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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2
+       Antarctic 1910-1913
+
+Author: Apsley Cherry-Garrard
+
+Release Date: December 15, 2004 [eBook #14363]
+[Most recently updated: May 23, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Ted Garvin and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORST JOURNEY ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Frontispiece]
+
+
+
+
+THE WORST JOURNEY
+
+IN THE WORLD
+
+ANTARCTIC
+
+1910-1913
+
+BY
+
+APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD
+
+WITH PANORAMAS, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE LATE
+
+DOCTOR EDWARD A. WILSON AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+
+VOLUME ONE
+
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED
+
+LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY
+
+_First published 1922_
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+This volume is a narrative of Scott's Last Expedition from its departure
+from England in 1910 to its return to New Zealand in 1913.
+
+It does not, however, include the story of subsidiary parties except
+where their adventures touch the history of the Main Party.
+
+It is hoped later to publish an appendix volume with an account of the
+two Geological Journeys, and such other information concerning the
+equipment of, and lessons learned by, this Expedition as may be of use to
+the future explorer.
+
+APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This post-war business is inartistic, for it is seldom that any one does
+anything well for the sake of doing it well; and it is un-Christian, if
+you value Christianity, for men are out to hurt and not to help--can you
+wonder, when the Ten Commandments were hurled straight from the pulpit
+through good stained glass. It is all very interesting and uncomfortable,
+and it has been a great relief to wander back in one's thoughts and
+correspondence and personal dealings to an age in geological time, so
+many hundred years ago, when we were artistic Christians, doing our jobs
+as well as we were able just because we wished to do them well, helping
+one another with all our strength, and (I speak with personal humility)
+living a life of co-operation, in the face of hardships and dangers,
+which has seldom been surpassed.
+
+The mutual conquest of difficulties is the cement of friendship, as it is
+the only lasting cement of matrimony. We had plenty of difficulties; we
+sometimes failed, we sometimes won; we always faced them--we had to.
+Consequently we have some friends who are better than all the wives in
+Mahomet's paradise, and when I have asked for help in the making of this
+book I have never never asked in vain. Talk of ex-soldiers: give me
+ex-antarcticists, unsoured and with their ideals intact: they could sweep
+the world.
+
+The trouble is that they are inclined to lose their ideals in this
+complicated atmosphere of civilization. They run one another down like
+the deuce, and it is quite time that stopped. What is the use of A
+running down Scott because he served with Shackleton, or B going for
+Amundsen because he served with Scott? They have all done good work;
+within their limits, the best work to date. There are jobs for which, if
+I had to do them, I would like to serve under Scott, Amundsen, Shackleton
+and Wilson--each to his part. For a joint scientific and geographical
+piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a
+dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of
+a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time. They
+will all go down in polar history as leaders, these men. I believe Bowers
+would also have made a great name for himself if he had lived, and few
+polar ships have been commanded as capably as was the Terra Nova, by
+Pennell.
+
+In a way this book is a sequel to the friendship which there was between
+Wilson, Bowers and myself, which, having stood the strain of the Winter
+Journey, could never have been broken. Between the three of us we had a
+share in all the big journeys and bad times which came to Scott's main
+landing party, and what follows is, particularly, our unpublished
+diaries, letters and illustrations. I, we, have tried to show how good
+the whole thing was--and how bad. I have had a freer hand than many in
+this, because much of the dull routine has been recorded already and can
+be found if wanted: also because, not being the leader of the expedition,
+I had no duty to fulfil in cataloguing my followers' achievements. But
+there was plenty of work left for me. It has been no mere gleaning of the
+polar field. Not half the story had been told, nor even all the most
+interesting documents. Among these, I have had from Mrs. Bowers her son's
+letters home, and from Lashly his diary of the Last Return Party on the
+Polar Journey. Mrs. Wilson has given her husband's diary of the Polar
+Journey: this is especially valuable because it is the only detailed
+account in existence from 87° 32´ to the Pole and after, with the
+exception of Scott's Diary already published. Lady Scott has given with
+both hands any records I wanted and could find. No one of my companions
+in the South has failed to help. They include Atkinson, Wright,
+Priestley, Simpson, Lillie and Debenham.
+
+To all these good friends I can do no more than express my very sincere
+thanks.
+
+I determined that the first object of the illustrations should be
+descriptive of the text: Wright and Debenham have photographs, sledging
+and otherwise, which do this admirably. Mrs. Wilson has allowed me to
+have any of her husband's sketches and drawings reproduced that I wished,
+and there are many hundreds from which to make a selection. In addition
+to the six water-colours, which I have chosen for their beauty, I have
+taken a number of sketches because they illustrate typical incidents in
+our lives. They are just unfinished sketches, no more: and had Bill been
+alive he would have finished them before he allowed them to be published.
+Then I have had reproduced nearly all the sketches and panoramas drawn by
+him on the Polar Journey and found with him where he died. The half-tone
+process does not do them justice: I wish I could have had them reproduced
+in photogravure, but the cost is prohibitive.
+
+As to production, after a good deal of experience, I was convinced that I
+could trust a commercial firm to do its worst save when it gave them less
+trouble to do better. I acknowledge my mistake. In a wilderness of firms
+in whom nothing was first class except their names and their prices, I
+have dealt with R. & R. Clark, who have printed this book, and Emery
+Walker, who has illustrated it. The fact that Emery Walker is not only
+alive, but full of vitality, indicates why most of the other firms are
+millionaires.
+
+When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those
+who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said
+nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the
+fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn
+how to say it. Every one who has been through such an extraordinary
+experience has much to say, and ought to say it if he has any faculty
+that way. There is after the event a good deal of criticism, of
+stock-taking, of checking of supplies and distances and so forth that
+cannot really be done without first-hand experience. Out there we knew
+what was happening to us too well; but we did not and could not measure
+its full significance. When I was asked to write a book by the Antarctic
+Committee I discovered that, without knowing it, I had intended to write
+one ever since I had realized my own experiences. Once started, I enjoyed
+the process. My own writing is my own despair, but it is better than it
+was, and this is directly due to Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Shaw. At the age of
+thirty-five I am delighted to acknowledge that my education has at last
+begun.
+
+APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD.
