Cherry (13 page)

Ponies had been used to pull sledges on at least one Arctic expedition. Shackleton had been the first to take them south, on the
Nimrod
. Despite the fact that the beasts had not performed well in the Antarctic, Scott had chosen to take ponies as well as dogs on the
Terra Nova
. It was an odd decision: Shackleton had described the way the ponies sank into soft surfaces, whereas lighter dogs could travel rapidly over the same snow. Furthermore, the ponies Scott had brought were inadequate. Oates was in charge of them, but, crucially, he had not accompanied Meares to Siberia to select them. As soon as he saw them in New Zealand he knew that they were a bunch of old crocks. ‘
Nobby
,’ read his diary catalogue after he had inspected the ponies for the first time. ‘Aged. Goes with stiff hocks. Spavin near hind. Best pony we have.’

Kathleen and Oriana Wilson both wrote to Evelyn from New Zealand, their letters bursting with compliments about Cherry. But goodwill among the wives had its limits, and Kathleen and Hilda Evans squabbled so intemperately in New Zealand that Oates recounted, ‘There was more blood and hair flying about the hotel than you would see in a Chicago slaughterhouse in a month.’ Kathleen was disgusted with the other wives, whom she perceived as dim, simpering little women clinging pathetically to their men. ‘If ever Con [Scott] has another expedition,’ she scribbled in her diary in New Zealand, ‘then the wives must be chosen more carefully than the men.’ When the mild-mannered Birdie learned of the rows among the wives he concluded, I don’t know who to blame, but somehow I don’t like Mrs Scott . . . Nobody likes her on the expedition and the painful silence when she arrives is the only jarring note of the whole thing. There is no secret that she runs us all just now and what she says is done – through the Owner. Now nobody likes a schemer and she is one undoubtedly . . . We all feel that the sooner we are away the better.

At noon on 26 November the Bishop of Christchurch took a service among the steering equipment on deck. The officers crowded onto the poop with the local dignitaries and the sun glinted off their gold-laced uniforms for the last time in months or years. At the end of the service Petty Officer Evans was discovered to be drunk; so drunk that he ended up in the water. There were two Evanses on the
Terra Nova
. One was Teddy, Scott’s second-in-command. The other belonged below decks. Edgar ‘Taff ’ Evans was a huge Welshman with large appetites. He had served under Scott in warmer waters on HMS
Majestic
and then in the Antarctic on the
Discovery
expedition. They had even dangled down a crevasse together. Taff had got spectacularly drunk once before on the expedition, when he had had to be carried back to the ship after a farewell dinner in Cardiff. A wily, popular tentmate who drew on a bottomless fund of navy yarns, he knew he was in favour with Scott, and was determined to make a name for himself in the south this time. Scott considered him ‘wonderfully capable’, and had put him in charge of sledging equipment.

After he had been fished out of the Lyttelton docks Taff was ordered home on the grounds that he had disgraced the expedition. But he wheedled his way round Scott and rejoined the ship at her final stop in Port Chalmers, much to the fury of Teddy Evans, who wanted him banished. The disagreement over Taff contributed to the tension that had been simmering for months between Scott and Teddy, and at Port Chalmers a row finally erupted. Scott made a decision which Evans interpreted as a slur on his honesty, and it ‘was the last straw in the heavy load that broke the camel’s back’: Teddy told colleagues privately that he intended to resign unless a clear understanding was reached between him and Scott. The trouble was exacerbated, according to Birdie, by the excessive jealousy of the wives, each goading her husband to gain ground over the other. Several officers decided they would resign in sympathy if Teddy quit, and they asked Cherry if he would join them. But he refused. He would have been happy to see Evans go. ‘From the first,’ he wrote, ‘I had never liked Evans.’ Behind Teddy’s relentless high spirits Cherry saw a shallow man with none of Scott’s complexity or Wilson’s thoughtful altruism.
¹⁶
For a brief, tense period at the last port before the merciless Southern Ocean, the expedition was in jeopardy. Finally, with Bill acting as peacemaker, Scott and Evans reached an agreement. ‘May it never be known,’ Birdie wrote to his mother, ‘how very nearly the
Terra Nova
came to not sailing at the last few hours.’

