by Sara Wheeler
Then, as the leaves fell from the calendar, the men at Hut Point began to wonder, and worry took hold. Not one but two groups were out: when the Terra Nova had returned briefly on her way back to New Zealand she brought the news that bad ice conditions had prevented her from picking up Campbell and the five other members of the geologising Northern Party. Already absent for a year, they were now stranded 230 miles up the coast. Like Scott and his men, they only had small tents to protect them against the horrors of the Antarctic winter. But Campbell had supplies, and the six of them could probably survive until the spring in an ice cave or igloo. The polar party, on the other hand, would certainly perish in the sunless winter if they did not make it back to Cape Evans soon. ‘Atch and I look at one another – and he looks and I feel quite haggard with anxiety,’ Cherry wrote. As each day passed, the spectre of disaster solidified. One night, asleep in their bunks, they were woken by knocks at the window. Atch shouted, ‘Hullo! Cherry, they’re in!’ Keohane yelled, ‘Who’s cook?’ and they all rushed out, hearts pounding. But it was a dog, slapping the window with his tail.
With painful frequency someone spotted figures sledging in, they all raced outside, and each time, ‘hope sprang up anew’. Atch and another man sledged more than thirty miles out on the Barrier in the hope that they might meet the polar party. But conditions were atrocious, and in the bad light Atch finally acknowledged that the search was hopeless. On 30 March he recorded that he was ‘morally certain that the party had perished’.
They were again trapped at Hut Point by open water. The Discovery shelter there was fifteen miles along the coast from Cape Evans, and the only route back was across the sea ice – if it ever froze. Although he had good days, Cherry was weak, and suffered from chronic headaches and a swollen throat. He too was now certain that his friends were dead. On 2 April he wrote, ‘I think I have been down into hell.’ A week later he was left alone for four days, so feeble that he was obliged to crawl about on his hands and knees. Like many of his later illnesses, this one had no name: it was more a random collection of symptoms than a specific condition. He took morphine, and lay on the floor in his crusty sleeping bag in the bitter hut, periodically dragging himself over to the stove to feed it blubber as the walls swam away and the floor heaved and sank like a wave. The dogs took advantage of his infirmity, and he said he could easily have killed the lot of them.
The sun left them on 23 April, the sea finally froze, and a week later Cherry sledged back to Cape Evans in the perpetual twilight that marks the hiatus between summer and winter in the unforgiving Antarctic. He had had six weeks’ rest since coming in from the dog journey to One Ton with Dimitri, but when he arrived at Cape Evans he was ‘more or less an invalid’.
Nine men had gone with the ship, including Ponting, Griff and the sick Teddy Evans, and two had landed, leaving thirteen at Cape Evans for the winter, many of them exhausted. The six-strong ‘officers’ contingent comprised Cherry, Atch, Silas, Deb, biologist Edward ‘Marie’ Nelson and the 23-year-old Norwegian skiing expert Gran. Anticipating a bulging mail bag, Gran had been horrified to receive only one item, and that was a bill. But he rallied, and made himself useful with the animals during the winter, successfully deploying a football pump to give a mule an enema. By default, Atch was in charge, unless Campbell were to turn up. They had plenty of everything they needed, and recognised the importance of routine and activity to stave off despair. A handful of hyacinth bulbs that had come down with the ship bloomed blue in a basin of wet sawdust.
Four years older than Cherry but not quite as handsome, Atch was strong and nimble (as a medical student he had been the hospital light heavyweight boxing champion). He spent his early years in Trinidad in the company of his parents and five sisters, and was educated in England, joining the navy as a surgeon two years after qualifying. He worked primarily as a researcher, and had published a paper on gonorrhoeal rheumatism, possibly not the most useful area of expertise in the polar regions. As there was little medical work to do on the expedition, Atch had also been engaged as a parasitologist, and he was often to be found enthusiastically delving in the entrails of penguins. In later years, when he was working on his polar worms in a lab at the London School of Tropical Medicine, he named a new species garrardi.
