The time in New Zealand was not without incident; Kathleen Scott and Hilda Evans did not get on. Bowers attributed this to mutual jealousy, though he adored Hilda Evans.54 This developed eventually to a ‘magnificent battle’; Oates said he had been told that it was a draw after fifteen rounds. He said that Oriana flung herself into the fight after the tenth round and there was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you would see in a Chicago slaughterhouse in a month. The husbands got a bit of the backlash and there is a certain amount of coolness which I hope they won’t bring into the hut with them.55 But before the ship sailed, Kathleen gave conciliatory tea to Hilda and Oriana on the ship. Two of them would never see their husbands again.
On Wilson and Oriana’s last day, they bid a sad goodbye to Lady Bowen and Lily and travelled to Christchurch. Friends came to see them off; Wilson was especially pleased with a bouquet of flowers for his Oriana from an old lady who had travelled miles to present it. (Wilson took the verbena out of the bouquet, dried it and took it with him on his travels).56 Then they travelled to Dunedin for the final send-off. Even there they had to go to a dinner and dance in honour of the officers. After a few hours Oriana and Wilson ‘went back to the hotel and there we were very happy for the last evening together for some time – poor dear’.57 When Terra Nova cast off on 29 November Oriana stayed on board for as long as possible before leaving on a tug. Wilson wrote:
I saw her disappear out of sight waving happily, a goodbye that will be with me till the day I see her again in this world or the next – I think it will be in this world and some time in 1912. We had excellent weather for a start and a sunny day for a send-off.58
He asked Dr Fraser, his friend from St George’s, to look after Oriana when she got back to England and he remembered his godson; he hoped that he would grow up as honest as his father ‘and then he isn’t far wrong’.59
They were dogged with problems from the start. When Terra Nova was three days out of Port Lyttelton the expedition was hit by disaster. The winds rose, seas poured over both sides of the ship filling her waist with water and tearing everything adrift. Terra Nova was dangerously overladen, and with laboratories, boats, ice house, sheep carcasses, motor sledges, stables, dogs, horses, petrol cases and more on the upper deck, she ‘wallowed in the water like a thing without life’.60 A force-ten wind howled and shrieked through the rigging. The water gradually dislodged the petrol cases roped onto the deck and the forage food and hurled bags of coal around the deck like battering rams. Wilson wrote that when they plunged into the drowned waist of the ship to grab a broken case they often got caught by a wave ‘and the green sea would sweep along the deck, over one’s shoulders while the cases beneath all floated up anyhow, jamming one’s seaboots and themselves in every possible direction and forcing one often to drop everything and cling to the rail’.61 They had to throw coal sacks overboard so that they could tie the petrol cases down again. The ship’s violent movements opened up the deck seams and water poured below, washing quantities of coal dust into the bilges. This dust combined with oil in the bilges to form hard balls, which choked the pumps’ suction.
The dogs, whose on-board existence was awful at the best of times, were thrown around, held on board by their neck chains. One died. The ponies too began to fall: first one, then another, then another. Oates and Atkinson had to work desperately to try to keep them standing. In spite of their efforts one pony died. All hands laboured in the waist of the ship to bail water out of the boiler room, often submerged as they worked. As the night wore on and the wind got higher, the ship plunged up and down even more distractedly. The pumps were clogged, waves of filthy water washed to and fro in the engine rooms, the fires had to be put out and the engines stopped. The ship was at the mercy of the storm. It seemed that unless the pumps could be repaired the expedition would end before it got near the Antarctic. A ‘bucket group’ bailed water continuously for twelve hours in sweltering heat. It was impossible to get at the pumps through the hatch, so to get at them a hole had to be made in the engine room bulkhead, coal dug out from the next compartment and another hole cut into the suction well where the main handpump was located. Lieutenant Evans and Bowers squeezed into the pump shaft and, sometimes submerging completely in filthy oily water, passed back buckets and buckets of balls of the coal and oil sludge that had been blocking the pump. At last ‘to the joy of all, a good stream of water came from the pump for the first time’.62 Throughout, and in spite of, apparent impending disaster, the crew’s courage remained high. Officers and men kept their spirits up by singing sea shanties. Wilson in particular was undismayed:
I must say I enjoyed it all from beginning to end, and as one bunk became untenable after another, owing to the wet, and comments became more and more to the point, as people searched out dry spots here and there to finish the night, in oilskins and great coats on the cabin or wardroom floors, I thought that things were becoming interesting.63
When the pumps failed he wrote:
It was a weird night’s work with the howling gale and the darkness and the immense sea running over the ship every few minutes and no engines and no sail and we all in the engine room black as ink with engine room oil and bilge water, singing shanties as we passed up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above slopping a little over the heads of us all below him, wet through to the skin, so much so that some of the party worked altogether naked.64
He did not get seasick, though some men had to vomit and bail alternately, but he must have been a calming influence; the men who worked beside him realised that he had no fear and had a faith that could interpret a rainbow that he saw fleetingly at the height of the storm as the hope, or indeed the confirmation, that all would be well.65 In two days the nightmare was over. The fires were relit and the ship was pumped dry. Scott heaped praise on his crew.
