by Sara Wheeler
Then they heard the metallic cries of the Emperors.
Late in the afternoon they reached an impasse and were forced, reluctantly, to turn round and return to the knoll. The next day, climbing in the short period of dim midday twilight, they roped together and found a better route, cutting steps in the ice with their axes and using their sledge as a bridge over soft crevasse lids. Two miles down they reached the cliffs leading to the rookery and glimpsed a hundred birds huddled on the sea ice, trumpeting and shuffling – and with eggs on their toes.
‘After indescribable effort and hardship,’ Cherry wrote, ‘we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made – and we had but a moment to give.’
Alone of all creatures, Emperors incubate and hatch their young in the polar winter. In May the female lays a single egg which she passes almost immediately to her mate on the ice before heading out to sea to feed. The male incubates the egg in a brood pouch above his toes for over two months, in darkness, without food or drink, in temperatures of minus forty and fifty and sixty. To conserve body heat he huddles together with the other males from his rookery, each bird taking a turn on the windward edge. The tightly packed group does not move more than a few feet during this two-month incubation period. The fattened female returns a day or two before the chick hatches in mid July. But Wilson didn’t know any of that.
The men were not elated: they were too anxious about the imminence of total darkness and the ominous wind from the south. They were still not at sea level. Initially foiled by walls of ice, Wilson eventually found a hole like a fox’s burrow. They wriggled through and found themselves on the rim of a dwarf ice cliff. One of them had to stay up there, to haul the others back. Cherry was the obvious candidate: his short sight made him the least able. As he waited, ice axe fixed in a crevasse, Bill and Birdie got to the rookery, collected five eggs and killed three birds to flense for the blubber stove. Then they were hoisted back up the cliff.
As they struggled back to the igloo, the thin light drained beyond the horizon. On the steep slopes, Cherry couldn’t even see the footholds they had cut with their axes on the way down. He had to kick indiscriminately to get a toe-hold. Bill said, ‘Cherry, you must learn how to use an ice axe.’ Birdie was proving the most physically robust, Cherry the least. He fell and fell in his blindness, breaking both the precious eggs he was carrying; the grease did his gloves good, he noticed later. It was beginning to blow hard, and they almost missed the igloo. Sleepless, icy and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, ‘we were already beginning to think of death as a friend’.
They moved into the igloo for the first time as a blizzard set in, and pitched their tent outside the entrance. During dinner, a blob of boiling blubber flew into Wilson’s eye, injuring it so badly that he thought he was going to lose it, though he didn’t tell the others that.
They had only one tin of oil left. Then, some time in the early hours of 22 July, the tent blew away.
It had taken them almost three weeks to get to Crozier. Could they possibly get back without a tent?
The igloo, sucking in drift like a vacuum, was close to collapse, and everything inside was under six inches of snow. The men shouted at each other over the roar of the blizzard. In his book Cherry talks about his lack of hope and impious attitude; in his diary, written up back at the hut, he recorded, ‘I said my prayers and waited.’ The day after the tent went, the canvas roof and door of the igloo were whipped away in strips, the blocks that had secured them crashing all around. The men retreated into the sleeping bags as if to their graves. For forty-eight hours they lay in the open igloo in darkness, without food or drink, mummified in snow. Birdie and Bill sang hymns, and when he caught snatches of a tune, Cherry joined in. The remaining ribbons of canvas cracked like a continual firing squad (at the hut sixty-seven miles away the anemometer was recording windspeeds of over seventy-five miles an hour). Bill prayed hard. The second day was his birthday, and Birdie thumped him at intervals to see if he was still alive.
Has any man or woman ever come closer to the limits of endurance? I doubt it. Cherry freely admitted that he had no hope of survival. ‘I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven,’ he recalled, ‘but candidly I did not care.’ Confronting death, he thought about his life, and regretted the parts he had wasted. ‘The road to Hell might be paved with good intentions: the road to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities. I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have had with them: what glorious fun! . . . and I wanted peaches and syrup – badly.’ He resolved to get some morphine from the medical case if things got unbearable. ‘Yes, comfortable warm reader,’ he wrote. ‘Men do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.’
After two days and two nights without a meal they struggled to prepare tea and pemmican, rising from their snow coffins to sit up in their bags and pull the floor cloth over their heads to protect the thin Primus pyre. By then, the blubber stove had given up. The tea was choked with reindeer hair from the bags as well as penguin feathers, dirt and debris, but how delicious it was. The blubber left in the pot meant it had a burnt taste, and for the rest of his life singed food gave Cherry a Proustian rush.
In a lull in the blizzard they went out, and Birdie found the tent on a lower slope. It was like an Old Testament miracle. The tent had gone up poles and all like a shut umbrella, and was perfectly usable. ‘Our lives had been taken away and given back to us,’ Cherry wrote. ‘We were so thankful, we said nothing.’
