William Speirs Bruce The Last Explorers

In 1902, an expedition set out from Scotland to conquer Antarctica

in the name of science.

It was led by a man called William Speirs Bruce.

In 2011, I agreed to retrace Bruce's journey to Antarctica,

following in the footsteps of a scientific explorer and photographer

who has become all but lost to history.

In 1923, according to his wishes,

the ashes of William Speirs Bruce

were scattered right here in the southern ocean.

There was a time when William Speirs Bruce was a household name,

but by the time his mortal remains were settling onto the sea bed, he was all but a forgotten man.

William Speirs Bruce was one of a small group of explorers who took to the stage

as the great age of exploration was drawing to a close.

Many before them sought adventure, fortune

and staked claim to vast territories in the name of God and country,

but the last explorers didn't plant flags. They planted ideas.

Ideas that helped shape the modern world we know today.

'The Nevis mountain range is where my expedition begins

'with one of Britain's top polar guides, Jim McNeill.

'At this time of year this is as close to a polar climate as you can find in Britain,

'which is why William Speirs Bruce also came here to prepare himself as best he could

'for his expedition to Antarctica,

'an expedition whose remarkable achievements have been overshadowed

'by the exploits of Britain's better-known polar heroes for far too long.'

What sort of location are you looking for, Jim?

Well, we're not here to mountaineer.

We're here to try to get a similar situation to the Antarctic during summer.

-So if we dig a trench...

-I'm basically digging my own grave.

-Yeah, pretty much.

-Great. OK.

'Before we set off south, he needs to make sure I have a grasp of basic survival techniques.

'Simple things that really could make the difference between life and death.'

Try it out for size.

-Instant silence.

-It is, isn't it, yeah?

-That's amazing.

-As soon as you get out of the wind, everything changes.

It's much like stepping indoors.

Bruce was 26 when he came here, one of just a handful of people in the country who'd been to Antarctica.

Whilst still a medical student, he had sailed to Antarctica as a ship's surgeon and naturalist

on a whaling trip.

There Bruce had glimpsed a world of untapped scientific potential

that so captivated him, he declared himself ravenous to return.

He began to prepare himself mentally and physically for what would be the greatest challenge of his life.

'He lived at the top of Ben Nevis, Britain's tallest and coldest mountain,

'for the best part of a year, working at the now-ruined observatory.

'There he taught himself how to sledge and ski expertly

'and how to conduct scientific experiments in sub-zero temperatures.'

-So, hat.

-Yeah.

-This feels so wrong.

-I didn't realise you had on so many layers! No wonder you're warm.

-Right.

'I wonder if he ever thought about doing this.'

-I think this is as far as I'm prepared to go!

-That's fine.

'Apparently, I need to learn to recognise the early warning signs of hypothermia.'

It might take 10, 15 minutes for it.

My cheeks and my jaw feel, you know, stiff.

Yeah.

It just feels as if... the flexibility is going.

-And you have to deliberately articulate.

-Uh-huh.

-To get the words out.

-Very much.

So when you're next to someone and they start to mumble, this should ring alarm bells.

-Start to mumble, start to fumble, then they start to stumble and fall.

-Uh-huh.

It's the fact that it's painful as well. It's not just cold.

It's almost like being burned. Almost the same sensation of holding your hand too close to a fire.

You can feel that if it goes on for much longer there's damage coming.

And my face just feels like it's shrunk. It's not comfortable.

-Oh, my hands are blue.

-Yeah, yeah.

Made the point?

-Think we've made the point, Neil?

-Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, I get the...

'It's reassuring that Jim will be along to keep me safe on land,

'but it's not really the land bit that's on my mind.

'Following in Bruce's footsteps means having to cross the world's most dangerous stretch of ocean.'

I'm not an intrepid person. I don't go looking for trouble or danger. I don't like it.

So the thing I'm most worried about is the boat journey.

It's five or six days in the Southern Ocean

and I worry about hitting icebergs, hitting semi-submerged containers that fell off container ships,

being swamped by massive waves, capsizing, drowning.

