A First Rate Tragedy (23 page)

It was difficult for Scott to know how to react to the news. Amundsen could hardly have been less informative about his intentions. It was not clear where he would land or what his ultimate goal would be, whereas Scott’s own plans had been openly published, including his intention of reaching the Pole
around 22 December 1911. What use would the secretive, not to say duplicitous Norwegian, as Scott must have regarded him, make of this piece of information? It was a worrying thought.

Preoccupied as he must have been with the Norwegian threat, Scott was forced to set off on ‘yet another begging campaign’. The Australian government had coughed up a mere £2,500, half the sum given to Shackleton and this only after they heard that a Japanese expedition was in the offing. Before departing from Australia Scott talked frankly to the press about the expedition’s chances: ‘We may get through, we may not. We may have accidents to some of our transports, to the sledges or to the animals. We may lose our lives. We may be wiped out. It is all a question that lies with providence and luck.’
¹²
This fatalism was both part of his nature and born of his experiences on the
Discovery
. Knowing the uncertainties of Polar travel he must have comforted himself that luck would apply equally to Amundsen.

After lecturing to enthusiastic audiences, Scott and Kathleen embarked by passenger boat for Wellington, where he received the welcome news that a wealthy citizen from Sydney had agreed to make up the £2,500 shortfall in the Australian government’s contribution. Reporters also pressed him for a response to Amundsen’s challenge. Scott replied with dignity that his plans remained unchanged. He would attempt to reach the Pole but not at the expense of the expedition’s scientific goals. The down-to-earth Oates’s reaction in a letter to a friend was typical of him: ‘Bloody Norskies coming down south is a bit of a shock. I only hope they don’t get there first. It will make us look pretty foolish. They say that Amundsen has been underhand in the way he has gone about it, but I personally don’t see it as underhand to keep your mouth shut.’

Evans, meanwhile, had sailed the
Terra Nova
to Lyttelton, the
tiny New Zealand port that had also hosted the
Discovery
, the
Morning
, and Shackleton’s
Nimrod
. Here she was to be joined by those officers and scientists who had not sailed out in her and to spend a month being unloaded and repacked. Ponting described how: ‘It was as interesting as it was delightful to note that our leader’s wife spent many days checking packages as they were unloaded and then re-stowed’. What others thought, notably Bowers who was the
Terra Nova
’s expert on stowing, is not recorded. There were the three motor sledges to come aboard in their crates and Meares was waiting with his nineteen white Manchurian ponies and thirty-three Siberian sledge dogs.

Oates gloomily assessed the ponies, noting that ‘they are very old for a job of this sort and four of them are unsound however we shall have to make the best of them’. He consoled himself by drinking ‘a skinful of beer’.
¹³
Stables now had to be constructed on the
Terra Nova
’s upper deck and under the forecastle, and the seamen volunteered some of their living space for the stowing of extra supplies with Edgar Evans acting as spokesman. Urine dripped from the pony stables on the deck above through leaky planking into their remaining accommodation, making their lives even more uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Oates and Scott argued about the amount of pony fodder to be taken on board. Scott was reluctant to heed Oates’s warnings about the dangers of underfeeding the ponies, dismissing the man who knew more about horses than anyone else on the trip as ‘a cheery old pessimist’. However, Oates stuck to his guns and they compromised. Oates also smuggled a couple of tons of extra feed on board, bought at his own expense, without Scott’s knowledge.

If Cardiff was the expedition’s greatest friend in the northern hemisphere, Lyttelton held that place in the south, reacting with true generosity and enthusiasm to her guests. There were
donations of coal, frozen sheep and bullocks, tinned meat, boxes of butter, bacon, beer and biscuits, jerseys and bibles. Lyttelton harbour waived all fees and everyone was given free rail passes. There was also a busy round of parties, dances and race meetings. Oates wrote acidly that: ‘Some of the visitors who come in [sic] board write their names on the paintwork which is rather sickening.’
¹⁴
Bowers, who in each port the
Terra Nova
had visited had displayed a lively eye for the local girls, wrote ‘the charms of the fair sex have not been exaggerated. The girls here are as a whole good-looking and the average would pass as pretty . . . but the little we see of leisure at present precludes the possibility of my falling this time.’ Scott complained in an unpublished entry in his diary that in New Zealand he had ‘had to hear much talk of Shackleton’. He and Kathleen spent some of their last days together in the beautiful house of Joseph Kinsey, the expedition’s agent. It was high on a cliff with wonderful views and a garden ablaze with red and golden flowers. At night they slept outside under clear skies.

