The expedition hut with Mount Erebus in the background. The stable, on the left, was built out of fodder bales with a roof of tarpaulins over rafters. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, 1910–1911.
Scott’s ‘den’, cluttered with his books, photographs of Kathleen and his son, Peter, polar clothing, and a pipe rack. His much loved naval overcoat lies on his bed. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, winter 1911.
An informal group photograph of the officers and scientists, and Debenham’s teddy bear, in the wardroom of Terra Nova. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, December 1910.
Olaf Bjaaland, a professional skier, planing sledge runners in preparation for Amundsen reaching the South Pole. They adjusted the skis, customised foot bindings and crampons, and altered the sledges to make loading easier.
Scott took the same attitude to skiing as to dogs. Despite having tried it himself on the Discovery voyage, he had never seen effective skiing until he visited Norway to test one of the sledge tractors. Here Nansen introduced him to Tryggve Gran, a well-off young Norwegian who had been trying to mount his own expedition. Gran’s skiing – which was nothing special – so impressed Scott that he changed his opinion, decided that skis should be taken and asked Gran to come as instructor. Today, when thousands of far better-equipped amateurs know how difficult skiing is to master as an adult, Scott’s belief that his men could do so as part of an expedition in which their lives might depend on it seems bizarre. (Amundsen’s men, like Gran, had of course been on skis since they could walk.) Others who were to play significant roles in Scott’s team were Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a young Cambridge graduate who also paid his way and wrote one of the best accounts of the voyage; the retired naval lieutenant Victor Campbell, who was first mate and was to command a second shore party, eventually landed to explore South Victoria Land; and Herbert Ponting, the photographer whose stills and film footage were to immortalise Scott’s last expedition in visual form. Scott became known as ‘the Owner’; Teddy Evans as the ‘Skipper’; the formidable Campbell ‘the Wicked Mate’ and Oates as ‘Titus’ or ‘the Soldier’. Wilson, the peacemaker, was known as ‘Uncle Bill’.
The ship’s patriotic send-off from London on 1 June 1910 was under the white ensign, a Naval blessing not granted to Discovery. (Scott had been made a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, which has the privilege of flying it.) Kathleen, with Teddy Evans’s and Wilson’s wives, travelled by steamer as far as New Zealand. What would be last farewells for two of them took place when Terra Nova sailed from Port Chalmers on 29 November. The ship started to unload at McMurdo Sound on 5 January 1911 after the stormy passage, during which two ponies died and one dog was swept overboard. Scott was obliged to set up his camp at Cape Evans on Ross Island, 12 miles north of Hut Point, rather than as intended at Cape Crozier, on the eastern side and closer to the Pole. During unloading, one of the much-vaunted motor sledges was carelessly lost through the sea ice to the bottom of the Sound.
On 24 January Scott led a large party to begin setting up depots south across the Barrier. Wilson and Meares successfully drove two dog teams but Scott remained sceptical about them until their good performance was reinforced by Oates’s worst fears about the ponies. As Shackleton’s had, they struggled through deep snow rather than trotting on top of it like dogs, and alternately sweated and froze, necessitating constant care: dogs, by contrast, do not sweat and have thick fur. Furthermore, all their feed was additional weight to carry: Antarctica provided inexhaustible seal and penguin meat for dogs and men, but nothing for herbivores. After only 18 days’ march, the ponies were weakening and Oates advised driving them as far as possible before butchering them as meat depots for the Polar Party (as it was formally titled). The more sentimental Scott sent three back, only one of which survived the journey. The result was that when they finally laid their most southerly major supply dump, the famous ‘One Ton’ depot, it was only 210km (130 miles) south from Cape Evans, and more than 30 miles (48km) north of the point intended – the 80th parallel of latitude.
The party returned to Hut Point again at the end of February, but not before Bowers, Cherry-Garrard and Crean made the mistake of camping on weak sea ice to the south, with four of the five surviving ponies. The ice broke up in the night, leaving them adrift with one pony lost and killer whales in the offing. Crean leaped from floe to floe to get help from Scott on the Barrier proper, and his companions also managed to reach safety, abandoning the ponies. When a chance arose to rescue them next day, two fell in the sea and had to be killed with pickaxes before the killer whales got them. The temporary ice break-up also marooned the whole party uncomfortably in the old Discovery hut, within sight of Cape Evans, until mid-April.
