Cherry (19 page)

Wilson was concerned, as the southern journey approached, that Scott was venting his frustration at the ‘great string of rotten unsound ponies’ on Oates, who was entirely blameless as he had not picked them: it was he who had kept them alive, smuggling extra forage on board at Christchurch at his own expense and toiling in the frosted stables day and night. ‘He is spoken to,’ Wilson wrote, ‘rather as though he was to blame whenever anything goes wrong with them, and of course he doesn’t like it.’

Indeed he did not. ‘I dislike Scott intensely,’ Oates wrote to his mother, ‘and would chuck the thing if it was not that we are a British expedition and must beat these Norwegians.’

As for Cherry, still the old worries persisted. After his night watch on 23 September he felt ‘more than extra mouldy’. He was making his way through the row of Kiplings he had brought, and wondering whether he wanted to stay another year. Much depended on the news from Lamer when the ship arrived in January – if indeed she did come in January. He wrote his mother a 29-page summary of events so far, telling her that he weighed a stone more than he had when he left home and including a detailed bulletin of his day-to-day activities, with scale maps of his sledging journeys. He told her not to take much notice of Shackleton’s hair-raising account of his perilous summit journey – published to general acclaim in 1909 and still selling well – as it was written ‘
to appeal to the public
’, and that really there was very little danger. This latter was entirely untrue, but how many of us have not glossed the truth to purchase maternal calm?

Daylight rushed over the continent like a spring tide, and all over the frozen sea swollen female Weddells gnawed open holes and flopped onto the ice to pup. When the little seals appeared they gained five pounds a day; to the men it was like watching dough rise. Sledging parties set off to dig out the depôts laid the preceding autumn, and in the middle of September Scott went on a trip to the west for a fortnight. Nobody was sure why he had gone; they surmised that he wanted some sledging practice. Soon after he returned Cherry perceived that the Owner had become ‘worried and unhappy’. He had reason to worry. Several men were incapacitated by injuries, two of the ponies were in poor condition, a dog died, and days before departure the aluminium axle casing on one of the motors split. Scott would have been much gloomier had he known that on 20 October Amundsen was to start for the Pole with fifty-two dogs.

Since learning the explosive news that Amundsen was based not over a thousand miles away on the other side of the continent but just along the Barrier, sixty miles closer to the Pole, Scott’s men had often speculated about the Norwegians’ intentions. Their proximity had inevitably fuelled the sense of competition that lurked in all minds. The general feeling was that Amundsen had chosen a risky spot for his base, and might have already been thwarted by the instability of the Barrier ice. But everyone knew, whether they admitted it or not, that if Amundsen had come through the winter, his skill at handling his dogs meant that he would be travelling towards the Pole faster than Scott.

A third edition of the
South Polar Times
appeared on 15 October, this time including a ‘Ladies’ Letter’ featuring polar fashion advice by ‘Jessamine’ (Deb). But Cherry was in a pickle. Back in June Scott had prepared notes for the officers and scientists taking part in the journey to the Pole. Each man, Scott decreed, should have a rudimentary knowledge of navigation so that in an emergency he could steer a sledge home. He should also be able to take observations with a theodolite, work out the altitude of the meridian and much else. The non-scientists threw themselves into the task of acquiring these skills, none more assiduously than Cherry. But now he went to Scott with a pale face: he was ashamed to tell him, he said, that he couldn’t be counted on as a navigator. At first, Scott didn’t know what he was talking about. Then it emerged that Cherry had determined to master the most abstruse navigational problems, and after hours tussling with log tables and compasses despaired of ever being able to do it. Scott confided in a letter to Reggie that there wasn’t one chance in a hundred that Cherry would have to navigate, and that if that one chance came off he would need only the simplest skills; but Scott was pleased to have chosen a man who took his work so seriously. Cherry’s powers of concentration and application seemed to work on just two settings: on and off. There was no ‘moderate’. And as for that one chance in a hundred . . .

