Cherry (17 page)

At the beginning of May they played the first of many nine-a-side football matches on the ice. Twenty minutes each half was enough in those temperatures. Atch was the best player, and Gran had represented Norway, whereas Anton had never seen a football before and was not sure what side he was on until shortly before the match ended. A few days later an ice hockey match was abandoned when the puck, which they had made from shellac and paraffin wax, shattered as soon as it was struck.

On 12 June Cherry went to Cape Royds for a night with Birdie. A few miles along the coast from Cape Evans, Royds was the site of Shackleton’s
Nimrod
hut. On a previous visit, Ponting had unearthed a pile of illustrated newspapers displaying his own work. Leafing through them back at Cape Evans, Cherry’s eye was caught by a photograph of the shapely Marie Lohr. He asked Ponting if he could have that page of the newspaper. The delighted Ponting thought his colleague wanted his photograph of the Jungfrau, which was on the other side of Miss Lohr, and generously offered to mount it. ‘I got badly ragged in “Virtue Villa” when it was found by Titus that I did not want Ponting’s photo,’ Cherry recorded in his diary. But Miss Lohr went up on the wall next to his bunk.

Before the dash for the Pole, there was to be another great journey – the most ambitious of all the journeys. The first sledging expedition ever undertaken on the Barrier in the polar darkness, its object was to collect Emperor penguin embryos from the rookery sixty-seven miles away at Cape Crozier. Nobody had ever seen an early Emperor embryo; before Scott’s first expedition, the bird had been almost entirely unknown. On that earlier venture Wilson had made two summer visits to Crozier, manhauling across the ice shelf from Hut Point, and once he had camped in the pressure ridges for a month. He had discovered that the Emperor incubates its egg on sea ice in winter – an extraordinary phenomenon of the natural world – and had begun to piece together its life cycle. In his published report he said it was a great disappointment to him that although they had brought back abandoned eggs and young chicks, they had been unable to obtain early embryos. It was obvious that the recovery of embryos would have to involve a winter journey, and he put forward the idea of building a stone igloo near the rookery where he would be able to cut out the embryos before the eggs froze. He knew it would be a tough trip: he had had a horrible time among the Emperors in summer. ‘Cape Crozier,’ he wrote with foreboding, ‘is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted, by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror, into a regular drifting blizzard full of snow.’

He and Scott had none the less been planning this winter trip for more than a year. They knew it was risky, but it offered a tempting zoological prize. ‘The possibility that we have in the Emperor penguin,’ Wilson had written in his report, ‘the nearest approach to a primitive form not only of a penguin, but of a bird, makes the future working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible importance.’

Wilson thought the study of the Emperor embryo would shed light on the history of its ancestors. He had been deeply influenced by the work of the German biologist and philosopher Ernst Haeckel, an enthusiastic early Darwinist. In 1866 Haeckel had published his ‘biogenetic’ law, more often stated as ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. Haeckel proposed that the embryonic stages (ontogeny) of each animal sequentially repeat the evolutionary history (phylogeny) of its type. According to Haeckel, the gill slits of the early human embryo repeat our ancient past as fish. As the Emperor penguin was at that time thought to be the most primitive bird, the logical conclusion was that a study of its embryology would reveal the origin of birds and their relationship to other vertebrates. What a tool ontogeny-recapitulating-phylogeny would have been to evolutionists if it had worked! The hypothesis was discredited around the time the
Terra Nova
sailed, but it persisted in popular culture. As for the idea that Emperors, and penguins in general, were the most primitive birds, ornithologists and palaeontologists now tend to agree that flightless birds evolved from birds with flight, rather than the other way round.

Wilson had asked Cherry and Birdie to go with him on the winter journey (he told his wife they were the two he liked most, besides the fact that they were the best sledgers). The three of them had already spent weeks preparing equipment. Each was taking different rations with a view to determining the most effective combination of fats and carbohydrates. Cherry’s stone hut building had been useful practice – they were going to build an igloo at Crozier as Wilson had suggested seven years previously. But Cherry was quite unprepared, mentally and physically, for the horrors that lay ahead. On 19 June he wrote in his diary that he had got ‘a bad needle about the Cape Crozier journey: I think it may be awful work’. That day the temperature crashed to minus 33 again, and when Silas went out in his pyjamas first thing to take a reading, as was his custom, his nose was frostbitten in under two minutes. (The cooling effect of the wind meant that the temperature on his skin would have been even colder – a phenomenon that had not yet been named the wind-chill factor.) On 21 June, the day before the expedition’s midwinter celebration, Cherry wrote, ‘a good bust out will I think do a lot to buck up people all round. There is no doubt that most men are, naturally, feeling this long night a bit, and some I think a good deal, especially the last two or three days. I feel very chippy some days myself, but very seldom.’

