A First Rate Tragedy (30 page)

Bowers wrote a memorable account of the epic struggle which ensued: ‘I have never pulled so hard, or so nearly crushed my inside into my backbone by the everlasting jerking with all my strength on the canvas round my unfortunate tummy.’ He also
observed that on 15 December the ‘Owner was in quite a paddy with the weather and said we had not had a good piece of luck since we started. After pitching our tent we discovered a crevasse two feet from the door. I threw an empty oil can down and it echoed down for a horribly long time.’ However, if they had only known it, the race was already lost. Amundsen had reached the Pole on 14 December. ‘Five weather-beaten, frost-bitten fists’ had ‘raised the waving flag in the air, and planted it as the first at the geographical South Pole’.
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By 17 December, as Amundsen was preparing for his return dash to Framheim, Scott’s men, all unknowing, had reached 3,500 feet below the Cloudmaker Mountain, dragging the sledges up the pressure ridges and sliding down the other side, avoiding crevasses that could have accommodated St Paul’s Cathedral. To Bowers it was ‘the greatest fun in our lives’ zooming over the frozen switchback. Wilson was also enjoying himself. After the Winter Journey the Beardmore could hold no horrors for him. He sketched whenever he could, turning out marvellous panoramic drawings. However, they were all beginning to suffer from food fantasies, dreaming of sumptuous banquets. Cherry-Garrard dreamt of big buns and chocolate in a railway station buffet but always awoke just as he was about to sink his teeth into them. Also, as the altitude increased they were becoming increasingly dehydrated with Scott writing, ‘We get fearfully thirsty and chip up ice on the march, as well as drinking a great deal of water on halting. Our fuel only just does it . . .’

The Mid-Glacier Depot was laid at 84°33'S in near perfect weather and Scott felt his spirits begin to rise at last. However, he now realized that dogs could have made the climb and it must have given him serious cause for reflection. As Amundsen later wrote: ‘Not only can one get the dogs up over the huge glaciers
that lead to the plateau, but one can make full use of them the whole way. Ponies, on the other hand, have to be left at the foot of the glacier, while the men themselves have the doubtful pleasure of acting as ponies.’
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As Scott’s party climbed still higher the glacier broadened out into large fields of ice, ‘a hard rippled blue surface like a sea frozen intact while the wind was playing on it’, beautiful and awesome in its scale. Oates was beginning to note the poor state of his feet: ‘They have been continually wet since leaving Hut Point and now walking along this hard ice in frozen crampons has made rather hay of them . . .’ He was also limping from his war wound. Atkinson, who knew him best, told Cherry-Garrard that Oates did not want to go on. However, Oates did not tell Scott at this critical juncture when he was about to name the first returning party.

Scott had been watching his companions closely – he thought Wright, the young Canadian physicist, looked near the end of his tether, bearing out Scott’s view, though not Markham’s, that the older, more seasoned men could cope better than the youngsters. Scott’s own opinion had been confirmed by the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier – Cherry-Garrard, the youngest of the three to make the journey, had been in infinitely worse shape than Wilson or Bowers and had taken longer to recover. This conclusion was personally reassuring to Scott who liked to reflect on the fact that Peary was fifty-two when he reached the North Pole. Scott now selected the youthful Wright and Cherry-Garrard, together with Atkinson and Keohane, to return but it was a painful decision – ‘heart-rending’ was the word he used in his diary. Cherry-Garrard was cut to the quick and said to Scott that he hoped he had not disappointed him – ‘he caught hold of me and said “No-no-no”.’ Wilson comforted him and said it had been ‘a toss up’ whether Cherry-Garrard or Oates should go on.

Wright was bitterly disappointed. He had blamed Teddy Evans for some time for the slow progress of their sledge team, writing on one day that ‘Teddy is a quitter’ and on another ‘Teddy, the damn hypocrite, as soon as he sees the Owner’s sledge stopped and they watch us come up puts his head down and digs in for all he is worth.’ It had come to the point where Teddy Evans was unable to do anything properly, according to Wright, who even criticized his behaviour in the tent. Now Wright gave vent to his emotions in his diary: ‘Scott a fool. Teddy goes on. I have to make course back. Too wild to write more tonight. Teddy slack trace seven eighths of today.’

