A First Rate Tragedy (27 page)

However, this jollity marked a watershed. The new sledging season was approaching, with everything that implied. Scott felt the mantle of responsibility settle even more firmly on his shoulders. He was also concerned about a strange quest which three of his men were about to attempt – the famous ‘Worst Journey in the World’. Wilson had persuaded Scott to allow him to lead an expedition in the depths of the Antarctic winter to the emperor penguin rookery at Cape Crozier. Previous explorers thought that the male penguins tended the eggs during the winter months but no one had proved it. Neither was it known when the eggs hatched. Wilson hoped to answer some of these questions and by retrieving some eggs and studying their embryology to explore the link between birds and reptiles. The scheme had been in Wilson’s mind since the discovery of their breeding ground at Cape Crozier nine years earlier and he had revealed this ambition to Cherry-Garrard in London.

Shackleton had vetoed a similar proposal from his men and the more cautious Scott was initially very reluctant to allow Wilson to take such a risk. He would be battling against gale-force winds, appallingly low temperatures and a circuitous route of some seventy miles of deeply crevassed ice and cliff. Twice during the winter he had taken Wilson for a walk to try to dissuade him, but without success. He could not find it in his heart to disappoint
him and reasoned that some useful experience would be gained for the Polar attempt. More would be learned about the conditions on the Barrier, and he asked Wilson to experiment with diet, trying out different proportions of fats, carbohydrates and proteins. He allowed Wilson to take Cherry-Garrard and Bowers, whom Wilson described in a letter to Ory as ‘the two best sledgers of the whole Expedition’.
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Cherry-Garrard thought he might have done better to take Lashly rather than himself, but described how Wilson had a prejudice against seamen for a journey of that type on the grounds that ‘They don’t take enough care of themselves, and they
will
not look after their clothes’.

And so ‘the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition’ began.
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Ponting took a flashlight photograph and Scott saw them off with a mixture of hope and foreboding, writing in his journal: ‘This winter travel is a new and bold venture, but the right men have gone to attempt it. All good luck go with them!’ Cherry-Garrard’s moving and evocative book,
The Worst Journey in the World
captures their excitement and apprehension: ‘. . . three men, one of whom at any rate is feeling a little frightened, stand panting and sweating out in McMurdo Sound.’ Their two nine-foot sledges were lashed one behind the other and carried between them some 750 pounds of food and equipment. The surface they had to cross was considered unsuitable for dogs or ponies and so they were to manhaul. They had given up the idea of going on skis because they felt too inexperienced to use them in the darkness. Wilson warned Ory that the trek would be ‘a regular snorter’ but this proved something of an understatement.
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Existing on a diet of pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea the three men tried to adjust to camping in the dark, finding that everything took much longer. Close to the Barrier the temperature dropped to -47°F. and then -56°F. A badly frostbitten
Cherry-Garrard painted a ghastly picture of the nineteen days it took to reach Cape Crozier. ‘I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain . . . It was the darkness that did it. I don’t believe minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight, not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going . . .’ Their clothes became so frozen that it took two men to bend them into the required shape. One morning Cherry-Garrard went outside the tent, raised his head to look around ‘and found I could not move it back’. He had to walk for four hours with his head stuck at a curious angle. The only solace was the magical lights of the Aurora Australis which sometimes danced overhead, though Cherry-Garrard could not appreciate it with his poor eyesight. It was too cold for him to wear his spectacles.

The temperature continued to fall and the lowest recorded on the journey was an unimaginable -77.5°F. The question inevitably arose of whether to go on. ‘“I think we are all right as long as our appetites are good,” said Bill [Wilson]. Always patient, self-possessed, unruffled, he was the only man on earth, as I believe, who could have led this journey.’ He also kept a close eye on the state of their feet, recognizing that: ‘We couldn’t afford to risk getting anyone crippled in the feet above all else.’ Bowers remained unremittingly cheerful and somehow the party struggled onwards. Finding it too hard now to pull both sledges they resorted to relaying, progressing a bare two or three miles a day but walking three times the distance. Sometimes Cherry-Garrard felt like howling. They were now among deep crevasses and only a fleeting sliver of moonlight saved them from tumbling into an abyss.

