by Sara Wheeler
Although he had brought supplies for two years, Scott was still hoping that he could get to the Pole and back the following summer, in which case everyone would leave with the ship without staying a second winter. From the start, this had looked ambitious. The ship was returning to New Zealand for the winter, and it was impossible to predict whether, and when, ice conditions would allow her back to Cape Evans. More significantly, Scott and the polar party would have to get back before the sea ice began to freeze. But Scott was keen to avoid the expense of a further year, as it would involve another costly trip down to the Antarctic for the Terra Nova as well as extra salaries for the men.
Scott had planned an ambitious scientific programme. A core of scientists were to remain at the hut, gathering data which they could then analyse in their makeshift labs. Others were to leave Cape Evans to collect material from more distant parts of the continent. The most significant splinter group, the Eastern Party, was to be led by the experienced skier Victor Campbell, first officer on the Terra Nova. The aim of this six-man team was to explore and geologise along a section of Antarctic coastline to the east. A smaller group of geologists, led by Griff Taylor, was to spend several weeks collecting specimens in the Western Mountains.
The ship went off, carrying the Eastern Party, which was to be dropped on King Edward VII Land – the part of the Antarctic that lay beyond the eastern edge of the Barrier – to explore and winter. In addition, Griff ’s four-man Western Geological Party was landed at Butter Point. After depositing the Eastern Party, Pennell was to captain the ship to New Zealand, where she would spend the southern winter before returning to the Antarctic at the end of 1911, again under Pennell’s command. The Terra Nova was carrying the first batch of Ponting’s photographs and the last mail the wintering men would be able to send for a year. Both Scott and Wilson again took the trouble to write to Cherry’s people, telling them what a valuable member of the team he had turned out to be (Scott said he was one of the best pony leaders and that he was ‘ready for everything’). Cherry himself churned out piles of letters, among them a missive to Kitty Williams in Cape Town. In his business correspondence he revealed to Farrer that ‘a second year [in the Antarctic] has been seriously debated for the first time’. He had decided that if most men were staying on, and if he were given a definite job, then he too would stay. He knew it would be a shock to his mother,18 and he apologised to Farrer for putting a further burden on him and Smith, as it meant that they would be saddled with his extensive affairs until 1913. But he asked Farrer to send another year’s power of attorney when the ship returned. ‘I am enjoying every moment of the day and night,’ he told him.
Cherry wasn’t sorry to see the ship go. ‘I expect you are just done with the election,’ he wrote to Farrer. ‘I wish I knew the result here, but we are so out of the world that further than that we are fairly content to know nothing.’
On 24 January thirteen men, eight ponies and twenty-six dogs set off on the depôt-laying journey, a round trip of about three hundred miles. It was a vital six-week mission, for Scott’s chances of reaching the Pole depended on it; yet after their unloading and hut-building efforts the men were exhausted before they even started on their first sledging journey. ‘If we sat down on a packing case,’ Cherry wrote, ‘we went to sleep.’ But the job had to be done, and the dead, dark polar winter loomed ominously close. ‘We finally left camp,’ noted Cherry, ‘in a state of hurry bordering upon panic.’
The first week slipped by in a miasma of snow-blindness, long days on the trail and prayers on Sunday. And yet, and yet – the crust of surface ice that snapped underfoot, the meaty fragrance from the bubbling pot, the flutter of the canvas tent flaps, the thin band of apricot and petrol blue that hung over the Transantarctic Mountains and the pallid sun that shed a watery light over thousands of miles of ice: Cherry never forgot those first days of sledging. They hauled up from the sea ice onto the soft surface of the Barrier, which the ponies did not like, and confronted their first deep crevasses, often many feet wide. Picking their way over the corrugated snow bridges that hid the most treacherous holes, they began laying depôts immediately.
Cherry revelled in the newness of this adventure. ‘Every seal-hole was of interest,’ he wrote, ‘and every type of windswept snow a novelty.’ But there was little time to admire the landscape. ‘As we came up to Camp Five,’ he recorded, ‘we floundered into a pocket of soft snow in which one pony after another plunged deeper and deeper until they were buried up to their bellies and could move no more . . . My own pony somehow got through with his sledge to the other side, and every moment I expected the ground to fall below us and a chasm to swallow us up.’
At Corner Camp, so called because there the trail turned due south, a three-day blizzard obliged them to lie up. Cherry admitted that the rest was welcome. ‘Cherry-Garrard is remarkable,’ Scott wrote, ‘because of his eyes. He can only see through glasses and has to wrestle with all sorts of inconvenience in consequence. Yet one could never guess it – for he manages somehow to do more than his fair share of the work.’ The autumn temperatures on the Barrier were much lower than Scott had expected, and the ponies, each pulling 900 pounds, suffered terribly. Oates had not changed his mind about the poor quality of his charges, and anyway the Antarctic is a grim place for ponies – even decent ones. Scott fretted constantly about the beasts, and according to Cherry felt their sufferings more than the animals themselves. As the ponies found the going easier when the surface hardened up, Scott decided to march at night when temperatures were lower; so days were turned on their heads (an easy thing to do in 24-hour daylight). But on 13 February the three weakest ponies and their leaders turned back, and shortly afterwards two of the animals died on the trail. Teddy Evans remembered the last days of the pony Blossom. ‘It was surprising what spirit the little brute had,’ he wrote. ‘If we started to march away Blossom staggered along after us, looking like a spectre against the white background of snow. We kept on giving him up and making to kill him, but he actually struggled on for over thirty miles before falling down and dying in his tracks.’
Cherry continued south, moving into a tent with Scott, Wilson and the dog-handler Meares. ‘He [Cherry] is excellent,’ Scott noted, ‘and is quickly learning all the tips for looking after himself and his gear.’ Because of the blizzard they were not as far south as they had hoped. Scott had wanted to lay the last depôt on the 80th parallel, but instead they stopped at 79 degrees 29 minutes south, depositing a ton of provisions and assorted equipment about 150 miles from the hut at a place they christened One Ton Depôt, a toponym that came to haunt Cherry. Had the depôt-laying party been able to struggle on for another march or two and lay a depôt further south, or had the Corner Camp blizzard not come in to delay them, Scott and his two companions, staggering back from the Pole the next summer, would probably have reached the depôt and lived. But expeditions are made of chance and circumstance, with risks and hazards at every turn. From the start, Scott was gambling that the things he could not control would go his way. But there were an awful lot of them.
On the way back from One Ton Cherry began his turn as cook, deeply worried that his companions would either starve or be poisoned. He made a huge ‘hoosh’ or thick soup from pemmican (a cakey slab of dried, pounded meat and melted beef fat), water, arrowroot, curry power and biscuit, and reported ‘everybody as happy as ninepins’. The next day Scott said, ‘Cherry, you are going far to earn our eternal gratitude – I have never had such a dry hoosh as far as I can remember.’ But Scott got indigestion.
They covered a whacking thirty-eight miles one day, then ten dogs fell down a crevasse. Scott and the others just managed to anchor the sledge in time, to stop it following the dogs down. After dangling on their leather trace for more than an hour, eight dogs were hauled out, then Scott was lowered into the crack to rescue the last two. (Cherry offered to go, saying that he often went down the well at home.) It was a miraculous escape for men and dogs, and the latter celebrate
d with a tremendous fight with the other team. When it was over, snug in the tent, Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘There is a pleasant air of friendship about, rather more than usual. I feel that a man who never says much in the way of prayers would say one tonight.’ ‘My companions today were excellent,’ Scott reported, ‘Wilson and Cherry-Garrard if anything the most intelligently and readily helpful.’ But years later Cherry was to note in the margin of his journal, ‘Up to this day Scott had been talking to Meares of how the dogs would go to the Pole. After this, I never heard him say that.’
At Hut Point, named after a shelter built by Discovery men eight years previously, they found news so dramatic that it left them reeling. The Terra Nova had returned to Ross Island after heavy pack ice had prevented her from dropping Campbell and his men on King Edward VII Land. But she had left messages in the Hut Point shelter. They included the startling information that Amundsen had been sighted unloading stores in the Bay of Whales, just off the eastern edge of the Barrier. He had decided to position his base on the floating Barrier itself: a bold, innovative and potentially risky move.