+
+Lamer, Wheathampstead,
+
+1921.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                  PAGE
+                 INTRODUCTION                     xvii
+CHAPTER   I      FROM ENGLAND TO SOUTH AFRICA        1
+CHAPTER  II      MAKING OUR EASTING DOWN            24
+CHAPTER III      SOUTHWARD                          48
+CHAPTER  IV      LAND                               79
+CHAPTER   V      THE DEPÔT JOURNEY                 104
+CHAPTER  VI      THE FIRST WINTER                  178
+CHAPTER VII      THE WINTER JOURNEY                230
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+McMurdo Sound from Arrival Heights in Autumn. The sun
+    is sinking below the Western Mountains.              _Frontispiece_
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+                                                            FACING PAGE
+
+The Last of the Dogs. Scott's Southern Journey 1903.              xxxvi
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+The Rookery of Emperor Penguins under the Cliffs of the
+    Great Ice Barrier: looking east from Cape Crozier.             xlii
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Raymond Priestley and Victor Campbell.                              liv
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Sunrise behind South Trinidad Island. July 26, 1910.                 12
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+The Roaring Forties.                                                 32
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Pack-ice in the Ross Sea. Midnight, January 1911.                    62
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+A Sea Leopard.                                                       66
+
+A Weddell Seal.                                                      66
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+The Terra Nova in the pack. Men watering Ship.                       74
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Taking a Sounding.                                                   84
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Krisravitza.                                                         84
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Mount Erebus showing Steam Cloud, the Ramp, and the
+    Hut at Cape Evans.                                               96
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Dog-skin outer Mitts showing lampwick Lashings for slinging
+    over the Shoulders.                                             114
+
+Sledging Spoon, Pannikin and Cup, which pack into the inner
+    Cooker.                                                         114
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Hut Point from the bottom of Observation Hill, showing the
+    Bay in which the Discovery lay, the Discovery Hut,
+    Vince's Cross, the frozen sea and the Western Mountains.        158
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Seals.                                                              162
+
+From the Sea.                                                       162
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Winter Quarters at Cape Evans. Notice the Whale-back clouds
+    on Erebus, the débris cones on the Ramp, and the anemometer
+    pipes which had to be cleared during blizzard by way
+    of the ladder at the end of the Hut.                            172
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+A Cornice of Snow formed upon a Cliff by wind and drift.            176
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+PLATE I. A panoramic view over Cape Evans, and McMurdo
+    Sound from the Ramp.                                            184
+      _From photographs by F. Debenham._
+
+The sea's fringe of Ice growing outwards from the Land.             198
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Leading Ponies on the Barrier. November 20, 1911.                   206
+      _From a sketch for a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Frozen sea and cliffs of Ice: the snout of the Barne Glacier in
+    North Bay.                                                      212
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+Erebus and Land's End from the Sea-ice.                             224
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+Erebus from Great Razorback Island.                                 224
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+Two Emperor Penguins.                                               234
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+PLATE II. A panoramic view of Ross Island from Crater Hill,
+    looking along the Hut Point Peninsula, showing some of
+    the topography of the Winter Journey.                           236
+      _From photographs by F. Debenham._
+
+Camping after Dark.                                                 246
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Camp work in a Blizzard: passing the cooker into the tent.          256
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+A procession of Emperor Penguins.                                   264
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+The Knoll behind the Cliffs of Cape Crozier.                        264
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+The Barrier pressure at Cape Crozier, with the Knoll. Part of
+    the bay in which the Emperor Penguins lay their eggs is
+    visible.                                                        266
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+The Emperor Penguins nursing their Chicks on the Sea-ice,
+    with the cliffs of the Barrier behind.                          268
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Mount Erebus and detail of Ice-pressure.                            280
+      _From photographs by C. S. Wright._
+
+Down a Crevasse.                                                    290
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+
+MAPS
+
+From New Zealand to the South Pole.                                lxiv
+Hut Point. From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson.                   128
+Cape Evans and McMurdo Sound.                                       194
+The Winter Journey.                                                 294
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having
+a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in
+which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until
+Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find
+them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London,
+more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As
+men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so
+it would be interesting to contrast the rival claims of the Antarctic as
+a medium of discomfort. A member of Campbell's party tells me that the
+trenches at Ypres were a comparative picnic. But until somebody can
+evolve a standard of endurance I am unable to see how it can be done.
+Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time
+than an Emperor penguin.
+
+Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the
+Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying
+far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation, and nothing is more
+striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its
+absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were
+navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the
+battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the
+South.
+
+For those who wish to read an account of the history of Antarctic
+exploration there is an excellent chapter in Scott's Voyage of the
+Discovery and elsewhere. I do not propose to give any general survey of
+this kind here, but complaints have been made to me that Scott's Last
+Expedition plunges the general reader into a neighbourhood which he is
+supposed to know all about, while actually he is lost, having no idea
+what the Discovery was, or where Castle Rock or Hut Point stand. For the
+better understanding of the references to particular expeditions, to the
+lands discovered by them and the traces left by them, which must occur in
+this book I give the following brief introduction.
+
+From the earliest days of the making of maps of the Southern Hemisphere
+it was supposed that there was a great continent called Terra Australis.
+As explorers penetrated round the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn, and
+found nothing but stormy oceans beyond, and as, later, they discovered
+Australia and New Zealand, the belief in this continent weakened, but was
+not abandoned. During the latter half of the eighteenth century eagerness
+for scientific knowledge was added to the former striving after
+individual or State aggrandizement.
+
+Cook, Ross and Scott: these are the aristocrats of the South.
+
+It was the great English navigator James Cook who laid the foundations of
+our knowledge. In 1772 he sailed from Deptford in the Resolution, 462
+tons, and the Adventure, 336 tons, ships which had been built at Whitby
+for the coal trade. He was, like Nansen, a believer in a varied diet as
+one of the preventives of scurvy, and mentions that he had among his
+provisions "besides Saur Krout, Portable Broth, Marmalade of Carrots and
+Suspissated juice of Wort and Beer." Medals were struck "to be given to
+the natives of new discovered countries, and left there as testimonies of
+our being the first discoverers."[1] It would be interesting to know
+whether any exist now.
+
+After calling at the Cape of Good Hope Cook started to make his Easting
+down to New Zealand, purposing to sail as far south as possible in search
+of a southern continent. He sighted his first 'ice island' or iceberg in
+lat. 50° 40´ S., long. 2° 0´ E., on December 10, 1772. The next day he
+"saw some white birds about the size of pigeons, with blackish bills and
+feet. I never saw any such before."[2] These must have been Snowy Petrel.
+Passing through many bergs, where he notices how the albatross left them
+and penguins appeared, he was brought up by thick pack ice along which he
+coasted. Under the supposition that this ice was formed in bays and
+rivers Cook was led to believe that land was not far distant.
+Incidentally he remarks that in order to enable his men to support the
+colder weather he "caused the sleeves of their jackets (which were so
+short as to expose their arms) to be lengthened with baize; and had a cap
+made for each man of the same stuff, together with canvas; which proved
+of great service to them."[3]
+
+For more than a month Cook sailed the Southern Ocean, always among bergs
+and often among pack. The weather was consistently bad and generally
+thick; he mentions that he had only seen the moon once since leaving the
+Cape.
+
+It was on Sunday, January 17, 1773, that the Antarctic Circle was crossed
+for the first time, in longitude 39° 35´ E. After proceeding to latitude
+67° 15´ S. he was stopped by an immense field of pack. From this point he
+turned back and made his way to New Zealand.
+
+Leaving New Zealand at the end of 1773 without his second ship, the
+Adventure, from which he had been parted, he judged from the great swell
+that "there can be no land to the southward, under the meridian of New
+Zealand, but what must lie very far to the south." In latitude 62° 10´ S.
+he sighted the first ice island on December 12, and was stopped by thick
+pack ice three days later. On the 20th he again crossed the Antarctic
+Circle in longitude 147° 46´ W. and penetrated in this neighbourhood to a
+latitude of 67° 31´ S. Here he found a drift towards the north-east.
+
+On January 26, 1774, in longitude 109° 31´ W., he crossed the Antarctic
+Circle for the third time, after meeting no pack and only a few icebergs.
+In latitude 71° 10´ S. he was finally turned back by an immense field of
+pack, and wrote:
+
+"I will not say it was impossible anywhere to get farther to the south;
+but the attempting it would have been a dangerous and rash enterprise,
+and what, I believe, no man in my situation would have thought of. It
+was, indeed, my opinion, as well as the opinion of most on board, that
+this ice extended quite to the Pole, or perhaps joined to some land, to
+which it had been fixed from the earliest time; and that it is here, that
+is to the south of this parallel, where all the ice we find scattered up
+and down to the north is first formed, and afterwards broken off by gales
+of wind, or other causes, and brought to the north by the currents, which
+are always found to set in that direction in the high latitudes. As we
+drew near this ice some penguins were heard, but none seen; and but few
+other birds, or any other thing that could induce us to think any land
+was near. And yet I think there must be some to the south beyond this
+ice; but if there is it can afford no better retreat for birds, or any
+other animals, than the ice itself, with which it must be wholly covered.
