A First Rate Tragedy Page 17
The Terra Nova arrived at Simonstown, the Cape Town naval base, on 15 August 1910. Oates recorded their reception with his usual sardonic humour – ‘Hurrah parties, nibs, nobs, and snobs off to welcome us, but they forgot to bring our letters or any bottled beer.’7 Cherry-Garrard and Bowers took the opportunity to whisk two pretty girls for a spin in a hired car but it broke down ‘in the middle of the wild’.8 Scott had already arrived and was in Pretoria wooing the likes of Botha and Smuts. He had to raise £8,000 from South Africa, Australia and New Zealand to make good his deficit. He managed to secure an official South African grant of £500 and an equivalent sum from private donors, but it was hard work and the necessary socializing was not always congenial as Wilson described:
. . . for our sins we were entertained by the Cape Town ‘Owl Club’, a sort of colonial Savage Club and one of the worst we have ever had the ill fortune to attend. We were all seated at small tables and apparently two members were told off to look after two guests. My two hosts first of all made offensive remarks about teetotallers when I said I didn’t drink, and then quarrelled about the payment for a bottle of soda water which I was given and half a glass of sherry which had accidentally been poured into my glass by the waiter while I wasn’t looking. The quarrel was not who should pay for it, but who should not pay for it, and eventually as both refused to pay for the sherry, and as the old waiter said if they didn’t he would have to, they said he might! . . . The evening was truly one of the most awful penalties of being a member of such a public expedition. There was no redeeming feature about the whole thing.
Wilson was equally intolerant of ‘white derelicts wallowing in the idleness and dirt of . . . degenerate Kaffirs on equal terms’. Though gifted with great humanity Wilson was also a man of his time.
Wilson longed for the simplicity of life aboard the Terra Nova, the mugs of cocoa shared with a companion as the sun rose, the closeness to nature as he sat sketching on the deck and the ‘happy family’. He was therefore disappointed when Scott dispatched him ahead to Melbourne by mail steamer to recruit the expedition’s geologist, Raymond Priestley, and to persuade the Federal Government to stump up funds. As Scott was going to sail with the Terra Nova, Wilson was also given the job of looking after Kathleen Scott – a preposterously difficult task given their diametrically opposed outlooks on life, but luckily she was a bad sailor (or said she was) and they saw little of each other. Hilda Evans and Oriana also sailed with him. Kathleen found the other women trying. Why, she wondered, could the world not be peopled by men and babies? But she recognized that ‘my hatred of women is becoming a monomania and must be curbed’. Kathleen was a woman of strong opinions. (She once wrote of Winston Churchill that he might be a genius but, if so, he disguised it well.) Now she seems to have found the saintly Wilson just a little dull and a bit of a prig. She certainly bullied him to take her out to the Terra Nova in heavy seas by mail launch as the vessel approached Melbourne so she could be reunited with Scott. She wrote that although Wilson had been furious with her, ‘The relief at getting back to sane folk who understood me was more than can be written about.’ Wilson’s verdict was that ‘. . . in future I hope it will never fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after, at any rate in a motor launch, in a running sea at night-time.’
Teddy Evans was very disappointed at having to yield command of the Terra Nova to Scott on the voyage to Melbourne, interpreting this as a criticism of himself. However, Scott wanted the opportunity for him and his men to get to know one another. He was also planning to choose the Antarctic shore parties during the voyage. While there was a less exuberant atmosphere than under Teddy Evans, Scott regarded the high spirits of his young team benignly. The physicist Charles Wright described how: ‘The Owner has a thirst for scientific knowledge that cannot be quenched. He takes no part in the skylarking – but always looks on with a grin.’9 Gran also left an interesting pen portrait: ‘In Norway I had learned to know Scott as a cheerful and easy man, and this first impression was strengthened when I again came close to him. He was short-tempered and not to be trifled with when angry, but if he had judged someone unfairly and discovered his mistake, he was quick to make amends.’ He was to feel something of Scott’s impatience himself – Scott was beginning to consider the confident Norwegian a lazy, posing fellow and a shirker.
