by Sara Wheeler
As Scott pulled the men up, he said, ‘This is the end of the Pole.’ He had invested so much hope in the ponies, and with four more gone before the journey to the Pole had even begun he saw little hope of success. The dogs alone could not pull four or five months’ worth of food and fuel: Scott did not have enough of them. He was tense with anxiety and dismay. They pitched camp, and Birdie, realising how much was at stake, persuaded Scott that they should try to rescue the three drifting ponies who were waiting trustingly for their nosebags on a clunking floe. ‘The others meanwhile, a little overwrought,’ Scott wrote; ‘Scott was the man who was overwrought,’ Cherry remembered. When they got to the drifting ponies, Punch leapt for it, but fell in, and after a struggle lay motionless in the frothy water. The men looked down at the still, white corpse in sorrow and despair. Then Punch snorted. A horrified Scott covered his face with his hands. ‘Oh! Cherry, Cherry,’ he cried, ‘why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t dead?’ But they couldn’t get Punch out, so Oates brained him with a pick.
In the end they saved one pony. Of the eight that had started the depôt journey, two were still alive. On 2 March Scott wrote in his diary, ‘The events of the past 48 hours bid fair to wreck the expedition, and the only one comfort is the miraculous avoidance of loss of life.’
Back at Hut Point, Cherry and eleven others had to wait for the sea ice to freeze: it was their only route back to the main hut fifteen miles away at Cape Evans. It took a month longer than they had expected, leaving them stranded in the old Discovery shelter as autumn slid into winter. It was not a friendly hut. There was no outlet for the blubber stove, so the interior was permanently murky and filled with acrid smoke, and as neither walls nor roof were insulated it was rarely warm. They had exhausted their sledging supplies and were dependent on seals for food, fuel and light, though they had plenty of biscuit (delicious fried in blubber) and a small store of luxuries such as chocolate, lentils and raisins. Improvisation is the key to happiness in any camp, but attempts to manufacture an acetylene gas plant from a case of carbide they dug out resulted in several minor explosions before the project was abandoned. The men were black, and smelt of blubber. When Griff Taylor’s Geological Party got in after six weeks exploring the dry valleys in the Western Mountains they failed to recognise their sooty companions. These four new arrivals brought the population of the hut to sixteen.
They went climbing, or crouched in the lee of rocks on top of Observation Hill, sketching the glowing amber landscapes of late autumn. ‘We spent . . . our evenings in long discussions which seldom settled anything,’ Cherry wrote. Sitting on packing cases, they smoked in the dim glow of candles and the blubber lamp before spreading their reindeer-pelt sleeping bags on the floor. Water dripped on them all night, though after six weeks’ hard sledging they were able to sleep for twelve hours at a stretch without any difficulty. ‘Perhaps this is not everybody’s notion of a good time,’ Cherry wrote, ‘but it was good enough for us.’
Still dreaming of sea ice and killer whales, a week later, on 16 March, he went out with the last sledging party of the season to boost the depôt at Corner Camp. It was an eight-day trip. The temperature floundered in the minus thirties and forties and the wind shrieked furiously down from the Plateau. Silas wrote:
Supper by candlelight in frozen sweaty gear with hoarfrost down one’s neck and over everything. The metal cooker and Primus blistering at every touch. Then a struggle to unroll the frozen bags, change into frozen finnesko [reindeer-skin footwear, with fur on the outside] and wet warm socks . . . With luck you have melted the bag after two hours shivering and then you have all the feelings of a wet bath sponge till joy comes in the morning.
Even then, it took them an hour to put their boots back on.
At Hut Point, anxieties pressed upon Scott. ‘Bit by bit I am losing all faith in the dogs,’ he noted in his diary. As the days shortened the men lapsed into what Cherry described as ‘a very lazy and rather irritating existence waiting for the sea to freeze, which it does about every 24 hours, and then comes the wind and out it goes’. A dubious mass of brownish glue turned up under some snow and was found to be ten-year-old Bovril – a major discovery. They thawed out some old copies of the Girl’s Own Paper , and a battered edition of Stanley Weyman’s My Lady Rotha, which they all read, the suspense of the plot permanent since the end was missing. After the last box of lavatory paper had been counted out – twenty-nine sheets were issued to each man – back numbers of the Contemporary Review (‘contemporary to ten years ago’) fulfilled a useful function.
