A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  The surviving members of the expedition had varying fates. The ebullient Teddy Evans had suffered the death of his wife Hilda from peritonitis on board ship returning from New Zealand. Later he had a highly successful naval career, winning the DSO, rising to Vice-Admiral and created a Labour Peer, Lord Mountevans of the Broke, in 1946. The Broke was the destroyer he had fearlessly commanded during a fierce engagement against a pack of German destroyers in 1917.

  Oates’s soulmate Dr Atkinson survived the war, winning the DSO and then the Albert Medal for rescuing men from a burning ship in Dover harbour, which cost him an eye. He died at only forty-six in 1929.

  Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the sensitive and short-sighted young man who made the memorable mid-winter journey to Cape Crozier with Wilson and Bowers to collect emperor penguin eggs, never recovered from the loss of his companions and was haunted for the rest of his life by the thought that in March 1912 he should have taken the dogs beyond One Ton Depot to look for the Polar party, only some sixty miles away on the Barrier. He had a recurring dream that ‘the hut door opens, letting in its mist of cold air, and the Polar party walks in, shaking the snow from their clothes and the ice from their faces . . . The disappointment of finding that it is only a dream will last for days.’5 In 1913, as the sole survivor of the Winter Journey, he took the eggs to the Natural History Museum, where they were received without a word of thanks. He even had to insist on being given a receipt. During the First World War he commanded a squadron of armoured cars. Afterwards he lived quietly, periodically troubled by illness, both mental and physical, and died in 1959.

  Thomas Crean, the muscular Irishman who had saved Teddy Evans’s life, was awarded the Albert Medal for his efforts. The lure of Antarctica proved irresistible. In 1912 he bought himself out of the navy to join Shackleton in his expedition aboard the Endurance. He died in Ireland in 1938 at only sixty-two. His companion on the return to Cape Evans, William Lashly, also received the Albert Medal. Discharged from the navy on his return from Antarctica with a pension, he joined the reserve the next day. The First World War saw him fighting aboard HMS Irresistible, sunk in the Dardanelles and then transferred to HMS Amethyst. He ended his working life as a customs officer in Cardiff and retired to a house he named ‘Minna Bluff’, dying in 1940. He left instructions that there should be no headstone on his grave.

  Cecil Meares, the buccaneering adventurer who had taken charge of the dogs, continued his exotic career. During the First World War he joined the Royal Flying Corps reaching the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1921 he took part in a British air mission to Japan and received the Japanese Order of the Sacred Treasure, Third Class. Retiring to British Columbia he died in 1937 at sixty.

  Herbert Ponting or ‘Ponko’, the expedition’s talented photographer, continued his career after the Terra Nova expedition and derived considerable kudos both from his still photography and from his film 90° South. However, in subsequent years various business ventures failed. He died in 1935.

  Tryggve Gran, the youngest member of the party, also joined the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, justifying his promise to Oates that he would fight for Britain when the chips were down. He later joined the Norwegian Flying Corps and took part in the search for Amundsen. He died in 1980 aged ninety-one, the last survivor of the Terra Nova expedition.

  Frank Debenham, who founded the Scott Polar Research Institute in 1926, had a distinguished academic career and died in 1959. His fellow Australian Griffith Taylor also did well academically, becoming Professor of Geography first at Chicago and then at Toronto University and lived until 1964. Charles Wright, the expedition’s sole Canadian, served as a wireless officer in the First World War and won the MC and the Legion of Honour. He went on to become a highly respected scientist with the Admiralty, was knighted in 1946 and died in 1975.

  The Discovery, which took Scott on his first expedition, had a busy subsequent career first with the Hudson Bay Company as a merchant vessel, then as a scientific research ship and for over forty years as a Sea Scouts’ training ship on the Thames. In 1979 she was put into the care of the Maritime Trust, restoration began and in 1986 she was returned to her native Dundee to the sound of bagpipes. Today she is open to visitors as part of an exhibition about Scott’s Antarctic expeditions. The Terra Nova, that ‘small queer-shaped ship’ as Debenham called her, was lost off Greenland during the Second World War.

