century. The romance hidden inside them was a gift waiting for the right moment to be discovered.

In 1913, after knowing Atkinson for some three years, Pennell finally confessed to his diary: “I am quite absurdly in love with him.”

Part I
The Expedition

Pennell and Atkinson first got to know each other in the wardroom of the Terra Nova, surrounded by a bevy of officers and Cambridge-trained scientists. Despite his five first-class certificates from the HMS Britannia’s officer school and a medal for his service in the Boxer Rebellion in China, Pennell felt appallingly ignorant compared with his accomplished shipmates—“rather a worm,” as he put it. Still, he quickly grew close to a handful of his fellow officers.

There was Edward Adrian Wilson, a physician, self-trained watercolorist, and director of the scientific staff. He was also Scott’s best friend; the two had become close on the Discovery expedition nine years earlier. Wilson’s assistant was Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a young, bespectacled Oxford graduate with deep pockets—something the expedition desperately needed—and a desire to see the world. He was one of the group of scientists Wilson oversaw, men of varied disciplines, from physics and geology to biology and parasitology. The latter was Atkinson’s specialty. “After Wilson, Atkinson is the favourite and that is natural for he is an out and out gentleman with the quiet self assurance that makes a man without making him offensive,” Pennell wrote in his diary.

Atkinson was the kind of person others trusted when they needed someone to talk to, as Pennell did after the Terra Nova arrived in Melbourne in October 1910, on its way to the Antarctic. One night, after being wined and dined by Melbourne notables, Pennell began imagining the day he would take command of the Terra Nova once the expedition reached Antarctica. Though Atkinson had gone to bed, Pennell knocked at the door of his hotel room, and Atkinson welcomed him in for a long discussion about the ship and the weight of command. “I have great faith in his judgement in many matters and, whether I agree or not, find his point of view worth considering, particularly as he is very much in touch with the mess deck feeling,” Pennell wrote. “At any rate it’s a good thing I think to have someone with whom I can discuss matters without reserve & is safe to keep them quite quiet.”

From Australia, the Terra Nova sailed to New Zealand. The newspapers by then were full of talk of a cryptic telegram Amundsen had sent to Scott: “Am going south. Amundsen.” It was clear that he meant to bag the South Pole for Norway. “As to who is first by a few weeks I cannot really see it matters,” Pennell wrote in his journal, but to Scott it mattered a great deal. Atkinson’s thoughts on the subject are unknown, though he may have discussed it with Pennell in private or as an aside during the many meals they shared. “It is extraordinary how fond I have become of Atkinson,” Pennell wrote. “The defects of his qualities come out in rather an undue amount of obstinacy.” Pennell also noted that his new friend sometimes drank to excess. And when he did, the normally quiet Atkinson became an incorrigible flirt.

The Terra Nova departed New Zealand on November 29, 1910. For many of the men, it would be their last sight of civilization for nearly two years. The officers by then had all been given nicknames, of the kind often handed out at the elite schools many of them had attended. Lieutenant Henry Robertson Bowers, in charge of stores, was Birdie, because of his prominent nose. Captain Lawrence Oates, in charge of the expedition’s ponies, was Titus. Geologist Frank Debenham was Deb and biologist Edward Nelson was Marie, while Cherry-Garrard was Cherry and Wilson was Dr. Bill. Atkinson was either Atch or Jane.

Pennell, or Penelope, was perhaps the most likable of the naval officers on the expedition. He wasn’t a martinet like third-in-command Lieutenant Victor Campbell (the Wicked Mate), nor overly exuberant like second-in-command Lieutenant Edward R. G. R. Evans (Teddy). Pennell was a sensible and lovable fellow, “father and mother to every man on board his ship,” according to Cherry.

He was also incredibly hardworking. As the expedition’s navigating officer, Pennell kept odd hours and night watches. He didn’t seem to require much sleep at all—perhaps only four or five hours a night. When he did turn in, it was rarely in the cabin he officially shared with two other men. He would instead catch a few winks in a sleeping bag beneath the large table in the chart room on the bridge. Then he’d rise energetically to see to his varied duties, from laborious coal trimming down in the engine room, to shouting commands from the poop deck and watching for seabirds to enter into the zoological log. Cherry described him as “as happy as the day is long” when he was at work. Unrelated to his duties, and just for science’s sake, Pennell took regular magnetic observations, which required hours of complex calculations. Cherry often helped him copy down numbers.

Charles “Silas” Wright, the expedition’s young Canadian physicist, noted in his diary that Pennell had “a taste for dancing hornpipes at inopportune moments” and was “suspected of being in Love.” But who was the object of his affection? Silas made no guess, and nothing in Pennell’s journal at the time gave anything away—though Atkinson appeared with increasing regularity as the voyage wore on.

It was not unheard of for military men of the time to form close, even romantic relationships with other men aboard their ships or in their regiments. In fact, Pennell had been in love before. There was Gerry Hodson, his friend from the training ship HMS Mercury. The two had spent their free weekends cycling along the southern coast of England and visiting Gerry’s family home in Gloucestershire, where his father was a rector. Then there was young Ben Barrett, a midshipman Pennell had charge of as a lieutenant on the HMS Drake. He and the fresh-faced Barrett bathed beneath waterfalls in Algeciras and lounged in a field of blueberries in Halifax. In his diary, Pennell reflected that the boy was “good company for a person of my temperament.”

How did Pennell see his sexuality, a term he would likely never have heard let alone used? There is no way of knowing. He lived in a time of implication and inference, of reading between the rigid lines. He was a conservative man, one who may not have had the words to explain himself, or be willing to use them if he did. He knew that he had a “curious nature.” He’d always made friends easily, but had loved no one until Gerry Hodson. Then, so soon afterward, came Ben Barrett, for whom his “attachment [was] rather a one sided arrangement,” he concluded. He was often confused by his friends’ reckless pursuit of women, but supposed that one day each of them would marry, regardless of his feelings on the subject—as would he.

The Terra Nova was awash with masculine energy. Schoolboyish antics often began after the evening meal, courtesy of Teddy Evans. Cued by an exuberant cry of “Furl t’gallant sails!” the officers would try to tear each other’s clothing off. By the end of the game, which could last hours, hardly anyone was left standing, clothed, or able to breathe through his laughter.

It was one of many ways the crew passed the long days and nights at sea. Biologist Denis Lillie also spent time drawing exquisitely pointed caricatures of the crew. He depicted Pennell with close-cropped blond hair and cheeks flushed pink with health, shouting from the crow’s nest, “Lower away skiff—out trawl!” Lillie’s caricature of Atkinson showed him in naval attire, with a handsome face and jutting square chin.

