A First Rate Tragedy (32 page)

The next day a blizzard struck. Scott consoled himself that the rest would be good for Evans’s hand and used the enforced break to write a tribute to his companions. His diary turns to eulogy about his sledging comrades:

It is quite impossible to speak too highly of my companions. Each fulfils his office to the party; Wilson, first as doctor, ever on the lookout to alleviate the small pains and troubles incidental to the work; now as cook, quick, careful and dexterous, ever thinking of some fresh expedient to help the camp life; tough as steel on the traces, never wavering from start to finish. Evans, a giant worker with a really remarkable headpiece. It is only now I realise how much has been due to him . . . Little Bowers remains a marvel – he is thoroughly enjoying himself. I leave all the provision arrangement in his hands but not one single mistake has been made. In addition to the stores, he keeps the most thorough and conscientious meteorological record, and to this he now adds the duty of observer and photographer
. . . Oates had his invaluable period with the ponies; now he is a foot slogger and goes hard the whole time, does his share of camp work, and stands the hardship as well as any of us. I would not like to be without him either. So our five people are perhaps as happily selected as it is possible to imagine.

This Platonic view of an expedition as a mini society where everyone has their particular specialism is shared by more modern explorers. Sir Ranulph Fiennes wrote in his account of his Pole to Pole Transglobe expedition that ‘much of our strength, despite our lack of experience, lay in our collective ability’.
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The blizzard lifted and on 9 January Scott was able to note in his diary a triumphant ‘RECORD’ – they had passed Shackleton’s farthest south and were truly in terra incognita. However, the party were becoming increasingly weary. The Polar plateau was covered with sandy snow which clogged the runners of the sledge. Relatively warm and sunny conditions made the going worse. His diary shows that Scott now realized that the journey was going to be ‘a stiff pull
both ways
apparently’. On 11 January Scott was writing: ‘Another hard grind in the afternoon and five miles added. About 74 miles from the Pole – can we keep this up for seven days? It takes it out of us like anything. None of us ever had such hard work before.’ He was using words such as ‘fearful’ and ‘agonising’. The heavy pulling was soul-destroying. ‘With the surface as it is, one gets horribly sick of the monotony and can easily imagine oneself getting played out . . . It is an effort to keep up the double figures, but if we can do so for another four marches we ought to get through. It is going to be a close thing,’ wrote a sombre Scott.

They were feeling the cold: ‘At camping to-night everyone was
chilled and we guessed a cold snap, but to our surprise the actual temperature was higher than last night, when we could dawdle in the sun. It is most unaccountable why we should suddenly feel the cold in this manner; partly the exhaustion of the march, but partly some damp quality in the air, I think.’ From now on the cold becomes a recurring theme – the effect of the climate was exacerbated by lack of food. Scott noticed that Oates, in particular, was feeling the chill and the fatigue more than the others. But in spite of these warning signs Scott was buoyed up as they neared the Pole, intent on his goal. On Monday 15 January he wrote like an excited schoolboy: ‘It is wonderful to think that two long marches would land us at the Pole. We left our depot to-day with nine days’ provisions, so that it ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the Norwegian flag forestalling ours.’

Of course, that is exactly what happened. Scott’s diary entry for the next day tells how the ‘appalling possibility’ had become reality:

The worst has happened, or nearly the worst. We marched well in the morning . . . and we started off in high spirits in the afternoon, feeling that to-morrow would see us at our destination. About the second hour of the march Bowers’s sharp eyes detected what he thought was a cairn; he was uneasy about it, but argued that it must be a sastrugus. Half an hour later he detected a black speck ahead . . . We marched on, found that it was a black flag tied to a sledge bearer; near by the remains of a camp; sledge tracks and ski tracks going and coming and the clear trace of dogs’ paws – many dogs. This told us the whole story. The
Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions.

Curiously enough on 15 December while out sledging Gran had dreamt accurately that his fellow Norwegian had reached the Pole that day. His companions pooh-poohed it but he insisted on noting it down in Griffith Taylor’s copy of Browning. Taylor later ascribed it to extraordinary coincidence rather than the supernatural, as Gran believed, but was clearly struck by the strangeness of it.

