Wilson chose two companions, the ‘pick of the whole party’.9 Three meant that there was a ‘spare’ in case of an accident. He chose the indomitable Birdie Bowers and his protégé, Cherry-Garrard; he presumably felt that Cherry-Garrard’s appalling eyesight would hardly matter in the twenty-four hour darkness. His choice was undoubtedly a happy one; both Cherry-Garrard’s and Bower’s diaries stress their devotion to Wilson. Cherry-Garrard wrote of them both later, ‘these two men went through the Winter Journey and lived: later they went through the Polar Journey and died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was’.10
In 1903 Wilson had seen thousands of emperor chicks at Cape Crozier; he now decided that the eggs must be laid in late June.11 If he was ever to find vestiges of teeth in early embryos, (which would be evidence towards a connection with dinosaurs), he needed to be on the Cape then. His calculations were not correct. The female emperor actually lays her single egg in May. By the time Wilson left Cape Evans the chicks were already being incubated. Any scientist of the time could have made the same miscalculation. The life cycle of the emperor penguins was a total mystery.
The five-week trek started on 27 June 1911. Ponting used his magnesium flash-powder to take photographs of them in front of the hut. ‘Never was there such a collection of apparatus taken on a sledge journey but then also never was anyone before so led to undertake such a journey in midwinter darkness on the Barrier. It is an experimental journey’.12 The darkness lasted through the twenty-four hours, the temperature dropped many degrees below freezing. They battled against an uneven and often sand-like ice surface, lurking crevasses and permanent fatigue. For Cherry-Garrard the darkness was the worst; day and night ceased to have meaning:
I don’t believe minus seventy temperatures would be bad in daylight, not comparatively bad, when you could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food; could see your footsteps lately trodden into the soft snow that you might find your way back to the rest of your load; could see the lashings of the food bags; could read a compass without striking three or four boxes to find one dry match; could read your watch to see if the blissful moment of getting out of your bed was come … when it would not take you five minutes to lash the door of your tent and five hours to get started in the morning.13
They pulled two nine-foot sledges in tandem, 750 lbs of equipment.14 They went without dogs; dogs they thought would be unable to cope with the winter conditions. At the last moment, realising the enormous weight that they had to haul, they left their skis, aware or their probable limited value in darkness and on uneven surfaces. They pulled their double-lined tent, pick-axes, ropes, eiderdown-lined sleeping bags, provisions and oil for six weeks.
It was obvious immediately that this expedition was even worse than previous ones, however terrible they had been. Although they had hoped that the moon might give them a glimmer of light, this rarely happened, clouds blocked the moon. On ‘day’ two they passed their old friend, Hut Point, and moved from the sea ice onto the Barrier. This was to be their only ‘good’ pulling time throughout the round trip. As they got onto the Barrier a steady stream of cold air flowed down it onto the relatively warm sea ice. Wilson recorded the temperature change: minus 26.5°F at Hut Point and minus 47°F a few miles on. Not only did the temperature drop but also the snow surface got worse and worse. It was much more difficult for them to pull.15
No one had ever encountered such conditions. Scott wrote that although Amundsen had experienced similar temperatures on a journey to the north magnetic Pole, he had a reasonable amount of light, ‘Esquimaux’ who could build igloos and he turned home after five days rather than five weeks.16 These three had a thin canvas tent. All three were affected by the conditions but Cherry-Garrard was particularly bothered. He learnt quickly that he had to get into the right position for pulling just as soon as he left the tent; their clothes froze to iron armour in seconds and did not thaw out again until the next meal. Once, Cherry-Garrard had to pull for hours with his neck arched backwards because he had glanced up at the stars. On another occasion he took off his mitts briefly to pull on a rope to be rewarded with inch-long blisters on his fingertips that were filled with frozen pus and which only thawed out when he got into the tent and the relative warmth of the primus stove. His glasses fogged up and he could only see anything very close up. All three got excruciating leg cramps. Bowers got stomach cramps, though not badly enough to stop him sleeping and snoring, a remarkable cacophony which interfered with his companions’ already fragmented sleep. Wilson got bad foot blisters. They found that cooking was so difficult and slow that they started a daily rota instead of the usual weekly arrangement. The sleeping bags became solid lumps that took about forty-five minutes of tortuous negotiation to force an entry. When they got out of the bags they stuffed clothes into the opening to make a plug that could be pulled out. This helped them slightly when it was time to start the struggle again. Cherry-Garrard’s bag was too big, a serious problem because he lay surrounded by cold air shuddering and shaking until his back seemed to break. His breath froze on his skin. He thought that the best time of the twenty-four hours was when they had breakfast, because they would not have to get back into their bags for seventeen hours. Perhaps Dante was right to put circles of ice below circles of fire.
They understood the importance of ‘layering’. They wore similar protection to that worn in the Discovery days with layers of thick wool jerseys and underwear, gabardine overshirts, trousers and a woollen hood covered with a wind-proof covering. Their faces were covered with a guard. They had three pairs of gloves, three or four pairs of socks and reindeer-skin finesco.17 As the clothes froze, so they could do less and less and ‘climbing up ropes or out of crevasses becomes exceedingly difficult for anyone but an acrobat’.18 Clothes froze in whatever shape they were in when the blubber stove was put out.