Midwinter Day, an important psychological turning-point in the Antarctic, did turn out to be a ‘good bust out’. Cherry presented the
South Polar Times
to Scott with everyone gathered round him at the head of the table. It ran to more than fifty pages, and included prints by Ponting and watercolours by Wilson as well as a strong selection of poetry and prose, and lots of jokes. Bernard Day, the motor engineer, had made a binding from grey sealskin and plywood, and carved a monogram on the cover. Scott proceeded to read most of it out loud, interrupted by uproarious laughter and indignant barracking. Much of the material was in praise of sledging:

O Blubber Lamp! O Blubber Lamp!
I wish that I could tell,
The glamour of thy smoky-gleam,
The savour of thy smell.

‘The funniest part now,’ Cherry wrote, light-headed with relief, ‘is to see everybody going round and spotting who wrote the different things. They are quite wrong, and quite certain they are right.’ At dinner he sat next to Scott, who got a bit drunk, and ‘it was very funny to see him blossom out’. A Rabelaisian meal was followed by the entry of a flaming Christmas tree and speeches all round; but when it came to Cherry’s turn he said that he thought everything to be said had been said. He wasn’t the speech-making kind. And he had a winter journey on his mind.

6

Even with God

Wilson reckoned that Emperors laid their eggs towards the end of June. In order to collect embryos at the optimum stage of incubation, three men set out on the twenty-seventh of that month ‘on the weirdest bird’s-nesting expedition that has ever been or will be’. Ponting got out his magnesium flash powder and photographed them in harness on the glassy ice in front of the hut. They were hauling over 750 pounds – six weeks’ food and fuel, pickling equipment and camping gear – on two nine-foot sledges, one sledge toggled on behind the other. They were not taking dogs, preferring to pull their own sledges the sixty-seven miles each way. At the last minute they even decided to leave their skis behind. Cherry was frightened; he admitted it later.

‘This winter travel,’ Scott wrote in the hut that night, ‘is a new and bold venture, but the right men have gone to attempt it.’ In fact, he had his doubts about the wisdom of such a dangerous journey, and had allowed Wilson to talk him into it. Scott was susceptible to the temptations of scientific discovery, and the Darwinian prize dangling in front of him was irresistible: Darwin had been keenly debated, even by non-scientists, for as long as Scott could remember. During the long sledging journey towards the Pole on the
Discovery
expedition Scott, Shackleton and Wilson had taken it in turns to read aloud from
On the Origin of Species
while swaddled in their three-man sleeping bag. But even Wilson acknowledged that at Crozier they were in for ‘a regular snorter’.

On the second day, hauling the sledges up onto the Barrier, Cherry got all his fingers frostbitten, leaving blisters an inch long. ‘I was a fool,’ he wrote, ‘to take my hands out of my mitts to haul on the ropes.’ That evening the temperature fell to minus 47. When they started marching, the Barrier surfaces were as soft and powdery as arrowroot. Fifteen seconds after stepping outside the tent, their clothes froze into iron armour, and they couldn’t move from the waist up until the garments thawed again at the next meal. Even their heads were frozen in position, and they quickly learned that they had to start pulling with their necks bent low. Their sweat froze and accumulated in the layers of their clothes. Cherry’s glasses iced up and had to be abandoned (‘must be sure not to let any inability arising from this get on my nerves,’ he resolved). Everything was harder in the dark. Cooking was so difficult that they took turns day by day instead of following their usual weekly roster. The butter (all they had was biscuit, butter and pemmican) shattered like glass when they put a knife to it. On 30 June Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘It does not look as if we [can] pull this off.’ They had a record low of minus 66, and in his sleeping bag Cherry shivered until his back seemed to break: ‘They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body chatters you may call yourself cold.’
²⁰
The hours spent in the sleeping bags were torture, as the sweat melted from their clothes and into the bags, where it froze into steely sheets. At one stage they got frostbitten even while they lay inside. In the morning it took four or five hours to strike camp and get into harness, two men forcing each frozen strait-jacket into shape to get the other man in it. When they entered a bay protected from the high wind, the surface of the snow was not swept and hardened as it was elsewhere. Instead it was ‘a mass of the hardest and smallest snow crystals to pull through which in cold temperatures was just like pulling through sand’. Soon it became so bad that they couldn’t pull both sledges and had to begin the hell of relay, taking one sledge at a time and going back for the other. This meant that they were travelling three miles for every mile of progress. They could not read the compass in the dark, and regularly struck three or four boxes of matches before one would light. ‘Generally we steered by Jupiter,’ Cherry wrote later, ‘and I never see him now without recalling his friendship in those days.’

The second of July was ‘a terrible day. I felt absolutely done up at lunch.’ Cherry’s blisters were worse, and they froze, and his big toes were frostbitten; at the end of each day’s march he could feel that his heart was beating very slowly. Sometimes, he wrote, ‘it was difficult not to howl’. Instead he invented a formula which he repeated like a mantra: ‘You’ve got it in the neck, stick it, stick it.’ On 5 July soft new snow made the surface almost impossible, and they managed only a funereal one-and-a-half miles, recording a noon temperature of minus 76. ‘The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out that records are not worth making,’ he wrote. Bill kept apologising, and saying he had never dreamt it would be so bad.

Besides the trials of winter sledging, Bill had to bear the responsibility of leadership. The wellbeing of his two companions was always on his mind: he asked them how they were at regular intervals, and undertook whatever small task he could to alleviate their miseries. As a doctor, he felt he should be the most vigilant when it came to frostbite. He wrote in his diary:

I had to keep a very watchful eye on three pairs of feet and continually when one asked if they were cold, it was only to be told that they had been cold, but the owner didn’t think they were frozen as they were most comfortable. I had to judge then whether they were really warmer or actually frozen, and sometimes it was exceedingly difficult to tell what was happening even with one’s own feet.

Besides his concern for the safety of Cherry and Birdie, Wilson was determined not to let Scott down. ‘Bill had a tremendous respect for Scott,’ Cherry wrote. Even when things were at their most desperate on the winter journey, Bill was anxious not to forget equipment which Scott might need for the forthcoming season. ‘Scott will never forgive me if I leave gear behind,’ he said. Cherry noted that while thorough attention to equipment was an important aspect of sledging, ‘it is a principle which can be carried to excess’.

On the depôt journey, Cherry wrote to his mother later, ‘the temperature was down to minus 43, and we thought ourselves fine fellows: now . . . we know that we were quite warm’. They began to think of the minus fifties as a rare luxury. Day-dreaming was one of the pleasures of summer sledging: Cherry liked to think about the hot chocolate sauce that was served at Claridge’s, or a pretty girl (‘or girls’). But there were no wistful imaginings while marching on a winter journey. His mind shut down to everything but the torments of the moment.

It took him forty-five minutes to chip his way into his sleeping bag each night, as during the day it froze flat like a slab of tombstone granite. The bag was too big for him, which was a serious problem: it meant that once he was in he couldn’t get the air inside warm. He had a bout of heartburn. But on 7 July he had a better night and was able to write, ‘There is something after all rather good in doing something never done before.’ The aurora was always ahead of them as they travelled east, the sky draped with swaying curtains of electric green, orange and pink as soft topaz searchlights criss-crossed the dark sky. On one occasion the three of them lay on their backs in the snow to look at these mysterious southern lights. But without his glasses Cherry was too near-sighted to see anything but a luminous blur.

On 9 July the temperature rose to a tropical minus 36 and they were able to pull both sledges at the same time. They were now marching constantly among crevasses, disastrously handicapped by their frozen rigidity. ‘If we had been dressed in lead,’ Cherry thought, ‘we should have been able to move our arms and necks and heads more easily than we could now.’ They were in the lee of Mount Terror, Erebus’s extinct twin, and in the tumultuous pressure ridges folded tightly at its feet a three-day blizzard pinned them down, sodden and steamy. They were very worried about their oil supply. They were burning more than planned.

On 14 July they found themselves under a mountain of black pressure ridges. All three men fell and swung on the lip of apparently bottomless crevasses. ‘My nerves,’ acknowledged Cherry, ‘were about on edge at the end of the day.’ And who can wonder.

It took nineteen days to get to Cape Crozier. ‘I for one,’ Cherry recorded, ‘had come to that point of suffering at which I did not really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the heroism of the dying – they little know – it would be so easy to die, a dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is to go on . . .’

It was too difficult to talk much. One discussion about what constituted a cold snap lasted a week, with two or three comments added each day. ‘Do things slowly,’ wrote Cherry, ‘always slowly. That was the burden of Wilson’s leadership.’ He described Bill as ‘Always patient, self-possessed, unruffled, he was the only man on earth who could have led this journey.’ ‘I think we are all right,’ Bill would say, ‘as long as our appetites are good.’ Yet Cherry admitted later that there was nothing he had wanted to do more than turn back. ‘I was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy.’