+I, who had ambition not only to go farther than any one had been before,
+but as far as it was possible for man to go, was not sorry at meeting
+with this interruption; as it, in some measure, relieved us; at least,
+shortened the dangers and hardships inseparable from the navigation of
+the Southern Polar regions."[4]
+
+And so he turned northwards, when, being "taken ill of the bilious
+colic," a favourite dog belonging to one of the officers (Mr. Forster,
+after whom Aptenodytes forsteri, the Emperor penguin, is named) "fell a
+sacrifice to my tender stomach.... Thus I received nourishment and
+strength, from food which would have made most people in Europe sick: so
+true it is that necessity is governed by no law."[5]
+
+"Once and for all the idea of a populous fertile southern continent was
+proved to be a myth, and it was clearly shown that whatever land might
+exist to the South must be a region of desolation hidden beneath a mantle
+of ice and snow. The vast extent of the tempestuous southern seas was
+revealed, and the limits of the habitable globe were made known.
+Incidentally it may be remarked that Cook was the first to describe the
+peculiarities of the Antarctic icebergs and floe-ice."[6]
+
+A Russian expedition under Bellingshausen discovered the first certain
+land in the Antarctic in 1819, and called it Alexander Land, which lies
+nearly due south of Cape Horn.
+
+Whatever may have been the rule in other parts of the world, the flag
+followed trade in the southern seas during the first part of the
+nineteenth century. The discovery of large numbers of seals and whales
+attracted many hundreds of ships, and it is to the enlightened
+instructions of such firms as Messrs. Enderby, and to the pluck and
+enterprise of such commanders as Weddell, Biscoe and Balleny, that we owe
+much of our small knowledge of the outline of the Antarctic continent.
+
+"In the smallest and craziest ships they plunged boldly into stormy
+ice-strewn seas; again and again they narrowly missed disaster; their
+vessels were racked and strained and leaked badly, their crews were worn
+out with unceasing toil and decimated with scurvy. Yet in spite of
+inconceivable discomforts they struggled on, and it does not appear that
+any one of them ever turned his course until he was driven to do so by
+hard necessity. One cannot read the simple, unaffected narratives of
+these voyages without being assured of their veracity, and without being
+struck by the wonderful pertinacity and courage which they display."[7]
+
+The position in 1840 was that the Antarctic land had been sighted at a
+few points all round its coasts. On the whole the boundaries which had
+been seen lay on or close to the Antarctic Circle, and it appeared
+probable that the continent, if continent it was, consisted of a great
+circular mass of land with the South Pole at its centre, and its coasts
+more or less equidistant from this point.
+
+Two exceptions only to this had been found. Cook and Bellingshausen had
+indicated a dip towards the Pole south of the Pacific; Weddell a still
+more pronounced dip to the south of the Atlantic, having sailed to a
+latitude of 74° 15´ S. in longitude 34° 16´ W.
+
+Had there been a Tetrahedronal Theory in those days, some one might have
+suggested the probability of a third indentation beneath the Indian
+Ocean, probably to be laughed at for his pains. When James Clark Ross
+started from England in 1839 there was no particular reason for him to
+suppose that the Antarctic coast-line in the region of the magnetic Pole,
+which he was to try to reach, did not continue to follow the Antarctic
+Circle.
+
+Ross left England in September 1839 under instructions from the
+Admiralty. He had under his command two of Her Majesty's sailing ships,
+the Erebus, 370 tons, and the Terror, 340 tons. Arriving in Hobart,
+Tasmania, in August 1840, he was met by news of discoveries made during
+the previous summer by the French Expedition under Dumont D'Urville and
+the United States Expedition under Charles Wilkes. The former had coasted
+along Adélie Land, and for sixty miles of ice cliff to the west of it. He
+brought back an egg now at Drayton which Scott's Discovery Expedition
+definitely proved to be that of an Emperor penguin.
+
+All these discoveries were somewhere about the latitude of the Antarctic
+Circle (66° 32´ S.) and roughly in that part of the world which lies to
+the south of Australia. Ross, "impressed with the feeling that England
+had ever _led_ the way of discovery in the southern as well as in the
+northern region, ... resolved at once to avoid all interference with
+their discoveries, and selected a much more easterly meridian (170° E.),
+on which to penetrate to the southward, and if possible reach the
+magnetic Pole."[8]
+
+The outlines of the expedition in which an unknown and unexpected sea was
+found, stretching 500 miles southwards towards the Pole, are well known
+to students of Antarctic history. After passing through the pack he stood
+towards the supposed position of the magnetic Pole, "steering as nearly
+south by the compass as the wind admitted," and on January 11, 1841, in
+latitude 71° 15´ S., he sighted, the white peaks of Mount Sabine and
+shortly afterwards Cape Adare. Foiled by the presence of land from
+gaining the magnetic Pole, he turned southwards (true) into what is now
+called the Ross Sea, and, after spending many days in travelling down
+this coast-line with the mountains on his right hand, the Ross Sea on his
+left, he discovered and named the great line of mountains which here for
+some five hundred miles divides the sea from the Antarctic plateau. On
+January 27, "with a favourable breeze and very clear weather, we stood to
+the southward, close to some land which had been in sight since the
+preceding noon, and which we then called the High Island; it proved to be
+a mountain twelve thousand four hundred feet of elevation above the level
+of the sea, emitting flame and smoke in great profusion; at first the
+smoke appeared like snowdrift, but as we drew nearer its true character
+became manifest.... I named it Mount Erebus, and an extinct volcano to
+the eastward, little inferior in height, being by measurement ten
+thousand nine hundred feet high, was called Mount Terror." That is the
+first we hear of our two old friends, and Ross Island is the land upon
+which they stand.
+
+"As we approached the land under all studding-sails we perceived a low
+white line extending from its eastern extreme point as far as the eye
+could discern to the eastward. It presented an extraordinary appearance,
+gradually increasing in height as we got nearer to it, and proving at
+length to be a perpendicular cliff of ice, between one hundred and fifty
+and two hundred feet above the level of the sea, perfectly flat and level
+at the top, and without any fissures or promontories on its even seaward
+face."[9]
+
+Ross coasted along the Barrier for some 250 miles from Cape Crozier, as
+he called the eastern extremity of Ross Island, after the commander of
+the Terror. This point where land, sea and moving Barrier meet will be
+constantly mentioned in this narrative. Returning, he looked into the
+Sound which divides Ross Island from the western mountains. On February
+16 "Mount Erebus was seen at 2.30 A.M., and, the weather becoming very
+clear, we had a splendid view of the whole line of coast, to all
+appearance connecting it with the main land, which we had not before
+suspected to be the case." The reader will understand that Ross makes a
+mistake here, since Mounts Erebus and Terror are upon an island connected
+to the mainland only by a sheet of ice. He continues: "A very deep bight
+was observed to extend far to the south-west from Cape Bird [Bird was the
+senior lieutenant of the Erebus], in which a line of low land might be
+seen; but its determination was too uncertain to be left unexplored; and
+as the wind blowing feebly from the west prevented our making any way in
+that direction through the young ice that now covered the surface of the
+ocean in every part, as far as we could see from the mast-head, I
+determined to steer towards the bight to give it a closer examination,
+and to learn with more certainty its continuity or otherwise. At noon we
+were in latitude 76° 32´ S., longitude 166° 12´ E., dip 88° 24´ and
+variation 107° 18´ E.
