A First Rate Tragedy (8 page)

Many companies had been generous with their sponsorship and this was a great help given that money was so tight. Dr Jaeger’s Sanitary Woollen System Company Ltd manufactured some special windproof outer garments and gave the expedition a 40 per cent discount, which Scott acknowledged with gratitude. He was quick to recognize the benefits of sponsorship in an age when this was still a relatively new concept. Colman’s donated nine tons of flour and plenty of mustard; Cadbury’s gave 3,500 pounds of ‘excellent cocoa and chocolate’ which became one of the greatest treats for hungry sledgers; from Bird’s came 800-weight of baking and custard powders and, despite Koettlitz’s views on anti-scorbutics, lime juice from Messrs Evans, Lescher and Webb. There were also supplies of Bovril, which became a feature of the sledging journeys. However, the real staple food for sledging was pemmican, with its high fat and calorie content. During the heyday of British Arctic exploration pemmican could be bought in Britain, but now the expedition had to look overseas for supplies. Scott obtained his from a factory in Copenhagen, having found a product made in Chicago unsuitable.

And then there was the equipment to be stowed on board – reindeer sleeping bags, bales of Lapland grass to insulate the feet, seventy pairs of skis and nine nine-foot sledges made to Nansen’s design, complete with sledge flags designed by Markham. As if they were knights of old on a quest, their flags resembled medieval pennants. The romantic Markham devised mottos for them – Scott’s was ‘Ready, Aye, Ready’.

There was also a balloon purchased from the army. Sir James Hooker, the elderly and distinguished botanist who had sailed with Ross in 1839–43 had urged Scott to take one for aerial surveys. There was a growing fascination with the possibilities of air travel at this time. There had even been a premature attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon in 1897 – the ill-fated
Eagle
expedition – but Scott’s balloon would be firmly anchored. There was also the array of instruments and other equipment lent by the Admiralty. Given the other necessities – the oil, coal, fresh water, dog food, medical supplies, wooden hut, piano and library and personal possessions like Shackleton’s typewriter, make-up box and conjuring tricks for entertainment – it took considerable planning to stow it all in a vessel only 172 feet long and 34 feet wide.

Just before departure Scott received his final instructions. While much was left to his discretion, the expedition was to follow Ross’s path along the Great Ice Barrier and winter on the coast of Victoria Land. The main objective was to explore inland, and if possible to explore by sea to the east of the Great Ice Barrier. There was no mention of the South Pole.

On 31 July 1901 the
Discovery
set sail, pausing at Cowes where the glittering royal regatta was in full swing. She was a bit of an ugly duckling with her black hull, stumpy masts and barrel of a crow’s nest compared with the elegant vessels around her. King
Edward VII, as yet uncrowned because Victoria had only died in January, came aboard and made a speech and Queen Alexandra tested the bunks. Hannah Scott, bursting with maternal pride, pinned the Royal Victorian Order (fourth class) on Scott’s tunic on behalf of their Majesties. There was a moment’s panic when the Queen’s Pekinese went overboard, to be retrieved by a sailor who dived in to save it. By the next day the memory of the great jamboree, with its glory and farce, was fading as the
Discovery
slipped past the Needles. Her crew wondered what awaited them and when they would see home again.

They went with their nation’s blessing, a welcome distraction from the baffling war which was still being fought out with the Boers. As the
Morning Post
put it: ‘Even in the last throes of an exhausting struggle, we can yet spare the energy and the men to add to the triumphs we have already won in the peaceful but heroic field of exploration . . .’

4

‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’

On the afternoon of 2 January 1902 the men of the
Discovery
gazed on their first icebergs, silent ambassadors of the approaching pack. The next day they crossed the Antarctic Circle, earning them the sailors’ traditional right to drink a toast with both feet on the table. The
Discovery
’s ironclad prow began to nose her way through the honeycombed floes causing the vessel to shudder gently. The world her crew would now inhabit was cold, beautiful and treacherous. No one knew how long the
Discovery
would be in the pack ice. The
Southern Cross
had taken forty-three days to fight her way back into open water. Yet despite the danger and the uncertainty it was a magical sight. Bernacchi was moved by ‘the alabaster whiteness of the floes . . . intensified by the exquisite green colouring of the cracks and cavities’.