Six scientists and a photographer joined the ship in New Zealand, bringing the total, including new seamen, to sixty-five. Among the recruits a chirpy Australian geologist soon made his mark in the wardroom. The 27-year-old Frank Debenham was the strapping son of a New South Wales parson. A recent graduate of Sydney University, he had applied for service with the encouragement of his tutor, Professor (later Sir) Edgeworth David, the geologist who had played an important part on Shackleton’s 1907
Nimrod
expedition to the Antarctic. ‘Deb’, as he was known, had been selected by Wilson when he went ahead to Australia (the sparkle in his eye clinched it, according to Wilson), and the appointment was sanctioned by Scott during an interview in a Sydney hotel room. One of three geologists on the expedition, Deb was to contribute a great deal both to geological and cartographic work. He was practical and versatile, emerging as a competent illustrator and photographer, and like Cherry he could hold his own at the pianola. Scott described him as sturdy, and Cherry said this was exactly the right word: he was a robust figure with an open, cheeky face. Deb was modest and warm-hearted, but in the privacy of his diary and his letters home he was not afraid to be critical; his attitude to Scott, in particular, became deeply ambiguous. He and Cherry grew close during the first year of the expedition and remained close for five decades. ‘In a quiet way,’ Deb wrote of Cherry in his diary, ‘he is a rattling good chap, and true as steel.’

Herbert Ponting, the expedition photographer, also joined the expedition in New Zealand, having sailed by P. & O. steamer from London. Ponting was a talented photographer with years of experience and keen commercial ambition that was not complemented by business acumen. He had a cropped, dark moustache, and his face was hard, like a face stamped on a coin. Yet another who was nervy by disposition, when he couldn’t set his shots up perfectly he quickly became very agitated. Ponting had reached an agreement with Scott to film both stills and a moving picture, which he called a kinematograph, and he took himself so seriously that he insisted on being called ‘camera artist’. The men soon became irritated at being asked to pose all the time (it was called ‘to pont’), especially as they almost froze in the process, and they found it difficult to avoid making fun of Ponting. Before leaving home he had been told that pepper was a great thing to keep your feet warm, and he had brought a case of cayenne to put in his boots.

After the Bishop’s service, at three o’clock the
Terra Nova
steamed out of the sunny Lyttelton docks. Special trains had brought crowds of well-wishers who pressed together in the balmy November afternoon, waving little flags and shouting ‘Good luck!’ as the
Terra Nova
shrank into the blue. Cherry was not on board; he took the train to Port Chalmers, where he picked up well-wishing telegrams, sent a wire to his mother and went to one last dance, oddly dressed as he had left his decent gear behind in Lyttelton. The expedition set off from New Zealand in bright sunshine on 29 November. The people of Dunedin, the town just south of Port Chalmers, had been given a half-day’s holiday, and thousands more turned out on the wharf to say goodbye. A pair of decked-out tugs escorted the ship to the Heads and small craft continued into the open sea until, one by one, they dropped away, their hoots fading into the chaos of civilisation stretching northwards behind them.

The overloaded
Terra Nova
lay low in the water. Sixteen-foot-long crates shrouded in tarpaulins and containing three motor sledges with caterpillar treads took up most of the deck, along with stacks of timber for the huts. Two of the motor sledge cases and a baulk of timber formed a corral for some of the thirty-three dogs, who spent the first days trying to gnaw through their chains. The last 30 tons of coal of the 460-odd tons on board were stowed in bags next to drums of petrol and paraffin, which were in turn cased in wood. More dogs were chained on top of the fuel supplies, and five tons of dog biscuits were jammed below. Immediately in front of the motor sledges, a hundred carcasses of frozen mutton and several carcasses of beef were stored in the ice house, ten dogs chained to a brass rail above them. Next door, the sad eyes of four ponies poked out from their stalls. The other fifteen ponies were stabled in the forecastle above the seamen’s quarters, where their urine seeped through the leaky deck onto the unfortunate human cargo below. Besides Nigger, the on-board zoo included a blue Persian kitten, several pet rabbits (one soon flattened by a pony), a couple of squirrels and a guinea pig who lived in a cigar box that was subsequently dropped overboard by mistake.

The men celebrated their rupture from the world by having their hair cut on deck with horse clippers, a procedure that left most of them looking like criminals. But the mood of playful indulgence was soon brought to an abrupt conclusion.

