A First Rate Tragedy (36 page)

They pressed on, sometimes using a sail to help them along, Evans grinding his teeth with the pain. They were hoping to run into dog teams on their way out to meet the Polar party. On 17 February they thought they spotted a tent in the deceptive
light of the Barrier but it turned out to be only a piece of biscuit box. Marching on, they reached one of the abandoned motor sledges which lifted their spirits and they made camp. However, the next morning it was clear that Evans was dying. Crean was almost in tears. They made the wise decision that he should strike out alone to fetch help. He set out with just a little chocolate and a few biscuits, a staunch figure struggling alone and on foot because the skis had been among the equipment jettisoned.

Evans’s account of their wait shows what Scott and his companions must have gone through in their last days: ‘The end had nearly come, and I was past caring; we had no food, except a few paraffin-saturated biscuits, and Lashly in his weakened state without food could never have marched in. He took it very quietly – a noble, steel true man.’ However, on 20 February they heard a sound which made their hearts leap. Lashly described the wonderful moment: ‘Hark! from us both. Yes, it is the dogs near. Relief at last.’ One of the dogs rushed into the tent and slobbered over the prostrate Evans: ‘Perhaps to hide my feelings I kissed his old hairy, Siberian face with the kiss that was meant for Lashly. We were both dreadfully affected at our rescue.’

In fact, the delight which greeted the rescue of the Last Supporting Party, coupled with their news that on parting from Scott he had been marching strongly for the Pole, obscured the significance of what had happened to Teddy Evans. Tryggve Gran, however, hit the nail on the head:

My conversation with Evans had not lasted long, but from what I heard . . . the prospects of our five-man Polar party were not so bright as most of the members of the expedition imagined. Evans’s frightful return journey was a pointer to what Scott and his men
would be bound to undergo. There was also another matter which caused me anxiety. Since the Beardmore Glacier’s suitability for dogs had been established, I took it for granted that Amundsen had reached the Pole before Scott. The consequence would probably be a fall in morale for our Polar party. Of course I kept these dark broodings to myself for . . . my pessimism could only cause damage.
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It was some time before the rest of the party at Cape Evans began to worry seriously about Scott. The main preoccupation was what to do about sending dog teams to meet the Polar party. The various messages sent back by Scott had caused some confusion. There had been plans for Meares and his dog teams to take extra rations for the returning parties and dog biscuit out to One Ton Depot, provided they returned from the Polar trip in the first half of December. However, they did not return to Cape Evans in time. As a result, some of the extra rations but no dog biscuit were manhauled to One Ton Depot by Day, Nelson, Clissold and Hooper. It was not until 13 February that the dog teams set out again, under Atkinson since Meares was returning on the
Terra Nova
. Their mission was to run further supplies south to One Ton Depot for the returning party. The fateful encounter with Crean at Hut Point meant that Atkinson, as the doctor, was now required to nurse Teddy Evans.

Cherry-Garrard took his place, arriving with Dimitri at One Ton Depot on 3 March. He wondered whether he would find Scott already there. Of course he was not. He was still over a hundred miles away with Oates fast approaching his end. Faced with a lack of dog food and heavy winds Cherry-Garrard decided the best course was to wait at the depot. If he headed south there
was every chance he might miss Scott. It never crossed his mind that the Polar party would be running out of food and fuel – as far as he knew adequate provisions had been left at the depots. Also, Atkinson had stressed that the Polar party was not dependent on the dogs to get them home and had reminded him of Scott’s orders that under no circumstances were the dogs to be risked. The only way Cherry-Garrard could take the dogs south was to kill them for dog food as he went. He therefore waited six days until, on 10 March, dwindling supplies and the fact that Dimitri was suffering from the cold, decided him to turn northwards again. As he later learned Scott was just sixty miles away. It was a decision for which he would never forgive himself.

