A First Rate Tragedy (12 page)

Struggling on Scott decided to depot the dog food and most of their own remaining supplies for the return journey and to travel on without relaying. However, the pattern was set. The men were too hungry to have very much pulling power and continued to be tormented by snowblindness. To add to their worries Wilson believed that Shackleton and Scott were showing signs of scurvy as he was himself. They forgot their woes on Christmas day, which was celebrated with extravagant fare. The travellers feasted on a breakfast of biscuit and seal-liver fried in bacon and pemmican
fat, and blackberry jam. Lunch was cocoa, a whole biscuit and more jam. Supper was a hoosh consisting of a double whack of everything and more cocoa. Shackleton then produced the
pièce de résistance
– a Christmas pudding the size of a cricket ball he had ‘stowed away in my socks (clean ones) in my sleeping bag’.
¹¹
They boiled it in cocoa and decorated it with a piece of artificial holly.
²

Yet this was only temporary comfort. Wilson was suffering horribly from snowblindness caused by taking off his goggles to sketch. His painful eyes watered so much he could not see. He anointed them with liquid cocaine and had to dose himself with morphine to help him both to sleep and to continue to haul his sledge. While he pulled, he wore a blindfold and fantasized about walking through woods of beech or fir. The swish of the skis made him think of brushing through heather or succulent bluebells in his native Gloucestershire. Scott became his eyes, describing the magnificent new ranges of mountains coming into view to the south-west. Wilson managed to open one eye long enough to sketch the scene. They named the highest, a glorious twin-peaked mountain, after Sir Clements Markham. On 30 December 1902 they reached their farthest south – 82° 17'S, over 410 miles from the Pole but over 250 miles further south than any other human being before them. Later that day Scott took Wilson with him on skis to chart the mountain chain visible southwards. Modestly, he named a distant cape after Wilson and a nearby inlet for Shackleton but nothing after himself. ‘We have almost shot our bolt,’ Scott wrote. Had they but known it they were almost within sight of the ascent to the Polar plateau which Shackleton would
discover in six years’ time. The three men tried to push on by ski to reach land and take some geological samples but found their way barred by a crevasse. Shackleton took a photograph showing Scott, a small resolute figure dwarfed by the grandeur around him. Then they turned back.

To head north again must have been both a relief and a frustration, but the realities of the return journey soon became clear. It became a finely balanced race to reach the various depots before supplies ran out and was predicated on the men remaining fit. However, their rations had had to be progressively reduced during the journey, leaving them starving and susceptible to scurvy. They were physically weak and mentally depressed and the situation with the dogs did not help. They were literally on their last legs, so feeble that Scott and his companions loaded them onto the sledges which the men helped to pull. Others had to be killed or just died in their tracks. Scott found it appalling and again left the killing to Wilson and Shackleton, an abdication of responsibility as he admitted. When one of his favourites, Kid, finally collapsed he wrote: ‘He has pulled like a Trojan throughout and his stout little heart bore him up till his legs failed beneath him . . .’ It brought him close to tears. Clearly they could no longer expect the surviving dogs to pull the sledges and they released them. For the first time they were able to converse freely instead of having to shout at the dogs. They were also relieved to be free of the moral burden of driving reluctant, exhausted animals even if it meant hauling the sledges themselves – a view that would seem insane to explorers like Amundsen but which had a profound influence on Scott and Shackleton.

Perhaps the situation did begin to seem a little insane to them as they pushed on. The weather had turned mild, making the snow wet and soggy so that it clung to the runners and made the three
men perspire, leaving them perpetually damp and clammy. They managed to reach their depot and rewarded themselves with a generous hoosh, but they were in a miserable condition, all suffering from scurvy and with Shackleton deteriorating fast. His gums were inflamed, he found it hard to breathe and he was spitting blood, yet they still had about 150 miles to go. A sick companion was one of the worst dilemmas a Polar commander could face. Scott listened carefully to Wilson’s diagnosis of Shackleton’s condition and decided there was nothing for it but to give up any idea of further exploration, kill the two remaining dogs and make a dash for the
Discovery
. It never occurred to these sentimental Britons to eat the dogs, as Amundsen was to do. Had they done so they would have alleviated their scurvy. As it was, the death of the dogs affected Scott deeply in his weakened and emotional state. He described how: ‘This was the saddest scene of all; I think we could all have wept. And so this is the last of our dog team, the finale to a tale of tragedy; I scarcely like to write of it.’ The dogs had become like personal friends. Wilson’s poignant sketch ‘the Last of the Dogs’ was testimony to his own feelings about the dogs’ fate. When the explorers eventually returned to the ship the dead dogs would be toasted for their gallant contribution to the cause of science.

