Hell with a Capital H by Katherine Lambert

Author:Katherine Lambert
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446448076
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

In a lecture delivered to the Royal Geographical Society on the fiftieth anniversary of Scott’s death, Priestley put Campbell’s find in context: ‘One sliver of wood formed the subject of a whole memoir and controversy about its exact age still goes on.’

At the time Edith Sitwell was the enfant terrible, not yet the grande dame, of the English eccentrics. She and Raymond Priestley were exact contemporaries. It is not known whether they ever met, but it is tempting to imagine that she crafted a few of the lines in her poem The Shadow of Cain after a conversation with him:

And now in memory of great oscillations

Of temperature in that epoch of the Cold,

We found a continent of turquoise, vast as Asia

In the yellowing airs of the Cold: the tooth of a mammoth;

And there, in a gulf, a dark pine-sword

To show there had once been warmth and the gulf stream in our veins

Where only the Chaos of the Antarctic Pole

Or the peace of its atonic coldness reigns.

The discovery of this pine-tree fossil was not only important in unravelling some of Antarctica’s mysteries, but also turned out to be an unknown genus related to the monkey-puzzle tree, and as such was given the species name Araucaria priestleyi by the author of the report on Antarctic plant fossils discovered during the Terra Nova expedition. Priestley had earned his ticket.

Before pursuing this exciting lead, Campbell’s party decided to make a detour to explore the steep, deeply crevassed glacier, which they named Corner Glacier for its shape, descending from the western slopes of Mount Dickason. They succeeded in getting to the top of its first ice fall, where a fine panorama of a valley and steep glaciers, two of which seemed to emanate from the hills above the Boomerang, unfolded before them. But it was impassable by sledge: they would have had to carry everything on their backs. They returned to camp footsore and disappointed.

At last, on 31 January, after more rough going and bad language,3 the miscreants succeeded in catching up with the others, who were marching again for the Priestley Glacier to resume their searches, ‘& there were great rejoicings at the reunion’. Either Levick was glossing over a chilly reception, or Campbell had got over his pique (perhaps the fossil find had mended his temper). The newcomers were regaled with lurid details of their snow blindness, learnt about their collecting efforts, their investigation of the Corner Glacier, and above all, the exciting discovery of the fossil wood immured in sandstone. (‘It is perhaps one of the greatest discoveries made in the Antarctic up to date’, was the impression gained by Levick, and ‘Priestley is in great fettle about it.’)

Campbell had by then abandoned his master plan: ‘I had now given up all hope of getting through to Wood Bay this year, our time being too short to get over by the Boomerang, which I consider the only passable route for a sledge.’ The discovery of the fossil wood was therefore all the

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