The motor party was the first to start on the long-awaited southern journey, lurching off in chilly sunshine on 24 October. The two surviving machines were hitched to sledges of food and fodder which they were to leave on the Barrier. Four men accompanied them: steward F. J. Hooper and Teddy Evans steered the crawling juggernauts, while engineer Bernard Day and leading stoker William Lashly kept the engines running. Or rather, they didn’t. The combination of primitive air-cooled motors, inadequate caterpillar tracks and slippery surfaces conspired against the little team, and by the end of the first week, both machines had broken down. The men had to haul the loads themselves. ‘I can’t say I am sorry because I am not,’ Lashly noted when the second motor broke; coaxing the beasts to life each morning had been agony. On 9 November the four men reached one degree south of One Ton Depôt and waited for the others.

The pony party, comprising ten men and ten animals, left on 1 November. They were divided into three groups, Cherry and his pony Michael marching with Scott and Wilson and their beasts. But the teams were soon miles apart, as the ponies were so erratic. ‘It reminded me,’ wrote Scott, ‘of a regatta or a somewhat disorganised fleet with ships of very unequal speed.’ On the way to One Ton, this straggling caravan passed the abandoned motors. It was a blow to Scott. Even though he had suspected the motors would let him down, and had planned accordingly, he had badly wanted to prove that they could be useful in the Antarctic. ‘At the back of his mind,’ Cherry wrote, ‘I feel sure, was the wish to abolish the cruelty which the use of ponies and dogs necessarily entails.’

They marched at night, so the ponies could rest in the warmer day. It was hard work; but not for a man who had been to Cape Crozier in midwinter. ‘My personal impression of this early summer sledging on the Barrier,’ Cherry wrote, ‘was one of constant wonder at its comfort. One had forgotten that a tent could be warm and a sleeping-bag dry.’ He slept deeply and well after those long days on the march, lulled into his dreams by the sound of the ponies tethered outside, munching their supper in the sun. But the weather turned (‘it was about as poisonous as one could wish’) and Scott became anxious and gloomy. It took 15 days for the pony party to reach One Ton, 150 miles from Hut Point. Once there, ‘a prolonged Council of War’ was held, with Scott summoning various men into his tent; these conferences, Cherry felt, were always ‘serio-comic’. The main issue concerned the ponies: how much food and rest they needed, and how much marching they had left in them. Scott decided to get them just to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, though some would be killed on the way. His diary is a sustained expression of anguish about the beasts.

They were aiming for fifteen miles a day, laying depôts for the returning parties every seventy-five miles. The temperature was hovering at around minus 18. The faster dog teams, led by Meares and his assistant, Dimitri Gerof, had caught them up before One Ton, and from then on the demoralised leaders of the clapped-out ponies faced a daily struggle to keep up. According to Scott’s instructions, Meares was to take the dogs part of the way across the Barrier and then return to the hut no later than 19 December. In January they would then be able to make a second journey to One Ton to depôt rations for the men marching back.

Now, a few days out of One Ton, dogs, ponies and men met the four-man motorless motor party, who had passed the time reading
The Pickwick Papers
out loud.

Cherry had been out for three weeks when the first pony was shot, and after that two men turned back, carrying to Simpson,
²³
in temporary charge at the hut, fresh orders for dogs and men at the end of the season. This left fourteen in the southern party. Then the weather turned once more, with sharp southerly winds and thick snowfall, and in the chalky light of the Barrier another pony was killed. Everyone felt depressed in the bad weather. Cherry, reading the ostensibly consoling verses of
In Memoriam
in the tent from his green leatherbound Tennyson (‘Ring, happy bells, across the snow’), tried to focus on nobler things, but in reality his life revolved around Michael, his pony. ‘I go all the way on man-hauling,’ he wrote on 29 November, ‘pony driving is a rotten, pottering job.’ That day, after almost 350 miles of monotony, the fog rolled back like a scroll and they saw the mountains towering over the Barrier ahead, turbaned in straw-coloured cloud and gleaming in sunlight. Overall, Scott reckoned it was ‘touch and go’.

On the first day of December they laid their last depôt on the Barrier. It was their twenty-seventh camp. They had been out for a month, and had marched more than 370 miles – but they were not yet half-way to the Pole. Cherry had been sharing a tent with Scott, which he enjoyed. Some men found the Owner obsessively neat and tidy in his domestic arrangements, with every item allocated its special place in the tent. But Cherry liked that. He found order reassuring.

