Cherry (20 page)

As the Beardmore opened onto the Polar Plateau, they came across stretches of hard blue ice slashed with deep grooves by the ferocious katabatic winds that swept down the glacier. On 18 December the men beat their own record: fourteen miles (‘and a better march than Shackleton ever managed on the Beardmore’). They had risen to 5,800 feet. That day, Bill revealed to Cherry that Scott had told him who was likely to be continuing south to the Pole. One of the most difficult choices lay between Titus and Cherry, ‘but things being close, it was
seniores priores
’. It looked as if Titus, the older man, was on his way to the Pole.

On 20 December, after a whopping march, Cherry was putting on his reindeer-fur boots a little way behind the tent when Scott padded up to him.

‘I’m afraid I have rather a blow for you,’ Scott said softly.

Cherry knew what was coming.

‘I think it is especially hard on you,’ Scott murmured.

‘I hope I have not disappointed you, sir,’ Cherry replied. Scott caught hold of his arm. ‘No, no, no. At the bottom of the glacier I was hardly expecting to go on myself.’

Scott had two doctors with him on the Plateau, and now he sent one of them, Atkinson (Atch), back to Cape Evans with Cherry. Silas and Keohane were also returning. Atch, the senior navy man, was in command. The seven Scott had selected to sledge on with him were Wilson, Bowers, Oates, Teddy Evans and, from the ranks, Taff Evans, Tom Crean and leading stoker William Lashly. A quietly articulate teetotaller from Hampshire, 44-year-old Lashly had served on the
Discovery
, like Taff and Crean. He had returned from that expedition garlanded with praise (among other notable achievements he had saved Scott’s life by pulling him out of a crevasse), and Markham once called him ‘the best man in the engine room’. In 1910 Lashly had volunteered to return to the Antarctic with Scott. He was a tireless worker, and popular on both decks.

The eight who were continuing south wrote letters for the others to take back to the ship. ‘Please write to Mrs Cherry-Garrard,’ Wilson asked his wife, ‘and say how splendidly her son has worked on this sledge journey. He . . . has made himself beloved by everyone – a regular brick to work and a splendid tent mate.’ Scott had already written a similar letter to Reggie. ‘He is the most unselfish good-natured fellow in the world, with plenty of intelligence and bottomless pluck. He is extremely popular . . . I hope you will let his people know what golden opinions he has deserved and won.’

The twenty-first of December was the last day of Cherry’s march towards the south. In seven weeks he had travelled 575 miles, pulled his sledge beyond 85 degrees south, and risen above 7,000 feet.

There was a ‘mournful air’ in camp as they prepared to spend their last night together. Bill went into the tent while Cherry was cooking and told him that Scott could see he had been ‘pulling his guts out for him all the way’. The hoosh smelled rich and meaty, blotting out the tang of fuel in the air. But it was a wretched parting.

Cherry gave away all the gear he could spare and turned for the long march down the Beardmore and back across the Barrier. ‘Scott has only to average seven [geographical] miles a day to get to the Pole – it’s practically a cert for him,’ he noted in his diary. Scott gave Atch further instructions regarding the dogs. He was to make sure someone brought them out to One Ton in February to meet the polar party on its way back. ‘With the depôt [of dog food] which has been laid [at One Ton],’ he said, ‘come as far as you can.’ Scott’s orders for the end of the season were becoming fatally confused.

On the return march Cherry’s small party immediately met badly crevassed ice. ‘Had a hell of a time,’ wrote Keohane. ‘We were going down holes as fast as we got out of them [and] every ten paces Dr Atkinson went down one big one head first and got brought up by his harness.’ The four men all suffered from sickness and a touch of dysentery, and their hands got very ‘puddingy’. Camping under a leaden sky on Christmas Eve, Cherry thought about the lighted streets and shop windows of London and all the feasts at home. But after their pemmican dinner they had ‘a good whack of cocoa with half a pound of McKellar’s plum pudding cooked in it in a bag’. (‘Had a bad bellyake,’ wrote Keohane the next day.) Cherry left cosy little notes on the depôts for Bill and Birdie. ‘I will take on your pyjama trousers from the pony depôt,’ he informed Bill on the twenty-eighth. ‘You should see my wonderful sketches! We had a very happy Xmas & the pudding was fine. Heaps of love and good luck to you all.’ Except on Christmas Day, they were hungry all the time. (‘I watched my companions’ faces with their eyes and necks falling in . . . One day I got a piece of looking-glass and found I looked just the same.’) But he was cheerful. ‘My birthday,’ he recorded on 2 January 1912, ‘and given some more grub I don’t want a better.’ He was twenty-six. They had an extra biscuit for lunch in his honour. A few days later he dreamt he was buying chocolate and buns on the platform of Hatfield railway station, and one night he sat up in his bag and called out, ‘Within a yard of the Great Hoosh!’