+
+"During the afternoon we were nearly becalmed, and witnessed some
+magnificent eruptions of Mount Erebus, the flame and smoke being
+projected to a great height; but we could not, as on a former occasion,
+discover any lava issuing from the crater; although the exhibitions of
+to-day were upon a much grander scale....
+
+"Soon after midnight (February 16-17) a breeze sprang up from the
+eastward and we made all sail to the southward until 4 A.M., although we
+had an hour before distinctly traced the land entirely round the bay
+connecting Mount Erebus with the mainland. I named it McMurdo Bay, after
+the senior lieutenant of the Terror, a compliment that his zeal and skill
+well merited."[10] It is now called McMurdo Sound.
+
+In making the mistake of connecting Erebus with the mainland Ross was
+looking at a distance upon the Hut Point Peninsula running out from the
+S.W. corner of Erebus towards the west. He probably saw Minna Bluff,
+which juts out from the mainland towards the east. Between them, and in
+front of the Bluff, lie White Island, Black Island and Brown Island. To
+suppose them to be part of a line of continuous land was a very natural
+mistake.
+
+Ross broke through the pack ice into an unknown sea: he laid down many
+hundreds of miles of mountainous coast-line, and (with further work
+completed in 1842) some 400 miles of the Great Ice Barrier: he penetrated
+in his ships to the extraordinarily high latitude of 78° 11´ S., four
+degrees farther than Weddell. The scientific work of his expedition was
+no less worthy of praise. The South Magnetic Pole was fixed with
+comparative accuracy, though Ross was disappointed in his natural but
+"perhaps too ambitious hope I had so long cherished of being permitted to
+plant the flag of my country on both the magnetic Poles of our globe."
+
+Before all things he was at great pains to be accurate, both in his
+geographical and scientific observations, and his records of meteorology,
+water temperatures, soundings, as also those concerning the life in the
+oceans through which he passed, were not only frequent but trustworthy.
+
+When Ross returned to England in 1843 it was impossible not to believe
+that the case of those who advocated the existence of a South Polar
+continent was considerably strengthened. At the same time there was no
+proof that the various blocks of land which had been discovered were
+connected with one another. Even now in 1921, after twenty years of
+determined exploration aided by the most modern appliances, the interior
+of this supposed continent is entirely unknown and uncharted except in
+the Ross Sea area, while the fringes of the land are only discovered in
+perhaps a dozen places on a circumference of about eleven thousand miles.
+
+In his Life of Sir Joseph Hooker, Dr. Leonard Huxley has given us some
+interesting sidelights on this expedition under Ross. Hooker was the
+botanist of the expedition and assistant surgeon to the Erebus, being 22
+years old when he left England in 1839. Natural history came off very
+badly in the matter of equipment from the Government, who provided
+twenty-five reams of paper, two botanizing vascula and two cases for
+bringing home live plants: that was all, not an instrument, nor a book,
+nor a bottle, and rum from the ship's stores was the only preservative.
+And when they returned, the rich collections which they brought back were
+never fully worked out. Ross's special branch of science was terrestrial
+magnetism, but he was greatly interested in Natural History, and gave up
+part of his cabin for Hooker to work in. "Almost every day I draw,
+sometimes all day long and till two and three in the morning, the Captain
+directing me; he sits on one side of the table, writing and figuring at
+night, and I on the other, drawing. Every now and then he breaks off and
+comes to my side, to see what I am after ..." and, "as you may suppose,
+we have had one or two little tiffs, neither of us perhaps being helped
+by the best of tempers; but nothing can exceed the liberality with which
+he has thrown open his cabin to me and made it my workroom at no little
+inconvenience to himself."
+
+Another extract from Hooker's letters after the first voyage runs as
+follows:
+
+"The success of the Expedition in Geographical discovery is really
+wonderful, and only shows what a little perseverance will do, for we have
+been in no dangerous predicaments, and have suffered no hardships
+whatever: there has been a sort of freemasonry among Polar voyagers to
+keep up the credit they have acquired as having done wonders, and
+accordingly, such of us as were new to the ice made up our minds for
+frost-bites, and attached a most undue importance to the simple operation
+of boring packs, etc., which have now vanished, though I am not going to
+tell everybody so; I do not here refer to travellers, who do indeed
+undergo unheard-of hardships, but to voyagers who have a snug ship, a
+little knowledge of the Ice, and due caution is all that is required."
+
+In the light of Scott's leading of the expedition of which I am about to
+tell, and the extraordinary scientific activity of Pennell in command of
+the Terra Nova after Scott was landed, Hooker would have to qualify a
+later extract, "nor is it probable that any future collector will have a
+Captain so devoted to the cause of Marine Zoology, and so constantly on
+the alert to snatch the most trifling opportunities of adding to the
+collection...."
+
+Finally, we have a picture of the secrecy which was imposed upon all with
+regard to the news they should write home and the precautions against any
+leakage of scientific results. And we see Hooker jumping down the main
+hatch with a penguin skin in his hand which he was preparing for himself,
+when Ross came up the after hatch unexpectedly. That _has_ happened on
+the Terra Nova!
+
+Ross had a cold reception on his return, and Scott wrote to Hooker in
+1905:
+
+"At first it seems inexplicable when one considers how highly his work is
+now appreciated. From the point of view of the general public, however, I
+have always thought that Ross was neglected, and as you once said he is
+very far from doing himself justice in his book. I did not know that
+Barrow was the bête noire who did so much to discount Ross's results. It
+is an interesting sidelight on such a venture."[11]
+
+In discussing and urging the importance of the Antarctic Expedition which
+was finally sent under Scott in the Discovery, Hooker urged the
+importance of work in the South Polar Ocean, which swarms with animal and
+vegetable life. Commenting upon the fact that the large collections made
+chiefly by himself had never been worked out, except the diatoms, he
+writes:
+
+"A better fate, I trust, awaits the treasures that the hoped-for
+Expedition will bring back, for so prolific is the ocean that the
+naturalist need never be idle, no, not even for one of the twenty-four
+hours of daylight during a whole Antarctic summer, and I look to the
+results of a comparison of the oceanic life of the Arctic and Antarctic
+regions as the heralding of an epoch in the history of biology."[12]
+
+When Ross went to the Antarctic it was generally thought that there was
+neither food nor oxygen nor light in the depths of the ocean, and that
+therefore there was no life. Among other things the investigations of
+Ross gave ground for thinking this was not the case. Later still, in
+1873, the possibility of laying submarine cables made it necessary to
+investigate the nature of the abyssal depths, and the Challenger proved
+that not only does life, and in quite high forms, exist there, but that
+there are fish which can see. It is now almost certain that there is a
+great oxidized northward-creeping current which flows out of the
+Antarctic Ocean and under the waters of the other great oceans of the
+world.
+
+It was the good fortune of Ross, at a time when the fringes of the great
+Antarctic continent were being discovered in comparatively low latitudes
+of 66° and thereabouts, sometimes not even within the Antarctic Circle,
+to find to the south of New Zealand a deep inlet in which he could sail
+to the high latitude of 78°. This inlet, which is now known as the Ross
+Sea, has formed the starting-place of all sledging parties which have
+approached the South Pole. I have dwelt upon this description of the
+lands he discovered because they will come very intimately into this
+history. I have also emphasized his importance in the history of
+Antarctic exploration because Ross having done what it was possible to do
+by sea, penetrating so far south and making such memorable discoveries,
+the next necessary step in Antarctic exploration was that another
+traveller should follow up his work on land. It is an amazing thing that
+sixty years were allowed to elapse before that traveller appeared. When
+he appeared he was Scott. In the sixty years which elapsed between Ross
+and Scott the map of the Antarctic remained practically unaltered. Scott
+tackled the land, and Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling.