A quiet, diligent man with impeccable manners, Atch turned out to be a popular and gifted leader, and throughout the emotional carnage of the second winter he was also a magnificent confidant for the sick Cherry. He kept a grip on morale by maintaining naval discipline (the officers and scientists continued to mess separately from the seamen) and issuing each man with orders. Cherry was appointed official recorder of events, and told to continue with his taxidermy, and with the South Polar Times, and, in between, to rest.
When they got home, someone had to write up the expedition records. Atch and Cherry both felt passionately that if Teddy Evans, as second-in-command, were to take on the task they would end up with ‘a garbled, disloyal account’. Their worries drew them together. But Atch had a sense of perspective, whereas the idea of Evans ‘taking over’ became an obsession with Cherry. He brooded on it in the hut and expressed his views in a letter to Reggie, whose firm was to publish the official expedition book. His main criticism was that Evans had spoken disloyally of Scott behind his back: a serious violation of Cherry’s code of honour. ‘Evans has been the one blot,’ he told Reggie, ‘on what I believe is the best expedition which has ever sailed.’ At the same time, Cherry began writing Scott’s story, and the seed of The Worst Journey was planted.
Blizzards imprisoned them for weeks. The seamen were much taken up with the mules which had been sent down from India to replace the ponies, and in their free time they entertained themselves with games. ‘This winter is passing a lot better than I thought it would under the circumstances,’ wrote Keohane. ‘It is no doubt owing to our skelleywag board everybody is very keen on winning.’ Without complaint they followed a regime that might have seemed brutal at home. ‘We usually wear our underclothing about a month,’ recorded Petty Officer Thomas Williamson cheerfully. ‘Now that we have run out of soap,’ he added, ‘we shall be obliged to wear them much longer periods.’ On the other side of the partition Cherry discharged his duties and read, subsisting on a conventional diet of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Arnold Bennett, Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope. For light relief he pored over reports of the coronation of George V in the illustrated papers sent down by his old Winchester housemaster, Theodore ‘Kenny’ Kensington. He improved his painting, and when he got bored of penguin wings and parasitic rock cones he drew ink studies of cancan dancers, gorgeous Lautrecian creatures never previously sighted south of the Antarctic Circle. One day he astonished everyone with a break of 102 at billiards, which they played on a miniature folding table, one of the rackety wooden balls no longer being recognisably round. With a depleted roster he was no longer able to escape lecturing, speaking in May on rowing and in July on Florence under the Medici. (Oscar Wilde once lectured on a similar subject to the red-shirted miners of Leadville, Colorado, though the miners were more enthusiastic than Scott’s grizzled seamen.)
On Midwinter’s Day the bunting, flags and Christmas tree were manfully wheeled out again, and the menu extended to noisettes d’agneau Darwinian and charlotte russe glacé à la Beardmore. Soon the light began seeping back into the edges of the dark sky, and for a whole fortnight Cherry had only one headache. He watched the seals glissade through the black water, outlined in the phosphorescence, and one day he saw an eruption of Erebus in which flames seemed to shoot thousands of feet into the air, fall and rise, fall and rise; then disappear. But blizzards brought his depression back. (‘It is of some scientific interest to be a living blizzometer, but I wouldn’t recommend it even to my enemies, if there are any about.’) He had already lost seven pounds and now he shed a further half a stone in the course of a month ‘that has been one continual fight against a kind of nervous strain and sick headaches’. He concealed his depression from everyone
except Atch, more or less. ‘Cherry was his usual cheerful self,’ Silas remembered, ‘but rather subdued by the loss of his two greatest friends.’ In fact, he was reeling from the most profound emotional shock of his life. More often than the others knew, he retreated to the private colonies of the imagination. In his dreams the polar party appeared at the door of the hut; and then he woke again to the same, sickening horror. He had stabbing pains in his heart: stumbling in the bleak psychic landscape of bereavement and trapped on a frigid cape, he internalised his trauma so completely that it manifested itself in physical symptoms.
