An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor

by Michael Smith

  ‘I offered to do the journey and Crean remain behind, but Tom said he would much rather that I stayed with the invalid and look after him, so I thought it best I should remain …’25

  They stuffed Crean’s pockets with the only food they could find, which was three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate. Lashly tried to make a drink for him but the Irishman could not carry it.

  Crean ducked his head inside the tent to say goodbye to Evans who somehow summoned the strength to thank him weakly for what he was doing. Crean then stepped out into the snow, with Lashly holding open the little round tent door flap to allow Evans to see him depart. Evans remembered the scene:

  ‘He strode out nobly and finely – I wondered if I should ever see him again.’26

  Lashly propped up the frail Evans to watch Crean begin the lonely march for survival. His large dark silhouette was the only visible object in the vast white wilderness. Years later he remembered the Irishman ‘staggering forward in a stooping posture in knee-deep snow, his arms folded across his face as a shield against the blizzard’.

  It was 10 a.m. on Sunday 18 February 1912, and the march began with some good luck. The weather brightened and the travelling surface was fairly good, though the soft snow was a problem.

  Remarkably, Crean trudged 16 miles across the ice before he even stopped for a break. Then he halted for barely five minutes to eat his meagre provisions, devouring two of the three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate. He placed one biscuit back in his pocket – for emergencies!

  The travelling was hazardous, particularly as Crean did not have the skis which he had dumped miles back on the Barrier to save weight. He frequently sank up his thighs in the soft snow and there was the ever-present fear of crashing through a crevasse, from which there would be no rescue. He had no tent to shelter from the weather, no means of navigation and no hot food. Any accident, such as breaking a leg in a fall, would be fatal.

  Shortly after Crean departed, Lashly made the 1-mile trip to Corner Camp in search of some scraps of food for himself and Evans. He found some butter, cheese and a little treacle. He also found a disturbing note from Day, the motor mechanic, which warned of ‘a lot of very bad crevasses’ between Corner Camp and the Sea – the very direction in which Crean was heading. Significantly, Lashly never told Evans about Day’s note on the grounds that he had enough to worry about.

  Soon Crean’s long legs had carried him past Safety Camp, which sits about 2 miles (3.2 km) from the very edge of the Barrier and only 6 or 7 miles (11 km) from Hut Point. Shortly after midnight on Monday he finally reached the Barrier’s edge, though the weather was breaking up and Crean, by now desperately tired, was feeling the cold terribly. In his tiredness, he frequently slipped on the glassy ice, occasionally and painfully tumbling on his back, yet he had no choice but to soldier on.

  In desperation he started to move around Cape Armitage towards Hut Point, but the sea ice had not frozen sufficiently and he felt the slush coming through his finnesko snow boots. Even though he was on the edge of exhaustion, he could not risk taking the shortest route crossing weak ice. He avoided Cape Armitage and went round to the side of Observation Hill, which looks down on the Hut Point Peninsula and the familiar site of the old Discovery hut.

  But there was disappointment waiting for him after he had clawed his weary frame up to the top of the hill. Although he could dimly pick out the hut below, there was no sign of activity, no people moving about and no dog tracks. The lack of dogs was a particular disappointment, since they offered the fastest means of travelling back onto the Barrier to rescue Evans and Lashly.

  Many people would have wilted at the prospect that there was no help at Hut Point because this would have meant trudging another 14 or 15 miles to Cape Evans without food or shelter where he could be certain of finding help. After coming so far, the disappointment must have been acute. But Crean, composed and imperturbable, simply sat down on an ice ridge and finished his last biscuit with a bit of ice. ‘I was very dry,’ he remembered.27

  The weather, which had so far been mercifully kind on the march, was now closing in. Wind was blowing up the drifting snow and visibility was deteriorating fast. A blizzard could be seen approaching in the distance and even at the point of sanctuary, the brutal Antarctic weather was prepared to have the final word. Crean knew he could not defeat a blizzard.

  Tom Crean’s epic solo walk of 35 miles from near Corner Camp to Hut Point to save the life of Teddy Evans in 1912.

  He somehow scrambled down the hill as the wind picked up and made his way slowly towards the hut, casting worried glances back towards the weather which threatened to engulf him. Then, to his utter relief, Crean suddenly saw the dogs and sledges in the distance out on the sea-ice.

  The sight invigorated him and he somehow found enough strength to reach the hut. Crean finally stumbled into the hut and fell to his knees, almost delirious with hunger and exhaustion, and numbed with cold. Inside he found the Russian dog driver, Dimitri, and Atkinson, luckily the one doctor within 400 miles (640 km) of Hut Point.

  He blurted out the alarming news about his two companions on the Barrier and collapsed on the floor. As soon as he was revived, Crean asked if he could go back out onto the Barrier with the party of rescuers for Evans and Lashly who were stuck in their tent 35 miles away.28 Atkinson, sensibly, refused.

  It was 3.30 a.m. on Monday 19 February 1912, and Tom Crean’s remarkable 35-mile solo journey, which had lasted nearly eighteen hours, was over.