As they pushed southwards using sail and steam they sang the hymn, ‘Eternal Father Strong to Save’. But the hymns were no talisman; they had to face more problems. On 9 December they entered the pack ice to the north of the Ross Sea. This year the ice stretched further north than it had in 1901. Hopes to get through it quickly, as had happened on Discovery, were doomed.
For Cherry-Garrard the slow transit through the ice was a revelation. He wrote, ‘No one of us whose privilege it was to be there will forget our first sight of penguins, our first meal of seal meat, or the first big berg along which we coasted close in order that London might see it on film.’ He liked the little Adéle penguins hurrying to meet them, ‘Great Scott, they seemed to say, what’s this? “Aark, aark” they said and full of wonder and curiosity and perhaps a little out of breath, they stopped every now and then to express their feelings’.66 Wilson thought the penguins as attractive as ever. The birds liked the sound of the men singing and would gather round admiringly as the crew bellowed out ‘She’s got bells on her fingers and rings on her toes’. Meares’ voice though, singing ‘God Save the King’, always sent them scurrying into the water. He sang flat, perhaps that was why.67
Terra Nova did not escape from the pack until 29 December, twenty days after entering (Discovery had taken four). Sometimes she moved so slowly that skiing lessons went on alongside her. Extra water was harvested. Fresh water, as opposed to seawater, was essential so gangs of sailors, singing sea shanties as they worked, cut great chunks of ice out of old salt-free floes. Wilson occupied himself with drawing, reading, skinning penguins (wanted for eating) and cleaning skulls and skeletons. He taught his assistant zoologist how to kill the birds by the humane method of ‘pithing’ them with a long needle driven through the back of the head and into the brain, so the birds died straight away. Cherry-Garrard, his enthusiasm and interest thoroughly aroused, wrote that he had never imagined anything as good as the life they were having with its fellowship, novelty, interest, colour and animal life. He wrote that words could not describe the beauty of the scene: the sun-kissed bergs, the brilliant blue sky fading into green and pink on the horizon, pink floes floating
in the deep blue sea and ice that shaded from burnished copper to salmon pink.68 Scott had hoped to be in clear water south of the pack by Christmas Day; this was impossible and he wrote that the scene from the ship on 25 December was ‘altogether too Christmassy’. Morale was maintained with a mess decorated with flags and banners, a Christmas service and a special dinner of tomato soup, penguin breast, roast beef, plum pudding, mince pies, asparagus, champagne, port and liqueurs, accompanied by untalented singing till 1a.m.69 Wilson hung up his flag from Caius College (made by the Master’s wife and still in the college) along with a Union Jack, a New Zealand flag and his sledging flag made by Oriana. A rabbit, a New Zealand gift, added her bit to the celebrations by producing seventeen babies. Overall, in spite of the slow progress, there was little bickering or back-stabbing. The men on board had been brought up in a tradition of self-control. Scott thought that they showed tolerance and good humour and was impressed that they could live under such conditions of hardship, monotony and danger in such an atmosphere of good companionship and wrote, ‘I have not heard a harsh word or seen a black look. A spirit of tolerance and good humour pervades the whole community’.70 He thought that such a combination of knowledge, experience, ability and enthusiasm must achieve something.71 Wilson used the time to study penguins, whales, microscopic crustaceans and ‘the wonderful stillness and beauty of the whole fairy-like scene’ where daylight lasted for twenty-four hours.72 He often sat in the crow’s nest, which he used as his private chapel, alone, with thoughts of God and of Oriana. By contrast Scott, who was not meditative or resigned, found the delay almost intolerable. He began to think they would have to winter in the pack; he worried about the coal supply. He remembered the days in the pack as days of unceasing struggle.
