A First Rate Tragedy (29 page)

In the second place the weather was dire. Scott was to face conditions on this journey that he had never foreseen and which he had not thought possible. At first, though, they made good progress and Oates recorded Scott’s satisfaction with the ponies’ performance while Scott wrote ‘even Oates is pleased’. However, within the first week blizzards struck and on 12 November Scott was recording weather that was ‘horrid, overcast, gloomy, snowy. Our spirits became very low’. Cherry-Garrard was right when he observed that ‘indefinite conditions always tried Scott most’. The ponies were clearly faltering under their burdens of 500 pounds apiece and Scott’s diary becomes increasingly preoccupied with them – ‘I am very anxious about these beasts – very anxious . . .’ – and deeply appreciative of Oates’s efforts – ‘if they pull through well, all the thanks will be due to Oates’. Oates had even invented a fringed device to save the ponies from snowblindness. As Teddy Evans wrote: ‘The Soldier hated to see his animals suffering . . .’
¹⁷
However, there was little he could do to protect them from the cold. Bowers described how: ‘Huge icicles form under [the ponies’] noses during the march. Victor generally rubs his off on my sleeve.’

Oates was soon warning Scott that he doubted whether the beasts would pull through. He himself was having the devil of a time with the temperamental Christopher. Once harnessed there was no stopping him and Oates was forced to cling grimly to his bridle until the end of each day’s march, thus forgoing a midday rest and food, which affected his stamina. He had words with Scott, complaining that he was a very difficult man to get along with. Scott also seems to have argued with Bowers, accusing him of overloading some of the sledges. However, Bowers was more forgiving than Oates and wrote that he could ‘quite understand his feelings . . . and after our experience of last year a bad day like this makes him fear our beasts are going to fail us’. Tensions were beginning to tell and understandably so.

On 15 November the party struggled in to One Ton Depot to find a note from Teddy Evans saying he and his companions had gone ahead. Scott called a council of war to discuss how best to proceed and according to Cherry-Garrard it was at this stage that he finally abandoned any thought of trying to get any of the ponies up the glacier. It was decided they would take just enough fodder to reach the foot of the Beardmore Glacier and then kill any surviving ponies. Cherry-Garrard, who had moved into Scott’s tent for a while enjoyed the lively conversation: ‘we had a jolly lunch meal, discussing authors. Barrie, Galsworthy and others are personal friends of Scott. Someone told Max Beerbohm that he was like Captain Scott, and immediately, so Scott assured us, he grew a beard.’

Six days later the main party caught up with Teddy Evans and his group at the appointed rendezvous. Wilson noted that they were extremely hungry – it was the consequence of manhauling and the significance of this, given what was to come, was not fully appreciated. They had been amusing themselves by reading
The Pickwick Papers
and looked, in Teddy Evans’s words, as if they had come out of ‘a bull-fight in a barn’ with hair and beards full of loose reindeer hairs from their sleeping bags. They were instructed to march ahead of the main party, erecting marker cairns at intervals and selecting campsites.

Scott had now decided that it would be easier for the ponies to rest by day when the temperatures were higher and to march by night when the more frozen ground would provide a better surface for them. The dogs, driven by the enigmatic Meares and Dimitri Gerov, followed behind in excellent form, but the ponies continued to struggle and Scott’s mood grew sombre. Oates described Scott’s face as ‘like a tired sea boot’. On 24 November the first pony, Jehu, was shot and fed to the dogs, an event which Scott found traumatic and in which he could take no part. Oates, who did the deed, regarded it as a brutal act while Bowers tried to comfort himself: ‘A year’s care and good feeding, three weeks’ work with good treatment . . . and then a painless end. If anybody can call that cruel I cannot either understand it or agree with them.’

Day and Hooper were now sent back to Cape Evans, taking a sledge and two sick dogs. Atkinson, who had been leading Jehu, joined the manhaulers. Two days later Middle Barrier Depot was laid, but progress was disappointingly slow across the soft surface of the Barrier and the scenery monotonous and depressing. On 28 November Chinaman was shot and his driver Wright began manhauling. There were now just eight ponies left.

The next day the party passed Scott’s farthest south of 1902 at 82°17' and it cheered their spirits. Less then seventy miles now separated them from the Beardmore and ahead lay the dramatic peaks of Mount Markham. What also cheered their spirits was the fact that they were adding pony meat to their hoosh. Hunger
had overcome sentiment and the meat gave them vitamins that their diet otherwise lacked. No lime juice had been brought – Atkinson had given a lecture on scurvy during the winter and Debenham wrote in his diary: ‘Tho’ the incidence of scurvy in the Navy has decreased since lime-juice was made a ration, it is the general opinion that lime-juice by itself is not a preventative.’ They pushed on at an average speed of about two miles an hour but with the ponies up to their knees in snow. On 1 December the Southern Barrier Depot was laid and Oates dispatched the troublesome Christopher, who, true to form, was the only pony not to be killed cleanly. He moved as Oates shot him and perhaps his hand had been less than steady for Christopher had been his special charge. The pony careered about the camp before being finally caught and killed.