On December 22, the day Pennell turned 27, the ship was held up in ice for the third week in a row, still hundreds of miles from its destination of McMurdo Sound. Any ship hoping to reach Antarctica had to battle the gauntlet of thick floes that formed against the continent during winter and broke loose in the summer, floating northward en masse. Being stuck in the ice frustrated Scott nearly to the breaking point. His diary entries were a mess of anxiety—that the delay was his fault, that it was costing the expedition precious coal, that it would cost them the Pole. But Pennell found that it wasn’t all that bad. The time spent unmoving amid floes and bergs, without any sightings to take or courses to chart, was more time to spend with Jane, who by this time figured prominently in his thoughts. “I have seen a good deal of Atkinson in spite of the large numbers onboard,” he wrote in his diary. “He is a most attractive individual & intensely human, & although disagreeing with him on large number of points, yet his view has always a very sound side to it.”

As to their disagreements Pennell gave no specifics. Perhaps it was something to do with the service—the Admiralty’s proposed reforms, or the threat posed by the Germans. In 1910, everyone knew war was in the offing. It was only a matter of time before conflict would erupt in Europe. Many of the men on the Terra Nova hoped that war wasn’t imminent; it would be a shame to miss out on the chance to serve one’s country.

Near the end of December, they were finally released by the pack and steamed onward, full speed ahead. On New Year’s Eve, some hours before midnight, Cherry was woken by Atkinson. Up on deck, the nearsighted Cherry squinted at the horizon, adjusting his thick spectacles. “All the highlights are snow, lit up by the sun,” Atkinson whispered to him. Before them lay Antarctica. The great peaks of the Admiralty Range gleamed in the midnight sun.

As the ship steamed down the coastline in a perfect flat calm, the air was crisp and smelled impossibly clean. The colors of the landscape—pink, purple, yellow, blue—were illuminated in shapes and planes, alien and massive. No black-and-white photograph could do them justice. It was a good thing Dr. Bill had his watercolors in hand to capture the splendor.

Once they reached land, Scott chose a site for base camp on the coast of Ross Island. He named it Cape Evans, in honor of his second-in-command. Then began the great work of unloading two years’ worth of supplies. Every man pitched in, but only 25 would have the privilege of living in the camp’s main hut. An auxiliary party of six would be dropped off farther along the coast to explore another part of the continent, and the remainder would stay with the ship.

Pennell confessed privately to Atkinson how much he would like to stay in Antarctica. Instead, once the supplies were unloaded in a few weeks, he would take command of the Terra Nova and its remaining men for the ten months the ship would spend away from McMurdo Sound, avoiding damage the fierce winter might cause the vessel, and preparing to resupply the expedition come next summer. Pennell wrote in his diary that it was “rather a jar saying good-bye, particularly to Jane who poor chap was snow blind already.” Atkinson had been out on the ice without eye protection, and the ultraviolet light reflecting off the bright surface gave him a bad bout of the common Antarctic condition. With eyes red, burning, and swollen shut, he could scarcely see Pennell as they bid each other farewell.

“I may not see you but I hope I do as I have a very great deal to say to you, things that one cannot write,” Atkinson confessed to Pennell in a letter.

With the ship gone, Scott and his men settled into their new home on the west coast of Ross Island. The island was a volcanic speck rubbing up against the Great Ice Barrier (today called the Ross Ice Shelf), a floating behemoth nearly as big as France. Above camp loomed the grand Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano, its conical peak often emitting a cloud of smoke.

There were nine men in the forward part of the main hut, including a steward, a cook, a clutch of petty officers, and two Russians whose job was to tend to the animals: 33 dogs chained up outside and 17 ponies in an adjacent stable. In the aft part of the hut lived 16 officers and scientists. A bulwark of storage crates separated the two sections, ensuring that discipline and hierarchy could be maintained even at the bottom of the world. Such strictness was a comfort to Scott, who relied on the order of the navy he had known all his life to maintain authority and something resembling self-confidence.

The first year of Scott’s expedition would consist of depot laying—hauling supplies out to designated points on the 500-mile-wide Barrier—as the austral summer ended, followed by hunkering down for the dark, cold winter months at Cape Evans. Come September, as temperatures rose, preparations could begin in earnest for the trek to the Pole. Scott planned to leave Cape Evans in November 1911 and would return in early March 1912. It was nearly 900 miles there and another 900 miles back.

The journey would be completed in stages, with supporting parties of men carrying the supplies that would make the final push to the Pole possible. Though the parties would use ponies, dogs, and motorized vehicles for some of the journey, the men eventually switched to pulling the supplies behind them on wooden sledges—a Victorian-era technique called manhauling.

Atkinson was sure that Pennell would have enjoyed life on the ice, and he said as much in a letter he wrote to “dear Penelope” in October 1911 and left at camp for Pennell to read when he returned to Antarctica. The work was “good and hard.” But other aspects of the expedition were not so satisfactory. “Teddy Evans is a very great failure in everyway conceivable,” Atkinson wrote to Pennell. “This is not one of my sudden spasms which you are aware of but is and was a great shock to me. Really he is unsuited for the job in every way and is very stupid.”

Pennell had written in his diary of the tendency for Evans and Scott to clash over the smallest issues, and predicted that their relationship would not stand the strain of sledging. Indeed, over the winter Scott lost all confidence in Evans, finding him irresponsible and immature. Scott wrote to expedition manager J. J. Kinsey in New Zealand that Evans was “not at all fitted to be ‘Second-in-Command,’ as I was foolish enough to name him.”

Despite failing to live up to Scott’s high standards, Evans maintained both his title and his position on the polar journey: He was chosen to be part of the larger 12-man party that would accompany Scott up the Beardmore Glacier toward the Pole, as were Atkinson and Cherry-Garrard. Scott then planned to send two supporting parties back to base camp, leaving only four in the final polar party. Everyone hoped to be chosen, but the makeup of the final party would be Scott’s choice, dependent on the physical and mental condition of the men.

Pennell and the Terra Nova were due back from New Zealand when summer came, but it was possible that Atkinson wouldn’t have returned to base camp by then. “I may not see you but I hope I do as I have a very great deal to say to you, things that one cannot write,” Atkinson confessed to Pennell in a letter. “To my mind the whole result depends upon good weather and lies in the lap of the Gods.”

After a dark winter busy with work, exercise, and the occasional holiday celebration, the sun returned to the Antarctic sky. The complicated journey toward the Pole began at last in early November, when Scott’s group headed south on the Barrier with their ponies and sledges. By December 22, the Antarctic summer solstice, Scott and his men had reached the top of the great Beardmore Glacier, some 330 miles from the South Pole. There, Scott sent Atkinson, Cherry, Silas, and Petty Officer Keohane back to Cape Evans. Two parties—eight men in total—proceeded. Another four men would turn back in a fortnight, and the final party, led by Scott, would go on to the Pole. They hoped to make history.

At least that was the plan, if they were lucky, which they’d really not been so far. Early on, the motorized vehicles had broken down after only a handful of miles. The ponies struggled through unexpectedly thick snow; eventually all were shot for meat at the foot of the Beardmore. The men, under their own power, navigated huge crevasses and dangerous icefalls. Scott was despondent at times, Wilson always patient. Evans was lazy and didn’t pull as much weight as the other men. The weather was horrible and everyone was cold, wet, and brutally hungry—the rations, so carefully calculated and packed, never seemed to be enough.

