With Scott in the Antarctic

by Isobel E Williams

  Shackleton made a triumphant return to London in June 1909 having crossed the Ross Ice Barrier and found the way up onto the polar plateau through a pass he named the Beardmore Glacier, after his sponsor, William Beardmore.66 He had made the most significant advances and reached to within ninety-seven miles of the Pole. But in spite of these great achievements, he had perpetrated a cardinal sin in Wilson’s eyes by landing on McMurdo, as he could not get through the ice pack around King Edward VII Land. Scott felt that this had always been his intention and felt betrayed. Wilson never forgave Shackleton in spite of being familiar with the conditions that Shackleton would have met and being aware that exploration costs made it important that sponsors got a good return for their money. He felt that the compromise that he had bartered had been broken and his deep and intransigent sense of right and wrong was affronted. He wrote to Shackleton to say that he was glad that they had been able to meet and talk in a friendly manner but giving his uncompromising opinion that Shackleton had broken his word. He said the Shackleton had taken Scott’s job practically out of his hands, against his wish and knowing that Scott was hoping to finish it. He wrote that he thought that Shackleton should not have gone, but since he had, the correct course now was for him to be as generous to Scott as Scott had been to him, by stating publicly that he had had his turn at the Pole and that the field was now open to Scott ‘to take up his own work again’. He told Shackleton to ‘play the game now by him as he has played the game by you’.67 He finished the friendship.

  Scott knew that Shackleton’s return without a polar ‘hit’ had reopened the door to his own ambitions. His plans solidified. Having obtained the necessary assurance from Shackleton that he had no objection to the next Antarctic adventure, he sent a telegram to Wilson on 16 September asking him to organise and lead the scientific staff for the expedition due to leave England in June 1910. Wilson accepted, writing to his father in September, ‘Scott is a man worth working for as a man’.68 He wrote to his mother,

  For my own part I have long been convinced that the first principle of right living is to put one’s life into the hands of God and then do the work he gives one to do. I know one sometimes has to make a choice between two pieces of work which offer; but when one alone is offered one is meant to do it trusting it will turn out all right in the end. … There has been no choice and therefore no difficulty to my mind in deciding and I am to go as ‘Leader of Scientific Staff’, a high sounding title with the disagreeable duty attached to it of having to reply to toasts on behalf of the Scientific Staff at the Send-off dinner.69

  So began further, seemingly endless work. He had to complete his writings on grouse disease. He was still working on British Birds and British Mammals and the preparations needed for the expedition were formidable. He was consulted on details of every department in addition to his own. Most importantly he had to select his staff, inspect the scientific instruments, calculate food values and quantities for men and animals, consult on details for depot laying and keep up with his correspondence. He wrote, ‘My work is endless; it seems as if I could not possibly get through it all, and yet bit by bit it gets done’.70 He had to work standing up to keep awake. Probably at the suggestion of his wife, he tried to introduce some balance in his life and had his portrait painted. The portrait, now in the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, shows a strong face, a man of purpose and determination. The commission was done by Alfred Soord (1868–1915), a pupil of Wilson’s famous artistic neighbour, Herkomer. Soord went on to paint both of Wilson’s parents and ‘Titus’ Oates’ mother, Caroline. He also prepared, from her description, a ‘portrait’ of a lady’s dead father. She had no photographs to show him. On being shown the result, she shook her head sadly and commented on how he had changed. Wilson enjoyed the enforced relaxation and wrote to Soord:

  I too learned a lot from our conversations. You have done a great deal more than to paint a picture which will be a great comfort to my ‘grass-widow’. … My character is weathered or ought to be as you have painted it, and I pray God it may be increasingly to the end… for ‘here we have no abiding place and this is not our rest’.71

  He spent his last English Christmas at Westal with his family. His father recorded that he was the gayest and liveliest of the family. He gave a copy of The South Polar Times to his godson, the son of his St George’s friend, Hugh Fraser. He visited his brother-in-law Bernard Rendall’s school in Sussex and thanked the boys for their help in providing a sledge for the expedition and contributing to the purchase of scientific instruments, (support equalled by donations from all over the country). Before he joined Scott’s new ship, Terra Nova, in June 1910 he had one further experience to cram in.

