As his father lay dying some six years ago, Julian Broke-Evans promised him that he would ‘keep telling the story’, the story being that of Scott’s ill-fated but heroic 1910–13 Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole. Julian’s grandfather was Teddy Evans (later Admiral Lord Mountevans), Scott’s second-in-command, who was to win fame in 1917 as ‘Evans of the Broke’ when he took on six German destroyers in the Dover Straits. Marrying a Norwegian, he embraced the land of Scott’s rival, Amundsen, with an enthusiasm that has passed down the generations and which is now inspiring an Anglo–Norwegian collaboration of rare beauty, set on a mountain-top above Gudbrandsdalen.
Julian, who describes himself as ‘composer, performer and lecturer’, decided to visit the Antarctic himself. An idea was forming in his imagination, an installation of vertical ice pipes. But this was not just to be a visual work: he also intended to record the sound of the polar winds sweeping across the pipes. ‘If I went as a composer, if I did what I do, I felt I would be honouring the promise to dad.’
We are so used to experiencing the expedition through the photographs of Herbert Ponting that it is easy to overlook the sounds that permeated the men’s daily existence. They certainly reverberate through the various accounts. At the hut at Cape Evans (named after Julian’s grandfather) winds blew with such ferocity for six days that pebbles from the beach were hurled against its wooden walls and the chimney vibrated ‘with the sound of an iron gate rattled by prisoners in hell’.
In The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote of the five-week quest to Cape Crozier for a living Emperor penguin embryo: ‘Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds but this journey beggared our language.
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