Numlock Sunday: Allegra Rosenberg on a romance at the bottom of the world

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote From Antarctica with Love for Atavist Magazine.

I really loved this story, it wasn’t a perfect fit for the daily edition but it’s such a fascinating read, it reveals a relationship between two men who served on the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. It’s based on some newly digitized diaries and historical data, and I just loved it.

Allegra can be found at her Substack and on Blue Sky at @tchotchke.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Allegra, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me.

I am so excited to talk to you. You wrote a story that is just really magnificent. It’s called “From Antarctica with Love.” It was published in the Atavist Magazine. This thing is just magnificent. It is an amazing story that blends history and discovery. A lot of what you’re really interested in is the fan obsession with unheralded and misunderstood elements of history. I just want to throw it to you. Can you just bring people up to speed about what you discovered over the course of recording this?

Yeah, of course. I’ve always been interested in polar exploration, that’s the Arctic and the Antarctic, for five years now. It was my pandemic hobby that spiraled out into something that has really brought so much joy to my life. I’ve really become part of an amazing community. In the course of my research, on the side of other stuff that I was doing, I came across this amazing story. It was very much happening in the background of a story that some people might know, which is the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s last expedition.

This was an expedition to the South Pole that happened between 1910 and 1913. If you grew up in the UK or if you’re interested in these things, you probably know that Captain Scott and 4 of his team members died on the way back from the South Pole in 1912. They had come in second place to Roald Amundsen. It was this huge tragedy, and he had this afterlife as a hero of the Empire. It was this big deal, historically speaking. British people probably grew up hearing about Captain Scott and the men who died with him.

But what tends to be lesser known is all the men who were on the expedition with him who survived and had to go home and tell that story of grief, of loss, of coming second place, losing their friends. There’s an amazing book called The Worst Journey in the World by Ashley Cherry Gerrard, who was one of the survivors, and that’s a classic of travel literature. All these different other stories that happen in the background of that, and this story that I found is one of them.

There was a group of men who were on this ship who would come and resupply the expedition when the ice broke up, and then there was a group of men that were staying on the continent. Captain Scott and his men were part of that group, but there were also some members of that group who survived and went home. The captain of the ship was a guy named Harry Pennell, and the doctor on the expedition who had to lead the team after Scott and his men died was a man named Edward Leicester Atkinson. Pennell and Atkinson, as I discovered, had been in what we might think of as a loving relationship for a year or so after the expedition returned home.

My article traces the evolution of that relationship with the expedition and the expedition’s aftermath with World War I as the background context. These men come from the harshness of the Antarctic, then they get a little summer break, and then they’re right into the trenches in World War I when that starts in 1914.

So it’s very much an Edwardian story. It’s a look into the past. I want people to make their own decisions about what the relationship between these men was like. There are some very telling phrases and testimonies in these letters and diaries, but there’s also a lot of ambiguity, and there’s also the fact that this was over 100 years ago. The way we think about love and romance and sexuality was very, very, very different than we do now. So yeah, that’s the story. I don’t want to spoil anything else.

No, of course. At one point in the story you even describe, like, “Listen we don’t know how they conceived of their own sexuality, because they would not have even had the word sexuality.”

Exactly. I mean, it was an academic phrase, and these were, like, buff navy men. They wouldn’t have known what that was, even if some people, maybe the bohemians of the scene might have been thinking along those lines, but these guys were about as far removed from those milieus as you could get. They were on dreadnought ships, looking under microscopes at parasites or calling commands from the poop deck. They were not in cabarets, let’s just say.

Yeah, can you also paint us a picture of these two fellows, Atkinson and Pennell. Can you just tell us a little bit about them?

I feel like I really know them. They’re like my best friends at this point. So they were both in the Navy, they were both commissioned officers and they had both come from upper middle class backgrounds — very typical of that officer class of the World War I era British Navy. They had both attended boarding schools as young boys and then gone right to the Navy. Atkinson had gone to medical school, he was a medical doctor and then became a commissioned surgeon in the Navy. He also has scientific interests. He was a medical doctor but he was also a parasitologist, so he was interested in studying the life cycles of human and animal parasites.

