Emperor Penguin Egg from Scott's Terra Nova Expedition
Collected in July 1911
The plainest object in the Treasures gallery has the most harrowing story. It is a single egg of an emperor penguin, pale and slightly greenish, and it was carried back across the Antarctic ice by three men who very nearly died to get it. In the winter of 1911, in the middle of the polar night, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard left Captain Scott's base at Cape Evans and man hauled their sledges for five weeks to the emperor penguin colony at Cape Crozier, in temperatures that fell below minus fifty degrees Celsius.
They wanted the eggs because emperor penguins breed in winter, and scientists at the time believed that the embryo of such a primitive bird might reveal a link between reptiles and birds through the development of scales into feathers. The men collected five eggs; two broke on the way back. When their tent blew away in a blizzard they lay in their sleeping bags for a day and a half, singing hymns and expecting to die, before the wind dropped and they found the tent half a kilometre away.
Wilson and Bowers went on to die with Scott on the return from the South Pole the following year. Cherry-Garrard survived, brought the three surviving eggs to this museum in 1913, and was so coldly received by the staff that he later wrote a bitter account of the moment in his book The Worst Journey in the World. The embryos, when finally studied, told scientists nothing about the origin of feathers. The egg remains on display as a monument to courage spent on a question that turned out to be the wrong one.
Did You Know? Cherry-Garrard's teeth shattered from chattering in the cold during the journey to collect this egg.
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