Cherry (15 page)

At Hut Point, named after a shelter built by
Discovery
men eight years previously, they found news so dramatic that it left them reeling. The
Terra Nova
had returned to Ross Island after heavy pack ice had prevented her from dropping Campbell and his men on King Edward VII Land. But she had left messages in the Hut Point shelter. They included the startling information that Amundsen had been sighted unloading stores in the Bay of Whales, just off the eastern edge of the Barrier. He had decided to position his base on the floating Barrier itself: a bold, innovative and potentially risky move.

Nobody had suspected that the Norwegians would be starting from the same side of the continent as Scott, or that they would be so well positioned: their base was over sixty miles nearer the Pole than Cape Evans. Furthermore – and this was devastating news – Amundsen had over a hundred dogs. ‘I never thought he could have got so many dogs safely to the ice,’ Scott wrote in his diary. Dogs could cope with early spring temperatures and surfaces, which ponies could not. ‘But above all and beyond,’ Scott acknowledged ruefully, ‘he [Amundsen] can start his journey early in the season – an impossible condition with ponies.’

Visits had been exchanged between the ships.
¹⁹
As the
Terra Nova
steamed away from the Bay of Whales, geologist Ray Priestley, one of Campbell’s party, noted, ‘The world will watch with interest a race for the Pole next year, a race which may go either way . . .’ Meanwhile the Norwegians had all started sneezing. They had caught colds from their unexpected visitors.

The hut erupted like a volcano at the news of Amundsen’s proximity. ‘For an hour or so we were furiously angry,’ Cherry wrote, ‘and were possessed with the insane sense that we must go to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen . . . we had just paid the first instalment of the heartbreaking labour of making a path to the Pole; and we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned the first right of way.’ When they woke on 24 February Scott leapt out of his bag and said, ‘By Jove what a chance we have missed – we might have taken Amundsen and sent him back on the ship.’ Cherry later elaborated on this: ‘Scott said we could go and fight Amundsen. There was no law south of sixty.’ This was an absurd reaction, typical of the competitive urge of the Admiralty and British empire-builders in general, all of whom thought they had a prior claim to any far-off land on which they had set their sights. Amundsen had every right to be where he was.

Wilson calmed Scott down, arguing that there might well be no law south of sixty, but at some point they would have to go north of sixty. ‘We had hours of it . . .’ Cherry continued. ‘Bill said to me, “We had a bad time with Scott on the
Discovery
: but never anything like this.” ’ In his rational moments, Scott acknowledged that the important thing was to carry on as if nothing had happened, and ‘to go forward and do our best for the honour of the country without fear or panic’.

As for Campbell, having failed to find a place to disembark on King Edward VII Land, etiquette had prevented him from establishing a base close to the Norwegians, so the ship had continued 500 miles along the Barrier edge and then northwards to land the party in South Victoria Land. This was the part of the continent to the north of the western, Ross Island edge of the Barrier. The Eastern Party was renamed the Northern Party. On 18 February 1911 they were duly landed on the beach at Cape Adare, in great haste as the ship was running short of coal for the journey back to New Zealand. They were to be out for two long winters.

Sledging parties were still battling it out on the Barrier, finishing the depôt work. Another pony died. Cherry’s unease with Teddy Evans was beginning to solidify into overt, if private, criticism. Atch (Dr Atkinson) had been out on the trail with Evans. ‘He said it was a terrible thing to say of anyone,’ Cherry confided to his diary, ‘but Evans was not pulling.’ Later, Deb told Cherry that he had had the same experience out sledging with Evans; Silas too was disenchanted (‘Teddy a quitter’). Furthermore, Evans had been criticising Scott behind his back: Birdie had gone to Cherry one night ‘almost in tears’ to talk about his treacherous carping. Scott himself was having doubts about Evans. He described him privately as ‘a queer study – his boyish enthusiasm carries all along till one sees clearly the childish limitations of its foundation and appreciates that it is not a rock to be built upon . . . There are problems ahead here for I cannot consider him fitted for a supreme position . . . It was curious to note how his value (in this respect) suddenly diminished as he stepped on shore . . .’

