An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor

by Michael Smith

  Equally the decision to send back three men was a huge risk for the returning party, particularly as only Evans was capable of navigation. The bleak featureless Plateau and the Barrier are little different to being afloat at sea and sound navigation was essential. The risk of having only one navigator, when accidents were commonplace, was immense.

  Scott’s motives, which have been the subject of intense debate since 1912, are difficult to fathom. The decision to take an extra man, Bowers, only days after ordering him to depot his skis, is bizarre. In addition, closer inspection of the team’s physical fitness would have revealed Taff Evans’ worsening hand injury and the growing weakness of Oates. Some historians believe that Scott panicked and simply wanted more pulling power for the final march.

  The eight men rose early, at about 5.45 a.m., on 4 January 1912, but the reorganisation of supplies and sledges took somewhat longer than expected and they were late getting away. Eventually the two parties started out together, still heading due south. After what must have been a tense, silent few miles in the harness, the little caravan came to an abrupt halt at around 10 a.m. They were at latitude 87° 34′, about 146 geographic miles (268 km) from the Pole.

  It was an emotional moment for Crean, the final grim realisation that, despite the prodigious efforts of the past two months, he was not going to the Pole. He was perhaps no more than ten to fifteen days of good marching away from the prize and the honour of being the first Irishman to stand at the Pole.

  It was too much for the muscular Kerryman. On the barren Polar Plateau, in freezing, flesh-numbing temperatures of –17 °F (–27 °C), Crean openly broke down and cried, leaving his bitter tears of disappointment on the endless white snow plain. Scott recorded the sorrowful moment in his diary:

  ‘Poor old Crean wept and even Lashly was affected.’24

  Many years later, Crean told members of his family that his tears were both for himself and for Scott, who he realised had taken a huge risk in adding an extra man to the polar party. With his experience of ice travel, it may well have struck Crean that Scott’s decision smacked of desperation.

  They all shook hands and said goodbye for the last time. Crean probably gave an especially warm clasp to his old messmate and long time friend, Taff Evans. Oates, who was the most affected of the polar party, gave Teddy Evans a letter for his beloved mother and his considerate last words were to console the three returning men over their disappointment of not going to the Pole.

  Bowers handed over some letters and was almost dismissive of the severe difficulties the three men faced on the long journey home, writing that they had a ‘featherweight sledge’ and ought to ‘run down the distance easily’. Lashly said the group felt the parting ‘very much’ but wished the men ‘every success and safe return’. Scott gave Evans a letter for his wife, Kathleen, which he said was ‘a last note from a hopeful position’.

  As the moment of parting approached, the silence of the Polar Plateau was broken with ‘three huge cheers’ from Crean, Lashly and Evans as they watched their five comrades trudge slowly off towards the bleak, white horizon. It was the last appreciation they would hear.

  The trio then stood, watching in silence as their comrades moved slowly away into the distance and only shook themselves into action when the biting cold of the Plateau’s sub-zero temperatures began to take a grip. The Polar Plateau is no place to linger and for Crean, Lashly and Evans it was now time to turn round and begin their melancholy walk northwards to Cape Evans. The forlorn group frequently stopped in their tracks and looked back to the south to see the dark figures of Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates and Taff Evans silhouetted against the endless white backdrop.

  Slowly the five figures began to disappear towards the horizon. The polar party grew smaller and smaller, until they were just a distant little black speck on the vast white expanse. Suddenly they were gone, melting into the whiteness.

  It was the last time anyone would see the five men alive.

  10

  A race for life

  Crean, Lashly and Evans faced a desperate march as the last supporting party began the homeward journey on 4 January 1912, a gruelling 750-statute-mile (1,206 km) journey which was to develop into a race of a different kind to the one they had endured with Scott – a race for life. From the start, the odds were stacked against the three men.

  Scott had admitted before the separation on the Polar Plateau that Evans and Lashly were ‘stale’, the two men being badly weakened by over two months of energy-sapping man-hauling across the Barrier and up the Beardmore. In particular, Scott should have been more sensitive to the fact there were very serious risks involved with a three-man party, with only one navigator, pulling a sledge for hundreds of miles in sub-zero temperatures as the season began to close in. The fraught, winter journey to Cape Crozier under Wilson six months earlier was full testament to the risks facing a three-man team.

  Also, the recent experience of all British polar expeditions suggested that, at best, the return journey would be a close run thing. Scott’s ‘furthest south’ on the Discovery expedition in 1902–3 was a typically narrow escape for a three-man team and Shackleton’s own ‘furthest south’, when he came to within 97 miles of the Pole in 1909, only averted complete disaster by the slimmest of margins.

  An injury to any one of the men, such as breaking a leg by a fall through a crevasse, would probably have fatal consequences for the other two. Nor did the men have the benefit of a sledgemeter to measure their daily distances and steer dead ahead, a huge impediment for men with a critical need to find their food supply depots. If the trio could not pick up their depots, they would die of starvation.