  According to his own account of the remarkable walk, Atkinson immediately gave Crean hot food and a drink. Crean recalled:

  ‘He gave me a tot first and then a feed of porridge – but I couldn’t keep it down; that’s the first time in my life that it ever happened and it was the brandy that did it.’29

  Within 30 minutes of reaching the safety of the Hut, the blizzard which had threatened to overwhelm Crean on the way in, suddenly struck the area with full ferocity, raging throughout the day and into the next night. Had the blizzard come down half an hour earlier, Crean would certainly have perished on the Barrier’s edge and no one would have known about the plight of Evans and Lashly huddled in their small green tent 35 miles away. Cherry-Garrard, who witnessed the savage brutality of the blizzard, said ‘no power on earth could have saved him’.30

  Crean’s epic journey had taken him to the very brink, though once again his own account of proceedings is overwhelmingly modest and can scarcely do justice to the terrible ordeal.

  Crean did not write his own account of the remarkable journey and very few of his recollections in letters have survived the passage of time. But, thankfully, he gave an oral version of events to Cherry-Garrard which, in turn, Cherry translated into his own words and included in The Worst Journey in the World.

  The story of the eighteen-hour march is told in almost matter-of-fact language as though describing a quiet stroll in the countryside on a sunny afternoon. It conveys little of the dangers he faced from hunger, blizzards or crevasses, or his own appalling physical state and the freezing cold. Nor does it give any insight into his personal feelings at the exhaustion, starvation and ever-present hazards. Or, finally, the elation and relief he must have felt at pulling through against truly impossible odds and seeing the faces of his comrades, Lashly and Evans.

  Crean’s version, written by Cherry-Garrard for The Worst Journey in the World, simply says:

  ‘He started at 10 on Sunday morning and “the surface was good, very good indeed,” and he went about sixteen miles before he stopped. Good clear weather. He had three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate. He stopped about five minutes, sitting on the snow and ate two biscuits and the chocolate, and put one biscuit back in his pocket. He was quite warm and not sleepy.

  He carried on just about the same and passed Safety Camp on his right some five hours later, and thinks it was about 12.30 on Monday morning that he reached the edge of the Barrier, tired, getting cold in the back and the weather coming on thick.
<
br />   It was bright behind him but it was coming over the Bluff, and White Island was obscured though he could still see Cape Armitage and Castle Rock. He slipped a lot on the sea-ice, having several falls on to his back and it was getting thicker all the time.

  At the Barrier edge there was light wind, now it was blowing a strong wind, drifting and snowing. He made for the Gap and could not get up at first. To avoid taking a lot out of himself he started to go round Cape Armitage; but soon felt slush coming through his finnesko (he had no crampons) and made back for the Gap.

  He climbed Observation Hill to avoid the slippery ice. When he got to the top it was still clear enough to see vaguely the outline of Hut Point, but he could see no sledges nor dogs. He sat down under the lee of Observation Hill, and finished his biscuit with a bit of ice; “I was very dry.” [He] slid down the side of Observation Hill and thought at this time there was open water below, for he had no goggles on the march and his eyes were strained.

  But on getting near the ice-foot he found it was polished sea-ice and made his way round to the hut under the icefoot. When he got close he saw the dogs and sledges on the sea-ice, and it was now blowing very hard with drift. He walked in and found the Doctor and Dimitri inside.’31

  A brief glimpse of Crean’s personal feelings are contained in two letters which he wrote in the Antarctic after his rescue mission. The first, dated 26 February 1912, was composed only seven days after he had staggered into Hut Point. It was written to a friend while he was recovering from the trek and the date he gives for his arrival was the day he went back to Cape Evans after completing his round trip of 1,500 miles to within 150 miles of the Pole. It says:

  ‘I returned on the 24th from sledging after being 4 months away. It was very trying indeed. If any one has earned fame, it is your own County Kerry man.

  There were three of us returning after being 140 miles from the Pole. Lieut. Evans was taken bad and we had to drag him 90 miles on the sledge. Then we had to go over to our hut and we were in a bad way regarding food, and our patient got very bad.

  So it fell to my lot to do the 30 miles for help, and only a couple of biscuits and a stick of chocolate to do it. Well, sir, I was very weak when I reached the hut.

  It’s a fine record for us, but I don’t know how things will turn out until the Captain returns.’32

  A year later, on 18 January 1913, Crean again remembered his heroics with disarming modesty and in a further letter he wrote:

  ‘Comm. Evans is in charge of the whole show now. And he told me he would never forget me, or the other man. There is no doubt about it but we saved his life. You might tell Catherine my long legs did the trick for him. But I must say I was pretty well done for when I finished.’33

  The grim state of Crean and the news about Evans and Lashly alarmed Atkinson, particularly when the blizzard grew in intensity and temperatures plunged. But, frustratingly, he could not move until the weather eased off.

  He waited a day and a half until late in the afternoon of 20 February when he set off with two dog teams to scamper the 35 miles to the little tent on the Barrier.