Evans found it difficult to stick to the rules. As a boy he had been expelled from school and detained by the police for pilfering. But he had talent. While a naval cadet, despite regular misdemeanours he had impressed his superiors and won an excellent reputation. He was to have a glorious war, and in peacetime he would rise to the top of the navy. While he quickly hardened into an archetypal enemy in Cherry’s imagination, and to a lesser extent in the imaginations of others, he was not without supporters on the expedition. Campbell was a firm friend in later years; the taciturn Oates respected him; and even Birdie, so hurt by his tales out of school, was sympathetic to the man (‘He is the best of skippers and friends’). Men less wedded to ideals and codes of honour than Cherry would say Evans’ criticisms of Scott in the Antarctic were no worse than might be heard on the bridge of any warship. Evans’ weaknesses were his mercurial temperament and his feline way of ingratiating himself. ‘He is a man of moods,’ concluded Birdie. ‘A good friend – but like most Welshmen, a bad enemy.’

Cherry had been out with a sledging party ferrying stores from Hut Point to Corner Camp. On the way back, leading four ponies off the Barrier, he camped on the sea ice with Birdie and an Irish seaman called Tom Crean. A strong and immensely able petty officer with broad shoulders and a deep chest, Crean was one of the best polar travellers in the whole history of exploration. He had left his family farm in County Kerry and signed on with the Royal Navy ten days before his sixteenth birthday. Eight years later, serving on a navy ship in New Zealand, he had been recruited to fill a vacancy on Scott’s
Discovery
. He acquitted himself with such distinction in the Antarctic that when Scott went back to sea after the expedition he asked to take Crean with him. In 1909, as soon as his plans for a second polar venture were made public, Scott again applied to the Admiralty for Crean’s services. Crean had an insatiable appetite for adventure as well as an iron constitution, and at the age of thirty-two he had no hesitation about following Scott into the unknown for a second time.

The small caravan of men and ponies had had a taxing journey through black mist, but despite that, and the usual rigours of an icy camp, the mood was calm, the men were content, and the only upset in an otherwise peaceful evening occurred when Birdie, who was cook, mistook curry powder for cocoa. Even then Crean swigged the drink back before realising anything was wrong.

In the night, thinking that he could hear his pony attacking the oats, Birdie went out in his socks. The sea ice under the camp had broken up, and they were stranded on a small floe between long black tongues of boiling ocean. ‘The tops of the hills were visible,’ Birdie wrote home later, ‘but all below was thin mist and as far as the eye could see there was nothing solid; it was all broken up, and heaving up and down with the swell.’ Cherry’s pony, Guts, had already gone (‘a dark streak of water alone showed the place where the ice had opened under him’). Birdie poked his head into the tent and announced that they were floating out to sea.

Striking camp in record time, they began leaping from floe to floe, avoiding the prowling killer whales and coaxing the ponies over the furious water when the channels between the islands of ice narrowed. ‘Very little was said,’ Bowers wrote. ‘Crean like most bluejackets behaved as if he had done this sort of thing often before.’ Using the twelve-foot sledges as bridges to cross the widest channels of water, after six hours they reached the heavier floes near the fast ice of the Barrier. Bowers sent Crean off with a message to Scott, who was camped not far away. Cherry and Birdie waited with the ponies on a floe in the middle of it all, ‘utterly done. I remember thinking what a beautiful place the world was.’ Broken sea ice promises a tasty crop of seal for killer whales. They shot up vertically to stare over the lip of the floe, their huge black and white heads and piggy eyes only a few yards from the tent flaps. Cherry had heartburn and cramp. ‘I suppose there is no doubt,’ he recorded in his diary as he squatted on a sledge on the bobbing floe, ‘we are in the devil of a hole.’

‘It was not a pleasant day that Cherry and I spent all alone there,’ wrote Bowers, ‘knowing as we did that it only wanted a zephyr from the south to send us irretrievably out to sea.’ As the day wore on, skua gulls, eager for carrion, settled on a nearby floe. Scott, Oates and Crean eventually appeared on the edge of the Barrier. Throwing down a rope, Scott shouted at Bowers to climb to safety using the sledges as ladders.

‘What about the ponies and sledges?’ Bowers shouted back.

‘I don’t care a damn about the ponies and sledges, it’s you I want,’ yelled Scott. ‘Between us and the Barrier,’ Cherry wrote, ‘was a lane of some fifty yards wide, a seething cauldron. Bergs were calving off as we watched: and capsizing: and hitting other bergs, splitting into two and falling apart. The killers filled the whole place. Looking downwards into a hole between our berg and the next, a hole not bigger than a small room, we saw at least six whales.’

