Cherry (21 page)

The dogs strained in the traces. Then they stampeded away with a howl, the sledge runners swishing and freezing air rushing at the drivers’ faces. Cherry found navigation devilishly hard: since his goggles were fogging, he had to rely on Dimitri to spot the cairns. The light was diminishing daily, and on 28 February they were obliged to use a candle in the tent for the first time. Fears crowded into Cherry’s journal. They got to One Ton, but they had a cold coming of it. The weather was so bad for four of the next six days that it was either impossible to push on further south, or pointless as they would have almost certainly missed another party in the milky drift. Furthermore, they were running out of dog food, none having been depôted at One Ton, and so could only move south by killing dogs. Yet Cherry’s verbal instructions from Atch included the order that he was on no account to risk the dogs: Scott had stipulated that they were to be saved for sledging the following season. It did not cross Cherry’s mind to disobey those orders; and, anyway, according to Scott’s schedule there was still plenty of time for the polar party to get in. ‘I had no reason,’ he wrote in
The Worst Journey
, ‘to suppose that the polar party could be in want of food.’

Both Atch and Cherry thought the dog party was going out to meet Scott at One Ton and help him get back quickly so that he could send mail out with the ship – including, hopefully, news of his triumph, as he was desperate to reach the public before the Norwegians. But by this time Scott thought their job – or someone’s job – was to save the lives of the polar party by bringing food and fuel south of One Ton. The deadly misunderstanding was a result of confused and conflicting orders.

At an early juncture, Scott had left instructions for extra dog food and man food to be taken to One Ton. This was for the party which was to hurry him back to the ship on his return journey. But the decision to take the dogs 345 miles further than planned on the way to the Pole had had a domino effect. It meant that Cecil Meares, who was in charge of the dogs, returned to the hut too late to undertake further reprovisioning trips, as he was going home with the ship before the second winter. Although others did the reprovisioning, and man food was laid at One Ton, in the confusion and comings and goings of parties and the ship, dog food had been forgotten.

In the meantime, on Scott’s return journey much of the oil left in the depôts had evaporated, leaving him short. This fuel shortage, the unexpectedly poor weather and the polar party’s sickness meant that the men and dogs at One Ton now had a very different role from the one Cherry had imagined: to save Scott’s men by taking food and fuel out to them. But Cherry could not know this. He could not travel further south with the dogs as he had no food for them; but he did not know it had become a matter of life or death.

While Cherry was waiting there at One Ton, Scott was lying in his sleeping bag writing in the queer greenish light of a polar tent, ‘We hope against hope that the dogs have been to Mt Hooper [a depôt south of One Ton]; then we might pull through.’ But they had not, and he did not.
²⁷

Soon after arriving at One Ton, Dimitri began to suffer badly from the cold. First he had a bad head, then a bad right arm and side which developed into partial paralysis. Cherry did what he could for him, and they waited, in brutal Barrier temperatures, a tiny dot in hundreds of miles of swirling snow. If it cleared for an instant, they convinced themselves they could see the polar party coming in, gulled by the delusive light.

On 10 March, with just enough dog food for the return journey, Cherry laid a small depôt and started for home, leaving a pencilled note in a film canister for Scott. ‘Dear Sir’, it said, ‘We leave this morning with the dogs for Hut Point. We have made no depôts on the way in being off course all the way, and so I have not been able to leave you a note before. Yours sincerely, Apsley Cherry-Garrard.’
^†
Eleven days later, Scott, Bill and Birdie were dying just twelve and a half miles to the south.

On the eight-day return journey Cherry contended with open crevasses, ravenous, raving dogs, and a sick man. Dimitri’s right side was now completely useless, and for the last days he was immobilised. It was Cherry who filled the aluminium cooker with gritty snow, grappled with stiff, flapping canvas and lashed leaden sleeping bags to the sledges. He was worried about everything on this trek: finding a route, the weather, the condition of the sea ice near Hut Point, Dimitri. ‘Lately I have felt that it has almost been too much,’ he wrote ominously.

They reached the
Discovery
shelter at Hut Point on 16 March. Atch and Keohane were there; in his official report Atch wrote, ‘Cherry-Garrard under the circumstances and according to his instructions was in my judgement quite right in everything he did. I am absolutely certain no other officer of the Expedition could have done better.’ He noted that when they got in, ‘Both men were in exceedingly poor condition, Cherry-Garrard’s state causing me serious alarm.’ The ship had left.