They shot two more ponies before a thick blizzard obliterated the sight of the next tent. The men were constantly digging the ponies out and rebuilding the wind-breaker walls which they raised around them at each camp. Only the dogs were comfortable, entombed beneath the drifting snow. Scott was bewildered by the lethal rapidity with which the weather could change. But it cleared, and the mountains coalesced out of the mist again. ‘Gallant little Michael’, his shanks weathered and his black eyes dulled, was shot on 4 December. The next day, Cherry ate him.

The men had been crossing ridges of ice twelve or even twenty feet high, but at least they could see the mountains ahead getting bigger, and to the left the outflow of the Beardmore Glacier was now visible, stretching away like a series of huge waves. According to Scott’s original plan, Meares, his assistant Dimitri and the twenty-three dogs were to have turned back earlier, but the animals were travelling so well that the Owner changed his mind. The dogs continued southwards. Then, a major blizzard pinned them all down for four days at a camp they called the Slough of Despond (an image relentlessly invoked to conjure the horror of the trenches three years later). The temperature shot above freezing, which meant they were soggy. A rivulet of brown tobacco juice trickled from Titus’s bag. Scott had not expected significant summer blizzards, and was tormented by the delay. ‘Oh!’ he wrote, ‘but this is too crushing.’ The most serious repercussion, according to Scott, was that they started eating summit rations – food earmarked for the Beardmore and beyond. Even the indomitable Birdie was fed up.

Pressed against the green walls of the tent, clothes clinging wetly and a line of sopping socks and balaclavas dripping above their heads, they listened to the patter of falling snow and the flapping of the canvas. There was nothing to do but finish their books. Cherry swapped
The Little Minister
with Silas for Dante’s
Inferno
. He had lent his Tennyson to Bill, who was busy rhapsodising over
In Memoriam
, ‘a perfect piece of faith and hope’.

Scott suggested that if the blizzard continued they would have to turn the tents upside down and use them as boats. But on 9 December they dug the sledges out from under four feet of drift and groped forward. The last ponies were killed, so exhausted at the end that the men could goad them only five or six yards forward before they collapsed and sank into the snow. The beasts had got them to the edge of the Barrier and up to the gap between the mainland and Mount Hope, a peak sticking up through the ice sheet. Reddish granite crags thrust upwards on its right side, and on the left the pale sun gilded its sugary tips between delicate bands of cirrus clouds. Standing in the shadow of the mountain, Scott thanked Titus for getting the ponies so far.

They were late, on account of the unseasonal blizzard. Soft snow made terrible going for the sledges, though the dogs were still running well. Scott must have begun to regret his transport decisions. On 11 December three 4-man teams pulling 500 pounds a sledge started up the dreaded 100-mile Beardmore. They had appalling powdery snow instead of the hard ice Shackleton had described (they were constantly comparing their performance with his).

As the others started up the glacier, Meares, Dimitri and the dog teams finally turned back, 345 miles further on than Scott had originally intended. Though he had been impressed with the dogs’ performance on the Barrier, he did not think they could cope with the Beardmore. This left twelve in the southern party.

Many men were snow-blind and the Pole was still more than 280 miles away. No crust had formed over the soft surface snow, and their back-breaking pulls covered only a mile or two a day, exhausting them physically and mentally. The sledges regularly sank in over a foot deep, and the men had to take off their skis to right them when they toppled over. Some days the crevasses were everywhere, and it was difficult to find a safe surface on which to make camp. They got so hot pulling that they marched in singlets, their lips cracked and bleeding and their faces blistered and scabby. Yet they all claimed to be enjoying themselves. In the middle of crucifying marches, near-misses and frostbitten extremities, Cherry began his diary entry for 17 December, ‘This morning was just like an exciting day on the scenic railway at Earl’s Court.’

Scott’s anxiety over the ponies had been transferred to the weather and the surfaces, and he noted that Cherry and Petty Officer Pat Keohane were the weakest in their team, ‘though both put their utmost into the traces’.
²⁴
He was less satisfied that Teddy Evans was doing his best. ‘I had expected failure from the animals,’ he wrote, ‘but not from the men – I must blame Lieut. Evans much – he shows a terrible lack of judgement.’ Scott didn’t seem to remember that Evans and Lashly had been pulling for longer than the others, as they had taken over the loads of the defunct motors before the rest of the men had even left Cape Evans.