by Sara Wheeler
The twenty-first of December was the last day of Cherry’s march towards the south. In seven weeks he had travelled 575 miles, pulled his sledge beyond 85 degrees south, and risen above 7,000 feet.
There was a ‘mournful air’ in camp as they prepared to spend their last night together. Bill went into the tent while Cherry was cooking and told him that Scott could see he had been ‘pulling his guts out for him all the way’. The hoosh smelled rich and meaty, blotting out the tang of fuel in the air. But it was a wretched parting.
Cherry gave away all the gear he could spare and turned for the long march down the Beardmore and back across the Barrier. ‘Scott has only to average seven [geographical] miles a day to get to the Pole – it’s practically a cert for him,’ he noted in his diary. Scott gave Atch further instructions regarding the dogs. He was to make sure someone brought them out to One Ton in February to meet the polar party on its way back. ‘With the depôt [of dog food] which has been laid [at One Ton],’ he said, ‘come as far as you can.’ Scott’s orders for the end of the season were becoming fatally confused.
On the return march Cherry’s small party immediately met badly crevassed ice. ‘Had a hell of a time,’ wrote Keohane. ‘We were going down holes as fast as we got out of them [and] every ten paces Dr Atkinson went down one big one head first and got brought up by his harness.’ The four men all suffered from sickness and a touch of dysentery, and their hands got very ‘puddingy’. Camping under a leaden sky on Christmas Eve, Cherry thought about the lighted streets and shop windows of London and all the feasts at home. But after their pemmican dinner they had ‘a good whack of cocoa with half a pound of McKellar’s plum pudding cooked in it in a bag’. (‘Had a bad bellyake,’ wrote Keohane the next day.) Cherry left cosy little notes on the depôts for Bill and Birdie. ‘I will take on your pyjama trousers from the pony depôt,’ he informed Bill on the twenty-eighth. ‘You should see my wonderful sketches! We had a very happy Xmas & the pudding was fine. Heaps of love and good luck to you all.’ Except on Christmas Day, they were hungry all the time. (‘I watched my companions’ faces with their eyes and necks falling in . . . One day I got a piece of looking-glass and found I looked just the same.’) But he was cheerful. ‘My birthday,’ he recorded on 2 January 1912, ‘and given some more grub I don’t want a better.’ He was twenty-six. They had an extra biscuit for lunch in his honour. A few days later he dreamt he was buying chocolate and buns on the platform of Hatfield railway station, and one night he sat up in his bag and called out, ‘Within a yard of the Great Hoosh!’
They were following Meares’ tracks, depôt to depôt, cairn to cairn. It was hard, but all right, and they averaged sixteen miles a day up to One Ton in the bad Barrier light. They were obsessed by the depôt at One Ton: had the men at the hut sledged out to leave food for the returning parties? Had Meares taken more than his fair share on his way home? ‘As I lay in my bag here,’ wrote Keohane, ‘I think of all the food ever I left behind that I could not eat I wish I had it now.’ On 15 January they reached One Ton. It had been laid – the great hoosh at last.
Eleven days later they sledged up to Hut Point, bursting with expectation as they thought the ship had probably arrived with the mail. Instead they found a note from Meares saying that the ship was not in. But at least she had been sighted: she was waiting for more ice to melt.
In three months Cherry had travelled over 1,100 miles.
When the Terra Nova was at last able to lay anchor in the bay, Cherry got a pillow-case full of mail. At home top billing went to Lassie’s marriage to George Herbert Shorting, a widower with two children who was vicar of Kimpton, a village near Lamer. The wedding was related in exhaustive detail in a fifty-page epic. ‘I miss you horribly and want you at every turn,’ Evelyn wrote in her catalogue of events, which included a lengthy description of police crowd control at the church. She even threatened to sail out to meet him. And he did feel pangs, as he sat on his scratchy bunk and read about the heatwave and the girls and the things he knew so very well. ‘I thought as I drove up from the train yesterday I had never seen Lamer looking so beautiful,’ his mother told him. ‘Gorgeous tints of green, with all the flowering trees out and masses of white chestnut blossom. The garden radiates with rhododendrons, lilies, laburnums . . .’
