A First Rate Tragedy (9 page)

The
Discovery
now steamed eastwards along the Barrier. On 30 January they passed the extreme eastern position reached by Ross in 1842. Shackleton was overcome with the strangeness of looking on lands never before seen by the human eye. Scott named this new region King Edward VII land. He charted 150 miles of its coast but was tantalized by glimpses of distant hills that there was no time to explore. The moment was approaching when they must seek winter quarters and they turned westward again.

However, there was still time on 4 February to unpack the balloon, nicknamed
Eva
, and send it aloft. What happened next caused Wilson to express his feelings with unusual asperity. Scott decided to be the first up and at 500 feet threw all the sandbags overboard. He nearly shot straight into the heavens and was saved only by the balloon’s secure mooring. ‘As I swayed about in what appeared a very inadequate basket and gazed down on the rapidly diminishing figures below I felt some doubt as to whether I had been wise in my choice,’ he later wrote laconically. Shackleton, undeterred by his commander’s erratic ascent, went next, clutching a camera. All they could see was the surface of the Barrier. Wilson described the episode as perfect madness: ‘If some of these experts don’t come to grief over it out here, it will only be because God has pity on the foolish.’ In fact, that was that as far as
ballooning was concerned.
Eva
sprang a leak and never ascended again to Wilson’s profound satisfaction.

As the
Discovery
sailed west the temperature began to drop rapidly. Scott found a winter home in McMurdo Sound which he had decided would be a good base for sledging exploration when the spring came. By 8 February the
Discovery
was secured to an ice-foot
¹
off Mount Erebus. Stoker Lashly recorded glumly that it looked ‘a dreary place’,
²
but there was a plateau of volcanic rubble level enough for the erection of the large hut brought from Australia. This was ‘a fairly spacious bungalow of a design used by the outlying settlers in that country’ called ‘Gregory Lodge’ after Professor Gregory who had designed it. Hardly, at first glance, ideal for Antarctica, Armitage described it as more suitable for a colonial shooting lodge than a Polar dwelling. However, it was not to be their winter home. Although the original intention had been that the
Discovery
should land a small party and then turn north before the season closed, Scott hoped that McMurdo Sound would be a safe haven where she could ride out the winter months and provide the main living quarters although she would, inevitably, be iced in. He was, however, taking a gamble and had no evidence on which to base his decision.

The hut was still important as a shelter for returning sledging parties in case the ship had to put out to sea. It was also to serve as the ‘Royal Terror Theatre’ when, during the dreary Antarctic winter, the men turned to amateur theatricals and concerts. Two smaller asbestos-covered huts had also been brought to house the magnetic instruments, and there were kennels for the twenty-three Siberian dogs which had been taken on board during a last stop-over in New Zealand. The crew were heartily glad to get these snapping snarling
creatures ashore so they would stop fouling the decks. The dogs spurned their kennels, preferring to curl up in the snow.

Lashly tried to erect a windmill to drive a dynamo for electric lighting, but its success was short-lived. The winds were too strong and an acetylene plant was used instead. In between their labours they played football on the ice and there was always ski practice. Scott described how ‘figure after figure can be seen flying down the hillside, all struggling hard to keep their balance . . .’ and usually coming a cropper. Tobogganing, using a contraption artfully fashioned out of a pair of skis and a packing case, soon became the craze while Ferrar, feeling full of energy, was the first to climb the nearby ‘Observation Hill’ and discover that they were in fact on an island. Named after Ross, it became one of the great landmarks in Antarctic exploration.

The dogs provided another diversion. Scott and his men, nearly all inexperienced, began experimenting to see whether dogs could pull loads but while some worked well, others were so timid they grovelled at any attempt to drive them. They all fought ‘whenever and wherever they could’, Scott noted. What was the best way to handle dogs? Bernacchi, from his
Southern Cross
experience, was sure that all that was needed was kindness. Armitage, from his Arctic knowledge, argued that the only thing to do was to apply the whip. They decided to put their theories to the test and each selected a team of dogs. At first neither team could be persuaded to start. After a period of wild confusion with twisted traces and some vicious fights, Bernacchi eventually managed to coax his animals into a trot which became a wild career up a steep snow-slope leaving him panting behind. The other team declined to move at all. It seemed that gentle persuasion was the best approach, but if the incident proved anything it was that Scott and all his men had a great deal to learn about working with dogs.