At last, on 11 April nine men, including Scott, left for the hazardous crossing to Cape Evans, leaving Cherry and the others to bring back the dogs and ponies when the sea ice thickened.
The seven grease-covered men left at Hut Point had run out of most things, but they were a happy party. On Easter Sunday Titus Oates made a special tinned haddock breakfast, a biscuit and cheese hoosh for lunch, and a pemmican fry for dinner, using a precious tin of Nestlé’s milk for the cocoa and tea. (Titus was full of ‘Robinson Crusoe genius’, according to Teddy Evans.) It was minus 25 outside. ‘Those Hut Point days,’ remembered Cherry, ‘would prove some of the happiest of my life. Just enough to eat and keep us warm, no more – no frills or trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life . . . the luxuries of civilisation satisfy only those wants which they themselves create.’
When Cherry finally arrived back at Cape Evans he hadn’t washed or shaved for twelve weeks and three days. His beard was white and grey. The men from Hut Point were so filthy that their anxious companions at Cape Evans at first thought they were the Norwegians. But what a welcome they had in the warm, dry hut. Light, noise, cutlery, clean faces – they sat next to the huge round stove and worked their way through a feast which included rice pudding, figs and custard and a bucket of cocoa. The primitive hut had been transformed. Telephones connected it with two science shelters and a sophisticated acetylene lighting system had been installed. ‘Today has been the greatest fun,’ Cherry wrote two days after he got in, ‘fitting up my bunk, fitting up shelves, unpacking my Kiplings, and now getting into The Light that Failed for the fifth or sixth time.’ Cherry identified with many of Kipling’s motley cast of heroes, none more closely than Dick Heldar from The Light that Failed. He latched on to Heldar’s urge to travel to find his vocation (his ‘go-fever’), his poor sight and his puzzled consideration of the eternal conflict between art and action. The novel as a whole endorsed the conservative, anti-feminist world-view that Cherry had absorbed throughout his youth, as well as his father’s attitudes to Indians, and to foreigners in general. ‘The sun rose for the last time after service this morning . . .’ Cherry continued in his diary. ‘It was a beautiful sight behind the glacier – the ice cliffs quite green, and all round bathed in a rosy glow fading into pure orange ochre.’
A pony and a dog had died while the men were out laying depôts, and round in the stables, Anton, his English unimproved, was hunched over a blubber stove making bran mash. The surviving ponies were horribly thin – ‘regular hat racks’, according to Deb.
In the brief silver twilight, the Antarctic quivered on the cusp between day and night. Measured in mass and energy, the growth and decay of Antarctic sea ice are the greatest seasonal events on earth. Around the hut, the ice cracked like a whip as the surface cooled and contracted, and a pallid mist stole over the freezing Sound and glazed the bergs, clamped in now for the winter. Finally the opalescent light faded into the chilled blackness of the polar night.
They might not have had light, but with so much sea frozen the men had more solid territory to explore. On clear days, guided by the ghostly outline of Erebus, they roamed the glaciers and islands among which they were marooned and skied under the great dark walls of the ice cliffs. Most had pet projects to occupy the spare winter hours: Cherry was designing and building a stone taxidermy lab. But, again, a note of unease crept into his diary. ‘I feel very unsettled coming back to this easy life,’ he w
rote. He began sleeptalking more frequently. ‘Every morning now,’ he wrote on 25 April, ‘there is a recital of the curious things I have said in my sleep. Last night I gave a speech on the gramophone.’
