A First Rate Tragedy Read online

  It was a weird night’s work with the howling gale and the darkness and the immense sea running over the ship every few minutes, and no engine and no sail, and we all in the engine-room black as ink with engine-room oil and bilgewater, singing chanties as we passed up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above slopping a little over the heads of all of us below him, wet through to the skin, so much so that some of the party worked altogether naked . . .

  The storm began to abate and after a twelve-hour struggle a hole was eventually cut through the engine-room bulkhead to reach the suction well of the hand pump which was flooded. Teddy Evans squeezed through and worked neck-high to clear the valves when ‘to the joy of all a good stream of water came from the pump for the first time,’ wrote a grateful Scott. The danger was past – fires could be re-lit, bilges dried out and the cost counted. Everything was sopping, including Gran’s wellington boots which were ‘like eel-pots’. More importantly, two ponies had died and their bodies had to be pushed out of the forecastle skylight. Teddy Evans described it as ‘a dirty job, because the square of the hatch was so small that a powerful purchase had to be used which stretched out the ponies like dead rabbits’. In addition, one dog had drowned and 10 tons of coal and 65 gallons of petrol had been lost, together with a case of biologist’s spirit.

  The phlegmatic Edgar Evans took it in his stride, writing to his mother simply that ‘Since leaving New Zealand we have had some pretty bad weather . . .’4 To Wilson, the Terra Nova’s salvation had been God’s work signalled by ‘a most perfect and brilliant rainbow’ which had appeared at the storm’s height, though it apparently went unnoticed by his less spiritual colleagues. Wilson took it as a sign that ‘seemed to remove every shadow of doubt, not only as to the present issue, but as to the final issue of the whole Expedition . . .’ Bowers was similarly sustained by a deep faith that: ‘Under its worst conditions this earth is a good place to live in’.5 Cherry-Garrard after forty-eight hours without sleep was more down to earth. ‘For sheer downright misery,’ he wrote, ‘give me a hurricane, not too warm, the yard of a sailing ship, a wet sail and a bout of seasickness.’

  However, a second blow followed swiftly on the first. Just ten days after leaving New Zealand the first iceberg was sighted, heralding the approach of the pack. A delighted Ponting described this great white floating island: ‘flat as a table; about eighty feet in height, and a mile or more long. Its vertical cliffs were seamed with fissures, and near the water line the great mass was pitted with caverns into which the waves rushed and foamed, or, dashing against the cliffs, rose with a roar, far up the perpendicular precipices.’ On 9 December the Terra Nova collided with her first big ice floe. To eager young men like Cherry-Garrard the pack was a fantasy world: ‘The floes were pink, floating in a deep blue sea, and all the shadows were mauve. We passed right under a monster berg, and all day have been threading lake after lake and lead after lead. “There is Regent Street,” said somebody, and for some time we drove through great streets of perpendicular walls of ice.’ However, they did not grasp the significance. They had sailed into the pack much farther north than Scott had anticipated. He worried that it would delay their arrival at Cape Crozier, his intended base.

  The Terra Nova made slow progress, using up her coal at an alarming rate. Scott, always an impatient man, fretted. ‘Oh, but it’s mighty trying to be delayed and delayed like this . . .’ he raged inwardly, but he took care to conceal his frustration from his men. Wilson’s feelings were rather different: ‘the soft seething noise of moving ice and an occasional bump and grating noise along the ship’s side gave one a feeling of old times.’ Soon he was again sketching the prolific wildlife. There were emperor penguins and less stately but more acrobatic Adélies. Flocks of Antarctic petrels roosted on the ice floes, snowy petrels circled and schools of blue whales passed by – ‘their blows were very high and looked almost like factory chimney smoke as they rose dark grey against the white ice blink of the pack ice sky . . . a grey column of foggy, frosty breath.’