Scott soon had something else to think about, however. On berthing at Melbourne on 12 October he received Amundsen’s famously laconic telegram from Madeira: ‘Am going South, Amundsen.’ This volte-face was a complete surprise to Scott, Norway and the wider world. Amundsen had been loaned Nansen’s Fram (by now Norwegian State property), and had put together an expedition on the understanding that his goal was the exploration of the North Polar Basin. However, as Amundsen admitted subsequently, Peary’s conquest of the North Pole changed everything. ‘Just as rapidly as the message had travelled over the cables I decided on my change of front – to turn to the right-about, and face to the South.’10 Amundsen told neither his backers, including Nansen, nor most of his fellow explorers until they were already at sea and it was rather too late for a change of mind. In fact, he had only made six people, on board or ashore, aware of his true intentions before sailing. He later tried to justify his secrecy, arguing, perhaps correctly, that if he had made his plans public they would have been stifled at birth.
He wrote in self-defence that: ‘I knew I should be able to inform Captain Scott of the extension of my plans before he left civilization, and therefore a few months sooner or later could be of no great importance.’ He also maintained that the main object of Scott’s journey was scientific research and that the Pole was ‘only a side-issue’. Furthermore, he argued, a man with Scott’s ‘great knowledge of Antarctic exploration’ would hardly have been likely to alter his plans.11 Yet the truth was that Amundsen was a ruthlessly ambitious man. He was also a ‘professional’ explorer in a way which Scott, with his troupe of gifted amateurs, so thoroughly in the British tradition, was not. Amundsen had chosen exploration as a career, beginning with the Gerlache expedition and studying such scientific subjects as magnetism because he thought they might be useful in attracting sponsors, rather than through any academic interest. However distasteful such an attitude may have appeared to Scott and his men, Amundsen’s focused professionalism would show to his advantage later.
It was difficult for Scott to know how to react to the news. Amundsen could hardly have been less informative about his intentions. It was not clear where he would land or what his ultimate goal would be, whereas Scott’s own plans had been openly published, including his intention of reaching the Pole around 22 December 1911. What use would the secretive, not to say duplicitous Norwegian, as Scott must have regarded him, make of this piece of information? It was a worrying thought.
Preoccupied as he must have been with the Norwegian threat, Scott was forced to set off on ‘yet another begging campaign’. The Australian government had coughed up a mere £2,500, half the sum given to Shackleton and this only after they heard that a Japanese expedition was in the offing. Before departing from Australia Scott talked frankly to the press about the expedition’s chances: ‘We may get through, we may not. We may have accidents to some of our transports, to the sledges or to the animals. We may lose our lives. We may be wiped out. It is all a question that lies with providence and luck.’12 This fatalism was both part of his nature and born of his experiences on the Discovery. Knowing the uncertainties of Polar travel he must have comforted himself that luck would apply equally to Amundsen.
After lecturing to enthusiastic audiences, Scott and Kathleen embarked by passenger boat for Wellington, where he received the welcome news that a wealthy citizen from Sydney had agreed to make up the £2,500 shortfall in the Australian government’s contribution. Reporters also pressed him for a response to Amundsen’s challenge. Scott replied with dignity that his plans remained unchanged. He would attempt to reach the Pole but not at the expense of the expedition’s scienti
fic goals. The down-to-earth Oates’s reaction in a letter to a friend was typical of him: ‘Bloody Norskies coming down south is a bit of a shock. I only hope they don’t get there first. It will make us look pretty foolish. They say that Amundsen has been underhand in the way he has gone about it, but I personally don’t see it as underhand to keep your mouth shut.’
Evans, meanwhile, had sailed the Terra Nova to Lyttelton, the tiny New Zealand port that had also hosted the Discovery, the Morning, and Shackleton’s Nimrod. Here she was to be joined by those officers and scientists who had not sailed out in her and to spend a month being unloaded and repacked. Ponting described how: ‘It was as interesting as it was delightful to note that our leader’s wife spent many days checking packages as they were unloaded and then re-stowed’. What others thought, notably Bowers who was the Terra Nova’s expert on stowing, is not recorded. There were the three motor sledges to come aboard in their crates and Meares was waiting with his nineteen white Manchurian ponies and thirty-three Siberian sledge dogs.