Atkinson found the usually cheery lieutenant at death’s door. If Atkinson had arrived a day hence, it might have been too late.

Atkinson and his party made it back to base camp with relative ease on January 26, 1912. The Terra Nova, returning from New Zealand to resupply the shore party, was spotted in the distance soon after. Pennell had accomplished much since the prior autumn. Before even leaving Antarctica, he unexpectedly came across Amundsen’s ship Fram at the Bay of Whales and dined with the Norwegians before they began their own journey to the Pole. He dropped off a six-man auxiliary party led by Lieutenant Campbell at Cape Adare, a few hundred miles from Cape Evans, to further explore the continent. Just before sailing back to New Zealand, he mapped never-before-glimpsed parts of the Antarctic coast. In New Zealand, where he oversaw the Terra Nova’s refitting, he also completed a marine survey on behalf of the government.

All the while he missed Atkinson. He discussed Jane frequently with the ship’s biologist, Lillie, a quirky fellow prone to spouting mystical theories about reincarnation when he wasn’t studying the life cycles of whales and dolphins. Lillie had confessed at one point to another shipmate that he felt his nature was “split”—that he was really a woman trapped in a man’s body, and that he blushed when he saw another man naked. Whether Pennell knew of this or not, he grew close with Lillie, in part because of their mutual admiration of Atkinson. “It is difficult to realise how one likes one’s messmates till they are out of reach. Lillie & I cannot be together more than an hour without talking about Jane,” Pennell mused in his diary.

As he again approached McMurdo Sound in February 1912, Pennell must have been eager to see the man who had so occupied his thoughts. And then there he was: Atkinson, expertly driving a dog sledge, was the first person to make contact with the Terra Nova. Once aboard the ship, he gave Pennell all the news he could. “Old Jane has been spinning me all the shore yarns, it is delightful to have him again to talk to,” Pennell wrote to Dr. Bill, in a letter he left for Wilson to read when he returned from the trip to the Pole with Scott.

After unloading supplies, Pennell and the Terra Nova were set to sail across McMurdo Sound to fetch Campbell and his party, who had been transferred a few weeks earlier to a place called Terra Nova Bay for geological research. But the pack ice was heavier than expected, and the Terra Nova could not reach the men. If the ice didn’t allow the ship through soon, Campbell’s party would face a long winter alone, stranded on the shoreline. Planning to try again in a few days, and hoping for improved conditions, Pennell returned to Cape Evans.

Meanwhile, Atkinson was preparing to leave with a dog team to replenish supply depots on the Barrier—to be used by Scott and his men upon their return from the Pole—when a ghastly apparition staggered into camp. It was Petty Officer Tom Crean, who had just walked 35 miles in 18 hours to reach Atkinson with terrible news: Teddy Evans was lying ill with scurvy in a tent out on the ice, with only Petty Officer Bill Lashly there to nurse him. Scott had forged ahead to the Pole in a party of five instead of four, and a final three-man party had turned back.

Crean’s incredible feat left him exhausted. He had only just beaten the blizzard that now raged around the hut as Atkinson hand-fed him brandy and porridge. Eventually, the weather calmed enough for Atkinson and Dmitri Gerov, the Russian dog driver, to go fetch Evans and Lashly. Atkinson brought along onions, seal meat, and other antiscorbutic food for Evans. When they arrived at the tent on the Barrier, Atkinson found the usually cheery lieutenant at death’s door. If Atkinson had arrived a day hence, it might have been too late.

Back at camp, Atkinson had a hard decision to make. For Scott’s party to return from the Pole safely, the right rations had to be available for them to pick up at the depots, and it was Atkinson’s job to make sure that this was the case. But as the only doctor at camp, he could not leave Evans’s side. So the duty to replenish One Ton Depot, 137 miles from base, fell to Cherry, who in addition to being nearsighted had never driven a team of dogs before.

Evans was lifted aboard the Terra Nova in his sleeping bag and installed in a berth, clinging to life. It was a pity—not only his sickness but his incapacitated state meant that he could not give Pennell his place on the ice that winter, as he had said he would. “If we stay a 2nd year I don’t mind exchanging with you if you like,” Evans had written to Pennell before he left for the Pole. Scott was planning to stay on in Antarctica after the Pole had been reached to focus on scientific research. But Evans, unwilling to endure the growing chasm between himself and Scott, had already made up his mind to leave the expedition and reunite with his wife, who was waiting in New Zealand.

Evans’s scurvy showed rapid improvement over the course of the next few days, a relief for Atkinson, who could safely return to base camp when the ship next stopped there. The Terra Nova wasn’t so lucky. Pennell tried again to make it through the ice to Campbell’s party, to no avail. Atkinson’s presence must have been a balm during the stress of the failed rescue mission. “It was a great pleasure to have [Atkinson] onboard & as he had little to do I saw a great deal of him,” Pennell wrote of that short period. But Pennell was disappointed that Evans had not recovered enough to take command of the ship. “The idea of landing and being with him … was so attractive that the miscarriage of the scheme at the last moment was most annoying,” he wrote. “However much one would like to have landed there can be no doubt as to my duty keeping me in the ship.”

Pennell deposited Atkinson at base camp, and then headed north, bound for New Zealand, with Evans aboard. Though it was early March, the very beginning of autumn, the ice in McMurdo Sound was already formidable. “There can be no doubt that this season is very early,” Pennell observed in his official shipboard diary. In his private journal he spared a thought for Campbell’s stranded party. “Above all things the chief hope lies in Campbell’s cool, clear brain,” he wrote.

For Scott’s party he expressed no worries at all.

Part II
Disaster

On March 3, following Atkinson’s instructions, Cherry arrived at One Ton Depot to await his dearest friends, the ones who had given new purpose to his otherwise aimless aristocratic life. He’d nearly died alongside Dr. Bill and Birdie Bowers during their treacherous journey in winter darkness to fetch valuable Emperor penguin eggs at Cape Crozier. His teeth had shattered in the brutal minus-70-degree cold, and his poor eyesight meant that he was unable to see the gorgeous auroras in the sky above them. But the journey was instrumental in making Cherry the type of man he wished to be. Bill and Birdie were steadfast and true, and Cherry found that he could be, too. He had been devastated to not continue on the polar journey with them and looked forward to their reunion. The inspiring Dr. Bill and the indomitable Birdie, along with Scott, Oates, and Petty Officer Edgar “Taff” Evans, were due to arrive at the depot any day. “My first feeling was one of relief that the Polar Party had not been to the Depôt and that therefore we had got their provisions out in time,” Cherry later wrote. “I decided to remain at the Depôt where we were certain to meet.”