Bill wasn’t prepared to risk further delay in those murderous temperatures with so little oil. There was no question now of pickling the booty before they got back to the hut – if they ever did. So they turned for home, Cherry feeling ‘as if I should crack’. They were all weak. Yet Birdie had not even used the down bag each had brought as a reserve lining for the reindeer-pelt sleeping bags. He had offered his to Cherry on the way out to Crozier, and Cherry had refused. Now, getting closer to collapse every day, he accepted. ‘I felt a brute to take it,’ Cherry wrote, ‘but I was feeling useless unless I got some sleep.’
Birdie’s stamina and his ability to withstand the cold had already become legendary on the expedition. His tough, strong limbs never tired, and he found a way round every difficulty. Before setting out on the winter journey he had constructed a special hat with extensions to protect his long nose from frostbite. He looked out for the hardest jobs – he had been the one to lug the biggest stones to the igloo – and he took responsibility for the meteorological instruments. Throughout the Crozier trip he kept an excellent weather log (‘a masterpiece’, according to the official meteorologist), despite the fact that touching metal with naked fingers for even a fraction of a second led to frostbite. ‘He was up and out of his bag continually,’ Cherry wrote in his description of the blizzard on the knoll, ‘stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.’
Before leaving Cape Evans Birdie had secretly stowed two tins of sweets on one of the sledges as a surprise for the others, one to celebrate their arrival at the knoll, and the other for Bill’s birthday. When things were at their gravest, he was able to infect the others with his positive outlook. After the tent blew away and they were lying like mummies he lent out of his bag and yelled, ‘We’re all right’, and they shouted back that they agreed. ‘Despite the fact that we knew we only said so because we were all wrong,’ wrote Cherry, ‘this statement was helpful.’
Birdie always wanted to go on. After they had recovered the tent, he wrote in his diary, ‘I think he [Wilson] thought he had landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though I was for one other tap at the rookery.’ But he had voluntarily placed himself under Bill’s orders for the trip, and did not demur when Bill decided on retreat.
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p; The temperature hovered at the colder end of the minus forties and they stepped into thinly crusted crevasses. Birdie tied himself to the tent at night as human ballast to stop it from taking off again. They struggled onto the windless bight of the Barrier with its ghostly fogs and mists, guided when they were lucky by vague silhouetted shapes which might be yards or miles away. Most of Cherry’s teeth split from the cold. He slept on his feet, and woke when he bumped into Birdie. ‘The day’s march was bliss compared to the night’s rest,’ he wrote, ‘and both were awful.’ You’ve got it in the neck, stick it, stick it.
Towards the end of July they had some light. Six days marching ahead if they were lucky; five days, four—
‘Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as it sounds,’ Cherry wrote later. ‘But this journey had beggared our language: no words could express its horror.’ It was the other two who made it bearable. Sledging, Cherry said, was by far the greatest test of character. The winter journey was sledging at its hardest, yet ‘I saw self-sacrifice standing every test’. Over and over again he was to talk about his companions’ selflessness; it was a quality he prized above almost every other. ‘In civilization,’ he wrote in The Worst Journey, ‘men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men . . . were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.’ Even a winter journey had not shaken Wilson’s still centre. His strongest language had been, ‘I think we reached bedrock last night.’ Wilson saw God’s purpose in his suffering, and was able, as a result, to bear all hardship with grace and dignity. As always, he sought to sublimate the self. After they had got back to the hut, he wrote a report of the journey for Scott. The episode when the boiling oil flew into his eye was summarily dismissed with the words, ‘I was incapacitated for the time being.’ To Cherry, Bill was a light in the darkness.
As for Birdie, Cherry described him as one of the two or three greatest friends of his life. Birdie simply refused to admit difficulties; according to Cherry he had ‘few doubts and no fears’. How attractive that was to a young man wreathed in anxiety. ‘He made life look simple,’ Cherry wrote. ‘Perhaps it really is.’
They arrived at the Cape Evans hut in the evening of 1 August, thirty-five days after setting out. As they approached, Bill said, ‘Spread out well and they will be able to see that there are three men.’ But nobody saw them until they were at the door. They struggled out of their harnesses before it opened, and a voice said, ‘By Jove! Here is the Crozier Party.’
Then there was pandemonium.
They were seized by pyjama-clad figures trying to prise off their armour, until finally the clothes had to be cut off their bodies (someone suggested a can-opener). The next morning Cherry’s sodden pile weighed twenty-four pounds. He looked about thirty years older than he had when he had set off, his cadaverous face scarred and corrugated, nose dark, eyes dull and hands white and wrinkled with damp. Griff wrote in his diary, ‘Cherry staggered in looking like nothing human. He had on a big noseguard covering all but his eyes, and huge icicles and frost stuck out like duck’s bills from his lips.’ Ponting said he had seen the same look on some half-starved Russian prisoners’ faces at Mukden. The three men sat at the table behind slabs of bread and tin jugs of cocoa, choking with unaccountable laughter at George Robey on the gramophone. Scott said, ‘You know, this is the hardest journey ever made.’ Then they slipped into warm bags. ‘I managed to keep awake long enough,’ Cherry remembered, ‘to think that paradise must feel something like this.’