They were following Meares’ tracks, depôt to depôt, cairn to cairn. It was hard, but all right, and they averaged sixteen miles a day up to One Ton in the bad Barrier light. They were obsessed by the depôt at One Ton: had the men at the hut sledged out to leave food for the returning parties? Had Meares taken more than his fair share on his way home? ‘As I lay in my bag here,’ wrote Keohane, ‘I think of all the food ever I left behind that I could not eat I wish I had it now.’ On 15 January they reached One Ton. It had been laid – the great hoosh at last.

Eleven days later they sledged up to Hut Point, bursting with expectation as they thought the ship had probably arrived with the mail. Instead they found a note from Meares saying that the ship was not in. But at least she had been sighted: she was waiting for more ice to melt.

In three months Cherry had travelled over 1,100 miles.

When the
Terra Nova
was at last able to lay anchor in the bay, Cherry got a pillow-case full of mail. At home top billing went to Lassie’s marriage to George Herbert Shorting, a widower with two children who was vicar of Kimpton, a village near Lamer. The wedding was related in exhaustive detail in a fifty-page epic. ‘I miss you horribly and want you at every turn,’ Evelyn wrote in her catalogue of events, which included a lengthy description of police crowd control at the church. She even threatened to sail out to meet him. And he did feel pangs, as he sat on his scratchy bunk and read about the heatwave and the girls and the things he knew so very well. ‘I thought as I drove up from the train yesterday I had never seen Lamer looking so beautiful,’ his mother told him. ‘Gorgeous tints of green, with all the flowering trees out and masses of white chestnut blossom. The garden radiates with rhododendrons, lilies, laburnums . . .’

He ploughed through his business correspondence, which included a supertax return, lease renewals, papers relating to the trust fund set up in accordance with the General’s will, the purchase of stocks, reports from land agents at both Lamer and Denford, and much, much more. As for the wider world (which meant England), Oxford had won the Boat Race, and apart from that the main topics were the loss of the House of Lords’ power of veto and the widespread labour unrest which so characterised 1911. Cherry found it all ‘absolutely bewildering. England seems to have gone back to the days of the Reform Bill or the Chartist agitation.’ (Thirty-nine years later he described these first reports from home as ‘the rumblings of the storms to come’.) Letters from Harry Woollcombe revealed that he had carried the word with such exemplary zeal that he had collapsed with heart strain on the way to India and had returned home to Devon. From there he wrote about the proliferation of strikes and the alarming social disorder they towed in their wake. ‘Personally,’ fulminated the reverend, ‘I hope it will galvanise our class into realising that we simply must pull ourselves together and consider the “social evil” and not talk rot about the “discomforts of the poor”.’

The
Terra Nova
had brought provisions for the third year: new sledges, fourteen dogs and seven mules which, at Titus’s suggestion, Scott had requested from India to replace the ponies. When unloading began, Cherry wore himself out sledging twenty miles a day between ship and shore. He received cases and cases of gear from Evelyn and Reggie, among it thirty scarves, sixty books and an eighteen-gallon cask of sherry. The ship steamed off to pick up a party out geologising in the west, and to relieve Campbell and his men. On her way down to Cape Evans in January she had collected Campbell’s party and moved them to a new site further along the coast. The plan was that she should return six weeks later and bring the men home to Cape Evans.

Cherry tried to reply to his multitudinous correspondents before the
Terra Nova
called in briefly on her way back to New Zealand. His letters to Lamer were detailed and loving, in his characteristic, understated way, inspired in part by his father’s long, tender correspondence from bloodier battlefields. On the business front, he drew up a testamentary document bequeathing £4,000 (£185,000 in 2001) to Scott in the event of his death before their return to England. Cape Crozier and the sea ice incident had brought death to life.

