The Worst Journey in the World (71 page)

Atkinson was in command: in addition, he and Dimitri took over the care
of the dogs. Many of these, both those which had been out sledging and
those just arrived, were in a very poor state, and a dog hospital was
soon built. At this date we had 24 dogs left from the last year, and 11
dogs brought down recently by the ship: three of the new dogs had already
died. Lashly was in charge of the seven mules, which were allotted to
seven men for exercise: Nelson was to continue his marine biological
work: Wright was to be meteorologist as well as chemist and physicist:
Gran was in charge of stores, and would help Wright in the meteorological
observations: Debenham was geologist and photographer. I was ordered to
take a long rest, but could do the zoological work, the South Polar
Times, and keep the Official Account of the Expedition from day to day.
Crean was in charge of sledging stores and equipment. Archer was cook.
Hooper, our domestic, took over in addition the working of the acetylene
plant. There was plenty of work for our other two seamen, Keohane and
Williamson, in the daily life of the camp and in preparations for the
sledging season to come.

The blizzard which threatened us all the way from Hut Point on May 1
broke soon after we got in. The ice in North Bay, which had been frozen
for some time, was taken out on the first day of this blizzard, with the
exception of a small strip running close along the shore. The rest
followed the next afternoon, when the wind was still rising, and blew in
the gusts up to 89 miles an hour. The curious thing was that all this
time the air had been quite clear.

This was the second day of the blizzard. The wind continued in violence
as the night wore on, and it began to snow, becoming very thick. From 3
A.M. to 4 A.M. the wind was so strong that there was a continuous rattle
of sand and stones up against the wall of the hut. The greater part of
the time the anemometer head was choked by the drifting snow, and
Debenham, whose night-watch it was, had a bad time in clearing it at 4
A.M. During the period when it was working it registered a gust of over
91 miles an hour. While it was not working there came a gust which woke
most people up, and which was a far more powerful one, making a regular
hail of stones against the wall. The next morning the wind was found to
be averaging 104 miles an hour when the anemometer on the hill was
checked for three minutes. Later it was averaging 78 miles an hour. This
blizzard continued to rage all this day and the next, but on May 6, which
was one of those clear beautiful days when it is hard to believe that it
can ever blow again, we could see something of the damage to the sea-ice.
The centre of the Sound was clear of ice, and the open water stretched to
the S. W. of us as far back as Tent Island. We were to have many worse
blizzards during this winter, but this particular blow was important
because it came at a critical time in the freezing over of the sea, and,
once it had been dispersed, the winds of the future never allowed the ice
to form again sufficiently thick to withstand the wind forces which
obtained.

Thus I find in my diary of May 8: "Up to the present we have never
considered the possibility of the sea in this neighbourhood, and the
Sound out to the west of us, not freezing over permanently in the winter.
But here there is still open water, and it seems quite possible that
there may not be any permanent freezing this year, at any rate to the
north of Inaccessible Island and this cape. Though North Bay is now
frozen over, the ice in it was blown away during the night, and, having
been blown back again, is now only joined to the ice-foot by newly frozen
ice."

During this winter the ice formed in North Bay was constantly moving away
from the ice-foot, quite independently of wind. I watched it carefully as
far as it was possible to do so in the dark. Sometimes at any rate the
southern side of the sea-ice moved out not only northwards from the land,
but also slightly westwards from the glacier face. To the north-east the
ice was sometimes pressed closely up against the glacier. It seemed that
the whole sheet was subject to a screw movement, the origin of which was
somewhere out by Inaccessible Island. The result was that we often had a
series of leads of newly frozen ice stretching out for some forty yards
to an older piece of ice, each lead being of a different age. It was an
interesting study in the formation of sea-ice, covered at times by very
beautiful ice-flowers. But it was dangerous for the dogs, who sometimes
did not realize that these leads were not strong enough to bear them.
Vaida went in one day, but managed to scramble out on the far side. He
was induced to return to the land with difficulty, just before the whole
sheet of ice upon which he stood floated out to sea. Noogis, Dimitri's
good leader, wandered away several times during the winter: once at any
rate he seems to have been carried off on a piece of ice, and to have
managed to swim to land, for when he arrived in camp his coat was full of
icy slush: finally he disappeared altogether, all search for him was in
vain, and we never found out what had happened.