Scott and Wilson now pulled the sledges, which each had a weight of over 260 lbs, while Shackleton tottered dizzily alongside. Wilson described how hard it was to make the excitable Irishman take things quietly. A change of diet with more dried seal meat and no bacon seemed to help combat the scurvy, but Shackleton remained desperately ill. At one stage he sat on the sledge. The going was good and his task was to help slow the pace on downward gradients using a ski stick. There was later to be ill-feeling between Shackleton and Scott over whether he
had ridden on the sledge partly through weakness or simply to act as a brake, but Scott was to pay public tribute to his ‘most extraordinary pluck and endurance’.
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They pushed on as best they could, Scott and Wilson sharing the main burden and cementing their relationship in the midst of the hardship. Wilson’s heroic efforts bore out Scott’s view that sledging is ‘a sure test of a man’s character’. Wilson described how he and Scott discussed every conceivable subject and he recorded that ‘indeed he is a most interesting talker when he starts’, an interesting sidelight both on Scott’s reserve and their growing bond. It is also noteworthy that at one stage Wilson felt it necessary to have ‘had it out with Scott’.
¹³
What they discussed, and why, is unclear but if – and it is only if
–
Wilson raised Scott’s failings – his outbursts of temper and sometimes autocratic behaviour and his attitude towards Shackleton – he must have done it very tactfully. If anything the dialogue only heightened the respect and affection of each man for the other. Wilson had set out as Shackleton’s friend but was returning as Scott’s. Somewhere along the line the chemistry between the three men had altered.

Scott’s first great Antarctic journey finally ended on 3 February. Distant specks on the ice turned out to be not penguins but Skelton and Bernacchi who had come out to look for them. Wilson described them as ‘clean tidy looking people’. They were certainly in stark contrast to the three travellers who were skeletally thin with faces the colour of brown boots except where lamp soot had blackened them, hair, beards and moustaches that were long and wild, lips that were blistered and raw. Scott’s ankles were swollen, Wilson was limping badly and Shackleton was on the brink of complete collapse. They had travelled some 850 miles, including relays, and been away from the
Discovery
for ninety-three days.

As they marched the final half dozen miles to a
Discovery
freshly painted and decked with bunting, Skelton and Bernacchi were eager to tell them everything that had happened while they had been away. The most important piece of news was that a relief ship, the
Morning
, had arrived bringing post and parcels. It had been part of the original plan that a relief ship should be sent down to Antarctica after a year to bring supplies, take back news and invalids or even rescue the whole expedition. There was great psychological comfort in the thought of this contact with the outside world.

The
Morning
brought orders instructing Scott to take what he needed from the relief ship and sail the
Discovery
to Lyttelton. However, despite attempts to free her, the
Discovery
remained locked in the ice and Scott concluded that she would have to pass another year in McMurdo Sound. He was later to be accused of not trying hard enough to release her.
The Times
suggested that like another famous naval man he had chosen to turn a blind eye to his orders. He was certainly tenacious and, having now experienced Antarctic exploration, was not sorry to be able to stay, although it was probably the weather conditions that actually clinched matters.