He ploughed through his business correspondence, which included a supertax return, lease renewals, papers relating to the trust fund set up in accordance with the General’s will, the purchase of stocks, reports from land agents at both Lamer and Denford, and much, much more. As for the wider world (which meant England), Oxford had won the Boat Race, and apart from that the main topics were the loss of the House of Lords’ power of veto and the widespread labour unrest which so characterised 1911. Cherry found it all ‘absolutely bewildering. England seems to have gone back to the days of the Reform Bill or the Chartist agitation.’ (Thirty-nine years later he described these first reports from home as ‘the rumblings of the storms to come’.) Letters from Harry Woollcombe revealed that he had carried the word with such exemplary zeal that he had collapsed with heart strain on the way to India and had returned home to Devon. From there he wrote about the proliferation of strikes and the alarming social disorder they towed in their wake. ‘Personally,’ fulminated the reverend, ‘I hope it will galvanise our class into realising that we simply must pull ourselves together and consider the “social evil” and not talk rot about the “discomforts of the poor”.’
The Terra Nova had brought provisions for the third year: new sledges, fourteen dogs and seven mules which, at Titus’s suggestion, Scott had requested from India to replace the ponies. When unloading began, Cherry wore himself out sledging twenty miles a day between ship and shore. He received cases and cases of gear from Evelyn and Reggie, among it thirty scarves, sixty books and an eighteen-gallon cask of sherry. The ship steamed off to pick up a party out geologising in the west, and to relieve Campbell and his men. On her way down to Cape Evans in January she had collected Campbell’s party and moved them to a new site further along the coast. The plan was that she should return six weeks later and bring the men home to Cape Evans.
Cherry tried to reply to his multitudinous correspondents before the Terra Nova called in briefly on her way back to New Zealand. His letters to Lamer were detailed and loving, in his characteristic, understated way, inspired in part by his father’s long, tender correspondence from bloodier battlefields. On the business front, he drew up a testamentary document bequeathing £4,000 (£185,000 in 2001) to Scott in the event of his death before their return to England. Cape Crozier and the sea ice incident had brought death to life.
As late summer clouds began to rake the mountain tops across the Sound, the hut-dwellers waited for the last returning party to sledge in with news. Everyone speculated on which three Scott had chosen to accompany him to the Pole. Each man at Cape Evans was convinced that he could pick a winning team. Silas thought that both he and Cherry had been in better shape than Teddy at the top of the Beardmore. ‘Scott a fool,’ Silas wrote in camp on the night the announcement was made. ‘Too wild to write more tonight.’ (Convinced that Teddy was a shirker and a hypocrite, Silas had wanted to push him down a crevasse. Cherry confided to his journal that it was a pity he hadn’t.) Oates was limping from his South African wound, and on the glacier he privately revealed to Atch that he wasn’t fit to continue. Cherry considered it was a mistake to take a limping man; Scott, he thought, should have asked his doctors’ advice.25
The men in the hut also talked incessantly about who was going back to New Zealand with the ship. Meares definitely was, so on 13 February it was Atch, not he, who left for Hut Point to prepare to sledge to One Ton as Scott had instructed. He took Dimitri and the dogs with him.
Six days later, Atch was making the final adjustment to the leather sledge straps on the slippery platform of rock outside the Discovery hut. When he straightened up, he saw a man stumbling out of the icefields to the south.
Atch hurried out, and as
he approached the tottering, wind-scoured and frost-scarred wreck he recognised Tom Crean. Crean was the stalwart Irish seaman who had leapt across the floes to get help when Cherry, Birdie and the ponies had been caught on the sea ice. Ensconced in the hut, he revealed that Teddy Evans was lying in a tent thirty-five miles out on the Barrier, perilously ill after collapsing with scurvy. Crean had left Lashly nursing Evans, and walked in alone to get help.
This, then, was the last returning party – but where was the fourth man?
Atch and Dimitri strained with expectation. Crean took a swig of cocoa. Then he spoke. There was no fourth man. Scott had decided it was five for the Pole.
