The Worst Journey in the World (41 page)

—790 lbs. total.

The 'Lamp box' mentioned above contained the following:

1 Lamp for burning blubber.
1 Lamp for burning spirit.
1 Tent candle lamp.
1 Blubber cooker.
1 Blowpipe.

The party of three men set out with a total weight of 757 lbs. to draw,
the ski and sticks in the above list being left behind at the last
moment.

It was impossible to load the total bulk upon one 12-ft. sledge, and so
two 9-ft. sledges were taken, one toggled on behind the other. While this
made the packing and handling of the gear much easier, it nearly doubled
the friction surface against which the party had to pull.

June 22. Midwinter Night.

A hard night: clear, with a blue sky so deep that it looks black: the
stars are steel points: the glaciers burnished silver. The snow rings and
thuds to your footfall. The ice is cracking to the falling temperature
and the tide crack groans as the water rises. And over all, wave upon
wave, fold upon fold, there hangs the curtain of the aurora. As you
watch, it fades away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and
rushes to the zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of
flaming gold. Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams
which rise behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus. And again the
spiritual veil is drawn—

Here at the roaring loom of Time I ply
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by.

Inside the hut are orgies. We are very merry—and indeed why not? The sun
turns to come back to us to-night, and such a day comes only once a year.

After dinner we had to make speeches, but instead of making a speech
Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a
ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch; candles, sweets,
preserved fruits, and the most absurd toys of which Bill was the owner.
Titus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle,
and a pop-gun which went off when he pressed in the butt. For the rest of
the evening he went round asking whether you were sweating. "No." "Yes,
you are," he said, and wiped your face with the sponge. "If you want to
please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you," he said to me,
and then he went round shooting everybody. At intervals he blew the
whistle.

He danced the Lancers with Anton, and Anton, whose dancing puts that of
the Russian Ballet into the shade, continually apologized for not being
able to do it well enough. Ponting gave a great lecture with slides which
he had made since we arrived, many of which Meares had coloured. When one
of these came up one of us would shout, "Who coloured that," and another
would cry, "Meares,"—then uproar. It was impossible for Ponting to
speak. We had a milk punch, when Scott proposed the Eastern Party, and
Clissold, the cook, proposed Good Old True Milk. Titus blew away the
ball of his gun. "I blew it into the cerulean—how doth Homer have
it?—cerulean azure—hence Erebus." As we turned in he said, "Cherry, are
you responsible for your actions?" and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on
his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was that he woke up Meares
to ask him whether he was fancy free.

It was a magnificent bust.

Five days later and three men, one of whom at any rate is feeling a
little frightened, stand panting and sweating out in McMurdo Sound. They
have two sledges, one tied behind the other, and these sledges are piled
high with sleeping-bags and camping equipment, six weeks' provisions, and
a venesta case full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving. In
addition there is a pickaxe, ice-axes, an Alpine rope, a large piece of
green Willesden canvas and a bit of board. Scott's amazed remark when he
saw our sledges two hours ago, "Bill, why are you taking all this oil?"
pointing to the six cans lashed to the tray on the second sledge, had a
bite in it. Our weights for such travelling are enormous—253 lbs. a man.

It is mid-day but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.

As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy office in Victoria
Street some fifteen months ago. "I want you to come," said Wilson to me,
and then, "I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the
embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I'm not saying much about it—it
might never come off." Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where
the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the
people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a
talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to
take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.

After the Depôt Journey, at Hut Point, walking over that beastly,
slippery, sloping ice-foot which I always imagined would leave me some
day in the sea, Bill asked me whether I would go with him—and who else
for a third? There can have been little doubt whom we both wanted, and
that evening Bowers had been asked. Of course he was mad to come. And
here we were. "This winter travel is a new and bold venture," wrote Scott
in the hut that night, "but the right men have gone to attempt it."

I don't know. There never could have been any doubt about Bill and
Birdie. Probably Lashly would have made the best third, but Bill had a
prejudice against seamen for a journey like this—"They don't take enough
care of themselves, and they
will
not look after their clothes." But
Lashly was wonderful—if Scott had only taken a four-man party and Lashly
to the Pole!

What is this venture? Why is the embryo of the Emperor penguin so
important to Science? And why should three sane and common-sense
explorers be sledging away on a winter's night to a Cape which has only
been visited before in daylight, and then with very great difficulty?

I have explained more fully in the Introduction to this book the
knowledge the world possessed at this time of the Emperor penguin, mainly
due to Wilson. But it is because the Emperor is probably the most
primitive bird in existence that the working out of his embryology is so
important. The embryo shows remains of the development of an animal in
former ages and former states; it recapitulates its former lives. The
embryo of an Emperor may prove the missing link between birds and the
reptiles from which birds have sprung.

Only one rookery of Emperor penguins had been found at this date, and
this was on the sea-ice inside a little bay of the Barrier edge at Cape
Crozier, which was guarded by miles of some of the biggest pressure in
the Antarctic. Chicks had been found in September, and Wilson reckoned
that the eggs must be laid in the beginning of July. And so we started
just after midwinter on the weirdest bird's-nesting expedition that has
ever been or ever will be.

But the sweat was freezing in our clothing and we moved on. All we could
see was a black patch away to our left which was Turk's Head: when this
disappeared we knew that we had passed Glacier Tongue which, unseen by
us, eclipsed the rocks behind. And then we camped for lunch.

That first camp only lives in my memory because it began our education of
camp work in the dark. Had we now struck the blighting temperature which
we were to meet....

There was just enough wind to make us want to hurry: down harness, each
man to a strap on the sledge—quick with the floor-cloth—the bags to
hold it down—now a good spread with the bamboos and the tent inner
lining—hold them, Cherry, and over with the outer covering—snow on to
the skirting and inside with the cook with his candle and a box of
matches....

