Cherry (22 page)

Cherry was sent out depôt-laying in preparation, fuming that he would not be back at the Cape Evans hut before the search journey began. But out on the trail, it wasn’t so bad. The white-gold clouds of spring drifted hazily around the lower slopes of Erebus, the rim of the crater glowed against the cobalt sky, and the smell of fuel when the Primus flame whooshed rekindled the romance of a southern camp.

At the end of October twelve men set off for the Barrier with dogs and mules. They marched on for a fortnight in moderate conditions, the temperatures bouncing between minus 7 and minus 29. The mules were not a success. While they enjoyed tea leaves and tobacco, they did not care for their own rations, and a great deal of human energy was expended in coaxing them to eat.

In the morning of 12 November, twelve-and-a-half miles south of One Ton, Cherry was driving a dog team when he saw Silas and the mules turn off course and swerve to the right in a sparkling cloud of ice particles that sprayed wide in a soaring arc. Silas had seen what he thought was a cairn, and something black next to it. ‘A vague kind of wonder,’ Cherry remembered, ‘gradually gave way to real alarm.’ Silas, realising what he had found, signalled to the others; he felt it would be sacrilegious to make a noise. They all went up to this mound of snow, and stopped, mules weary, dogs frisky, men afraid. Silas came across to Cherry.

He said, ‘It is the tent.’

Someone brushed away a small column of snow on the top of the mound, revealing the green flap of a tent ventilator. Two of them found the entrance, and went in through the funnel and then past the inner bamboos. But the snow banked up outside made it too dark to see anything, so they started shovelling it away from the cambric walls. Slowly the ghostly outlines formed. There were three of them.

Scott was in the middle, the flaps of his bag thrown back, one hand stretched over Bill to his right. Bill’s hands were folded over his chest. Birdie lay with his feet to the door. Their skin was yellow and glassy, like old alabaster, and they were mottled with frostbite. Everything was tidy.

‘That scene can never leave my memory,’ Cherry wrote.

As Atch searched in Scott’s bag for his diary, the others heard a crack, like a shot being fired. Years later, Gran could still hear that sound. ‘It was something breaking,’ he said. ‘It was Scott’s arm.’ They found everything: diaries, letters, film, thirty-five pounds of geological specimens dragged hundreds of miles from the Beardmore, and Cherry’s copy of Tennyson in its green leather binding. They learned from the diaries that Amundsen had got to the Pole first, news that seemed at that moment to be of no importance whatever. They learned too that Scott had run out of oil, less than thirteen miles from the plenty of One Ton.

They dug down to find Scott’s sledge, and put up their own tent. Atch sat inside and went through Scott’s diary, according to the instructions on the cover, then gathered everyone together to read them the bones of the story.

After the last returning party had gone back, the five men had continued doggedly across the Plateau with only four pairs of skis between them. The inclusion of an extra man at the last moment had other serious implications: more fuel was required for cooking, and rations had been prepared in quantities of four. But they knew the Pole – the grail – was close. Then, on 16 January, Birdie spotted a tiny scrap of black flapping in the wind. It was a Norwegian flag. ‘All the day-dreams must go,’ Scott wrote. The next evening they reached the Pole itself, their hands freezing through double woollen and fur mitts. ‘It was a very bitter day,’ Wilson noted in his diary. They camped, planted a flag (‘our poor slighted Union Jack’), and took observations. Amundsen had left a tent, some equipment and a cordial note for Scott. They were only a month behind him.

Five Norwegians had reached the Pole on 14 December 1911. They had pioneered a new route, avoiding the Beardmore, and had not been encumbered with ponies. Apart from one false start that almost ended in disaster (Amundsen had set out too early, and low temperatures drove him back to his hut), there had been no major setbacks. ‘We are going like greyhounds,’ the Norwegian leader wrote on the Barrier. The men had practically grown up on skis – one was a former national champion – and they drove some of their dogs all the way to the Pole. Furthermore, they were not stopping to survey or load their sledges with rocks.
³⁰
By the time he returned to his hut, despite appalling fog and desperately challenging terrain, Amundsen had covered over 1,600 miles in 99 days.

Scott and his companions, meanwhile, had turned for home – 860 miles away. A sail rigged to the sledge speeded them along, but temperatures were low, surfaces poor and their spirits broken. Taff Evans had a nasty cut on his hand which refused to heal; he was especially run down, and gradually became ‘rather dull and incapable’. He and Oates were badly frostbitten. Everyone was hungry, and, given the altitude, more than usually thirsty. After a cold seven weeks on the Plateau, they struggled down the Beardmore and onto the Barrier, battling crevasses, snow-blindness, falls, cold and more cold. Evans, whom Scott had originally thought the strongest man of the party, was on an irreversible downward trajectory, and on 16 February he collapsed. He struggled up, but the next day he broke down completely, and by the time they got him into the tent he was comatose. He never regained consciousness. They had watched him die, slowly, for many days.

They slogged on, colder and weaker. Scott’s diary for these weeks is a lament of misfortune, like a chorus in a Greek tragedy. Each day unfurled in a slow, mental scream of anguish about their chances of finding the next depôt. When they did reach the depôts they found them short of oil (the result of evaporation and leakage). The weather turned bad – much colder than Scott could reasonably have expected on the Barrier at that time of year – and Titus’s feet were black with frostbite. ‘We are in a
very
queer street,’ Scott noted with robust English understatement. On Amundsen’s return journey a month earlier his food depôts had been so plentiful, he noted in his diary, that he and party were ‘living among the fleshpots of Egypt’.

On about 17 March Oates said at lunch that he could not go on; he wanted them to leave him there in his bag. But they would not, and he went on, one more agonising march with a huge swollen foot frostbitten over and over again. He had given his diary to Wilson, asking him to pass it on to his mother, who was, he said, the only woman he had ever loved. That night he turned in hoping never to wake, but that passive exit was denied him. In the morning a thick blizzard was blowing. Oates said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ They did go and look for him, but they did not find him.

‘Should this be found,’ Scott wrote, ‘I want these facts recorded. Oates’ last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death.’

They staggered on, ‘and though we constantly talk of fetching through, I don’t think any one of us believes it in his heart’. At their sixtieth camp since the Pole, less than thirteen miles from the bounty of One Ton, they had nine days of blizzard, and that was the end. They had pitched the tent for the last time five days after Cherry and Dimitri arrived back at Hut Point with the dogs. Scott had no fuel left, and hardly any food. His feet were so bad he could scarcely walk (‘amputation is the least I can hope for now’), and Birdie and Bill were planning to go on to the next depôt alone; but the blizzard put a stop to that. Scott made the last entry in his diary on 29 March. ‘For God’s sake,’ he wrote, ‘look after our people.’

They left farewell letters, thawing their fingers to write by the wispy flame of an improvised spirit lamp. ‘Death has no terrors for me,’ Wilson wrote to his parents, and he begged his wife not to be unhappy, since ‘all is for the best . . . my love is as living for you as ever’. Birdie tore a flimsy leaf from a notebook and wrote to his mother for the last time. He signed off, ‘Your ever loving Son to the end in this life and the next when we will meet and where God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes.’

‘He was one of the two or three greatest friends of my life,’ Cherry wrote later of Birdie, who had died aged twenty-eight. As for Bill, he had been more than a friend. He had offered a hand to a fearful young man who came to love him sincerely. ‘How cold are your feet, Cherry?’ Bill had asked when they faced death together at Crozier. ‘Very cold,’ Cherry replied. ‘That’s all right,’ Bill said, ‘so are mine.’

Besides his letters, Scott left a ‘Message to the Public’. It began with the assertion that the causes of the disaster were not due to faulty organisation but to misfortune, citing specifically the loss of pony transport on the depôt journey the previous season, which meant they had started late; the poor weather; and the soft snow in the lower reaches of the Beardmore. Despite all that, he said they would have got through had it not been for Oates’ prolonged sickness, the shortage of fuel in the depôts, and the last blizzard. ‘We are weak,’ he concluded, ‘writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them . . . Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’

They had not been expecting this. They had thought the bodies were dangling down some crevasse on the far-off Beardmore. They stood there, stamping their feet softly, lost in shock, until Atch found the Prayer Book. Then they gathered on the gleaming ice shelf with their balaclavas in their hands, and Atch read the lesson from the Burial Service into the deep Barrier silence. They did not move their friends, but Cherry searched for Bill’s watch to give to his widow. He found the cheery little notes that he had left on the depôts folded in his pyjama pockets. Outside, sheets of emerald clouds rippled across the southern sky. In Cherry’s bursting heart, something died.

They removed the tent poles and collapsed the cambric over the three bodies. Then they built a twelve-foot cairn over the tomb, and made a cross out of skis for the top. On either side they placed the two sledges, upright. In a metal cylinder on a bamboo they put a note commemorating the three dead men in the snow and the two out there on the ice. It cited inclement weather and lack of fuel as the cause of death. ‘The Lord giveth,’ the note ended, ‘and the Lord taketh away.’

‘I do not know how long we were there,’ Cherry wrote, ‘but when all was finished . . . it was midnight of some day.’ Gran said that he envied them. ‘They died having done something great. How hard must not death be having done nothing.’ Cherry was already haunted. ‘I for one,’ he wrote, ‘shall be very glad to leave this place.’

‘The question of what we might have done for them with the dog teams is terribly on my mind,’ Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘but we obeyed instructions . . . and I know that we did our best.’ In an attempt to clear his mind he sat down on a sledge and wrote out the sequence of events that had led to his dog journey to One Ton with Dimitri. He badly wanted to make it clear that he had had no food with which to take the dogs on. He now knew that if he had pressed on through the blizzard, he could have left oil and food on cairns which Scott and the others might have seen. If he had made good progress, and killed some dogs to feed the others, he might even have met the polar party and shepherded them home. Cherry sat among the immense, bloodless icefields as men began unlashing sledges, and recriminations without end began to rain down.

Subsequent climate data reveals that the temperatures Scott experienced on the homeward trek across the Barrier were lower than average; over some periods as much as twenty degrees lower. The unseasonally cold conditions were a significant factor in the disaster. Cherry crucified himself over the repercussions of his decisions during the crisis at One Ton, but the facts indicate that the polar party would almost certainly have died even if he had sledged on. The facts, however, did not determine Cherry’s personal tragedy.

He was sorry that the question of oil shortage had arisen, as it implied selfishness, or at best carelessness, on the part of the returning teams. (They did not then know how the shortage had arisen.) ‘We were always careful,’ Cherry wrote fretfully that night in his diary, ‘to take a little less than we were entitled to.’

The following day they marched south to look for Titus’s body, the gritty wind in their faces and the light poor. They found just his sleeping bag, empty except for his socks. Near the spot where he had walked out they built another cairn, and another cross, with a note written on a page torn from Cherry’s sketchbook. Signed by Cherry and Atch, it began, ‘Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.’

They reached Hut Point a week later, and Cherry went up to the entrance. After a minute or two he rushed back to the others, ‘his face transformed’. On a note pinned to the door he read that Campbell and his men had arrived at Cape Evans. Finally, they had good news. ‘It is the happiest day for nearly a year – almost the only happy one,’ Cherry rejoiced. They soon got over to Cape Evans themselves and sat up to hear the story.

What Campbell and his five men endured beggars belief, even in the steely annals of Antarctic hardship. They had been out from February 1911 until November 1913. Their first season at Cape Adare was successful: geologist Ray Priestley collected important specimens and they charted new territory, though they were hemmed in by unclimbable glaciers, and so could not penetrate the hinterland. (During this time they published their own newspaper, the
Adélie Annual
, which included a cookery column.) In January 1912 they were picked up by the
Terra Nova
on her way from New Zealand and deposited further down the coast, but when exceptionally bad ice conditions prevented her from relieving them, they made their home in an ice cave on Inexpressible Island (it was they who named it). The cave was nine feet by twelve, and five-feet-six high, which meant they could never stand upright. They spent much of their second winter lying in their bags talking about food. They had to ration themselves to one match a day to light the stove, and their practically all-meat diet meant that the acid content of their urine was exceptionally high, with the result that they wet themselves all the time and everyone had haemorrhoids. When Campbell had a touch of dysentery he got his penis frostbitten. ‘The road to hell might be paved with good intentions,’ one of the party wrote, ‘but it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved something after the style of Inexpressible Island.’ But they saved twentyfive raisins apiece to celebrate birthdays, and held divine service on Sundays. Finally, not having washed or changed their clothes for eight months, they sledged the 230 miles back to Cape Evans, still friends.