Scott had been expected back at any time from early March and by the end of the month at the latest. The men at Cape Evans waited for a signal from Hut Point to say that they were in. The telephone cable had been washed out to sea so they had agreed that rockets would be fired. However, as the month drew on there was an ominous silence from Hut Point while the storms and blizzards which raged around Cape Evans boded ill for anyone out on the Barrier. As Gran wrote: ‘It can’t be easy to travel on the Barrier in such God-forsaken weather.’
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Sometimes the dogs would ‘sing’, something they often did when a party was approaching. The men in the hut would rush outside only to find that there was nothing. The position became more critical with every day that passed: ‘Atkinson and I look at one another, and he looks, and I feel, quite haggard with anxiety. He says he does not think they have scurvy,’ wrote Cherry-Garrard. Atkinson and Keohane made a sortie out onto the Barrier but could find no trace of any living thing and dared not venture much beyond Corner Camp. Their return to Cape Evans with Dimitri sparked false hopes. As Gran described: ‘I heard someone shout, “The Polar party’s coming.”
I rushed into the hut to the gramophone to get out the national anthem to greet Scott. I stood and waited long, but no one came. I went out again, and there stood three men, bearded, and coated with ice, dirty as sweeps.’ A mournful Cherry-Garrard confided to his diary in early April: ‘We have got to face it now. The Pole Party will not in all probability ever get back. And there is no more that we can do.’

Atkinson had taken command as the only naval officer left. Teddy Evans had returned on the
Terra Nova
, while Campbell and his men were marooned in an igloo at Evans Coves, along the coast from Cape Adare where they had landed after finding Amundsen ensconced at the Bay of Whales. Atkinson now led an abortive attempt to get through to Campbell. However, on 24 April the sun disappeared and with it any realistic hope of rescuing anybody. The members of the expedition tried to keep busy and not fall prey to morbid thoughts. However, it must have been hard faced with the empty bunks of their companions. There was no Scott sitting at his lino-covered table calculating sledging rations with the eager little Birdie, no wise ‘Uncle Bill’ to look up from his sketching and dispense some kind word, no Oates to tease the scientists and indulge in horseplay and no Edgar Evans to roar his way around the mess-deck. The men with the most striking personalities, as Ponting had remarked, were gone for ever.

The dilemma facing Atkinson was whether to devote his resources to rescuing Campbell or to try and discover what fate had overtaken Scott once the sledging season came round again. He had put the question to Cherry-Garrard at the beginning of the winter and his reply had been to go for Campbell: ‘. . . just then it seemed to me unthinkable that we should leave live men to search for those who were dead.’ However, the
Terra Nova
might have managed to pick up Campbell and his men on her voyage north. Alternatively, if Campbell had not been rescued but had survived the winter, the
Terra Nova
should be able to reach him on her way back to Cape Evans, although a land party might reach them earlier.

Scott and his companions had undoubtedly perished – the general view was that they had fallen down a crevasse, probably in the hellish labyrinth of the Beardmore, though Lashly and Crean believed they had contracted scurvy. However, dead or alive, there was surely a duty to try to discover what had happened. As Cherry-Garrard observed: ‘The first object of the expedition had been the Pole. If some record was not found, their success or failure would for ever remain uncertain.’ Even if the chance of finding the bodies was remote Scott had been meticulous about leaving notes at the depots. On Midwinter Day in June 1912 Atkinson gathered the whole party round the table and put the arguments. The decision was unanimous. When the weather permitted they would go south and seek the fate of the Polar party. It was a decision that would be vindicated. Campbell and his party returned safely under their own steam in mid-November.

And so it was that towards the end of October the search party set out. On 12 November, eleven miles south of One Ton Depot, they made their grim discovery. Wright saw what he thought was a cairn with something black by its side to his right and veered off towards it. ‘It is the tent,’ he said quietly to the others who had hurried in his wake.
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Someone brushed off an overhanging pile of snow to reveal the green flap of the ventilator. Atkinson crawled in taking Lashly with him because he was the oldest member of the group and the last to have seen Scott and the Polar party. When he came out Lashly did not say a word but tears were rolling from his eyes.

