A First Rate Tragedy (26 page)

Thomas Crean, the huge Irish petty officer with a profile like the Duke of Wellington’s, leapt across the floes. Gaining the Barrier, he raised the alarm and Scott hurried to the Barrier’s edge. Meanwhile Bowers and Cherry-Garrard had their work cut out to calm the ponies terrorized by the sight of ‘Huge black and yellow heads, with sickening pig eyes only a few yards from us’.
¹⁴
Luckily their floe came to rest against the edge of the Barrier and a mightily relieved Scott shouted down, ‘My dear chaps, you can’t think how glad I am to see you safe!’
¹⁵
Bowers wrote how he ‘realised the feeling Scott must have had all day. He had been blaming himself for our deaths and here we were very much alive.’

However, Scott saw continuing danger. At any moment the current might shift and the floe with its bedraggled and exhausted cargo would float out to sea. He therefore ordered Bowers and Cherry-Garrard to abandon the animals. They did so but while they persisted in trying to cut steps to lead the ponies up on to the Barrier after them, the ice floe broke loose again. They had to endure the sight of the three disconsolate beasts floating away. The next morning Bowers spotted the ponies about a mile to the north west where their floe had again come to rest. However, in the frantic efforts to hustle them once more across a moving bridge of ice floes to the safety of the Barrier two fell in and Oates and Bowers had the sickening task of killing them with pickaxes to save them from the whales. Only one survivor, Nobby, made it to safety. It was a great blow to Scott’s plans for the Pole. ‘If ever a man’s footsteps were dogged by misfortune, they were surely our leader’s,’ wrote an unusually sombre Teddy Evans. The fatalistic
Wilson put the sequence of calamities down to God’s will, just as he had their survival from the storm at sea.

The break-up of the sea-ice also meant that the party was now trapped at Hut Point. They were forced to exist in the smoky, reeking atmosphere of the old
Discovery
hut whose stove was fuelled with lumps of seal blubber. Their plight was made even more frustrating by the knowledge that ‘Cape Evans, though dimly in sight, was as far off as New Zealand till the sea froze over,’ as Bowers wistfully described. Living conditions became even more cramped when on 14 March Griffith Taylor and his band of geological surveyors, including Edgar Evans, arrived. Petty Officer Evans had won the admiration of Griffith Taylor and his fellow academics for his strength and courage, his inexhaustible supply of anecdotes and unusual swearwords and his choice of reading matter. They had abandoned their more erudite tomes in favour of his William le Queux novel and copy of the
Red Magazine
.

The men rubbed along well enough in a spirit of camaraderie. They dined on fried seal liver and penguin breast and Wilson invented a penguin lard which tasted like very bad sardine oil. Oates put in a plea for plain cooking, remarking in a loud voice: ‘Some of our party, who rather fancy themselves as cooks, quite spoil the meals by messing up the food in their attempts to produce original dishes.’
¹⁶
However, he appears to have enjoyed Wilson’s chapattis. He tried unsuccessfully to get Wilson to give him some brandy ‘for medicinal purposes’ by pretending to throw a fit but Wilson saw through it: ‘Yes, he’s got a fit all right; rub some snow down his neck, and he’ll soon get over it.’
¹⁷

Scott was pleased to see such high spirits but his own confidence had been severely jolted by the events of the depot journey,
compounded by the news about Amundsen. He wrote: ‘It is ill to sit still and contemplate the ruin which has assailed our transport . . . The Pole is a very long way off, alas!’ As soon as the sea-ice began to re-form Scott leapt at the chance to be off, though some of the group had misgivings. Soon men and sledges were descending onto the sea-ice by alpine ropes. Teddy Evans admired Scott’s resolution, writing that ‘a more nervous man would have fought shy because once down on the sea ice, there was little chance of our getting back’. It is a measure of Scott’s frustration that he was prepared to take such a risk, but he was worried about what he might find at Cape Evans, fearing that ‘misfortune was in the air’ and that ‘some abnormal swell’ might have wrought havoc.

