[And in this connection, let me put in a good word for pipe smoking also, viz.:]
Tuesday April 25, 2000 The Guardian
Six desperate men
Captain [Robert Falcon] Scott dropped them off on the Antarctic coast to study penguins - but never came back for them. With no winter clothing and just seven weeks' rations, the team managed to survive for eight and a half months before reaching safety. Now, 90 years on, their doctor's blubber-stained notes are to be auctioned. Angelique Chrisafis on a brilliant feat of endurance:
Six sheets of blubber-stained notes on the subject of happiness have been put up for auction at Christie's in a lot valued at £18,000. The writing is 90 years old and neatly pencilled. Happiness, say the notes, is largely a matter of contrast. "After a wretched day," they read, "the comparative comfort of the evenings enhanced by the stimulation of hot food makes us happy as sand boys."
These notes were written by the light of a seal blubber-burning lamp, crudely fashioned from an Oxo tin, under an Antarctic snowdrift during the winter in 1912. The so-called "ice cave manuscripts", which have never been published and have yet to be crawled over by scholars, describe in optimistic terms perhaps the most brilliant feat of survival in Antarctic history.
In the last months of his final polar expedition, Captain Robert Falcon Scott dropped off a party of six men to study penguins on the Antarctic coast, while he and the rest of his crew pressed on to the south pole. The penguin party was kitted out with summer sledging clothes and enough rations for seven weeks on the ice. Scott's ship was due to pick them up in six weeks' time - but the ship never came.
Somehow, those six men survived for eight and a half months, through the Antarctic winter, living in an ice cave 5ft high, dug out of a snowdrift on what was later called Inexpressible Island. They lived off seals killed with a pocket knife. Then, when spring came, they sledged 200 miles in four weeks to reach the British polar base, where they learned Scott had died.
The ice cave manuscripts were written by Murray Levick, a surgeon and zoologist Scott chose for his expedition because "he cheerfully accepts any amount of chaff". ...
Strangely, Levick's notes from inside the cave seem quite cheerful. "The only thing we have in abundance is time for reflection," he writes. Each night by blubber lamp, he read the party a chapter of David Copperfield. Then the men would "chew upon their mental cuds" occasionally thinking of a sentence worth saying, in which case the men would nose it about and discuss it "from its centre to its frayed edges".
Levick mulled this cheerfulness over and explained it psychologically in the consolation of several cakes of tobacco and some good pipes to smoke it in. Several degrees below zero, he writes: "My pipe is in my mouth and, as I puff slowly, I am sensible of a feeling of calm comfort and enjoyment and a tendency to look on the bright side of things."
Unlike alcohol, which Levick claimed cheered but dulled the mind and prompted people to forget the seriousness of their position, a pipe provided a philosophical state of mind "able to regard steadily the small roughnesses on the road which might otherwise have shaken it".
Levick found that discomfort can be tolerated remarkably well if the sufferer is a good person, a philosopher or a smoker. ...
By enforcing exercise and keeping food to an equal ration of meat and blubber, Levick managed to keep all six men sane in the cave. One of the sailors had a breakdown after returning to camp, but he recovered. "What, after all, are a few months of darkness and blubber lamps," Levick asks, "when we have an allowance of a couple of pipes a day to console us?"
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4011458-103680,00.html>
Carl
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