That is how we tied it: that is the way we were accustomed to do it, day
after day and night after night when the sun was still high or at any
rate only setting, sledging on the Barrier in spring and summer and
autumn; pulling our hands from our mitts when necessary—plenty of time
to warm up afterwards; in the days when we took pride in getting our tea
boiling within twenty minutes of throwing off our harness: when the man
who wanted to work in his fur mitts was thought a bit too slow.

But now it
didn't
work. "We shall have to go a bit slower," said Bill,
and "we shall get more used to working in the dark." At this time, I
remember, I was still trying to wear spectacles.

We spent that night on the sea-ice, finding that we were too far in
towards Castle Rock; and it was not until the following afternoon that we
reached and lunched at Hut Point. I speak of day and night, though they
were much the same, and later on when we found that we could not get the
work into a twenty-four-hour day, we decided to carry on as though such a
convention did not exist; as in actual fact it did not. We had already
realized that cooking under these conditions would be a bad job, and that
the usual arrangement by which one man was cook for the week would be
intolerable. We settled to be cook alternately day by day. For food we
brought only pemmican and biscuit and butter; for drink we had tea, and
we drank hot water to turn in on.

Pulling out from Hut Point that evening we brought along our heavy loads
on the two nine-foot sledges with comparative ease; it was the first, and
though we did not know it then, the only bit of good pulling we were to
have. Good pulling to the sledge traveller means easy pulling. Away we
went round Cape Armitage and eastwards. We knew that the Barrier edge was
in front of us and also that the break-up of the sea-ice had left the
face of it as a low perpendicular cliff. We had therefore to find a place
where the snow had formed a drift. This we came right up against and met
quite suddenly a very keen wind flowing, as it always does, from the cold
Barrier down to the comparatively warm sea-ice. The temperature was -47°
F., and I was a fool to take my hands out of my mitts to haul on the
ropes to bring the sledges up. I started away from the Barrier edge with
all ten fingers frost-bitten. They did not really come back until we were
in the tent for our night meal, and within a few hours there were two or
three large blisters, up to an inch long, on all of them. For many days
those blisters hurt frightfully.

We were camped that night about half a mile in from the Barrier edge. The
temperature was -56°. We had a baddish time, being very glad to get out
of our shivering bags next morning (June 29). We began to suspect, as we
knew only too well later, that the only good time of the twenty-four
hours was breakfast, for then with reasonable luck we need not get into
our sleeping-bags again for another seventeen hours.

The horror of the nineteen days it took us to travel from Cape Evans to
Cape Crozier would have to be re-experienced to be appreciated; and any
one would be a fool who went again: it is not possible to describe it.
The weeks which followed them were comparative bliss, not because later
our conditions were better—they were far worse—because we were
callous. I for one had come to that point of suffering at which I did not
really care if only I could die without much pain. They talk of the
heroism of the dying—they little know—it would be so easy to die, a
dose of morphia, a friendly crevasse, and blissful sleep. The trouble is
to go on....

It was the darkness that did it. I don't believe minus seventy
temperatures would be bad in daylight, not comparatively bad, when you
could see where you were going, where you were stepping, where the sledge
straps were, the cooker, the primus, the food; could see your footsteps
lately trodden deep into the soft snow that you might find your way back
to the rest of your load; could see the lashings of the food bags; could
read a compass without striking three or four different boxes to find one
dry match; could read your watch to see if the blissful moment of getting
out of your bag was come without groping in the snow all about; when it
would not take you five minutes to lash up the door of the tent, and five
hours to get started in the morning....

But in these days we were never less than four hours from the moment when
Bill cried "Time to get up" to the time when we got into our harness. It
took two men to get one man into his harness, and was all they could do,
for the canvas was frozen and our clothes were frozen until sometimes not
even two men could bend them into the required shape.

The trouble is sweat and breath. I never knew before how much of the
body's waste comes out through the pores of the skin. On the most bitter
days, when we had to camp before we had done a four-hour march in order
to nurse back our frozen feet, it seemed that we must be sweating. And
all this sweat, instead of passing away through the porous wool of our
clothing and gradually drying off us, froze and accumulated. It passed
just away from our flesh and then became ice: we shook plenty of snow and
ice down from inside our trousers every time we changed our foot-gear,
and we could have shaken it from our vests and from between our vests and
shirts, but of course we could not strip to this extent. But when we got
into our sleeping-bags, if we were fortunate, we became warm enough
during the night to thaw this ice: part remained in our clothes, part
passed into the skins of our sleeping-bags, and soon both were sheets of
armour-plate.

As for our breath—in the daytime it did nothing worse than cover the
lower parts of our faces with ice and solder our balaclavas tightly to
our heads. It was no good trying to get your balaclava off until you had
had the primus going quite a long time, and then you could throw your
breath about if you wished. The trouble really began in your
sleeping-bag, for it was far too cold to keep a hole open through which
to breathe. So all night long our breath froze into the skins, and our
respiration became quicker and quicker as the air in our bags got fouler
and fouler: it was never possible to make a match strike or burn inside
our bags!

Of course we were not iced up all at once: it took several days of this
kind of thing before we really got into big difficulties on this score.
It was not until I got out of the tent one morning fully ready to pack
the sledge that I realized the possibilities ahead. We had had our
breakfast, struggled into our foot-gear, and squared up inside the tent,
which was comparatively warm. Once outside, I raised my head to look
round and found I could not move it back. My clothing had frozen hard as
I stood—perhaps fifteen seconds. For four hours I had to pull with my
head stuck up, and from that time we all took care to bend down into a
pulling position before being frozen in.