Cherry

by Sara Wheeler

  Cherry had dreaded going aloft in those latitudes, but when he did, he found that it wasn’t so bad. As the temperature dropped to 34 degrees, new birds circled the ship. Wilson snared an Antarctic petrel, and Cherry learned to identify whales from a spotter’s guide pinned to the wardroom wall. Early in the morning of 9 December a cry came from the crow’s nest, ‘Large iceberg ahead, sir.’ When the steward appeared in the nursery, adding the news to his greeting, for once they all sprang out of bed. On deck, squinting in the buttery light, they saw a tabular berg, eighty feet in height and a mile long, its fissured cliffs pocked with foamy caverns at the deep green waterline and shimmering in the dry polar air.

  At this stage they were getting about two hours of darkness a night. ‘We are shaking down capitally with all our new hands,’ Cherry wrote. ‘When we are so close together it does not take long . . . I thought that after leaving New Zealand it would be rather hard to reconcile oneself to such an isolated existence. But I would not go back now for anything.’ He was earning a reputation as a solid team player, and was such a smiler that his nickname often turned into ‘Cheery’ or, affectionately, ‘Cheery Blackguard’.

  Soon after they encountered their first berg, they entered the pack ice. This was much further north than Scott had anticipated. ‘One of the best mornings I have ever spent,’ rejoiced Cherry. ‘Bump! We have just charged our first ice!’ On 10 December the ship crossed the Antarctic Circle, and there was great excitement on deck when streaky brown crabeater seals were spotted lounging on the floes. Men leant over the shuddering forecastle rail to watch the iron-plated prow battering the pack ice in an unearthly cacophany of swishing and grinding. As if in retaliation, the pack thickened around them into frozen waves thirty feet high. The pack ice of the Ross Sea in the sunshine is an incomparable sight, the burnished coppers and rosy pinks of the austral skies reflecting off glittering and translucent bergy whites. That night, the sun did not set. ‘It was more than a wonderful day,’ wrote Cherry.

  While the ship was stuck in the ice they lowered a plank over the side and practised skiing. They also had to exercise the dogs and water ship. The overworked condenser was struggling to produce enough drinking water, and as salt drains out of the top layer of old sea ice they were able to replenish their supply by hacking off large chunks with a pick and passing them aboard in a relay. It was so mild that they were able to go bareheaded, and so still that at the regular Sunday service held on deck their hymns broke the silence. Initially someone played the pianola at church. This was not a success, as the machine operated with rolls of music and resolutely refused to produce hymns, spontaneously bursting into ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’ after Scott had intoned the collect.

  The men were captivated by the sight of their first penguins, quickly identifed as Adélies. Someone threw a potato over the side, causing a sensation among the birds, who were so enthralled with the tuber that they camped around it. ‘I have never thought of anything as good as this life,’ Cherry wrote in his diary. ‘The novelty, interest, colour, animal life and good fellowship go to make up an almost ideal picnic.’

  There were low moments. Cherry cut his hand on a flensing knife and found it dreary not being able to work, obliged instead ‘to moon around with a gun’ or read Nansen’s Farthest North on his damp bunk. The leak supposedly mended in Lyttelton had not been mended at all, and bailing was a Casaubon-like enterprise. If there was any chance of movement Pennell or Teddy Evans stood in the crow’s nest, guiding the ship through lanes of blue water by shouting to the steersman through a megaphone. Progress was painfully slow, which was agony for Scott, who was desperate to begin his sledging programme: he needed to make one major journey laying in depôts of food and fuel before the first Antarctic winter. It was bad luck to have met the pack ice this far north. Scott watched his coal supplies being burnt down and his ponies and dogs losing condition and voiced his dread that if they were held up for much longer they might have to winter in the pack ice. ‘What an exasperating game this is –’ he confided to his diary, ‘one cannot tell what is going to happen in the next half or even quarter of an hour. At one moment everything looks flourishing, the next one begins to doubt if it is possible to get through.’