Cherry waited and waited, a day and then another. He wasn’t worried. Even after seven days, he wrote, “I had no reason to suspect that [they] could be in want of food. Thus I felt little anxiety for the Polar Party.” He could not take the dogs farther inland to look for them, because there wasn’t enough dog food for the journey. So on March 10, Cherry returned to base camp, hoping—believing—that his friends were close behind him.

Weeks went by. The sun vanished. Winter darkness fell, and the truth finally set in. Everyone in the hut knew that the polar party’s supplies would have run out by now. Nothing and no one could survive on the Barrier without food and fuel. This meant only one thing: All five men were dead. Atkinson, as the highest-ranking naval officer at Cape Evans, was now in full command of the British Antarctic Expedition.

The group in the hut was down to 13—apart from Scott’s lost party, nine others had gone home on the Terra Nova. After a subdued midwinter holiday dinner in June, Atkinson called the men together—officers, civilian scientists, and seamen. Atkinson was a different kind of leader than Scott, and he wanted all the men to weigh in on what should be done when the sun returned. Should they go west and try to rescue Campbell’s party, who would have had access to seals and penguins for sustenance to see them safely through the winter? Or should they go south, seeking out the remains of the lost party?

The vote was unanimous. There was a chance Campbell’s party would make it back to base on their own. But if the men didn’t try to find what remained of Scott’s party, it was possible that no one would ever know what became of them. The dead could not recover themselves.

At the end of the winter, Atkinson wrote a long letter to Pennell about the situation. “It really has been a devil of a winter and a very trying time,” he said. “By Jove I shall be very pleased to see you again and shall have a good deal to say. I think we all need civilization pretty badly.” The rest of the missive was characteristically modest; Atkinson singled out others at Cape Evans for praise, especially Cherry. “Please remember and remind anyone that I could never claim any credit for anything that will be done,” he wrote to Pennell. “There is much more for the others, but I am ready to take any blame for myself.”

Atkinson hoped that he might find some peace with Pennell once they returned home. “Mind you try and throw over a few things,” he wrote, “and we shall get off into the quiet country somewhere away from people.”

The search party set out on October 29 and covered the 137 miles to One Ton Depot in two weeks, arriving on November 11. The next day, Silas Wright squinted through the vast brightness glaring off the Barrier and noticed a small, out-of-place dark spot. He skied over to investigate. Soon the other men saw him waving frantically, beckoning them to follow. When they arrived, Silas said, “It is the tent.”

The men dug it out from a winter’s worth of drifted snow. Inside it was quiet as a cathedral. Some would say later that the dead men seemed to be sleeping. Others would describe it as a horrible, gruesome scene. All would agree that Scott’s arm was out of his bag, stretched over Wilson.

The search party silently collapsed the tent over the bodies, built a cairn of snow atop it, and put up a cross made of a pair of skis. Atkinson led a funeral service. “The sun was dipping low above the Pole, the Barrier was almost in shadow,” Cherry would write years later. “And the sky was blazing—sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds. The cairn and Cross stood dark against a glory of burnished gold.”

Campbell’s party had spent the winter in a dug-out ice cave not tall enough to stand up in, lit only by a single, smelly blubber lamp. They’d survived—barely.

As the Terra Nova cruised toward Cape Evans in midsummer, the crew strung up celebratory bunting and readied champagne, cigars, and chocolate. The ship was scrubbed, the yards squared, and the Union Jacks and ensigns hoisted. It was the least the men on board could do for Scott to ease the disappointment of having come in second place behind the Norwegians, who after returning from the Pole had sailed directly to Australia and announced their triumphant news to the world.

Though Pennell was aboard the ship, he was no longer its captain: Evans had recovered and been promoted to commander, taking over just before the Terra Nova headed south again. Grumbled Pennell in his diary: “The position is of course a very awkward, one might almost say humiliating, one.” But leaving the expedition would have meant not reuniting with Atkinson, so he accepted the demotion to navigator.

Approaching Ross Island on January 18, 1913, in a beautiful and sunny calm, Pennell was relieved to see Campbell and the other members of his party through his spyglass, waving to greet the ship. They had made it through the winter and rejoined the main party; they even looked to be in good health.

“Are you all well?” Evans shouted. Campbell raised a megaphone as the Terra Nova approached. He hesitated for a moment. “The southern party reached the South Pole on the seventeenth of January last year, but were all lost on the return journey,” he called out. “We have their records.”

The ship bobbed in silence as the sun bounced off the water. It was Pennell who broke the quiet. “All hands to let fall anchor!” he ordered. The men jerked back into action. There was a splash and the rattle of a chain. Evans dispatched crew members to bring down the celebratory flags.

Soon Atkinson and Campbell were on board, giving the Terra Nova’s crew the news in detail. The story of Campbell’s party was inspiring: They’d spent the winter in a dug-out ice cave not tall enough to stand up in, lit only by a single, smelly blubber lamp. They’d survived—barely—on seal and penguin meat, and kept themselves sane by singing hymns and obeying strict naval discipline. The three seamen in the party pretended not to hear the discussions on the officers’ side of the cave, and vice versa.

Of the polar party’s story there was almost too much to take in, not least the pain and grief suffered by the men at Cape Evans. “No one can ever know quite how much Atkinson has been through this last winter,” Pennell later wrote. For Evans’s part, he was awed at the “grit and loyalty” Atkinson had displayed through such a trial.

The ship’s carpenter constructed a nine-foot-tall memorial cross, upon which the names of the dead were carved, along with a quotation selected by Cherry from “Ulysses” by Alfred Lord Tennyson: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” It was erected on Observation Hill, above Hut Point, the last staging point on the way to the Pole.

Everyone left on the expedition was aboard the Terra Nova as it steamed north. Pennell observed that Campbell somehow seemed younger now than when the expedition first set out. But Atkinson was another story. “Jane is much more marked—lines all over his face, which now, in repose, has a thoughtful almost sad look,” Pennell wrote in his diary. “The expedition will I think affect him more (permanently) than any other member.”

Atkinson would have to tell the families of the dead—and the wider world—that Scott’s party had perished. He would have to explain what led to the tragedy, when he still did not fully comprehend it himself. He saw the dead bodies, frostbitten and starved, in his mind’s eye; he saw the cans of precious fuel at the depots on the Barrier, their contents evaporated through faulty seals. He alone had read the end of Scott’s diary, with its increasingly bewildered enumeration of each point of failure: “The loss of pony transport in March 1911… The weather throughout the outward journey… The soft snow in lower reaches of glacier… [T]his sudden advent of severe weather… [A] shortage of fuel in our depôts for which I cannot account…”

Pennell, among others, tried to convince Atkinson that the expedition had been, at least in some ways, a success: An Englishman had reached the Pole, and the Terra Nova was carrying back the most extensive scientific records of Antarctica ever collected, including more than 70 pounds’ worth of immensely valuable geological specimens from the top of the Beardmore Glacier, hauled to the very end by the polar party.