By then, in late February, Scott received a message from Campbell on Terra Nova that he had been unable to get ashore on King Edward VII Land on the east of the Ross Sea, as first intended. On 3 February he had instead found Amundsen setting up camp near the Barrier edge in the Bay of Whales, where Fram had arrived ten days after Scott and some 100km (60 miles) closer to the Pole. The meeting was painfully polite but hospitable on both sides, with Amundsen being quite frank about his intention to reach the Pole at the first opportunity. It was clear to Campbell that they were a compact, highly prepared and comfortably quartered group (Fram was luxurious compared to Terra Nova), as well as impressively fast-moving dog and ski specialists – a small display of Norwegian gamesmanship in this regard having greeted their guests’ arrival. Amundsen invited Campbell to set up a base nearby but he naturally declined, hurried back to leave the news and his two ponies at Hut Point, and went on to set up a base camp near Cape Adare before Terra Nova left to winter in New Zealand.
Scott now recognised that it was going to be a race, but not how fast the prize was slipping from his grasp. While Amundsen had experienced setbacks, including problems with his tents, inadequate ski boots, some personal frictions and medical problems (he himself was a martyr to serious piles, a bane of polar life), and had also overtaxed his dogs before they were re-acclimatised to polar conditions, he nonetheless managed to lay a depot on 14 February at 80˚ south. This was 56km (35 miles) beyond Scott’s ‘One Ton’, and was laid just four days from ‘Framheim’, as he called his base. In the first week of March, when Scott had already finished sledging for the season, the Norwegians laid their furthest depot at 82° south, more than 240km (150 miles) beyond ‘One Ton’. This caused some dissatisfaction: Amundsen’s philosophy was to include large margins of safety at every point, but their target had been latitude 83˚, a further 110km (69 miles). Building up seal meat at the 80˚ depot on a final April journey, days before Scott at last got back to Cape Evans, they lost two dogs in a crevasse. Otherwise there were no significant problems and they were covering anything between 24 and 80km (15 and 50 miles) a day. In a series of rapid forays over two months, Amundsen’s eight men and 50 dogs had moved three times the weight of supplies further than Scott had moved a ton in a single month-long march with 13 men and eight ponies, seven of which had been lost.
Scott’s party passed the winter on the Discovery pattern. Class distinctions were preserved, officers and men being separated in the Cape Evans hut, but all busy on scientific observations or on servicing equipment. Wilson revived the South Polar Times, Ponting gave magic lantern shows and Midwinter Day (Antarctic Christmas) was celebrated on 22 June. There unfolded the story recounted by Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World when, on 27th, Scott allowed Wilson to take him and Bowers to collect Emperor penguin eggs from the rookery at Cape Crozier for research purposes. It was a man-hauling trip in darkness over rough terrain, dragging two heavy sledges and making no more than two or three kilometres (one or two miles) a day. The temperature dropped as low as -60.8˚C, clothing was inadequate, and they barely escaped with their lives when their tent blew away in a blizzard. Fortunately they recovered it and staggered home in late July, badly frostbitten.
Dr Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard after returning from a grim midwinter trip to collect Em
peror penguin eggs. It inspired The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry-Garrard’s acclaimed book on the Terra Nova expedition. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, August 1911.
The Arctic winter night lifted in the third week of August and on 13 September Scott outlined his plans for the Pole. The march would begin with 17 men and end with a group of four reaching it. Overall it would be a journey of more than 2,575km (1,600 miles), initially setting out with the ponies, but once they were dead on the outward journey, they would man-haul the sledges and use the tractors. These would pull supplies out ahead, while the still ambivalently regarded dogs would shuttle fodder up the line for the ponies, and then return to base.
Not all was well, partly due to the strains of close living over a long winter. Scott’s outer calm and methodical work concealed growing self-doubt about his own and the expedition’s capacities, which burst out as hectoring and abusive bouts of temper. There was growing tension with his second-in-command, Teddy Evans, with whom he was now dissatisfied as a ‘duffer’ when not at sea. Oates also concluded Scott was not a good leader and felt blamed for the deficiencies of the ponies.
