The photographer or ‘camera artist’ was Herbert George Ponting (1870–1935). He was to create the most beautiful black and white stills (the originals are in the Scott Polar Institute) and a film of the early part of the expedition. Wilson described his work as ‘beyond all praise’ and planned a joint exhibition with Ponting after his return.24
The ship was slow. Wilson described her as having two speeds, slow and slower, and she took two months to get to South Africa, but the routine of regular work was soon in place, four-hour shifts, stoking the boiler, trimming the sails. Wilson maintained a busy schedule. He was woken at 4a.m. with a mug of cocoa. His duties included overseeing the scientific programme, completing commissioned sketches and paintings for the journals, writing up his whaling notes and finishing the grouse paintings (entry after entry in his diary records the hours he spent on these). He did a few medical duties though: diagnosing measles in Lillie and operating on Dr Atkinson’s infected finger. He did not just limit himself to his scientific work but took part in the three-hour coal-trimming rota, moving coal from the main hold to bunkers to feed one of the three furnaces. He wrote to Oriana, ‘in ten minutes we are streaming with sweat. … The air in the hold is always tested first to make sure it is breathable’.25 The heat of the furnaces burnt their eyes. As the ship progressed into the tropics the conditions were to get worse; ‘stoke-hole flies’, drops of hot oil from the engines, stung the men’s skin continuously as they worked in the hold.
Terra Nova arrived in Madeira after an eight-day sail. Wilson thought it ‘grand’. But he still was behind on his commissions, particularly the grouse report. He took the grouse paintings on shore and set up in a café where he finally completed them, having worked through most of the night. He received ‘two letters and a wire from Ory whereas poor Campbell and Evans did not hear from their wives at all’.26
He was permanently busy. He said a few hours rest at sea went a long way, but he still had to work standing up to stop falling asleep. He commandeered a corner of the baggage-room cabin and wrote on a suitcase perched on top of a washstand and was at his ‘desk’ most mornings from 4 until 6a.m. or on until breakfast. He could not work in his cabin, which he shared with Evans.27 It was small, with little light, less air and no table or chairs. If he ever left papers out there they invariably landed on the greasy floor as the ship rolled along. But the voyage showed him nature at her attractive best and there was always someone about with expert knowledge to explain her mysteries.28 It is difficult to imagine how beautiful even the most common animals are until they are seen fresh-coloured from the deep sea. As they went along constant cries rang out: whale, whale, new bird, dolphin. Wilson painted them all.
Terra Nova crossed the Line on 5 July. As on Discovery, Neptune (Seaman Evans) and his attendants arrived to initiate those men crossing for the first time. Wilson having been ‘done’ on Discovery watched as the hapless initiate was made to swallow a soap and tallow ‘pill’, as big as a golf-ball, washed down by a vinegar/cayenne mixture and lathered with flour, soot and water, shaved to the waist with a great wooden razor and dropped backwards into a bath. He had thought the performance barbaric on Discovery but now, as an onlooker, he was definitely more tolerant of proceedings.29
On Saturday 16 July, his wedding anniversary, he painted a ‘sunrise’ for Oriana. Seven days later, his birthday (he was thirty-eight) was celebrated in the middle of the night with dancing and singing on the main hatch dog kennel by his friends who had managed to forget the date in their busy schedule. Wilson wrote that ‘everyone was overflowing with good nature’.30 He was one of the oldest aboard and was called ‘Uncle Bill’ but he wrote enthusiastically to Sir Clements that he could not find the words to say how lucky they were with the choice of officers and civilian staff and how well they got on together and how they were bursting with health and spirits.31 The feeling of being old soon wore off. He enjoyed the atmosphere on board which he described as being like an undergraduate outing with plenty of horseplay.
‘Birdie’ Bowers was also appraising his new companions. Of them all, the man who impressed him the most was Wilson. He wrote to his mother:
He is the soundest man we have, a chap who I would trust with anything. I am sure he is a real Christian [as was Birdie]; there is no mistaking it – it comes out in everything. Of course he has more presence than anybody in the mess, being the oldest and certainly the wisest.