  Lashly had wisely torn up an old piece of coating and attached it to a long piece of bamboo so that the recovery party would not miss seeing the tiny green tent on the vast Barrier landscape. Evans confessed that he was ‘at his last gasp’. They were down to their last paraffin-stained biscuits and, as Evans put it, ‘… when everything looked blackest’. He added:

  ‘If Crean had not got through, it was all up with us.’34

  But the stillness and silence of the Barrier was suddenly shattered by the howling and yelping of Atkinson’s dogs, who galloped right up to the tent door. One animal, who may have grasped the gravity of the situation, stuck its head through the little tent flap and licked the face and hands of the stricken Evans. To hide his emotion, Evans grabbed its ears and sank his face deep into the hairy mane of the grey Siberian dog. The two men, Evans recalled, were ‘both dreadfully affected’ by the rescue.

  Atkinson immediately gave Evans and Lashly fresh vegetables, fruit and seal meat and began preparing them for the return to Hut Point. The men were placed on the sledges and the dogs charged off, covering the 35 miles in little more than three hours – a fraction of the eighteen hours it had taken Crean to stumble and scramble the same distance.

  At Hut Point Evans and Lashly were reunited with the beaming and hugely relieved figure of Crean. Sadly, we do not know what Evans said to the Irishman who had just saved his life.

  What none of them could quite explain was how Crean and Lashly had managed to survive the dreadful journey without succumbing to scurvy like Evans. All three had covered the same distance, eaten the same food and endured the same appalling weather and stress over the near four-month trip. Although Crean and Lashly were undoubtedly very weak, they had somehow managed to avoid the debilitating effects of scurvy.

  Even today, doctors remain uncertain about why one person can be struck down by scurvy while another escapes. It is a complex subject involving the different rates at which bodies retain residual elements of vitamin C and the stress which the body is suffering at the time. In a normal environment the lack of vitamin C would bring on scurvy in a period of four to six months. But doctors would expect the ailment to be greatly accelerated in the hostile Antarctic climate when men were experiencing extremely hard work like man-hauling a heavy sledge over soft, sticky snow and feeling undernourished because of lack of food.

  But doctors are convinced about one thing: people who smoke regularly are more likely to be affected by scurvy. Crean, however, defied even this piece of medical knowledge – he smoked a pipe almost every day of his life!

  11

  A tragedy foretold

  The harrowing sight of the last supporting party – Crean, Lashly and Evans – aroused the first serious concern for the safety of Scott’s polar team. The men at Cape Evans and Hut Point quickly realised that Scott’s team might be in trouble, suffering the same effects of scurvy, hunger and exhaustion which had reduced Crean, Lashly and Evans to wrecks. Scott by now had travelled further than the three men and was still out on the Barrier with the temperatures sinking fast and the winter season closing in.

  However, Crean, Lashly and Evans had returned with a generally optimistic assessment of the polar party’s prospects of reaching the South Pole and returning safely. Crean had kept a constant watch on the horizon, expecting to be caught up by the five men on their way back to Cape Evans.

  But, unknown to the outside world, the tragedy started to unfold almost from the moment Scott left Crean, Lashly and Evans on the bleak Polar Plateau straining their eyes for a final glimpse of their doomed colleagues. Although they moved off in hopeful mood, it took Scott less than 24 hours to appreciate the added difficulties of taking the fifth man, Bowers, when the entire operation had been built around four-man teams. On 5 January, the day after leaving the final supporting party, he wrote:

  ‘Cooking for five takes a seriously longer time than cooking for four; perhaps half an hour on the whole day. It is an item I had not considered when reorganising.’1

  The travelling surface was abominable, a clogging, cloying soft snow covering the frozen wave-like undulations of the ‘sastrugi’, which grew to several feet in height and made dragging the sledge immensely hard. It meant they were moving ever slower in ever falling temperatures. On 7 January they covered only 5 miles in four hours in temperatures of –23 °F (–30 °C). Scott also discovered Evans’ badly cut hand and Bowers, a short man whose little legs sunk deep into the snow, was having a torrid time without his skis which had been depoted miles back on the Plateau. On 14 January he made the first reference to the rundown condition of Oates who, said Scott, was ‘feeling the cold and fatigue more than rest of us’.

  Scott, though tired from the heavy hauling, was confident of reaching his goal and on 15 January he wrote:

  ‘… it ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the N
orwegian flag forestalling ours.’2

  A day later on Tuesday 16 January, the keen-eyed Bowers spotted a small black speck on the otherwise unblemished white horizon, which spelt the end of their dreams. Initially they thought it might be some piled up snow, but soon it became grimly apparent that this was a man-made object. They pulled on and eventually came across a black flag tied to a sledge bearer, surrounded by clear traces of dog tracks in the snow. ‘The worst has happened,’ Scott wrote.

  The next day they marched on to the Pole in temperatures down to –22 °F (–30 °C) and Scott mournfully recorded:

  ‘THE POLE. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected.’3

  Oates, who took the defeat better than the others, said the dejected men were ‘not a happy party’ that night and Scott memorably summed up the enormous sense of disappointment after hauling and pulling for almost 900 wearisome miles (1,450 km) in dreadful conditions: