The Worst Journey in the World (90 page)

The Terra Nova is a wood barque, built in 1884 by A. Stephen & Sons,
Dundee; tonnage 764 gross and 400 net; measuring 187' x 31' x 19';
compound engines with two cylinders of 140 nominal horse-power;
registered at St. Johns, Newfoundland. She is therefore not by any means
small as polar ships go, but Pennell and his men worked her short-handed,
with bergs and growlers all round them, generally with a big sea running
and often in darkness or fog. On this occasion we were spared many of the
most ordinary dangers. It was summer. Our voyage was an easy one. There
was twilight most of the night: there were plenty of men on board, and
heaps of coal. Imagine then what kind of time Pennell and his ship's
company had in late autumn, after remaining in the south until only a
bare ration of coal was left for steaming, until the sea was freezing
round them and the propeller brought up dead as they tried to force
their way through it. Pennell was a very sober person in his statements,
yet he described the gale through which the Terra Nova passed on her way
to New Zealand in March 1912 as seeming to blow the ship from the top of
one wave to the top of the next; and the nights were dark, and the bergs
were all round them. They never tried to lay a meal in those days, they
just ate what they could hold in their hands. He confessed to me that one
hour he did begin to wonder what was going to happen next: others told me
that he seemed to enjoy every minute of it all.

Owing to press contracts and the necessity of preventing leakage of news
the Terra Nova had to remain at sea for twenty-four hours after a cable
had been sent to England. Also it was of the first importance that the
relatives should be informed of the facts before the newspapers published
them.

And so at 2.30 A.M. on February 10 we crept like a phantom ship into the
little harbour of Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand. With what
mixed feelings we smelt the old familiar woods and grassy slopes, and saw
the shadowy outlines of human homes. With untiring persistence the little
lighthouse blinked out the message, "What ship's that?" "What ship's
that?" They were obviously puzzled and disturbed at getting no answer. A
boat was lowered and Pennell and Atkinson were rowed ashore and landed.
The seamen had strict orders to answer no questions. After a little the
boat returned, and Crean announced: "We was chased, sorr, but they got
nothing out of us."

We put out to sea.

When morning broke we could see the land in the distance—greenness,
trees, every now and then a cottage. We began to feel impatient. We
unpacked the shore-going clothes with their creases three years old which
had been sent out from home, tried them on—and they felt unpleasantly
tight. We put on our boots, and they were positively agony. We shaved off
our beards! There was a hiatus. There was nothing to do but sail up and
down the coast and, if possible, avoid coastwise craft.

In the evening the little ship which runs daily from Akaroa to Lyttelton
put out to sea on her way and ranged close alongside. "Are all well?"
"Where's Captain Scott?" "Did you reach the Pole?" Rather unsatisfactory
answers and away they went. Our first glimpse, however, of civilized
life.

At dawn the next morning, with white ensign at half-mast, we crept
through Lyttelton Heads. Always we looked for trees, people and houses.
How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as
though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe
we were not dreaming still.

The Harbour-master came out in the tug and with him Atkinson and Pennell.
"Come down here a minute," said Atkinson to me, and "It's made a
tremendous impression, I had no idea it would make so much," he said. And
indeed we had been too long away, and the whole thing was so personal to
us, and our perceptions had been blunted: we never realized. We landed to
find the Empire—almost the civilized world—in mourning. It was as
though they had lost great friends.

To a sensitive pre-war world the knowledge of these men's deaths came as
a great shock: and now, although the world has almost lost the sense of
tragedy, it appeals to their pity and their pride. The disaster may well
be the first thing which Scott's name recalls to your mind (as though an
event occurred in the life of Columbus which caused you to forget that he
discovered America); but Scott's reputation is not founded upon the
conquest of the South Pole. He came to a new continent, found out how to
travel there, and gave knowledge of it to the world: he discovered the
Antarctic, and founded a school. He is the last of the great geographical
explorers: it is useless to try and light a fire when everything has been
burned; and he is probably the last old-fashioned polar explorer, for, as
I believe, the future of such exploration is in the air, but not yet. And
he was strong: we never realized until we found him lying there dead how
strong, mentally and physically, that man was.

In both his polar expeditions he was helped, to an extent which will
never be appreciated, by Wilson: in the last expedition by Bowers. I
believe that there has never been a finer sledge party than these three
men, who combined in themselves initiative, endurance and high ideals to
an extraordinary degree. And they could organize: they did organize the
Polar Journey and their organization seemed to have failed. Did it fail?
Scott said No. "The causes of this disaster are not due to faulty
organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken."
Nine times out of ten, says the meteorologist, he would have come
through: but he struck the tenth. "We took risks, we knew we took them;
things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for
complaint." No better epitaph has been written.

He decided to use the only route towards the Pole of which the world had
any knowledge, that is to go up the Beardmore Glacier, then the only
discovered way up through the mountains which divide the polar plateau
from the Great Ice Barrier: probably it is the only possible passage for
those who travel from McMurdo Sound. The alternative was to winter on the
Barrier, as Amundsen did, so many hundred miles away from the coast-line
that, in travelling south, the chaos caused in the ice plain by the
Beardmore in its outward flow would be avoided. To do so meant the
abandonment of a great part of the scientific programme, and Scott was
not a man to go south just to reach the Pole. Amundsen knew that Scott
was going to McMurdo Sound when he decided to winter in the Bay of
Whales: otherwise he might have gone to McMurdo Sound. Probably no man
would have refused the knowledge which had already been gained.

I have said that there are those who say that Scott should have relied on
ski and dogs. If you read Shackleton's account of his discovery and
passage of the Beardmore Glacier you will not be prejudiced in favour of
dogs: and as a matter of fact, though we found a much better way up than
Shackleton, I do not believe it possible to take dogs up and down, and
over the ice disturbances at the junction with the plateau, unless there
is ample time to survey a route, if then. "Dogs could certainly have
come up as far as this," I heard Scott say somewhere under the
Cloudmaker, approximately half-way up the glacier, but the best thing you
could do with dogs in pressure such as we all experienced on our way down
would be to drop them into the nearest chasm. If you can avoid such
messes well and good: if not, you must not rely on dogs, and the people
who talk of these things have no knowledge.

If Scott was going up the Beardmore he was probably right not to take
dogs: actually he relied on ponies to the foot of the glacier and
man-haulage on from that point. Because he relied on ponies he was not
able to start before November: the experience of the Depôt Journey showed
that ponies could not stand the weather conditions before that date. But
he could have started earlier if he had taken dogs, in place of ponies,
to the foot of the glacier. This would have gained him a few days in his
race against the autumn conditions when returning.

Such tragedies inevitably raise the question, "Is it worth it?" What is
worth what? Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country?
To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very
attractive to Scott: it had to contain an additional object—knowledge. A
feat had even less attraction for Wilson, and it is a most noteworthy
thing in the diaries which are contained in this book, that he made no
comment when he found that the Norwegians were first at the Pole: it is
as though he felt that it did not really matter, as indeed it probably
did not.

It is most desirable that some one should tackle these and kindred
questions about polar life. There is a wealth of matter in polar
psychology: there are unique factors here, especially the complete
isolation, and four months' darkness every year. Even in Mesopotamia a
long-suffering nation insisted at last that adequate arrangements must be
made to nurse and evacuate the sick and wounded. But at the Poles a man
must make up his mind that he may be rotting of scurvy (as Evans was) or
living for ten months on half-rations of seal and full rations of
ptomaine poisoning (as Campbell and his men were) but no help can reach
him from the outside world for a year, if then. There is no chance of a
'cushy' wound: if you break your leg on the Beardmore you must consider
the most expedient way of committing suicide, both for your own sake and
that of your companions.

Both sexually and socially the polar explorer must make up his mind to be
starved. To what extent can hard work, or what may be called dramatic
imagination, provide a substitute? Compare our thoughts on the march; our
food dreams at night; the primitive way in which the loss of a crumb of
biscuit may give a lasting sense of grievance. Night after night I bought
big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield
station, but always woke before I got a mouthful to my lips; some
companions who were not so highly strung were more fortunate, and ate
their phantom meals.

And the darkness, accompanied it may be almost continually by howling
blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in
such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air
exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize
how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you
are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who
under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide,
you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do
the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal
circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of
everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot
be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable.

Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and
find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging
life which is the hardest test. It is because it is so much easier to
shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your
average man can do. It does not really matter much whether your man
whose work lies in or round the hut shirks a bit or not, just as it does
not matter much in civilization: it is just rather a waste of
opportunity. But there's precious little shirking in Barrier sledging: a
week finds most of us out.

There are many questions which ought to be studied. The effect upon men
of going from heat to cold, such as Bowers coming to us from the Persian
Gulf: or vice versa of Simpson returning from the Antarctic to India;
differences of dry and damp cold; what is a comfortable temperature in
the Antarctic and what is it compared to a comfortable temperature in
England, the question of women in these temperatures...? The man with the
nerves goes farthest. What is the ratio between nervous and physical
energy? What is vitality? Why do some things terrify you at one time and
not at others? What is this early morning courage? What is the influence
of imagination? How far can a man draw on his capital? Whence came
Bowers' great heat supply? And my own white beard? and X's blue eyes: for
he started from England with brown ones and his mother refused to own him
when he came back? Growth and colour change in hair and skin?

There are many reasons which send men to the Poles, and the Intellectual
Force uses them all. But the desire for knowledge for its own sake is the
one which really counts and there is no field for the collection of
knowledge which at the present time can be compared to the Antarctic.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to
give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man
you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but
cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are
mad, and nearly all will say, "What is the use?" For we are a nation of
shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not
promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge
nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers:
that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will
have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

BLIZZARD. An Antarctic blizzard is a high southerly wind generally
accompanied by clouds of drifting snow, partly falling from above, partly
picked up from the surface. In the daylight of summer a tent cannot be
seen a few yards off: in the darkness of winter it is easy to be lost
within a few feet of a hut. There is no doubt that a blizzard has a
bewildering and numbing effect upon the brain of any one exposed to it.