With Scott in the Antarctic by Isobel E Williams

Author:Isobel E Williams [Williams, Isobel E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752473529
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-10-23T23:00:00+00:00

9

Paintings and Penguins

Wilson was unemotional about Morning’s departure on 2 March 1903. He did not go to wave off the dejected Shackleton, but remained on Discovery and cleaned out his cabin and got everything ready for him to start work again. He painted skua heads, caught up with his correspondence and started working on pen and ink drawings from his southern journey sketches. This was a major and prolonged undertaking; the newly discovered Victoria Land coastline and the mountain ranges were of tremendous general interest and he eventually worked up 100 feet of drawings into a panoramic record.1 Nothing was easy. The light in his cabin was so poor that painting had to be done in the mess and all the artwork cleared off the mess table for each ‘prolonged’ meal. But he managed ‘3 hours in the morning if one does not go out, in the afternoon 2 and a half hours and in the evening 7.30 to 11p.m. when the acetylene gas is turned off and only those with candles to spare can go on working’.2 Lighting was a problem, not only for Wilson’s painting but for the psyche of all on board – continuous darkness can lead to depression. Wilson thought that the lack of light would make their lives miserable in the long sunless winter. They had no lights in their cabins,3 but Skelton had rigged up an acetylene light system, which ran through the inhabited parts of the ship for limited hours. This was a bonus for morale and better than smoky candles, which were in short supply anyway. But since Wilson’s work was so dependent on light he made candles by melting old wax and pouring it into glass tubes threaded through with a piece of string fixed with a cork.4 Three home-made candles equalled the light of one proper candle and lasted for eight hours.

After the southern journey Wilson’s knee stayed stiff and swollen, ‘a nice clean discomfort, not an illness, which needn’t worry other people’.5 He had to stay on the ship for six weeks until he was mobile. His appetite was enormous and he soon began to put on weight. His attack of scurvy does not appear to have affected his scarred lung. This is surprising because scurvy can cause the disintegration of old scars as the normal production of ‘repair’ protein is arrested and old ‘repair’ protein continues to be broken down. If the St George’s diagnosis of tuberculosis was correct, scurvy might well have caused a recurrence of the disease; the organisms that cause tuberculosis can survive for years in scarred lung tissue and can become active again if a scar breaks down. But he seems to have had no chest problems whatsoever. He was not concerned by the thought of another Antarctic winter; in fact he wanted to stay on to continue his observations on bird and marine life. He wrote to his mother, ‘A polar winter is not by any means the terrible experience we were led

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