Atch was obliged to abandon his plans for One Ton in order to take the dogs out to rescue Evans. Delayed by a blizzard, he waited at Hut Point, and Crean poured out the rest of the story. After Cherry and the first returning party had turned round at the top of the Beardmore on 22 December, the eight remaining men had sledged on across the Plateau among crevasses ‘as big as Regent Street’ until 4 January, when Scott announced that Wilson, Bowers, Titus and Taff Evans were going with him to the Pole. The last returning party, Teddy Evans, Crean and Lashly, turned for home at an altitude of about 9,000 feet barely 163 miles from the Pole, leaving Scott and his men almost certain of success (‘I think the British flag will be the only one to fly there,’ Bowers wrote). Evans had more verbal orders from Scott about the dogs: they were to come further south to meet him on his way back, and hurry him back to Cape Evans before the ship left. These orders were forgotten in the ensuing drama.
Hauling in a reduced team of three was a terrible struggle (‘too great a sacrifice’). After struggling for hundreds of miles Teddy Evans developed scurvy (Lashly noted, ‘he is turning black and blue and several other colours as well’), and was towed on the sledge until heavy snow prevented further pulling. Then Crean, who had already racked up 1,500 miles, marched 35 more over 18 hours in a miniature polar epic all of his own. The blizzard broke half an hour after he came in.
Back on the Barrier Lashly was left to take care of a man falling slowly towards death. He and Evans had no food except a few paraffin-soaked biscuits.
As soon as the blizzard broke, Atch and Dimitri set off to rescue the two men. When they reached the tent, the lead dog, a dark grey and white husky called Krisravitsa, went right inside and licked the patient’s cheek. ‘I kissed his old hairy Siberian face with the kiss that was meant for Lashly,’ Evans recorded. After restorative onions and cake, and a medical examination, Evans was towed back to Hut Point.26 Lashly had been out for four months. When he got in he wrote in his diary that now they were keen to get their mail. ‘How funny,’ he wrote, ‘we should always be looking for something else, now we are safe.’
Atch decided that Evans was too sick to be left without a doctor, and, as he was the only doctor, it meant someone else had to take the dogs to One Ton with Dimitri. He despatched two men to Cape Evans with a note suggesting Silas or Cherry for the job. Silas could not be spared from the scientific work. ‘I’m right in it,’ Cherry wrote in his diary. He had neither navigated nor driven dogs before, winter was closing in, and he had to reach a depôt 150 miles out on the featureless Barrier. This was the chance in a hundred that Scott had doubted would ever come.
The dogs strained in the traces. Then they stampeded away with a howl, the sledge runners swishing and freezing air rushing at the drivers’ faces. Cherry found navigation devilishly hard: since his goggles were fogging, he had to rely on Dimitri to spot the cairns. The light was diminishing daily, and on 28 February they were obliged to use a candle in the tent for the first time. Fears crowded into Cherry’s journal. They got to One Ton, but they had a cold coming of it. The weather was so bad for four of the next six days that it was either impossible to push on further south, or pointless as they would have almost certainly missed another party in the milky drift. Furthermore, they were running out of dog food, none having been depôted at One Ton, and so could only move south by killing dogs. Yet Cherry’s verbal instructions from Atch included the order that he was on no account to risk the dogs: Scott had stipulated that they were to be saved for sledging the following season. It did not cross Cherry’s mind to disobey those orders; and, anyway, according to Scott’s schedule there was still plenty of time for the polar party to get in. ‘I had no reason,’ he wrote in The Worst Journey, ‘to suppose that the polar party could be in want of food.’
Both Atch and Cherry thought the dog party was going out to meet Scott at One Ton and help him get back quickly so that he could send mail out with the ship – including, hopefully, news of his triumph, as he was desperate to reach the public before the Norwegians. But by this time Scott thought their job – or someone’s job – was to save the lives of the polar party by bringing food and fuel south of One Ton. The deadly misunderstanding was a result of confused and conflicting orders.
At an early juncture, Scott had left instructions for extra dog food and man food to be taken to One Ton. This was for the party which was to hurry him back to the ship on his return journey. But the decision to take the dogs 345 miles further than planned on the way to the Pole had had a domino effect. It meant that Cecil Meares, who was in charge of the dogs, returned to the hut too late to undertake further reprovisioning trips, as he was going home with the ship before the second winter. Although others did the reprovisioning, and man food was laid at One Ton, in the confusion and comings and goings of parties and the ship, dog food had been forgotten.