Cherry said afterwards that this second winter was ‘a ghastly experience’. It was a bitter and desolate sequel to the happiness and fulfilment of the early part of the expedition. ‘The scenery has lost much of its beauty to us,’ Deb wrote, ‘the auroras are cheap and the cold rather colder.’ It was hardly surprising: every day they slept alongside empty bunks.
On 27 August the sun returned to Cape Evans, at last. The hut was still snowed in, but the familiar jagged battlements of the Western Mountains thickened in the gloom, and the lower slopes of Erebus, their friend, gleamed in the pale, frosty light of early spring.
Cherry too had emerged from gloom, and soon he was ‘top dog’ for the first time in many months. He finished the lugubrious job of packing Bill’s and Birdie’s possessions, a task assigned to him by Atch, and after listing the contents of each box in one of his slim hardback notebooks he nailed down the lids for the return journey. The female seals were popping up again, bursting like overripe melons, and the first visiting parties of Emperors came calling. Cherry went over to Cape Royds, and to Hut Point, but he was determined not to go sledging for the fun of it: ‘God knows I have done enough hard sledging to want no “objectless” trips.’
Something inside him had broken. He no longer had Bill’s lofty ideals and Birdie’s unremitting selflessness to guide him. At the beginning of October he was furious when Atch asked him to take on some sledging errands. ‘It is all I can do not to speak out sometimes,’ he wrote; but he spoke to his journal instead. ‘There is not a dangerous or hard job which has ever been done down here that I have not done – depôt journey, ponies on the sea ice, winter journey, southern journey, unloading ship, dog journey to south – work till an inevitable breakdown which has given me such hell this winter as I hope never to suffer again.’ Once he had begun, he couldn’t stop. ‘And when we got back from three months’ sledging last year we sledged on unloading the ship, up early and late to bed – while the men on the ship who could hardly waddle for fat took alternate days on and off. Never again – never!’
His shapeless feelings of loss and grief now found an outlet in bitterness. While he was not given time to concentrate on his taxidermy, ‘others sit round the table reading novels . . . And God alone knows where it will all end. Likely or not in a crevasse . . . There’s only four or five months more and they can all go to hell.’ Bill’s cherished ‘forgetfulness of self ’ was a long way off. In the shifting layers of Cherry’s unconscious he displaced his hostility towards Scott (at some level responsible for the deaths of Birdie and Bill) onto his companions in the hut, and, more permanently, onto the absent Evans.
Day after day the men had chewed over the problem of where to concentrate their resources when the light returned. They could either sledge south, in the hope of finding out what had happened to the dead polar party, or west and north to try to relieve Campbell and his Northern Party, who could very well be alive. It was difficult to put the dead above the living, but unlikely that the ice would be good enough to reach Campbell, and there was also an outside chance that he had been relieved by the Terra Nova on her way north. If he had not, and they did go, by the time they got to him Campbell would be out of danger one way or the other: either he would have set off for Cape Evans, or he would soon be relieved by the ship on her way back south. The Cape Evans men had a clear duty, on the other hand, to tell the public what had happened to Scott. Most of them thought the five-strong polar party had gone down a crevasse, though one or two suspected they had died of scurvy.29 While they reckoned there was little chance of finding bodies, Scott always left notes on his depôts, and a search might yield at least some information. When Atch called for a vote, everyone wanted to go south except Lashly, who abstained.
Cherry was sent out depôt-laying in preparation, fuming that he would not be back at the Cape Evans hut before the search journey began. But out on the trail, it wasn’t so bad. The white-gold clouds of spring drifted hazily around the lower slopes of Erebus, the rim of the crater glowed against the cobalt sky, and the smell of fuel when the Primus flame whooshed rekindled the romance of a southern camp.
At the end of October twelve men set off for the Barrier with dogs and mules. They marched on for a fortnight in moderate conditions, the temperatures bouncing between minus 7 and minus 29. The mules were not a success. While they enjoyed tea leaves and tobacco, they did not care for their own rations, and a great deal of human energy was expended in coaxing them to eat.
