by Sara Wheeler
Apsley had been accepted on the expedition just five weeks before the ship was due to sail: a very short time to prepare for a trip that would last eighteen months at least. In addition to his personal arrangements, Scott asked him to learn to type, as he was taking two typewriters south and nobody knew how to use them. Farrer gamely took on the tricky job of obtaining life insurance, insurers not liking the sound of the Antarctic any more then than they do now. Apsley spent hectic days in London, lunching quickly at Harrods or at Reggie’s house in Green Street and squeezing in one last night at the theatre with the Smiths, his head too full of lists to concentrate on Galsworthy’s new play. At Lamer he sorted through a rubble of new purchases spread over the study floor between teetering piles of books, and the girls scuttled in with offers of knitted headwear. Lassie set about making a sledging flag, rushing down to the Kensington School of Art to learn a special new stitch that appeared the same at the back and the front. Having been waited on all his life, Apsley panicked at the thought of having to take his turn at the Primus, so he sloped into the kitchen and asked the appalled cook for lessons. Meanwhile the Terra Nova was being fitted out and provisioned at London’s West India Docks, dwarfed by cargo vessels and gleaming liners.
The death of Edward VII at the beginning of May meant that a country already tense with industrial unrest and political acrimony became tenser. As one of the chief features of England’s social disquiet was class hatred, the chance of escape was especially attractive to a young gentleman with land, money and a nervous cast of mind.
On 1 June the Terra Nova raised steam at the West India Docks, painted, polished and fluttering with flags. The wharf was bristling with the cocked hats of dignitaries, including that of Sir Clements Markham, the expedition’s chief supporter. Markham’s wife and Lady Bridgeman, the wife of the First Sea Lord, hoisted the white ensign, and the Terra Nova slipped down the Thames to the low elephant grief of ships’ horns.
Apsley joined the ship at Cardiff, and Elsie and Mildred went to see him off. The girls stayed on board until the Barry Docks, and there they finally picked their way down the ship’s ladder and climbed into the last tug back to Cardiff. Then the crew steamed away down the Bristol Channel, gleefully tossing overboard hundreds of tracts and periodicals left by earnest visitors, the flimsy sheets lifting briefly aloft before floating down to dissolve in the pewter water. Scott was not on board; he had stayed behind to drum up funds and make final arrangements, leaving his second-in-command, Lieutenant ‘Teddy’ Evans, in charge of a mixed company of thirty-nine navy men and civilians. Teddy was a jovial, ambitious young officer who relished the responsibility of leadership and wore it lightly. He had sailed to the Antarctic before, as second officer on the Morning expedition to free the Discovery from the ice. On that trip he had made up his mind that he would see more of the polar regions.
Before signing up on the Terra Nova, Evans had planned to mount an expedition of his own. Like Scott, he saw that the uncharted spaces at the bottom of the world offered a fine opportunity for a naval officer to make his name. But the country could not afford two expeditions. In the summer of 1909, with the discreet intervention of Sir Clements, the prospective leaders had reached an agreement. Evans would yield to Scott and hand over the monies he had already raised in exchange for the position of second-in-command on Scott’s expedition.
While Scott was traipsing round the country drumming up cash, Evans had overseen the cleaning and refitting of the greasy old ship, and he had thrown himself into the task with gusto. ‘I shall never forget the day I first visited the Terra Nova in the West India Docks,’ he wrote years later. ‘She looked so small and out of place . . . but I loved her from the day I saw her, because she was my first command.’ Under his supervision, gangs of labourers removed the blubber tanks, cleansed and whitewashed the hold and scrubbed and disinfected the bilges. They built storerooms and laboratories, erected an ice house on the upper deck and fitted out bunks around the saloon. Then the ship had to be provisioned, and on a severely limited budget. ‘The verb “to wangle”,’ Evans wrote, ‘had not yet appeared in the English language, so we just “obtained”.’
The sense of rivalry between Evans and Scott never disappeared. They were profoundly different characters: Evans a boisterous extrovert with the common touch, Scott a reserved introvert with a diffident manner. Their relationship was uneasy, and it was not clear how it would evolve.
