by Sara Wheeler
They slogged on, colder and weaker. Scott’s diary for these weeks is a lament of misfortune, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. Each day unfurled in a slow, mental scream of anguish about their chances of finding the next depôt. When they did reach the depôts they found them short of oil (the result of evaporation and leakage). The weather turned bad – much colder than Scott could reasonably have expected on the Barrier at that time of year – and Titus’s feet were black with frostbite. ‘We are in a very queer street,’ Scott noted with robust English understatement. On Amundsen’s return journey a month earlier his food depôts had been so plentiful, he noted in his diary, that he and party were ‘living among the fleshpots of Egypt’.
On about 17 March Oates said at lunch that he could not go on; he wanted them to leave him there in his bag. But they would not, and he went on, one more agonising march with a huge swollen foot frostbitten over and over again. He had given his diary to Wilson, asking him to pass it on to his mother, who was, he said, the only woman he had ever loved. That night he turned in hoping never to wake, but that passive exit was denied him. In the morning a thick blizzard was blowing. Oates said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ They did go and look for him, but they did not find him.
‘Should this be found,’ Scott wrote, ‘I want these facts recorded. Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death.’
They staggered on, ‘and though we constantly talk of fetching through, I don’t think any one of us believes it in his heart’. At their sixtieth camp since the Pole, less than thirteen miles from the bounty of One Ton, they had nine days of blizzard, and that was the end. They had pitched the tent for the last time five days after Cherry and Dimitri arrived back at Hut Point with the dogs. Scott had no fuel left, and hardly any food. His feet were so bad he could scarcely walk (‘amputation is the least I can hope for now’), and Birdie and Bill were planning to go on to the next depôt alone; but the blizzard put a stop to that. Scott made the last entry in his diary on 29 March. ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote, ‘look after our people.’
They left farewell letters, thawing their fingers to write by the wispy flame of an improvised spirit lamp. ‘Death has no terrors for me,’ Wilson wrote to his parents, and he begged his wife not to be unhappy, since ‘all is for the best . . . my love is as living for you as ever’. Birdie tore a flimsy leaf from a notebook and wrote to his mother for the last time. He signed off, ‘Your ever loving Son to the end in this life and the next when we will meet and where God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes.’
‘He was one of the two or three greatest friends of my life,’ Cherry wrote later of Birdie, who had died aged twenty-eight. As for Bill, he had been more than a friend. He had offered a hand to a fearful young man who came to love him sincerely. ‘How cold are your feet, Cherry?’ Bill had asked when they faced death together at Crozier. ‘Very cold,’ Cherry replied. ‘That’s all right,’ Bill said, ‘so are mine.’
Besides his letters, Scott left a ‘Message to the Public’. It began with the assertion that the causes of the disaster were not due to faulty organisation but to misfortune, citing specifically the loss of pony transport on the depôt journey the previous season, which meant they had started late; the poor weather; and the soft snow in the lower reaches of the Beardmore. Despite all that, he said they would have got through had it not been for Oates’ prolonged sickness, the shortage of fuel in the depôts, and the last blizzard. ‘We are weak,’ he concluded, ‘writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them . . . Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’
They had not been expecting this. They had thought the bodies were dangling down some crevasse on the far-off Beardmore. They stood there, stamping their feet softly, lost in shock, until Atch found the Prayer Book. Then they gathered on the gleaming ice shelf with their balaclavas in their hands, and Atch read the lesson from the Burial Service into the deep Barrier silence. They did not move their friends, but Cherry searched for Bill’s watch to give to his widow. He found the cheery little notes that he had left on the depôts folded in his pyjama pockets. Outside, sheets of emerald clouds rippled across the southern sky. In Cherry’s bursting heart, something died.
They removed the tent poles and collapsed the cambric over the three bodies. Then they built a twelve-foot cairn over the tomb, and made a cross out of skis for the top. On either side they placed the two sledges, upright. In a metal cylinder on a bamboo they put a note commemorating the three dead men in the snow and the two out there on the ice. It cited inclement weather and lack of fuel as the cause of death. ‘The Lord giveth,’ the note ended, ‘and the Lord taketh away.’