As Scott pulled the men up, he said, ‘This is the end of the Pole.’ He had invested so much hope in the ponies, and with four more gone before the journey to the Pole had even begun he saw little hope of success. The dogs alone could not pull four or five months’ worth of food and fuel: Scott did not have enough of them. He was tense with anxiety and dismay. They pitched camp, and Birdie, realising how much was at stake, persuaded Scott that they should try to rescue the three drifting ponies who were waiting trustingly for their nosebags on a clunking floe. ‘The others meanwhile, a little overwrought,’ Scott wrote; ‘Scott was the man who was overwrought,’ Cherry remembered. When they got to the drifting ponies, Punch leapt for it, but fell in, and after a struggle lay motionless in the frothy water. The men looked down at the still, white corpse in sorrow and despair. Then Punch snorted. A horrified Scott covered his face with his hands. ‘Oh! Cherry, Cherry,’ he cried, ‘why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t dead?’ But they couldn’t get Punch out, so Oates brained him with a pick.

In the end they saved one pony. Of the eight that had started the depôt journey, two were still alive. On 2 March Scott wrote in his diary, ‘The events of the past 48 hours bid fair to wreck the expedition, and the only one comfort is the miraculous avoidance of loss of life.’

Back at Hut Point, Cherry and eleven others had to wait for the sea ice to freeze: it was their only route back to the main hut fifteen miles away at Cape Evans. It took a month longer than they had expected, leaving them stranded in the old
Discovery
shelter as autumn slid into winter. It was not a friendly hut. There was no outlet for the blubber stove, so the interior was permanently murky and filled with acrid smoke, and as neither walls nor roof were insulated it was rarely warm. They had exhausted their sledging supplies and were dependent on seals for food, fuel and light, though they had plenty of biscuit (delicious fried in blubber) and a small store of luxuries such as chocolate, lentils and raisins. Improvisation is the key to happiness in any camp, but attempts to manufacture an acetylene gas plant from a case of carbide they dug out resulted in several minor explosions before the project was abandoned. The men were black, and smelt of blubber. When Griff Taylor’s Geological Party got in after six weeks exploring the dry valleys in the Western Mountains they failed to recognise their sooty companions. These four new arrivals brought the population of the hut to sixteen.

They went climbing, or crouched in the lee of rocks on top of Observation Hill, sketching the glowing amber landscapes of late autumn. ‘We spent . . . our evenings in long discussions which seldom settled anything,’ Cherry wrote. Sitting on packing cases, they smoked in the dim glow of candles and the blubber lamp before spreading their reindeer-pelt sleeping bags on the floor. Water dripped on them all night, though after six weeks’ hard sledging they were able to sleep for twelve hours at a stretch without any difficulty. ‘Perhaps this is not everybody’s notion of a good time,’ Cherry wrote, ‘but it was good enough for us.’

Still dreaming of sea ice and killer whales, a week later, on 16 March, he went out with the last sledging party of the season to boost the depôt at Corner Camp. It was an eight-day trip. The temperature floundered in the minus thirties and forties and the wind shrieked furiously down from the Plateau. Silas wrote:

Supper by candlelight in frozen sweaty gear with hoarfrost down one’s neck and over everything. The metal cooker and Primus blistering at every touch. Then a struggle to unroll the frozen bags, change into frozen finnesko [reindeer-skin footwear, with fur on the outside] and wet warm socks . . . With luck you have melted the bag after two hours shivering and then you have all the feelings of a wet bath sponge till joy comes in the morning.

Even then, it took them an hour to put their boots back on.

At Hut Point, anxieties pressed upon Scott. ‘Bit by bit I am losing all faith in the dogs,’ he noted in his diary. As the days shortened the men lapsed into what Cherry described as ‘a very lazy and rather irritating existence waiting for the sea to freeze, which it does about every 24 hours, and then comes the wind and out it goes’. A dubious mass of brownish glue turned up under some snow and was found to be ten-year-old Bovril – a major discovery. They thawed out some old copies of the
Girl’s Own Paper
, and a battered edition of Stanley Weyman’s
My Lady Rotha
, which they all read, the suspense of the plot permanent since the end was missing. After the last box of lavatory paper had been counted out – twenty-nine sheets were issued to each man – back numbers of the
Contemporary Review
(‘contemporary to ten years ago’) fulfilled a useful function.