by Sara Wheeler
Cherry, Oates, Henry Bowers and Edward Atkinson, a quiet navy doctor and parasitologist, stayed out at Coghill’s Hotel in Wynberg, up in the hills about five miles south of Cape Town. ‘We are [a] peaceloving party,’ wrote Bowers, ‘and want quiet and little gaiety.’ The foursome got on well (‘we usually hunt in a quartet’), and Bowers and Cherry had already laid the foundations of a friendship that was to be one of the closest of the expedition. ‘Cherry-Garrard is a great pal of mine,’ Bowers wrote to his sister May, describing him as ‘our young millionaire . . . a thorough gentleman and very keen’.
The 27-year-old Bowers was a short, solid Scot with red hair, limbs as tough as teak and a hooked nose which had conferred the nickname ‘Birdie’. He had inherited a passion for seafaring from his father, a hardy old seadog who had died when his adoring son was four. The widowed Emily Bowers, left to fend for herself in modest but not indigent circumstances, had devoted herself to her son and his two elder sisters. Birdie accepted his position as head of the family, and like Scott he gladly supported his widowed mother. But like Scott he went to sea as a teenager despite the pulls of kinship. When he was fourteen he enrolled as a cadet on the training ship HMS Worcester, and in 1899 qualified for the Merchant Service. For six years he worked his way through the ranks, gaining valuable experience under steam and sail. In 1905 he was gazetted as a sub-lieutenant to the Royal Indian Marine, a service which ranked second in prestige only to the Royal Navy.
The lower ranks adored Bowers. He was a good-tempered, hard-working officer and a cheery optimist who exuded warm good sense: as one of his sisters said, ‘There wasn’t a twist in him.’ He was devoid of intellectual pretension or aspiration. He simply marched resolutely through life getting things done, eschewing undue attention and avoiding show. Indeed, Bowers was almost unnaturally modest, a trait that was in part a consequence of his goblin-like appearance. In his attitudes he was an imperialist, a Conservative and a patriot. ‘I love my country,’ he once wrote, ‘and trust that I shall not be found wanting when the day comes to act.’ Above all, he was a deeply religious man whose life was grounded in his faith. Standing alone on deck in the long night watches, contemplating a becalmed and starry ocean, he often sensed the mystical presence of Christ, and he wrote movingly about this subject in his long letters home to his mother and sisters.
In the Indian Marines Bowers sharpened his navigational skills on the Irrawaddy in Burma, polished up his Hindustani and qualified as a lieutenant before proceeding to the Persian Gulf to serve on a battle-cruiser. His constitution and strength were legendary, and he was hungry for adventure. The challenges of the Antarctic called him with sirens’ voices. ‘Ever since I went within three degrees of the Antarctic Circle, I looked due South,’ he wrote in 1907. ‘I have thought – as I thought then – that’s my mark . . . Reading Captain Scott’s books (2 vols) on the Discovery Expedition made me as keen as mustard.’ When he read news of Shackleton’s thrilling journey towards the Pole on the Nimrod expedition, he wrote home, ‘If only they will leave the South Pole itself alone for a bit they may give me a chance. Don’t laugh!’
Nobody laughed. As a young cadet Bowers had been introduced to Sir Clements Markham, and he made such an impression that in 1909 the old man recommended him to Scott for the Terra Nova. The suggestion was enthusiastically endorsed by Bowers’ old commandant on the Worcester, and, to Birdie’s unending delight, he was accepted without an interview and without submitting a formal application.
It was a difficult time for Emily Bowers, who was distraught to see her son vanish again, and to such an impossibly remote destination. Their parting scenes at Waterloo station in London as Birdie caught the train to Portsmouth to meet the Terra Nova were inhibited by the presence of a truckload of coffins on the platform alongside them.
‘Well, we’re landed with him now and must make the best of it,’ Scott allegedly said to Wilson when they finally met their new recruit. Scott was taken aback by the quasi-comical appearance of this muscle-bound, fivefoot-four-inch sailor with red hair, a pink face and a large nose. But Scott never regretted his decision. Bowers was appointed primarily as a junior officer in charge of expedition stores, possibly the most arduous and thankless position on board. Scott was consistently impressed by his mastery of detail, astonishing hard work and stamina, and the crew quickly got a measure of the man when, on one of his first days on duty, Birdie fell nineteen feet into the ship’s hold, stood up, retrieved his peaked cap and carried on as if nothing had happened.