On 26 November, the day the
Terra Nova
was due to leave Lyttelton for her final stop at Port Chalmers to take on coal, Edgar Evans fell in the water as he rushed to get aboard after a night out drinking with the locals. Teddy Evans wanted the petty officer dismissed. However, it would have been well nigh impossible for Scott to do this after all they had shared. The fact that in the months to come Kathleen Scott would dream about Petty Officer Evans shows how often Scott must have talked of him and the bonds between them. He therefore decided to overlook this plunge from grace and ordered the Welshman to travel by train to Port Chalmers. In fact they travelled together and the cheerful seaman apparently behaved as if nothing had happened. However, Scott’s decision seriously annoyed Teddy Evans who was
angry to see the petty officer trotting briskly on board again and the diaries hint more generally at arguments behind the scenes between Scott and Evans. Scott referred to Teddy Evans’s ‘vague and wild grievances’.

There was also tension between their wives. Bowers attributed it to jealousy between the two. He regarded Hilda Evans as a womanly woman of remarkable beauty and general charm ‘who was everything a wife should be’.
¹⁵
He was much less in sympathy with the more emancipated and forthright Kathleen and had already reported home that ‘he hated to see a woman like her getting out of their proper place in the world’. Now he wrote, ‘I don’t like Mrs. Scott . . . Nobody likes her on the expedition and the painful silence when she arrives is the only jarring note . . . There is no secret that she runs us all just now and what she says is done through the Owner [Scott]. Now nobody likes a schemer and she is one undoubtedly.’
¹⁶

Oates described a splendid fight between Kathleen and Hilda. ‘Mrs Scott and Mrs Evans had a magnificent battle, they tell me it was a draw after 15 rounds. Mrs Wilson flung herself into the fight after the 10th round and there was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you see in a Chicargo [sic] slaughterhouse in a month.’
¹⁷
He hoped it would not cause coolness among the men when they got down south but added characteristically that it would not bother him if it did. Kathleen decided that if her husband ever mounted another expedition, the wives must be chosen more carefully than the men or, better still, have none. As Bowers remarked, the sooner they were all away the better.

The final farewells in fact came on 29 November. Kathleen, together with Oriana Wilson and Hilda Evans, remained on board until the ship cleared the flag-decked harbour, when they were taken off by tug. Kathleen had left a bundle of letters with Teddy
Evans to be given to Scott on special days. She described in her autobiography ‘his face radiating tenderness as the space between us widened, until I held only my memory of that upturned face, but held it for a lifetime’. To cheer herself up she visited a babies’ home but found them very plain. Hilda Evans was ‘ghastly white’ and Oriana Wilson ‘sphinx-like’ as the tug turned back. Wilson wrote in his diary of his Ory’s ‘temporary widowhood’, little guessing that it was to be permanent, saying that he was taking with him the memory of the most perfect companionship he had ever known.

Back in Britain the news of the
Terra Nova
’s departure south received only muted attention. Perhaps the most frequent reminder of the great adventure was the advertisements for a brand of underwear which the expedition had taken with them, under the bold headline ‘GONE WITH SCOTT’.

11

Stewed Penguin Breast and Plum Pudding

‘All links with civilization are cut, and as night falls New Zealand sinks from sight. It is almost sad to think that years will pass before we shall once more see land with forests and green fields,’ wrote an unusually sombre Tryggve Gran as the
Terra Nova
creaked on her way. She was heavily overladen. The crated motor sledges covered in tarpaulins took up most of the deck, together with sixty wooden components for the hut, sacks of coal and drums of fuel. Birdie Bowers described how the decks were crowded with ‘garbage fore and aft’ but added ‘risk nothing and do nothing; if funds could not supply another ship, we simply had to overload the one we had or suffer worse things down south’.
¹
She was also a floating menagerie. The thirty-three dogs were billeted on the open deck, chained up around the other cargo and exposed to the wind and the spray, the picture of canine misery. ‘The dogs sit with their tails to this invading water, their coats wet and dripping. It is a pathetic attitude, deeply significant of cold and misery; occasionally some poor beast emits a long pathetic whine. The
group forms a picture of wretched dejection; such a life is truly hard for these poor creatures,’ wrote Scott. He also worried about the fifteen ponies accommodated under the forecastle: ‘One takes a look through a hole in the bulkhead and sees a row of heads with sad, patient eyes come swinging up together from the starboard side, whilst those on the port swing back; then up come the port heads, whilst the starboard recede. It seems a terrible ordeal for these poor beasts . . .’ The ponies also posed an ordeal for the seamen since some were housed directly above the seamen’s mess-table and what they euphemistically described as ‘mustard’ dripped down.