Bowers wrote revealingly in his diary: ‘Meares and Dimitri do all the cutting up as the dogs do the whole march in three hours and they have little else to do for the rest of the day. The dogs are doing splendidly; when one sees how well our two teams have done I must say that Amundsen’s chance of having forestalled us with 120 dogs looks good.’

As they continued to inch forward with the remnants of the ponies, Scott observed the difference snowshoes could make, noting that Nobby came along splendidly for some five miles while wearing a pair: ‘There is no doubt that these snow-shoes are
the
thing for ponies . . .’ However, this begs the question of why, particularly after the experience on the depot journey, the winter months had not been spent trying to design some effective snowshoes. They had been discussed after one of Oates’s lectures on horse management but little seems to have been done. Perhaps Oates still at bottom distrusted them and thought them merely a fad of the fussy Scott’s.

They were now nearing the Beardmore, but the conditions were still poor and they had to push the ponies onward. Bowers’s pony Victor had to be killed because the fodder was running out. Scott broke the news to Bowers and the only trace of bitterness in his whole diary was now: ‘Good old Victor! He has always had a biscuit out of my ration, and he ate his last before the bullet sent him to his rest . . . I feel sorry for a beast that has been my constant companion and care for so long.’ However, they were all now eating pony meat with increasing relish. Wilson noted that it tasted like boiled beef and cheerfully recorded a supper of ‘hoosh with plenty of Victor in it’.

Scott had been trusting that the weather would turn but he was disappointed. On 3 December a violent gale and thick snow made progress almost impossible. Scott felt his luck was ‘preposterous’. The next day brought blizzards and Scott brooded on his ill-fortune, knowing that Shackleton had faced quite different conditions at precisely the same time of year. On 4 December Bowers recorded: ‘Wild one of Shackleton’s quartette [sic] wrote in his diary about December 15th. “This is the first day for a month that I can say we have not had glorious weather.” Either he must have had a phenomenally fine season or we have an extraordinary bad one. The sailors are debating who is the Jonah.’ Making agonizingly slow progress they reached a point twelve miles from the gateway to the glacier, where another pony was killed. Scott hoped that just one more march would see them camped on the Beardmore, but 5 December brought weather from hell. Another blizzard descended of such ferocity that ‘One cannot see the next tent, let alone the land’.

‘What on earth does such weather mean at this time of year?’ Scott railed. ‘It is more than our share of ill-fortune . . .’ The blizzard brought the greatest snowfall Scott had ever seen.
Oates and Bowers struggled to keep the ponies from being snowed up though the dogs were snug enough in their snow holes. The warmer temperatures that came with the blizzard meant wet tents and soggy sleeping bags. Their bodies lay in pools of water – ‘a snipe marsh’ Bowers called it. Keohane saw the funny side and Scott recorded his rhyme: ‘The snow is all melting and everything’s afloat. If this goes on much longer we shall have to turn the tent upside down and use it as a boat.’ However, Scott’s diary of 6 December shows a deep despair. ‘Miserable, utterly miserable. We have camped in the “Slough of Despond” . . . A hopeless feeling descends on one and is hard to fight off.’ He had no option but to break into the summit rations. Men and animals had to be fed even though they were making no progress.

Scott wondered whether the bad weather was affecting Amundsen. Was it widespread or was he the victim of ‘exceptional local conditions’? If the latter, it was hard to know that while his party was struggling against adversity ‘others go smilingly forward in the sunshine’. In fact, Amundsen was also suffering from blizzards in early December but was still able to make progress. On his worst day he covered two and a half miles and on others was achieving over twenty-five – a tribute to the pulling power of dogs and the skiing ability of his team. His route to the Polar plateau had taken him up the Heilberg Glacier and the Devil’s Glacier, reckoned by some to be an even greater challenge than the Beardmore. However, he had been able to drive eighty miles farther south than Scott before reaching the mountains. As Scott and his men shivered in their sopping tents on the third day of the blizzard and he lamented ‘the horrid feeling that this is a really bad season’, Amundsen had passed Shackleton’s record of 88°23'S and was within a hundred miles of the Pole. The knowledge would
have infuriated loyal little Bowers, who was wondering how the ‘back-handed, sneaking ruffian’ was faring.