In the morning of 12 November, twelve-and-a-half miles south of One Ton, Cherry was driving a dog team when he saw Silas and the mules turn off course and swerve to the right in a sparkling cloud of ice particles that sprayed wide in a soaring arc. Silas had seen what he thought was a cairn, and something black next to it. ‘A vague kind of wonder,’ Cherry remembered, ‘gradually gave way to real alarm.’ Silas, realising what he had found, signalled to the others; he felt it would be sacrilegious to make a noise. They all went up to this mound of snow, and stopped, mules weary, dogs frisky, men afraid. Silas came across to Cherry.
He said, ‘It is the tent.’
Someone brushed away a small column of snow on the top of the mound, revealing the green flap of a tent ventilator. Two of them found the entrance, and went in through the funnel and then past the inner bamboos. But the snow banked up outside made it too dark to see anything, so they started shovelling it away from the cambric walls. Slowly the ghostly outlines formed. There were three of them.
Scott was in the middle, the flaps of his bag thrown back, one hand stretched over Bill to his right. Bill’s hands were folded over his chest. Birdie lay with his feet to the door. Their skin was yellow and glassy, like old alabaster, and they were mottled with frostbite. Everything was tidy.
‘That scene can never leave my memory,’ Cherry wrote.
As Atch searched in Scott’s bag for his diary, the others heard a crack, like a shot being fired. Years later, Gran could still hear that sound. ‘It was something breaking,’ he said. ‘It was Scott’s arm.’ They found everything: diaries, letters, film, thirty-five pounds of geological specimens dragged hundreds of miles from the Beardmore, and Cherry’s copy of Tennyson in its green leather binding. They learned from the diaries that Amundsen had got to the Pole first, news that seemed at that moment to be of no importance whatever. They learned too that Scott had run out of oil, less than thirteen miles from the plenty of One Ton.
They dug down to find Scott’s sledge, and put up their own tent. Atch sat inside and went through Scott’s diary, according to the instructions on the cover, then gathered everyone together to read them the bones of the story.
After the last returning party had gone back, the five men had continued doggedly across the Plateau with only four pairs of skis between them. The inclusion of an extra man at the last moment had other serious implications: more fuel was required for cooking, and rations had been prepared in quantities of four. But they knew the Pole – the grail – was close. Then, on 16 January, Birdie spotted a tiny scrap of black flapping in the wind. It was a Norwegian flag. ‘All the day-dreams must go,’ Scott wrote. The next evening they reached the Pole itself, their hands freezing through double woollen and fur mitts. ‘It was a very bitter day,’ Wilson noted in his diary. They camped, planted a flag (‘our poor slighted Union Jack’), and took observations. Amundsen had left a tent, some equipment and a cordial note for Scott. They were only a
month behind him.
Five Norwegians had reached the Pole on 14 December 1911. They had pioneered a new route, avoiding the Beardmore, and had not been encumbered with ponies. Apart from one false start that almost ended in disaster (Amundsen had set out too early, and low temperatures drove him back to his hut), there had been no major setbacks. ‘We are going like greyhounds,’ the Norwegian leader wrote on the Barrier. The men had practically grown up on skis – one was a former national champion – and they drove some of their dogs all the way to the Pole. Furthermore, they were not stopping to survey or load their sledges with rocks.30 By the time he returned to his hut, despite appalling fog and desperately challenging terrain, Amundsen had covered over 1,600 miles in 99 days.
Scott and his companions, meanwhile, had turned for home – 860 miles away. A sail rigged to the sledge speeded them along, but temperatures were low, surfaces poor and their spirits broken. Taff Evans had a nasty cut on his hand which refused to heal; he was especially run down, and gradually became ‘rather dull and incapable’. He and Oates were badly frostbitten. Everyone was hungry, and, given the altitude, more than usually thirsty. After a cold seven weeks on the Plateau, they struggled down the Beardmore and onto the Barrier, battling crevasses, snow-blindness, falls, cold and more cold. Evans, whom Scott had originally thought the strongest man of the party, was on an irreversible downward trajectory, and on 16 February he collapsed. He struggled up, but the next day he broke down completely, and by the time they got him into the tent he was comatose. He never regained consciousness. They had watched him die, slowly, for many days.