The gamble paid off and on 13 April they regained the relative luxury of Cape Evans, where a relieved Scott found ‘all safe’. They looked so changed with their beards, weatherbeaten skins and clothes soaked in seal blubber and soot, that Ponting took them for Norwegians. When he realized who it was he rushed for his camera but, as he later wrote:

To my intense disgust . . . Petty Officers Evans and Crean had clipped off their bushy, black beards before their turn came round, leaving only a lot of bristles that were sufficient to dismay any self-respecting camera . . . But Griffith Taylor, with a lofty scorn for gibes, which added greatly to my respect for him, declined to sacrifice his ‘Keir-Hardie’ whiskers for anyone.

Ten days later the sun rose for the final time for four months, heralding the arrival of winter. In the dark days to come Scott would have much on which to reflect. On the voyage south he had written: ‘Fortune would be in a hard mood indeed if it allowed such a
combination of knowledge, experience, ability and enthusiasm to achieve nothing.’
¹⁸
But Fortune had not smiled. Instead she had allowed in an interloper.

12

Winter

As the darkness fell, life settled into an orderly routine. The hut was comfortable, even cosy, with acetylene gas jets, stoves, clothes lines, clocks and the all-important gramophone on which the men played such sentimental favourites of the age as ‘A Night Hymn at Sea’ by Clara Butt and K. Rumford and ‘Tis Folly to Run Away From Love’ by Margaret Cooper. The nine men of the mess-deck lived their separate existence, separated from the wardroom by a shelved wall and warmed by the galley stove, the hut’s main source of heat. Debenham described how: ‘In the hut the temperature at floor-level was kept below freezing point so that any snow brought in could be swept out daily, but at table height it would be about 50°F., while at the peak of the hut it could rise to 70°F., where we could thaw a bucket of ice for our weekly wash.’

On the other side of this partition the sixteen officers and scientists eked out the space as economically as they could. Scott had a curtained alcove six foot square where he worked at a linoleum-covered table. When he looked up his eye would fall on photographs of Kathleen, Peter and his mother and sisters. For
solace he had his volumes of Hardy, Galsworthy and Browning and his much cherished 23-year-old Royal Navy greatcoat which had become something of a mascot and which he often used for a bedspread. Given that Scott, like most of the men, was a smoker, his section of the tightly sealed hut, like the rest of it, would have had a permanent smoke haze. (Wilson, a non-smoker himself, had written in his medical report on the
Discovery
expedition in the
British Medical Journal
in July 1905 that tobacco was invaluable on sledge journeys as ‘a sedative to chronic and insatiable hunger’.)

There was a meticulously clean darkroom which Ponting had designed for himself and where he also slept. Next door was Atkinson’s laboratory full of microscopes and test tubes, while adjacent to him was the meteorologist Simpson, whose wonderful collection of state-of-the-art instruments hummed, ticked and whirred. These included Dine’s Anemometer which recorded each gust of wind by means of a vane attached to a two-inch pipe projecting above the roof. Ponting described its eerie sound effects: ‘When blizzards raged, the sighing and moaning and utterly unearthly sounds emitted by this tube at night were most depressing.’ They contrasted with the sound of Clissold the cook’s improvised bread-making machine. Clissold made his dough, placed it in a big pot to rise and retired to bed. According to Griffith Taylor: ‘When the dough rose sufficiently it pushed up a disc, which overbalanced a gutter. Down this ran a lead ball which made contact and rang a bell! Further, the bell actuated a pulley and wire and made another contact whereby a red light appeared at intervals above his head!’

Wilson’s corner was opposite Simpson. Each day would find him hard at work from five in the morning, noting and drawing. Nelson and Day shared one cubicle while the Australians,
Debenham and Griffith Taylor, shared another with Gran. In a letter to his mother Debenham confessed rather mysteriously to misgivings about Gran’s ‘morals’.
¹
Whether this was a reference to his boasting about women or something else, perhaps masturbation, is hard to tell. They curtained off their entrance with some photographic blackout material begged from Ponting, a refinement that was irresistible to Oates, who declared their accommodation no better than an opium den or ladies’ boudoir. He himself shared a cubicle with Cherry-Garrard, Bowers, Meares and Atkinson which earned the nickname ‘The Tenements’ on account of its Spartan austerity. Oates’s only luxury was a small bust of Napoleon whom the chauvinistic soldier admired passionately despite his nationality. The philosophy of the tenement dwellers was ‘Down with Science, Sentiment and the Fair Sex’ and they engaged in a good-natured war of words with their scientific neighbours which sometimes spilled into high-spirited horseplay. Scott described how: ‘Tonight Oates, captain in a smart cavalry regiment, has been “scrapping” over chairs and tables with Debenham, a young Australian student’. Oates in fact spent much of his time in the stables, conscientiously tending the ponies with Anton, who worried about his one-legged girlfriend back in Russia. The latter was so perturbed by the darkness and the dancing Aurora Australis that he left cigarettes out on the ice to appease these spirits of winter. Anton became devoted to Oates. When asked about him he would reply in his broken English that Captain Oates was good to horses, good to Anton.