They pulled to the ‘Windless Bight’, so called because here the Barrier winds are deflected to the Ross Sea in front and McMurdo Sound behind.19 This did not help; because of the lack of wind, the snow surface changed from being hard and polished (relatively easy to run over) into sand-like crystals impossible to pull on. At low temperatures there is less lubrication; the sledge runners roll the crystals over each other increasing friction so that pulling the sledge is just like pulling through sand.20 Pulling the two sledges and their 750 lbs of equipment became impossible. The half load was heavier than the whole one had been on the sea ice.21 They had to start the dreaded process of relaying on 30 June only three days after they had set out. For nine days they relayed wearily. On the first day they covered ten miles to actually advance three and a quarter.22 Sometimes they used a naked candle to find the second sledge. Whenever the planet Jupiter could be seen through the clouds they steered by his friendly faint light, ‘and I never see him now without recalling his friendship in those days’.23 The temperatures were lower than any recorded on Discovery days. On 6 July the temperature was virtually always below minus 70°F. Wilson wrote that the lowest temperature they recorded on that day was minus 77°F, i.e. 109 degrees below freezing. He thought this was a record.24
Anxiety about frostbite was ever present. Wilson was frightened ‘beyond all else’ of any one of the trio getting damaged feet and he had to keep a careful watch on all three pairs. If there was any fear of frostbite, the remedy was clear: stop and stamp around until the circulation improved, if this was unsuccessful, camp and drink hot water. The problem was how to make a clinical decision with companions who announced that their feet had been cold but were now most comfortable. Cherry-Garrard suffered badly and not only with his feet; his heart beat slowly at the end of the day and he wrote ‘it was difficult not to howl’. To keep going he repeated a little mantra, ‘you’ve got it in the neck – stick it, stick it, you’ve got it in the neck’.25 But he never complained; it would have been difficult to do so in the company of the selfless
older men. In general the three talked little, but discussions about whether they were having particularly bad conditions or whether they were experiencing the normal for the area, lasted about a week.26 They discussed whether to turn back, but decided to struggle on, dividing their day into three: seven hours for resting, nine hours for camp work, and eight hours for marching.
The auroras were remarkable features that they discussed and described. These brilliant lights in the sky appear near the magnetic poles. In the south they are called ‘aurora australis’. They appear sixty miles up when charged particles streaming from the sun hit low-density holes around the sun and are pulled towards the north and south magnetic poles by the earth’s magnetic fields. In 1911, the sky absolutely blazed with ‘long swaying curtains, shaken by the breeze’,27 and brilliant swathes and whirls of pale orange, yellow, emerald green and pink whirling into vortices or opening like vast mushrooms, or darting into beams like searchlights. All three lay on their backs to see them. Bowers and Wilson marvelled; Cherry-Garrard saw a blur.
When George Simpson later analysed their recordings he wrote that Bowers’ meteorological record was a masterpiece. These records were, to say the least, a trial to prepare. Water vapour from their breath condensed on the paper and covered it with a film of ice that the pencil could not bite through. Sir George wrote:
Throughout the journey that lasted for thirty-six days in the depth of winter; when for days at a time the temperature was below –50°F, frequently below –60 and on one day –76, when every observation had to be made by candlelight, the meteorological log is practically complete with three observations per day.28
Simpson observed that the coldest month on the Barrier was about twenty-five degrees lower than at Cape Evans. When the temperature was at its lowest even Bowers wrote, ‘I was beginning to think I could stand most things but then I didn’t want to ask for any more’.29 Because of the conditions they could only pull a few miles each day. Cherry-Garrard decided that they hadn’t a ghost of a chance of getting as far as the penguins. Then, on 4 July, a new problem: snow. The temperature rose to minus 27°F, visibility was so bad that they lay in their tents all day. Their clothes became saturated and as soon as they got out of the tent, the clothes froze stiffly, like tin mail.30
Some days they could not even relay: snow covered their footprints, fog blocked visibility and they could not get back to the sledge they had left behind. Most days they relayed determinedly until, after nine days the snow surface improved enough for them to pull the sledges together. Their main concerns were to avoid both crevasses and huge pressure ridges (undulating masses of compressed ice gradually flowing towards the sea). One day they fell foul to both, getting lost in the ridges and falling into crevasses each one dangling in a crevasse in his sledging harnesses until the other two managed to pull him out. Wilson could not decide whether their difficulties with pulling were due to the slopes of the pressure ridges or to the bad snow surface; it was too dark to see.31 They learnt to judge the surface of the snow by listening to their footsteps. On deeper (and safer) snow their footsteps made a lower note and when their feet made a higher sound, they knew they were in danger of running into cracks.32 At night they could hear the ice groaning and creaking sounding like a giant banging an empty tank. Cherry-Garrard wrote:
I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of dying – they little know – it would be easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on.33
After nineteen days they reached Cape Crozier. Wilson had planned to camp on the beach but this was impossible and he decided to pitch their tent 800 feet above the cape on the slopes of Mount Terror. In addition he wanted to build a stone shelter, a makeshift laboratory, in which he could cut out the embryos before the eggs froze. He hoped to get a series of embryos at various stages of development. So the three men climbed up to a ridge below the top of the Knoll (a hill), a site that they thought would be protected from the wind. Here they spent precious time building a stone igloo. In retrospect this was unrealistic. The conditions were simply too ghastly for careful scientific work. Wilson would have been better off simply collecting eggs and returning with them to Cape Evans. If he had done this there would have been a slight danger of moisture and bacteria getting into the egg, although the likelihood of this happening is probably slight,34 and a definite possibility of the eggs cracking as they cooled (as did happen). But they would have had more time and energy to concentrate on the actual business of collecting numbers of eggs, rather than the one visit of a few hours that they eventually managed. As it was, it took them three days to dig out frozen rocks for the walls of their igloo, which Wilson called ‘Oriana Hut’, and bank it with snow blocks which they had to chip out of the solid snow. They used a sledge as a ridge beam and canvas weighted down with stones, as the roof. They looked out in the dim moonlight, on huge pressure ridges running to the Barrier edge and beyond the edge, the frozen Ross Sea. In 1957 Sir Edmund Hillary and four companions retraced Wilson’s journey in the Antarctic summer, travelling by tractor rather than on foot. Remarkably, they found the remains of the stone walls, a sledge, test tubes, unexposed film and Wilson’s pencils.