The psychological impact of the discovery on Scott’s Polar party was tremendous. The shock made it difficult to sleep that night. Scott lay in his sleeping bag contemplating the weary journey back, all hope gone. His thoughts must have turned to Kathleen, then visiting relations in Berlin and attending lectures given by Nansen. This is the occasion on which Roland Huntford alleges they had an affair.
¹⁴
Kathleen certainly enjoyed the company and admiration of this virile explorer who perhaps reminded her of her husband. She may well have been strongly attracted to him. However, she was both too honourable and too sensible to embark on what she must have recognized could become a lasting and destructive liaison. Just as she had determinedly preserved her virginity in her youth while relishing the ardent admiration of her many suitors, she would have kept the relationship from becoming physical. She made no secret of their meeting, writing to Scott in a letter which he would never read: ‘He really is an adorable person and I will tell you all the lovely times we had together when you get back. He thinks you are marvellous and me still more.’
¹⁵

The next day, Wednesday 17 January, they at last reached the Pole but, as Scott wrote bitterly, in very different circumstances to those which they had imagined. To make matters worse there was
a chill wind blowing and the air seemed curiously damp, penetrating into their bones. Oates, Evans and Bowers all had frostbitten noses and cheeks and Evans’s hands were hurting him. They took some sightings but there is nothing but despair in Scott’s diary, culminating in his anguished cry: ‘Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’ This says it all – the back-breaking struggle, the terrible deprivation, the worry and anxiety had all been for nothing. Whatever Scott may have said and thought earlier he now knew how badly he had wanted to win. ‘Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it,’ are his heroic comments in the edited version of his diary, which was later published. What he actually wrote at the Pole was: ‘a desperate struggle to get the news through first.’ Even if he was not the first at the Pole he still hoped to give the Central News Agency the scoop they expected.

Scott was determined to salvage something and his reaction is in interesting contrast to his colleagues’. He did not have Wilson’s quiet faith that everything turned out as God meant it to. Wilson’s own diary is phlegmatic: ‘He [Amundsen] has beaten us in so far as he made a race of it. We have done what we came for all the same and as our programme was made out.’ Bowers’s letter to his mother was positively chirpy:

Well, here I really am and very glad to be here too. It is a bleak spot – what a place to strive so hard to reach . . . It is sad that we have been forestalled by the Norwegians, but I am glad that we have done it by good British manhaulage. That is the traditional British sledging method and this is the greatest journey done by man . . .
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There is a strong hint that their approach based on ‘honest sweat’ was more honourable than Amundsen’s. Evans’s response is not recorded but it must have been a deep disappointment to him. Victory at the Pole would have set him and his family up for life, allowing him to fulfil his ambition of owning a pub. Oates’s reaction was one of sardonic detachment. ‘We are not a very happy party tonight,’ he wrote, mentally shrugging his shoulders. ‘I must say that that man must have had his head screwed on right. The gear they left was in excellent order and they seem to have had a comfortable trip with their dog teams, very different from our wretched man-hauling.’
¹⁷

However, despite appearances, the Norwegians had been exhausted too, finding the altitude a struggle. Altitude sickness comes on at lower altitudes near the Pole. On 11 December, just four days from the Pole, Amundsen had written: ‘We’ll get our breath back, if only we win.’
¹⁸
He too realized the psychological boost of winning.

On 18 January, as Scott and his men continued to take observations around the Pole, they came across Amundsen’s tent at his most southerly camp. It was a neat, compact affair supported by a single bamboo pole. Inside was a letter to King Haakon of Norway and a note from Amundsen asking Scott to make sure it was delivered. Amundsen was covering himself in case some accident overtook him on the way back to Framheim, though on that very day he was within one week of regaining the Bay of Whales. To Scott and his men it must have seemed the ultimate humiliation. Scott pocketed the letter and left a note to say he had visited the tent. The rest of this final day at the Pole was spent in sketching and erecting a small cairn from which to fly ‘our poor slighted Union Jack’.
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Scott and his men then photographed themselves in front of it; Birdie Bowers used a string to activate
the shutter. Those pictures are among ten taken on a single roll of film at the Pole. They are the saddest of the whole expedition and not only because one knows those pictured were doomed – the weariness and sense of futility leap out. Their faces are drawn and weatherbeaten and there is no joy in them. Oates looks tired and in pain, leaning heavily on his shorter left leg.