Scott and his wife Kathleen had sailed directly to the Cape in a merchant ship. Soon after their arrival they went out to Wynberg, turning up at Coghill’s to find Cherry and the others in bed. Two other wives joined their husbands in Simonstown. These were Hilda Evans, wife of Scott’s second-in-command, and Wilson’s wife Oriana. Some of the men were irritated by their presence (‘the wives are much in evidence’). But it was Kathleen Scott who was most in evidence. She was suspected of having too much influence over her husband.
The least conventional thing about Scott was his choice of wife: Kathleen Bruce was a sculptress given to bohemian behaviour and exotic friends. After a strict upbringing in a Jacobean rectory she had gone off to Paris to study art – a daring course of action in 1901. There she became close to Rodin, who taught and encouraged her; and to the avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan, whose illegitimate child she later helped deliver. Kathleen loved to dance herself, but not on a stage: preferably barefoot in the garden, as she was happier outdoors. She had met Scott in 1907 at a lunch party given by Mabel Beardsley, sister of the illustrator Aubrey (there were scandalous rumours that the two had enjoyed an incestuous relationship). Scott had been famous since his return from the Antarctic on his first expedition, and he was a draw at any social function. ‘I glowed rather foolishly and suddenly,’ Kathleen remembered, ‘when I clearly saw him ask his neighbour who I was.’ She was not beautiful, but she was striking, even handsome, with long, thick and slightly frizzy chestnut hair, and throughout her life she was pursued by amorous men. In 1908 Kathleen married her handsome captain (‘Darling,’ she had promised him, ‘I will be good when we’re married’), and the following year their son Peter was born, Kathleen having spent much of her pregnancy sleeping on a beach wrapped in a blanket. She loved babies almost as much as she loved men.
Kathleen held forceful opinions, none expressed more regularly or with more conviction than her view that women were far less interesting than men. If she was bored, as she often was in the company of more conventional women, she found it difficult not to reveal her feelings. Scott often had her with him, and everyone could see that he discussed expeditionary matters with her in detail, and that she had much to say on every subject.
A herd of young British officers bound for the Antarctic, many in uniform, must have had a devastating effect on the young women of the small Cape colony. At one dance Birdie was introduced to the Misses Williams, two young sisters who turned out to be ‘little rippers and ladies too’. So much for wanting a quiet time. A few days later the Misses Williams came aboard, Birdie reported to his sister May, ‘with staid and proper Cherry-Garrard who had accidentally appeared from nowhere when they wanted to come down’. Cherry went on to ‘make hay’ with the Misses Williams. He might have been shy in large groups or at cocktail parties, but he was not diffident with women, or if he was, he overcame his diffidence when an opportunity presented itself. He issued Birdie with peremptory orders to organise a day out with the girls.
At 8.30 on Wednesday morning Birdie and Cherry got hold of a car and driver and called at the Williams’ residence in Cape Town. After being introduced to the girls’ parents (‘the Pater, a lawyer . . . a very sound chap indeed’) they motored off with Kitty and Betty to Hoow-Hoek, about fifty-five miles to the south-west. Birdie let Cherry pick his girl. ‘As I was not in the least particular I let Cherry – who was somewhat near the line one knows so well – have his choice while I kept out of the way with Miss Betty – an
absolutely ripping little girl.’ What Betty made of it was not recorded.
After lunch and a stroll they started back in high spirits, but ten miles later, in the middle of rolling moorland, the car broke down. They were obliged to walk five miles to the nearest village. ‘Cherry took a shorter cut by another way to get us time to wire and the girls and yours truly plugged on for what seemed like crossing Africa before we sighted the village. They stuck it out most pluckily against a stiff breeze . . .’ The hapless driver was eventually set up for the night in his car and Cherry and Birdie joined the girls at the village hotel, having meanwhile reassured the Pater by wire. They had a sing-song in the parlour. ‘The proprietress,’ continued Birdie, ‘who looked upon us all with suspicion, looked in from time to time. At 10 p.m. she assured us that the motor could not come and said she had got a room for the ladies and indicated that Cherry and I had better quit.’ As she spoke, they heard a toot. ‘We had a jolly drive back though it was a wild night and arrived at 2 a.m. when we found the Pater waiting up . . .’