Life settled into an ordered routine but there remained a profound sense of the strangeness and the beauty of it all. The sun was now circling so low that a soft pink light tinged the snow and ice, fading into the purple outline of the distant mountains. The surrounding peaks seemed to turn to gold in the pure shafts of sunlight. The closer winter approached, the more spectacular were the effects – the diaries describe saffron tints deepening to crimson, fleecy clouds with bright gilded edges. But on 11 March the magic fled. Scott was forced to record one of their blackest days in the Antarctic. A sledge party had departed for Cape Crozier, some fifty miles away, under Royds. Scott had intended to lead it himself but had injured his knee skiing. He watched it depart in some despair, conscious of the very limited experience of his men – they did not know – and he had not arranged for them to learn – how to allocate their rations, how to put up their tents, how to use their cookers, how to run their dogs or even how to dress for the conditions. His misgivings were confirmed by the news, brought back by the distraught and wild-eyed survivors, of a tragedy out on the ice.

Royds had decided to send most of the party, dogs included, back to the ship because of bad conditions and inadequate equipment. There were only three pairs of skis between them all. However, some of the returning party, which included Edgar Evans, found themselves in a driving blizzard on a steep icy slope some 1,000 feet high. This was their first real experience of an Antarctic blizzard, often caused by the wind whipping up snow crystals on the ground rather than by falls of new snow. They slithered, struggling for a purchase on mirror-smooth ice and suddenly saw a precipice beneath their feet and below it the open sea. They managed to stop themselves with one exception. Able seaman George Vince, an obliging and cheerful character,
was unable to get a grip on the ice because of the fur boots he was wearing. What followed was over in an instant. Before his horror-stricken companions had time to react, Vince flashed past and disappeared. When news of the tragedy reached the ship the siren was sounded and Shackleton went out in a whaler to search forlornly among the floes, but everyone knew Vince was dead.

For the first time since they had arrived at McMurdo Sound their new environment had shown the treachery lurking beneath the beauty. Some of the men became so overwrought at this loss to their small community that they thought they could see a figure crawling down the hillside, only to find it was an illusion. The accident brought reality back into what had been a
Boy’s Own
adventure. It also emphasized their isolation. There was no way of relaying the news to the outside world and to Vince’s family. Meanwhile another member of the party was still missing. There was great relief, not to say astonishment, when Clarence Hare the steward, also believed to have perished, was seen descending the hillside and staggering towards the ship having spent forty-eight hours exposed to wind and snow. He was not even frostbitten and was strong enough to complain to Wilson, his doctor, about being given invalids’ fare.

Vince’s death was, in fact, the second to have occurred since the
Discovery
had sailed from England in 1901. As she left the New Zealand port of Lyttelton on her way southwards, another young seaman, Charles Bonner, had, in his excitement, shinned up to the top of the mainmast with a bottle of whisky to wave farewell, lost his balance and crashed to the deck. Able seaman Thomas Crean, an Irishman from County Kerry who was to achieve such a name for himself on Scott’s final expedition, had replaced him. Scott felt these deaths keenly and must have brooded over his own responsibility for them. He attributed the death of Vince to the
expedition’s lack of experience and prefaced one of the chapters in the
Voyage of the Discovery
paraphrasing Shakespeare’s words, ‘Experience be a jewel that we have purchased at an infinite rate.’ In his heart of hearts Scott had been troubled from the beginning by the knowledge that he and his team were just amateurs. He might know about the navy and how to run a ship but he was no seasoned explorer.

The community was now kept busy by the numerous tasks which had to be accomplished before the sun set for the last time. There was plenty to occupy them. The dogs fought suddenly and savagely for no apparent reason, having lulled their masters into a false sense of security – ‘. . . alas for dog morals!’ Scott wrote. Gradually he and his companions learned that when one dog was shown particular favour, or separated from the rest of the pack, it immediately became an object of suspicion to the rest. Yet despite these insights Scott remained genuinely shocked at their behaviour, talking anthropomorphically of ‘murderers’ and ‘victims’ and finding the dog mind quite inscrutable.