  Blue whales 100 feet long fluked round the ship, their jets of pale grey fog squirting 15 feet into the air. A leopard seal reminded Cherry of the sea monster in Kipling, and one of the scientists found eighteen penguins in the creature’s stomach. At last, on 19 December, Cherry’s hand had healed well enough for him to get back to skinning his zoological specimens. That day he saw his first Weddell, the enormous mottled seal that lives further south than any other, its sharp teeth enabling it to keep holes open in the ice. Two days later, Midsummer Day (the temperature was twenty degrees below freezing), he went out onto the ice and fell through twice, whereupon he was ‘ignominiously called back by Scott’ in front of everyone. ‘Felt a bit chippy . . .’ he confided in his diary that evening, ‘but put it down to overeating and no exercise.’ Scott’s admonition had brought on the chippiness, not too much food. The wire was stretched as tightly as ever.

  The weather had been cloudy for most of the slog through the pack, much to Ponting’s annoyance. But Christmas Eve was windless and sunny, the bergs shimmering in a limpid light and the pack crunching gently. Dinner deteriorated into a ‘general scrap’ in the wardroom. ‘Titus dragged all Bill’s clothes off,’ Cherry noted, ‘and Bill burst naked into the wardroom dragging Titus along on his back.’

  For Cherry, the next day was ‘the most Christmassy Christmas I have ever had’. He opened a parcel of calendars and cards from home, doling the calendars out as presents and saving the cards for the following Christmas. Evelyn had sent so many packages down to New Zealand, in fact, that he was able to present his colleagues with a range of supplies. Griff recorded that although he had known Cherry for some time, ‘A most acceptable pair of Jaeger socks brought about our real introduction!’ (He also noted privately that his benefactor was ‘very pleasant but with the Oxford shyness with newcomers’.) Cherry was generous by temperament. In later years, when he had become awkward and something of a curmudgeon, he remained a loyal and munificent friend. ‘Cherry is very generous,’ Birdie wrote to his mother on the journey to New Zealand, ‘and one has to fight with him all the time to keep him from paying for everything.’

  After church the lower ranks had mutton for Christmas dinner; they didn’t think penguin was good enough for the occasion. The officers and scientists had their celebration in the evening. The wardroom was decked with sledging flags, of which Cherry’s, depicting the family arms, was given place of honour on the wall. The table was laid with a new blue cloth, and after bowls of salted almonds the stewards served up turtle soup, stewed penguin breasts in redcurrant jelly (not unlike jugged hare, according to Ponting), roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, asparagus, flaming plum pudding, mince pies, preserved fruits and a jumbo box of Fry’s chocolates, the lot sluiced down with champagne, port and liqueurs. After the meal Ponting played his banjo and, going twice round the table, everybody had to contribute a song, though Gran made a speech instead. ‘I do think in my mind of Captain Scott this time next year,’ he said in his staccato Norwegian accent, ‘sitting quite close to the South Pole, a little frost-bitten on the nose perhaps but very warm inside. We do always say in our country that bad luck in the first of an expedition do mean good luck in the end and so I do not mind our sticking in the pack for this so long time.’

  Shortly after Christmas they were able to sunbathe on deck, crammed into the slivers of open space lying face against tail like sardines. At midnight on 29 December the Terra Nova left the pack ice and entered open water. They had spent almost three weeks at the whim of the pack, far more than anticipated. Unknown to them, less than a week later the Fram entered the pack ice. She took just four days to clear it.

  On the last day of 1910 the rigging was crusted with icicles and the air filled with driving snow. Cherry was seasick again and w
ent to bed, but someone crept into the nursery and whispered in his ear, ‘Have you seen the land?’ Cherry went up wrapped in blankets. ‘And there they were: the most glorious peaks appearing, as it were like satin, above the clouds, the only white in a dark horizon.’ The peaks were Mount Sabine and the Admiralty Range, over a hundred miles away but indubitably on the Antarctic continent.

