The Worst Journey in the World (89 page)

"Are you all well," through a megaphone from the bridge.

"The Polar Party died on their return from the Pole: we have their
records." A pause and then a boat.

Evans, who had been to England and made a good recovery from scurvy, was
in command: with him were Pennell, Rennick, Bruce, Lillie and Drake. They
reported having had a very big gale indeed on their way home last year.

We got some apples off the ship, "beauties, I want nothing better....
Pennell is first-class, as always...." "One notices among the ship's men
a rather unnatural way of talking: not so much in special instances, but
as a whole, contact with civilization gives it an affected sound: I
notice it in both officers and men."
^[339]

"
January 19. On board the Terra Nova.
After 28 hours' loading we left
the old hut for good and all at 4 P.M. this afternoon. It has been a bit
of a rush and little sleep last night. It is quite wonderful now to be
travelling a day's journey in an hour: we went to Cape Royds in about
that time and took off geological and zoological specimens. I should like
to sit up and sketch all these views, which would have meant long
travelling without the ship, but I feel very tired. The mail is almost
too good for words. Now, with the latest waltz on the gramophone, beer
for dinner and apples and fresh vegetables to eat, life is more bearable
than it has been for many a long weary week and month. I leave Cape Evans
with no regret: I never want to see the place again. The pleasant
memories are all swallowed up in the bad ones."
^[340]

Before the ship arrived it was decided among us to urge the erection of a
cross on Observation Hill to the memory of the Polar Party. On the
arrival of the ship the carpenter immediately set to work to make a great
cross of jarrah wood. There was some discussion as to the inscription, it
being urged that there should be some quotation from the Bible because
"the women think a lot of these things." But I was glad to see the
concluding line of Tennyson's "Ulysses" adopted: "To strive, to seek, to
find, and not to yield."

The open water stretched about a mile and a half south of Tent Island,
and here we left the ship to sledge the cross to Hut Point at 8 A.M. on
January 20. The party consisted of Atkinson, Wright, Lashly, Crean,
Debenham, Keohane and Davies, the ship's carpenter and myself.

"
Evening. Hut Point.
We had a most unpleasant experience coming in. We
struck wind and drift just about a mile from Hut Point: then we saw there
was a small thaw pool off the Point, and came out to give it a wide
berth. Atkinson put his feet down into water: we turned sharp out, and
then Crean went right in up to his arms, and we realized that the ice was
not more than three or four inches of slush. I managed to give him a hand
out without the ice giving, and we went on floundering about. Then Crean
went right in again, and the sledge nearly went too: we pulled the
sledge, and the sledge pulled him out. Except for some more soft patches
that was all, but it was quite enough. I think we got out of it most
fortunately."

"Crean got some dry clothes here, and the cross has had a coat of white
paint and is drying. We went up Observation Hill and have found a good
spot right on the top, and have already dug a hole which will, with the
rock alongside, give us three feet. From there we can see that this
year's old ice is in a terrible state, open water and open water slush
all over near the land—I have never seen anything like it here. Off Cape
Armitage and at the Pram Point pressure it is extra bad. I only hope we
can find a safe way back."

"You would not think Crean had had such a pair of duckings to hear him
talking so merrily to-night...."

"I really do think the cross is going to look fine."
^[341]

Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well.
Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow:
they had seen it time after time as they came back from hard journeys on
the Barrier: Observation Hill and Castle Rock were the two which always
welcomed them in. It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had
lived: and the Barrier on the other, where they had died. No more fitting
pedestal, a pedestal which in itself is nearly 1000 feet high, could have
been found.

"
Tuesday, January 22.
Rousing out at 6 A.M. we got the large piece of
the cross up Observation Hill by 11 A.M. It was a heavy job, and the ice
was looking very bad all round, and I for one was glad when we had got it
up by 5 o'clock or so. It is really magnificent, and will be a permanent
memorial which could be seen from the ship nine miles off with a naked
eye. It stands nine feet out of the rocks, and many feet into the ground,
and I do not believe it will ever move. When it was up, facing out over
the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more."

We got back to the ship all right and coasted up the Western Mountains to
Granite Harbour; a wonderfully interesting trip to those of us who had
only seen these mountains from a distance. Gran went off to pick up a
depôt of geological specimens. Lillie did a trawl.

This was an absorbing business, though it was only one of a long and
important series made during the voyages of the Terra Nova. Here were all
kinds of sponges, siliceous, glass rope, tubular, and they were generally
covered with mucus. Some fed on diatoms so minute that they can only be
collected by centrifuge: some have gastric juices to dissolve the
siliceous skeletons of the diatoms on which they feed: they anchor
themselves in the mud and pass water in and out of their bodies:
sometimes the current is stimulated by cilia. There were colonies of
Gorgonacea, which share their food unselfishly; and corals and marine
degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but
have gone down in the world. And there were starfishes, sea-urchins,
brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers. The sea-urchins are
formed of hexagonal plates, the centre of each of which is a ball, upon
which a spine works on a ball and socket joint. These spines are used for
protection, and when large they can be used for locomotion. But the real
means of locomotion are five double rows of water-tube feet, working by
suction, by which they withdraw the water inside a receptacle in the
shell, thereby forming a vacuum; starfishes do the same. We found a
species of sea-urchin which had such large spines that they practically
formed bars; the spines were twice as long as the sea-urchin and shaped
just like oars, being even fluted. A lobster grows by discarding his
suit, hiding and getting another, growing meanwhile. A snail or an oyster
retains his original shell, and adds to it in layers all the way down,
increasing one edge. But our sea-urchin grows by an increment of
calcareous matter all round the outside of each plate. As the animal
grows the plates get bigger.