I think if I'd known as much about it as I do now, I wouldn't have agreed to do it in the first place.

I just feel as if I've crossed the Rubicon now and have to do it,

but it's not the kind of thing I would ever do.

'William Speirs Bruce was a different kettle of fish.

'He was so passionate about a return to Antarctica

'that after Ben Nevis he continued his cold weather training with expeditions to the Arctic.

'He toured the country with lectures that brought the polar regions to the public for the very first time.

'And he dreamt up plans for future expeditions that he submitted to august societies.

'Gradually, the scientific establishment began to pay attention to his beloved Antarctica.'

Scientifically, Antarctica remained an entire continent of dotted lines and question marks.

Not even the most basic knowledge existed.

Was it formed of ice or was it a group of islands?

How cold did it get there?

Could it support life?

'In 1899, to tackle some of those fundamental questions,

'the British National Antarctic Expedition was announced to great public acclaim.

'Britain would explore Antarctica in the name of science.

'And, of course, Empire.'

You can easily see why

it would have been almost literally a clean white slate

-upon which anything might be written about the Greater British Empire.

-Yes.

In a way, that's what makes the Antarctic so inviting.

This place literally appeared without a history or a geography.

Now we know it had both, but it was like a blank slate.

You could, in a sense, let your imagination run riot.

Now the weather could be brutal, but if you came back successfully, you could tell good stories

about national pride, about manly character.

It becomes an extraordinary space of fantasy. And if you want to fire the imaginations of sponsors,

let alone wider citizens, there's something quite arresting

about holding up a piece of paper to say, "We think there's something here. We don't know.

"Help us fill those blanks in." I think that has a kind of resonance.

We see it today when we say we must explore Mars or Saturn.

We just need to go back 100 plus years and it is Antarctica that really is the final frontier.

'The man in charge of the British National Antarctic Expedition was Sir Clements Markham,

'the President of the Royal Geographical Society and a creature of the establishment,

'an ex-Navy officer infatuated with the idea that the expedition would reach the South Pole

'and plant the British flag there.

'He commissioned an icebreaker called the Discovery and began hand-picking its crew.

'Bruce was by then recognised as Britain's most experienced polar scientist and expeditioner.

'He wrote immediately to Markham, offering himself as leader,

'but Markham was convinced that only a naval officer would have the right stuff

'for such a high-profile Imperial venture.

'The person he had in mind was a young lieutenant with no polar experience whatsoever.

'His name was Robert Falcon Scott.

'Bruce was eventually offered the post of naturalist on the expedition, but he turned it down,

'convinced that science would play second fiddle to adventure.

'By then, Bruce was already working on an audacious plan for an expedition of his own,

'one that he would lead in the pursuit of science

'to an even more dangerous quarter of Antarctica.'

I had no idea that an expedition that's so forgotten

is so well documented. The irony of it.

So what happened was in early 1900, just as the Discovery was being fitted out over in Dundee,

Bruce, with the support of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society,

is beginning to prepare his own expedition,

paid for by "patriotic Scotsmen".

And it's an idea that very quickly captures the national imagination.

'A public appeal for funds was launched and Bruce quickly secured the financial help

'of one of Scotland's richest men, Sir Andrew Coats.

'When Markham found out, he could barely contain his anger.'

'Dear Mr Bruce, I am very sorry to hear that an attempt is to be made at Edinburgh to divert funds

'from the Antarctic expedition in order to get up a rival enterprise.

'I do not understand why this mischievous rivalry should have been started, but trust that you will not

'connect yourself with it.'

This is 1900

and none of the great, famous adventures by Scott or Shackleton have happened yet.

And here's Bruce, he talks about setting up a scientific station.

He made no secret of the fact that it was something that Scotland would be proud of

and he intended to take the saltire and the lion rampant,

but Bruce wasn't about

trying to take those flags to the Pole, to the South Pole,

and plant them there.

As far as he was concerned, it was about science. It wasn't just some endurance test.