They carried the flag a short distance northwards, fixed it to a stick then helped themselves to some of the surplus equipment left behind by Amundsen – Bowers took a pair of reindeer mitts to replace his lost dogskin ones. Amundsen had considered leaving them a spare can of fuel but had concluded that Scott’s party would be so well-provisioned there was little point. Yet, as events were about to prove, this would have been the greatest service he could have rendered his defeated rivals, who now prepared for the homeward trek.

So that was that – a banal and humiliating end to an epic journey. Their ambitions had been thwarted and there was only the consolation prize. ‘Well,’ Scott wrote, ‘we have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition and must face our 800 miles of solid dragging – and good-bye to most of the day-dreams!’

15

‘God Help Us’

Retracing their steps, Scott’s weary party trekked past the ‘ominous black flag’ which just three days earlier had blasted their hopes.
¹
They took the flag staff to help make a sail, hoping to use the wind to speed them on their way. It was made of hickory, gave Wilson splinters and was soon discarded. At first they made reasonable progress, picking up their old track but showers of fine crystals rendered the surface heavy as sand and they were all feeling the cold more than on the outward journey. Scott reflected that ‘the return journey is going to be dreadfully tiring and monotonous’. Over the next few days his diary is dominated by such gloomy descriptions as ‘terrible bad’, ‘really awful’, ‘terribly weary’. This is in marked contrast to Amundsen’s jaunty account of the Norwegians’ departure from the Pole: ‘The going was splendid and all were in good spirits.’
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Scott’s men were not in good spirits. Even Bowers, ‘an undefeated little sportsman’
³
to the last and engagingly optimistic, was finding the long marches tiring with his short legs and was yearning for his ‘dear old ski’. Oates was clearly suffering from cold and fatigue. However, Scott was determined to keep up a
good marching pace to give them the chance to be back in time to catch the ship. He did not yet seriously consider the possibility that they might not return at all. In fact the returning
Terra Nova
was spotted by Tryggve Gran on 20 January, just three days after their departure from the Pole, trying to nose her way in through the pack ice.

They made dogged progress. Bowers recorded how they watched anxiously for the chain of cairns they had built on their outward odyssey: ‘We are absolutely dependent upon our depots to get off the plateau alive, and so welcome the lonely little cairns gladly.’ They used the wind when they could. On 23 January Bowers was cheerfully recording that ‘Filling the sail we sped along merrily doing 8
³
/4 miles before lunch. In the afternoon it was even stronger and I had to go back on the sledge and act as guide and brakeman. We had to lower the sail a bit, but even then she ran like a bird.’ However, on the same day they were depressed by Wilson’s discovery that Edgar Evans’s nose was badly frostbitten – ‘white and hard’ according to Scott. On the
Discovery
expedition Scott had noticed that Evans’s nose had always been ‘the first thing to indicate stress of frostbiting weather’, but Evans was no longer joking about his ‘old blossom’ as he had once called his nose. They made camp and cooked up a good hot hoosh, but Scott was worried about his comrade. For the first time, perhaps, he realized that the man he believed to be a Goliath and the strongest of them all had suffered the most from the long haul to the Pole.

Evans was the heaviest and should, in theory, have had larger rations than the others. As Cherry-Garrard observed, larger machines need more fuel to drive them. Dr Mike Stroud, who manhauled to the Pole himself a few years ago, calculated that Evans would have lost more weight than anyone else, perhaps over 15 kilos, by the time he reached the Pole, equivalent to about one
fifth of his body weight.
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As he was ‘in hard condition’, the loss would have been mainly to his muscles, with consequent effects on his pulling power. A concerned Scott noted that he seemed very run down, with badly blistered fingers and frostbites. He also noticed something more disturbing – Evans seemed ‘very much annoyed with himself’. The usually ebullient and self-reliant Welshman was losing confidence. Unused to physical weakness and afraid of letting his companions down he was becoming depressed and withdrawn. This hesitant, fretful Evans was a far cry from the man who had tumbled down a crevasse with Scott on the
Discovery
expedition and made calm conversation as he dangled over a chilly abyss.