+
+This period of time saw a great increase in the interest taken in science
+both pure and applied, and it had been pointed out in 1893 that "we knew
+more about the planet Mars than about a large area of our own globe." The
+Challenger Expedition of 1874 had spent three weeks within the Antarctic
+Circle, and the specimens brought home by her from the depths of these
+cold seas had aroused curiosity. Meanwhile Borchgrevink (1897) landed at
+Cape Adare, and built a hut which still stands and which afforded our
+Cape Adare party valuable assistance. Here he lived during the first
+winter which men spent in the Antarctic.
+
+Meanwhile, in the Arctic, brave work was being done. The names of Parry,
+M'Clintock, Franklin, Markham, Nares, Greely and De Long are but a few of
+the many which suggest themselves of those who have fought their way mile
+by mile over rough ice and open leads with appliances which now seem to
+be primitive and with an addition to knowledge which often seemed hardly
+commensurate with the hardships suffered and the disasters which
+sometimes overtook them. To those whose fortune it has been to serve
+under Scott the Franklin Expedition has more than ordinary interest, for
+it was the same ships, the Erebus and Terror, which discovered Ross
+Island, that were crushed in the northern ice after Franklin himself had
+died, and it was Captain Crozier (the same Crozier who was Ross's captain
+in the South and after whom Cape Crozier is named) who then took command
+and led that most ghastly journey in all the history of exploration: more
+we shall never know, for none survived to tell the tale. Now, with the
+noise and racket of London all round them, a statue of Scott looks across
+to one of Franklin and his men of the Erebus and Terror, and surely they
+have some thoughts in common.
+
+Englishmen had led the way in the North, but it must be admitted that the
+finest journey of all was made by the Norwegian Nansen in 1893-1896.
+Believing in a drift from the neighbourhood of the New Siberian Islands
+westwards over the Pole, a theory which obtained confirmation by the
+discovery off the coast of Greenland of certain remains of a ship called
+the Jeannette which had been crushed in the ice off these islands, his
+bold project was to be frozen in with his ship and allow the current to
+take him over, or as near as possible to, the Pole. For this purpose the
+most famous of Arctic ships was built, called the Fram. She was designed
+by Colin Archer, and was saucer-shaped, with a breadth one-third of her
+total length. With most of the expert Arctic opinion against him, Nansen
+believed that this ship would rise and sit on the top of the ice when
+pressed, instead of being crushed. Of her wonderful voyage with her
+thirteen men, of how she was frozen into the ice in September 1893 in the
+north of Siberia (79° N.) and of the heaving and trembling of the ship
+amidst the roar of the ice pressure, of how the Fram rose to the occasion
+as she was built to do, the story has still, after twenty-eight years,
+the thrill of novelty. She drifted over the eightieth degree on February
+2, 1894. During the first winter Nansen was already getting restive: the
+drift was so slow, and sometimes it was backwards: it was not until the
+second autumn that the eighty-second degree arrived. So he decided that
+he would make an attempt to penetrate northwards by sledging during the
+following spring. As Nansen has told me, he felt that the ship would do
+her job in any case. Could not something more be done also?
+
+This was one of the bravest decisions a polar explorer has ever taken. It
+meant leaving a drifting ship which could not be regained: it meant a
+return journey over drifting ice to land; the nearest known land was
+nearly five hundred miles south of the point from which he started
+northwards; and the journey would include travelling both by sea and by
+ice.
+
+Undoubtedly there was more risk in leaving the Fram than in remaining in
+her. It is a laughable absurdity to say, as Greely did after Nansen's
+almost miraculous return, that he had deserted his men in an ice-beset
+ship, and deserved to be censured for doing so.[13] The ship was left in
+the command of Sverdrup. Johansen was chosen to be Nansen's one
+companion, and we shall hear of him again in the Fram, this time with
+Amundsen in his voyage to the South.
+
+The polar traveller is so interested in the adventure and hardships of
+Nansen's sledge journey that his equipment, which is the most important
+side of his expedition to us who have gone South, is liable to be
+overlooked. The modern side of polar travel begins with Nansen. It was
+Nansen who first used a light sledge based upon the ski sledge of Norway,
+in place of the old English heavy sledge which was based upon the Eskimo
+type. Cooking apparatus, food, tents, clothing and the thousand and one
+details of equipment without which no journey nowadays stands much chance
+of success, all date back to Nansen in the immediate past, though beyond
+him of course is the experience of centuries of travellers. As Nansen
+himself wrote of the English polar men: "How well was their equipment
+thought out and arranged with the means they had at their disposal!
+Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. Most of what I prided myself
+upon, and what I thought to be new, I find they had anticipated.
+M'Clintock used the same things forty years ago. It was not their fault
+that they were born in a country where the use of snowshoes is
+unknown...."[14]
+
+All the more honour to the men who dared so much and travelled so far
+with the limited equipment of the past. The real point for us is that,
+just as Scott is the Father of Antarctic sledge travelling, so Nansen may
+be considered the modern Father of it all.
+
+Nansen and Johansen started on March 14 when the Fram was in latitude 84°
+4´ N., and the sun had only returned a few days before, with three
+sledges (two of which carried kayaks) and 28 dogs. They reached their
+northern-most camp on April 8, which Nansen has given in his book as
+being in latitude 86° 13.6´ N. But Nansen tells me that Professor
+Geelmuyden, who had his astronomical results and his diary, reckoned that
+owing to refraction the horizon was lifted, and if so the observation had
+to be reduced accordingly. Nansen therefore gave the reduced latitude in
+his book, but he considers that his horizon was very clear when he took
+that observation, and believes that his latitude was higher than that
+given. He used a sextant and the natural horizon.
+
+They turned, and travelling back round pressed-up ice and open leads they
+failed to find the land they had been led to expect in latitude 83°,
+which indeed was proved to be non-existent. At the end of June they
+started using the kayaks, which needed many repairs after their rough
+passage, to cross the open leads. They waited long in camp, that the
+travelling conditions might improve, and all the time Nansen saw a white
+spot he thought was cloud. At last, on July 24, land was in sight, which
+proved to be that white spot. Fourteen days later they reached it to find
+that it consisted of a series of islands. These they left behind them
+and, unable to say what land they had reached, for their watches had run
+down, they coasted on westwards and southwards until winter approached.
+They built a hut of moss and stones and snow, and roofed it with walrus
+skins cut from the animals while they lay in the sea, for they were too
+heavy for two men to drag on to the ice. When I met Nansen he had
+forgotten all about this, and would not believe that it had happened
+until he saw it in his own book. They lay in their old clothes that
+winter, so soaked with blubber that the only way to clean their shirts
+was to scrape them. They made themselves new clothes from blankets, and
+sleeping-bags from the skins of the bears which they ate, and started
+again in May of the following year to make Spitzbergen. They had been
+travelling a long month, during which time they had at least two very
+narrow escapes--the first due to their kayaks floating away, when Nansen
+swam out into the icy sea and reached them just before he sank, and
+Johansen passed the worst moments of his life watching from the shore;
+the second caused by the attack of a walrus which went for Nansen's kayak
+with tusks and flippers. And then one morning, as he looked round at the
+cold glaciers and naked cliffs, not knowing where he was, he heard a dog
+bark. Intensely excited, he started towards the sound, to be met by the
+leader of the English Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition whose party was
+wintering there, and who first gave him the definite news that he was on
+Franz Josef Land. Nansen and Johansen were finally landed at Vardo in the
+north of Norway, to learn that no tidings had yet been heard of the Fram.