The sixteen officers and scientists and nine seamen settled into their winter routine. They were called at 8.15. The cook served up fried seal’s liver and porridge for breakfast, but as everyone liked porridge there was never enough to go round. If it was fine, in the morning Cherry, Titus and Birdie took the ponies out in the moonlight, its soft beams silvering the crenellated bergs. Sometimes they helped the scientists with their work, or assisted the cook in fetching supplies (on one occasion two men were almost killed by a 500-pound case of hams flying through the air in an eighty-mile-an-hour wind). They returned with ice in their beards to clear the long table of its cargo of books, charts and glass tubes and lay it up for lunch. The meal consisted of bread, butter, jam or cheese (on alternate days), and, twice a week, sardines or lambs’ tongues. Tea and cocoa were followed by pipes, and then, unless a blizzard was raging, they went out again, returning for hut work and a spot of pianola before dinner. The evening repast always began with tinned soup, which was followed by seal or penguin (seal’s liver curry was popular) and mutton on Sundays, served with tinned vegetables. They drank diluted lime juice – often with a suspicious penguin flavour derived from the ice slopes from which they quarried their water – for its anti-scorbutic properties. Alcohol was served only on birthdays and other special occasions. (A careful record was kept to ensure that each man had only one birthday a year.)
Scott had arranged a winter lecture programme, scheduling three talks a week (everyone except him thought this was too many). Some lectures were gripping, but when Deb spoke on volcanoes several people fell alseep, and after Silas Wright, the physicist, had held forth on ‘The Constitution of Matter’, he recorded in his diary, ‘Wonder if any of them knew what I was talking about.’ Ponting had brought his slide collections with him, and his illustrated talks were popular, though Cherry noted sniffily that his lecture on Burma ‘showed merely a tourist’s knowledge of the country’.
The acetylene was turned off at about half-past ten in the evening, whereupon the hut was dark except for the glow of the galley stove and the silhouette of the nightwatchman preparing his supper by oil lamp. If it was calm outside only snores, the ticks of the instruments or the whine of a dog broke up the silence. But it is rarely calm in an Antarctic winter. More often, the roars and howls of a blizzard shook the hut and hurled pebbles against the wooden walls.
The scientists pressed on during the dark months. Hydrogen-filled balloons attached to fine silk thread floated off, carrying temperature and pressure recorders. Atch, the quiet navy doctor, was doubling up as a parasitologist, and his corner of the hut bristled with culture-ovens, test-tubes and microscopes, the man himself quietly crooning among them. Alongside him Simpson’s Corner, the kingdom of meteorologist George Simpson, was crammed with every kind of weather-measuring device from barometers, thermometers and thermographs to an anemometer connected to input tubes on the roof (it was rechristened the Blizzometer). The biologists caught fish in a trap lowered into an ice hole; having been sketched and dissected, the fish were eaten, though without much enthusiasm.
Scott took an interest in every experiment. He had an oddly religious attitude to the work. ‘Science –’ he wrote in his diary on 9 May, ‘the rock foundation of all effort!’ He remembered how, a decade earlier, the conflict between science and exploration had almost ended his first expedition before it had begun, and he was determined that neither should be neglected in 1911. From the beginning Scott regularly proclaimed that the aims of the expedition were twofold: to continue the scientific and geographical work begun on his previous expedition, and to plant the Union Jack in the ice at the South Pole. But the twin goals formed an uneasy alliance. When it was all over, Cherry concluded that it had been an error to pursue both.
Scott asked Cherry to edit the expedition newspaper. The tradition of the polar newspaper had been established on Arctic expeditions. It was enthusiastically taken up by the Discovery men, and Shackleton had become the first editor of the South Polar Times. Desperate to do a good job, Cherry began by nailing a flour box to a wall alongside a notice inviting anonymous contributions for the first edition. While he waited, he read Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge, wrote a report on the building of snow huts for Scott, and put the roof on his stone taxidermy lab.
The lecture at which nobody slept was Scott’s, for he unfolded his plans for the polar journey. Cape Evans to ninety south and back was over 1,700 miles. Scott intended to get to the Polar Plateau by sledging up the 100-mile-long Beardmore Glacier which flowed through a gap in the Transantarctic Mountains and drained into the Ross Ice Shelf. The Beardmore had been discovered by Shackleton during the Nimrod expedition, and Scott was relying heavily on his reports. Scott’s experience on the depôt journey, when the temperatures on the Barrier had been so low, had convinced him that he should wait until November before starting out for the Pole. It meant that the polar party would not be back until late March, and Scott officially called for volunteers to stay a second year.