Scott now faced some important decisions. He knew he would have to cut back on crew members if he was to remain. He called for volunteers to return on the
Morning
and received eight including Brett, the highly unsatisfactory cook. Scott later congratulated himself that they were exactly the eight men he would have wished to send back. However, it is highly likely that he had exercised some persuasion behind the scenes. He also suggested to Armitage that he might like to return. Not only had his wife recently had a baby but in one of the letters brought to him by the
Morning
Scott had learned that she had been involved in
some unsavoury scandal. Scott was therefore trying to be tactful and compassionate but Armitage reacted angrily. He interpreted this as evidence that Scott believed that the expedition should be the preserve of the Royal Navy and that he had a prejudice against the Merchant Navy, noting that several merchant seaman were among those returning on the
Morning
. He may also have believed there was a more personal dimension. He suspected that Scott considered Antarctica peculiarly his own after these first endeavours and feared Armitage as his greatest potential rival. Armitage accordingly resisted Scott’s suggestion on the grounds that his command was independent of Scott and stored this up as a further source of grievance.

Scott was, however, adamant that Shackleton, the man who was to prove his real rival, must return on the grounds that ‘He ought not to risk further hardships in his present state of health’. Koettlitz seems to have been in two minds about his fitness and Armitage later claimed that the doctor believed Shackleton was as capable of remaining as Scott. He also claimed that Scott threatened that ‘If he does not go back sick he will go back in disgrace’.
¹⁴
However, these were the accusations made after the death of Shackleton, as well as Wilson and Scott, by an embittered man whose career had not prospered and whose wife, ‘a hell of a woman’ as Skelton called her, had ruined him financially.

Wilson recorded in his diary that ‘Poor old Shackleton has been sent home as the result of his break down on our southern sledge journey, a thing which has upset him a great deal as he was very keen indeed to stop and see the thing through. It is certainly wiser for him to go home though.’ Wilson had been concerned about his friend’s health from the very beginning and these comments on the wisdom of sending him home ring true. Michael Barne who escorted Shackleton to the
Morning
noted
that they made very slow progress ‘as poor old Shackles is still very shaky’.
¹⁵
Whether Scott had deeper motives is difficult to judge. His experience of sledging with Shackleton had revealed not just the other man’s physical weakness but a propensity to argue and to resist authority running counter to the spirit of naval discipline which Scott valued so highly. So while there were sound medical reasons for sending Shackleton home, it may also be true that Scott was not sorry to see him go. However, one story sheds a more human light on the relationship between these two men who had experienced so much together. Safely back on the
Discovery
they had found it hard to satisfy their hunger in spite of the great feast to which they were treated. An officer from the
Morning
related how he heard Scott rousing Shackleton, whose cabin was next door. ‘“Shackles,” I heard him call, “I say Shackles, how would you fancy some sardines on toast?”’
¹⁶

On 2 March the
Morning
stood out to sea on course for Lyttelton in New Zealand. Shackleton was on the deck apparently in tears as the small figures waving from the ice disappeared from view. This was a defining moment for the future of all three men who had made the southern journey together. Scott wrote in the spirit of the age, ‘If we had not achieved such great results as at one time we had hoped for we knew at least that we had striven and endured with all our might.’ They had, however, surveyed some 300 miles of new coastline, added to knowledge about the Barrier and set the scene for the quest for the South Pole, even if they had not fulfilled their own and others’ expectations.

6

‘Little Human Insects’

As the air grew chillier and the winter darkness returned, Scott reflected on what he had learned. He had gained a new assurance, born of experience. In many ways the southern journey had been a revelation, showing him that he had the mental and physical strength to lead an expedition and helping him to overcome his persistent self-doubt. The narrow-chested dreamy child had turned into a tough and purposeful leader. He remained therefore in an optimistic mood as, some months later, the new sledging season dawned and his enthusiasm communicated itself to the rest of the crew. ‘To judge by the laughter and excitement, we might be boys escaping from school,’ he wrote. The winter had passed much as the previous one. For example, Michael Barne, a great jokester, had dreamt up such pranks as dressing in furs and jumping out at the nervous Koettlitz, pretending to be a bear. Others had written up their diaries and scientific notes and got up plays, and further editions of the
South Polar Times
had appeared. A feast on Midwinter’s Day had been a jolly affair, leaving the normally abstemious Scott ‘quite as much excited as was necessary for his dignity’.
¹