‘I do not know how long we were there,’ Cherry wrote, ‘but when all was finished . . . it was midnight of some day.’ Gran said that he envied them. ‘They died having done something great. How hard must not death be having done nothing.’ Cherry was already haunted. ‘I for one,’ he wrote, ‘shall be very glad to leave this place.’
‘The question of what we might have done for them with the dog teams is terribly on my mind,’ Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘but we obeyed instructions . . . and I know that we did our best.’ In an attempt to clear his mind he sat down on a sledge and wrote out the sequence of events that had led to his dog journey to One Ton with Dimitri. He badly wanted to make it clear that he had had no food with which to take the dogs on. He now knew that if he had pressed on through the blizzard, he could have left oil and food on cairns which Scott and the others might have seen. If he had made good progress, and killed some dogs to feed the others, he might even have met the polar party and shepherded them home. Cherry sat among the immense, bloodless icefields as men began unlashing sledges, and recriminations without end began to rain down.
Subsequent climate data reveals that the temperatures Scott experienced on the homeward trek across the Barrier were lower than average; over some periods as much as twenty degrees lower. The unseasonally cold conditions were a significant factor in the disaster. Cherry crucified himself over the repercussions of his decisions during the crisis at One Ton, but the facts indicate that the polar party would almost certainly have died even if he had sledged on. The facts, however, did not determine Cherry’s personal tragedy.
He was sorry that the question of oil shortage had arisen, as it implied selfishness, or at best carelessness, on the part of the returning teams. (They did not then know how the shortage had arisen.) ‘We were always careful,’ Cherry wrote fretfully that night in his diary, ‘to take a little less than we were entitled to.’
The following day they marched south to look for Titus’s body, the gritty wind in their faces and the light poor. They found just his sleeping bag, empty except for his socks. Near the spot where he had walked out they built another cairn, and another cross, with a note written on a page torn from Cherry’s sketchbook. Signed by Cherry and Atch, it began, ‘Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.’
They reached Hut Point a week later, and Cherry went up to the entrance. After a minute or two he rushed back to the others, ‘his face transformed’. On a note pinned to the door he read that Campbell and his men had arrived at Cape Evans. Finally, they had good news. ‘It is the happiest day for nearly a year – almost the only happy one,’ Cherry rejoiced. They soon got over to Cape Evans themselves and sat up to hear the story.
What Campbell and his five men endured beggars belief, even in the steely annals of Antarctic hardship. They had been out from February 1911 until November 1913. Their first season at Cape Adare was successful: geologist Ray Priestley collected important specimens and they charted new territo
ry, though they were hemmed in by unclimbable glaciers, and so could not penetrate the hinterland. (During this time they published their own newspaper, the Adélie Annual, which included a cookery column.) In January 1912 they were picked up by the Terra Nova on her way from New Zealand and deposited further down the coast, but when exceptionally bad ice conditions prevented her from relieving them, they made their home in an ice cave on Inexpressible Island (it was they who named it). The cave was nine feet by twelve, and five-feet-six high, which meant they could never stand upright. They spent much of their second winter lying in their bags talking about food. They had to ration themselves to one match a day to light the stove, and their practically all-meat diet meant that the acid content of their urine was exceptionally high, with the result that they wet themselves all the time and everyone had haemorrhoids. When Campbell had a touch of dysentery he got his penis frostbitten. ‘The road to hell might be paved with good intentions,’ one of the party wrote, ‘but it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved something after the style of Inexpressible Island.’ But they saved twentyfive raisins apiece to celebrate birthdays, and held divine service on Sundays. Finally, not having washed or changed their clothes for eight months, they sledged the 230 miles back to Cape Evans, still friends.
That they survived at all was due in no small part to the outstanding leadership of Campbell, who, as the senior navy man, now took over command at Cape Evans. Everyone tried to be cheerful, but all they wanted to do was go home. ‘Hope I have set foot on Barrier for last time,’ Silas noted in his diary. Cherry had to type up Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ ready for telegraphic despatch round the globe when the ship reached New Zealand, and it brought on ‘a terrible fit of the blues’. They even saw their dead companions, as they went into Ponting’s darkroom and developed the films that had lain on the snow next to Scott’s body for eight months. Five men posed woodenly at the Pole, hairy faces solid with ice. Birdie was holding the string to open the camera shutter.
As an antidote, Cherry went off to Cape Royds for three weeks to pickle Adélie penguin embryos. The weather was good; he had the companionship of Atch, who had gone with him to work on parasites; and as for the food – tins of boiled chicken, kidneys, ginger, Garibaldi biscuits: ‘Truly Shackleton’s expedition must have fed like turkey cocks from all the delicacies here.’ Best of all, they had fresh buttered skua gull eggs for breakfast. Besides taking copious notes on the behaviour of Adélies for an article he planned to write, Cherry sketched, skinned and indulged his taste for solid Victorian novels by knocking off Adam Bede. One afternoon he worked out his own sledging record, and found that he had clocked up a whacking thirty-three weeks and four days on the Barrier, and that he had been absent from Cape Evans for forty-eight weeks and four days. His sledging total was 3,059 miles, higher than any other man’s. He was proud. More than that, he was pleased to get the embryos done, as he knew it was what Bill would have wanted.
They went back to Cape Evans for Christmas, the return journey ‘more like a steeplechase in deep snow than anything else’. It was not a happy holiday. They did manage a good meal, though all the wine was gone and they were obliged to drink liqueurs. There was little to do now except wait for the ship. They had packed up, ready to leave at short notice, and the words ‘When I get home . . .’ rang round the hut like a refrain. It was agreed that anyone who wanted could take a dog back to England with him, and Cherry settled on Kris, the hairy dark grey and white Siberian who had slavered over the sick Evans. Cherry ascribed to Kris the character of a Bolshevik – though he was immensely fond of him none the less.
January dragged on. The ship was frequently sighted, and always turned out to be an iceberg. On the seventeenth they decided to prepare for another winter. It was a grim prospect. They were almost out of coal, so were going to start cooking with seal oil. Food was to be rationed. Campbell issued orders to begin slaughtering seals.
After breakfast the next day Cherry went off to hunt while some of the others started carving a meat store in the ice. He killed and cut up two blubbery Weddells, and at about midday walked back to the hut across the hummocky headland. Everyone was out working, the air was still, and the chop-chop of ice axes sang out over the cape. Suddenly the bows of the Terra Nova glided out from behind the snout of the Barne Glacier.
The yells were wild.
On the ship, almost every man was on deck, straining into binoculars or telescopes. Many of the old crew were there, including the industrious navigator Harry Pennell, who had enjoyed an uneventful winter in New Zealand after the taxing journey up from Antarctica at the end of the previous season. But this time Pennell was not in command: he had yielded to Teddy Evans, who had recovered from scurvy and been promoted, becoming the youngest commander in the navy. The doughty old Terra Nova had been specially scrubbed, yards had been squared, ropes coiled and the ensign hoisted. The wardroom table was decked with flags and ribbons, champagne had been fetched up from the hold, and ranks of cigars, cigarettes and chocolates stood ready for duty. As the ship approached the ice foot at Cape Evans, her engines were cut. The shore party gave three cheers, and the ship’s company replied. ‘Are you all well?’ Teddy Evans shouted through a megaphone from the bridge. There was a pause. Then Campbell shouted back:
‘The Polar Party died on their return from the Pole: we have their records.’
The men on shore worked all night loading, then shot the last mules and shut up the hut, leaving it well provisioned for whoever might come next. When they sailed round to Cape Royds to pick up the zoological specimens left at Shackleton’s hut, Cherry watched Cape Evans recede without regret: he never wanted to see it again. ‘The pleasant memories,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘are all swallowed up in the bad ones.’ He had been in the Antarctic for almost exactly two years.