Birdie had fallen for Miss Betty. ‘Perhaps it is well I am off and I should not answer for myself after a little longer acquaintance . . . I don’t think so though. Both Cherry and I are able to see things as they should be though he – not being a sailor and having gone deeper – will like it less than I.’ However deep Cherry had gone, he was determined to conceal it from his mother. Later, before parcelling up his journal for despatch to Lamer where Evelyn was instructed to read it instead of a letter, he wrote up his South African entries without a single reference to his coup de coeur. ‘I did a lot of shopping,’ he concluded.
Meanwhile, who should turn up in Cape Town but Harry Woollcombe, last sighted in Brisbane. He was still preaching furiously for the Church of England Men’s Society, and had arrived in South Africa after an exhausting tour through New Zealand. He took Cherry off to meet the Archbishop and other eminent Cape Town personages, all less appealing than Miss Kitty. It was a busy time. Besides sightseeing (Cherry went up Table Mountain by Skeleton Gorge) there was a banquet to attend and mail to send.
They set sail again on 2 September, and Scott took over the command as far as Melbourne, sending Wilson on to Australia by steamship to recruit another geologist and continue fund-raising. Everyone was disappointed that Wilson was temporarily leaving the ship. ‘It will be terrible without “our Bill”,’ wrote Birdie, ‘as he was always the balancing point in the mess.’ Wilson, meanwhile, was keen to reassure Reggie that the faith they had invested in their protégé was being rewarded. ‘It is delightful to find,’ he wrote, ‘that he [Cherry] is such a real favourite with everyone. . . . You need have no fears for his eyesight. I have so often watched him and have been struck by the absence of all handicap when he might have been bothered by glasses . . .’
Shortly after the Terra Nova left Simonstown she steamed into the famous gales of the roaring forties. All the crew could do was put the engines at dead slow and sail as close to the wind as possible. The little ship rose on the crest of one mountain of water after another, plunging into the foamy valleys in between and rolling sharply, flinging anyone on deck against the rail. Men on the first and middle watches went aloft in the dark in seventy-mile-an-hour winds and driving hail, unable to see the canvas that was flapping crazily four feet away. Despite having broken a small bone in his wrist the night they left South Africa, Cherry learned to reef sails and to work flattened against the yard-arm, and he weathered the storms like an old hand. A member of the expedition later wrote that he was ‘one of the landsmen who took kindly to a sailor’s life’, and Wilson reported gleefully to Reggie that Cherry was ‘as strong as a horse’.
For this leg of the journey Cherry was the sole zoologist. He applied himself to the task with vigour, noting on 14 September that he had been lucky with the bird line and caught three Cape pigeons, two great grey shearwaters and one black-breasted petrel. Below deck the seamen were preparing camping gear, sewing up food bags and repairing lampwick bindings, while in the wardroom sledging plans were again discussed avidly. Cherry discovered that he had already been selected for the important journey with dogs, ponies and sledges to cache stores on the ice in preparation for the dash to the Pole. He was thrilled.
The men who did not know Scott now had the opportunity to see him in action. He was more aloof, as a captain, than his second-in-command Evans: according to Silas Wright, Scott ‘takes no part in skylarking – but always looks on with a grin’, whereas Evans, known as ‘the Skipper’, ‘has a taste for rowdyism’. Short, muscular Evans had a range of wardroom tricks up his sleeve. He was able to pick a man up by his teeth (by getting hold of his belt, for example), and was famed for his ability to rip a pack of cards in half. ‘Evans is leader in all these things,’ an observer wrote of the larks. The difference in personality and leadership style between Scott and his second-in-command was felt keenly throughout the expedition – and after it.
Scott was forty-two years old. He was not a fatherly leader. He was a reserved man, and, like Cherry, he was not at ease at cocktail parties. But Scott was more volatile, and he was subject to black moods that lasted for days. Temperamentally he was more complicated than his peers, especially in his self-doubt, which tortured him. He believed that he was by nature indolent, and that his most vital task was to triumph over his baser self. But he had worked tirelessly to raise funds for the expedition, trailing round the country addressing damp, half-empty halls in provincial towns, sometimes, through no fault of his own, bringing in as little as twenty pounds in a night. Throughout the months of preparation Scott put his shoulder to the punishing wheel of fund-raising without complaint, and he could be very persuasive. Nobody enjoys that kind of work, but Scott enjoyed it less than most. He used to say that the worst part of an expedition was over when the preparation was finished.