  Clearly an accident to Evans as navigator would be disastrous and would leave Crean and Lashly reliant on the precious few cairns of snow which were dotted across the snowy landscape. It would be foolish to rely on these few markers to pick a way across the ice to safety, especially in a blizzard when all landmarks were blotted out. Crossing the Barrier might be a little easier because more depots had been laid. But the Barrier was as flat and featureless as an ocean and without adequate navigation they would be highly vulnerable to missing the depot flags.

  Finally, Evans was already in the early stages of scurvy.

  The perilous journey was divided into three distinct phases – 230 miles (370 km) across the 10,000-ft high Plateau, 120 miles (190 km) down the crevasse-strewn Beardmore and then about 400 miles (640 km) across the desolate Barrier. Each stage, said Evans with classic understatement, had its own ‘special excitements, dangers and peculiarities’.

  Evans was aware of the dangers, particularly the risks of a three-man party covering such long distances across the frozen wastes at that time of the season when the weather can wreak havoc. Unlike Scott, he was prepared to share his fears with his comrades. To his credit Evans was able to admit freely that they were all in the same mess and that survival was dependent on a combined effort. In his words:

  ‘Reluctant as I was to confess it to myself, I soon realised that the ceding of one man from my party had been too great a sacrifice, but there was no denying it and I was eventually compelled to explain the situation to Lashly and Crean and lay bare the naked truth. No man was ever better served than I was by these two.’1

  The scale of their task was abundantly clear on the very first day that the three trekked northwards. The men marched for nine hours in radiantly fine weather on a surface that Evans said was ‘all that could be desired’.

  But even with the environment in their favour, it was not enough. Evans quickly realised that nine hours was not enough if the men were to remain on full rations for the prolonged walk home and before long they were in the harness for ten hours and sometimes even thirteen hours a day. He concluded that they had to cover an average of 17 miles (27 km) a day for the first 230 miles across the Plateau. It was a demanding schedule for men who had already covered so many weary miles.

  As a first step, Evans decided to ‘steal’ some time by
secretly advancing his watch an hour each morning and putting it back to normal at the end of the day in the hope of fooling Crean and Lashly into spending more time marching. However, both Crean and Lashly later admitted that they were perfectly well aware of Evans’ ruse but, equally, they were aware of the urgency and never let on. Playing the game was in everyone’s interest and Evans confirmed the seriousness of their plight when he conceded that the march was now a ‘fight for life’.2

  The men, who were hauling around 400 lb (180 kg) on the sledge, made solid progress immediately after turning for home, despite an early blizzard and the rarefied air which at around 10,000 ft (3 km) above sea level made breathing a little difficult. However, they were particularly cheered after picking up their ‘depoted’ skis on 6 January when they covered a welcome distance of 19 miles (30 km) in one day.

  Crean was initially in the lead, but paid a heavy penalty by developing an attack of snowblindness. Evans, who was prone to snowblindness, said the crippling ailment was as though ‘the eyes were on fire’ and he improvised a treatment of bandaging them with a poultice made of old tea leaves.

  They marched on in eerie silence, each man alone with his thoughts. The only noise was the grating sound of their skis scraping across the top layer of snow and the occasional muffled curse from one of their companions in the harness. They spoke little. It may be that, after months of close confinement with each other, they had simply run out of things to talk about. Temperatures were frequently –20 °F (–29 °C) and Evans recalled that the wind blew directly into their faces, slashing their cheeks ‘with the constant jab of frozen needle points’.

  Inevitably the men lost their way in the bad weather and broken terrain at the point where the Plateau gives way to the descent of the Beardmore. By 13 January, Evans calculated they were miles off course, situated high above the Shackleton Ice Falls and gazing down on the Beardmore Glacier 2,000 ft below. He was concerned that it might take three days to make the long detour round the Ice Falls to get onto the Beardmore.

  In their plight, with food supplies critical, delay was out of the question. The men could not afford to lose time on their marches and so Evans decided to take drastic action.

  He proposed a desperate do-or-die solution. They would climb aboard the sledge and glissade down the Ice Falls, regardless of the dangers and the unknown fate which waited them at the bottom.

  The men were taking their lives in their hands with what seemed a cavalier and reckless plan. If one of the party suffered a serious injury in the haphazard enterprise it would probably spell the end for all three. But the alternative of ‘wasting’ three days on a detour round the Ice Falls with dwindling food stocks was even worse. Evans, true to form, discussed their precarious prospects with Crean and Lashly.

  Evans later told members of his family that Lashly bowed to rank, accepting the apparently crazy scheme and Evans’ authority with the casual, almost dismissive remark: ‘You’re the officer.’ But Crean was not afraid to question authority and he openly clashed with Evans. He protested:

  ‘Captain Scott would never do a damn fool thing like that.’

  Evans was prepared to listen but had clearly made up his mind. He retorted:

  ‘Well, Captain Scott is not here – so get on board!’3

  Evans, writing later, confirmed that the discussion with Crean and Lashly was ‘very short-lived’ and they promptly began the perilous descent into catastrophe or safety.