  The hut at Cape Evans still stands. While researching this book, the account of a Polar explorer who had recently visited it caught my eye:

  It was impossible to feel at ease in the shadowy hall, and though the atmosphere was not malevolent, the feeling of reproach never left me while I pried into its dark corners . . . None of us . . . ever mustered enough courage to sleep a night there.6

  Others, I knew, had been brave enough, even sleeping in Scott’s own bunk, but the almost universal reaction of visitors to the hut is that it is disturbingly atmospheric – a place where people talk instinctively in whispers.

  Curious to judge ourselves, in February 1997 my husband and I sailed from New Zealand for Ross Island aboard a small 2,000-ton Russian research vessel. Our route south was the same as Scott’s but, like him, we ran into a terrific storm – in our case a full-scale hurricane off Cape Adare. 140-knot winds whipped off the Polar plateau, causing 70-foot high seas which hurled boulder-sized chunks of ice at the ship’s bows, denting them. For forty-eight hours our chain-smoking and unshaven Russian captain held the vessel into the wind. A life-raft was blown overboard, activating a transponder which signalled to far away Moscow that the ship was in trouble – possibly lost. At last, with no sign of the storm abating and with ice accumulating so rapidly on the ship’s superstructure that we were in danger of capsizing, our captain decided we must turn northwards again. As we came beam-on to the wind, heavy seas almost swamped us but we made it.

  Our first emotion was relief, but this soon gave way to disappointment that we had come a long way for nothing. Later though we realized that we had at least increased our understanding of what Scott and his men endured. Like them we had found ourselves victims of this beautiful but capricious and fundamentally unwelcoming end of the earth. Also like them, we had encountered ‘unseasonal weather’, unfulfilled expectations and a ship with two speeds – ‘slow and slower’. At least we were alive and could hope another chance would come.

  It did. After a further abortive but less dramatic attempt to reach the Ross Sea, when clotting sheets of ice forced our ship to pull back or risk becoming trapped, we finally made it. In 2004 we sailed from Hobart in Tasmania on a fully-fledged ice breaker. This time the conditions were kind and the voyage south went smoothly. By 40 degrees south, we saw our first wandering albatrosses riding the air currents as they searched the silver-grey seas for squid. By 50 degrees south there was a distinct Antarctic bite to the air and by 60 degrees a gentle snow was falling. Soon after, our first iceberg – a pale turquoise cliff – came rocking gently towards us. Then came the so-called ‘ice blink’ – a luminous white light reflecting off the pack ice that girdles Antarctica.

  We turned past Cape Adare into the Ross Sea and sailed along the dazzling wall of the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. We approached Ross Island with the sun low in the sky, pinkening the blow from a pod of killer whales spouting around us. Next day, a drifting shelf of ancient sea-ice, too thick even for an ice-breaker to smash through, was blocking the final approach to Cape Evans but we were able to land near Scott’s hut by one of the ship’s helicopters. Beneath its cocoon of snow and with the mighty backdrop of Mount Erebus, the hut looked touchingly small.

  Slithering over the ice to the entrance, I felt suddenly and unexpectedly reluctant to enter a place so overlain with emotion and so long in my thoughts. When finally I stepped inside, I caught my breath at the fusty atmosphere. It recalled meals cooked long ago on blubber stoves impregnating everything with smoke and fat. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I began to make out some very human reminders of th
e men who once lived and worked here. The galley where Clissold the cook baked bread at night is still piled with provisions – boxes of sledging rations, bottles of Heinz tomato ketchup, tins of Lyles golden syrup and Colman’s mustard. The long table where Scott’s men celebrated Midwinter’s Day – the Antarctic Christmas – with a feast including penguin breast with redcurrant jelly – remains. Touching the smooth wood conjures the improvised decorations, the little delicacies carefully preserved for the occasion, the cheerful eager young faces captured on film by Herbert Ponting. His small neat darkroom remains a testimony to his skill as a ‘camera artist’ as he liked to call himself. The ‘tenements’ along the north wall – where Oates and Bowers slept and plotted their schoolboy raids on the scientists living opposite them – look exactly as in Ponting’s photos. Scott’s private cubicle, with its narrow bed and reindeer sleeping bag, also looks achingly familiar and there is still a photograph of Kathleen and his baby son Peter on the wall. The nearby bunk of Edward Wilson lies beneath a shelf still cluttered with his medicine bottles.