He wrote later, ‘I still think him the most pre-eminent chap – the perfect gentleman – the most manly and the finest character in my own sex that I have ever had the privilege to meet’.32 The admiration was mutual. Wilson wrote that Bowers had ‘the most unselfish character I think I have ever seen in a man anywhere’.33
The sailing track of ships from England ran out towards South America and, as on Discovery in 1900, the itinerary included a stop in South Trinidad. When they arrived on 26 July, Wilson and some others went ashore. South Trinidad was very interesting to Wilson. The birds, having rarely seen humans, were fearless and their variety was remarkable. With Cherry-Garrard he collected Trinidad petrel birds, white terns and ‘handsome’ gannets. Wilson himself wrote that the petrel named after him after his visit in 1901, and the other Trinidad petrels, were in fact all varieties of the same species; a fact confirmed later. The land crabs remained as nightmarish as in Discovery days. Their dead staring eyes followed the men as if willing them to fall down. They pecked at the men’s boots hopefully. When the men returned to the shore to go back to the ship, they found themselves trapped by thirty-foot waves. The pick-up boat could not get through and they all had to haul themselves to the ship on a lifeline, pulling through the raging water and mindful of the fourteen sharks that had been seen in it that very morning. One sailor lost the rope and was battered to and fro onto the rocks. He eventually managed to get a hold, though underwater for ‘an impossible length of time’.34 Wilson’s reaction to the whole incident was unruffled. He sat on the top of a rock coolly eating a biscuit. He thought that ‘only the British temperament, (knowing there was nothing they could do), could quietly watch a man fighting for his life’.35
From South Trinidad onwards, Wilson stopped sketching to finish off the written parts of the grouse report, a task that must have seemed never-ending. But he thrived on the atmosphere on Terra Nova. He wrote to Reginald Smith: ‘there hasn’t been a single quarrelsome word on the ship on the way to the Cape’. He was pleased too that Cherry-Garrard, his protégé, was a success and wrote that Cherry-Garrard was flourishing, was as strong as a horse and popular; he had never seen anyone enjoying life more. Cherry proved to be a conscientious assistant zoologist; he skinned birds all of one night to save them from decomposing in the heat.36
Terra Nova arrived in Simonstown on 15 August. Oriana, her sister Constance and Teddy Evan’s wife, Hilda, were waiting. The arrival was newsworthy and the Cape Times reporters were there. Wilson had finally got his grouse report finished. This was an enormous relief though he felt sorry for the poor proofreader, as the papers had been written in pencil on a heavily rolling ship. He and Oriana visited a whaling station and then felt free to devote themselves wholeheartedly to flowers and birds.
We were in a sort of enchanted land where the commonest things were all new and beautiful and one’s foot crushes new beauties at every step. The variety of lovely Irises and small lilies and daisies and marigolds and heaths and geraniums and Heaven knows what, was quite bewildering and unreal.37
The birds were equally fascinating: on a hilltop he saw a black and white buzzard with a red-brown tail, perched on its eyrie on a rock, looking like a monument.
When Scott, having travelled independently to South Africa, arrived on board, Wilson was dismayed to be ordered to leave Terra Nova and to sail to Melbourne on Corinthic, a steamer. Scott wanted to get to know the crew and he moved into Wilson’s cabin with Evans.38 Wilson’s orders were to go ahead to organise expedition matters, appoint a third geologist and to travel to Sydney to make a presentati
on for a Federal Government grant towards the expedition. He was to travel with Oriana, Kathleen Scott and Hilda Evans. Neither Wilson nor Lieutenant Evans was happy with the decision, ‘for we felt there would not be lacking people who would put their own construction on such an unexpected change of plan at the first opportunity’ (i.e. a lack in confidence or even an envy of Evans).39 For himself, Wilson thought unhappily about the undesired comfort of a liner, rather than the happy-go-lucky attractive discomforts of the Terra Nova. He knew also that speeches and money-raising were not his forte. But he had no choice and he wrote to Sir Clements that it would give Scott a chance to get to know the ‘first rate lot of men he has to work with him’.40
In the event the quartet that travelled together was an uncomfortable mix. Kathleen was probably too exciting and flamboyant for her companions and did not easily get on with any of them. She thought Wilson humourless, as probably he was in her presence. She later described Oriana, who had the ability to behave with someone she did not like as if that person did not exist,41 as ‘a absurd prig’.42 She was later to have a furious row with Hilda Evans.