  Wilson’s diary captures the magical beauty:

  The sunlight at midnight in the pack is perfectly wonderful. One looks out upon endless fields of broken ice, all violet and purple in the low shadows, and all gold and orange and rose-red on the broken edges which catch the light, while the sky is emerald green and salmon pink, and these two beautiful tints are reflected in the pools of absolutely still water which here and there lie between the ice-floes. Now and again one hears a penguin cry out in the stillness . . . and then, perhaps, he appears in his dress tail coat and white waistcoat suddenly upon an ice-floe from the water – and catching sight of the ship runs curiously towards her, crying out in his amazement as he comes . . . but only intensifying the wonderful stillness and beauty of the whole fairy-like scene as the golden glaring sun in the south just touches the horizon . . .

  Ponting wanted to obtain ‘a moving-picture film showing the bow of the Terra Nova cleaving the ice-floes’. He clambered onto some overhanging planks rigged up by the crew and filmed one of his most dramatic sequences. Nine months later Kathleen Scott would watch it at the Gaumont cinema in London.

  Despite the delay and uncertainty, the ice floes did at least provide an opportunity for ski practice ‘or in current parlance (à la Gran) to go “mit dee shee op”,’ as Griffith Taylor described with some mirth. Tryggve Gran marshalled his slithering, tottering companions and demonstrated how to use two ski sticks, rather than the one which until recently had been customary. Not everyone was enthusiastic. Petty Officer Evans referred darkly to the skis as ‘planks’. However, officers, scientists and seamen were soon hurtling about. Griffith Taylor recorded: ‘We learned from Gran that a knock-kneed man has the advantage in ski-ing; at any rate we had to keep our knees together to counteract a tendency of the ski to spread.’

  Christmas Eve brought about the usual high jinks which Cherry-Garrard recorded:

  Jane [Atkinson] and Soldier [Oates] entered the mate’s cabin and said that they did not want to use force, but they wanted the return of twenty matches which he had taken from the Eastern Party. There was such a fight that afterwards Campbell was hanging over the side feeling very sick! Titus dragged all Bill’s clothes off and Bill burst naked into the wardroom dragging Titus along on his back.6

  Christmas dinner included an entrée of stewed penguin breasts with redcurrant jelly and concluded with a flaming plum pudding, mince pies and chocolates washed down with heroic quantities of champagne, port and liqueurs. The whole company then gathered around the pianola and the usually taciturn Oates amazed everyone by bursting into song. The next morning Bowers, who took pride in washing in cold water, emptied a bucket of icy water over his naked body to sober himself up and offered to do likewise for his colleagues.

  Kathleen Scott’s Christmas was rather more muted. She took Peter to stay with his grandmother at Henley who ‘said how sad it was that Peter didn’t know the divine meaning of Christmas Day. I had to be a little stern, and told her that Peter knew that there was a little baby in history born in a stable who grew up to be a very wonderful man, and that was more than most babies of two knew.’

  Scott was glad to see his men in such spirits, though, as he could not join in, it heightened his sense of isolation from them. The responsibility for a successful outcome weighed on him. His anxiety about the delays and about the condition of the animals overshadowed everything. Nevertheless, while impressed with Oates’s ceaseless efforts with the ponies, he felt inhibited from making suggestions to him. His diary expressed surprise that Oates did not take advantage of the relative stability of the ship in the pack to exercise the ponies on deck, but he did not suggest it. Perhaps the reason was a sense of social and/or professional inferiority. Oates had quickly divined that neither Scott nor Evans understood animals, writing to his mother that ‘their ignorance is colossal’.7 A lack of communication betweem Scott and Oates would remain a feature of the expedition.

  On 30 December the Terra Nova at last
broke free. She had been in the pack ice for twenty days compared with the Discovery’s four and had used up 61 tons of coal. According to Debenham, Scott attributed the delay to a combination of starting so early in the season and to ‘rank bad luck’. On New Year’s Eve came the first glimpse of Antarctic land – the peaks of the Admiralty range appeared in the distance, lit up by the sun ‘like satin, above the clouds’. Two days later the towering mass of Erebus was sighted and Ponting photographed it in the brilliant light of the midnight sun. This familiar landmark brought a lump to the throats of the Discovery veterans. However, the swell at Cape Crozier was too fierce to allow them to land and set up their winter base as they had intended. They would have to seek another haven with easy access to the Barrier, but it would not be so close to the Pole.