The scientists, mostly civilians, were unfamiliar with naval systems and traditions, and they instinctively identified with Wilson. Furthermore, Wilson was always willing to answer their questions and listen to their complaints. Good-natured Bill was one of the few men on the expedition who didn’t grow critical of Scott’s temper, and it was he, not the leader, who inspired superlatives from almost everyone. ‘To all his comrades,’ Raymond Priestley remembered, ‘[he was] the nearest thing to a perfect man they ever knew or can hope to know.’
At Port Melbourne the ship was met by a launch bearing Wilson, his wife Oriana, Kathleen, Hilda Evans and the mailbag. It was dark and lashing with rain, and the sea was rolling heavily, but the women had insisted on persevering, bullying Wilson, who was steering, into submission. ‘I hope,’ he wrote in his diary afterwards, ‘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.’
Cherry had been invited to stay with the Reverend W. H. Fitchett, a friend of his cousin Reggie Smith. A keen traveller and author, whose uplifting books included the bestselling Deeds that Won the Empire, Fitchett had met Cherry through Reggie on a recent visit to England. He was principal of the Methodist Ladies’ College out at Hawthorn, where he and his family also lived. ‘Cherry-Garrard had a look of the stoke-hole about him,’ recalled Fitchett affectionately. ‘He was the picture of health, with his face bronzed. He wore a soft shirt, his nails were broken and dirty, his hands horny, but he was the same charming, sweet-natured gentleman as ever, and we greatly enjoyed having him with us.’
The college was a multi-pinnacled, pseudo-Gothic affair of the kind popular with Australian settlers at the end of the nineteenth century. The girls were in residence, and when a dashing young Englishman appeared en route to the Antarctic they rushed for their cameras and autograph books and vied to be his tennis partner. It was difficult to imagine a more attractive welcome.
Fitchett had heard a good deal about Wilson from Reggie, and Uncle Bill and his wife were duly invited out to the college. After they had gone Fitchett eagerly wrote to Reggie:
Mrs Wilson told me
that she heard Captain Scott discussing the members of the staff with Wilson, and he summed up Apsley Cherry-Garrard saying, ‘He is tip-top always.’ They will select the party for the actual dash for the Pole on the test of their fitness when the moment comes for the adventure, and Dr Wilson told me that he thought Apsley Cherry-Garrard would be one of the chosen party. He is justifying his claim to a place in it by his cheerfulness, his pluck, and his activity.
The expedition left Melbourne on 16 October after some changes of personnel. Once again, Scott wasn’t with them: he was to rejoin them in New Zealand. Before they finally departed, the ship was inspected by an Australian admiral who paused at the sight of Nigger, the expedition cat, reclining magisterially in the hammock the seamen had made him, complete with bedding and pillow.15
In Melbourne Scott had picked up a cable announcing news which was to alter the course of polar history and shape his own destiny. It read simply, ‘Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen .’
On 1 September 1909, embroiled in preparations for his North Pole bid, Amundsen had opened a newspaper and read that someone else had got there first (two people, actually). The air went out of his project as if from a balloon. The tall, inscrutable Norseman with ice-blue eyes considered his position, and kept his own counsel. His lively imagination was fuelled by his powerful ambition: like most explorers, he saw little point in coming second. He had been travelling and training on ice since he was a boy, and he was one of the most experienced ice-men alive. Above all, Amundsen was a man who wanted to make a splash.
He made up his mind to switch poles. Like all expedition leaders, he would certainly return to colossal debt, and it would be far easier to raise funds after the event if he planted the Norwegian flag at the South Pole, rather than following others to its northern counterpart (there was to be no footling around with science after all). With characteristic flair, and with the Fram due to sail in a matter of months, Amundsen did not reveal his new plans to the public, to his backers, or to his crew. He kept silent, and made the startling announcement on the deck of the Fram off Madeira. (The cable to Scott was despatched by Amundsen’s brother Leon, who left the ship at Madeira.) Each man on board was given the opportunity to quit the expedition, and offered a free passage home. None took it. They were going to the South Pole.