He wanted to go there and map the land,

do a topographical survey, look at plants, look at animals.

It was real scientific endeavour.

When these words went to the press,

there was everything to play for.

There we go.

"Scotia in winter quarters, Laurie Island, 1903." That's where I'm going.

Bruce's ship, the Scotia, sailed out of the Clyde estuary

on November 2nd, 1902. A Sunday.

'A rendition of Auld Lang Syne rang out. One newspaper was scandalised

'that a ship could sail on the Sabbath with pipes playing and people singing profane songs.

'Two months later, the Scotia stopped for supplies at the Falkland Islands, its last port of call

'before sailing south for Antarctica.

'108 years or so after Bruce docked here, it's my turn to depart for the south.'

It's one of these here.

One's small and one's smaller than that.

Right. It's the smaller one.

Dear, oh, dear.

-Hello, Jim.

-Hello.

-OK.

-Right.

-This is it.

-This is home.

-Alistair? No, Neil.

-Neil.

-Hiya.

-How are you doing?

-Is this the boat we use to get out to the big boat?

-No, this is the boat.

-The smaller the better.

-Really? This is deliberate?

-It's a counterintuitive situation.

-OK.

It just looks so small.

I thought it was all icebreakers

and big ships. If a big wave hits it or the seas got mountainous,

it would just get tossed about like foam.

Shows how much I know about sailing.

'Skip Novak, the captain, and Chris Harries, the mate,

'take on the final supplies for the expedition ahead.

'And as dusk comes down, we prepare to depart.

'It's a four-day journey from the Falklands to Antarctica,

'across the most feared ocean in the world, the Southern Ocean.

'If anything does happen to us at sea, we're at least two or three days away from help.

'On our first day out, the Southern Ocean isn't quite what I'd built it up to be.

'It's idyllic. So much so that Skip allows me to take the wheel.'

What is it about the Southern Ocean that particularly draws you?

I wouldn't say it's actually the Southern Ocean. It's getting to the places that lie within it.

-The Southern Ocean is a thing to be endured, as you'll probably find out.

-Yeah, yeah.

So even after all this time, you still find it has to be endured?

-After 22 or 23 years down here myself, I've got more fear than when I started.

-Don't tell me that!

You start out pretty cavalier and the more you've seen, the more careful and cautious you become.

There's no doubt about that.

How much respect or admiration do you have for sailors who pioneered sailing in the Antarctic,

-Bruce and Scott, those men?

-What we do is not comparable.

Imagine coming here in those days with no communications, navigating with a sextant.

-It was a different breed of men.

-Uh-huh.

-The modern day explorers

who we hear about on television and read in the newspapers,

or celebrities going around doing things, I sort of laugh in my beer.

Well, for sure.

I...I... When I was faced with the prospect of coming down here,

I was just...scared. I could feel the colour draining out of my face.

You can have very high winds, very big seas,

and coupled with the cold temperatures I think that breeds anxiety when you sail down here.

You sort of dread getting into a catastrophic weather situation. We try to avoid that at all costs.

'After Skip's cheering pep talk, I try to make myself useful the best way I can.

'But even in these mild conditions, it's still a challenge for a landlubber like me.

'The Scotia's heartbeat was its daily scientific routine.

'Depth soundings of the ocean bed, dredges of weird and wonderful sea creatures to be examined

'and meteorological readings to be taken and recorded.

'This all provided the crew and its scientific staff with their rhythm as they sailed further south.'

"We had two water bottles - one 12 fathoms from the bottom, the other 500.

"A surface sample was also taken,

"and temperatures accompanying all these, since to know the density of the water without its temperature

"is of no value for obtaining data for oceanic circulations."

It's just about impossible to make a cup of tea here! The thought of going on deck in a freshening wind

and trying to mess about with water bottles and thermometers, honestly...

The way these men were wired up

begs investigating.

'200 miles into our journey, the wind has picked up

'and the Southern Ocean has revealed another side of its nature.