Nobody had suspected that the Norwegians would be starting from the same side of the continent as Scott, or that they would be so well positioned: their base was over sixty miles nearer the Pole than Cape Evans. Furthermore – and this was devastating news – Amundsen had over a hundred dogs. ‘I never thought he could have got so many dogs safely to the ice,’ Scott wrote in his diary. Dogs could cope with early spring temperatures and surfaces, which ponies could not. ‘But above all and beyond,’ Scott acknowledged ruefully, ‘he [Amundsen] can start his journey early in the season – an impossible condition with ponies.’
Visits had been exchanged between the ships.19 As the Terra Nova steamed away from the Bay of Whales, geologist Ray Priestley, one of Campbell’s party, noted, ‘The world will watch with interest a race for the Pole next year, a race which may go either way . . .’ Meanwhile the Norwegians had all started sneezing. They had caught colds from their unexpected visitors.
The hut erupted like a volcano at the news of Amundsen’s proximity. ‘For an hour or so we were furiously angry,’ Cherry wrote, ‘and were possessed with the insane sense that we must go to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen . . . we had just paid the first instalment of the heartbreaking labour of making a path to the Pole; and we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned the first right of way.’ When they woke on 24 February Scott leapt out of his bag and said, ‘By Jove what a chance we have missed – we might have taken Amundsen and sent him back on the ship.’ Cherry later elaborated on this: ‘Scott said we could go and fight Amundsen. There was no law south of sixty.’ This was an absurd reaction, typical of the competitive urge of the Admiralty and British empire-builders in general, all of whom thought they had a prior claim to any far-off land on which they had set their sights. Amundsen had every right to be where he was.
Wilson calmed Scott down, arguing that there might well be no law south of sixty, but at some point they would have to go north of sixty. ‘We had hours of it . . .’ Cherry continued. ‘Bill said to me, “We had a bad time with Scott on the Discovery: but never anything like this.” ’ In his rational moments, Scott acknowledged that the important thing was to carry on as if nothing had happened, and ‘to go forward and do our best for the honour of the country without fear or panic’.
As for Campbell, having failed to find a place to disembark on King Edward VII Land, etiquette had prevented him from establishing a base close to the Norwegians, so the ship had continued 500 miles along the Barrier edge and then northwards to land the party in South Victoria Land. This was the part of the continent to the north of the western, Ross Island edge of the Barrier. The Eastern Party was renamed the Northern Party. On 18 February 1911 they were duly landed on the beach at Cape Adare, in great haste as the ship was running short of coal for the journey back to New Zealand. They were to be out for two long winters.
Sledging parties were still battling it out on the Barrier, finishing the depôt work. Another pony died. Cherry’s unease with Teddy Evans was beginning to solidify into overt, if private, criticism. Atch (Dr Atkinson) had been out on the trail with Evans. ‘He said it was a terrible thing to say of anyone,’ Cherry confided to his diary, ‘but Evans was not pulling.’ Later, Deb told Cherry that he had had the same experience out sledging with Evans; Silas too was disenchanted (‘Teddy a quitter’). Furthermore, Evans had been criticising Scott behind his back: Birdie had gone to Cherry one night ‘almost in tears’ to talk about his treacherous carping. Scott himself was having doubts about Evans. He described him privately as ‘a queer study – his boyish enthusiasm carries all along till one sees clearly the childish limitations of its foundation and appreciates that it is not a rock to be built upon . . . There are problems ahead here for I cannot consider him fitted for a supreme position . . . It was curious to note how his value (in this respect) suddenly diminished as he stepped on shore . . .’
Evans found it difficult to stick to the rules. As a boy he had been expelled from school and detained by the police for pilfering. But he had talent. While a naval cadet, despite regular misdemeanours he had impressed his superiors and won an excellent reputation. He was to have a glorious war, and in peacetime he would rise to the top of the navy. While he quickly hardened into an archetypal enemy in Cherry’s imagination, and to a lesser extent in the imaginations of others, he was not without supporters on the expedition. Campbell was a firm friend in later years; the taciturn Oates respected him; and even Birdie, so hurt by his tales out of school, was sympathetic to the man (‘He is the best of skippers and friends’). Men less wedded to ideals and codes of honour than Cherry would say Evans’ criticisms of Scott in the Antarctic were no worse than might be heard on the bridge of any warship. Evans’ weaknesses were his mercurial temperament and his feline way of ingratiating himself. ‘He is a man of moods,’ concluded Birdie. ‘A good friend – but like most Welshmen, a bad enemy.’
