Cherry (23 page)

That they survived at all was due in no small part to the outstanding leadership of Campbell, who, as the senior navy man, now took over command at Cape Evans. Everyone tried to be cheerful, but all they wanted to do was go home. ‘Hope I have set foot on Barrier for last time,’ Silas noted in his diary. Cherry had to type up Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ ready for telegraphic despatch round the globe when the ship reached New Zealand, and it brought on ‘a terrible fit of the blues’. They even saw their dead companions, as they went into Ponting’s darkroom and developed the films that had lain on the snow next to Scott’s body for eight months. Five men posed woodenly at the Pole, hairy faces solid with ice. Birdie was holding the string to open the camera shutter.

As an antidote, Cherry went off to Cape Royds for three weeks to pickle Adélie penguin embryos. The weather was good; he had the companionship of Atch, who had gone with him to work on parasites; and as for the food – tins of boiled chicken, kidneys, ginger, Garibaldi biscuits: ‘Truly Shackleton’s expedition must have fed like turkey cocks from all the delicacies here.’ Best of all, they had fresh buttered skua gull eggs for breakfast. Besides taking copious notes on the behaviour of Adélies for an article he planned to write, Cherry sketched, skinned and indulged his taste for solid Victorian novels by knocking off
Adam Bede
. One afternoon he worked out his own sledging record, and found that he had clocked up a whacking thirty-three weeks and four days on the Barrier, and that he had been absent from Cape Evans for forty-eight weeks and four days. His sledging total was 3,059 miles, higher than any other man’s. He was proud. More than that, he was pleased to get the embryos done, as he knew it was what Bill would have wanted.

They went back to Cape Evans for Christmas, the return journey ‘more like a steeplechase in deep snow than anything else’. It was not a happy holiday. They did manage a good meal, though all the wine was gone and they were obliged to drink liqueurs. There was little to do now except wait for the ship. They had packed up, ready to leave at short notice, and the words ‘When I get home . . .’ rang round the hut like a refrain. It was agreed that anyone who wanted could take a dog back to England with him, and Cherry settled on Kris, the hairy dark grey and white Siberian who had slavered over the sick Evans. Cherry ascribed to Kris the character of a Bolshevik – though he was immensely fond of him none the less.

January dragged on. The ship was frequently sighted, and always turned out to be an iceberg. On the seventeenth they decided to prepare for another winter. It was a grim prospect. They were almost out of coal, so were going to start cooking with seal oil. Food was to be rationed. Campbell issued orders to begin slaughtering seals.

After breakfast the next day Cherry went off to hunt while some of the others started carving a meat store in the ice. He killed and cut up two blubbery Weddells, and at about midday walked back to the hut across the hummocky headland. Everyone was out working, the air was still, and the chop-chop of ice axes sang out over the cape. Suddenly the bows of the
Terra Nova
glided out from behind the snout of the Barne Glacier.

The yells were wild.

On the ship, almost every man was on deck, straining into binoculars or telescopes. Many of the old crew were there, including the industrious navigator Harry Pennell, who had enjoyed an uneventful winter in New Zealand after the taxing journey up from Antarctica at the end of the previous season. But this time Pennell was not in command: he had yielded to Teddy Evans, who had recovered from scurvy and been promoted, becoming the youngest commander in the navy. The doughty old
Terra Nova
had been specially scrubbed, yards had been squared, ropes coiled and the ensign hoisted. The wardroom table was decked with flags and ribbons, champagne had been fetched up from the hold, and ranks of cigars, cigarettes and chocolates stood ready for duty. As the ship approached the ice foot at Cape Evans, her engines were cut. The shore party gave three cheers, and the ship’s company replied. ‘Are you all well?’ Teddy Evans shouted through a megaphone from the bridge. There was a pause. Then Campbell shouted back:

‘The Polar Party died on their return from the Pole: we have their records.’

The men on shore worked all night loading, then shot the last mules and shut up the hut, leaving it well provisioned for whoever might come next. When they sailed round to Cape Royds to pick up the zoological specimens left at Shackleton’s hut, Cherry watched Cape Evans recede without regret: he never wanted to see it again. ‘The pleasant memories,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘are all swallowed up in the bad ones.’ He had been in the Antarctic for almost exactly two years.