'Although spared any symptoms of seasickness, the best place to be is above deck or in the doghouse.

'Jim IS feeling seasick and we still have three or four days to go.'

I think officially the conditions are "favourable" and really quite good.

But for a novice sailor like me, they feel extreme, to put it mildly.

You can't stand up, you can't walk.

The boat is just being thrown about like a cork.

The winds could easily be twice as fast or more and the waves, presumably, could be twice as big.

And the ship could be being battered even more than it is. It's exciting,

but you also have this... real sense

of the power out there.

And that we're fleas riding on a giant's back and at any moment it could just...do that to us.

'From reading the Scotia's log book, I know how lucky we are compared to them.'

"On January 28th, the barometer fell steadily in the evening.

"The next day we encountered a heavy gale which blew with hurricane strength,

"testing for the first time the seagoing qualities of the Scotia.

"One heavy sea came on board, the Scotia taking it green.

"The weather bulwarks were stove in and two of the crew washed into the lee scuppers,

"while some of the deck cargo went overboard."

'If I thought it was rough earlier, today the swell is about 6 metres, which is nearly 20 foot.

'And the wind is picking up.

'Being on the boat is like being on a fairground ride that you can't get off.

'The physical challenge has given way to something altogether harder.

'The mental challenge of simply passing the time.

'I sleep or sit

'or climb up to the doghouse and stare out at the sea.

'The days are dragging. It's all strangely exhausting.'

It's been four days without sight or sound of anything but us.

There's not been another boat, there's certainly been no land

and the only company is the occasional glimpse of a seabird.

And they look just about as lost as we feel.

The thought that it took him and his men four or five months to get into these latitudes...

We've been four or five days and it's been a struggle so if I can't exactly get inside his head,

I can honestly sympathise with what they must have gone through.

To come down here from Britain was half a year's effort

and I honestly don't know what that would do to the inside of my head

if I had to spend five months on this boat.

I think messy murder would be done.

The big excitement here, actually, is that we are shortly - in the context of this journey -

to cross latitude 60 degrees.

When we cross over that imaginary line,

we will officially be in Antarctica.

And when...when Bruce and his men...

..made that momentous crossing into Antarctica,

apparently they all had a measure of grog and probably sang the National Anthem as well.

I'd like a wee Bisodol myself.

A bit nippy out here.

-Even you say that, yeah?

-It's dramatically colder now.

-You've fared pretty well. You haven't been seasick.

-No.

-You're surprisingly robust.

-A great blessing, really.

The funny thing is I can't bear things like rollercoasters.

The other thing I think of is this line from Bruce when he returned from his first trip.

-He said he burned with the desire to go back.

-Mm.

-I'm interested to see what it was he saw...

-Exactly!

-..that made him want to do it twice!

We're still north of 60 degrees.

-Is the ice a potential hazard for us?

-Yeah, it has been for the last couple of days.

We're in the zone where you get big icebergs and you always have associated small bits, growlers.

This boat's 30 tonnes. If we run into a 20-tonne growler,

-we're going to do some damage.

-Terrific(!)

-And that's a needle in a haystack. There's no way to see.

I look out there and a growler and a breaking wave are all the same.

The little stuff is luck of the draw.

-I don't like that thought.

-No, it's not good.

'It's an unsettling enough thought during the day, but it's even worse at night.

'It's practically impossible to spot growlers in a pitch-black sea.

'But still we need to keep watch for them through the night.

'After my watch, I'm exhausted and about to turn in

'when the radar begins to register large icebergs somewhere ahead.'

An hour ago, the ocean was empty. There was nothing.

Since we got alongside that iceberg, it's just teeming.

There's hundreds, thousands of birds within sight. I just saw a seal. There's penguins.

Finally, after four days at sea,

we reach 60 degrees south and officially enter Antarctica.

And all our iceberg anxiety gives way to sheer awe and wonder.

All these hundreds of feet standing straight up only makes you wonder

what vast bulk is sitting underneath to support that.