Oates gloomily assessed the ponies, noting that ‘they are very old for a job of this sort and four of them are unsound however we shall have to make the best of them’. He consoled himself by drinking ‘a skinful of beer’.13 Stables now had to be constructed on the Terra Nova’s upper deck and under the forecastle, and the seamen volunteered some of their living space for the stowing of extra supplies with Edgar Evans acting as spokesman. Urine dripped from the pony stables on the deck above through leaky planking into their remaining accommodation, making their lives even more uncomfortable. Meanwhile, Oates and Scott argued about the amount of pony fodder to be taken on board. Scott was reluctant to heed Oates’s warnings about the dangers of underfeeding the ponies, dismissing the man who knew more about horses than anyone else on the trip as ‘a cheery old pessimist’. However, Oates stuck to his guns and they compromised. Oates also smuggled a couple of tons of extra feed on board, bought at his own expense, without Scott’s knowledge.
If Cardiff was the expedition’s greatest friend in the northern hemisphere, Lyttelton held that place in the south, reacting with true generosity and enthusiasm to her guests. There were donations of coal, frozen sheep and bullocks, tinned meat, boxes of butter, bacon, beer and biscuits, jerseys and bibles. Lyttelton harbour waived all fees and everyone was given free rail passes. There was also a busy round of parties, dances and race meetings. Oates wrote acidly that: ‘Some of the visitors who come in [sic] board write their names on the paintwork which is rather sickening.’14 Bowers, who in each port the Terra Nova had visited had displayed a lively eye for the local girls, wrote ‘the charms of the fair sex have not been exaggerated. The girls here are as a whole good-looking and the average would pass as pretty . . . but the little we see of leisure at present precludes the possibility of my falling this time.’ Scott complained in an unpublished entry in his diary that in New Zealand he had ‘had to hear much talk of Shackleton’. He and Kathleen spent some of their last days together in the beautiful house of Joseph Kinsey, the expedition’s agent. It was high on a cliff with wonderful views and a garden ablaze with red and golden flowers. At night they slept outside under clear skies.
On 26 November, the day the Terra Nova was due to leave Lyttelton for her final stop at Port Chalmers to take on coal, Edgar Evans fell in the water as he rushed to get aboard after a night out drinking with the locals. Teddy Evans wanted the petty officer dismissed. However, it would have been well nigh impossible for Scott to do this after all they had shared. The fact that in the months to come Kathleen Scott would dream about Petty Officer Evans shows how often Scott must have talked of him and the bonds between them. He therefore decided to overlook this plunge from grace and ordered the Welshman to travel by train to Port Chalmers. In fact they travelled together and the cheerful seaman apparently behaved as if nothing had happened. However, Scott’s decision seriously annoyed Teddy Evans who was angry to see the petty officer trotting briskly on board again and the diaries hint more generally at arguments behind the scenes between Scott and Evans. Scott referred to Teddy Evans’s ‘vague and wild grievances’.
There was also tension between their wives. Bowers attributed it to jealousy between the two. He regarded Hilda Evans as a womanly woman of remarkable beauty and general charm ‘who was everything a wife should be’.15 He was much less in sympathy with the more emancipated and forthright Kathleen and had already reported home that ‘he hated to see a woman like her getting out of their proper place in the world’. Now he wrote, ‘I don’t like Mrs. Scott . . . Nobody likes her on the expedition and the painful silence when she arrives is the only jarring note . . . There is no secret that she runs us all just now and what she says is done through the Owner [Scott]. Now nobody likes a schemer and she is one undoubtedly.’16
Oates described a splendid fight between Kathleen and Hilda. ‘Mrs Scott and Mrs Evans had a magnificent battle, they tell me it was a draw after 15 rounds. Mrs Wilson flung herself into the fight after the 10th round and there was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you see in a Chicargo [sic] slaughterhouse in a month.’17 He hoped it would not cause coolness among the men when they got down south but added characteristically that it would not bother him if it did. Kathleen decided that if her husband ever mounted another expedition, the wives must be chosen more carefully than the men or, better still, have none. As Bowers remarked, the sooner they were all away the better.