The Terra Nova’s crew consisted mostly of naval officers and ratings, but they had been joined by six of the expedition’s twelve scientific staff; the rest were to meet the ship in New Zealand. All twelve were automatically classified as officers. They included two men untrained in any scientific field and called ‘adaptable helpers’ by Scott. Apsley was one. His title was zoological assistant, and his duties essentially involved assisting Wilson with his specimens. The other ‘adaptable helper’ was Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, a soldier in the Inniskilling Dragoons, a cavalry regiment. Oates’ few words were caustic. Of the multitudinous well-wishers who had crowded the decks before the ship left Cardiff, he remarked that only the telephone operator was a gentleman.
The Terra Nova was no Orient liner. She rolled fifty degrees each way, and Apsley was seasick for the first few days, manfully typing out notices and general orders for Evans while looking very green. But after less than a week at sea he was able to record in his diary, ‘Every prospect of a really good time. Setting sail on Sunday afternoon I got quite done; I feel very soft after a year’s travelling, which makes one fit, but anything but hard.’
His bunk was in the nursery, so called because it housed the youngest members of the expedition. Next to the engine room and boilers, and, annoyingly, providing a short cut to both, the nursery was larger than the other cabins, with six bunks as well as the ship’s library and a pianola equipped with bulky rolls of music. The floor was permanently layered with a deep jumble of boots and overcoats, and in the gloom it was almost impossible for a man to find his own kit.
Apsley was determined to meet the stiff challenges of a crowded ship run according to unfamiliar naval rules. He kept three clocks and two wristwatches above his bunk to make absolutely sure that he did not miss his shift on deck. To the amusement of the other nursery residents he often spoke out loud in his sleep and went sleepwalking twice, rescued both times by Tryggve Gran, a Norwegian skiing expert and the youngest man on the expedition. Apsley took the inevitable teasing gracefully; one of his shipmates noted that he had ‘an ever-ready laugh’. It was a useful asset.
They anchored at Funchal in Madeira on 23 June. The town was hot, swarming with lizards and ants, and the cobbled streets smelt of flowers, drains and onions. Apsley and two other men went up the mountain, first in a funicular then on foot, lunched at a hotel (‘excellent food – I had a bath, better still’), ate pounds of loquats (yellow, plum-like fruits), then went to another hotel for dinner. ‘This is always to be remembered as an A1 day,’ he wrote in his diary. In a letter from Funchal, Wilson told Reggie, ‘I really never have seen anyone with such a constant expression of “this is what I have been looking for” on his face.’
Less than three months later, on 6 September, another crew of polar explorers anchored off Madeira. They were a leaner, sleeker group: only nineteen men all told. Their leader was Roald Amundsen. He had been yearning for another great adventure since sailing through the North-West Passage in 1905, the year his country gained independence from Sweden. A reserved, ascetic bachelor with pale, icy blue eyes and a certain inscrutability, after his successful 1908 expedition Amundsen had set his sights on the North Pole. On a lecture tour to England in 1907 he had asked the great Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, at the time serving in London as Norway’s first ambassador to Britain, if he could sail in the doughty Fram, a ship Nansen knew well (she was state property, but Nansen had absolute moral authority in the field of exploration in Norway). Nansen had been dreaming of taking the Fram to the Antarctic and of conquering the South Po
le, but he reluctantly yielded to the younger man. ‘And so with a bleeding heart,’ he told Amundsen years later, ‘I gave up the plan I had prepared for so long, and which would have crowned my life, in favour of your voyage, because I saw it as the right thing to do, and the way which would bring most to Norway.’
In November 1908 Amundsen unveiled his plans for the North Pole, and the King and Queen of Norway opened the subscription list. Amundsen claimed that his main object was a scientific study of the polar sea, but this was disingenuous: he rarely paid any attention to science. His plans were known in England, and when Scott visited Norway to test equipment he tried to meet him in order to discuss scientific collaboration between the respective north and south expeditions. But Amundsen avoided Scott.