  They packed their skis on the sledge, attached spiked crampons to their finnesko snow boots and guided the sledge through the maze of hummocks and crevasses. Quickly the men climbed on board and kicked off, sending the sledge racing down the slippery slopes of blue ice. They had attached themselves to the runaway sledge by their harness in the faint hope that they would be saved if it went into a crevasse.

  Crevasses, described as ‘gaping gargantuan trenches’ up to 200 ft (60 m) wide, were all around and Evans later wrote:

  ‘We encountered fall after fall, bruises, cuts and abrasions were sustained, but we vied with one another in bringing all our grit and patience to bear; scarcely a complaint was heard, although one or other of us would be driven almost sick with pain as the sledge cannoned into this or that man’s heel with a thud and made the victim clench his teeth to avoid crying out.’4

  Suddenly the men came across a very steep blue ice slope and the sledge began to accelerate even faster down the slippery hill like a toboggan, with the three terrified men lying face-down and clinging onto the straps which held their precious gear in place. The sledge, which had no means of braking, raced to a frightening speed of about 60 mph as it plunged helter-skelter into the unknown. At one point it seemed that it had literally taken off as it shot straight across a yawning crevasse with the men hanging on for dear life. Evans cast a quick glance at Crean who raised his eyebrows as if to say ‘What next!’

  Seconds later, the sledge crashed into an ice ridge, capsized and rolled over and over, dragging the bewildered men along in its wake until it finally came to a shuddering standstill. One of Evans’ ski sticks was wrenched from the sledge and plunged down a blue-black chasm which had nearly swallowed them whole. Then silence.

  Crean hauled himself to his feet and discovered that his windproof trousers were torn to ribbons and Evans said the big Irishman was left ‘standing there in a pair of Wolsey drawers and fur boots’. But they were all alive and thankfully, no bones were broken.

  Taking their lives in their hands, the three men had glissaded down about 2,000 ft onto the Beardmore Glacier and saved three precious days of marching and food. None of them was entirely sure precisely how far they had come and no one was going back to check the distance. They knew how lucky they had been and Evans admitted:

  ‘How we ever escaped entirely uninjured is beyond me to explain.’5

  Years later Evans remembered the terrifying descent and wrote:

  ‘It makes me sweat, even now, when I think of it. I’ve run a good many risks in my life, but none compares with that tobogganing over the Ice Falls.’6

  But the gamble had paid off and the men were now embarked on the descent of the Beardmore. They reached the Mount Darwin Depot on 14 January, replenished their food supplies and on 16 January managed somewhere between 18 and 20 miles (32 km) in a very good day’s march.

  Although the weather had improved, the travelling was slow and heavy going, while the absence of a sledgemeter meant they were having difficulties steering directly. They marched across a maze of crevasses and pressure ridges, which they occasionally overcame by slinging the sledge across gaping chasms and making a bridge. The heavy work and constant fear of crashing down a crevasse was beginning to take its toll on the weary men and Lashly’s diary on 17 January said:

  ‘We have today experienced what we none of us ever wants to be our lot again. I cannot describe the maze we got into and hairbreadth escapes we have had to pass through today. This day we shall remember for the rest of our lives. Don’t want many days like this.’7

  On the same day, Scott reached the South Pole only to find that Amundsen and his Norwegian companions had beaten them by a month.

  The three men of the last supporting party had little choice but to plough on through the labyrinth of passageways and crevasses, hoping the weather would not break and that the deadly broken ground would give way to smoother travelling. They were, however, coming closer together, increasingly aware that they depended upon each other for survival. Bonds were forming between the three men which would remain for the rest of their lives. Evans said Crean and Lashly had ‘hearts of lions’ and as fresh difficulties presented themselves, ‘the more valiantly did my companions set themselves to work’.8

  Evans fondly remembered Crean as ‘a raw-boned Irishman with the most comically serious face’. More pertinently, he also described Crean as ‘imperturbable’ and with the greatest dangers still ahead of them, the Irishman’s mental strength would be as valuable as his physical power. Crean himself tried
to keep up their spirits with the occasional tune and in his diary Lashly remembered one night when ‘… old Tom is giving us a song while he is covering up the tent with snow’.

  Evans developed a severe bout of snowblindness and soon after they ran into a major problem with vast and dangerous crevasses blocking their route. The men remembered ’stupendous gulfs’ and Lashly later said it would have been possible to drop St Paul’s Cathedral down some of the yawning icy canyons.

  One vast chasm meant another desperate and dangerous decision. Going back or around it was out of the question because their food was running out and they could not spare the time. Reaching the next depot was vital, so they elected to struggle across one gaping hole via a connecting bridge of hard snow. But no one knew whether the bridge would take the weight. It was another huge gamble by three desperate men and Crean said afterwards:

  ‘We went along the crossbar to the H of Hell.’9