Scott’s transport arrangements had been the subject of endless debate and speculation in the hut, and now he revealed that he was taking the ponies only to the foot of the Beardmore. As for the dogs: he was sure they would not make it even that far. It was to be manhauling alone for the long, last leg to the Pole – just like the epic British expeditions to the Arctic in which teams of men in leather harnesses had stooped in the slicing wind to drag wooden sledges with names such as Hotspur and Resolute . Many of Scott’s men had absorbed the quaint British romanticisation of manhauling. ‘It will be a fine thing,’ wrote Birdie, ‘to do that plateau with man-haulage in these days of the supposed decadence of the British race.’ The idea that decadence might be foiled by good old teeth-gritting and pulling would be farcical, had it not turned out to be tragic.
Dogs had achieved remarkable success in the Arctic, both for indigenous peoples and explorers. Yet Sir Clements Markham was fatally prejudiced against them, preferring the old system, which he seemed to think was more British. Behind his illogical ideas there lay the conviction that mighty Britons had little to learn from foreigners. American explorers were often more willing to adapt: Robert Peary was one of many who had learned vitally useful dog-driving skills from the peoples of Greenland. Scott had absorbed some of Markham’s opinions on the questionable value of dogs. In addition, both Shackleton and Scott had been influenced by what they perceived to be the poor performance of dogs on the Discovery venture. In fact, dogs had achieved some success on that expedition. Such failures as there were had come about as a result of faulty diet and handling.
Scott had confessed in his diary that he was losing faith in the dogs he had brought down on the Terra Nova, but the fact was that he had never had much. The geologist Ray Priestley summed it up like this: ‘Scott took the British naval tradition with him to the south, and his own streak of sentiment caused him, combined with some ineptitude in dog management, to return from his first journey still further certain that dogs were of little use.’ Cecil Meares, the man in charge of the dogs, thought Scott regularly took poor decisions regarding the animals. It was a crucial failing on Scott’s part, horribly apparent from a reading of Amundsen’s account of his own expedition to the South Pole, in which the dogs emerge with more distinct personalities than the men. ‘If we had a watchword,’ Amundsen wrote, ‘it was dogs first and dogs all the time.’ ‘The fact of the matter is,’ Deb concluded years later, ‘that neither Scott nor Shackleton, the two great exponents of manhauling, understood the management of sledge dogs.’
Scott was a likeable man. Though Cherry came to be critical of some aspects of his leadership, he respected him, and his deep affection for him never really wavered. ‘He was eager to accept suggestions if they were workable,’ he was to write of Scott in The Worst Journey, ‘and always keen to sift
even the most unlikely theories if by any means they could be shaped to a desired end . . . Essentially an attractive personality, with strong likes and dislikes, he excelled in making his followers his friends by a few words of sympathy or praise: I have never known anybody, man or woman, who could be so attractive when he chose.’ When he wrote that Scott was ‘a subtle character, full of lights and shades’, Cherry could have been describing himself. ‘But few who knew him realized how shy and reserved the man was, and it was partly for this reason that he so often laid himself open to misunderstanding.
‘Add to this that he was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership to such a man may be almost a martyrdom.’ In the original typescript Cherry wrote, ‘nightmare’ in place of ‘martyrdom’. To lead none the less: Cherry recognised what a triumph it was. ‘Temperamentally,’ he continued, ‘[he] was a weak man, and might very easily have been an autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might last for weeks . . . He cried more easily than any man I have ever known.
‘What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together. It would be stupid to say he had all the virtues: he had, for instance, little sense of humour, and he was a bad judge of men.’ This was a harsh criticism. Cherry was thinking primarily of Evans, and Scott had recognised that Teddy was difficult. He had recorded misgivings about other men in his diary too. Gran was ‘a lazy, posing fellow . . . who never does his share of work’, and it had been ‘a terrible mistake to bring him’; ‘Meares hates exercise’; Simpson displayed ‘cocksureness’; and poor old Nelson, one of the biologists, was both idle and ‘a young man whose habit of life is that of the pot-house politician’.