The Southern Ocean can be pitiless. ‘Dante tells us,’ Cherry wrote in
The Worst Journey
, ‘that those who have committed carnal sin are tossed about ceaselessly by the most furious winds in the second circle of Hell. The corresponding hell on earth is found in the southern oceans . . .’ Only two days out of New Zealand, a furious gale rolled out of the lurid purple skies to the south and almost swallowed the
Terra Nova
. With freezing fingers Cherry lashed and relashed cargo as tons of water crashed on board in 35-foot waves and screaming gusts clawed at the bags of coal and crates of petrol. The main pumps became choked by a mixture of oil and coal dust that formed evil little cakes, and as the deck was submerged, the men couldn’t get to the hand pumps to clear it. When Cherry put his head into the wardroom he saw grave faces, and above the roar of the storm he heard shouted talk about provisioning the lifeboats. The men decided to cut the engine and drill a hole in the engine-room bulkheads to reach the hand pump-well; it seemed to be the only chance left. The
Terra Nova
rolled and dipped, lifeless without sail or steam, while exhausted men waist-deep in oil and watery coal dust fought to save her. They were put on bailing shifts, two hours on and two hours off all day and all night, passing buckets from the boiler room to the upper deck, standing on tiny metal ladders and covered in bilge oil. The men at the bottom of the chain worked naked, and still boiled, and those at the top froze. ‘As I looked into the depths,’ remembered geologist Ray Priestley, who was standing near the top of the line, ‘I could see the stark-naked figures of my comrades in the chain, heaving heavy buckets from one to the other and grunting as they came.’ Cherry was seasick, but bailed all through the storm, vomiting where he stood.

They lost ten tons of precious coal and scores of cases of petrol. Two ponies died (many more were nearly hanged by their halters), and so did a dog, though another hound, Osman, was washed overboard by one wave and brought back again by the next. Cherry did not sleep for forty-eight hours. ‘For sheer downright misery,’ he decided, ‘give me a hurricane, not too warm, the yard of a sailing ship, a wet sail and a bout of seasickness.’

The cabins were now even more crowded, engorged with four-foot-long canvas sausage bags of Antarctic clothing that had been issued to each man. Most of the company had brought their own supplementary gear, and all kinds of peculiar outfits, especially hats, appeared on the poop deck as the mercury fell. Griff Taylor, one of the geologists, noted, ‘One scientist reverted to a fashionable Tudor garb, to wit, a long, speckled knitted tunic reaching the knees, and a pair of very long thick blue stockings.’ Griff was a gaunt, untamed figure, though Cherry wrote that ‘a halo of good fellowship’ atoned for his wild appearance. He was outspoken, witty and likeable, and he talked so much that the dog-handler Cecil Meares nicknamed him ‘Ram-Jatsass’. The others eventually discovered that this meant ‘verbally flowing eternally’ in a Tibetan dialect.

Cherry had dreaded going aloft in those latitudes, but when he did, he found that it wasn’t so bad. As the temperature dropped to 34 degrees, new birds circled the ship. Wilson snared an Antarctic petrel, and Cherry learned to identify whales from a spotter’s guide pinned to the wardroom wall. Early in the morning of 9 December a cry came from the crow’s nest, ‘Large iceberg ahead, sir.’ When the steward appeared in the nursery, adding the news to his greeting, for once they all sprang out of bed. On deck, squinting in the buttery light, they saw a tabular berg, eighty feet in height and a mile long, its fissured cliffs pocked with foamy caverns at the deep green waterline and shimmering in the dry polar air.

At this stage they were getting about two hours of darkness a night. ‘We are shaking down capitally with all our new hands,’ Cherry wrote. ‘When we are so close together it does not take long . . . I thought that after leaving New Zealand it would be rather hard to reconcile oneself to such an isolated existence. But I would not go back now for anything.’ He was earning a reputation as a solid team player, and was such a smiler that his nickname often turned into ‘Cheery’ or, affectionately, ‘Cheery Blackguard’.

Soon after they encountered their first berg, they entered the pack ice. This was much further north than Scott had anticipated. ‘One of the best mornings I have ever spent,’ rejoiced Cherry. ‘Bump! We have just charged our first ice!’ On 10 December the ship crossed the Antarctic Circle, and there was great excitement on deck when streaky brown crabeater seals were spotted lounging on the floes. Men leant over the shuddering forecastle rail to watch the iron-plated prow battering the pack ice in an unearthly cacophany of swishing and grinding. As if in retaliation, the pack thickened around them into frozen waves thirty feet high. The pack ice of the Ross Sea in the sunshine is an incomparable sight, the burnished coppers and rosy pinks of the austral skies reflecting off glittering and translucent bergy whites. That night, the sun did not set. ‘It was more than a wonderful day,’ wrote Cherry.