‘We slept ten thousand thousand years,’ he wrote. Then they got up for a haircut, bath and shave. Their extremities swelled and came out in rashes, some of Cherry’s toenails were falling off and his fingers were useless. ‘We are looked upon as beings who have come back from another world,’ he noted. Two hours after each meal he wanted to eat another one; and in between he raided his mother’s supply of Turkish delight. Astonishingly, he had lost only one pound in weight (the other two had lost three-and-a-half pounds each). In his diary, Scott wrote:
The result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination as one of the most gallant stories in polar history. That men should wander forth in the depth of a polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.
Had Scott been right at the outset? Had ‘the right men’ attempted the winter journey? ‘I don’t know,’ Cherry wrote years later. He had no doubts about Birdie and Bill; but himself – he always had doubts about himself. ‘Probably Lashly [leading stoker William Lashly] would have made the best third, but Bill had a prejudice against seamen for a journey like this.’ Wilson told Scott that although Cherry had suffered the most, ‘his spirit never wavered for a moment’, and in his official report to Scott he wrote that it would be impossible to say too much of Cherry as a sledging companion. So perhaps Scott had been right.
How much did they really achieve? Wilson had intended to camp at Crozier and examine the birds for some time; in the event he only made it down to the rookery once. When he examined the three eggs that he had collected, the embryos turned out to be older than he expected. He was disappointed. ‘Wilson,’ Gran recorded, ‘considers the journey to have been fruitless as regards study of the penguin.’ Bill’s report concluded, ‘We had attempted too difficult an undertaking without light in the winter.’ More seriously, the reserves of three key sledgers had been depleted before the trek to the Pole had even begun. To Amundsen, such a journey would have been unthinkable.
Nobody ever learned much from the three eggs, which were too far developed to test Haeckel’s theory, or from the experiments with rations and sledging gear. But Cherry brought something back from Cape Crozier that was infinitely more precious than a penguin’s egg. He had to find redemption in the journey, or it would all have been a colossal waste of time; later, after his two companions died, that thought became unbearable. His reward for the worst journey was an affirmation of the value of dignity and the abnegation of the self. There were no promises attached to the trek – the effort brought its own rewards. What mattered was ‘the response of the spirit’, and it is the same whatever your personal Crozier. ‘I’ll swear there was still a grace about us when we staggered in,’ Cherry wrote. ‘And we kept our tempers – even with God.’
The hut had been so quiet while they were away that according to Gran’s diary a change of underwear constituted ‘a very eventful day’. They were rubbing along all right, given the psychological demands of a polar winter. On 18 July Deb wrote, ‘Tempers are beginning to get just a little shaky in one or two cases but produce nothing worse than sarcasm and we still keep up the Terra Nova’s reputation as a happy ship.’22 It wasn’t bad going. The next winter they would look back on it as a picnic.
Everyone was talking about the great trek to the Pole, and the long table was piled with rations queuing up to be weighed and bagged in readiness for the journey. Sixteen men were to set out in stages: four with the motors, ten with ponies and two with dogs. Various parties would be sent back as the march progressed, leaving four men to make a final slog to ninety south. Cherry knew he was going, but not how far. He was prickling with apprehension. The Crozier trip had taxed his strength, and he took longer to recover than the other two. The toll was mental as well as physical. ‘As I get more and more fit,’ he wrote on 10 August, ‘I find I get times when I get a bit “down” . . . Once I got very down about the Southern Journey – feeling that the whole journey was an impossibility.’ Yet he was immersed in preparations. At Scott’s request he was typing out data from Shackleton’s book, panic rising in his throat as his fingers hit the keys:
Ever since we came back from Cape Crozier I seem
to, in an undefined way, be given a kind of reputation for sledging which I am sure I do not deserve. I would much rather this did not happen: the possibility of breaking down on the Glacier, or Plateau if I get there, is bad enough when you know that nothing much is expected of you: to start with a reputation, however small, to live up to, would be worse.
The next day the clouds dissolved from the smoking peak of Erebus and ‘that really horrible feeling of depression has gone with the blizzard’. When the sun peeped above the sea north of the hut on 21 August, it lifted everyone’s spirits with it. Shouting and singing out on the rubbly sea ice around the polished bergs, Ponting wrote, ‘We felt like boys again, and acted, too, like boys.’ In the hut, Atch gave a lecture on scurvy. Scott had seen scurvy on his first polar expedition. ‘It seems very far away from us this time,’ he wrote in his diary. But it wasn’t.
Cherry was mostly concerned with the ponies and the South Polar Times. He grew tired of the newspaper, but when the second issue came out, it was judged better than the first (‘Poor Cherry perspired over the editorial,’ wrote Scott). As for the ponies, Scott let him choose his own animal for the polar journey. In the end Cherry picked Michael, spending hours exercising him or quizzing Oates about horse management in the stables. One day, as they sat on opposite sides of the smelly blubber stove making a bran mash for a sick pony, Titus suddenly looked over at Cherry through the blue smoke and said, ‘It’s you or me for the Pole.’ He had guessed – correctly, as it turned out – the way Scott’s mind was working.