Lillie, ever eager to cheer up his comrades, drew one of his caricatures, depicting Pennell and Atkinson as a pair of what he called Penelopatchicus antarctica, or “Antarctic Love-Birds,” perched on branches underneath a bell jar. With plumage resembling naval dress uniforms, the birds appeared to be performing some kind of mating dance. Both men signed their names to the drawing, as if to approve it for posterity.

Pennell may have looked at the dark-haired, compact Atkinson—quiet, strong Jane—and seen a man sorely tested who now needed kindness, care, and rest.

In the dark early hours of February 10, 1913, Atkinson and Pennell were rowed ashore by Tom Crean in Oamaru, New Zealand. The local lighthouse, in Morse code, flashed, “What ship?” But the crew of the Terra Nova refused to reveal the ship’s name—just as Atkinson and Pennell refused to tell the night watchman onshore who they were. Britain’s Central News Agency had negotiated the exclusive rights to Scott’s story before the expedition, and neither man was about to violate the agreement.

After a few hours of sleep on the bemused harbormaster’s floor, Pennell and Atkinson headed to Oamaru’s small telegraph office at 8 a.m. sharp. They sent a wire to the expedition’s agent, J. J. Kinsey, informing him that they would arrive by train in Christchurch to deliver the full story in person. The Terra Nova was already steaming up the coast to meet them there.

As they waited for the train, Pennell and Atkinson sat together in a field near the station. When was the last time it had been just the two of them? Perhaps nearly two years, when Pennell visited Atkinson’s hotel room to confess his anxieties about taking command of the ship. So much had happened since then. Pennell’s difficulties, whatever they may have been, paled in comparison with what Atkinson had endured. Whatever words did or did not pass between them, Pennell may have looked at the dark-haired, compact Atkinson—quiet, strong Jane—and seen a man sorely tested who now needed kindness, care, and rest.

It was a hazy and warm late-summer day. A northerly wind sent ripples over the broad blue-green sea and blew the sound of morning birdsong toward the two men. It was a rare and precious moment, the calm before the storm.

The storm found them soon enough. By the time Pennell and Atkinson were on the train to Christchurch, reporters had gotten word of the Terra Nova’s return and were on their trail, dogging the men from station to station. Some recognized Pennell from his two winters spent in New Zealand; some mistook Atkinson for Scott. Pennell shielded Atkinson from their prying. “Sorry, but I can’t give you a word,” he told one overeager reporter. “You know we are bound to secrecy.”

They handed over the full dispatch, written by Evans, as soon as they arrived in Christchurch, and Kinsey assumed responsibility for its immediate transmission. The story of Scott’s demise soon reverberated worldwide; it was in the headlines of nearly every paper around the globe by February 11. It happened so quickly that Atkinson did not even have a chance to speak to Oriana Wilson, Dr. Bill’s wife, before she heard a newsboy at the train station shout word of her husband’s death.

“It’s made a tremendous impression,” Atkinson told Cherry afterward. “I had no idea it would make so much.” It felt to many people like another Titanic, which had sunk only the year before. In Britain, children assembled in school halls to be told the terrible news by teachers. St. Paul’s Cathedral hosted a memorial service with King George in attendance. Thousands gathered outside, straining to hear the hymns.

In New Zealand the press was in a frenzy, and the men of the Terra Nova were at the center of it. Many of the scientists and civilians decamped right away for home or holiday, but the naval officers, duty bound to stay with the expedition until given leave, had no such luxury as headlines turned from shock to blame, much of it focused on Atkinson. Had he done enough, reporters asked, to save Scott? Could he have been at fault for the whole ordeal?

After Atkinson, stressed and grief-stricken, escaped to Kinsey’s country home outside Christchurch for rest and privacy, a reporter from the Lyttelton Times raised the issue with some of the Terra Nova’s officers. Pennell interrupted him. “There is not the slightest ground for suggesting that criticism of anything Dr. Atkinson did came from a single member of the expedition,” he said.

“Especially from me, who was in charge of one of the parties he was trying to relieve,” Campbell put in.

“Or from me, whose life he saved by his professional skill,” Evans added.

Bad feeling among the crew did exist privately, but it was mostly directed toward Evans. Since Scott’s death, he had become the head of the entire expedition, much to the chagrin of those, like Atkinson, who thought him unworthy of the position. But there was no time to dwell on the issue in the face of so much to be done: speaking to the press, arranging for passage back to England, filling out paperwork, preparing the Terra Nova for the ship’s homeward voyage.

It was only on weekends that Pennell and Atkinson could find a moment to themselves, and they made the most of it. They created a sanctuary for themselves at Te Hau, Kinsey and his wife’s country estate. There they bunked in a cozy hut in the garden, meant to serve as a meteorological station in Antarctica but left behind for lack of room on the ship. “Mrs. K carefully arranged that J & I should sleep together in the Cabin & apologised very much for having to put us in the one room,” Pennell wrote. The men smoked their pipes. They listened to the gramophone. They leafed through books of fashion plates. They took photographs, posing cheerfully with fellow expedition members and local friends. A couple they befriended even chose them to be godfathers to the child they were expecting.

But it could not last. Atkinson was tasked with chaperoning the widowed Oriana Wilson and her unmarried sister, Constance Souper, home to England. They steamed away on the SS Remuera on March 6. The night before, Pennell and Atkinson spent a final evening together at the Royal Oak—“the best hotel in Wellington but such a dirty place,” Pennell wrote. They would not see each other again until June or perhaps July, when the Terra Nova would finally arrive back in England. Pennell, always the optimist, was already looking forward to their reunion.

“In some ways this has been a very happy month,” he wrote. “None could have imagined how nice everyone could be until this sort of thing occurred, the thoughtfulness & sympathy of all our neighbours, the press & the public has been wonderful.” Though he had been very busy, there was a silver lining. “The whole time has been practically with Jane & this need not be emphasised.”

Part III
Home

The men were not together for the long journey back to England, but they were on the same seas: from New Zealand around Chile’s Cape Horn, up the eastern coast of South America, and across the Atlantic to England. Teddy Evans had chosen to join his wife on a steamer back home, leaving a grateful Pennell once again in command of the Terra Nova.

Writing to Pennell from the Remuera, Oriana Wilson assured him that Atkinson’s help as chaperone was invaluable to her, and that her presence had eased his grief as well. “I have felt so for him,” she wrote, “but I can’t say it to him—it has been such a relief to see him cheering up and enjoying things.” On the Terra Nova, Pennell slept during the day so he could take the night watch. “You will be amused to hear that the last 2 days I have been dreaming of you,” he wrote to Atkinson. “The day before yesterday I was smashing your bottom with great gusto.” This was something he had delighted in doing when Atkinson was on board—catching him unawares with a firm smack.

The Remuera arrived in England on April 15; the Terra Nova docked in Cardiff two months later. It was the end of the line for the Terra Nova, which would now be sold, but for the expedition there was much work still to be done: scientific, administrative, financial. First, however, it was time for Pennell to go home.