Thirty-six years later, Cherry was thrashing it all out for the umpteenth time with his friend and mentor George Bernard Shaw, then ninety-two. ‘If the depôt [of dog food] had been laid,’ Shaw asked him (thanks to Cherry, polar travel had been dropped into the boundless reservoir of Shavian expertise), ‘would you have gone on?’ ‘Of course,’ Cherry said.

If there had been food for them at One Ton, Cherry would have taken the dogs on after the weather cleared. He might have found the polar party and three or four of them might have lived.

7

It is the Tent

In the murky sanctuary of Hut Point Cherry collapsed, overwhelmed by exhaustion and tension. He was experiencing a breakdown, its physical symptoms including fainting fits and depression so crushing that some days he could barely get up. Dimitri, by contrast, staged a miraculous recovery. ‘It is sad,’ Cherry wrote, ‘that he has really been shamming ill . . . He just hasn’t got the guts.’
²⁸

As the Western Mountains shrank into the polar night, Cherry started hearing bells, and ‘hardly cared what happened’. Atch diagnosed heart strain. Whatever was wrong with him, Cherry was definitely too ill to be considered for a final sledge journey to look for the polar party. A note of foreboding entered his journal as he waited for news, although he kept telling himself that he had no reason to be especially anxious about his friends: according to Scott’s schedule they were not expected for some days. The men’s marches during the first fortnight on the Plateau had been excellent, and they had caught up with Shackleton’s dates before the last five struck out alone. Scott himself was confident. ‘What castles one builds now hopefully that the Pole is ours,’ he wrote the day after the last supporting party left him.

Then, as the leaves fell from the calendar, the men at Hut Point began to wonder, and worry took hold. Not one but two groups were out: when the
Terra Nova
had returned briefly on her way back to New Zealand she brought the news that bad ice conditions had prevented her from picking up Campbell and the five other members of the geologising Northern Party. Already absent for a year, they were now stranded 230 miles up the coast. Like Scott and his men, they only had small tents to protect them against the horrors of the Antarctic winter. But Campbell had supplies, and the six of them could probably survive until the spring in an ice cave or igloo. The polar party, on the other hand, would certainly perish in the sunless winter if they did not make it back to Cape Evans soon. ‘Atch and I look at one another – and he looks and I feel quite haggard with anxiety,’ Cherry wrote. As each day passed, the spectre of disaster solidified. One night, asleep in their bunks, they were woken by knocks at the window. Atch shouted, ‘Hullo! Cherry, they’re in!’ Keohane yelled, ‘Who’s cook?’ and they all rushed out, hearts pounding. But it was a dog, slapping the window with his tail.

With painful frequency someone spotted figures sledging in, they all raced outside, and each time, ‘hope sprang up anew’. Atch and another man sledged more than thirty miles out on the Barrier in the hope that they might meet the polar party. But conditions were atrocious, and in the bad light Atch finally acknowledged that the search was hopeless. On 30 March he recorded that he was ‘morally certain that the party had perished’.

They were again trapped at Hut Point by open water. The
Discovery
shelter there was fifteen miles along the coast from Cape Evans, and the only route back was across the sea ice – if it ever froze. Although he had good days, Cherry was weak, and suffered from chronic headaches and a swollen throat. He too was now certain that his friends were dead. On 2 April he wrote, ‘I think I have been down into hell.’ A week later he was left alone for four days, so feeble that he was obliged to crawl about on his hands and knees. Like many of his later illnesses, this one had no name: it was more a random collection of symptoms than a specific condition. He took morphine, and lay on the floor in his crusty sleeping bag in the bitter hut, periodically dragging himself over to the stove to feed it blubber as the walls swam away and the floor heaved and sank like a wave. The dogs took advantage of his infirmity, and he said he could easily have killed the lot of them.

The sun left them on 23 April, the sea finally froze, and a week later Cherry sledged back to Cape Evans in the perpetual twilight that marks the hiatus between summer and winter in the unforgiving Antarctic. He had had six weeks’ rest since coming in from the dog journey to One Ton with Dimitri, but when he arrived at Cape Evans he was ‘more or less an invalid’.