The Terra Nova leaked so much that when she was under sail the crew had to man the hand pumps amidships every four hours; by the time they left Madeira Apsley had already written in his diary, ‘The pump is going to be a bit of a nightmare.’ And it was. When the engines were going he took his turn as stoker (‘I think I shall dream of great monumental stones of coal which cannot be moved’), and in the early weeks he also worked for the navigator, Lieutenant Harry Pennell.
The 28-year-old Pennell was a relentless hard worker who was always willing to lend a hand trimming coal if he wasn’t occupied on the bridge or up in the crow’s nest. Besides keeping a meticulous ship’s log, which included a detailed record of all animals sighted, he spent hours working on magnetic observations as a hobby. He never seemed to go to bed: when he felt an urgent need to sleep he simply lay down under his chart table. He was cheerful (‘as happy as the day is long’, according to Apsley), steady and sober – though not too sober, as he danced hornpipes at inopportune moments. ‘He was father and mother to every man on board his ship,’ Apsley wrote. ‘He knew all their troubles, smoothed over many a difficulty, helped them not to get drunk.’ Wilson rated him ‘by far the most capable man on the whole expedition’. On the journey down to South Africa Apsley helped Pennell take observations (and was praised for his neat handwriting and accuracy), and they often drank cocoa together in the quiet stillness of the early watch as dawn spilled over the ocean. Cherry came to admire Pennell hugely, and so did many others. ‘He is only eighteen months older than I am,’ wrote Birdie Bowers, ‘and when I think of all he has in his brain I begin to wonder if I know anything at all.’
Unlike the Discovery, which had caused so much trouble when she froze in, the Terra Nova was not going to remain in the Antarctic during the winter. Her job was to land a party of men on an island close to the Antarctic continent and return to New Zealand. The shore party would then overwinter in their hut. As navigator, Pennell was not required to stay: he would captain the ship back to New Zealand, and take her back down to Scott in the spring. Many of the men who were staying were sorry that they would not have Pennell as a companion through the long darkness of the polar night.
Every day was hotter than the last after Madeira, and by the end of June the deck scalded the men’s bare feet. In the tropics they slept outside, and when it rained they ran around naked to get clean. Apsley and Wilson bedded down on top of the ice house between the great squares of sail rising fore and aft. They all placed bets on what day they would reach South Africa, set up a whale watch and leant over the rail to inspect glassy Portuguese men-of-war twisting in the clear blue water. Most of all they liked discussing the Antarctic. A sledging committee was formed with Apsley nominally the secretary, and the men who had been south before lectured the others on the vagaries of that unknown continent.
Apsley had learned to steer and was now confidently furling sail aloft with the seamen, the first among the civilians on board to do so. ‘Enjoying myself greatly,’ he ended his 17 July diary entry, two days after they had celebrated crossing the Equator with elaborate high jinks. In the doldrums they reverted to steam power. ‘I have been more fit yesterday and today than I have been since I joined,’ he wrote. No wonder, after four-hour shifts in the furnace of a stokehold, and in the tropics to boot.
They were chronically short of water, as the tanks were too small. One result, according to Charles ‘Silas’ Wright, was ‘the lack of something decent to drink. One does pall of champagne, beer and ginger ale in the course of time.’ Twenty-three-year-old Wright, a Canadian, was already a much-loved member of the company. After graduating from college in Toronto he had won a scholarship enabling him to take up a place to study physics at Cambridge. There he began work on natural penetration radiation and became friends with Thomas Griffith Taylor, a British-born geologist who had grown up in Australia. Taylor had gone through Sydney University with Douglas Mawson, the Australian explorer (also British-born) who had sledged to the South Magnetic Pole on Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition. Encouraged by his Cambridge tutors as well as by Mawson, Taylor applied for the post of physiographer and geologist on the Terra Nova. When he was accepted, Wright decided to have a shot at the still-vacant position of physicist. He liked the idea of continuing his measurements of penetrating radiation on the journey down to the Antarctic, but his primary motivation was curiosity about that immense continent and its little-known topography. In fact, he was desperate to go south with Scott. The problem was that his application was rejected.
Undaunted, Taylor announced that the two of them should go down to London, face Scott and Wilson and persuade them to change their minds. They set off on foot, with twelve hard-boiled eggs and a few bars of chocolate to sustain them, and walked the fifty miles in a day.