It was not until 9 December that the dejected group could move on. Teddy Evans described how Oates had spent much of the blizzard crouching behind a drifted-up snow wall to be near his ponies: ‘We could not help laughing at him, after the blizzard, when he wrung the icy water out of his clothing. His personal bag was in a dreadful state. His sodden tobacco had discoloured everything, and as he squeezed his spare socks and gloves a stream of nicotine-stained water flowed out.’
¹⁸
Yet despite his efforts the ponies could barely stagger, belly-deep in snow, and had to be flogged on, a task the men found sickening. That evening, at a place aptly named ‘Shambles Camp’ close to the entry to the glacier, Oates dispatched the last of them. Wilson’s relief was palpable. ‘Thank God . . . we begin the heavier work ourselves,’ he wrote – a sentiment that Amundsen would have found incomprehensible, particularly as three quarters of their journey still lay ahead of them. The unsentimental and wholly pragmatic Norwegian had worked out his own plans to the last detail: ‘In my calculations I figured out exactly the precise day on which I planned to kill each dog as its usefulness should end for drawing the diminishing supplies on the sleds and its usefulness should begin as food for the men.’
¹⁹

Scott now divided his men into three manhauling teams for the ascent up the Beardmore. He took Wilson, Oates and Petty Officer Evans in his group. Teddy Evans took Atkinson, Wright and Lashly – Scott had been losing patience with Teddy Evans, believing he was not keeping his team shipshape and that their increasingly slow progress was due to lack of care. Bowers shared Scott’s view, noting that he was sorry to see a deterioration in Evans. Evans, however, took the view with some justice that he
and his men had been manhauling much longer than anyone else and that it was therefore quite natural that they should have less stamina. Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Crean and Keohane were to haul together. It was a gruelling business. Pushing the heavy sledges through deep wet snow in weather so warm was such hard work that some of the men wore only singlets on their torsos. The mild temperature meant that snow goggles misted up with perspiration so quickly that they needed constant wiping. Those who dispensed with them suffered the penalty of snow blindness. However, the Lower Glacier Depot was laid beneath the glacier on 11 December. Meares and Dimitri now turned for home with the dogs. Bowers had reflected on the previous day that ‘the dogs are wonderfully fit and will rush him and Dimitri back like the wind’. Cherry-Garrard agreed, writing that Amundsen seemed to have chosen the right form of transport.

Meares was carrying a letter from Scott to Kathleen:

Things are not so rosy as they might be but we keep our spirits up and say the luck must turn. So far every turn shows the extraordinary good fortune that Shackleton had. This is only to tell you that I can keep up with the rest as well as of old, and that I think of you whenever I stretch tired limbs in a very comfortable sleeping-bag. – P.S. The thought of you is
very
pleasant.
²⁰

Kathleen meanwhile had been pursuing her vigorous round of social activity in London, ‘the antithesis of the pathetic grass widow’ as Scott called her.
²¹
In diaries which Scott would never have the chance to read she described such events as lunch with H.G. Wells, a ‘disgusting little bounder’ though witty and clever, and Nansen, who had become devoted, writing to her that ‘It is
nice to know there is a woman so like what one has dreamt of but never met’.

The granite cliffs of the Beardmore looked awesome, rearing above the flat expanse of the Barrier. However, half the party were not in a position to appreciate the sight as they were suffering from snowblindness. An irritable Scott blamed them for their own carelessness. He also blamed his ‘tiresome fellow-countrymen’ for not having become more proficient skiers. Skis would have made a big difference on the soft snowy surface with its hidden dangers. Bowers agreed, writing: ‘The ski are a wonderful protection against crevasses, as the weight is distributed over such a large surface.’ Scott’s short temper was partly the result of such a bad acid stomach that, as he later told Cherry-Garrard, he feared that he might not be able to go on. He was also worried. The sledges weighed some 700 pounds. Could they really haul them up the 110-mile Beardmore? Moreover, the going was very soft while Shackleton had had the advantage of blue ice – another fact that Scott noted glumly. Scott was carrying the diary of Frank Wild recounting the latter’s journey south with Shackleton. Raymond Priestley, geologist on both expeditions, later wrote: ‘Throughout the outward journey, Shackleton’s team naturally played the part of a ghostly pacemaker in the race’, while Cherry-Garrard described how: ‘We were working against Shackleton’s averages and dates . . .’ Scott was determined to outperform his rival. He was also keen to prove that Shackleton had exaggerated the difficulties, referring in his diary to ‘Shackleton’s overdrawn account’. The word ‘overdrawn’ was later edited out in the published version.