+That very day she cleared the ice which had imprisoned her for nearly
+three years.
+
+I cannot go into the Fram's journey save to say that she had drifted as
+far north as 85° 55´ N., only eighteen geographical miles south of
+Nansen's farthest north. But the sledge journey and the winter spent by
+the two men has many points in common with the experience of our own
+Northern Party, and often and often during the long winter of 1912 our
+thoughts turned with hope to Nansen's winter, for we said if it had been
+done once why should it not be done again, and Campbell and his men
+survive.
+
+Before Nansen started, the spirit of adventure, which has always led men
+into the unknown, combined with the increased interest in knowledge for
+its own sake to turn the thoughts of the civilized world southwards. It
+was becoming plain that a continent of the extent and climate which this
+polar land probably possessed might have an overwhelming influence upon
+the weather conditions of the whole Southern Hemisphere. The importance
+of magnetism was only rivalled by the mystery in which the whole subject
+was shrouded: and the region which surrounded the Southern Magnetic Pole
+of the earth offered a promising field of experiment and observation. The
+past history, through the ages, of this land was of obvious importance to
+the geological story of the earth, whilst the survey of land formations
+and ice action in the Antarctic was more useful perhaps to the
+physiographer than that of any other country in the world, seeing that he
+found here in daily and even hourly operation the conditions which he
+knew had existed in the ice ages of the past over the whole world, but
+which he could only infer from vestigial remains. The biological
+importance of the Antarctic might be of the first magnitude in view of
+the significance which attaches to the life of the sea in the
+evolutionary problem.
+
+And it was with these objects and ideals that Scott's first expedition,
+known officially as the British Antarctic Expedition of 1901-1904, but
+more familiarly as 'The Discovery Expedition,' from the name of the ship
+which carried it, was organized by the Royal Society and the Royal
+Geographical Society, backed by the active support of the British
+Government. The executive officers and crew were Royal Navy almost
+without exception, whilst the scientific purposes of the expedition were
+served in addition by five scientists. These latter were not naval
+officers.
+
+The Discovery left New Zealand on Christmas Eve 1901, and entered the
+belt of pack ice which always has to be penetrated in order to reach the
+comparatively open sea beyond, when just past the Antarctic Circle. But a
+little more than four days saw her through, in which she was lucky, as we
+now know. Scott landed at Cape Adare and then coasted down the western
+coast of Victoria Land just as Ross had done sixty years before. As he
+voyaged south he began to look for safe winter quarters for the ship, and
+when he pushed into McMurdo Sound on January 21, 1902, it seemed that
+here he might find both a sheltered bay into which the ship could be
+frozen, and a road to the southland beyond.
+
+The open season which still remained before the freezing of the sea made
+progress impossible was spent in surveying the 500 miles of cliff which
+marks the northern limit of the Great Ice Barrier. Passing the extreme
+eastward position reached by Ross in 1842, they sailed on into an unknown
+world, and discovered a deep bay, called Balloon Bight, where the rounded
+snow-covered slopes undoubtedly were land and not, as heretofore,
+floating ice. Farther east, as they sailed, shallow soundings and gentle
+snow slopes gave place to steeper and more broken ridges, until at last
+small black patches in the snow gave undoubted evidence of rock; and an
+undiscovered land, now known as King Edward VII.'s Land, rose to a height
+of several thousand feet. The presence of thick pack ahead, and the
+advance of the season, led Scott to return to McMurdo Sound, where he
+anchored the Discovery in a little bay at the end of the tongue of land
+now known as the Hut Point Peninsula, and built the hut which, though
+little used in the Discovery days, was to figure so largely in the story
+of this his last expedition.
+
+The first autumn was spent in various short journeys of
+discovery--discovery not only of the surrounding land but of many
+mistakes in sledging equipment and routine. It is amazing to one who
+looks back upon these first efforts of the Discovery Expedition that the
+results were not more disastrous than was actually the case. When one
+reads of dog-teams which refused to start, of pemmican which was
+considered to be too rich to eat, of two officers discussing the ascent
+of Erebus and back in one day, and of sledging parties which knew neither
+how to use their cookers or lamp, nor how to put up their tents, nor even
+how to put on their clothes, then one begins to wonder that the process
+of education was gained at so small a price. "Not a single article of the
+outfit had been tested; and amid the general ignorance that prevailed the
+lack of system was painfully apparent in everything."[15]
+
+This led to a tragedy. A returning sledge party of men was overtaken by a
+blizzard on the top of the Peninsula near Castle Rock. They quite
+properly camped, and should have been perfectly comfortable lying in
+their sleeping-bags after a hot meal. But the primus lamps could not be
+lighted, and as they sat in leather boots and inadequate clothing being
+continually frost-bitten they decided to leave the tent and make their
+way to the ship--sheer madness as we now know. As they groped their way
+in the howling snow-drift the majority of the party either slipped or
+rolled down a steep slippery snow slope some thousand feet high ending in
+a precipitous ice-cliff, below which lay the open sea. It is a nasty
+place on a calm summer day: in a blizzard it must be ghastly. Yet only
+one man, named Vince, shot down the slope and over the precipice into the
+sea below. How the others got back heaven knows. One seaman called Hare,
+who separated from the others and lay down under a rock, awoke after
+thirty-six hours, covered with snow but in full possession of his
+faculties and free from frost-bites. The little cross at Hut Point
+commemorates the death of Vince. One of this party was a seaman called
+Wild, who came to the front and took the lead of five of the survivors
+after the death of Vince. He was to take the lead often in future
+expeditions under Shackleton and Mawson, and there are few men living
+who have so proved themselves as polar travellers.
+
+I have dwelt upon this side of the early sledging deficiencies of the
+Discovery to show the importance of experience in Antarctic land
+travelling, whether it be at first or second hand. Scott and his men in
+1902 were pioneers. They bought their experience at a price which might
+easily have been higher; and each expedition which has followed has added
+to the fund. The really important thing is that nothing of what is gained
+should be lost. It is one of the main objects of this book to hand on as
+complete a record as possible of the methods, equipment, food and weights
+used by Scott's Last Expedition for the use of future explorers. "The
+first object of writing an account of a Polar voyage is the guidance of
+future voyagers: the first duty of the writer is to his successors."[16]
+
+The adaptability, invention and resource of the men of the Discovery when
+they set to work after the failures of the autumn to prepare for the
+successes of the two following summers showed that they could rise to
+their difficulties. Scott admitted that "food, clothing, everything was
+wrong, the whole system was bad."[17] In determining to profit by his
+mistakes, and working out a complete system of Antarctic travel, he was
+at his best; and it was after a winter of drastic reorganization that he
+started on November 2, 1902, on his first southern journey with two
+companions, Wilson and Shackleton.
+
+It is no part of my job to give an account of this journey. The dogs
+failed badly: probably the Norwegian stock-fish which had been brought
+through the tropics to feed them was tainted: at any rate they sickened;
+and before the journey was done all the dogs had to be killed or had
+died. A fortnight after starting, the party was relaying--that is, taking
+on part of their load and returning for the rest; and this had to be
+continued for thirty-one days.
