The Romance History Forgot
March 04, 2025 at 03:30PM
Allegra Rosenberg | The Atavist Magazine | February 2025 | 1,008 words (4 minutes)
This is an excerpt from issue no. 160, “From Antarctica with Love.”
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.
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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.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/04/antarctica-south-pole-expedition-love/
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