Finally they were in the open sea. Scott thought he could ‘breathe again’ though he was conscious of the amount of coal that had been consumed by the fight to get through the pack.73 Gradually the Antarctic came into view: the Admiralty Range, Mount Erebus. Terra Nova steered towards Cape Crozier, the home of the emperor penguins where it was hoped to winter. New Year’s Day was celebrated in the mess with a Westal plum pudding filled with shillings, pennies and buttons. Wilson got a button; this little talisman was to have a long life. Wilson took it south with him and it was later sent to his parent’s cook, Mrs Hart, in Cheltenham. Over ninety years later it was taken back to the Antarctic by the polar traveller Geoff Somers on his cross-Antarctic journey.74
Terra Nova reached Cape Crozier on 3 January. The emperor penguin rookery was in full view, but landing was made impossible by a heavy sea swell. This was a major disappointment for Wilson; one of his reasons for joining Scott’s second expedition was to further investigate the birds. But since landing was out of the question, Terra Nova returned along the west coast of Ross Island to McMurdo Sound. Here their base was on a small promontory, the Skuary, about twelve miles north of Hut Point. (Hut Point itself was avoided because of the problems there had been in releasing Discovery). The base allowed good access to the Barrier across the sea ice and was named ‘Cape Evans’ in honour of Lieutenant Evans. Wilson wrote, ‘the peace of God which passes all understanding reigns here in these days. One only wishes one could bring a glimpse away with one with all its unimaginable beauty’.75
They landed on 4 January. Work began on unloading immediately. As in 1902 it was important to get land-based at the earliest opportunity because at any moment the weather could deteriorate, forcing Terra Nova to move into open water. They were also already behind schedule. Two motor sledges were hoisted out looking ‘as fresh and clean as if they had been just packed’. The motors were running by the afternoon.76 Then came the ponies, all thin, but seventeen still alive and soon rolling and kicking on the floe with joy; then the dogs which were soon running light loads to and fro from ship to shore. The prefabricated hut that was to house them through the winter was unloaded in bits. All activities had an eager audience; the penguins were curious and keen to join the fun; they waddled around, poking their heads from side to side and trying to get the killer dogs to play. All too often their enticements ended with a ‘spring, a squawk and a horrid red patch on the snow’.77 In three days, working round the clock, all the provisions were on the shore. The ponies pulled loads of between 600 to 1,000 lbs. Men could pull 200 lbs, each dog 100 lbs.
By the time the third motor sledge was taken off the ship the ice had thawed and the sledge plunged through it. ‘R.I.P.’ wrote Wilson. The loss of one of these vehicles, which it was hoped would transform Antarctic travel, was a blow. In fact the other two did not get far; one broke down after a few miles, the second after fifty miles. Scott wrote that there was nothing wrong with the idea and correctly predicted a future for traction engines in Canada and other places. Oates disagreed; he thought they were a waste of money and wrote grumpily, ‘motors £100 each, ponies £5 each, dogs ten shillings each’.78 Another accident was just averted when camera-artist Ponting went onto an ice floe to photograph killer whales. As he set up his camera, he and the floe were heaved up as the whales rose in a coordinated attack, banging against the floe and splitting it into fragments around him. Somehow Ponting escaped, scrambling from floe to floe, just ahead of the whales’ hungry jaws; an event sadly not recorded on camera. He later said that the whales’ pent-up breath was like a blast from an air-compressor.79 He remarked afterwards that he was perspiring very freely. The crew was impressed with the whales’ cunning and orchestrated attack. It was clear that whales were very intelligent, an intelligence that they would treat with every respect.