He and Atkinson reunited in Awliscombe in June. Atkinson was exhausted from weeks spent traveling to meet with the relatives of the lost polar-party members, retelling the same horrible tale over and over—he badly needed a holiday. He got one in the form of a glorious summer week with Pennell: tennis on the court behind the family home, drives along country roads in a hired motorcar, a wooded hike to medieval earthworks, visits to various aunts and cousins in the area eager to meet two genuine Antarctic heroes.

Then the week was over and both men headed for London, where they moved into a house filled with other bachelors near Harley Street. “It is very comfortable here,” Pennell wrote of the place, “and being in the same house as Atkinson makes it most enjoyable.” During the week it was work, dinner, and then the theater—lots of it. (Pennell in particular was a fan of the stage.) Pennell took to waking Atkinson up at 6:30 a.m. to make the most of their days together; on the weekends he often escaped to family in the countryside while Atkinson remained in town.

In July, King George presented the Polar Medal to the members of the expedition at a state ceremony—everyone was in full dress uniform, with cocked hats and gold braid. Pennell proudly reported in his diary that the King “told Jane he had done very well, a kindly & well deserved acknowledgment of the way he has behaved.”

Soon it was time to part once more. On August 13, Pennell took a break from writing the report of the Terra Nova’s voyage to accompany Atkinson and his three sisters to Southampton. The Atkinsons were leaving on the passenger steamship Trent for the West Indies, where they were born and where their family still lived. They would be gone for a month.

Aboard the Terra Nova earlier that year, sailing for England, Pennell had written to Atkinson, “This little absence has given a very keen edge to the pleasure of looking forward to seeing you again. If the navy means everlasting break ups & paying offs it also means a great many meetings again & these are the pleasures of life.” For men like Pennell and Atkinson, the constant goodbyes and reunions were part of life, something to be endured in the former case and cherished in the latter.

A few days after Atkinson’s departure, who should show up in London but Gerry Hodson, with whom Pennell had served years prior on the Mercury and fallen in love. “Till I met [Gerry] I thought I should never know what real love was,” Pennell had written in his diary all those years ago. “And now he could twist me round his little finger.” Pennell spent two weekends in Gloucestershire with Hodson and his family. But his mind was elsewhere. “Find myself counting the days till Jane returns, it is almost aggravating at times to be so violently in love with a man,” he wrote. “It is lucky to have so many months with him now.”

As he waited for Atkinson’s return, Pennell kept busy—he knew no other way to be, really. He was always moving, always working. Finally, September arrived and Pennell was at London’s Waterloo Station to meet Atkinson’s train. “Jane was very bright & happy when he arrived & fled off to Essex where his lady love lives,” Pennell wrote in his diary, “but that is another story.”

Her name was Jessie Ferguson. She was a sprightly Scottish redhead whom Atkinson thought he might marry. It was the sensible end of the line for any man of his age and station. Passionate friendships between men were natural in the masculine worlds that Atkinson and Pennell inhabited. They’d both been boarders at private schools for the sons of gentlemen, where they would have acted as servants for older boys and then solicited obedience and devotion in turn from younger boys. As a teenage naval midshipman, Pennell might have harbored a crush—or “pash,” as he’d have called it—on a superior officer. But these feelings had a stopping point. A man, in particular a man in uniform, was supposed to get married. Atkinson and Pennell were keenly aware of social expectations and the repercussions of bucking them.

Men from Scott’s expedition were getting engaged left and right: to the sisters of other expedition men, to girls they’d met in New Zealand, even to the heiress of a pharmaceutical fortune. Atkinson, as Pennell knew very well, had always been a flirt, especially when tipsy. Dancing with a pretty girl appealed to him just as much as a bout of the sweaty naval boxing he excelled at before the expedition. Pennell, conversely, had never much seen the appeal of women. He had written with jealous undertones about Gerry Hodson’s dealings with local girls. When a fellow officer on the Terra Nova expressed his desperation to be reunited with his fiancée back in England, Pennell was bewildered. “Presumably I shall be the same when the world is entirely composed by one fair young thing—at present one simply marvels,” he wrote in a letter to Atkinson on the voyage.

Pennell contemplated all this while on a rainy shooting holiday in Scotland with Atkinson, Cherry, and Oriana Wilson in late September. One of Pennell’s role models was Dr. Bill, whose widow, Oriana, he considered a dear friend. “I never thought the Christ-life possible as an ideal till I saw it in your husband,” he once wrote to her. If Bill had managed to find such fulfillment in married life, perhaps Pennell could, too. He’d been promoted in the navy, giving him a new station in life. Maybe he ought to have a wife to go along with it.

Pennell had known Gerry Hodson’s younger sister, Katie, for nearly ten years. That summer, she had accompanied him and Gerry to the theater in London; she was a pleasant girl. Though she’d rarely featured in his letters or his diary, he now considered her a sensible enough choice—an obvious one, even.

The first weekend of November, he visited the Hodsons. “I proposed to Katie & dropped a bombshell in the vicarage,” Pennell wrote afterward. “Mr. & Mrs. Hodson & all the family are delighted … all except poor Katie who is having rather a bad time.” She was afraid of him—accomplished and handsome as he was, she barely knew him—and afraid of marriage altogether. She did not accept him right away; her family gave her the time and space to make her own decision.

While Katie weighed the idea of life with Pennell, he returned to London and to Atkinson. They dined at Les Gobelins and discussed—not marriage, anything but that—the prospect of another Antarctic expedition, which Atkinson was keen on. In a few years, might they be back on the Terra Nova together, on a journey to figure out what lay east of the Barrier? Marriage or not, they were looking forward to being in each other’s lives for a long time.

On November 27, Pennell received a telegram: Katie had agreed to marry him. “Dear little girl I am afraid it is a bigger step for her than for a man,” he wrote in his diary. “So you see I am not the confirmed bachelor you used to fear I was,” he wrote to a friend who had congratulated him on his engagement. Pennell celebrated at Piccadilly Restaurant with Atkinson and one of their housemates, followed by a showing of his favorite play, The Great Adventure—it was his fifth time attending it.

Then it was back to work. He finished preparing the Terra Nova’s charts and magnetic readings and submitted them for review. Antarctica’s Oates Coast, which Pennell had charted and named in honor of his lost shipmate, was soon to be an official landmark.

Pennell then joined Katie and her family for three weeks of ice skating, orchestral concerts, and cafés au lait in Lausanne, Switzerland. “It seems as if she had got over her sort of fear of me & only has to overcome her feeling of shrinkage at the thought of marriage—from its physical side,” he wrote in his diary. “Brought up in complete ignorance of natural functions as K. & so many others are this idea of copulation when first presented to a girl’s mind must indeed be frightening.”