Scott was pleased with ‘the universally amicable spirit’. The relatively happy and relaxed atmosphere was due, at least in part, to the fact that everybody was busy. There were scientific experiments to be carried out, instrument readings to be taken, sledging equipment to be checked and mended. Cherry-Garrard revived
the
South Polar Times
and painted a comfortable picture of daily life during the Polar winter.

Probably anyone arriving here from England would be surprised to find how much work there is to be done during a long and dark winter. There are ten ponies to be exercised every day and they seem to get fresher every time they go out, and seals have to be killed and skinned. There is constant work on the sea-ice, collecting fish and other animals for scientific work, taking soundings and measuring the tides. With the care of the dogs and ponies, meteorological observations, night watch for Aurora, working up the results of last season’s sledging and preparation for the coming season, there is not much spare time . . . And so we live very comfortable . . . and we are all as fit as we can be.

Ponting caused much amusement when his companions learned that some joker at home had told him that pepper was excellent for warming the feet and that credulously he had brought a case of cayenne with him and was assiduously putting it onto his boots. Sometimes the men played football in the half-light, a game that puzzled the tiny Anton exceedingly, though he joined in. Atkinson was the star, even though Gran had played for the Norwegian national team. Bowers stuck to his daily routine of going outside in his pyjamas to collect snow to rub himself down to keep clean. Wilson sometimes joined him, but the others preferred to let the dirt accumulate.

The
South Polar Times
also gave a lively picture of the evening lecture programme instituted by Scott. Oates was an unexpected success with his wry talk on horse management or
‘mismanagement’, which reduced his audience to helpless laughter. Invited to give a second performance he concluded with the story of a young lady who, arriving late at an elegant dinner party, blamed the slowness of the cab-horse. ‘Ah, perhaps he was a jibber,’ suggested her hostess. ‘Oh, no,’ smiled the damsel, all unknowing, ‘he was a bugger. I heard the cabby say so several times.’ Ponting’s magic lantern shows were also very popular, particularly his exquisite pictures of Japan. In her book on Captain Oates, Sue Limb recounts how Oates would say to Meares, ‘Coming to the pictures tonight, dearie?’ He often called Meares ‘dearie’ and Atkinson, his other boon companion, ‘Jane’. It is tempting to draw certain conclusions but there is no evidence of homosexual leanings. The badinage and nicknames, like the horse play, were probably no more than the humour of a closed male society.

Another well-attended lecture was by Atkinson on scurvy. He like others before him suggested that tainted tinned food might be a primary cause. Scott himself, however, recognized from the
Discovery
experience the value of fresh meat in avoiding the disease and insisted that his men ate fresh seal and penguin meat despite the reluctance of several, including Edgar Evans.

On 22 June, they celebrated Midwinter Day, the equivalent of Christmas Day and still the high-holiday of Antarctica. After lunch Cherry-Garrard handed Scott the first edition of the
South Polar Times
. As Debenham described with some amusement: ‘A silhouette of the Owner by Bill was very good but, as it represents him with his hair awry as it always is here, he didn’t like it at all and said, “Well I’m damned, I didn’t think I was so ugly.”’ Later that day, as blizzards rampaged around the hut, they ate a ‘gorgeous’ dinner of seal soup, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, plum pudding, mince pies, crystallized fruits, chocolates, custards, jellies and cake, with sherry, Heidsieck 1904 vintage champagne, brandy
punch and liqueurs – a degree of luxury and sophistication which would have amused and surprised the plain-living Amundsen, celebrating over at the Bay of Whales more restrainedly by eating ‘a little more than usual’ and smoking a cigar.
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Birdie Bowers devised a fine candle-lit Christmas tree out of ski sticks decked with skua feathers and gifts from Oriana Wilson’s sister and there were toasts and speeches galore. Oates danced the lancers with Anton and nearly everyone had too much to drink.