Vaida was a short-tempered strong animal, who must have about doubled his
weight since we came in from One Ton, and he became quite a house-dog
this winter, waiting at the door to be patted by men as they went out,
and coming in sometimes during the night-watch. But he did not like to be
turned out in the morning, and for my part I did not like the job, for he
could prove very nasty. We allowed a good many of the dogs to be loose
this year, and sometimes, when standing quietly upon a rock on the cape,
three or four of the dogs passed like shadows in the darkness, busily
hunting the ice-foot for seals: this was the trouble of giving them their
freedom, and I regret to say we found many carcasses of seal and Emperor
penguins. There was one new dog, Lion, who accompanied me sometimes to
the top of the Ramp to see how the ice lay out in the Sound. He seemed as
interested in it as I was, and while I was using night-glasses would sit
and gaze out over the sea which according to its age lay white or black
at our feet. Of course we had a dog called Peary, and another one
called Cooke. Peary was killed on the Barrier because he would not pull.
Cooke, however, was still with us, and seemed to have been ostracized by
his fellows, a position which in some lop-sided way he enjoyed. Loose
dogs chased him at sight, and when Cooke appeared, and others were about,
a regular steeplechase started. He also came up the Ramp with me one day:
half-way up he suddenly turned and fled for the hut as hard as he could
go: three other dogs came round the rocks in full chase, and they all
gave the impression of thoroughly enjoying themselves.

The question of what ought to be done for the best during the coming
sledging season must have been in the minds of all of us. Which of the
two missing parties were we to try and find? A winter journey to relieve
Campbell and his five men was out of the question. I doubt the
possibility of such a journey to Evans Coves with fit men: to us at any
rate it was unthinkable. Also if we could do the double journey up and
down, Campbell could certainly do the single journey down. Add to this
that there was every sign of open water under the Western Mountains,
though this did not influence us much when the decision was made. The
problem as it presented itself to us was much as follows:

Campbell's Party
might
have been picked up by the Terra Nova. Pennell
meant to have another try to reach him on his way north, and it was
probable that the ship would not be able to communicate again with Cape
Evans owing to ice: on the other hand it was likely that the ship had
not
been able to relieve him. It also seemed that he could not have
travelled down the coast at this time, owing to the state of the sea-ice.
The danger to him and his men was primarily during the winter: every day
after the winter his danger was lessened. If we started in the end of
October to relieve Campbell, estimating the probable date of arrival of
the ship, we judged that we could reach him only five or six weeks before
the ship relieved him. All the same Campbell and his men might be alive,
and, having lived through the winter, the arrival of help might make the
difference between life and death.

On the other hand we knew that the Polar Party must be dead. They might
be anywhere between Hut Point and the Pole, drifted over by snow, or
lying at the bottom of a crevasse, which seemed the most likely thing to
have happened. From the Upper Glacier Depôt in 85° 5' S. to the Pole,
that is the whole distance of the Plateau Journey, we did not know the
courses they had steered nor the position of their depôts, for Lieutenant
Evans, who brought back the Last Return Party, was invalided home and
neither of the seamen who remained of this party knew the courses.

After the experience of both the supporting parties on their way down the
Beardmore Glacier, when we all got into frightfully crevassed areas, it
was the general opinion that the Polar Party must have fallen down a
crevasse; the weight of five men, as compared with the four men and three
men of the other return parties, supported this theory. Lashly was
inclined to think they had had scurvy. The true solution never once
occurred to us, for they had full rations for a very much longer period
of time than, according to their averages to 87° 32', they were likely to
be out.

The first object of the expedition had been the Pole. If some record was
not found, their success or failure would for ever remain uncertain. Was
it due not only to the men and their relatives, but also to the
expedition, to ascertain their fate if possible?