On 15 July, Wilson’s wedding anniversary, after a terrible struggle through crevasses and pressure ridges they reached their
destination. Choosing a position high on the cliffs overlooking the rookery they began building themselves an igloo of rock and snow with a canvas roof to be heated with a blubber stove. Wilson named it Oriana Hut. On 19 July they set out to look for the penguins but could find no way of scrambling down on to the sea-ice, though they could hear ‘the emperors calling’. Their cries echoed tantalizingly in the silence. There was no alternative but to return to camp and try again. The second attempt was more successful. Working their way over the pressure ridges they at last found a way down through the ice like a foxhole, and there below them were the emperors, huddled under the cliff, incubating their eggs. They were gazing on a sight never before seen by man, but Wilson was disappointed to find a mere hundred or so birds compared with the several thousands he had been expecting. While the startled penguins kicked up a rumpus, Birdie and Wilson lowered themselves down and collected five eggs. They also killed and skinned three birds to provide fuel for the blubber stove.

However, the weather was closing in, there was a bitter wind and in the struggle to regain the hut short-sighted Cherry-Garrard stumbled and broke the two eggs he had been clutching in his fur mitts. The men were frozen, exhausted and near the end of their tether by the time they reached shelter. That night a gob of hot fat from the blubber stove hit Wilson in the eye, leaving this normally stoical man writhing in agony, afraid that he was blinded. He admitted that they had ‘reached bed-rock’ – strong language for Wilson – but his belief that things would improve was misplaced. A storm blew up which sounded to Cherry-Garrard ‘as though the world was having a fit of hysterics’. In the maelstrom, the tent, which had been pitched against the igloo to store equipment, blew away. All they could do was struggle to bring what was left into the igloo: ‘to get that gear in we fought against solid walls
of black snow which flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope.’

Conditions grew yet more desperate when the canvas roof of the hut ripped off, leaving them exposed. Wilson yelled to the others to get deep into their sleeping bags. When Cherry-Garrard tried to help him, ‘Wilson leaned over and said, “
Please,
Cherry . . .” and his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was he who had brought us to this ghastly end.’ Ironically, it was Wilson’s birthday. As Bowers later described, ‘I was resolved to keep warm and beneath my debris covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to pass the time. I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I knew he was alive all right – what a birthday for him!’
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However, what happened now was close to a miracle and Wilson and Bowers probably interpreted it as such. Bowers thanked God for his mercy in his diary. The hurricane abated, the three of them were still alive, though barely and, most extraordinary of all, their tent had landed intact just half a mile away. As Cherry-Garrard wrote, ‘We were so thankful we said nothing.’ A return journey to Cape Evans without a tent would have been well nigh impossible. Wilson was determined to take no more risks, although Birdie actually urged another visit to the penguins. Failing that he suggested that the Polar party should return that way rather than back down the Beardmore Glacier. The frozen men, somewhat surprised at still being alive, packed up and turned their steps homewards. The remnants of their camp would be found by Sir Vivian Fuchs during the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of the mid 1950s. Birdie was in the best physical condition, exactly the ‘sturdy, active, undefeatable little man’ lauded by Scott,
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but ‘Bill looked very bad’ according to Cherry-Garrard, while he himself felt so weak that he had at
last agreed to accept Birdie’s offer of the loan of his eiderdown, a gesture of such generosity that it almost reduced him to tears.

The return journey was so grim that Cherry-Garrard wrote that its horrors were blurred in his memory. What he did remember was that as they neared Cape Evans Wilson and Birdie had quite an angry argument about its exact location, the only time they had ever squabbled. He attributed it to the sudden release of tension at nearing home. He also remembered their arrival back at Cape Evans, three frostbitten emaciated scarecrows who were greeted by a cry of ‘Good God! Here is the Crozier Party’. Debenham described how: ‘Three ice-clothed objects came in, sooty, lank-haired and clothed in an armour of ice.’ Some wag suggested a can opener be fetched to release them.