He was given his old bunk on the ship. Besides beer, apples and the latest waltz on the gramophone, his chief joy was the mail. He had become an uncle, Lassie and her vicar having produced a little girl whom they named Susan. His multitudinous parcels and packing cases included a home-baked Dundee cake and a six-year supply of oilskins. Besides private news, he luxuriated in newspapers and magazines. ‘The last year,’ he wrote, ‘has fulfilled the promises of the year before in English home politics: there are big changes coming, and we who believe they are for the bad, will be unable to do much about them.’
They had decided to erect a cross on Observation Hill, near Hut Point, to commemorate the five dead men. The ship’s carpenter made a fine one from Australian jarrah wood, and quotations from the Bible were put forward as possible inscriptions. Cherry suggested the last line of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ instead: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ He was pleased when his idea was taken up. The erection of this impressive cross was their last task, and while he was on the hill Cherry put a piece of lava in his pocket to send to Bill’s widow. The cross stood nine feet out of the rock, and many feet into the ground. Lying on his bunk that night, Cherry wrote, ‘I do not believe it will ever move.’31
They coasted alongside the Western Mountains up to Granite Harbour. Denis Lillie trawled for specimens, crouching on the poop surrounded by forests of jars, sponges and spiny starfish. Two years Cherry’s senior, with sand-yellow hair and marble-blue eyes, Lillie was a genial character who had sailed down to the Antarctic with the Terra Nova and returned to winter in New Zealand, where he had worked on whales and fossils. Before the expedition he had studied Natural Sciences at Birmingham and Cambridge, and although he was not a distinguished student, he was an enthusiastic biologist who went on to publish a number of papers. A gifted artist, on the journey down to the Antarctic he had produced a series of excellent silhouette-style caricatures which were eventually reproduced in the South Polar Times . Lillie was popular on the ship, though he was probably the most unconventional man Scott had: he was deeply intellectual and was more interested in matters of the spirit than in schoolboy pranks. He had a number of eccentric, even c
ranky ideas which he happily aired as the Terra Nova pushed her way north, despite the fact that most of his theories were greeted at best with stupefaction by the others. He believed in reincarnation, for example, and thought he had been a Persian or a Roman in a previous existence. Reincarnated or not, Cherry liked him.
They picked up Campbell’s geological specimens from Inexpressible Island, left a depôt for future explorers and turned for home through heavy pack ice, counting first the weeks, then the days, then the hours. Everyone was seasick. The bergs were so large, and so close, that once, leaving the wardroom, Cherry nearly struck his head on one. As the Terra Nova sailed north, he read reports of the expedition in the preceding year’s newspapers. Evans’ role, grossly distorted, featured prominently in all of them. It was too much. ‘I should like to see things put in their right proportion,’ Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘and that man branded the traitor and liar he is.’ He trawled through the weekly Times noting the inaccuracies, mostly concerning Evans’ arduous sledging. ‘I wonder if all the print in The Times is equally unreliable,’ he mused, not the first person to ask such a question, or the last. ‘It’s fairly sickening and it makes one lose one’s faith in everything – a man chosen out of 8,000 volunteers and now “the youngest commander in the Navy”.’ He was deeply disillusioned. ‘One started with such high hopes, expecting men to get their desserts – and one’s hopes have come to worse than nothing . . . There may be honour among thieves – there is none among adventurers.’
Evans had been appalled to learn of Scott’s actions on the return journey from the Pole. In particular, he thought Scott a fool to have dragged the rock specimens on the sledge when the entire party was so weak. In a letter to one of the expedition’s supporters four days before the Terra Nova reached New Zealand he pointed out that he himself had displayed more prudence. ‘It seems to me extraordinary,’ Evans wrote, ‘that in the face of such obstacles they stuck to all their records and specimens. We dumped ours . . . I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores . . . Apparently Scott did not. His sledge contained 150 lbs of trash. He ought to have left it . . .’ His gift for self-promotion did not desert him. ‘Their biggest day’s march on the Barrier was 9 miles,’ he crowed, ‘against our average 16.’ This was vintage Evans. ‘Why should I be modest?’ he once asked a vice-admiral.