  For years he had wanted to go on a whaling boat from the Shetland Islands in Scotland. He wanted to update his knowledge on whales and whaling techniques and if possible to obtain the services of a Norwegian whaling gunner. It was ‘now or never’. He travelled to Scotland arriving in Orkney on 1 June. Here he was enthused by the herring-fishery industry, the steam trawlers, the tugs, the harbour, the lighthouse, the seabirds and the sheep. He went to the cathedral and sketched the monument of Dr John Ray, who had investigated the loss of Franklin and his crew in the Arctic and who had found the remains of bodies, identified by their possessions, as part of that ill-fated expedition. In his report to the Admiralty, which was published in The Times in July 1854, Ray had written that the survivors had been driven to cannibalism.72 This had attracted much hostility and he was ostracised. Wilson wrote that he ‘lay asleep wrapped in a buffalo sleeping bag with moccasins on, and just a book open by his side… [He] sleeps soundly in this little out-of-the-way Cathedral honoured by his own people and caring nothing for the rest’.73 On this northern visit Wilson met a future companion, Edward W. Nelson (1883–1923), the biologist on Terra Nova, ‘who has known the Shetlands all his life and will one day own half of them’.74

  Whaling was a lucrative, very dangerous business. Oil was needed for fuel, and bones for corsets, hairbrushes and whips. Whaling ships were fast and rugged; the one that Wilson was on rolled from side to side and twisted and untwisted unendingly. Its deck was awash with water that reached to his knees and at first he ‘wasn’t sure he could go on’.75 It was a day or two before he could stagger on deck to breathe air instead of ‘concentrated Chief Engineer and whale oil’. The Engineer was ‘a perfectly hugely fat pendulous man, who always came down the gangway backwards and squeezed into his cabin door sideways’.76

  The Captain was a ‘Viking’ of a man’ who had killed almost every species of whale. Harpoon guns were used to kill the whales. These were often shot from small wooden whaleboats that trailed the whales as the huge sea monsters moved underwater, to be close enough to kill the beasts as they slowly rose out of the sea, blowing out huge spouts of spray. The harpoon carried lines that anchored the poor beast, and the whaleboat crew could be treated to a ‘sleigh ride’ as the whale dragged its hunters through the sea, often for hours, in its attempt to escape. Eventually the whale was winched back to the ship. It was essential to prevent damage from the immense flaying tail and any residual signs of life were extinguished by a coup de grâce from a long lance thrust through the heart or chest. The body, belly up, floated high in the water and was kept on the surface by having air pumped into it. Wilson thought it a ‘great and thrilling sport, no more cruel in proportion than the shooting of a stag’.77 He had clearly moved on from his complete allegiance to St Francis.

  Returning to Cheltenham, he valued Oriana more and more. She had carefully prepared his possessions for the Antarctic and the ports of call on the way. He had to continue working late into the night on his last days at home, but Oriana insisted on staying up with him. He wrote, ‘we were both tired out and dreadfully short of sleep but I remember these last days with her as days of the most perfect companionship I have ever known’.78 He wrote to Dr Fraser that Oriana took the place of all friends and rendered him independent of them though not indiff
erent:

  My wife is all my friends and all my relatives and I often wonder why she has never been taken from me, as good things so often are when they become the breath of one’s very existence. My religious convictions are precisely what they were when you knew me at ‘The Corner’ [St George’s at Hyde Park Corner], but they don’t show so much.79

  The final few days before departure were truly chaotic. On Monday 13 June Wilson and Oriana travelled to London; he was still writing up a paper for the Zoological Society and doing more illustrations for British Mammals. In London he arranged for whaling equipment to be taken down to Cardiff (the starting port for Terra Nova), purchased scientific equipment, said his goodbyes to friends and continued with the grouse report, which was finally to be sent back from South Africa. They travelled to Cardiff on 15 June. Oriana and his parents stayed on board for the first thirty miles or so of Terra Nova’s voyage. They parted without anguish. Oriana was to meet him in South Africa. He went ‘full of hope for their next meeting’.80 And so to his bunk for the first good sleep in days.

  11

  Terra Nova

  Scott said, ‘A true sportsman is not jealous of his record or slow to praise those who surpass it’,1 but there was surely schadenfreude behind these generous comments; he must have been secretly relieved that the South Pole still remained unconquered and within his grasp. He must have been delighted that Wilson had chosen to go with him.

