Death on the Ice (62 page)

‘Then you have to believe this, because I swear it is so. On the night of St Patrick’s Day, I dreamt I met Titus. Out on the barrier, in a blizzard. He was all spent, in a bad way, with no boots on. I remembered that clearly. No boots. I held him in my arms. He told me it wasn’t Captain Scott’s fault, that it was damned bad luck, that is all. His head was in my lap when he died. He said he was looking forward to being warm again.’ Again, he neglected to mention one salient fact: Trigger had been drunk on Tom Crean’s beer when he dreamed this scene. There was no use in muddying the waters.

Kathleen Scott shook her head, not trusting her ears. ‘Is that all he said?’

‘Yes.’ Although that wasn’t quite true; in his dream Titus had talked about Edie at the end, wondering if she had given birth to a boy or a girl.

‘And you believe this?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s why you were so distant when they found the bodies?’

‘I suppose so. I had dreamed of Soldier alone in the snow, wandering around, lost, without his finnesko. On reading the journal of Captain Scott, I realised that was exactly how it happened.’

Kathleen thought this all superstitious nonsense. She did not give any credence to premonitions. ‘Well, whatever the reason for Mrs Oates stopping her demands for an inquiry and withdrawing her cooperation for the book, I am grateful to you, Tryggve.’

The wind was strengthening, threatening Lady Scott’s hat, and they turned back for her cottage as a mixture of sea spray and drizzle was flung at them. ‘There are days when I can’t believe he has gone. I imagine him coming home, safe from the Pole, Peter running to greet him. How different life would have been.’

Perhaps, thought Gran. Or perhaps it would only have delayed the inevitable. The Captain Scott he knew would have volunteered for a warship as soon as the conflict broke out. He might still have died, one of the fourteen ships lost at Jutland, perhaps—Harry Pennell, master of the
Terra Nova
on her New Zealand voyages, had died there—or sunk by a submarine. Or he might have become a naval hero, he supposed, like Teddy Evans at Dover. There was no telling.

‘You know, Lady Scott, I have talked to a lot of polar explorers in my time. Been there myself. There is something odd.’

‘About what?’

‘Your husband’s diary.’

‘Go on.’ Her voice was as frosty as the ice cap itself.

‘Those blizzards from the pole—katabatic winds, they call them—they never last ten days. Four, perhaps five.’

‘You think he was lying?’ she snapped.

‘I don’t know. I mean, there was a blizzard, of that I am sure. Cherry was trapped in one at the camp. But did it last to the very end? If Captain Scott couldn’t go on, would Wilson and Bowers have left him?’

Kathleen Scott glared at him, suspecting a slight. ‘What are you getting at?’

That the diary is not to be trusted. That nobody knows what happened in that tent. Did Scott really the last? Bowers was the stronger by far. Gran suspected he could have made One Ton if he had pressed on alone. But making it back to the tent, with a southerly in his face, would not have been so easy. And would he have abandoned his captain? No, not Birdie Bowers.

However, he could tell it was best not to dwell too much on this with the widow. There was a version that she had chosen to believe and she would hate anyone who tried to disabuse her of it. He decided to backtrack. ‘That, despite all the talk of dogs and horses, depots and man-hauling, in the end they really were unlucky. To have such an unusual storm pin them down. Ten days, that is bad luck in spades.’

Oh. I see. Yes.’

He could see relief on her face and he felt some pity. She was going to have to live with those three dying men in their tent for the rest of her days. ‘Blame the weather,’ he said softly. ‘Not the man.’

‘I am sure you are right.’

Perhaps not right but, politically and emotionally, it was the correct interpretation. Personally, Gran thought they died of thirst; with no fuel to melt snow, dehydration would have taken them far faster than the lack of food. But it hardly mattered now. They had died, that was the one incontestable fact. ‘You know, there are days when I can’t believe we did what we did. Sailing to the bottom of the world and living down there for all that time. Or what those brave men achieved.’

‘Brave?’

‘Oh yes. Brave. When we found them Cherry said he didn’t realise how much courage your husband had till that moment. He wasn’t perfect.’. Gran laughed, thinking of the times Scott had berated him for his imagined idleness, of his fury at Atch’s foot or Teddy Evans’s slackness. ‘But we can’t take that away from him.’

‘A good death, you mean.’

Gran shook his head. ‘No, Kathleen, a good life.’

She sniffed away a tear. When Lady Scott spoke, her voice was low and her gaze direct, as if, this time, she really wanted to hear the truth. ‘In the end, wasn’t it all just a terrible waste? Did they really achieve anything, Trigger?’

‘Yes they did.’ Gran stopped and fixed her, so Kathleen could be sure he wasn’t being flippant or evasive. ‘Amundsen won the Pole. But Scott, he achieved immortality.’

I
N THE FINAL DAYS,
Scott wrote letters to his widow (an edited version of which is used here), Wilson’s and Bowers’s mothers, J.M.Barrie, his own mother, and several others. There was also a general letter to the British people, which sought to explain—or offer excuses, depending on your perspective—the cause of the calamity that befell the expedition. It is undated.

Message to the Public

The causes of this disaster are not due to faulty organisation, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken.

1. The loss of pony transport in March 1911 obliged me to start later than I had intended, and obliged the limits of stuff transported to be narrowed.

2. The weather throughout the outward journey, and especially the long gale in 83 degrees S, stopped us.

3. The soft snow in the lower reaches of the glacier again reduced pace.

We fought every one of these untoward events with a will and conquered, but it cut into our provision reserve.

Every detail of our food supplies, clothing and depots made on the interior ice-sheet and over that long stretch of seven hundred miles to the Pole and back, worked out to perfection. The advance party would have returned to the glacier in fine form and with surplus of food, but for the astonishing failure of the man whom we had least expected to fail. Edgar Evans was thought the strongest man of the party.