Scott’s group set out on 1 November 1911, man-hauling sledges, and reached One Ton on the 15th through unseasonable blizzard conditions. On the way they passed Evans’s abandoned motor sledges, his group being six days ahead. One of these had broken down 22km (14 miles) from Hut Point, and the other just under 80km (50 miles). The technology had proved premature, and Evans and Lashly unexpectedly had to man-haul from then on. Scott caught up with them on 21 November, and three days later the first pony was shot to feed the dog teams of Meares and the Russian driver, Dmitri Gerov. On the 28th, just after laying the Middle Barrier depot, the next pony was killed, and the following day they passed Scott’s furthest-south point of 1902. The weather continued to be bad, with blizzards of snow and warmer temperatures that left them with sopping clothes and sleeping bags. When they pitched what they called Shambles Camp near the foot of the 177km (110-mile) ascent of the Beardmore Glacier on 9 December, the last of their ten ponies was killed. From now on, they would be man-hauling their 320kg (700lb) sledges entirely themselves.
Captain Scott in polar clothing standing by a laden sledge. His loose-fitting clothes suited man-hauling sledges, being flexible and allowing the body to breathe more than furs would have done. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, 1910–1911.
They could not know that they had already lost the race to the Pole, though Amundsen had a false start on 8 September when he set out too early with seven men and left Framheim with only his cook in charge. A week later, with both dogs and men defeated by intense cold, he returned in precipitate disarray. This sparked a mutiny from two of his party, primarily Hjalmer Johansen, an experienced former companion of Nansen’s who had been wished upon him and who had personal problems (he was to commit suicide in 1913). However, Amundsen crushed the opposition and on 15 October set off with just five men, four sledges and 52 dogs, leaving Johansen and the other two to mount a successful ‘first-footing’ on King Edward VII Land – just ahead of the Japanese, as it turned out. Despite bad weather and some bad terrain he made up to 32km (20 miles) in a day of five or six hours of bracing sledging, dry and warm in Inuit furs. Dogs, sledges and skilled skiers floated over the surface, and the rest of the time both men and animals ate and rested well. Each of his sledges was carrying double the weight of Scott’s supplies. Moreover, the margins of safety already established by his depots as far as 82˚ south had increased with the reduction of his party. They were further reinforced beyond that point by a change of plan in which his plentiful supplies allowed him to lay further well-marked depots at each advancing degree of latitude (that is, every 60 nautical miles). This lightened the load for his dogs and ensured no desperate marches on his return. Scott, by contrast, had assumed that he would encounter better weather than actually occurred, and had no margins of safety beyond One Ton. His man-made clothing did not match Amundsen’s furs’ capacity to retain warmth and avoid sweating, and his use of skis made them little more effective than snow shoes. Except for Meares, Gerov and the dogs, his men and horses trudged for eight hours a day to cover no more than 21km (13 miles), damp and freezing by turns.
Bowers’s sledge party man-hauling up the Beardmore Glacier. It illustrates the struggle to move a sledge after stopping, as they try to reach the tracks created by Lieutenant Evans. Photograph by Captain Scott, 13 December 1911.
Being further east in the Ross Sea, Amundsen’s journey over the Barrier was longer than Scott’s, but that in the more debilitating high altitude of the Polar plateau about 193km (120 miles) shorter. By 17 November the Norwegians were off the Barrier on ground unseen by man, with the Queen Maud Range (Amundsen’s name) of the Transantarctic Mountains rising up to 4,570 metres (15,000 feet) above them. On 19th, a turn westward over increasingly difficult outlying ridges unexpectedly delivered them to the edge of what Amundsen was to call the Axel Heiberg Glacier, after one of his patrons. It was an awesome sight: not the gradual 160km (100-mile) slope of the Beardmore down from the polar plateau but a drop of 2,440 metres (8,000 feet) over 32km (20 miles), most compressed within just 13km (8 miles). Amundsen took it by storm, using the remaining 42 dogs in relays to get the sledges up, and by 21 November was on top, having covered 71km (44 miles) since leaving the Barrier, in just four days.
They were only 440km (274 miles) from the Pole at a camp called ‘The Butcher’s Shop’, for here, having praised the dogs’ performance, 24 of them were immediately though regretfully shot, to be fed to the survivors, according to a prearranged plan. Amundsen and his men ate the choicer cuts themselves, correctly believing it would help prevent scurvy. ‘Wonderful dinners we have enjoyed from our good Greenlanders and I’ll say they tasted good,’ wrote Olav Bjaaland. From then on it would be three sledges only. With these they worked carefully forward through a continuing series of blizzards and an area of treacherous crevasses still called the Devil’s Glacier which, ironically, is now known to form the head of a less precipitous ascent (the Amundsen Glacier). By 8 December they were clear, and in much improved weather passed Shackleton’s most southerly point of 156km (97 miles) from the Pole, saluting how well he had done without their advantages.