And so ended this extraordinary Winter Journey. Each man had lost weight but not as much as expected. Cherry-Garrard’s sleeping bag had on the other hand increased in weight from 18 pounds to 45 pounds entirely due to the extra burden of his frozen sweat and breath. Scott was relieved to have his men safely home. Every time the weather had deteriorated around Cape Evans his thoughts had turned anxiously to the Cape Crozier party. He now gave full vent to his feelings in his diary: ‘. . . to me and to everyone who has remained here the result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination as one of the most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity . . . is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.’

However, this would also have been a fitting tribute to the journey he was about to undertake and which would truly prove to be ‘the worst journey in the world’.

13

‘Miserable, Utterly Miserable’

Twenty-third August saw the end of the Antarctic night, but a gale blotted out the returning light. It was three more days before the sun once again gilded the floes. ‘It was glorious to stand bathed in brilliant sunshine once more. We felt very young, sang and cheered . . .’ wrote the forty-three-year-old Scott euphorically. They also drank champagne and even the animals perked up in the sparkling air, going ‘half dotty’ in Teddy Evans’s words. The expedition had come through the winter relatively unscathed. The Cape Crozier party had returned safely, if on their last legs. Atkinson had got lost in a blizzard, blundered about for five hours but survived, albeit with a badly frostbitten hand disfigured with slug-like blisters. ‘The other excitement’, as Wilson put it, ‘was that one of the ponies very nearly died of colic.’

Everyone’s thoughts now turned to the Polar journey. However, as Scott began to lay his final plans, the expedition’s finances back in England were in a sorry state. The news of Amundsen’s arrival in the Bay of Whales had reached England and did not help Scott’s appeal. Instead of arousing patriotic generosity, people wondered why they should subscribe to an expedition which now looked
likely to fail. Kathleen Scott had received the unwelcome information that there was barely enough money to meet outgoings until the end of October. The London and the New Zealand agents between them needed £1,500. Kathleen sensibly suggested that the expedition’s accounts be published to show how desperate things were and set off on a round of energetic fund-raising. Unlike Scott she felt no embarrassment, though she baulked at an offer from the
Daily Mirror
, who wanted to print a photograph of Peter to help launch a new appeal. She could not ‘bear my weeny being bandied about in the half-penny press’. Practical as ever, she also doubted whether it would really raise much money. However, her natural resilience was dented by an unusual sense of foreboding. On 20 September she wrote: ‘Rather a horrid day today. I woke up having had a bad dream about you, and then Peter came very close to me and said emphatically: “Daddy won’t come back,” as tho’ in answer to my silly thoughts. Happily I am not often silly.’

Scott, meanwhile, was ignorant of the latest financial crisis, but he did know that on the voyage south he had failed to raise the funds for which he had hoped. He confided in Ponting more than once that ‘he was troubled by the fact that the cost of the enterprise had greatly exceeded his estimate, and that there would be a considerable deficit to face’. In mid-October he gathered his men together, explained that the expedition was in debt and asked all those who could to forgo their pay for the next twelve months. Those men who could afford to responded with warmth and generosity and Scott signed a formal note of indemnity, relieving the expedition fund of the liability for a number of salaries including his own.

Meanwhile, as the weeks drew on the sledging equipment was readied and dogs and ponies exercised. Scott spent much time
at his lino-covered table in his cubicle, the ‘holy of holies’ as the others called it, going over the details for the assault on the Pole with Bowers, checking and rechecking lists of equipment and calculations. The latter included ‘Sunny Jim’ Simpson’s data on the weather and temperature likely to be encountered on the journey, as well as other information on the most suitable diet and the amount of food and fuel to be carried. In the light of the experience of the winter party, more fat was added to the rations for the Polar team, which they called ‘the summit rations’. In fact, Scott regarded Bowers as the only man he could trust to get the figures right.