The Beardmore Glacier is not difficult in fine weather but on our return we did not get a single completely fine day; this with a sick companion enormously increased our anxieties.

As I have said elsewhere, we got into frightfully rough ice and Edgar Evans received a concussion of the brain—he died a natural death, but left us a shaken party with the season unduly advanced.

But all the facts above enumerated were as nothing to the surprise, which awaited us on the barrier. I maintain that our arrangements for returning were quite adequate, and that no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of year. On the summit in lat. 85/86 degrees we had -20, -30. On the barrier in lat. 82 degrees, ten thousand feet lower, we had -30 in the day, -47 at night pretty regularly, with continuous headwind during our day marches. It is clear that these circumstances come on very suddenly, and our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of this weather but for the sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account, and, finally, but for the storm which has fallen on us within eleven miles of the depot at which we hoped to secure our final supplies. Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow. We arrived within eleven miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one last meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent—the gale howling around us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.

Had we lived, I should have a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and the courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.

R. Scott

A
FTERWARDS
…

There are those who claim Captain Scott was not a good judge of character. Yet the subsequent achievements of those involved in his expedition, some of whom are listed below, suggests he put together a remarkable group of men.

EDWARD ‘ATCH’ ATKINSON was the leader of the search party for Scott. He served as a surgeon commander in the First World War, picking up a Distinguished Service Order (DSO) and the Albert Medal. He was badly burned and partially blinded when his ship was torpedoed in Dover harbour (by his own side: it had caught fire and they thought the magazine might go up), earning his AM by tending the sick when badly injured himself. After a miserable few years following the death of his wife, he remarried but died suddenly on his way home from India in 1928 and was buried at sea.

VICTOR CAMPBELL was the man who kept the stranded six-man Northern Party together and alive and shepherded them home after appalling privations. A shy man, he let Raymond Priestley do most of the talking upon their return home. During the First World War, he fought as Commander of the Drake Battalion in Gallipoli and in the Dardanelles, where he received the DSO, in the Battle of Jutland and took part in the Zeebrugge raid on board HMS
Warwick
in 1918. Campbell served in the Dover Patrol and sank a U-boat by ramming it, for which he was awarded the bar to his DSO and later an OBE. He emigrated to Newfoundland in 1923 and died there in 1956.

APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD served in the First World War but was invalided home. He died in 1959, still haunted by what would have happened had he moved beyond One Ton with the dogs. However, his true legacy is one of the finest works in polar literature because, with the encouragement of George Bernard Shaw, he wrote the classic
Worst Journey in the World
(1922), which looked at the winter expedition and Scott. He was very generous about Scott, although it is not a hagiography (he and Kathleen disagreed about his portrayal of Con). He later revised his opinion of Scott somewhat; he was also very critical of Teddy Evans. His later years were blighted with ill health and episodes of depression and an obsession with the expedition, although he did find solace in a happy marriage to a younger woman, Angela, and long sea voyages. Sara Wheeler’s moving biography of him (see below) is well worth reading.

THOMAS CREAN was also awarded the Albert Medal. Crean was ready to serve in the RN, but was allowed to go on Shackleton’s doomed
Endurance
expedition. It was Crean whom Shackleton took in the open boat when they rowed for seventeen days to get help for the men stranded on Elephant Island. In later life, he opened a pub in Annascaul called the South Pole Inn and died of a burst appendix in 1938, just shy of his sixty-first birthday. There is an excellent one-man play about him, called
Tom Crean, Antarctic Explorer
written and performed by Aidan Dooley.

FRANK DEBENHAM served in France and Greece as a major, till he was invalided out in 1916. The Australian founded the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge and became a Professor of Geology at the university there. He taught navigation to cadets during The Second World War. Hugely popular with undergraduates, ‘Deb’ inspired new generations of polar explorers until his death in 1965.

EDWARD ‘TEDDY’ EVANS had a good war, being promoted to captain and earning the DSO in an action off Dover. In 1945, he was made a baron, becoming Lord Mountevans of the
Broke
and a full admiral the following year. He died in 1957. He is something of a controversial figure, with several members of the party (Cherry and Wright) disliking him, although Oates got on well with him and he was certainly the life and soul of the wardroom. According to Sara Wheeler, when the expedition was deciding what to do about the legacy of Scott, Evans wanted to take out the mention of oil shortages from Scott’s Message to the Public. Now why would he want to do that?

TRYGGVE GRAN survived the war as an air ace with seventeen credited kills. In fact, he claimed to have shot down Hermann Goering in 1917. They later became friends, which led Gran to some unfortunate political choices (allowing the Quisling government to issue commemorative stamps of one of his pioneering flights). Later on, he was rehabilitated and celebrated for his achievements. His polar diaries, when subsequently published, demonstrated a belief in premonitions and dreams. (He did dream that Amundsen reached the Pole on 14 December, although the letter Scott found was dated 16 December, and the Norwegians had already been in the vicinity for several days when it was written). He died in 1980, the last survivor of the expedition.

STOKER WILLIAM LASHLY was awarded the Albert Medal for his efforts in getting Teddy Evans back alive. He survived the sinking of his ship in the Dardanelles and served in the navy for the entire war. He died in 1940.

CECIL HENRY MEARES was the dog driver who felt underused by Scott. He represents another ‘if’ in the story: what if he hadn’t gone home on
Terra Nova
, and stayed to drive the dogs to One Ton, rather than the inexperienced Cherry? He served in the RFC and the newly formed RAF in the Second World War, ending as a lieutenant colonel. He died in 1937, aged 60.