As late summer clouds began to rake the mountain tops across the Sound, the hut-dwellers waited for the last returning party to sledge in with news. Everyone speculated on which three Scott had chosen to accompany him to the Pole. Each man at Cape Evans was convinced that he could pick a winning team. Silas thought that both he and Cherry had been in better shape than Teddy at the top of the Beardmore. ‘Scott a fool,’ Silas wrote in camp on the night the announcement was made. ‘Too wild to write more tonight.’ (Convinced that Teddy was a shirker and a hypocrite, Silas had wanted to push him down a crevasse. Cherry confided to his journal that it was a pity he hadn’t.) Oates was limping from his South African wound, and on the glacier he privately revealed to Atch that he wasn’t fit to continue. Cherry considered it was a mistake to take a limping man; Scott, he thought, should have asked his doctors’ advice.
²⁵

The men in the hut also talked incessantly about who was going back to New Zealand with the ship. Meares definitely was, so on 13 February it was Atch, not he, who left for Hut Point to prepare to sledge to One Ton as Scott had instructed. He took Dimitri and the dogs with him.

Six days later, Atch was making the final adjustment to the leather sledge straps on the slippery platform of rock outside the
Discovery
hut. When he straightened up, he saw a man stumbling out of the icefields to the south.

Atch hurried out, and as he approached the tottering, wind-scoured and frost-scarred wreck he recognised Tom Crean. Crean was the stalwart Irish seaman who had leapt across the floes to get help when Cherry, Birdie and the ponies had been caught on the sea ice. Ensconced in the hut, he revealed that Teddy Evans was lying in a tent thirty-five miles out on the Barrier, perilously ill after collapsing with scurvy. Crean had left Lashly nursing Evans, and walked in alone to get help.

This, then, was the last returning party – but where was the fourth man?

Atch and Dimitri strained with expectation. Crean took a swig of cocoa. Then he spoke.
There was no fourth man.
Scott had decided it was five for the Pole.

Atch was obliged to abandon his plans for One Ton in order to take the dogs out to rescue Evans. Delayed by a blizzard, he waited at Hut Point, and Crean poured out the rest of the story. After Cherry and the first returning party had turned round at the top of the Beardmore on 22 December, the eight remaining men had sledged on across the Plateau among crevasses ‘as big as Regent Street’ until 4 January, when Scott announced that Wilson, Bowers, Titus and Taff Evans were going with him to the Pole. The last returning party, Teddy Evans, Crean and Lashly, turned for home at an altitude of about 9,000 feet barely 163 miles from the Pole, leaving Scott and his men almost certain of success (‘I think the British flag will be the only one to fly there,’ Bowers wrote). Evans had more verbal orders from Scott about the dogs: they were to come further south to meet him on his way back, and hurry him back to Cape Evans before the ship left. These orders were forgotten in the ensuing drama.

Hauling in a reduced team of three was a terrible struggle (‘too great a sacrifice’). After struggling for hundreds of miles Teddy Evans developed scurvy (Lashly noted, ‘he is turning black and blue and several other colours as well’), and was towed on the sledge until heavy snow prevented further pulling. Then Crean, who had already racked up 1,500 miles, marched 35 more over 18 hours in a miniature polar epic all of his own. The blizzard broke half an hour after he came in.

Back on the Barrier Lashly was left to take care of a man falling slowly towards death. He and Evans had no food except a few paraffin-soaked biscuits.

As soon as the blizzard broke, Atch and Dimitri set off to rescue the two men. When they reached the tent, the lead dog, a dark grey and white husky called Krisravitsa, went right inside and licked the patient’s cheek. ‘I kissed his old hairy Siberian face with the kiss that was meant for Lashly,’ Evans recorded. After restorative onions and cake, and a medical examination, Evans was towed back to Hut Point.
²⁶
Lashly had been out for four months. When he got in he wrote in his diary that now they were keen to get their mail. ‘How funny,’ he wrote, ‘we should always be looking for something else, now we are safe.’

Atch decided that Evans was too sick to be left without a doctor, and, as he was the only doctor, it meant someone else had to take the dogs to One Ton with Dimitri. He despatched two men to Cape Evans with a note suggesting Silas or Cherry for the job. Silas could not be spared from the scientific work. ‘I’m right in it,’ Cherry wrote in his diary. He had neither navigated nor driven dogs before, winter was closing in, and he had to reach a depôt 150 miles out on the featureless Barrier. This was the chance in a hundred that Scott had doubted would ever come.