They parted after one last great march together when Scott pushed on like a man possessed. He was ‘fairly wound up’ in Lashly’s words,
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and Teddy Evans and Atkinson fell the length of their harness down a crevasse before camp was made at 85°S and the Upper Glacier Depot was laid at 7,000 feet. Before they parted Scott instructed Atkinson orally to bring the dog teams south to meet the returning Polar party if Meares had gone back with the ship. Scott also gave the returning party a letter for Kathleen. He told her that they were almost at the top of the glacier and had sufficient provisions. ‘We ought to get through,’ he wrote.
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14

‘What Castles One Builds’

The outlook seemed brighter now in every sense. Sunlight danced over sparkling fields of ice and the Beardmore Glacier had been conquered. They were also closing the gap with Shackleton’s performance. A more cheerful Scott opened a fresh volume in his journal and inscribed on the flyleaf the names and ages of himself, forty-three, Wilson, thirty-nine, Petty Officer Evans, thirty-seven, Oates, thirty-two, and Bowers, twenty-eight – the very men who would go to the Pole. This gave, he noted carefully, an average age of thirty-six. The entry suggests that Scott had at least decided who was in contention to go to the Pole. Perhaps he had even taken the controversial decision that the final party would consist of five men, not four as originally planned. Whatever the case, he does not seem to have shared these thoughts with anyone, not even with Wilson, whom he cared for and trusted the most. Wilson had sent a letter back for Ory which simply said: ‘I am as fit and strong as a horse and have great hopes of being one of the final party.’
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For the moment the eight men hauled away across the plateau that would rise to over 10,000 feet. They were divided into two
teams, each pulling a sledge carrying twelve weeks’ supply of food and fuel. Scott’s party consisted, as before, of Wilson, Oates and Petty Officer Evans. Bowers marched with Teddy Evans, Lashly and Crean. They had to concentrate on avoiding treacherous crevasses as wide as Regent Street. Wilson described how: ‘Twice we had greenhouse ice with a false bottom – very disagreeable to go over. We have also crossed many wide crevasses bridged well, but sunk and with very rotten lower edges . . .’ Nevertheless, they were making good progress and Scott was satisfied that he had ‘weeded the weak spots’. On 23 December the surface hardened and the horizon levelled out. A more confident Scott wrote: ‘To me for the first time our goal seems really in sight.’

Christmas Eve saw them cover 14 miles. On Christmas Day, Lashly’s forty-fourth birthday, Scott coaxed an extra mile out of his men. They covered 15 miles and even Bowers felt the pace. Lashly fell into a crevasse but, as Scott observed, he was tough as nails and relatively unperturbed to find himself dangling in a void 50 feet deep. Lashly wrote: ‘It was not of course a very nice sensation, especially on Christmas Day and being my birthday as well. While spinning around in space like I was it took me a few seconds to gather together my thoughts . . . It certainly was not a fairy’s palace.’
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Teddy Evans, Bowers and Crean hauled him out and the latter wished him many happy returns of the day. Lashly’s reply was said to be unprintable.

They celebrated Christmas with what Wilson called ‘a magnificent lunch’ of biscuits, raisins, butter and chocolate. Dinner was ‘a regular tightener’ with a spectacular hoosh made of pemmican, pony meat, onion powder and curry powder and biscuit crumbs, a pannikin of cocoa, a large piece of plum pudding, five caramels and five pieces of ginger. They had reached the stage where food was becoming an obsession. Teddy Evans described their anxiety
as they watched Birdie cook it: ‘Had he put too much pepper in? Would he upset it? How many pieces of pony meat would we get each? But the careful little Bowers neither burnt nor upset the hoosh: it was up to our wildest expectations.’ However, Bowers himself had noticed some days earlier that ‘in spite of all this [food] we are getting noticeably thinner’.

Afterwards they lay contentedly in their sleeping bags and read. Scott was almost too replete to move and recorded with obvious regret that he and Wilson had been unable to finish their plum pudding. That night a sentimental Bowers said to Teddy Evans: ‘If all goes well next Christmas, Teddy, we’ll get hold of all the poor children we can and just stuff them full of nice things. Won’t we?’
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Their camp (on what they called ‘King Edward VII Plateau’, though unknown to them it had already been named after King Haakon VII of Norway, courtesy of Amundsen) was a tiny oasis of humanity in that vast frozen emptiness. Evans described their two tiny green tents, ‘the only objects that broke the monotony of the great white glittering waste that stretches from the Beardmore Glacier Head to the South Pole’.