  The Terra Nova now made for the familiar territory of McMurdo Sound and a landing place was found on the northern side of a tongue of land formed by an old lava flow from Mount Erebus. This site had been known in the Discovery days as ‘the Skuary’ because of the skua gulls nesting there. It lay some fifteen miles north of the Discovery’s old winter quarters at Hut Point and was separated from it by two deep bays which, when frozen, could be marched over in a day. The bays themselves were divided by a jutting spur of ice, Glacier Tongue. With characteristic generosity, Scott named their new home Cape Evans in honour of his number two.

  The Terra Nova was secured with ice-anchors and unloading began as fast as possible. Scott was relieved to be able to get his ponies on land again, a reaction they shared – Ponting’s film shows them rolling joyfully in the snow. Scott’s account of their antics was coloured by his tendency to anthropomorphise. He described how they obligingly nuzzled away at each other to relieve the itch which had tormented them on board. Some of the ponies were strong enough to begin work almost straight away, though they did not always take to sledge-pulling, showing a tendency to bolt. The dogs were also brought ashore and were in quite a sorry state, though not too weak to massacre any curious Adelies who waddled up to take a look.

  Ponting was nearly devoured by a school of killer whales he had run onto an ice floe to photograph. Before he realized what was happening, the whales spotted him and launched a concerted attack, swimming under the ice and rising in unison to dislodge him into the water. His horrified colleagues watched Ponting leap across the ice pursued by these demonic creatures with their ‘tawny head markings, their small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth . . .’8 He described his escape graphically:

  The ship was within sixty yards, and I heard wild shouts of ‘Look out!’ ‘Run!’ ‘Jump, man jump!’ ‘Run, quick!’ But I could not run; it was all I could do to keep my feet as I leapt from piece to piece of the rocking ice, with the whales a few yards behind me, snorting and blowing among the ice-blocks. I wondered whether I should be able to reach safety before the whales reached me; and I recollect distinctly thinking, if they did get me, how very unpleasant the first bite would feel, but that it would not matter much about the second.

  Ponting scrambled to safety to be greeted by an ashen Scott with the words, ‘My God! That was about the nearest squeak I ever saw!’

  The operation of unloading was a good opportunity to test out the motor sledges but further disaster struck when one of them fell through a patch of rotting ice. Priestley, one of the unloading party, described what happened:

  We realised that the ice was getting very rotten but when a message came back from an anxious Scott to hurry with the unloading, no one had the courage or the sense to ignore it. The Ship Party had got the sledge down on to the ice when without warning Williamson went through to his thighs. The motor sledge suddenly dipped, the ice gave way beneath her afterend and she fell with all her weight vertically on the rope. The rope began cutting through the thin ice . . . Man after man was forced to [let the rope go] and when only five of us were left, [the sledge] took charge at a gallop and is now resting on the bottom at a depth of 120 fathoms.

  Scott took the loss calmly, even though the £1,000 the sledge cost represented a sizeable slice of the money so painstakingly raised, blaming himself for his own impatience. Wilfred Bruce attributed his generally relaxed attitude to the fact that he had reached Antarctica safely: ‘Having landed, and feeling a bit more settled he bucked up a lot and said many pretty things to all of us.’9 Scott’s growing confidence can be seen in his reassuring letter to his mother: ‘My companions are a far abler lot of men than I had in the Discovery and all are devoted to the work and loyal to me.’10 Scott was also quite pleased with Cape Evans, writing to Kathleen that: ‘Fortune has been kind after all, and every day shows the advantages of the spot we have chosen for our winter station.’11

  Scott was anxious to establish his base quickly so that the various expeditions could start before the weather grew too cold. The most crucial thing was to erect the hut – a fine structure 50 feet long by 25 feet wide and 9 feet to the eaves. The double walls were insulated with quilted seaweed and lined with felt. The roof was covered with ‘three-ply ruberoid’ and the floor with linoleum. In line with strict rules of naval discipline the hut was subdivided into the wardroom, for use by the officers and scientists, and the mess-deck for the others. Although each side could hear everything which went on, the protocol was that they could not, thus giving a sense of comfort and privacy to both groups, important in the stressful isolated conditions of Antarctica. By 18 January the hut was ready for occupation – stove, cooking range, gramophone and pianola were all installed. A cave, hewn from the ice, housed the magnetic instruments while an ice grotto was crammed with supplies of mutton, penguin and seal. Stables for the ponies were built on the leeward side of the hut. In his diary Scott wrote that he had been wondering how the ponies would be accommodated. It seems at the least curious that he had not thought about this earlier, given the ponies’ supposedly crucial role, but perhaps he was trusting to Oates. Whatever the case, he was delighted with progress, though he continued to fret that there must be ‘some drawback hidden by the summer weather’ which they had overlooked.