On 15 July they arrived at the knoll on the slopes of Mount Terror where 800-foot cliffs to seaward formed Cape Crozier. This windy place was to be their base for the egg-collecting. They had arrived, at least, and it perked them up. ‘It is wonderful how our cares have vanished,’ Cherry wrote. They pitched camp and climbed higher to build the stone igloo in which they planned to pickle their little Emperors. About seven feet in diameter, the igloo was roofed with canvas and banked with rocks and snow; they said they must be living in a transitional period between the glacial and the palaeolithic ages. In the moonlight they could see a great field of pressure ridges like giant furrows running right up to the Barrier edge, and beyond it the frozen Ross Sea, sheathed in ivory frost smoke. It is a hostile enough spot, even in summer.
²¹

Once they reached the Cape, Cherry stopped writing his journal: if he breathed near a sheet of paper it was instantly covered with a film of ice through which the pencil wouldn’t bite.

It took three days to finish the igloo; then they had to find their way to the penguin rookery. Wilson, who had made the trip in daylight, led the way close under the cliffs, often on his hands and knees. Without landmarks they lost their way in the morass of ridges, chaotic ice blocks and mazy crevasses bridged with snowdrift. Despite hugging the cliffs they blundered into deep holes. Cherry couldn’t see the cracks even when the other two pointed them out, and he fell down constantly. He loathed crevasses in daylight, but now he realised that the weeks he had spent negotiating them in summer ‘were a Sunday School treat compared to our days of blind-man’s buff . . . among the crevasses of Cape Crozier’.

Then they heard the metallic cries of the Emperors.

Late in the afternoon they reached an impasse and were forced, reluctantly, to turn round and return to the knoll. The next day, climbing in the short period of dim midday twilight, they roped together and found a better route, cutting steps in the ice with their axes and using their sledge as a bridge over soft crevasse lids. Two miles down they reached the cliffs leading to the rookery and glimpsed a hundred birds huddled on the sea ice, trumpeting and shuffling – and with eggs on their toes.

‘After indescribable effort and hardship,’ Cherry wrote, ‘we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we were turning theories into facts with every observation we made – and we had but a moment to give.’

Alone of all creatures, Emperors incubate and hatch their young in the polar winter. In May the female lays a single egg which she passes almost immediately to her mate on the ice before heading out to sea to feed. The male incubates the egg in a brood pouch above his toes for over two months, in darkness, without food or drink, in temperatures of minus forty and fifty and sixty. To conserve body heat he huddles together with the other males from his rookery, each bird taking a turn on the windward edge. The tightly packed group does not move more than a few feet during this two-month incubation period. The fattened female returns a day or two before the chick hatches in mid July. But Wilson didn’t know any of that.

The men were not elated: they were too anxious about the imminence of total darkness and the ominous wind from the south. They were still not at sea level. Initially foiled by walls of ice, Wilson eventually found a hole like a fox’s burrow. They wriggled through and found themselves on the rim of a dwarf ice cliff. One of them had to stay up there, to haul the others back. Cherry was the obvious candidate: his short sight made him the least able. As he waited, ice axe fixed in a crevasse, Bill and Birdie got to the rookery, collected five eggs and killed three birds to flense for the blubber stove. Then they were hoisted back up the cliff.

As they struggled back to the igloo, the thin light drained beyond the horizon. On the steep slopes, Cherry couldn’t even see the footholds they had cut with their axes on the way down. He had to kick indiscriminately to get a toe-hold. Bill said, ‘Cherry, you
must
learn how to use an ice axe.’ Birdie was proving the most physically robust, Cherry the least. He fell and fell in his blindness, breaking both the precious eggs he was carrying; the grease did his gloves good, he noticed later. It was beginning to blow hard, and they almost missed the igloo. Sleepless, icy and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, ‘we were already beginning to think of death as a friend’.

They moved into the igloo for the first time as a blizzard set in, and pitched their tent outside the entrance. During dinner, a blob of boiling blubber flew into Wilson’s eye, injuring it so badly that he thought he was going to lose it, though he didn’t tell the others that.

They had only one tin of oil left. Then, some time in the early hours of 22 July, the tent blew away.

It had taken them almost three weeks to get to Crozier. Could they possibly get back without a tent?

The igloo, sucking in drift like a vacuum, was close to collapse, and everything inside was under six inches of snow. The men shouted at each other over the roar of the blizzard. In his book Cherry talks about his lack of hope and impious attitude; in his diary, written up back at the hut, he recorded, ‘I said my prayers and waited.’ The day after the tent went, the canvas roof and door of the igloo were whipped away in strips, the blocks that had secured them crashing all around. The men retreated into the sleeping bags as if to their graves. For forty-eight hours they lay in the open igloo in darkness, without food or drink, mummified in snow. Birdie and Bill sang hymns, and when he caught snatches of a tune, Cherry joined in. The remaining ribbons of canvas cracked like a continual firing squad (at the hut sixty-seven miles away the anemometer was recording windspeeds of over seventy-five miles an hour). Bill prayed hard. The second day was his birthday, and Birdie thumped him at intervals to see if he was still alive.