The Worst Journey in the World Part 24

[149] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 353.

CHAPTER VII

THE WINTER JOURNEY

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a Heaven for?

R. BROWNING, _Andrea del Sarto._

To me, and to every one who has remained here the result of this effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination, as one of the most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation which I hope may not be lost in the telling.

Scott's Diary, at Cape Evans.

The following list of the Winter Journey sledge weights (for three men) is taken from the reckoning made by Bowers before we started:

_Expendible Stores_-- lbs. lbs.

'Antarctic' biscuit 135 3 Cases for same 12 Pemmican 110 b.u.t.ter 21 Salt 3 Tea 4 Oil 60 Spare parts for primus, and matches 2 Toilet paper 2 Candles 8 Packing 5 Spirit 8 370

_Permanent Weights, etc._ 2 9-ft. Sledges, 41 lbs. each 82 1 Cooker complete 13 2 Primus filled with oil 8 1 Double tent complete 35 1 Sledging shovel 3.5 3 Reindeer sleeping-bags, 12 lbs. each 36 3 Eider-down sleeping-bag linings, 4 lbs. each 12 1 Alpine rope 5 1 Bosun's bag, containing repairing materials, and 1 Bonsa outfit, containing repairing tools 5 3 Personal bags, each containing 15 lbs. spare clothing, etc. 45 Lamp box with knives, steel, etc., for seal and penguin 21 Medical and scientific box 40 2 Ice axes, 3 lbs. each 6 3 Man-harnesses 3 3 Portaging harnesses 3 Cloth for making roof and door for stone igloo 24 Instrument box 7 3 Pairs ski and sticks (discarded afterwards) 33 1 Pickaxe 11 3 Crampons, 2 lbs. 3 oz. each 6.5 2 Bamboos for measuring tide if possible, 14 feet each 4 2 Male bamboos 4 1 Plank to form top of door of igloo 2 1 Bag sennegra.s.s 1 6 Small female bamboo ends and 1 Knife for cutting snow block to make igloo 4 Packing 8 420 ---- 790 ====

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 G.o.d 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.

t.i.tus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle, and a pop-gun which went off when he pressed in the b.u.t.t. 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. t.i.tus 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 Depot 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[150] 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EMPERORS]

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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ter; 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 s.h.i.+vering 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PANORAMIC VIEW OF ROSS ISLAND FROM CRATER HILL]

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 creva.s.se, 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 las.h.i.+ngs of the food bags; could read a compa.s.s 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.