  Terra Nova, a three-masted, scarred, worn, wooden whaling vessel had been purchased for £12,500. (Discovery was by now owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company who refused to give her up). Terra Nova had already been in action in the Antarctic during the Discovery rescue of 1904. In 1910 she left the London docks in early June, so as to be in New Zealand by mid-November.2 This meant, it was hoped, that she could force her way through the pack ice earlier than usual and that the expedition could set up a base in the Antarctic by the beginning of 1911.3 Terra Nova sailed round the south coast of England to Cardiff which was to be her final leaving point, eleven days after the burial of that royal Antarctic sponsor, King Edward VII. The beginnings of both Antarctic expeditions were overshadowed therefore by the death of the reigning sovereign.

  She sailed under a White Ensign; the Admiralty had relented since Discovery days and Terra Nova was allowed to fly the naval flag. Cardiff was chosen as her leaving port in appreciation of the support given by the Welsh to the expedition in terms of cash donations, coal, oil and scientific equipment. Scott announced that Cardiff would be the first port of call on returning to England. Indeed three years later, in June 1913, she sailed into Cardiff again, to be paid off.

  Terra Nova sailed from British shores on 15 June. The usual bands, flags, gun salutes and cheering crowds were there to send her off. Wilson wrote that the steam sirens and hooters ‘of which Cardiff seemed to possess an infinite number, made a perfectly hideous din’.4 His parents, sister and Oriana stayed on board for a short while. They were excited by the noisy bustle and his father wrote that when the ship got out of the dock ‘the rocks, quays and every corner was occupied by people cheering like mad’.5 He said that when he got back to Westal, the house felt ‘dull and flat’ without his son. But he proudly wrote that Wilson was ‘very bright but fearfully busy … being wanted in every direction as head of scientific staff’.6 Scott planned that Terra Nova would berth in Madeira, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand on her way to the Antarctic but he himself was not on board for the early part of the voyage; he stayed in England to continue fundraising (the expedition was still £8,000 in the red). Lieutenant Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans (1881–1957), second-in-command and navigator, was master. Scott with Kathleen, Oriana and Hilda Evans, Lieutenant Evans’s wife, were to meet the ship in South Africa.

  Although opinions varied as to the value of polar exploration and its results,7 8,000 had applied to join the expedition, eager to ‘reach a spot on the surface of the globe which has hitherto been untrodden by human feet unseen by human eye’.8 The President of the Royal Geographical Society opined that the expedition was ‘going to prove once again that the manhood of the nation is not dead and that the characteristics of our ancestors, who won this great empire, still flourish amongst us’.9 The ship’s complement was listed as officers, scientific staff (Wilson, as chief of scientific staff and zoologist, amongst these) and men, and divided into ‘Shore Parties’ and ‘Ship’s Party’.10 Wilson was listed amongst the Shore Parties. The seamen were nearly all from the Royal Navy and three of them – William Lashly the chief stoker, Tom Crean and Edgar Evans, both petty officers – were ex-Discovery sailors. The ‘Scientific Staff’ included the ski expert Tryggve Gran (1889–1980), a sub-lieutenant in the Norwegian Royal Navy and ‘a delightful young Norwegian giant’,11 and Wilson’s protégé, Cherry-Garrard, who sailed under the impressive title of ‘Batchelor of Arts, Assistant Zoologist’. The horribly overloaded ship carried amongst all the tons of essential equipment, 1,200 lbs of tobacco and 30,000 cigars. More personnel, dogs and horses were to be squeezed on in New Zealand.

  For Wilson most of the ship’s complement were new acquaintances though he was of course close to Scott and Cherry-Garrard and had met Edward Nelson, Terra Nova’s biologist. He would have remembered Lashly and Crean as well as ‘Swansea’s Antarctic explorer’, the big Welshman, Petty Officer Edgar Evans (1876–1912). Before the ship’s departure Evans had been a speaker at a banquet held in honour of the expedition in which he said that no one else would have induced him to go to the Antarctic again but if there is a man in the world who could bring this to a successful conclusion Captain Scott was that man. Evans had a tendency to drink but Scott described him as ‘A giant worker with a truly remarkable headpiece’.12

  Wilson was hopeful about the expedition. He had written to his father:

