Field Notes: They Came Home to Lyttelton

In my journal for The Entire Earth and Sky, I wrote,

I drove home to Lyttelton in my green truck, made a cup of tea, and curled up in bed. From my bed, I could look out a large window to the port. Later that night, a red coastal freighter would arrive, as it did each week, and begin unloading a cargo that often seemed to be entirely clanging metal bars. At that moment, the port was still, illuminated by melon halogen lights, lights that urged gulls to forget the night. They flew in a wide arc, silent, circling. Norris had given me a copy of his Antarctic book, which was sold at the Canterbury Museum. It collected a series of newspaper columns he contributed to a local paper, detailing the specific stories of Lyttelton and Canterbury men who sailed during the Heroic Age.

As I read, I could hear his voice. Some of the ships took expeditions to the Antarctic, then turned around and came home to Lyttelton where the crew waited out the frigid, ship-crushing winter season. Thus, Scott’s second and final ship, the Terra Nova was moored at Lyttelton for long periods during 1910-1913. The ship had dropped off Scott and the exploration team at Cape Evans. They would return in the spring thaw to fetch Scott and his victorious party, home from their dash to the South Pole.
You can imagine how people in Lyttelton would have felt, looking down into the port and seeing the Terra Nova in their midst. Norris was almost equally devoted to the ships themselves, the old sailor in him coming through, I reckoned, and he recorde the Terra Nova’s fate: She had vanished during World War II off the coast of Greenland, where she was in the service of the U.S. Navy.

I put the book down and recalled a photo in the Lyttelton Museum, an image that had captured a moment of pageant and freak show, P.T. Barnum does a wilderness act: Eleven men in Burberry anoraks, hoods extended and obscuring their faces. They wore harnesses and towed sledges just as five men would do en route to the South Pole. The first holds a crumpled Union Jack hastily hoisted on a pole. Two young boys galloped in from the right, skinny legs, knee breeches and caps, white collars glistening. The street mired in mud, the hillside homes cloaked in a faint coal-smoke haze. Behind the marchers, a regimental band, wearing topcoats with brass buttons. These Antarctic sailors march deliberately, suggesting they know where they are going – and in fact, they do – back to the quayside, a left turn and then two blocks down the steep hill, back to their ship’s chores, then off to sea. Later, the photos will show these men at sea, faces masked by cold and ice, skin darkened and shining from coal and blubber smoke.

I returned to his book, in an eloquent essay, They Came Back to Lyttelton, he listed more than a dozen and their fates. There was Lance Corporal A.H. Blissett who served aboard the Discovery. By the time Norris knew him, he was Harry Blissett, a rather gruff watersider, or dockworker. He had frightened Norris as a child. Blissett was the first to find an Emperor penguin’s egg, a moment Scott had recorded on January 28, 1903, “all the news seems good. Blissett has discovered an Emperor penguin egg and his messmates expect him to be knighted.”

Hugh McGowan had served as an engineer with Shackleton’s 1904-1906 Nimrod expedition and continued that work back in Lyttelton.

W.W. Knowles had been an able-bodied seaman on the Terra Nova. He worked as a watersider for many years in Lyttelton.

The Morning, a relief ship sent out in 1903 – I considered the odd moment of language meeting purpose, mourning, the feeling of showing deep sadness following the death of somebody – sailed to find and bring home Scott and his Discovery crew when they were late returning in 1903. She had two Lyttelton men aboard: Arthur Beaumont, able-bodied seaman, who later worked in Lyttelton as a watersider and crane operator, and Jack Partridge, who sailed with the Morning and then headed south again in 1907 on Shackleton’s Nimrod. He became fireman on the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s dredge Te Whaka.

Not all the Lyttelton men were seamen. Local boy Eric Norman Webb, Norris noted, was just twenty-two when selected by the legendary Australian polar scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson to head south.

Webb served as chief magnetician with the 1911 Australasian Expedition, and was key in locating the South Magnetic Pole. The magnetic pole describes, for the Earth’s magnetic field, the equivalent of the geographic South Pole. The South Magnetic Pole is not fixed, and drifts like a cloud across water, land, ice. In 2003 it hovered off the Antarctic coast, over the Southern Ocean. Webb went on to become a world authority on hydroelectric power.

The next morning, I wandered along the town’s quiet streets. Someone had broken the windows of two shops the night before. Drunken sailors? Young hooligans? I climbed cement stairs by the museum and sat down in Baden Norris Gardens, dedicated to his work as historian and naturalist, turned and gazed out across the deep turquoise water to Diamond Harbour on the other shore. A bay cruise boat, black and white, pulled slowly away from the quay, a dolphin-watching trip. Earlier in the year a pod of Orcas had made the unusual move of swimming into the harbour and gobbling up a lot the tiny, rare Hector’s dolphins that also called Lyttelton home. Those that remained were keeping a low profile. No one had seen any in months.