They were now at some 8,000 feet and the weather continued fine though the surface was undulating and the manhauling strenuous. As Scott wrote, ‘everyone sweated, especially the second team, which had great difficulty keeping up’. Poor Bowers, who set such store by his physical prowess, fretted: ‘. . . it is fairly heart-breaking to know you are putting your life out hour after hour while they go along with little apparent effort.’ His diary also reflected the awful effects of the weather: ‘I could not tell if I had a frostbite on my face now, as it is all scales, so are my lips and nose. A considerable amount of red hair is endeavouring to cover up matters.’

They experimented with changing the loading, swapping the
sledges between the two teams. This led Scott to conclude that ‘the sledge is the cause of the trouble and taking it out I found that all is due to want of care. The runners are excellent but the structure has been distorted by bad strapping. Bad loading etc.’ He continued irritably: ‘The party are not done, and I have told them plainly that they must wrestle with the trouble and get it right for themselves. There is no possible reason why they should not get along as easily as we do.’ Scott does not appear to have seen what Teddy Evans had noticed – that everyone was losing their springy step. Evans wrote that: ‘A man trained to watch over men’s health . . . would have seen something amiss,’ but Wilson apparently did not. He had not practised medicine since the
Discovery
expedition. The low temperatures – Scott and his men experienced a mean temperature of -19°F on the plateau – were sapping their stamina. They were also suffering from dehydration. They did not have sufficient fuel to melt enough ice to drink and yet, at altitude and in low temperatures, the body quickly loses moisture through perspiration.

Scott was feeling the pressure and the isolation of leadership. ‘Steering the party is no light task. One cannot allow one’s thoughts to wander as others do, and when, as this afternoon, one gets amongst disturbances, I find it is very worrying and tiring.’ Other more recent leaders of Antarctic expeditions such as Roger Mear have described similar exhaustion caused by having continually to motivate and lead.
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Bowers had earlier let his watch lose time by failing to attend promptly to the nightly instruction of ‘wind watches’. An accurate watch was essential to identify noon and thereby to work out longitude by using the sun’s position at this time. Scott’s watch had, however, remained accurate, avoiding major problems. Scott now found that Bowers had broken their only hypsometer, an instrument used to determine altitude,
and vented his frustration on him. The little man described ‘an unusual outburst of wrath’, mourning that it was ‘rather sad to get into the dirt tub with one’s leader at this juncture but accidents will happen and this was not carelessness . . .’

As December drew to a close they had reached over 9,000 feet, but the surface had worsened, making the pulling very heavy. On 29 December Scott recorded his satisfaction that the second party were now managing to keep up, but the very next day was expressing fears that they were tiring. He hoped the situation would improve after depoting some of the equipment so that they could move on with lighter loads. ‘We have caught up Shackleton’s dates. Everything would be cheerful if I could persuade myself that the second party were quite fit to go forward,’ he wrote nervously. On New Year’s Eve the next depot was laid. The two teams also halted for half a day for the sledges to be stripped down and for the 12-foot runners to be replaced with 10-foot runners to produce a lighter sledge. Lashly, Crean and Edgar Evans laboured in sub-zero temperatures without a proper carpenter’s bench and made a good job of it. However, in the process Evans cut his hand – an accident that would have great significance in the days that followed.

The New Year was celebrated with sticks of chocolate and a new camaraderie. Writing two years later in the
Strand Magazine
Teddy Evans described how Captain Oates opened out for the first time that night.

He told us all about his home, and his horses . . . He talked on and on, and his big, kind brown eyes sparkled as he recalled little boyish escapades at Eton . . . At length Captain Scott reached out and affectionately seized him in the way that was itself so characteristic of our leader, and said, ‘You funny old thing, you have
quite come out of your shell, “Soldier”. Do you know we have all sat here talking for nearly four hours? It’s News Year’s Day and 1 a.m.!’