It's so big, it's probably sitting grounded on the sea bed.

You see that beautiful, icing cake, pale blue colour?

It's got quite a presence.

It had taken Bruce almost five months to get into these dangerous waters,

but this was where Bruce's exploration really began, pushing south to find the edge of land

before winter set in.

As he sailed on, he photographed and filmed the very first moving images of Antarctica.

Images that have never been broadcast before.

As the Scotia crossed the 71st Parallel in the Weddell Sea,

the temperature suddenly plummeted.

"At noon, we got into a lot of year-old flat ice

"and this tightened up, so that we were beset.

"It is a case for severe patience,

"being ever ready to adapt our plans to our changing circumstances.

"Now it is questionable what can be done."

'After a week trapped in the ice,

'the ship broke free.

'Bruce retreated north away from the pursuing ice and towards a group of islands called the South Orkneys,

'a place only vaguely mapped and charted.

'It's where we're hoping to make landfall if the ice allows it.

'Finally, after fighting through heavy seas and storms,

'The Scotia limped towards the sanctuary of a small cove.

'Bruce later named it Scotia Bay.'

Well, we're just arriving into Scotia Bay...

..which is one of the key places associated with Bruce and the Antarctic.

And it's God-awful!

It's a foul night. It's...

NO SOUND

'What I was trying to say is that after four-and-a-half days at sea,

'we arrived during a foul night in freezing cold

'at a place that looks like the end of the Earth.

'I can only imagine what sort of sanctuary this must have represented for Bruce and the Scotia.'

'In Bruce's time, Scotia Bay and the rest of the island was completely uninhabited.'

SQUAWKING

'But that's not the case any more.'

This is just a surreal view.

Shabby Nissen huts in the middle of nowhere.

'The huts and outbuildings make up an Argentinian naval and scientific base

'that completely dominates the bay

'and sits strangely with the island's natural beauty.'

It's overwhelming.

On the approach, the beach is almost guarded by an army of fur seals.

It's like the smell of a thousand dogs kept in a confined space,

so I'm trying to imagine what it must have been like for Bruce and his team

because for scientists like them, this was an unknown world -

all the discoveries to be made, all the creatures to be seen and examined for the first time.

They were just getting a toehold...

..on a world so new, it must have felt like a new planet.

For all the beauty and scientific promise they encountered,

the crew of the Scotia were in a grave situation

and it wasn't long before the pack ice they had escaped caught up with them.

Just a few days after Bruce arrived here in the South Orkneys,

that bay behind me froze solid, trapping the Scotia in its grip.

The ship was beset and Bruce knew it wouldn't be released again

until the spring thaw in six or eight months' time.

Stranded on a small spit of land with a damaged ship

and the unknown challenges of an Antarctic winter looming,

the immediate priority was to construct a shelter on shore,

a place they could survive in if the ice pressure crushed the Scotia.

All they had to build with on the island were these -

rocks, some no bigger than pebbles,

but they collected 200 tons of them,

sometimes having to dig them out of the ice and frozen ground.

They hauled them into position using sledges, then used a construction technique

whose effectiveness Bruce could testify to

because it was the same that had been used to build the observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis.

And here, except for its roof, over 100 years after it was built

still stands Bruce's shore base, christened Omond House.

The timbers here were taken from the Scotia herself.

The floor is made up from what were once hatches between the ship's decks

and the walls of the store room behind me were lined with wood taken from boxes of ship's biscuits.

Now, the doorway has long since collapsed,

but into the lintel that was once here, Bruce carved the motto, "Through life we learn."

It's a noble thought, but I get the impression that for Bruce, it was more than just words.

It was an idea, a philosophy that he cared very deeply about

and it was to become a guiding principle for those who lived and worked here

during that harsh winter of 1903.

With a secure shore base, Bruce could concentrate

on the kind of scientific exploration he had come to Antarctica for.

His crew began taking hourly measurements of temperature,

pressure, wind strength and direction.