Scott watched anxiously as the ship forced her way through the grinding floes, relying on the officer of the watch up in the crow’s nest or on the bridge to seek out the open pools and channels. Yet there were lighter moments. Bernacchi was on duty one
morning and described how a cheerful Shackleton came to relieve him at four a.m. ‘full of verses and warmth-giving navy cocoa . . . Shackleton was a poet and that morning poetically very wide awake, and . . . kept me from my waiting bunk reciting endless verses in the voice and manner of an old-time tragedian – “One moment, old son,” he wheedled, as I edged towards the gangway, “have you heard this?”’ The cold, yawning young Australian physicist didn’t care whether he had or not and, throwing ‘politeness to the ice-floes’, decamped leaving Shackleton to his poetry and the pale Antarctic light.

Meanwhile, Wilson was in heaven, his sketchbook seldom out of his hand. Painting and drawing on board ship had its problems but Wilson found some ingenious solutions: ‘For deck work [I] have made a bad weather sketching box which I hang round my neck, and can sketch comfortably in it even when it rains and blows a gale and spray comes all over one. The paper keeps comparatively dry.’ The pack was no barren world. As they left the open sea behind them the wheeling albatrosses and delicately swooping oceanic petrels vanished, but other birds took their place. Pugnacious skua gulls flapped past. Giant petrels lumbered by in search of carrion. More appealing were the little snow petrels with their dainty white plumage, black beaks and feet and black beady eyes.

But the strangest, most engaging birds of all were the penguins. Scott described how the squawking of these ‘merry little companions’ was constantly heard:

. . . curiosity drew them to the ship, and suddenly their small figures appeared on a floe at some distance, only to skurry across and leap into the water on the near side, when with what seemed extraordinary rapidity
they bobbed up again, shooting out on to the surface of some floe quite close to the ship. Here they paused and gazed at us with open-eyed astonishment . . .

What particularly amazed them was when the sailors imitated their call.

Seals were plentiful as well – crab-eaters and Ross seals dozed on the floes. With no natural predators on land they were off their guard and easy to shoot and haul on board for food as well as for research. The deck became awash with gore. Wilson spent a whole day bathed in blood from head to foot. The seal meat, stripped of skin and blubber, was hung in the rigging which served in the cold as a larder.

A late Christmas was celebrated on 5 January and the crew decided to try out their skis. Few had ever skied before and there was much hilarity as they organized races over the ice, crashing and falling about. It seems odd to us, accustomed to modern emphasis on planning and training, that they had not sought an earlier opportunity for practice. Just three days later they were through the pack. Suddenly there was open sea around them and the leaden pall of clouds which had accompanied them dispersed. Later the same day they sighted the peaks of Victoria Land sparkling under the midnight sun. Bernacchi described how the water was a mass of quivering, shifting colour while banks of deep purple clouds caught in the sun’s path cast a strange radiance over everything. The men remained on deck until dawn, quite transfixed.

In a sense Bernacchi was coming home, for Scott was steering for Robertson Bay, formed by the long peninsula of Cape Adare, where Bernacchi and Borchgrevink had wintered on the
Southern Cross
expedition. There was a reception party waiting for them. Cape Adare is a breeding ground or rookery for the Adélie
penguins, named after the wife of the French explorer Dumont d’Urville, and they nest in the cliff face. Little black figures in white shirt fronts toddled forward to meet the new arrivals and as Bernacchi wrote: ‘We saw the ordered communism of their lives.’ The noise and the stench were overpowering. The droppings, looking and smelling like anchovy paste, were everywhere. The activity was ceaseless as the parent birds plodded down to the sea and back with food for their obstreperous young.

The hut of the
Southern Cross
expedition was right in the middle of this rookery and contained a letter in English left by the Norwegian for the next explorer. Scott read it out to his companions who fell about with mirth, deriding it for its poor spelling, pomposity and general uselessness. Skelton complained it didn’t even have anything helpful to say about stores. Bernacchi seems to have been rather offended by this, though he had not regarded Borchgrevink as the good leader he came to consider Scott. He climbed a nearby hill to visit the grave of his former colleague Nikolai Hanson, the naturalist who had died on the
Southern Cross
expedition, and who was the only human then buried on the Antarctic continent.