Pennell harbored his own doubts and fears, many of them the same ones Katie had. When he returned to England at the end of January 1914, he spent a Friday with Atkinson at the London School of Tropical Medicine. Ostensibly, he was there to help Atkinson with his work in parasitology—a lot of fiddly and difficult microscopy, “counting papillae on worms’ tails,” as Atkinson put it. In truth Pennell wanted to know, in detail, what would be expected of him as a husband, a topic about which he was sure Atkinson knew more than he. “Jane has been splendid explaining aspects of the physical side of marriage,” he later wrote. “He is a friend such as most men never find.”

“So you see I am not the confirmed bachelor you used to fear I was,” Pennell wrote to a friend who had congratulated him on his engagement.

By February, Pennell and Atkinson had moved out of their shared home at 15 Queen Anne Street. For Pennell, the greatest joy of the past nine months had been living “with Jane under the same roof.” But he had been posted to the HMS Duke of Edinburgh as navigating commander, and Atkinson was given a new job researching schistosomiasis in China with a colleague, Cherry serving as their assistant.

The work mainly involved digging through feces to find evidence of infection-causing parasites along the Yangtze River. Work that many would hate, Atkinson enjoyed. What he didn’t enjoy, especially once Cherry departed for England in May, was his colleague, Robert Leiper, whom he found himself frequently butting heads with. “I don’t really think old chap you can fully realize how perfectly damnable this man can be,” Atkinson wrote to Cherry, fuming.

It was a seemingly intractable problem. But then war broke out, shattering the still, hot air of August 1914. Atkinson put himself on the first ship home.

Part IV
The Great War

If the navy in peacetime was likely to separate Pennell and Atkinson—“everlasting break ups & paying offs,” as Pennell had put it—the navy in wartime was worse. Atkinson arrived in England on August 29 and quickly joined the men on the HMS St Vincent, a flagship in Britain’s Grand Fleet. There was little time for personal meetings. “The illustrious Pennell turned up the other day and I was alongside him in the skiff as soon as she dropped anchor,” Atkinson wrote in a letter a few months later. “He really is an old dear and blessed with all the virtues and I would give anything to be with him. I have only seen him once since then as we are on different duties and are seldom in together.”

But if he longed to be with Pennell at sea, Atkinson also yearned to be assigned to the front, where he could be of real use, and petitioned the navy to allow him to investigate sanitary and parasitological problems in the trenches. By then the first of the Terra Nova crew had already died in the war: Lieutenant Henry Rennick drowned in the North Sea when a German torpedo hit the HMS Hogue. In the cold water, he handed his life preserver to an exhausted comrade before being swept below. Newly married, he left behind his pregnant wife, Isobel.

Perhaps it was with Rennick on his mind that Pennell took a few days of leave in April 1915 to marry Katie. War weddings were a common enough sight. It was only a pity that neither Atkinson nor Denis Lillie could get away from their war duties to be his best men, as he’d wanted. At least Oriana Wilson was there, still in her black widow’s garb. So were Pennell’s sisters and an abundance of Hodsons. Katie’s father, the rector, performed the ceremony. Pennell wore his gold-braided dress uniform, with cocked hat and ceremonial sword. Katie wore a dress of white silk, edged with lace, and a pearl and diamond pendant given to her by Pennell. She used Pennell’s sword to cut the cake, which was decorated with penguins, seals, and anchors. The couple posed for photographs and then took a short honeymoon in Devonshire. Then Pennell went back to his ship.

Atkinson was still squirming to get to the front. “I am so excited at the idea of getting over and this waiting is bad,” he wrote to Cherry in June 1915. “Penelope writes very cheerfully but unfortunately I have missed him as his squadron and ours have now changed billets and so I may not see him again before I go over.” Atkinson was finally dispatched to Gallipoli in August 1915, and on his way stopped to marry Jessie Ferguson in a quick civil ceremony in an Essex registry office.

Landing at Cape Helles, Atkinson found himself in trenches filthy with disease from infestations of flies and maggots. It may have seemed like hell, but it was a perfect laboratory for Atkinson’s work. He and his crew burned waste, improved latrines, removed garbage, and tested out new insecticides. Atkinson’s mitigation efforts quickly bore fruit. The number of vermin decreased rapidly, and the amount of sickness affecting the men soon dropped by a third. Atkinson felt that he was being useful. Even the threat of being bombed hardly bothered him. “I am a bit of a Jonah over shells and have been swiped and that sort of thing and it really is queer how callous one gets,” he wrote to Cherry.

Shrapnel was one matter, sickness another. Come winter, Atkinson was struck with severe pneumonia, pleurisy, and paratyphoid, and was sent home. “I have been badly bitten by the life and my work was going along splendidly when this [damned] thing happened,” Atkinson grumbled. Pennell wrote to Cherry when he heard: “It is very unfortunate about Jane. Luck of war of course, but one hoped he might escape.”

Cherry was sick, too, as he had been on and off since returning from the Antarctic expedition. This time he was an invalid at home with severe colitis. Haunted by his failure to meet the polar party at One Ton Depot, trauma was taking a physical toll on him, and Atkinson was concerned. “Look here old chap in my usual interfering way I have been worrying around,” Atkinson wrote to him in early 1916. He recommended that Cherry get in touch with Denis Lillie. If Cherry was angry at the imposition, it didn’t last—one couldn’t possibly be mad at sweet Lillie, who was soon invited to repose at Lamer, Cherry’s large Hertfordshire estate.

Once recovered, Atkinson spent the spring of 1916 in England, trying to get a posting on a warship—any would do. There was rumored to be a “big show” coming, a major display of naval force against Germany, and he didn’t want to miss it.

The headlines that spring didn’t always convey news of the war. There had been another disaster in Antarctica. Shackleton’s Endurance expedition had not been heard from in nearly 18 months, and was now presumed lost. Something had to be done for Sir Ernest, a national hero ever since his close approach to the Pole in 1908. The Admiralty began to put together a rescue mission. Atkinson, having led Scott’s expedition through winter and the mission to find the lost party, was a natural choice to lead the search for Shackleton.

Atkinson wanted to turn the offer down—he had just been posted to France as medical officer for the howitzer brigade of the Royal Marine Artillery. An order from the Admiralty could not be ignored, however. So Atkinson relented and asked that Pennell be released from war duty in order to serve on the rescue mission together. The request was mistimed. On May 30, 1916, Pennell was on the HMS Queen Mary, steaming to the North Sea with the rest of the Grand Fleet, ready to engage German battleships in action: The big show had come at last.

Then, just as British ships were firing on the Germans, Shackleton suddenly reappeared. A telegram from the Falkland Islands reported the ordeal his men had survived: ship crushed by ice in the Weddell Sea, men starving on ice floes, sailing open boats to Elephant Island. The Admiralty could call off the rescue mission; Shackleton would save his own men.

As this spectacular news traveled around the world, Pennell and the men aboard the Queen Mary sustained a direct hit from a German ship. Then another. Then the Queen Mary’s munitions stores detonated. Amid the loud and brutal battle, the ship broke in two and sank fast.