+
+[Illustration: THE LAST OF THE DOGS--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+The ration of food was inadequate and they became very hungry as time
+went on; but it was not until December 21 that Wilson disclosed to
+Scott that Shackleton had signs of scurvy which had been present for some
+time. On December 30, in latitude 82° 16´ S., they decided to return. By
+the middle of January the scurvy signs were largely increased and
+Shackleton was seriously ill and spitting blood. His condition became
+more and more alarming, and he collapsed on January 18, but revived
+afterwards. Sometimes walking by the sledge, sometimes being carried upon
+it, Shackleton survived: Scott and Wilson saved his life. The three men
+reached the ship on February 3, after covering 960 statute miles in 93
+days. Scott and Wilson were both extremely exhausted and seriously
+affected by scurvy. It was a fine journey, the geographical results of
+which comprised the survey of some three hundred miles of new coast-line,
+and a further knowledge of the Barrier upon which they travelled.
+
+While Scott was away southwards an organized attempt was made to discover
+the nature of the mountains and glaciers which lay across the Sound to
+the west. This party actually reached the plateau which lay beyond, and
+attained a height of 8900 feet, when "as far as they could see in every
+direction to the westward of them there extended a level plateau, to the
+south and north could be seen isolated nunataks, and behind them showed
+the high mountains which they had passed": a practicable road to the west
+had been found.
+
+I need note no more than these two most important of the many journeys
+carried out this season: nor is it necessary for me to give any account
+of the continuous and fertile scientific work which was accomplished in
+this virgin land. In the meantime a relief ship, the Morning, had
+arrived. It was intended that the Discovery should return this year as
+soon as the sea-ice in which she was imprisoned should break up and set
+her free. As February passed, however, it became increasingly plain that
+the ice conditions were altogether different from those of the previous
+year. On the 8th the Morning was still separated from the Discovery by
+eight miles of fast ice. March 2 was fully late for a low-powered ship to
+remain in the Sound, and on this date the Morning left. By March 13 all
+hope of the Discovery being freed that year was abandoned.
+
+The second winter passed much as the first, and as soon as spring arrived
+sledging was continued. These spring journeys on the Barrier, with
+sunlight only by day and low temperatures at all times, entailed great
+discomfort and, perhaps worse, want of sleep, frost-bites, and a fast
+accumulation of moisture in all one's clothing and in the sleeping-bags,
+which resulted in masses of ice which had to be thawed out by the heat of
+one's body before any degree of comfort could be gained. A fortnight was
+considered about the extreme limit of time for such a journey, and
+generally parties were not absent so long; for at this time a spring
+journey was considered a dreadful experience. "Wait till you've had a
+spring journey" was the threat of the old stagers to us. A winter journey
+lasting nearly three times as long as a spring journey was not imagined.
+I advise explorers to be content with imagining it in the future.
+
+The hardest journey of this year was carried out by Scott with two seamen
+of whom much will be written in this history. Their names are Edgar Evans
+and Lashly. The object of the journey was to explore westwards into the
+interior of the plateau. By way of the Ferrar Glacier they reached the
+ice-cap after considerable troubles, not the least of which was the loss
+of the data necessary for navigation contained in an excellent
+publication called Hints to Travellers, which was blown away. Then for
+the first time it was seen what additional difficulties are created by
+the climate and position of this lofty plateau, which we now know extends
+over the Pole and probably reaches over the greater part of the Antarctic
+continent. It was the beginning of November: that is, the beginning of
+summer; but the conditions of work were much the same as those found
+during the spring journeys on the Barrier. The temperature dropped into
+the minus forties; but the worst feature of all was a continuous
+head-wind blowing from west to east which combined with the low
+temperature and rarefied air to make the conditions of sledging
+extremely laborious. The supporting party returned, and the three men
+continued alone, pulling out westwards into an unknown waste of snow with
+no landmarks to vary the rough monotony. They turned homewards on
+December 1, but found the pulling very heavy; and their difficulties were
+increased by their ignorance of their exact position. The few glimpses of
+the land which they obtained as they approached it in the thick weather
+which prevailed only left them in horrible uncertainty as to their
+whereabouts. Owing to want of food it was impossible to wait for the
+weather to clear: there was nothing to be done but to continue their
+eastward march. Threading their way amidst the ice disturbances which
+mark the head of the glaciers, the party pushed blindly forward in air
+which was becoming thick with snow-drift. Suddenly Lashly slipped: in a
+moment the whole party was flying downwards with increasing speed. They
+ceased to slide smoothly; they were hurled into the air and descended
+with great force on to a gradual snow incline. Rising they looked round
+them to find above them an ice-fall 300 feet high down which they had
+fallen: above it the snow was still drifting, but where they stood there
+was peace and blue sky. They recognized now for the first time their own
+glacier and the well-remembered landmark, and far away in the distance
+was the smoking summit of Mount Erebus. It was a miracle.
+
+Excellent subsidiary journeys were also made of which space allows no
+mention here: nor do they bear directly upon this last expedition. But in
+view of the Winter Journey undertaken by us, if not for the interest of
+the subject itself, some account must be given of those most aristocratic
+inhabitants of the Antarctic, the Emperor penguins, with whom Wilson and
+his companions in the Discovery now became familiar.
+
+There are two kinds of Antarctic penguins--the little Adélie with his
+blue-black coat and his white shirt-front, weighing 16 lbs., an object of
+endless pleasure and amusement, and the great dignified Emperor with long
+curved beak, bright orange head-wear and powerful flippers, a
+personality of 6½ stones. Science singles out the Emperor as being the
+more interesting bird because he is more primitive, possibly the most
+primitive of all birds. Previous to the Discovery Expedition nothing was
+known of him save that he existed in the pack and on the fringes of the
+continent.
+
+We have heard of Cape Crozier as being the eastern extremity of Ross
+Island, discovered by Ross and named after the captain of the Terror. It
+is here that with immense pressures and rendings the moving sheet of the
+Barrier piles itself up against the mountain. It is here also that the
+great ice-cliff which runs for hundreds of miles to the east, with the
+Barrier behind it and the Ross Sea beating into its crevasses and caves,
+joins the basalt precipice which bounds the Knoll, as the two-knobbed
+saddle which forms Cape Crozier is called. Altogether it is the kind of
+place where giants have had a good time in their childhood, playing with
+ice instead of mud--so much cleaner too!
+
+But the slopes of Mount Terror do not all end in precipices. Farther to
+the west they slope quietly into the sea, and the Adélie penguins have
+taken advantage of this to found here one of their largest and most
+smelly rookeries. When the Discovery arrived off this rookery she sent a
+boat ashore and set up a post with a record upon it to guide the relief
+ship in the following year. The post still stands. Later it became
+desirable to bring the record left here more up to date, and so one of
+the first sledging parties went to try and find a way by the Barrier to
+this spot.
+
+They were prevented from reaching the record by a series of most violent
+blizzards, and indeed Cape Crozier is one of the windiest places on
+earth, but they proved beyond doubt that a back-door to the Adélie
+penguins' rookery existed by way of the slopes of Mount Terror behind the
+Knoll. Early the next year another party reached the record all right,
+and while exploring the neighbourhood looked down over the 800-feet
+precipice which forms the snout of Cape Crozier. The sea was frozen over,
+and in a small bay of ice formed by the cliffs of the Barrier below were
+numerous little dots which resolved themselves into Emperor penguins.
+Could this be the breeding-place of these wonderful birds? If so, they
+must nurse their eggs in mid-winter, in unimagined cold and darkness.