Terra Nova was to return to New Zealand after she had sailed around the coast to offload an exploratory party. She was to carry the mail. Scott wrote glowingly to Oriana about her husband:
He is wonderful, at every turn his advice is asked, his sound commonsense and judgement is required for every decision of importance and his remarkable personality seems to stamp itself upon the whole enterprise. The most extraordinary fact of all is the quiet unobtrusive way in which his guidance of events is exerted. He is content to act in the background and as a consequence is wholly beloved as well as esteemed by everyone.80
Scott called Wilson to his cabin to show him, unusually, a letter to go on Terra Nova expressing his appreciation of all the crew’s work. He also revealed his plans for the depot journey to deposit supplies for the following year. Wilson was to be a dog-driver along with Scott, Meares and Teddy Evans.81 Wilson was pleased; he thought at the time that the dogs could probably get to the top of the Beardmore Glacier, ‘and the dog drivers are therefore the people who will have the best chance of doing the top piece of the ice cap to the Pole’. He hoped to be chosen, but ‘with so many bloods in the hey-day of youth and strength beyond my own I feel there will be a most difficult task in making choices towards the end’.82 He also wrote about life in Antarctica, vis-à-vis his eventual return, ‘Don’t be anxious if we don’t come back, remember that here we could live indefinitely without any supplies at all, for with seals, penguin, skuas and a boat with whaling gear we could live for years and years on food and blubber fires’.83
By 18 January the hut, fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, was ready for occupation. It gave an uninterrupted view across McMurdo Sound to the trans-Antarctic Mountains. The grey-white hut is there still, a living memento of this great period of exploration. Photographs taken in 2003 show the hut and the interior: the picks, hooks, shovels, sledges and skis are still neatly stored along with Griffith Taylor’s bicycle.84 The huts are protected by international treaty and are the focus of international financial support to prevent further deterioration. In 1911 the hut’s floor was covered with quilting, felt, boarding and linoleum, its interior divided into an ‘officers’ and ‘lower deck’ section by packing cases filled with wine or glass. The interior was warm, the gramophone played, the men were snug and happy.85 Life was hardly dull. Outside the noise was like a farmyard: howling dogs, horses neighing, skuas fighting with each other and penguins. Insid
e were cats, kittens, rabbits, squirrels and men. Wilson’s cabin was small but he had no complaints. In the first few weeks after landing, only a few men were in the hut anyway. Scott had organised sorties; four parties were to leave Cape Evans before the beginning of the Antarctic winter. They were to go to the Barrier to lay depots for the next year’s attempt at the Pole, to the west, to the east and to Cape Royds. Wilson was with the Barrier group.
Wilson’s group left for Cape Evans on the depot-laying journey on 24 January 1911, sent off with much excitement and photographing. They were to lay a series of depots starting at the edge of the barrier and stretching south for 140 miles. The final and biggest depot was to be called ‘One Ton Depot’. Eight ponies and two dog teams pulling 5,300 lbs (sufficient food and fuel for fourteen weeks) were led by thirteen men who knew that Scott would make his final selection for the Pole attempt in the Antarctic spring from amongst them. They were only allowed to take twelve lbs of personal kit. This included everything that they were not actually wearing: socks, shirts, tobacco, notebook, needles, thread, buttons, safety pins and sleeping boots.86 On the journey Wilson used his medical skills to remove pus from Atkinson’s (the doctor) infected heel. He drove a team of eleven dogs led by ‘Stareek’ (Russian for ‘Old Man’). He was by now relatively experienced with dog teams and could instruct them in their local dialect (Ki Ki for right, Ghui for left). He got to understand the dogs better and Stareek, a ‘ridiculous old man’ and ‘and quite the nicest quietest cleverest old dog’, never forgot his voice and always went to him after the trip. The dog teams were driven crazy by the sight and smell of seals. Wilson said that he managed never to get left behind when they rushed off, but on occasion he was dragged full length until the team got tired of running. Only then could he struggle to his feet.87
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