The uneasy quartet arrived in Melbourne ten days before Terra Nova. On a depressing, rainy 12 October, Wilson spent the afternoon in a motor launch, saddled with wives and mailbags, searching the bay for news of the vessel. When the ship was eventually sighted Kathleen demanded that they set off again in total darkness and a rough sea. ‘Ory behaved like a brick all through our difficulties in the bay, but in future I hope it will never fall to my lot to have more than one wife at a time to look after, at any rate in a motor launch, in running sea at night time’.43 However the main reasons for him going to Melbourne, money-raising and appointing a geologist, went well. Asking for money was a disagreeable business. Seeing so many senior state officials every day and agitating important ministers, including the Federal Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Andrew Fisher, for a grant was a trial, but he was rewarded with £2,500 from the Federal Government and £2,500 from a private individual. Appointing Raymond Priestley as geologist was, by contrast, a pleasure and he wrote to Sir Clements that the excellent crowd on Terra Nova would manage the Pole before anyone else, whether Japanese or German.44 Invited to a Lord Mayor’s Ball given in honour of Dutch ships also visiting Melbourne, he was unimpressed by the Dutch officers; the older ones were ‘stout, bald and ugly, the younger officers with one or two exceptions were well on the way to becoming stout, bald and ugly’.45
In Melbourne on 12 October Scott received the now famous terse telegram from Roald Amundsen, ‘Beg leave to inform you Fram [his ship] proceeding Antarctic’. The race to the Pole was about to begin although Scott did not at first realise that the Pole was Amundsen’s intended target.46 Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), a Norwegian, had planned and schemed to be a polar explorer from his early years. He was already famous. He had made the first navigation through the Northwest Passage and had travelled to the Antarctic in 1897, though not to its interior. He had sailed from Norway in 1910 on Fram with the professed intention of heading to the Arctic basin and the North Pole. But this was a feint (though he kept the truth from his financial backers as well as those on board). Months before, when he heard that two Americans, Frederick A. Cook and Robert E. Peary, had both claimed independently to have reached the North Pole, he understood immediately that this dealt the death blow to his own enterprise and ambition. As Fram was about to leave Madeira he summoned the crew and told his astonished listeners that he was sailing for the Antarctic and that their destination was the Bay of Whales. This was a bay on the Barrier that had been discovered by Shackleton in 1908, situated a few hundred miles along the coast from Scott’s destination on McMurdo Sound. For Amundsen, the Pole and back was a race with the British from the start. He expected to beat Scott by two or three weeks.47
Terra Nova sailed to New Zealand to take her final supply of coal. Here, for the first time, when Scott was in Wellington on more fund-raising efforts, rumours of a ‘Challenge for South Pole’ reached him when he was eagerly interviewed by local newspaper reporters. Scott now clearly understood that Amundsen could snatch his prize from him. On reflection he decided that it was too late to change the plans that had been widely publicised in his fund-raising campaign, and which could explain the timing of Amundsen’s announcement. He decided to continue with the scientific and geographical programmes as planned, as well as the Pole attempt.