Whereas, Pennell was a navigator. So he was an expert navigator. You had to be a pretty incredible mathematician and a human calculator to be able to be a maritime navigator. So he passed with flying colors all those exams and then worked his way up the naval ranks, aiming to become a captain of his own ship, which did finally happen when he was on this expedition. Pennell’s diary was the main source for this article. He was a very optimistic, open-hearted, energetic, friendly guy. Everybody adored him. He was like everybody’s best friend. He had this poetic side to him that came out when he wrote his diary. He was a little more open with his feelings, at least in the context of his diary, than many men of his era, like Atkinson.

They’re a little bit like opposites attract. Atkinson was quiet. He was stubborn. He was a boxer, a champion boxer on these navy ships. He was into contact. And very much that stiff upper lip of your prototypical Edwardian officer. He didn’t often say what he felt. He didn’t like to write letters. His letters are all stilted and a little formulaic. But — you get the sense from the way other people wrote about him — he had this incredibly sensitive side to him that came out once you got to know him.

I want you to speak a little bit more about Pennell’s diary and the sourcing on this. How do you discover this story?

Yeah It’s an interesting thing that during the pandemic, there was a lot of digitization of materials that were held in archives because people couldn’t fly to these far-flung archives. Museums, especially in Australia and New Zealand, which were very hard to get to at the time, began putting their material online. This diary is held by the Canterbury Museum, which is in Christchurch, New Zealand. At some point between 2012 (which is when some friends of mine had gone to New Zealand and read this diary) and 202 3(which is when I discovered it), it had gone up online. Canterbury Museum had just made it available as a PDF file on their website.

I’d reached the point in my research where I’d read all the published diaries that were out there from this expedition, and I just loved reading about the day-to-day life and what the people thought of each other. It’s basically like putting on my favorite TV show, right? I just have to open up this diary and start reading, and I’d get this drama playing out in my mind’s eye. This was a diary that I hadn’t read, and I was like, “Well, I don’t really know anything about Pennell, but maybe he says some stuff about the guys that I do know.” So I really wanted to check it out and see what he had to say.

Little did I know that when I opened up this diary, I was going to be dropped into this romance. I mean, I had no idea as I was reading it, and suddenly I’m like, “Wow, he’s mentioning Atkinson a lot. Wow, he really seems to like Atkinson.” I was like, “Am I imagining this?” Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but as you read the diary, it becomes clear that he was really really deeply in love with this guy.

Yeah, the thing that I really enjoyed about your story was that it also gives a sense of what exactly an expedition entails. I think that in people’s mind’s eye it’s just four gents just marching towards the pole, but these are significant logistical operations. The two gentlemen that you profile had very significant roles in it that you might not necessarily think of as you’re planning this. Of course somebody’s got to operate the boat, right? Of course somebody’s got to maintain camp. Could you tell me a little bit about what their roles on the expedition were, and how that informed you? It played a role in their relationship in many ways, because they were kept rather far apart.

Yeah. These expeditions, like you said, were huge operations. On the ship going down to Antarctica, there were 60-something men divided in between a group that would stay with the ship the whole time and a couple groups that would be landed on the continent to explore. Within those groups that would be landed, there were scientists, there were people in charge of the animals, there were people in charge of the stores and the transportation, the sledge, all these different roles that had to be played.

Now, this was a larger operation because it was in part a scientific expedition. Scott wanted to legitimize this idea of going to the South Pole by saying, “We’re also doing science for the Empire.” Whereas Amundsen’s expedition, which is the one that won because they got there first, they were literally just there to get to the pole and back. It was a much more streamlined personnel, where Scott had all these guys because they were all there to measure the auroras and to test the weather balloons and to find new rocks and minerals and stuff like that. So this was a big operation.

In order to keep that expedition on the shore supplied, they needed a ship that could go back and forth between New Zealand and Antarctica. Now, Antarctica, the part that they were in, is only accessible by ship 2-3 months of the year. So the ship could get there in late December or early January, which is the middle of the Antarctic summer. They would have to be out of there by like March 5th at the latest, or else the ship would get frozen in and unable to go home. So it was very precarious, and it had to be timed perfectly.