By now low oil reserves had become a big concern. Only one of the six cans they had brought was left. They had been keeping the stove going after supper to keep warm. It was imperative to get to the rookery and the eggs. They made an attempt on 19 July, leaving in gloom and knowing that they would have to return in darkness. Wilson’s knowledge of the area dated back ten years, when his visit had been made in relatively good visibility. He found that the pressure ridges had moved since 1903 and the trio got lost in a deep valley between the ridges. ‘Quite exciting work but it grew very much more exciting as the light got worse and worse’.35 They could not get down to the rookery and had to retreat, having the irritation of hearing the birds squawking only a quarter of a mile below them.
The following day, playing a sort of ‘blind man’s buff’, they found a perilous new route over huge pressure ridges and down steep slopes. They struggled for hours, having to make steps in the ice with their pickaxes and crossing crevasses by using their sledges as bridges, finally getting to ten feet above the penguins.
After indescribable effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world and we were the first and only men who had ever done so; so we had within our grasp material which might be of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made.36
Wilson and Bowers climbed down to the ice where the emperors were huddling, trumpeting in their curious metallic way, shuffling around with their eggs balanced on their feet and pressed against the bald patch under their breasts. Wilson was surprised at the numbers, only about a hundred rather than the thousands he had seen on his previous visit a decade before. But the visit was a scientific first. They collected only five eggs because it was important to get back to their base as soon as possible (they had difficulty in finding Cherry-Garrard in the conditions) and they killed three penguins to provide blubber for the stove. The journey back to their hut was awful. Cherry-Garrard’s sight was so bad he could not even see the footholds that they had made on the way down. He had to kick and kick at the icy surface to get some form of toehold. He just let himself go and trusted to luck. Wilson muttered patiently, ‘Cherry, you must learn how to use an ice axe’.37 He had been given two eggs to carry and these smashed when he fell, leaving only three to show for the Herculean efforts. They almost missed the way to the hut and as Cherry-Garrard wrote:
such extremity of suffering cannot be measured. Madness or death may give relief. But this I know, on this journey we were already beginning to think of death as a relief. As we groped our way back that night, sleepless, icy and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.38
More was to come: they
slept in the hut and when the stove was lit, a blob of rendered penguin fat spat into Wilson’s eye causing such pain and swelling that he thought he would loose the vision in one eye. His stifled groans kept the other two awake. Next morning Wilson said, ‘Things must improve. I think we hit bedrock last night’.39 They hadn’t by a long way.
That night a blizzard raged. The hut site, carefully chosen, proved disastrous. They had far better have built it in the open. The wind was deflected from the top of the Knoll onto the hut in furious whirling gusts and strained and tore at the canvas roof. They hoisted more slabs of ice onto the roof to try to secure it and brought the tent up and pitched it close to the hut; it was easier to warm than the hut and they could dry their mitts and socks in it. On the next day, 22 July, with the wind blowing ‘as though the world was having a fit of hysterics’,40 Birdie looked out of the igloo and found that the tent had blown away. This was the most major catastrophe: they were three weeks from base, temperatures were minus 30 or 40°F. Without tent, food or oil it would be virtually impossible to get back to base. Fortune had only relented in one way: although the wind had snatched the tent up like a folding umbrella many of the contents were left scattered on the snow. Meanwhile the storm continued unrelenting. The wind blew snow through every crack and crevice on the little hut covering everything inside in snowdrift and fine black dust. It sucked the canvas roof up, creating a vacuum effect and so sucking in even more snow. The ice slabs on the roof were blown off, the stove did not work and they lay in their sleeping bags listening to the canvas roof straining and snapping.
With Scott in the Antarctic Page 25