Nine men had gone with the ship, including Ponting, Griff and the sick Teddy Evans, and two had landed, leaving thirteen at Cape Evans for the winter, many of them exhausted. The six-strong ‘officers’ contingent comprised Cherry, Atch, Silas, Deb, biologist Edward ‘Marie’ Nelson and the 23-year-old Norwegian skiing expert Gran. Anticipating a bulging mail bag, Gran had been horrified to receive only one item, and that was a bill. But he rallied, and made himself useful with the animals during the winter, successfully deploying a football pump to give a mule an enema. By default, Atch was in charge, unless Campbell were to turn up. They had plenty of everything they needed, and recognised the importance of routine and activity to stave off despair. A handful of hyacinth bulbs that had come down with the ship bloomed blue in a basin of wet sawdust.

Four years older than Cherry but not quite as handsome, Atch was strong and nimble (as a medical student he had been the hospital light heavyweight boxing champion). He spent his early years in Trinidad in the company of his parents and five sisters, and was educated in England, joining the navy as a surgeon two years after qualifying. He worked primarily as a researcher, and had published a paper on gonorrhoeal rheumatism, possibly not the most useful area of expertise in the polar regions. As there was little medical work to do on the expedition, Atch had also been engaged as a parasitologist, and he was often to be found enthusiastically delving in the entrails of penguins. In later years, when he was working on his polar worms in a lab at the London School of Tropical Medicine, he named a new species
garrardi
.

A quiet, diligent man with impeccable manners, Atch turned out to be a popular and gifted leader, and throughout the emotional carnage of the second winter he was also a magnificent confidant for the sick Cherry. He kept a grip on morale by maintaining naval discipline (the officers and scientists continued to mess separately from the seamen) and issuing each man with orders. Cherry was appointed official recorder of events, and told to continue with his taxidermy, and with the
South Polar Times
, and, in between, to rest.

When they got home, someone had to write up the expedition records. Atch and Cherry both felt passionately that if Teddy Evans, as second-in-command, were to take on the task they would end up with ‘a garbled, disloyal account’. Their worries drew them together. But Atch had a sense of perspective, whereas the idea of Evans ‘taking over’ became an obsession with Cherry. He brooded on it in the hut and expressed his views in a letter to Reggie, whose firm was to publish the official expedition book. His main criticism was that Evans had spoken disloyally of Scott behind his back: a serious violation of Cherry’s code of honour. ‘Evans has been the one blot,’ he told Reggie, ‘on what I believe is the best expedition which has ever sailed.’ At the same time, Cherry began writing Scott’s story, and the seed of
The Worst Journey
was planted.

Blizzards imprisoned them for weeks. The seamen were much taken up with the mules which had been sent down from India to replace the ponies, and in their free time they entertained themselves with games. ‘This winter is passing a lot better than I thought it would under the circumstances,’ wrote Keohane. ‘It is no doubt owing to our skelleywag board everybody is very keen on winning.’ Without complaint they followed a regime that might have seemed brutal at home. ‘We usually wear our underclothing about a month,’ recorded Petty Officer Thomas Williamson cheerfully. ‘Now that we have run out of soap,’ he added, ‘we shall be obliged to wear them much longer periods.’ On the other side of the partition Cherry discharged his duties and read, subsisting on a conventional diet of Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Arnold Bennett, Rider Haggard and Anthony Hope. For light relief he pored over reports of the coronation of George V in the illustrated papers sent down by his old Winchester housemaster, Theodore ‘Kenny’ Kensington. He improved his painting, and when he got bored of penguin wings and parasitic rock cones he drew ink studies of cancan dancers, gorgeous Lautrecian creatures never previously sighted south of the Antarctic Circle. One day he astonished everyone with a break of 102 at billiards, which they played on a miniature folding table, one of the rackety wooden balls no longer being recognisably round. With a depleted roster he was no longer able to escape lecturing, speaking in May on rowing and in July on Florence under the Medici. (Oscar Wilde once lectured on a similar subject to the red-shirted miners of Leadville, Colorado, though the miners were more enthusiastic than Scott’s grizzled seamen.)