That was Pennell’s job. He was in charge of the ship, and he would go back to New Zealand. He’d be in New Zealand for like eight months, redoing the ship and also performing some marine surveys for the New Zealand government. Then he’d come back, drop off the new supplies, take home the people that needed to be taken home and be ready to come back again the next year. That meant that he was away, you know. He was on the ship going down south for like three months, dropped the people off, went away, came back only for two months, went away again, and then came back.

This was over the course of like three years. So he was with Atkinson — he got to know him — on the way down in 1910. Pennell saw him briefly in 1912 when the ship came to resupply. When he picked him back up in 1913, that’s when he got the news that Scott had died and Atkinson had been in charge of the shore party for the past seven months. I mean, there was no radio, there was no communication. These people were out of reach of the world for a year at a time. It was crazy.

It’s phenomenal, yeah. It’s a life that doesn’t really exist that much anymore. Yeah, just backing out a bit. I mean, I would really strongly encourage folks to read the story, so I don’t want to get too much into where this goes and how their relationship evolves over time. But as a researcher and as someone with a vested interest and deep interest in polar exploration, it sounds like this was a really cool new thing that you learned from these diaries. Is there anything else that you came across that really got your mind going?

I mean, there’s always something new that you can find because everybody has a different interest when they’re going into this material. Just because someone has been through this source material — this diary — and published a book that includes it, doesn’t mean that they found the parts that would be the most interesting to you. One of the amazing things about amateur and enthusiast research is: without the academic pressure to publish, you can seek out what you are most interested in, what you are most fascinated by.

I’m super interested in, obviously, the relationships between these expedition members, how they change people that like each other, people that don’t like each other, the drama, the soap opera, ensemble cast, nature of it all. Going back into the archives, reading these diaries, I’m like, “Hey, I thought I read this published version of this diary, but in this manuscript version, he’s best friends with the guy that is not mentioned in the published version. Now, why is that?” When you get into the why of it all, and when you think of all the people that have edited and censored — not necessarily for nefarious reasons, but just because interests change, right? A modern audience is interested in a different aspect of an expedition than an audience 20 years ago, 100 years ago.

There’s always something new to discover and there’s always different people to talk to, different perspectives: the perspective of the enlisted men, the seamen, the petty officers that were separated by class from the upper class officers. What was their perspective? There’s a lot of people doing really great work on these other perspectives that have not had so much attention thus far.

Yeah, it’s also just really interesting. If you look at the grand sweeping history of your job, the thing that’s gonna stick out to you is, like, the biologist I’m hanging out with that keeps talking about reincarnation. That’s a big part of my day. But maybe that’s not gonna make it into The Worst Journey in The World.

Right, no, exactly. I mean, it’s these little things. One of the my favorite things about Scott’s last Expedition is they did this little magazine over the winter when they were waiting to go to the pole. It’s just like a meme culture book where they make jokes about each other and have caricatures and give each other nicknames and say, “Well, this one is the designated girl of the hut — we’re gonna draw him in dresses on every page. And then in the guy’s diary, he’s like, “Well, I hate it when they do that.” It’s like this little subplot. They’re stuck inside for 5 or 6 months while the sun in Antarctica is below the horizon, so of course they get up to all these ridiculous pranks and hijinks and stuff and teasing. That’s all there in the book if you know where to look.

That’s funny. Yeah, you take a bunch of people who were raised in boarding schools, and then you put them in a boat.

It’s so British. I mean, the Norwegians weren’t doing that, let’s just say. It’s very British.

Amazing. Allegra, your work is really exciting. You’ve got some exciting stuff in the hopper coming down the pipe. Where can folks find you, and where can folks keep up with your work?

AllegraRosenberg.com is my website. I designed it myself, and my Substack and Bluesky are both @tchotchke, so you can find me there as well. I have some cool stuff coming down the line, like you said. If people read my article and they really want to read more about polar exploration, go and read The Worst Journey in the World. It’s a classic for a reason. Highly recommend.

Awesome. Thanks!

Thank you so much!

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Edited by Crystal Wang.

If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.

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