  As Scott’s only companion on the previous voyage I shall have a good position in the Expedition from the first. … As leader of Scientific Staff I shall have a wider opportunity of making a success in that if possible, so that no one can say it has only been a Pole hunt, though that of course is sine qua non. We must get to the Pole; but we shall get more too and there shall be no loopholes for error in means and methods if care in preparation can avoid them. I can promise you it is a work worth anyone’s time and care and I feel it is a really great opportunity.13

  Wilson’s role before departure had been to help fulfil Scott’s aim of continuing and developing the scientific work started on Discovery. He helped appoint the largest team that had ever gone with a southern expedition. He chose as meteorologist George Clarke Simpson (1878–1965), on loan from the Indian Weather Bureau, who was to become ‘the father of Antarctic meteorology’. Simpson had been turned down for the 1901-4 expedition on health grounds but was keenly accepted this time. In later life he became Director of the British Meteorological Office. Wilson wrote that Simpson was their only real socialist, anti-everything and a firm believer in the Manchester Guardian.14 Simpson’s assistant was Charles Wright (1887–1975), a 23-year-old Canadian Physicist who had also been an undergraduate at Gonville and Caius. The scientific party included three geologists, two from Cambridge: Australian-educated Griffith Taylor (1880–1964) and Raymond Priestley (1886–1964). Taylor and Priestley joined the ship in New Zealand along with a third geologist, Frank Debenham (1883–1965), another Australian who went on to establish and become first director of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and to become a Fellow of Gonville and Caius.

  The scientific staff included two marine biologists from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory. Dennis Lillie (1884–1963) was at that time a frail, 26-year-old. He was predominantly concerned with deep-sea work and wrote the expedition’s official report on whales. He was also a caricaturist. Wilson liked his work and redrew some of his caricatures for The South Polar Times. The second biologist was Edward Nelson, who Wilson had already met in Scotland. Kathleen Scott described Nelson as a man who ‘spends all his time on shore being a man about town which make
s him look exceedingly tired’.15 Nelson was known as, amongst other things, ‘Antonio the Immaculate’, because he always wore a clean collar at dinnertime,16 or Marie. The engineer in charge of the motor sledges, Bernard Day (1884–1935), had been to the Antarctic before, in 1907. He was also listed as a scientist.

  Wilson had at least one detractor. The experienced Australian geologist Douglas Mawson (1882–1958), who had made major contributions to Shackleton’s expedition, was approached by Scott to return to the Antarctic with him, but would only accept if offered the role of chief scientific officer, a position clearly not vacant. Perhaps predictably he noted later, ‘I did not like Dr Wilson’.17

  The officers were the Second in Command ‘Teddy’ Evans who in later years was promoted to Admiral and made Lord Mountevans. Evans was a skilled navigator and a man of energy and enthusiasm who had taken part in the relief of Scott’s Discovery expedition in 1902. Early in the expedition he painted out the Plimsoll line18 on the ship to avoid drawing the attention of the authorities (who might have prevented sailing) to her overburdened state. The mate was an old Etonian,19 Lieutenant Victor Campbell (1875–1956), who had lived in Norway and could ski well. As on Discovery there were two doctors, Murray Levick (1877–1956) and Edward Atkinson (1882–1929), both London graduates. Wilson had no problems with them although both were more experienced in medicine than him. He said that Atkinson did nothing without informing him and asking for his approval.

  The officers included two men fated to pass into the annals of Antarctic legend: Lieutenant Henry Robertson Bowers (1883–1912), gentle and honest with unquenchable spirits and energy, was accepted by Scott, sight unseen, on the forceful recommendation of Sir Clements Markham. Wilson must have been as startled as most people at his first sight of the plump little man with an immense nose and red bristly hair who was immediately called ‘Birdie’.20 The other was another old Etonian, Laurence Oates (1880–1912), who had given £1,000 towards the expedition and who signed on as midshipman at one shilling per week. He was called Titus, after the seventeenth-century anti-Catholic conspirator Titus Oates, or Soldier, because of his military experience in the Boer War when a bullet had sliced through his left thigh and fractured his leg. Oates was a captain of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons21 and the first soldier to join a British polar expedition. At his interview, he told a friend afterwards, he had said that he had no intention of being left at base and that he wanted to be in the party attempting the Pole.22 His final words, before crawling out of the doomed tent to his death in 1912, were to become permanently famous: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’.23