There was a sea-cucumber which nurses its young, having a brood cavity
which is really formed out of the mouth: this is a peculiarity of a new
Antarctic genus found first on the Discovery. It has the most complex
water-tubes, which it uses as legs, and a few limy rods in its soft skin
instead of the bony calcareous plates of sea-urchins and starfish. After
them came the feather-stars, a relic of the old crinoids which used to
flourish in the carboniferous period, examples of which can be found in
the Derbyshire limestone; and there were thousands of brittle-stars, like
beautiful wheels of which the hubs and spokes remained, but not the
circumference. These spokes or legs are muscular, sensory and locomotive;
they differ from the starfishes in that they have no digestive glands in
their legs, and from the feather-stars in that they do not use their legs
to waft food into their mouths. Once upon a time they had a stalk and
were anchored to a rock, and there are still very rare old stalked
echinoderms living in the sea. This apparently geological thing was found
by Wyville Thomson in 1868 still living in the seas to the north of
Scotland, and this find started the Challenger Expedition for deep-sea
soundings in 1872. But the Challenger brought back little in this line.
Most of the species we found were peculiar to the Antarctic.

There were Polychaete worms by the hundred, showing the protrusable
mouth, which is shoved into the mud and then brought back into the body,
and the bristles on the highly developed projections which act as legs,
by which they get about the mud. These beasts have apparently given rise
to the Arthropods. In a modified and later form they had taken to living
in a tube, both for protection and because they found that they could not
go through the mud, which had become too viscous for them. So they stand
up in a tube and collect the sediment which is falling by means of
tentacles. They spread from one locality to another by going through a
plankton embryonic stage in their youth. They may be compared to the
mason worms, which also build tubes.

But as Lillie squatted on the poop surrounded by an inner ring of jars
and tangled masses of the catch, and an outer ring of curious scientists,
pseudo-scientists and seamen, no find pleased him so much as the frequent
discovery of pieces of Cephalodiscus rarus, of which even now there are
but some four jars full in the world. It is as interesting as it is
uncommon, for its ancestor was a link between the vertebrates and
invertebrates, though no one knows what it was like. It has been a
vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early
life, and it also has gills. First found on the Graham's Land side of the
Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross
Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.

We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started
to make our way out. Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens
at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and
also to leave a depôt there for future explorers. We met very heavy pack,
having to return at least twelve miles and try another way. "The sea has
been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time
of year. There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes
this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of
which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen
comparatively recently."
^[342]
The propeller had a bad time, constantly
catching up on ice. At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape
Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island. That night we made good
progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the
day. But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we
stopped and banked fires. "We lay just where we stopped until at 5 A.M.
on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along,
and we started to make the same slow progress—slow ahead, stop (to the
engine-room)—bump and grind for a bit—then slow astern, stop—slow
ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big bump which
brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out
into open water."
^[343]

Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at
3 A.M. on January 26 we were passing the dark brown granite headland of
the northern foothills. We were soon made fast to a stretch of some 500
yards of thick sea-ice, upon which the wind had not left a particle of
snow, and before us the foothills formed that opening which Campbell had
well named Hell's Gate.

I wish I had seen that igloo: with its black and blubber and beastliness.
Those who saw it came back with faces of amazement and admiration. We
left a depôt at the head of the bay, marked with a bamboo and a flag, and
then we turned homewards, counting the weeks, and days, and then the
hours. In the early hours of January 27 we left the pack. On January 29
we were off Cape Adare, "head sea, and wind, and fog, very ticklish work
groping along hardly seeing the ship's length. Then it lifts and there is
a fair horizon. Everybody pretty sea-sick, including most of the seamen
from Cape Evans. All of us feeling rotten."
^[344]
Very thick that night,
and difficult going. At mid-day (lat. 69° 50' S.) a partial clearance
showed a berg right ahead. By night it was blowing a full gale, and it
was not too easy to keep in our bunks. Our object was now to make east in
order to allow for the westerlies later on. We passed a very large number
of bergs, varied every now and then by growlers. On February 1, latitude
64° 15' S. and longitude 159° 15' E., we coasted along one side of a
berg which was twenty-one geographical miles long: the only other side of
which we got a good view stretched away until lost below the horizon. In
latitude 62° 10' S. and longitude 158° 15' E. we had "a real bad day:
head wind from early morning, and simply crowds of bergs all round. At 8
A.M. we had to wedge in between a berg and a long line of pack before we
could find a way through. Then thick fog came down. At 9.45 A.M. I went
out of the ward-room door, and almost knocked my head against a great
berg which was just not touching the ship on the starboard side. There
was a heavy cross-swell, and the sea sounded cold as it dashed against
the ice. After crossing the deck it was just possible to see in the fog
that there was a great Barrier berg just away on the port side." We
groped round the starboard berg to find others beyond. Our friend on the
opposite side was continuous and apparently without end. It was soon
clear that we were in a narrow alley-way—between one very large berg and
a number of others. It took an hour and a quarter of groping to leave the
big berg behind. At 4 P.M., six hours later, we were still just feeling
our way along. And we had hopes of being out of the ice in this latitude!