By the time the thick black smoke had cleared enough to reveal the devastation, only scraps of debris of the Queen Mary remained, floating in an oil slick. There were 20 survivors in a company of nearly 1,300 men. None of them were officers.

If only Atkinson’s request that Pennell join him on the Shackleton rescue had been granted in time. “I wish to God now it had come off and he had been out of Queen Mary.”

“Penelope has gone and I am very sore at his loss,” Atkinson wrote to Cherry. It was a subdued response to the death of the man he loved, but writing was not Atkinson’s strength. (“He will not do so if he can help it,” Cherry once noted.) If there were any among their old crew to adequately translate grief to the page, it would have been the poetic, observant Pennell. Still, Atkinson tried. “Fate in these cases seems so hard and so very inexplicable. I would willingly have taken his place,” he confessed to Mrs. Kinsey in New Zealand, who had once provided the two men a cabin to share. To another friend of his and Pennell’s, Atkinson wrote, “Captain Pennell’s loss has been a very great blow to me.” If only Atkinson’s request that Pennell join him on the Shackleton rescue had been granted in time. “I wish to God now it had come off and he had been out of Queen Mary.”

With Shackleton safe, Atkinson remained in France attached to the howitzer brigade and its 94-ton guns, which were towed by tractors from trench to trench in pieces. There he stayed for a year, attending to the wounded. He survived a blast of shrapnel to the face and eye in July 1917, but insisted on returning to the front two weeks after it was removed.

By late 1917, however, he was growing tired morally, if not yet physically. “This affair is no longer the gentlemanly game that it was,” he wrote to Cherry. The summer of 1918 found him in England, at Haslar Hospital, for more shrapnel removal. With many mentions in dispatches and a Distinguished Service Order for his troubles, he could easily have attained a cushy posting away from the front, but such a thing was unthinkable. “So many of my friends have gone West through the aid of the Hun that it makes me most bitter and I want to do all I can against them as long as I can,” he wrote to a friend. In August, he received a posting to the HMS Glatton, a newly completed battleship that sailed to Dover harbor in September, preparing for a fall offensive.

On September 16, the Glatton caught fire while in harbor, and its amidships munitions exploded. Atkinson was temporarily knocked out by the blast. When he awoke, his cabin and the passageway outside were filled with smoke and flames. He began bringing unconscious men, one after the other, to the upper deck. On his third trip, another explosion rocked the vessel—the fire had reached another munitions store. The explosion blinded Atkinson, and shrapnel pierced his leg. He dug it out, then groped around for more men to bring to safety.

By this time the other ships in the harbor had sent aid to the Glatton and were pulling injured men onto the pier. Atkinson, according to newspaper reports, was found “on the upper deck in an almost unconscious condition, so wounded and burnt that his life was despaired of for some time.”

He recovered at the Royal Naval Hospital in Chatham, almost unrecognizable after losing much of the right side of his handsome, chiseled face. He was awarded an Albert Medal for saving five lives. Two weeks after the Armistice, he received a glass eye.

Epilogue

Atkinson never returned to Antarctica, instead settling into a mainly administrative navy career. He walked with a bad limp, had a loose piece of bone stuck in his head, and suffered chronic pain from his war injuries. Ten years after the end of the war, his wife, Jessie, died of cancer. They had no children.

Atkinson sank into a deep depression and drank heavily, and his family feared that he would soon follow his wife to the grave. Against their advice, he abruptly retired from the navy, married Jessie’s cousin, and shipped out as a doctor on a passenger steamship. “I shall be happiest at sea again,” he told Cherry. He died just a few months later in 1929, aged 47, aboard the liner City of Sparta. Some reports said that the cause was heart failure, others said fever. In any case, he seemed to have known that the end was near and wanted to meet it at sea.

Atkinson was dead; Pennell, too. And Lillie, such a dear friend to both men, was gone—not dead, but locked away in an institution. At the start of the war, the biologist declared himself a conscientious objector, went to work as a noncombatant in a military lab, and spent his rare weeks of leave at Cherry’s estate, pushing the temporarily wheelchair-bound Cherry around the large garden and cheering him with typically dreamy talk of reincarnation, alternate dimensions, and the universal flux. Cherry gamely tolerated what Lillie called his “heresies,” and Lillie in turn doled out abundant affection. He dreamed of a future in which neither man married, even once writing, “You will not fall [in love] until the real me turns up.”

But Lillie’s letters ended abruptly in early 1918, when he was institutionalized at Bedlam for suicidal depression and delusion. No one, not even Cherry, was allowed to see him. (Lillie, like so many others interned in British psychiatric wards during that era, remained there until he died, in 1963.) Cherry was now alone, with no way to talk to his dearest friends except to write about them. In an early draft of his acclaimed book, The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry wrote, “In Pennell’s heaven they will work thirty hours in the day.… He will perhaps keep the Celestial Log Book, and the record of the animals sighted.… And every now and then he would ask for leave to go and take some of his friends in Hell out for dinner. I hope he will ask me.” (Cherry, increasingly consumed by his guilt at not being able to save the polar party, imagined that he would not share an afterlife with the illustrious Pennell.)

Later, in the preface of a reprint of the book after Atkinson’s death, Cherry wrote, “I have never known a better rock than Atkinson was that last year down South. His voice has been with me often since those days: that gruffish deep affectionate monosyllabic way he used to talk to you when he knew you were ill and perhaps feeling pretty rotten. Not but that he was abrupt at times. It was of the manner of the man to be so; it was his pose. The funny thing was that he could not prevent the tenderness poking through, despite himself.”

The initial publication of the book, in 1922, had brought Cherry success, fame, and many fans, including T. E. Lawrence and Nancy Mitford, and cemented Cherry’s position as one of the best-known survivors of the Scott expedition. For a moment he was seen as a literary leading light, but he never wrote another book. “The Antarctic … was the highlight of his life’s experience; the long remainder was anticlimax,” wrote a biographer. He continued to struggle with his mental and physical health, and married a younger woman when he could no longer carry on alone. He passed away in 1959. His widow wed his doctor.

Captain Scott’s wife never liked The Worst Journey in the World, because it showed her husband as he was: an anxious, brave man, but not always an ideal leader, lovable and complicated and all too human. But that honesty became essential to the book’s longevity. It was a candor born of love and grief under extraordinary circumstances. “In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding,” Cherry wrote. “Not so down South.”

Only in a place like Antarctica, Cherry believed, could one man know another’s real character. It was where Cherry had felt most himself, where Captain Scott and Dr. Bill formed a friendship so deep it lasted until their deaths. And where Atkinson and Pennell came to know and understand each other. They could not escape the tragedy the continent held for them, nor the disasters that awaited them in the Great War—but how good it was that, for a while, they at least had each other.

The post From Antarctica with Love appeared first on The Atavist Magazine.

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