  Looking at the possessions of those who never came home brings a lump to the throat. So does thinking about those who waited here, hoping in vain that Scott and his party might still return. Even so, the hut at Cape Evans is more homely than haunting. The tragic ghosts that I’d sensed so vividly as I entered did not fully materialize as the minutes passed. So many things – hockey sticks resting against the wall, the scientific equipment, even socks hanging up to dry – are a reminder that for many of Scott’s party the months they spent in the seductive white wilderness of Antarctica was the greatest adventure of their lives and they experienced their warmest, most intensely human moments here.

  Sailing a little further south, we came to Hut Point where on his first expedition in 1904 Scott moored the Discovery to an ice anchor and built the Discovery Hut as a refuge. Today, this hut speaks less of Scott than of the party of Shackleton’s men later stranded here during his abortive Trans-Antarctic expedition. However, the smoke-blackened interior still smells of the hay eaten by Scott’s ponies when he was trapped here on his return from the depot-laying journey in 1911 and the floor still bears the scuffmarks from their hooves. The jarrah wood cross erected on nearby Observation Hill by Scott’s men to commemorate their dead comrades still survives and we climbed up to it. As we stood there, purple shadows were stealing in from the Pole and, like so many before us, we felt the full force of what is one of the most compulsively alluring regions on earth.

  It was sad to reflect, as we sailed northwards again, that though some measures had been taken to protect the historic huts from the effects of time and climate change, problems continue to mount. Warmer temperatures mean that pernicious wood fungi are gaining a hold while sea salt is eating away at metal containers, causing some to rust. Debate over the future of the huts and issues such as whether decaying artefacts should simply be stabilized or whether they should be replaced by similar articles of the period or even by replicas has been fierce and emotional. Some have suggested that the huts should be covered by geodesic domes, others even that they should be moved to New Zealand where more people could visit them. However, it has now been agreed that the Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans should be restored where it stands and by the end of 2009 nearly £3.5 million had been raised and work was under way with a planned completion date of 2014.

  Meanwhile the bodies of Scott and his two companions, ‘alone in their greatness . . . without change and bodily decay’ in Atkinson’s words lie as if only asleep beneath their frozen canopy.7 One day, as the Barrier moves down to meet the sea, the piece of ice in which they are buried will break off and bear them northwards again. Recent calculations suggest that this will not be for another 265 years.8

  But there we must leave a story which, though so much a part of its own time, continues to fascinate. Indeed, as our environment becomes busier, fuller, more restricting, Scott’s dissatisfaction with what he called this ‘dreadfully civilised world’ becomes ever more relevant. We can understand the spirit that motivated those five men on their strange quest and appreciate their achievement rather than criticize them for their failure. As Cherry-Garrard put it on behalf of his dead comrades: ‘though we achieved a first rate tragedy . . . tragedy was not our business.’9

  Sources and References

  This book is intended primarily for the general reader. For this reason I have tried to keep the number of textual references to manageable proportions and have not referenced the numerous quotations taken from the following primary sources, except where I felt the source might be unclear in the context:

  Bernacchi L. The Saga of Discovery;

  Bowers H.R. Journal of the Terra Nova Expedition (the typed version lodged in the Scott Polar Research Institute); and his letters which are also in the Scott Polar Research Institute;

  Cherry-Garrard Apsley The Worst Journey in the World;

  Debenham F. The Quiet Land;

  Evans E.R.G.R. South with Scott;

  Gran T. Antarctic Diary (published as The Norwegian with Scott);

  Kennet Lady Kathleen (Lady Scott) Self-Portrait of an Artist;

  Oates’s diaries – extracts are taken from ‘Captain Oates’ by Sue Limb and Patrick Cordingley and his letters which are also in the Scott Polar Institute. Oates’s diary was, in fact, destroyed on the orders of his mother, but not before his sister Violet was able to copy some extracts which she later gave to Sue Limb.