They charted the sea through ice and they mapped the island's landscape,

giving life and character to barren, hitherto nameless places.

And Bruce documented it all, making a remarkable collection of images,

the most detailed archive of Britain's first wave of Antarctic exploration.

Among Bruce's images are the very first moving pictures of Antarctic wildlife.

These were probably taken near to Scotia Bay

at the Point Martin penguin colony.

PENGUINS SQUAWK

Here, Bruce took some of his most remarkable wildlife photos,

but this penguin colony quickly became something more

than just a subject of scientific and photographic study.

Faced with surviving an Antarctic winter,

it became the crew's larder.

"We chose a good, prosperous-looking bird

"and brought down a club with a murderous smash on its head.

"The most depraved sportsman could find no sport in that it was sheer, cold-blooded, unskilled murder

"whose only excuse was that we were hungry and needed fresh food to keep us alive and healthy."

Bruce and his men were soon actively looking forward to meals of penguin eggs and penguin meat.

Apparently, they particularly liked penguin meat with fried onions

or cooked in a curry sauce.

And all of this says a lot about Bruce the man.

Bruce knew that such a diet would prevent scurvy

and would therefore maintain the health and well-being of his men.

And the lives of his team were lives that Bruce held very dear

and he understood very keenly

that this environment was capable of snuffing out their lives

if incompetence or any kind of mishap were allowed to intervene.

Bruce lost one man that winter -

Allan Ramsay, the Scotia's chief engineer.

And he died not from misadventure or mishap,

but from the heart disease he had carried with him from Scotland in his arteries.

Bruce chose this spot for him, facing north, the side closest to home.

As spring arrived and the pack ice melted,

Bruce sailed again, leaving behind a small scientific shore party.

First, he went back to the Falklands for supplies,

but the coal was too expensive,

so he went on to Buenos Aires where the crew received a heroes' welcome.

In Buenos Aires, Bruce petitioned the British Ambassador to allow him to claim the islands for Britain

and he requested more funding for his scientific research.

But on both counts, he was refused, perhaps not surprisingly.

After all, Bruce was not part of Sir Clements Markham's official British National Expedition.

His was a maverick Scottish enterprise.

So when Argentina offered to fund another year of scientific work at the base, Bruce agreed.

And he returned to the South Orkneys with three Argentinian scientists on board the Scotia.

# Nelly, Nelly, te quiero... #

This was the first house they built. Today, it's a seldom visited museum.

Bruce got wind of the fact that one of the Argentinian scientists had been kitted out with a stamp

that said "District 24".

That would be District 24 of the Argentinian Republic

and Bruce well knew that one of the first steps towards making a territorial claim

was the setting up of a post office.

# Mi pasion, mi sentir, mi querer

# Con tus besos quisiera juntar... #

So Argentinian scientists came to run the weather station and stayed.

The permanence of the occupation brought one great scientific benefit.

The weather records begun in Bruce's humble science observatory in 1904

have been taken diligently ever since.

They have become the longest running set of records about Antarctica

and provide the scientific treasury of over 100 years of first-hand Antarctic climate history.

# Para encenderla, mi cielo

# Una frase de amor... #

Today the base has grown to around 40 permanent staff

and is no longer just a scientific base.

It's under military command

and is part of a territorial claim to Antarctica held by Argentina

since they set up their post office here in 1904.

Bruce the scientist, the advocate of international scientific co-operation,

inadvertently opened the door to a different kind of Antarctic exploration,

one that was no longer just about exploring and discovering, but about staying and owning.

I think I'm beginning to understand why Bruce was so ravenous for Antarctica.

I might not be a scientist

or an explorer,

but for me, it's not just the raw beauty

or the incredible light.

It's the sense of privilege

at still being able to witness something wild.

I can't help thinking that only the wildlife really belongs here.

Human claims of ownership seem impertinent and unnecessary

until you realise that underneath the penguin rookeries and seal colonies

are natural resources of enormous potential value.

Bruce departed Scotia Bay

in February 1904, leaving the expedition's meteorologists behind with the Argentinians.