In the meantime, on Scott’s return journey much of the oil left in the depôts had evaporated, leaving him short. This fuel shortage, the unexpectedly poor weather and the polar party’s sickness meant that the men and dogs at One Ton now had a very different role from the one Cherry had imagined: to save Scott’s men by taking food and fuel out to them. But Cherry could not know this. He could not travel further south with the dogs as he had no food for them; but he did not know it had become a matter of life or death.
While Cherry was waiting there at One Ton, Scott was lying in his sleeping bag writing in the queer greenish light of a polar tent, ‘We hope against hope that the dogs have been to Mt Hooper [a depôt south of One Ton]; then we might pull through.’ But they had not, and he did not.27
Soon after arriving at One Ton, Dimitri began to suffer badly from the cold. First he had a bad head, then a bad right arm and side which developed into partial paralysis. Cherry did what he could for him, and they waited, in brutal Barrier temperatures, a tiny dot in hundreds of miles of swirling snow. If it cleared for an instant, they convinced themselves they could see the polar party coming in, gulled by the delusive light.
On 10 March, with just enough dog food for the return journey, Cherry laid a small depôt and started for home, leaving a pencilled note in a film canister for Scott. ‘Dear Sir’, it said, ‘We leave this morning with the dogs for Hut Point. We have made no depôts on the way in being off course all the way, and so I have not been able to leave you a note before. Yours sincerely, Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’† Eleven days later, Scott, Bill and Birdie were dying just twelve and a half miles to the south.
On the eight-day return journey Cherry contended with open crevasses, ravenous, raving dogs, and a sick man. Dimitri’s right side was now completely useless, and for the last days he was immobilised. It was Cherry who filled the aluminium cooker with gritty snow, grappled with stiff, flapping canvas and lashed leaden sleeping bags to the sledges. He was worried about everything on this trek: finding a route, the weather, the condition of the sea ice near Hut Point, Dimitri. ‘Lately I have felt that it has almost been too much,’ he wrote ominously.
They reached the Discovery shelter at Hut Point on 16 March. Atch and Keohane were there; in his official report Atch wrote, ‘Cherry-Garrard under the circumstances and according to his instructions was in my judgement quite right in everything he did. I am absolutely certain no other officer of the Expedition could have done better.’ He noted that when they got in, ‘Bo
th men were in exceedingly poor condition, Cherry-Garrard’s state causing me serious alarm.’ The ship had left.
Thirty-six years later, Cherry was thrashing it all out for the umpteenth time with his friend and mentor George Bernard Shaw, then ninety-two. ‘If the depôt [of dog food] had been laid,’ Shaw asked him (thanks to Cherry, polar travel had been dropped into the boundless reservoir of Shavian expertise), ‘would you have gone on?’ ‘Of course,’ Cherry said.
If there had been food for them at One Ton, Cherry would have taken the dogs on after the weather cleared. He might have found the polar party and three or four of them might have lived.
7
It is the Tent
In the murky sanctuary of Hut Point Cherry collapsed, overwhelmed by exhaustion and tension. He was experiencing a breakdown, its physical symptoms including fainting fits and depression so crushing that some days he could barely get up. Dimitri, by contrast, staged a miraculous recovery. ‘It is sad,’ Cherry wrote, ‘that he has really been shamming ill . . . He just hasn’t got the guts.’28
As the Western Mountains shrank into the polar night, Cherry started hearing bells, and ‘hardly cared what happened’. Atch diagnosed heart strain. Whatever was wrong with him, Cherry was definitely too ill to be considered for a final sledge journey to look for the polar party. A note of foreboding entered his journal as he waited for news, although he kept telling himself that he had no reason to be especially anxious about his friends: according to Scott’s schedule they were not expected for some days. The men’s marches during the first fortnight on the Plateau had been excellent, and they had caught up with Shackleton’s dates before the last five struck out alone. Scott himself was confident. ‘What castles one builds now hopefully that the Pole is ours,’ he wrote the day after the last supporting party left him.