Cherry-Garrard described what they had found:

Bowers and Wilson were sleeping in their bags. Scott had thrown back the flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand stretched over Wilson, his life-long friend. Beneath the head of his bag, beneath the bag and the floor-cloth, was the green wallet in which he carried his diary. The brown books of diary were inside: and on the floor-cloth were some letters.

Scott lay between his two companions whose appearance was serene, as if they had died very quietly, Bowers lying flat, his arms crossed, Wilson half-reclining, his head and upper body against the tent pole, and ‘traces of a sweet smile’ on his lips.
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Scott, with arm outflung towards Wilson, looked as if he had ‘fought hard at the moment of death’.
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Their skin was yellow and glassy and scarred by frostbite. By Scott’s side was a lamp made from a tin where he had burned the remnants of the methylated spirit as he wrote. Some tobacco and a bag of tea lay by his head. The tent itself was well-pitched and ship-shape. No snow had penetrated the inner lining and all their equipment was neatly stowed – pannikins, spare clothing, chronometers, finnesko, socks and a flag as well as more letters, and movingly the ‘chatty little notes’
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the supporting parties had left for Scott as they returned to Cape Evans. There were also detailed records. Despite all the obstacles and hardships, Bowers had kept a meticulous meteorological log until days before their death.

Scott had left instructions on the cover of his diary that the finder was to read it and then bring it home. Atkinson read enough to discover what had happened to the Polar party. He then gathered his comrades around him and read Scott’s ‘Message
to the Public’ and the account of Oates’s death which Scott had expressly asked to be made known.

It seemed sacrilege to move the bodies. The months during which they had lain beneath their canopy of snow had made them as one with the white and hostile world on which they had trespassed. Instead, the bamboos of the tent were removed and the tent itself collapsed over them. The men then built a cairn on which they placed a cross made by Lashly from Gran’s skis and Atkinson read the lesson from the Burial Service from Corinthians and other prayers for the dead. Cherry-Garrard was deeply affected and left a description of Arthurian grandeur:

I do not know how long we were there, but when all was finished, and the chapter of Corinthians had been read, it was midnight . . . The sun was dipping low above the Pole, the Barrier was almost in shadow. And the sky was blazing – sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds. The cairn and Cross stood dark against a glory of burnished gold.

Atkinson wrote his own tribute: ‘There alone in their greatness they will lie without change or bodily decay, with the most fitting tomb in the world above them.’
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After a miserable and eerie night an abortive attempt was made to locate Oates’s body. However, they found only his sleeping bag with the great slit down its front which he had made to help him climb in and out with his bad feet. The party erected a cairn to him at the point where he had walked out to meet his death and left a note recording how this ‘very gallant gentleman’ had sacrificed himself for his comrades. The search party then retraced its steps, minds still benumbed with the horror of their discovery
and the knowledge that the party had died just eleven miles from One Ton Depot. Gran wore Scott’s skis so that they completed the journey. The note they left at the cairn gave the cause of death as ‘inclement weather and lack of fuel’ but there was more to it than that.

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The Reason Why

Why the Polar party came to grief puzzled Scott’s contemporaries as well as subsequent generations. Was it bad luck, bad judgement or a combination? Why should Amundsen the adventurer and interloper have prospered while a carefully organized British naval expedition ended in disaster? Was there too much reliance on the British talent for ‘muddling through’? Was Scott merely a gifted amateur who should have done things differently?

Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’, written under enormous stress with his two friends dying at his side, was a careful vindication of his conduct of the expedition. He wanted the public to know that the disaster was not ‘due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken’. He cited the loss of ponies during the depot-laying journey which had obliged him to start out later than he had intended and limited the amount of supplies which could be transported; the bad weather and in particular the gales which delayed them for four days in early December; the soft snow on the lower reaches of the Beardmore Glacier. He claimed that every detail of the food supplies, clothing and depot laying
had been worked out ‘to perfection’ but that what could not have been foreseen was the ‘astonishing failure’ of Petty Officer Evans which, compounded by bad weather, delayed their descent down the Beardmore. Yet these events were as nothing compared to ‘the surprise which awaited us on the Barrier’.