  Ponting H.G. The Great White South.

  Priestley R. Diary at Scott Polar Research Institute;

  Scott R.F. The Voyage of Discovery

  Scott R.F. Scott’s Last Expedition (1913 edition);

  Scott R.F. Journals, edited by M. Jones (contains both Scott’s published account as above but also the excised entries);

  Taylor G. With Scott: The Silver Lining;

  Wilson E.A. Diary of the Discovery Expedition

  Wilson E.A. Diary of the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic;

  Where references to the above have been made, these refer to the editions listed in the bibliography. (Please note that quotes from Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World are taken from the 1994 Picador edition, while the quotes from Scott’s Last Expedition are from the 1913 edition published by Smith, Elder and Co unless otherwise specified. Similarly, the details of the editions used for other sources referenced in the notes are given in full in the bibliography.)

  Quotations from Scott’s correspondence and that of his wife come from the Kennet family papers held by Cambridge University Library, letters held by the Scott Polar Research Institute, supplemented by letters published with Kathleen Scott’s agreement by Stephen Gwynn, and from Louisa Young’s A Great Task of Happiness.

  Introduction

  1. Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, p. 475.

  2. Scott, letter to Kathleen Bruce, 11 May 1908.

  3. Wells H.G. quoted by Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind, p. 7.

  4. Balfour, Hansard Vol. 89, Cols. 19 and 20.

  5. Glyn, Romantic Adventure, p. 97–8.

  6. Baden-Powell, Scouting for boys, p. 208.

  7. MacKellar, C.D., Scented Isles and Coral Gardens, quoted by Huntford, Shackleton, p. 159.

  8. Scott, The Voyage of Discovery, Vol. I, p. 467.

  9. Gran, The Norwegian with Scott, p. 33.

  10. Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, p. 58.

  Chapter One – The Early Heats of the Great Race

  The key sources for this chapter are the diaries of Captain Cook, from which nearly all the quotes from Cook are taken; James Clark Ross’s A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions from which all Ross’s quotes are taken and L.P. Kirwan’s excellent book The White Road which chronicles the history of Polar exploration.

  1. Kirwan, The White Road, p. 12.

  2. Kirwan, ibid., p. 43.

  3. Scott, The Voyage of Discovery, Vol. I, p. 14.

  4. Kirwan, op. cit.
, p. 230.

  5. Address to the Royal Geographical Society, 1900.

  6. Quoted in Huxley, Scott of the Antarctic, p. 4.

  7. Markham, Antarctic Obsession, p. 4–5.

  8. Markham, The Lands of Silence, p. 447.

  Chapter Two – Scott – The Early Days

  1. Scott, letter to Kathleen Bruce, 26 May 1908.

  2. Thompson, Sir Courtauld letter quoted by J.M. Barrie, introduction to Scott’s Last Expedition, (1927).

  3. Scott’s diary, quoted by Seaver, Scott of the Antarctic, p. 18.

  4. Scott, letter to Kathleen Scott, 1 January 1911.

  5. Scott, letter to father, 29 September 1894.

  6. Scott, letter to mother, 1898.

  7. Scott, letter to mother, 2 December 1898.

  8. Scott, letter to mother, 15 October 1898.

  Chapter Three – ‘Ready, Aye, Ready’

  The main secondary sources for Wilson are G. Seaver’s two excellent books Edward Wilson of the Antarctic and The Faith of Edward Wilson. The main secondary source for Edgar Evans is G.C. Gregor’s Swansea’s Antarctic Explorer which provides some interesting detail about the early years of this engaging and important but sometimes neglected figure.

  1. Markham, Antarctic Obsession, p. 125.

  2. Ibid, p. 133.

  3. Armitage, Cadet to Commodore, p. 129.

  4. Ibid, p. 130.

  5. Ibid, p. 141.

  6. Schackleton, quoted Huntford, Schackleton, p. 13.

  7. Scott, letter to Oriana Wilson, March 1912.