Scott sailed on. Luck had been with him so far, but the next day brought the
Discovery
close to disaster. Standing to the south she became caught in the grip of a powerful current. Scott described the horror of it, the feeling of helplessness, made worse by the irony of the tranquil beauty around them:

Above us the sun shone in a cloudless sky, its rays were reflected from a myriad points of the glistening pack; behind us lay the lofty snow-clad mountains . . . the air about us was almost breathlessly still; crisp, clear and sunlit, it seemed an atmosphere in which all Nature
should rejoice; the silence was broken only by the deep panting of our engines and the slow, measured hush of the grinding floes; yet beneath all ran this mighty, relentless tide, bearing us on to possible destruction. It seemed desperately unreal that danger could exist in the midst of so fair a scene . . .

Ahead lay a phalanx of icebergs glittering and diamond hard. It was only at the very last moment that the tide slackened, the close-locked floes relaxed their grip and the
Discovery
steamed towards the open sea and safety.

The
Discovery
now headed south along the eastern shore of Victoria Land, enduring a storm so cold and vicious that, though it was midsummer, the seawater froze as it lashed the deck. They were following Ross’s course and by mid-January came upon an inlet in the cliff-face. A scene of such perfect beauty and stillness met their gaze that Wilson swore he would never forget it. Seals basked beneath the unsetting sun, and the ice around them was shot through with emerald, azure and aquamarine. However, once more Wilson the artist had to become Wilson the butcher. Such a cache of animals was too good to leave and thirty seals and ten emperor penguins were slain. It was, Wilson wrote, ‘a duty much against the grain’. For Scott it was even worse: ‘It seemed a terrible desecration to come to this quiet spot only to murder its innocent inhabitants and stain the white snow with blood; but necessities are often hideous and man must live,’ he later wrote. He and some others went off on their skis to escape the sight and sound of the carnage.

The value of the penguins and seals was two-fold. To contribute to scientific learning, certainly, but also to contribute to the larder. Scott feared he had a battle on his hands over the latter.
He knew that fresh food was essential for a healthy diet but he didn’t know how his men would react to seal steaks and penguin casserole. Neither did he know how he himself would react, confessing ruefully to a weak stomach in such matters. He could not resort to the stern measures taken by Cook, who had flogged his men for not eating sauerkraut and so was delighted when most of his crew displayed a healthy appetite for the local fare. Seal liver in particular was soon looked on as a real delicacy when fried in pemmican or bacon fat.

Swinging eastward the
Discovery
began to explore the Great Ice Barrier. There was tremendous excitement when what looked like the print of some large land mammal was spotted on a floe covered with soft snow. Cameras were soon hanging over the side, but it was quickly seen that the footprint was webbed and probably left by a giant petrel as it half ran, half flew to become airborne. On 22 January they managed to force a whaleboat ‘somewhat crowded with sixteen persons’ through the surf to land on Cape Crozier on the north-eastern edge of Ross Island. The decision to land was taken by Scott without consulting his crew. Wilson, Hodgson and Royds all noted this characteristic of taking sudden action without discussion. It was the old boyhood habit, perhaps, of going off into a reverie and then suddenly realizing there was something to be done. That old bugbear of abstraction was certainly still with him– his young steward Clarence Hare later told how Scott sprinkled milk and sugar over a plate of curry.
¹

Scott, Wilson and Royds climbed up a 1,350-foot volcanic cone to look down on the Barrier. Scott’s description captured a feeling of macabre grandeur: ‘. . . the barrier edge, in shadow, looked like a long narrowing black ribbon as it ran with slight windings to the eastern horizon . . . the very vastness . . . seemed to add to our own sense of its mystery.’

They turned their back on this extraordinary sight to find themselves dealing with a rather more immediate problem. They were in the midst of another vast Adélie penguin rookery. The young chicks ran hither and thither in alarm as Scott and his companions tried to weave their way through the mass of downy small bodies. This panic roused the parent birds. Scott described how they rushed at them with hoarse cries of rage: ‘After beating wildly at our shins with their beaks and flippers they would fall back growling and cursing in the most abominable manner.’