The final farewells in fact came on 29 November. Kathleen, together with Oriana Wilson and Hilda Evans, remained on board until the ship cleared the flag-decked harbour, when they were taken off by tug. Kathleen had left a bundle of letters with Teddy Evans to be given to Scott on special days. She described in her autobiography ‘his face radiating tenderness as the space between us widened, until I held only my memory of that upturned face, but held it for a lifetime’. To cheer herself up she visited a babies’ home but found them very plain. Hilda Evans was ‘ghastly white’ and Oriana Wilson ‘sphinx-like’ as the tug turned back. Wilson wrote in his diary of his Ory’s ‘temporary widowhood’, little guessing that it was to be permanent, saying that he was taking with him the memory of the most perfect companionship he had ever known.
Back in Britain the news of the Terra Nova’s departure south received only muted attention. Perhaps the most frequent reminder of the great adventure was the advertisements for a brand of underwear which the expedition had taken with them, under the bold headline ‘GONE WITH SCOTT’.
11
Stewed Penguin Breast and Plum Pudding
‘All links with civilization are cut, and as night falls New Zealand sinks from sight. It is almost sad to think that years will pass before we shall once more see land with forests and green fields,’ wrote an unusually sombre Tryggve Gran as the Terra Nova creaked on her way. She was heavily overladen. The crated motor sledges covered in tarpaulins took up most of the deck, together with sixty wooden components for the hut, sacks of coal and drums of fuel. Birdie Bowers described how the decks were crowded with ‘garbage fore and aft’ but added ‘risk nothing and do nothing; if funds could not supply another ship, we simply had to overload the one we had or suffer worse things down south’.1 She was also a floating menagerie. The thirty-three dogs were billeted on the open deck, chained up around the other cargo and exposed to the wind and the spray, the picture of canine misery. ‘The dogs sit with their tails to this invading water, their coats wet and dripping. It is a pathetic attitude, deeply significant of cold and misery; occasionally some poor beast emits a long pathetic whine. The group forms a picture of wretched dejection; such a life is truly hard for these poor creatures,’ wrote Scott. He also worried about the fifteen ponies accommodated under the forecastle: ‘One takes a look through a hole in the bulkhead and sees a row of heads with sad, patient eyes come swinging up together from the starboard side, whilst those on the port swing back; then up come the port heads, whilst the starboard recede. It seems a terrible ordeal for these poor beasts .
. .’ The ponies also posed an ordeal for the seamen since some were housed directly above the seamen’s mess-table and what they euphemistically described as ‘mustard’ dripped down.
What fate awaited this ungainly cargo of humans and animals? Scott set great store by luck but the coming weeks would bring a series of misfortunes. On 2 December, just two days out from New Zealand, the Terra Nova ran straight into the teeth of a Force 10 gale. Shrieking winds dislodged the deck cargo, sending sacks of coal and cans of fuel cannoning hither and thither. The wretched dogs, chained by the neck, were washed backwards and forwards across the deck. One was actually hurled overboard with such force that his chain broke, but by a miracle a great wave deposited him back again. The ponies were in danger of breaking their legs as the ship pitched and tossed.
The storm was a defining event which showed Scott the calibre of his companions. Oates and Atkinson worked ‘like Trojans’ among the ponies. Teddy Evans described Oates’s ‘strong brown face illuminated by a swinging lamp as he stood amongst those suffering little beasts. He was a fine, powerful man and on occasions he seemed to be actually lifting the poor little ponies to their feet as the ship lurched . . .’2 Scott himself remained calm and stoical – a storm at sea was well within his range of experience. Bowers later described Scott’s coolness with awe: ‘Captain Scott was simply splendid, he might have been at Cowes . . .’3 However the reality, as Scott later told Griffith Taylor, was that it was touch and go. The ship’s pumps had become clogged with balls of coal dust and engine oil and the ship was taking in water and slowly sinking. Scott and Teddy Evans set the afterguard to baling out by hand and Wilson, one of the lucky ones not to suffer from seasickness, described the desperate scenes: