The Worst Journey in the World (36 page)

By two o'clock we were dispersed once more to our various works and
duties. If it was bearable outside, the hut would soon be empty save for
the cook and a couple of seamen washing up the plates; otherwise every
one went out to make the most of any glimmering of daylight which still
came to us from the sun below the northern horizon. And here it may be
explained that whereas in England the sun rises more or less in the east,
is due south at mid-day, and sets in the west, this is not the case in
the Antarctic regions. In the latitude in which we now lived the sun is
at his highest at mid-day in the north, at his lowest at midnight in the
south. As is generally known he remains entirely above the horizon for
four months of the summer (October-February) and entirely below the
horizon for four months in the winter (April 21-August 21). About
February 27, the end of summer, he begins to set and rise due south at
midnight; the next day he sets a little earlier and dips a little deeper.
During March and April he is going deeper and deeper every day, until, by
the middle of April, he is set all the time except for just a peep over
the northern horizon at mid-day, which is his last farewell before he
goes away.

The reverse process takes place from August 21 onwards. On this date the
sun just peeped above the sea to the north of our hut. The next day he
rose a little higher and longer, and in a few weeks he was rising well in
the east and sinking behind the Western Mountains. But he did not stop
there. Soon he was rising in the S.E. until in the latter days of
September he never rose, for he never set; but circled round us by day
and night. On Midsummer Day (December 21) at the South Pole the sun
circles round for twenty-four hours without changing his altitude for one
minute of a degree, but elsewhere he is always rising in the sky until
mid-day in the north and falling from that time until midnight in the
south.

Often, far too often, it was blizzing, and it was impossible to go out
except into the camp to take the observations, to care for the dogs, to
get ice for water or to bring in stores. Even a short excursion of a few
yards had to be made with great care under such circumstances, and
certainly no one went outside more than was necessary, if only because
one was obliged to dig the accumulated drift from the door before it was
possible to proceed. Blizzard or no blizzard, most men were back in the
hut soon after four, and from then until 6.30 worked steadily at their
jobs. As supper time approached some kindly-disposed person would sit
down and play on the Broadwood pianola which was one of our blessings,
and so it was that we came to supper with good tempers as well as keen
appetites.

Soup, in which the flavour of tomatoes occurred all too frequently,
followed by seal or penguin, and twice a week by New Zealand mutton, with
tinned vegetables, formed the basis of our meal, and this was followed by
a pudding. We drank lime juice and water which sometimes included a
suspicious penguin flavour derived from the ice slopes from which our
water was quarried.

During our passage out to New Zealand in the ship (or as Meares always
insisted on calling her, the steamer) it was our pleasant custom to have
a glass of port or a liqueur after dinner. Alas, we had this no longer:
after leaving New Zealand space allowed of little wine being carried in
the Terra Nova, even if the general medical opinion of the expedition had
not considered its presence undesirable. We had, however, a few cases for
special festivals, as well as some excellent liqueur brandy which was
carried as medical comforts on our sledge journeys. Any officer who
allowed the distribution of this luxury on nearing the end of a journey
became extremely popular.

Lack of wine probably led to the suspension of a custom which had
prevailed on the Terra Nova, namely, the drinking of the old toast of
Saturday night, "Sweethearts and wives; may our sweethearts become our
wives, and our wives remain our sweethearts," and that more appropriate
(in our case) toast of Sunday, namely, "absent friends." We had but few
married officers, though I must say most survivors of the expedition
hurried to remedy this single state of affairs when they returned to
civilization. Only two of them are unmarried now. Most of them will
probably make a success of it, for the good Arctic explorer has most of
the defects and qualities of a good husband.

On the top of the pianola, close to the head of the table, lived the
gramophone; and under the one looking-glass we possessed, which hung on
the bulkhead of Scott's cubicle, was a home-made box with shelves on
which lay our records. It was usual to start the gramophone after dinner,
and its value may be imagined. It is necessary to be cut off from
civilization and all that it means to enable you to realize fully the
power music has to recall the past, or the depths of meaning in it to
soothe the present and give hope for the future. We had also records of
good classical music, and the kindly-disposed individual who played them
had his reward in the pleasant atmosphere of homeliness which made itself
felt. After dinner had been cleared away, some men sat on at the table
occupied with books and games. Others dispersed to various jobs. In the
matter of games it was noticeable that one would have its vogue and yield
place to another without any apparent reason. For a few weeks it might be
chess, which would then yield its place to draughts and backgammon, and
again come into favour. It is a remarkable fact that, though we had
playing cards with us none of our company appeared desirous to use them.
In fact I cannot remember seeing a game of cards played except in the
ship on the voyage from England.

With regard to books we were moderately well provided with good modern
fiction, and very well provided with such authors as Thackeray, Charlotte
Brontë, Bulwer-Lytton and Dickens. With all respect to the kind givers
of these books, I would suggest that the literature most acceptable to
us in the circumstances under which we did most of our reading, that is
in Winter Quarters, was the best of the more recent novels, such as
Barrie, Kipling, Merriman and Maurice Hewlett. We certainly should have
taken with us as much of Shaw, Barker, Ibsen and Wells as we could lay
our hands on, for the train of ideas started by these works and the
discussions to which they would have given rise would have been a godsend
to us in our isolated circumstances. The one type of book in which we
were rich was Arctic and Antarctic travel. We had a library of these
given to us by Sir Lewis Beaumont and Sir Albert Markham which was very
complete. They were extremely popular, though it is probably true that
these are books which you want rather to read on your return than when
you are actually experiencing a similar life. They were used extensively
in discussions or lectures on such polar subjects as clothing, food
rations, and the building of igloos, while we were constantly referring
to them on specific points and getting useful hints, such as the use of
an inner lining to our tents, and the mechanism of a blubber stove.

I have already spoken of the importance of maps and books of reference,
and these should include a good encyclopaedia and dictionaries, English,
Latin and Greek. Oates was generally deep in Napier's History of the
Peninsular War, and some of us found Herbert Paul's History of Modern
England a great stand-by. Most of us managed to find room in our personal
gear when sledging for some book which did not weigh much and yet would
last. Scott took some Browning on the Polar Journey, though I only saw
him reading it once; Wilson took Maud and In Memoriam; Bowers always had
so many weights to tally and observations to record on reaching camp that
I feel sure he took no reading matter. Bleak House was the most
successful book I ever took away sledging, though a volume of poetry was
useful, because it gave one something to learn by heart and repeat during
the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to
think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary
grievances, which may become distorted into real foundations of discord
under the abnormal strain of living for months in the unrelieved company
of three other men. If your companions have much the same tastes as
yourself it is best to pool your allowance of weights and take one book
which will offer a wide field of thought and discussion. I have heard
Scott and Wilson bless the thought which led them to take Darwin's Origin
of Species on their first Southern Journey. Such is the object of your
sledging book, but you often want the book which you read for half an
hour before you go to sleep at Winter Quarters to take you into the
frivolous fripperies of modern social life which you may not know and may
never wish to know, but which it is often pleasant to read about, and
never so much so as when its charms are so remote as to be entirely
tantalizing.

Scott, who always amazed me by the amount of work he got through without
any apparent effort, was essentially the driving force of the expedition:
in the hut quietly organizing, working out masses of figures, taking the
greatest interest in the scientific work of the station, and perhaps
turning out, quite by the way, an elaborate paper on an abstruse problem
in the neighbourhood; fond of his pipe and a good book, Browning, Hardy
(Tess was one of his favourites), Galsworthy. Barrie was one of his
greatest friends.

He was eager to accept suggestions if they were workable, and always keen
to sift even the most unlikely theories if by any means they could be
shaped to the desired end: a quick and modern brain which he applied with
thoroughness to any question of practice or theory. Essentially an
attractive personality, with strong likes and dislikes, he excelled in
making his followers his friends by a few words of sympathy or praise: I
have never known anybody, man or woman, who could be so attractive when
he chose.

Sledging he went harder than any man of whom I have ever heard. Men never
realized Scott until they had gone sledging with him. On our way up the
Beardmore Glacier we were going at top pressure some seventeen hours out
of the twenty-four, and when we turned out in the morning we felt as
though we had only just turned in. By lunch time we felt that it was
impossible to get through in the afternoon a similar amount of work to
that which we had done in the morning. A cup of tea and two biscuits
worked wonders, and the first two hours of the afternoon's march went
pretty well, indeed they were the best hours' marching of the day; but by
the time we had been going some 4½ or 5 hours we were watching Scott for
that glance to right and left which betokened the search for a good
camping site. "Spell oh!" Scott would cry, and then "How's the enemy,
Titus?" to Oates, who would hopefully reply that it was, say, seven
o'clock. "Oh, well, I think we'll go on a little bit more," Scott would
say. "Come along!" It might be an hour or more before we halted and made
our camp: sometimes a blizzard had its silver lining. Scott could not
wait. However welcome a blizzard could be to tired bodies (I speak only
of summer sledging), to Scott himself any delay was intolerable. And it
is hard to realize how difficult waiting may be to one in a responsible
position. It was our simple job to follow, to get up when we were roused,
to pull our hardest, to do our special work as thoroughly and quickly as
possible; it was Scott who had to organize distances and weights and
food, as well as do the same physical work as ourselves. In sledging
responsibility and physical work are combined to an extent seldom if ever
found elsewhere.

His was a subtle character, full of lights and shades.

England knows Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man. He
was certainly the most dominating character in our not uninteresting
community: indeed, there is no doubt that he would carry weight in any
gathering of human beings. But few who knew him realized how shy and
reserved the man was, and it was partly for this reason that he so often
laid himself open to misunderstanding.

Add to this that he was sensitive, femininely sensitive, to a degree
which might be considered a fault, and it will be clear that leadership
to such a man may be almost a martyrdom, and that the confidence so
necessary between leader and followers, which must of necessity be based
upon mutual knowledge and trust, becomes in itself more difficult. It
wanted an understanding man to appreciate Scott quickly; to others
knowledge came with experience.

He was not a
very
strong man physically, and was in his youth a weakly
child, at one time not expected to live. But he was well proportioned,
with broad shoulders and a good chest, a stronger man than Wilson, weaker
than Bowers or Seaman Evans. He suffered from indigestion, and told me at
the top of the Beardmore that he never expected to go on during the first
stage of the ascent.

Temperamentally he was a weak man, and might very easily have been an
irritable autocrat. As it was he had moods and depressions which might
last for weeks, and of these there is ample evidence in his diary. The
man with the nerves gets things done, but sometimes he has a terrible
time in doing them. He cried more easily than any man I have ever known.

What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over
and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together. It would
be stupid to say he had all the virtues: he had, for instance, little
sense of humour, and he was a bad judge of men. But you have only to read
one page of what he wrote towards the end to see something of his sense
of justice. For him justice was God. Indeed I think you must read all
those pages; and if you have read them once, you will probably read them
again. You will not need much imagination to see what manner of man he
was.

And notwithstanding the immense fits of depression which attacked him,
Scott was the strongest combination of a strong mind in a strong body
that I have ever known. And this because he was so weak! Naturally so
peevish, highly strung, irritable, depressed and moody. Practically such
a conquest of himself, such vitality, such push and determination, and
withal in himself such personal and magnetic charm. He was naturally an
idle man, he has told us so;
^[130]
he had been a poor man, and he had a
horror of leaving those dependent upon him in difficulties. You may read
it over and over again in his last letters and messages.
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