On the same day, to the north, Scott was some 400km (250 miles) behind at the foot of the Beardmore. He had covered 610km (379 miles) in 38 days compared to Amundsen, who had at about the same stage done 620km (385 miles) in just 29 days. On 9 December the remaining five starving and exhausted ponies were shot. Two days later, having taken them further than intended to assist the party up the lower slopes and establish the Lower Glacier Depot, Scott sent Meares, Gerov and the dogs home. Scott now knew his prejudices against dogs were a misjudgement but there were no supplies for them to go further. It was to be a hard journey on short rations, both for Meares and for the last support party who were to follow from the top of the Glacier. Between the appropriately named ‘Shambles’ depot of pony meat below it and One Ton at 79˚ 28.5’ south – a distance of more than 640km (400 miles) – Scott had placed just two others. Amundsen, by contrast, had six, one at every degree of latitude back to 80˚ south, and only a little further between the last of these and Framheim.
With the dogs gone, the British party was man-hauling alone on a slope up to nearly 2,740 metres (9,000 feet). This meant 91kg (200 pounds) a man on their waist-harnesses, with the sledges having to be painfully jerked free from deep snow or because their runners froze rapidly to the surface every time they stopped. With all the ponies gone, this was the price of Scott’s ‘fine conception’ of facing ‘hardships, dangers and difficulties with their own unaided efforts’ rather than using dogs. Bowers, who had welcomed the idea of man-haulage as a ‘fine thing’ that would disprove ‘the supposed decadence of the British race’ now found it ‘the most backbreaking work I have ever come up against’. Scott had now learned that sledges could be pulled with skis on, and that this increased safety when travelling over crevassed areas. Someti
mes using them, and sometimes not, he set a punishing pace to improve on Shackleton’s timings. Near the top of the Glacier, the first four of the support party (including the surgeon, EL Atkinson, and Cherry-Garrard) were sent back, leaving just two sledges to go on. Scott’s was pulled by himself, Wilson, Oates and Petty Officer Evans. The other team was led by Teddy Evans with Bowers and the tough seamen, Lashly and Crean. Scott now regarded Lieutenant Evans with ill-concealed hostility, overlooking that he and Lashly had been man-hauling some 640km (400 miles) further than the others since the motors broke down. On Christmas Day the Evans team was nearly lost in a crevasse, into which Lashly – also marking his 44th birthday – fell to the full length of his harness, while making an uphill march of more than 23km (14 miles). The increasingly worn-down party was now being driven as much as led.
On New Year’s Eve, to save weight but also precluding debate over who would go to the Pole, Scott ordered Evans’s team to depot their skis and continue on foot. On 3 January, now up on the plateau and 240km (150 miles) from the Pole, he confirmed his own group as the ‘Southern Party’ but at the last minute added Bowers. At the same time he ignored the medical opinion of both Wilson and Atkinson that Lashly and Crean were both in better shape than Petty Officer Evans, who had also badly cut his hand adjusting the sledges. Oates’s work with the ponies was done; he was visibly tiring and limping from his war-wounded leg, and he was already having trouble with his feet. Nonetheless, Scott did not question his fitness to go on, wanting a representative of the army as well as of the lower-deck at the Pole. A more perceptive man would have seen that it was only honour and iron self-control that kept Oates going, and that it would have been a kindness to send him back. The reasons for taking Bowers were that he was the only reliable navigator after Teddy Evans, loyal to Scott and immensely strong. However, being short-legged compared to the others and now by Scott’s order without skis, he was at a disadvantage for sledge-hauling, while an extra person in the four-man tent added to the discomfort of all. Even worse, the supplies for the last lap were calculated based on only four people and the addition of a fifth, despite factoring in his rations, threw apportionment and fuel issues out of kilter. The Southern Party in fact set out on a diet of some 4,500 calories a day for an expenditure of 6,000 or more. They began to starve from the beginning, with incipient scurvy affecting both Oates’s old wound and Evans’s worsening hand.
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