A few years after Bruce's departure,

Britain decided that it was interested in the South Orkneys after all

and also claimed them as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies.

Other countries have since made territorial claims to the continent,

some of them overlapping.

There is still no binding agreement about who owns what bit of the continent,

but nations do agree that there is vital work to be done here.

GROWLS

This is Signy Island,

a British base 40 miles away from Scotia Bay.

-Derren, how are you doing?

-Nice to meet you.

-Good to meet you.

-How far are we going?

-Two or three kilometres.

-That sounds manageable.

Just about.

'It was originally established in 1947 to help shore up Britain's territorial claim,

'but it has been gathering data on the plants and animals here ever since, for five decades,

'and today, some of it is proving vital in understanding climate change.

'Because the islands are in the warmest part of Antarctica,

'they serve as a kind of early warning system for the rest of the continent.'

So where are we headed?

We'll head out to the peninsula straight ahead of us, just to the right of this large hill

-How many do you think are down there?

-In that colony, there's about 1,500, mostly Chinstraps.

-There's a few Adelies in there as well.

-Right. Shall we head off?

'Derren Fox is a scientist with the British Antarctic Survey.

'His current project is counting penguins on the islands.'

He'll do. Come here.

'Derren and his colleagues have discovered

'that the penguin population here is in dramatic decline.'

Pop this little fella in. Try and find you a clean one.

The population has been dropping quite dramatically over the last 20 or 30 years.

They've gone down from nearly about 30,000 Adelies.

I think there are about 19,000 now. It's been dropping quite steadily.

-It's the same with the Chinstraps.

-What's causing that?

It's probably food-related.

Give him a little spray on his belly

All right, you're free to go. Thank you for your help.

Spray-painting penguins - the things you find yourself doing!

-They're little bundles of muscle.

-Yeah, absolutely.

'The penguins eat mainly krill, a kind of shrimp that lives under the sea ice,

'but due to global warming, the habitat where that vital food thrives is disappearing

'and the krill is diminishing.

'Without sufficient food, the penguin population is falling too.'

It's amazing the way...the research that you're doing, the way that their numbers are falling,

tells you that the volume of krill is being affected in some way

-and it all fits into a much bigger picture of life at the bottom of the world.

-Yeah.

Studying these top predators is a great way to work out the health of the ecosystem.

If things lower down are in trouble, it affects these guys dramatically.

-The sheer volume of krill these guys are taking in is incredible.

-Yeah.

'It's a sobering realisation that the ecosystem here is already under threat,

'but I suppose it's in discoveries like this that Bruce's legacy lies.'

Antarctica was made famous by Boy's Own adventurers

like Scott and Shackleton and Amundsen.

But William Speirs Bruce the scientist was here first.

And it's scientists who have continued to make this place their own.

There is still the occasional endurance stunt

that brings short-lived public attention to Antarctica,

but all the while in the background,

it's science and the scientists who are down here sharing this place with the wildlife

and doing the long, slow, diligent work

that informs our present

and that is making predictions about our future.

And I'm sure Bruce would be quietly satisfied

to learn that while the Boy's Own characters have come and gone,

it's the scientists who have remained

and it's science that has marked the time.

It's time for us to depart Antarctica

and I'm glad I've not had to call on Jim's polar survival skills.

But we still have the small matter of another four, five or even six days back across the Southern Ocean

before we reach the safety of the Falklands.

But it's nothing compared to Bruce.

When the Scotia left here,

her heading was south...

into the Weddell Sea.

She pushed down to 74 degrees of latitude

where she came upon a huge set of cliffs of ice sitting on land.

It was an undiscovered part of the Antarctic coastline.

The ship followed and mapped these cliffs for 150 miles.

And William Speirs Bruce was finally able to make his mark,

join the dotted lines on this part of Antarctica,

which today is still known as Coats Land after his sponsors.

It's been an eternity on the boat.

This is Year 11 on the boat...