  On 15 January Scott set out with Meares and a dog team to visit Hut Point. He was shocked to find that Shackleton and his men had left a window open so that the hut had filled with snow and ice. It had also been left in a squalid state in Shackleton’s rush to depart. He had re-embarked on the Nimrod just three days after returning to the hut, having spent two of them rescuing comrades left out on the ice. Scott’s resentment of his rival’s behaviour caused him to write an angry passage in his journal, later deleted for publication, describing how: ‘Boxes full of excrement were found near the provisions and filth of a similar description was thick under the verander [sic] . . . It is extraordinary to think that people could have lived in such a horrible manner and with such absence of regard for those to follow.’

  However, Scott had little time to brood as sledging was about to begin. His diary again shows a surprising uncertainty. He wrote: ‘my head doesn’t seem half as clear on the subject as it ought to be.’ In the event, he decided to lead a party of thirteen men with eight pony sledges and two dog sledges in the limited time before winter set in to lay the series of supply depots crucial for next season’s Polar attempt. The depots would provide substantial amounts of food and fuel to supplement the supplies which the Polar team and their supporting parties would be able to transport, thus increasing the effective range of operation to allow the Pole to be reached with an adequate safety margin. Lieutenant Campbell, the so-called ‘wicked mate’, was to lead a team to explore the coast of King Edward VII Land, while the Australian Griffith Taylor and three others were to carry out a geological survey of Victoria Land’s mountains and glaciers. The Terra Nova would drop Campbell’s and Griffith Taylor’s parties and then sail on to New Zealand since, unlike the Discovery, she would not winter in McMurdo Sound. As Scott had rejected the idea of bringing a wireless, from the time of the Terra Nova’s departure until her return Scott and his men would be entirely cut off from
the outside world.

  Scott’s depot-laying party of thirteen men marched out on 24 January, just three weeks after landing. There was a sense of occasion with, in Wilson’s words, ‘. . . a great deal of photographing and a good deal of trouble and excitement’ as the dogs and ponies slithered about on the ice. The men were amused by the figures they cut in their sledging garments. Debenham decided that their windclothes, cut very full to go over other clothing, were ‘not at all elegant and make a man look very corpulent even dropsical!’

  The plan was to march across the Barrier along the Polar route for a hundred miles or so, depoting such essential supplies as pony fodder, sledging rations, dog biscuits and paraffin at strategic points. The need for haste became immediately apparent – the sea ice which provided the only direct route to the Barrier was already breaking up. According to Cherry-Garrard the party crossed it in the nick of time ‘in a state of hurry bordering on panic’.

  Wilson and Meares were responsible for the two dog teams with Dimitri Gerov, while Scott, Oates, Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard, Birdie Bowers, Gran, Crean, Forde, Keohane and Teddy Evans led or marched alongside the ponies. Wilson thoroughly enjoyed his dog driving, finding it ‘a very different thing to the beastly dog driving we perpetrated in the Discovery days’. He developed a deep affection for the leader of his team, ‘Stareek’, Russian for old man, ‘quite the nicest, quietest cleverest old dog gentleman I have ever come across. He looks . . . as though he knew all the wickedness of all the world and all its cares and as though he was bored to death by both of them.’ He had discussed dog driving with Meares on the voyage south from New Zealand and had concluded that ‘if any traction except ourselves can reach the top of Beardmore Glacier it will be the dogs.’ Scott’s attempt at driving dogs was less successful, causing him to write in his journal that, ‘I withhold my opinion of the dogs, in much doubt as to whether they are going to be a real success – but the ponies are going to be real good.’