He was given his old bunk on the ship. Besides beer, apples and the latest waltz on the gramophone, his chief joy was the mail. He had become an uncle, Lassie and her vicar having produced a little girl whom they named Susan. His multitudinous parcels and packing cases included a home-baked Dundee cake and a six-year supply of oilskins. Besides private news, he luxuriated in newspapers and magazines. ‘The last year,’ he wrote, ‘has fulfilled the promises of the year before in English home politics: there are big changes coming, and we who believe they are for the bad, will be unable to do much about them.’

They had decided to erect a cross on Observation Hill, near Hut Point, to commemorate the five dead men. The ship’s carpenter made a fine one from Australian jarrah wood, and quotations from the Bible were put forward as possible inscriptions. Cherry suggested the last line of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ instead: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’ He was pleased when his idea was taken up. The erection of this impressive cross was their last task, and while he was on the hill Cherry put a piece of lava in his pocket to send to Bill’s widow. The cross stood nine feet out of the rock, and many feet into the ground. Lying on his bunk that night, Cherry wrote, ‘I do not believe it will ever move.’
³¹

They coasted alongside the Western Mountains up to Granite Harbour. Denis Lillie trawled for specimens, crouching on the poop surrounded by forests of jars, sponges and spiny starfish. Two years Cherry’s senior, with sand-yellow hair and marble-blue eyes, Lillie was a genial character who had sailed down to the Antarctic with the
Terra Nova
and returned to winter in New Zealand, where he had worked on whales and fossils. Before the expedition he had studied Natural Sciences at Birmingham and Cambridge, and although he was not a distinguished student, he was an enthusiastic biologist who went on to publish a number of papers. A gifted artist, on the journey down to the Antarctic he had produced a series of excellent silhouette-style caricatures which were eventually reproduced in the
South Polar Times
. Lillie was popular on the ship, though he was probably the most unconventional man Scott had: he was deeply intellectual and was more interested in matters of the spirit than in schoolboy pranks. He had a number of eccentric, even cranky ideas which he happily aired as the
Terra Nova
pushed her way north, despite the fact that most of his theories were greeted at best with stupefaction by the others. He believed in reincarnation, for example, and thought he had been a Persian or a Roman in a previous existence. Reincarnated or not, Cherry liked him.

They picked up Campbell’s geological specimens from Inexpressible Island, left a depôt for future explorers and turned for home through heavy pack ice, counting first the weeks, then the days, then the hours. Everyone was seasick. The bergs were so large, and so close, that once, leaving the wardroom, Cherry nearly struck his head on one. As the
Terra Nova
sailed north, he read reports of the expedition in the preceding year’s newspapers. Evans’ role, grossly distorted, featured prominently in all of them. It was too much. ‘I should like to see things put in their right proportion,’ Cherry wrote in his diary, ‘and that man branded the traitor and liar he is.’ He trawled through the weekly
Times
noting the inaccuracies, mostly concerning Evans’ arduous sledging. ‘I wonder if all the print in
The Times
is equally unreliable,’ he mused, not the first person to ask such a question, or the last. ‘It’s fairly sickening and it makes one lose one’s faith in everything – a man chosen out of 8,000 volunteers and now “the youngest commander in the Navy”.’ He was deeply disillusioned. ‘One started with such high hopes, expecting men to get their desserts – and one’s hopes have come to worse than nothing . . . There may be honour among thieves – there is none among adventurers.’

Evans had been appalled to learn of Scott’s actions on the return journey from the Pole. In particular, he thought Scott a fool to have dragged the rock specimens on the sledge when the entire party was so weak. In a letter to one of the expedition’s supporters four days before the
Terra Nova
reached New Zealand he pointed out that he himself had displayed more prudence. ‘It seems to me extraordinary,’ Evans wrote, ‘that in the face of such obstacles they stuck to all their records and specimens. We dumped ours . . . I must say I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores . . . Apparently Scott did not. His sledge contained 150 lbs of trash. He ought to have left it . . .’ His gift for self-promotion did not desert him. ‘Their
biggest
day’s march on the Barrier was 9 miles,’ he crowed, ‘against our
average
16.’ This was vintage Evans. ‘Why should I be modest?’ he once asked a vice-admiral.

While Cherry boiled, Evans was busy in the wardroom establishing a six-man committee for winding up the expedition. Atch, who was on it, reported to Cherry in low tones that Evans wanted to doctor Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ before it was cabled to the world at large. Specifically, he wanted to omit the references to the oil shortages. Atch was determined to stop him.

Cherry and Atch were already close, and now they were thrown together in their desire to prevent Evans from taking over. Cherry recognised that his angry outbursts about Atch in his diary in October had been unfair, as his friend had been doing his best in a difficult situation. ‘I consider him to be straight as a die,’ he now wrote. Once again, Atch grew alarmed at Cherry’s overwrought state. He told him he needed a complete change and plenty to occupy him when he got back. ‘I see he is afraid that things generally are worrying me too much,’ Cherry recorded.

In the early hours of 10 February the
Terra Nova
crept into Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand like a phantom ship. ‘With what mixed feelings,’ Cherry remembered later, ‘we smelt the old familiar woods and grassy slopes, and saw the shadowy outlines of human homes.’ Atch and Pennell landed incognito to send the official telegram (including Scott’s comment on the oil shortage: Atch had won), and the ship cruised around for a day to allow the news to get to the relatives first, and to fulfil the expedition’s exclusive contract with the Central News Agency. Cherry had a bath, shaved off his beard and got out a new blue landing suit. How strange it felt to be sheathed in its stiff cleanness.

They steamed through Lyttelton Heads at dawn on 12 February, the white ensign at half-mast. The harbour master chugged out to meet them, bringing Atch and Pennell, who had gone on from Oamaru. ‘Come down here a minute,’ Atch shouted to Cherry over the growl of the engine. The tug belched out its exhaust fumes. ‘It’s made a tremendous impression,’ he said conspiratorially when Cherry got to him. ‘I had no idea it would make so much.’

The Empire was in mourning. Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’ and the story of Oates’ end had gone to the heart of the civilised world. In London the King and Queen spoke out publicly in sympathy, as did the Prime Minister and representatives of both Houses of Parliament. Messages poured in from beyond the Empire: President Taft sent a telegram to King George from New York, and the Italian Chamber of Deputies voted to convey their sympathies to the House of Commons. The myth-making began before the survivors even got their land legs. Scott and his dead companions gratified the need of the hour for heroes who could demonstrate that Britain was still great (
The Times
announced confidently that their actions proved Britons were still ‘capable of maintaining the Empire that our fathers builded’). Only seven months before the news of Scott broke, the press had had an orgy over the
Titanic
disaster. Here was another monster story – the second in a year – facilitating feet, not inches, of column space hymning the uplifting virtues of gallantry in the teeth of catastrophe. And now, by an unwitting sleight of hand, it seemed that the polar party had won after all. Defeat on this earthly plain would surely be supplanted by British victory in the world to come:
The Times
concluded that the real value of the expedition was ‘moral and spiritual’. The Admiralty decided that their men – Scott and Taff Evans – had been killed in action. In his luminous death Oates embodied the code of the era (or what was perhaps already the past era), that of chivalry and sacrifice.

Cherry again stayed with the Burtons, who were standing on the wharf to meet him in the pale morning sunshine. For years he remembered the first night in a soft bed and the first dinner off a white tablecloth with gleaming silver spoons and forks. He relished the bright colours and the balmy air, had a number of baths, and found that he could not sleep. The day after he arrived, Oriana Wilson asked him to visit her at the home of Joseph Kinsey, the expedition agent, where she was staying. She had sailed down from England early and enjoyed happy travels in New Zealand while waiting for Bill. She heard the news while on the train to Christchurch from a newspaper vendor parading along the platform shouting, ‘Scott’s dead! Scott’s dead!’ Cherry hurried over, and Ory read him part of Bill’s last letter and told him all the nice things Bill had said about him. She wanted him to handle Bill’s things. ‘She is as fine a woman as he was a man,’ Cherry concluded.

Thousands came to Lyttelton and Christchurch to offer their condolences, messages poured in from all over the world and flags up and down the country fluttered sadly at half-mast. Cherry went to a memorial service at the cathedral. ‘I believe I am only just beginning to realise what has happened,’ he wrote. The day after the service he had one of his headaches, and got annoyed at the small talk over dinner at the Burtons’: ‘the old, old story of running down colonials, which I cannot keep silent about’. Meanwhile he was occupied by a myriad expedition affairs, as well as arrangements for his passage home. He met up with Atch, who was himself embroiled in meetings and arrangements. Atch told him that Evans was ‘quite hysterical’.