  The next day was clear and sharp, ‘the very air permeated with vitality’. Below decks, a seaman’s rabbit had given birth to seventeen little bunnies. ‘Our previous troubles,’ Birdie wrote to May, ‘seem to have fizzled out with the glad New Year.’ On 2 January 1911, Cherry’s twenty-fifth birthday, they spotted Mount Erebus in the distance. ‘I have seen Fuji,’ Cherry wrote in The Worst Journey, the most dainty and graceful of mountains; and also Kangchenjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most part nearer the horizontal than the vertical. And so he is the most restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy banner of his cloud of steam.

  Scott planned to establish his base on Ross Island, a volcanic landmass just off the Antarctic coast. The Discovery men knew the island well, as they had sledged over most of it. It lay in the Ross Sea, and was separated from the mainland on one side by a wide channel called McMurdo Sound. Specifically, Scott intended to set up camp near the Cape Crozier headland where Discovery men had found an Emperor penguin rookery – the first anyone had ever seen.

  As they approached Crozier’s basalt cliffs, Cherry and five other men rowed over in a whaler. But he was so nervous that he could not row properly. ‘I made an awful ass of myself,’ he confessed to his diary, ‘not being able to manage my oar at all, and I spent my time catching crabs, until even Scott said under his breath, “Oh! Steady on!” ’ But they couldn’t find a place to land – the swell was too heavy. Then, on the short row back to the ship, a crag snapped off the cliffs and hundreds of tons of volcanic rock crashed into the sea a few yards from the boat, enveloping them in dust and ice.

  Wilson was frustrated at their failure to land, as he was longing to investigate the Emperor penguin colony and continue the work on the bird’s breeding cycle that he had begun on the Discovery. As it was, he watched a stranded chick on the bay ice in a stage of development that nobody had ever seen before, the wings already feathered like an adult’s, but much of the body still covered in down. Wilson was to learn more of the Crozier penguins; and so was Cherry.

  They steamed on to McMurdo Sound in search of a landing, carrying out a detailed running survey of Ross Island. ‘Many watched all night’, recalled Cherry, ‘as this new world unfolded itself, cape by cape and mountain by mountain.’ Early in the morning, when it was sunny and calm, the sea scored blue and white, the pack loose and whales spouting all around, Wilson was invariably alone in the crow’s nest, ‘my private chapel’. It was a familiar landscape to this deeply thoughtful man. ‘These days are with one for all time – they are never to be forgotten,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and they are to be found nowhere else in all the world but at the poles. The peace of God which passeth all understanding reigns here in these days.’

  The transcendent beauty of the Antarctic has always awakened a deep sense of wonder in the human spirit. The scale, the purity, the unownedness: these are characteristics that stimulate contemplation. Then, and now, it would be impossible, looking out at the incandescent band of purply blue light that lies between ice and sky on an Antarctic horizon, not to think about forces beyond the human plane. From the fecund coast to the sterile interior, the dignity of the landscape shines a light onto a corner of the human psyche that is rarely lit among the gas bills and rain-splattered streets of home. ‘There, if anywhere,’ wrote the chronically unsentimental Griff Taylor, ‘is life worthwhile.’ ‘Antarctica,’ said the nature-writer Barry Lopez, ‘reflects the mystery that we call God.’

  After much confabulation, Scott picked out a low headland of eruptive rock north of a point the Discovery people knew as the Skuary. Ice anchors were laid, and Scott, Wilson and Evans left the blubbery Terra Nova and walked a mile over the sea ice to the headland. Scott had decided: this place was their home. He named it Cape Evans.

  5

  Out of the World

  For a week everyone worked nineteen hours a day setting up quarters for the twenty-five men who were to stay for the winter. The constant daylight disoriented them at first, and they were constrained by an epidemic of snow-blindness. But the clean and bracing Antarctic air felt fine. The dogs were in excellent form, dragging their leaders down the gangplank and running light loads between ship and shore while hurling themselves gleefully at marauding penguins. The ponies also began pulling loads (a two-year supply of fuel, food and other essentials had to come off the ship), and Cherry, soon dark with sunburn and dirt, was assigned to pony-leading. It was a devilish job, as the beasts were committed bolters, but he gained valuable experience in an important field, and Scott noted his talent for handling animals.