In mid-March Royds and his companions returned safely from their sledging trip to learn of the death of Vince. They brought tales of hardship of their own: the difficulty of handling the dogs, of extraordinarily localized extremes of weather and terrifying, all-engulfing blizzards, of cramp and frostbite and the inadequacy of night suits made out of thin wolf-skin. They had had to turn back without reaching Cape Crozier.

There was now the worry of what the full winter would bring. They were nearly 500 miles further south than where the
Southern Cross
had wintered. Would they be able to cope with the cold, and dark and isolation? Scott took his mind off such thoughts by organizing a further sledging trip, ostensibly to lay depots for journeys south when the spring came, but in reality to gain more
experience for himself and his men. He waited until the sea was sufficiently frozen to allow them to take the best route south over the ice of the bay. The sea duly froze over on Good Friday. To Lashly, however, this was less important than what the cook was up to. He glumly recorded: ‘. . . had hot cross buns or bricks, could not tell hardly which.’
³

The final sledging trip brought further problems with the dogs and Scott wished heartily that he had left them behind. Not only did they refuse to pull properly but they began to shed their coats. They were, after all, dogs from the northern hemisphere. In Siberia, their home, summer would be beginning. All in all there was nothing but hard graft, discomfort and frustration. After three days the party was only nine miles from the ship and Scott decided to bring the autumn sledging to an end. There would be time through the long dark winter to analyse the hard lessons learned and plan to do better. However, one lesson he did not absorb in time was that the ship’s boats, which had been moved to the sea-ice to allow a canvas deck-covering to be fitted snugly over the
Discovery
, would become completely frozen in. On the basis of his past experience, Bernacchi warned what would happen, but Scott told the physicist sharply to mind his own business. It was Bernacchi’s ‘one and only experience with what seemed an unreasonable side of his nature’. Over the winter the boats became embedded in the solid floe and it was indeed a colossal task to free them.

On 23 April the sun sank for the last time, not to reappear until late August. However, sombre thoughts were banished by an extra ration of grog and much hilarity as the men drank to the speedy passage of the long night. Scott was careful to establish a routine to give life some appearance of normality. The home of the eleven officers, including Scott, was the
Discovery’s
comfortable wood-panelled wardroom. This was 30 feet by 20 feet with a huge stove at one end, a table down the middle and a piano which only Royds could play well. It was a communal life but without the degree of boredom and irritation that Bernacchi had experienced at Cape Adare. Each officer had the sanctum of his own cabin while the crew’s quarters, called the mess-deck, were separate which eliminated what Bernacchi called ‘the friction of conflicting tastes’ and made it easier to run things along naval lines. The crew’s quarters were also larger and warmer as they were situated over the provision rooms and hold, which provided good insulation against the cold.

Meals were always at the same time and the fare was wholesome and simple. The only problems were caused by the inefficiency, dirtiness and insubordination of the cook, a sulky Antipodean named Brett whose ability to tell tall stories far exceeded his culinary skills. At one stage Scott clapped him in irons and on his next expedition he paid rather more attention to the recruitment of his cook, recognizing the vital link between good food and morale during the long Antarctic winter.

Breakfast was a large bowl of porridge with bread, butter, marmalade and jam and sometimes seal liver. The midday meal was soup, seal or tinned meat and either a jam or a fruit tart. Supper was the remains of the day’s meat dishes or bread, butter and tea, perhaps with some jam or cheese. Although the men and the officers ate separately and had their main meals at different times, Scott was adamant that the fare should be the same, except for luxuries sent by friends, wines and such ‘few delicate but indigestible trifles’ that were produced for special dinners in the wardroom. Out sledging on the ice, officers and men would be alike in every respect so there was no reason to make unnecessary distinctions on board ship. When a merchant seaman complained
about the quality of a cake that had been served, Scott was able to prove that exactly the same cake had been served in the wardroom and to punish the complainer for whingeing. The same individual was plainly unhappy with more than just the cuisine and on sledging trips had been known to sit up and exclaim, ‘Fancy
me
from bloody Poplar, on the bloody Ice Barrier, in a bloody sleeping-bag!’
⁴