Cherry had been out with a sledging party ferrying stores from Hut Point to Corner Camp. On the way back, leading four ponies off the Barrier, he camped on the sea ice with Birdie and an Irish seaman called Tom Crean. A strong and immensely able petty officer with broad shoulders and a deep chest, Crean was one of the best polar travellers in the whole history of exploration. He had left his family farm in County Kerry and signed on with the Royal Navy ten days before his sixteenth birthday. Eight years later, serving on a navy ship in New Zealand, he had been recruited to fill a vacancy on Scott’s Discovery. He acquitted himself with such distinction in the Antarctic that when Scott went back to sea after the expedition he asked to take Crean with him. In 1909, as soon as his plans for a second polar venture were made public, Scott again applied to the Admiralty for Crean’s services. Crean had an insatiable appetite for adventure as well as an iron constitution, and at the age of thirty-two he had no hesitation about following Scott into the unknown for a second time.
The small caravan of men and ponies had had a taxing journey through black mist, but despite that, and the usual rigours of an icy camp, the mood was calm, the men were content, and the only upset in an otherwise peaceful evening occurred when Birdie, who was cook, mistook curry powder for cocoa. Even then Crean swigged the drink back before realising anything was wrong.
In the night, thinking that he could hear his pony attacking the oats, Birdie went out in his socks. The sea ice under the camp had broken up, and they were stranded on a small floe between long black tongues of boiling ocean. ‘The tops of the hills were visible,’ Birdie wrote home later, ‘but all below was thin mist and as far as the eye could see there was nothing solid; it was all broken up, and heaving up and down with the swell.’ Cherry’s pony, Guts, had already gone (‘a dark streak of water alone showed the place where the ice had opened under him’). Birdie poked his head into the tent and announced that they were floating out to sea.
Striking camp in record time, they began leaping from
floe to floe, avoiding the prowling killer whales and coaxing the ponies over the furious water when the channels between the islands of ice narrowed. ‘Very little was said,’ Bowers wrote. ‘Crean like most bluejackets behaved as if he had done this sort of thing often before.’ Using the twelve-foot sledges as bridges to cross the widest channels of water, after six hours they reached the heavier floes near the fast ice of the Barrier. Bowers sent Crean off with a message to Scott, who was camped not far away. Cherry and Birdie waited with the ponies on a floe in the middle of it all, ‘utterly done. I remember thinking what a beautiful place the world was.’ Broken sea ice promises a tasty crop of seal for killer whales. They shot up vertically to stare over the lip of the floe, their huge black and white heads and piggy eyes only a few yards from the tent flaps. Cherry had heartburn and cramp. ‘I suppose there is no doubt,’ he recorded in his diary as he squatted on a sledge on the bobbing floe, ‘we are in the devil of a hole.’
‘It was not a pleasant day that Cherry and I spent all alone there,’ wrote Bowers, ‘knowing as we did that it only wanted a zephyr from the south to send us irretrievably out to sea.’ As the day wore on, skua gulls, eager for carrion, settled on a nearby floe. Scott, Oates and Crean eventually appeared on the edge of the Barrier. Throwing down a rope, Scott shouted at Bowers to climb to safety using the sledges as ladders.
‘What about the ponies and sledges?’ Bowers shouted back.
‘I don’t care a damn about the ponies and sledges, it’s you I want,’ yelled Scott. ‘Between us and the Barrier,’ Cherry wrote, ‘was a lane of some fifty yards wide, a seething cauldron. Bergs were calving off as we watched: and capsizing: and hitting other bergs, splitting into two and falling apart. The killers filled the whole place. Looking downwards into a hole between our berg and the next, a hole not bigger than a small room, we saw at least six whales.’