No, it's Week 3

and it's been a physical struggle, every moment of every day.

I've got some sense of...some tiny sense of what it must have been like

for those polar explorers of the golden age of polar exploration

because their journeys lasted years.

And they had to put up with much greater physical hardship.

My journey has only lasted weeks

and I've been cosseted all the way

by all the most modern navigational and life-saving technology.

And it has still been endless.

So...I'll be very, very pleased to get back to the Falklands

because from there it's just a hop, skip and a jump back home to my family.

And I am struck as never before by what it really meant to leave Britain

and come looking for Destination South.

It's an awful long way from home.

The Scotia arrived back in Scotland on July 21st, 1904,

the ship heaving under the weight of scientific specimens.

Bruce and his crew were hailed as heroes and were greeted by a telegram from the King.

But Bruce wasn't cut out to be a popular hero.

"On his return home, the polar explorer is asked to lecture.

"It is not the account of work done that people want to hear,

"but a narrative bursting with hair-breadth escapes and thrilling adventures."

Just two months later, Markham's troubled expedition also returned.

The Discovery had become stuck in the ice

and had to be rescued at huge cost.

But Scott and Shackleton had gone further south than anyone before

and they and their crew were rewarded with Britain's very highest honour.

This is the Polar Medal.

It's the highest accolade awarded by the Royal Geographical Society.

Now, even the stoker aboard the Discovery received one,

but not one member of the Scotia expedition,

not even Bruce himself, was deemed worthy.

And that slight,

and that's exactly how Bruce saw it, would burn within him

for the rest of his life.

I'll be chatting to one of our penguin keepers about the penguins here at the zoo, so stick around...

In the years after the expeditions, the Scotia's scientific reports were celebrated internationally,

but some of Scott's scientific work, particularly the meteorology,

was found to be so inaccurate that there were some calls for him to face a scientific court-martial.

Yet still there was no recognition for Bruce or his men.

Bruce thought he knew why.

Markham, the man in charge of polar expeditions, held grudges.

"Scott was Clements Markham's proteg and Markham thought it necessary,

"in order to uphold Scott, that I should be obliterated.

"He did the same to others whom he considered mischievous rivals. Alway a policy of stealthy obliteration."

An entry in Markham's diary confirms Bruce's suspicion.

"In January, 1902, in the first season, he did nothing...

"..and only reached 74 degrees...

"The longitude he recorded is very doubtful.

"Insolent charlatan."

Without Markham's support and without a Polar Medal,

Bruce was unable to raise money to return to Antarctica.

Instead, he put his energies into new scientific ventures like Edinburgh Zoo.

It seems to me that in some ways he was a bit of a fish out of water back here.

Maybe the world of committees and politics wasn't his natural habitat.

And it's strange to think that the zoo was set up by a penguin eater.

He's almost certainly the only founder of the zoo who not only knew how penguins behaved in the wild,

but what they tasted like in a curry sauce.

Bruce discovered 212 new species,

charted and mapped the South Orkneys

and a 150-mile chunk of previously unknown Antarctic coastline.

He took the first moving footage of Antarctica and its wildlife

and set up its first permanent weather station.

Yet he is practically without memorial.

In 1920, he suffered a mental collapse

and entered Liberton Hospital for Incurables in Edinburgh.

He died there a year later at the age of 54.

The stigma of mental illness ensured that William Speirs Bruce slipped from view.

So how should we remember Bruce?

For too long, he has existed unrecognised

in the shadow of people like Scott.

Scott's kind of heroism propelled him to his death, racing to reach the South Pole.

Bruce wouldn't or couldn't fit that mould.

He wasn't the right kind of hero for his time,

but he might be one for ours.

Whenever we hear about ice caps melting

or ice sheets breaking apart, we should remember that Bruce was there first.

And Bruce understood that Antarctica could mean something.

Not just to our country and our people, but to every country and all people.

Almost 60 years after Bruce's expedition to Antarctica,

an international treaty was signed

which dedicated the continent to science and peace.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2011

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