The chance of finding the remains of the Southern Party did not seem very
great. At the same time Scott was strict about leaving notes at depôts,
and it seemed likely that he would have left some record at the Upper
Glacier Depôt before starting to descend the Beardmore Glacier: it would
be interesting to know whether he did so. If we went south we must be
prepared to reach this depôt: farther than that, I have explained, we
could not track him. On the other hand, if we went south prepared to go
to the Upper Glacier Depôt, the number of sledging men necessary, in view
of the fact that we had no depôts, would not allow of our sending a
second party to relieve Campbell.

It was with all this in our minds that we sat down one evening in the hut
to decide what was to be done. The problem was a hard one. On the one
hand we might go south, fail entirely to find any trace of the Polar
Party, and while we were fruitlessly travelling all the summer Campbell's
men might die for want of help. On the other hand we might go north, to
find that Campbell's men were safe, and as a consequence the fate of the
Polar Party and the result of their efforts might remain for ever
unknown. Were we to forsake men who might be alive to look for those whom
we knew were dead?

These were the points put by Atkinson to the meeting of the whole party.
He expressed his own conviction that we should go south, and then each
member was asked what he thought. No one was for going north: one member
only did not vote for going south, and he preferred not to give an
opinion. Considering the complexity of the question, I was surprised by
this unanimity. We prepared for another Southern Journey.

It is impossible to express and almost impossible to imagine how
difficult it was to make this decision. Then we knew nothing: now we know
all. And nothing is harder than to realize in the light of facts the
doubts which others have experienced in the fog of uncertainty.

Our winter routine worked very smoothly. Inside the hut we had a good
deal more room than we needed, but this allowed of certain work being
done in its shelter which would otherwise have had to be done outside.
For instance we cut a hole through the floor of the dark-room, and
sledged in some heavy boulders of kenyte lava: these were frozen solidly
into the rock upon which the hut was built by the simple method of
pouring hot water over them, and the pedestal so formed was used by
Wright for his pendulum observations. I was able to skin a number of
birds in the hut; which, incidentally, was a very much colder place in
consequence of the reduction in our numbers.

The wind was most turbulent during this winter. The mean velocity of the
wind, in miles per hour, for the month of May was 24.6 m.p.h.; for June
30.9 m.p.h.; and for July 29.5 m.p.h. The percentage of hours when the
wind was blowing over fresh gale strength (42 m.p.h. on the Beaufort
scale) for the month of May was 24.5, for June 35, and for July 33 per
cent of the whole.

These figures speak for themselves: after May we lived surrounded by an
atmosphere of raging winds and blinding drift, and the sea at our door
was never allowed to freeze permanently.

After the blizzard in the beginning of May which I have already
described, the ice round the point of Cape Evans and that in North Bay
formed to a considerable thickness. We put a thermometer screen out upon
it, and Atkinson started a fish-trap through a hole in it. There was a
good deal of competition over this trap: the seamen started a rival one,
which was to have been a very large affair, though it narrowed down to a
less ambitious business before it was finished. There was a sound of
cheering one morning, and Crean came in triumph from his fish-trap with a
catch of 25. Atkinson's last catch had numbered one, but the seals had
found his fishing-holes: a new hole caught fish until a seal found it.
One of these fish, a Tremasome, had a parasitic growth over the dorsal
sheath. External parasites are not common in the Antarctic, and this was
an interesting find.

On June 1 Dimitri and Hooper went with a team of nine dogs to and from
Hut Point, to see if they could find Noogis, the dog which had left us on
our return on May 1. There was plenty of food for him to pick up there.
No trace of him could be found. The party reported a bad running surface,
no pressure in the ice, as was the case the former year, but a large open
working crack running from Great Razorback to Tent Island. There were big
snowdrifts at Hut Point, as indeed was already the case at Cape Evans.
During the first days of June we got down into the minus thirties, and
our spirits rose as the thermometer dropped: we wanted permanent
sea-ice.