It worked. Like most of the Terra Nova scientists, Wright was engaged on the flat rate of four pounds a week for the first year. (It was uncertain if the expedition would remain for a second year, and if it did, salaries would have to be renegotiated.) He was quickly nicknamed ‘Silas’, on the grounds that it was the most ‘Yankee’ name the others could think of. Cherry described him as ‘robust, willing and uncompromising’, and along with his friend ‘Griff’ Taylor, Silas injected a healthy dose of irreverence into expeditionary life. Like Cherry, he was short-sighted, but he made up for the difficulties this caused him out on the trail with his athleticism and unflagging energy. After the first season Scott described him as ‘goodhearted, strong, keen, striving to saturate his mind with the ice problems of this wonderful region’. Silas was a committed physicist and physiographer, though it was probably in the field of glaciology that he made his greatest contribution to the expedition’s scientific programme.
Sing-songs were a regular occurrence in the wardroom (not surprising, after all that champagne), ‘though there was hardly anybody in it who could sing’. Instead of grace, at the start of most meals they sang a music-hall song about the ‘Sisters Hardbake with the goo-goo eyes’, and schoolboy rough-and-tumble inevitably followed. One night, Wilson recorded in his diary, ‘Campbell, Cherry-Garrard and I held the nursery, which has two doors, against the rest of the wardroom. The struggle lasted an hour or two and half of us were nearly naked towards the finish, having had our clothes torn off our backs.’ Nicknames proliferated. Girls’ names were popular, with Pennell metamorphosing into ‘Penelope’ and Edward Nelson, a biologist, into ‘Marie’. As the oldest man on board Wilson was dubbed ‘Uncle Bill’, and Scott was known respectfully as ‘the Owner’, the standard naval term for the captain of a warship. Apsley was inevitably ‘Cherry’ (sometimes pronounced ‘Chewwy’), and the name stuck until the end of his life.14 The lower ranks were naturally suspicious of hyphens and called him ‘Mr Gerard’.
On 26 July the Terra Nova reached South Trinidad (now the Brazilian Ilha da Trindade), a coral-ringed, uninhabited volcanic island 680 miles east of Brazil. Several parties went ashore: Cherry set off to find specimens with Wilson and Pennell. Pursued by locusts and red-legged flies, they climbed up the crumbling lava and basalt almost to the top of the island and picnicked on captain’s biscuits among the yellow land crabs while the sun burnt all the blue from the sky. When a swell rose, the men who had stayed on board hoist
ed a warning flag and fired a rocket to call the scattered parties back. Cherry and his two companions scrambled down, denting their guns, but the sea was already too rough for the ship’s boats to land, and the men were obliged to swim one by one through the surf among cruising sharks. Cherry noted Wilson’s psychological leadership during the crisis: ‘When we first got down to the shore and things were looking nasty, Wilson sat down on the top of a rock and ate a biscuit in the coolest possible manner. It was an example to avoid all panicking, for he did not want the biscuit.’
‘One of the days of a man’s life and an exciting ending,’ Cherry wrote in his diary that evening. The reality of the trip – even the gruesome hours shovelling coal – was endorsing the vision he had glimpsed during his long walks across the Scottish moors with Wilson. After an uncertain journey through school and university, he had at last found congenial companionship, a genuine outlet for his talents and true adventure authenticated by a clearly defined purpose. The relief was inexpressible.
He spent the next day skinning the birds they had shot on South Trinidad, staying up all night to get the job done. Together with Wilson he worked in a small lab on the upper deck which he had painted and fitted with specimen shelves. Cherry loved learning from his sympathetic mentor in this cubby-hole, and he was turning out to be a practically adroit zoological assistant. Under Wilson’s tutelage, he had also taken up sketching. But his primary debt to the older man was emotional. When it was all over, Teddy Evans noted in his account of the expedition, ‘Wilson took Cherry-Garrard under his wing and brought him up as it were in the shadow of his own unselfish character.’
They rounded the Cape of Good Hope and on 16 August anchored in the sheltered bay at Simonstown, just south of Cape Town. It had taken them two months to reach South Africa; they now had eighteen days on land, and mail waiting.