What fate awaited this ungainly cargo of humans and animals? Scott set great store by luck but the coming weeks would bring a series of misfortunes. On 2 December, just two days out from New Zealand, the
Terra Nova
ran straight into the teeth of a Force 10 gale. Shrieking winds dislodged the deck cargo, sending sacks of coal and cans of fuel cannoning hither and thither. The wretched dogs, chained by the neck, were washed backwards and forwards across the deck. One was actually hurled overboard with such force that his chain broke, but by a miracle a great wave deposited him back again. The ponies were in danger of breaking their legs as the ship pitched and tossed.

The storm was a defining event which showed Scott the calibre of his companions. Oates and Atkinson worked ‘like Trojans’ among the ponies. Teddy Evans described Oates’s ‘strong brown face illuminated by a swinging lamp as he stood amongst those suffering little beasts. He was a fine, powerful man and on occasions he seemed to be actually lifting the poor little ponies to their feet as the ship lurched . . .’
²
Scott himself remained calm and stoical – a storm at sea was well within his range of experience. Bowers later described Scott’s coolness with
awe: ‘Captain Scott was simply splendid, he might have been at Cowes . . .’
³
However the reality, as Scott later told Griffith Taylor, was that it was touch and go. The ship’s pumps had become clogged with balls of coal dust and engine oil and the ship was taking in water and slowly sinking. Scott and Teddy Evans set the afterguard to baling out by hand and Wilson, one of the lucky ones not to suffer from seasickness, described the desperate scenes:

It was a weird night’s work with the howling gale and the darkness and the immense sea running over the ship every few minutes, and no engine and no sail, and we all in the engine-room black as ink with engine-room oil and bilgewater, singing chanties as we passed up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above slopping a little over the heads of all of us below him, wet through to the skin, so much so that some of the party worked altogether naked . . .

The storm began to abate and after a twelve-hour struggle a hole was eventually cut through the engine-room bulkhead to reach the suction well of the hand pump which was flooded. Teddy Evans squeezed through and worked neck-high to clear the valves when ‘to the joy of all a good stream of water came from the pump for the first time,’ wrote a grateful Scott. The danger was past – fires could be re-lit, bilges dried out and the cost counted. Everything was sopping, including Gran’s wellington boots which were ‘like eel-pots’. More importantly, two ponies had died and their bodies had to be pushed out of the forecastle skylight. Teddy Evans described it as ‘a dirty job, because the square of the hatch was so small that a powerful purchase had to be used which
stretched out the ponies like dead rabbits’. In addition, one dog had drowned and 10 tons of coal and 65 gallons of petrol had been lost, together with a case of biologist’s spirit.

The phlegmatic Edgar Evans took it in his stride, writing to his mother simply that ‘Since leaving New Zealand we have had some pretty bad weather . . .’
⁴
To Wilson, the
Terra Nova’s
salvation had been God’s work signalled by ‘a most perfect and brilliant rainbow’ which had appeared at the storm’s height, though it apparently went unnoticed by his less spiritual colleagues. Wilson took it as a sign that ‘seemed to remove every shadow of doubt, not only as to the present issue, but as to the final issue of the whole Expedition . . .’ Bowers was similarly sustained by a deep faith that: ‘Under its worst conditions this earth is a good place to live in’.
⁵
Cherry-Garrard after forty-eight hours without sleep was more down to earth. ‘For sheer downright misery,’ he wrote, ‘give me a hurricane, not too warm, the yard of a sailing ship, a wet sail and a bout of seasickness.’