On Midwinter’s Day the bunting, flags and Christmas tree were manfully wheeled out again, and the menu extended to
noisettes d’agneau Darwinian
and
charlotte russe glacé à la Beardmore
. Soon the light began seeping back into the edges of the dark sky, and for a whole fortnight Cherry had only one headache. He watched the seals glissade through the black water, outlined in the phosphorescence, and one day he saw an eruption of Erebus in which flames seemed to shoot thousands of feet into the air, fall and rise, fall and rise; then disappear. But blizzards brought his depression back. (‘It is of some scientific interest to be a living blizzometer, but I wouldn’t recommend it even to my enemies, if there are any about.’) He had already lost seven pounds and now he shed a further half a stone in the course of a month ‘that has been one continual fight against a kind of nervous strain and sick headaches’. He concealed his depression from everyone except Atch, more or less. ‘Cherry was his usual cheerful self,’ Silas remembered, ‘but rather subdued by the loss of his two greatest friends.’ In fact, he was reeling from the most profound emotional shock of his life. More often than the others knew, he retreated to the private colonies of the imagination. In his dreams the polar party appeared at the door of the hut; and then he woke again to the same, sickening horror. He had stabbing pains in his heart: stumbling in the bleak psychic landscape of bereavement and trapped on a frigid cape, he internalised his trauma so completely that it manifested itself in physical symptoms.

Cherry said afterwards that this second winter was ‘a ghastly experience’. It was a bitter and desolate sequel to the happiness and fulfilment of the early part of the expedition. ‘The scenery has lost much of its beauty to us,’ Deb wrote, ‘the auroras are cheap and the cold rather colder.’ It was hardly surprising: every day they slept alongside empty bunks.

On 27 August the sun returned to Cape Evans, at last. The hut was still snowed in, but the familiar jagged battlements of the Western Mountains thickened in the gloom, and the lower slopes of Erebus, their friend, gleamed in the pale, frosty light of early spring.

Cherry too had emerged from gloom, and soon he was ‘top dog’ for the first time in many months. He finished the lugubrious job of packing Bill’s and Birdie’s possessions, a task assigned to him by Atch, and after listing the contents of each box in one of his slim hardback notebooks he nailed down the lids for the return journey. The female seals were popping up again, bursting like overripe melons, and the first visiting parties of Emperors came calling. Cherry went over to Cape Royds, and to Hut Point, but he was determined not to go sledging for the fun of it: ‘God knows I have done enough hard sledging to want no “objectless” trips.’

Something inside him had broken. He no longer had Bill’s lofty ideals and Birdie’s unremitting selflessness to guide him. At the beginning of October he was furious when Atch asked him to take on some sledging errands. ‘It is all I can do not to speak out sometimes,’ he wrote; but he spoke to his journal instead. ‘There is not a dangerous or hard job which has ever been done down here that I have not done – depôt journey, ponies on the sea ice, winter journey, southern journey, unloading ship, dog journey to south – work till an inevitable breakdown which has given me such hell this winter as I hope never to suffer again.’ Once he had begun, he couldn’t stop. ‘And when we got back from three months’ sledging last year we sledged on unloading the ship, up early and late to bed – while the men on the ship who could hardly waddle for fat took alternate days on and off. Never again – never!’

His shapeless feelings of loss and grief now found an outlet in bitterness. While he was not given time to concentrate on his taxidermy, ‘others sit round the table reading novels . . . And God alone knows where it will all end. Likely or not in a crevasse . . . There’s only four or five months more and they can all go to hell.’ Bill’s cherished ‘forgetfulness of self ’ was a long way off. In the shifting layers of Cherry’s unconscious he displaced his hostility towards Scott (at some level responsible for the deaths of Birdie and Bill) onto his companions in the hut, and, more permanently, onto the absent Evans.

Day after day the men had chewed over the problem of where to concentrate their resources when the light returned. They could either sledge south, in the hope of finding out what had happened to the dead polar party, or west and north to try to relieve Campbell and his Northern Party, who could very well be alive. It was difficult to put the dead above the living, but unlikely that the ice would be good enough to reach Campbell, and there was also an outside chance that he had been relieved by the
Terra Nova
on her way north. If he had not, and they did go, by the time they got to him Campbell would be out of danger one way or the other: either he would have set off for Cape Evans, or he would soon be relieved by the ship on her way back south. The Cape Evans men had a clear duty, on the other hand, to tell the public what had happened to Scott. Most of them thought the five-strong polar party had gone down a crevasse, though one or two suspected they had died of scurvy.
²⁹
While they reckoned there was little chance of finding bodies, Scott always left notes on his depôts, and a search might yield at least some information. When Atch called for a vote, everyone wanted to go south except Lashly, who abstained.