  The site of the hut had been selected partly for the access it offered to the Ross Ice Shelf, then known as the Great Ice Barrier. This immense sheet of floating ice, about the size of France, was to provide Scott’s route onto the continent itself.17 Scott was going to have to cross the Barrier and march through a gap in the Transantarctic Mountains in order to reach the Polar Plateau and, ultimately, the Pole. Ross Island abutted the Barrier, and Scott had positioned his winter quarters on a black sand beach on the northern side of a spur of Mount Erebus. The Pole was over 860 miles away.

  It had been an unusually warm summer, and as a result Cape Evans faced an expanse of open water. From their new home the men could see the mountains glittering on the other side of McMurdo Sound, while the walls of passing icebergs reflected the saffron sun and crinkled sapphire water. The four Dellbridge Islands lay within three miles of the hut, all inundated volcanic craters, and along the coast in both directions rippling glaciers tumbled from the slopes of Erebus.

  The highlight of the first week ashore was an episode involving Ponting and a pod of hungry killer whales who burst up from under a floe just as he had set his camera down upon it. Next, one of the motor sledges disappeared. The first two had been successfully unloaded, but the third crashed through thin ice and sank, a disaster felt keenly by Scott, who had invested a great deal of hope and effort in his motors. They were four-cylinder monsters with caterpillar tracks and air-cooled engines, specifically designed for use on snow and lacking both steering and brakes. Although touted as forerunners of the tank, they had an upholstered chair on each end and resembled not so much military ordinance as vehicles for transporting elderly members of the royal family among adulatory crowds. The two surviving sledges were able to ferry stores ashore, and Scott still cherished the hope they would do much more, and help him reach the Pole. The shrewder of his men already had their doubts.

  With stores neatly arranged around the hut and guarded by pairs of upright skis, the Union Jack was hoisted. On the ship Cherry unhooked the royal family from the wardroom wall and sledged them to the hut. He was sorry that the King and Queen could not see themselves whizzing over the floe. Finally the pianola was also sledged over, and the first tune it played was ‘Home, Sweet Home’.

  Fifty feet long, twenty-five feet wide and nine feet to the eaves, the hut was heated by a huge round stove that dominated the interior like a lighthouse. Off the entrance porch a passage led to stables built onto the side, where Titus Oates and Anton, a Russian groom, tended the ponies. Once a jockey in Moscow, Anton was four feet ten and spoke very little English. Linguistic difficulties notwithstanding, he was already devoted to Titus.

  In the main body of the hut a bulkhead of packing cases divided the officers’ quarters at the far end from the galley and the seamen’s berths nearer the porch. Cherry was billet
ed with Birdie, Titus, Dr Atkinson (‘Atch’) and the dog-handler, Cecil Meares, in the warren of bunks known as the Tenements. Along the wall furthest from the porch the scientists had their lab tables and Ponting his darkroom, where he also slept. ‘It is wonderfully comfortable,’ Cherry wrote, ‘and the gramophone sounds ripping – Melba, Caruso, Scotti, Clara Butt . . .’ Even the seal rissoles tasted good.

  He was subject to difficult moods, even at this happy time. On 12 January he wrote, ‘This evening a variety of things went wrong and I felt very chippy. I am going to turn in with a little Tennyson for company.’ He cheered up two days later when Scott asked him if he would lead ponies on the depôt journey. It was a great honour.

  The depôt journey was a key feature of Scott’s strategy, and the first step towards the Pole. To prepare for the crucial polar trek the following spring, caches or depôts of fuel, manfood and animal fodder had to be laid as close to the Pole as possible before the winter set in. Only about twelve weeks of daylight remained in which to accomplish this task. Yet it had to be done, as the window of light and weather the following summer would allow only for the great march itself. Everything depended on the ponies. They were to pull the biggest loads, and Scott, who was to lead the depôt journey, selected his best men to handle them. Cherry’s inclusion meant that he was to gain valuable sledging experience early in the expedition, making it almost certain that he would be included in the Southern Journey – and perhaps even go to the Pole itself.