Wilson thought that the base that Amundsen had chosen on the Barrier was unsafe; it was on sea ice which he thought might break up. But of course the Norwegian group could be fortunate and the dogs a success, in which case Amundsen would reach the Pole first. He could travel faster, with dogs and expert skiers, than the British with their ponies and could also start earlier; the British did not want to expose the ponies to the October temperatures. Oates also rated their chances of success as good. The Norwegians were a very tough lot, ‘very good ski runners while the British could only walk’.48 He wrote to his mother, ‘I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves. All that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc is rot and if we fail it will only make us look more foolish.’49
Terra Nova arrived in New Zealand on 29 October and was welcomed with open arms. Officers and men were told that ‘although already separated by thousands of miles from their native land, here in this new land they would find a second home and those who would equally think of them in their absence and welcome them on their return’.50 Oriana was waiting for her husband. She was staying with Lady Bowen,51 ‘such a real old English home and such a dear old lady’. Wilson loved New Zealand all over again. He thought that there were the people and places he most wanted to be with. Terra Nova spent a month being unloaded and reloaded under Bowers capable instruction. She was put in dry-dock where, once again, leaks were plugged, pumps cleaned and bolts tightened. Tourists toured in their hundreds. For Wilson the time was passed in a whirl of business and social engagements as he and Oriana renewed their friendships with local people. The Bowens and their daughter Lily encouraged the Wilsons to use their house as if it was their home. But in spite of all the bustle, his faith remained central and he chose this last time before departure to enter into discussions with the Bishop of Wellington about the priesthood. Oriana did not support the idea of a fuller commitment to the church. Years later she wrote to Wilson’s younger brother Jim, himself ordained, that she thought a man could do so much for others without taking holy orders, especially a scientific man.52 Although Wilson abandoned ideas of the Church, he continued to insinuate the ‘Truth’ into each day; this continued the core of his existence.
In New Zealand, Terra Nova was loaded with yet more stores, food, equipment, men, dogs and horses. The extra human cargo included the Australian-based contingent: Griffith Taylor; Frank Debenham; Raymond Priestley; Bernard Day, the motor mechanic; and the camera-artist and cinematographer, 41-year-old Herbert Ponting. When Terra Nova finally left New Zealand on 29 November Wilson had more than sixty officers, scientists and seamen as fellow-travellers; thirty-two allocated to the Ship Party, thirty-two to the Shore Party. Other additions included nineteen white or dapple-grey Manchurian ponies; ponies of this colour were bought because lighter ponies lived longer on Shackleton’s expedition.53 The purchase of ponies was helped by donations from schools all over the country, (as were many things including sleeping bags, sledges and tents), they were housed in stables just above the sailors’ quarters, so that the animals’ urine was intermittently and unceremoniously sprayed onto the sailors’ bunks. Also on deck and also bought with help from schools, were thirty-three Siberian dogs, snarling, howling and fouling the decks, each dog chained at a safe distance from the next and so all over the deck. Presumably inflaming the predatory dogs to their limits, were a cat, a kitten, three rabbits, a pigeon, squirrels and a guinea pig. The deck, which looked like a floating farmyard, was further congested, Wilson wrote, by: more than 150 mutton carcasses and two beef carcasses; three deck-houses; all the equipment fo
r the laboratories; an ice house; five boats; sledges; enormous cases with the motor sledges; horse fodder, which Oates had thought was insufficient and bought, at his own expense, two more tons of; and more than 100 cases of petrol, oil and paraffin. Coal was mostly stored in the hold and bunkers but thirty tons were thrown down on the deck wherever there was space. The petrol was stored in cases, which formed a floor to the upper deck.
Not only the dogs and ponies but also their handlers came on board. The choice of the animals had been left to Cecil Meares (1887–1937), the dog expert, who had travelled in Russia, spoke Russian fluently and knew where to purchase dogs in Siberia. His choice of ponies was considered a crucial mistake; Oates thought that they were old, lame and diseased. To get his menagerie back to New Zealand and the ship, Meares hired two Russians: the jockey Anton Lukich Omelchenko (1883–1932) and a dog driver, 22-year-old Demitri Gerof (1888–?1932). They were accompanied by one of Kathleen Scott’s brothers, Wilfred Bruce (1874–1953), a Royal Naval lieutenant. The whole troop travelled from Vladivostok to Melbourne and then to Lyttleton.
With Scott in the Antarctic Page 22