+
+Five days more elapsed before further investigation could be made, for a
+violent blizzard kept the party in their tents. On October 18 they set
+out to climb the high pressure ridges which lie between the level barrier
+and the sea. They found that their conjectures were right: there was the
+colony of Emperors. Several were nursing chicks, but all the ice in the
+Ross Sea was gone; only the small bay of ice remained. The number of
+adult birds was estimated at four hundred, the number of living chicks
+was thirty, and there were some eighty dead ones. No eggs were found.[18]
+
+Several more journeys were made to this spot while the Discovery was in
+the south, generally in the spring; and the sum total of the information
+gained came to something like this. The Emperor is a bird which cannot
+fly, lives on fish which it catches in the sea, and never steps on land
+even to breed. For a reason which was not then understood it lays its
+eggs upon the bare ice some time during the winter and carries out the
+whole process of incubation on the sea ice, resting the egg upon its feet
+pressed closely to a patch of bare skin in the lower abdomen, and
+protected from the intense cold by a loose falling lappet of skin and
+feathers. By September 12, the earliest date upon which a party arrived,
+all the eggs which were not broken or addled were hatched, and there were
+then about a thousand adult Emperors in the rookery. Arriving again on
+October 19, a party experienced a ten days' blizzard which confined them
+during seven days to their tents, but during their windy visit they saw
+one of the most interesting scenes in natural history. The story must be
+told by Wilson, who was there:
+
+"The day before the storm broke we were on an old outlying cone of Mount
+Terror, about 1300 feet above the sea. Below us lay the Emperor penguin
+rookery on the bay ice, and Ross Sea, completely frozen over, was a
+plain of firm white ice to the horizon. There was not even the lane of
+open water which usually runs along the Barrier cliff stretching away as
+it does like a winding thread to the east and out of sight. No space or
+crack could be seen with open water. Nevertheless the Emperors were
+unsettled owing, there can be no doubt, to the knowledge that bad weather
+was impending. The mere fact that the usual canal of open water was not
+to be seen along the face of the Barrier meant that the ice in Ross Sea
+had a southerly drift. This in itself was unusual, and was caused by a
+northerly wind with snow, the precursor here of a storm from the
+south-west. The sky looked black and threatening, the barometer began to
+fall, and before long down came snowflakes on the upper heights of Mount
+Terror.
+
+"All these warnings were an open book to the Emperor penguins, and if one
+knew the truth there probably were many others too. They were in
+consequence unsettled, and although the ice had not yet started moving
+the Emperor penguins had; a long file was moving out from the bay to the
+open ice, where a pack of some one or two hundred had already collected
+about two miles out at the edge of a refrozen crack. For an hour or more
+that afternoon we watched this exodus proceeding, and returned to camp,
+more than ever convinced that bad weather might be expected. Nor were we
+disappointed, for on the next day we woke to a southerly gale and smother
+of snow and drift, which effectually prevented any one of us from leaving
+our camp at all. This continued without intermission all day and night
+till the following morning, when the weather cleared sufficiently to
+allow us to reach the edge of the cliff which overlooked the rookery.
+
+[Illustration: THE EMPERORS ROOKERY]
+
+"The change here was immense. Ross Sea was open water for nearly thirty
+miles; a long line of white pack ice was just visible on the horizon from
+where we stood, some 800 to 900 feet above the sea. Large sheets of ice
+were still going out and drifting to the north, and the migration of the
+Emperors was in full swing. There were again two companies waiting on
+the ice at the actual water's edge, with some hundred more tailing out in
+single file to join them. The birds were waiting far out at the edge of
+the open water, as far as it was possible for them to walk, on a
+projecting piece of ice, the very next piece that would break away and
+drift to the north. The line of tracks in the snow along which the birds
+had gone the day before was now cut off short at the edge of the open
+water, showing that they had gone, and under the ice-cliffs there was an
+appreciable diminution in the number of Emperors left, hardly more than
+half remaining of all that we had seen there six days before."[19]
+
+Two days later the emigration was still in full swing, but only the
+unemployed seemed to have gone as yet. Those who were nursing chicks were
+still huddled under the ice-cliffs, sheltered as much as possible from
+the storm. Three days later (October 28) no ice was to be seen in the
+Ross Sea: the little bay of ice was gradually being eaten away: the same
+exodus was in progress and only a remnant of penguins was still left.
+
+Of the conditions under which the Emperor lays her eggs, the darkness and
+cold and blighting winds, of the excessive mothering instinct implanted
+in the heart of every bird, male and female, of the mortality and gallant
+struggles against almost inconceivable odds, and the final survival of
+some 26 per cent of the eggs, I hope to tell in the account of our Winter
+Journey, the object of which was to throw light upon the development of
+the embryo of this remarkable bird, and through it upon the history of
+their ancestors. As Wilson wrote:
+
+"The possibility that we have in the Emperor penguin the nearest approach
+to a primitive form not only of a penguin but of a bird makes the future
+working out of its embryology a matter of the greatest possible
+importance. It was a great disappointment to us that although we
+discovered their breeding-ground, and although we were able to bring home
+a number of deserted eggs and chicks, we were not able to procure a
+series of early embryos by which alone the points of particular interest
+can be worked out. To have done this in a proper manner from the spot at
+which the Discovery wintered in McMurdo Sound would have involved us in
+endless difficulties, for it would have entailed the risks of sledge
+travelling in mid-winter with an almost total absence of light. It would
+at any time require that a party of three at least, with full camp
+equipment, should traverse about a hundred miles of the Barrier surface
+in the dark and should, by moonlight, cross over with rope and axe the
+immense pressure ridges which form a chaos of crevasses at Cape Crozier.
+These ridges, moreover, which have taken a party as much as two hours of
+careful work to cross by daylight, must be crossed and re-crossed at
+every visit to the breeding site in the bay. There is no possibility even
+by daylight of conveying over them the sledge or camping kit, and in the
+darkness of mid-winter the impracticability is still more obvious. Cape
+Crozier is a focus for wind and storm, where every breath is converted,
+by the configuration of Mounts Erebus and Terror, into a regular drifting
+blizzard full of snow. It is here, as I have already stated, that on one
+journey or another we have had to lie patiently in sodden sleeping-bags
+for as many as five and seven days on end, waiting for the weather to
+change and make it possible for us to leave our tents at all. If,
+however, these dangers were overcome there would still be the difficulty
+of making the needful preparations from the eggs. The party would have to
+be on the scene at any rate early in July. Supposing that no eggs were
+found upon arrival, it would be well to spend the time in labelling the
+most likely birds, those for example that have taken up their stations
+close underneath the ice-cliffs. And if this were done it would be easier
+then to examine them daily by moonlight, if it and the weather generally
+were suitable: conditions, I must confess, not always easily obtained at
+Cape Crozier. But if by good luck things happened to go well, it would by
+this time be useful to have a shelter built of snow blocks on the sea-ice
+in which to work with the cooking lamp to prevent the freezing of the egg
+before the embryo was cut out, and in order that fluid solutions might
+be handy for the various stages of its preparation; for it must be borne
+in mind that the temperature all the while may be anything between zero
+and -50° F. The whole work no doubt would be full of difficulty, but it
+would not be quite impossible, and it is with a view to helping those to
+whom the opportunity may occur in future that this outline has been added
+of the difficulties that would surely beset their path."[20]
+
+We shall meet the Emperor penguins again, but now we must go back to the
+Discovery, lying off Hut Point, with the season advancing and twenty
+miles of ice between her and the open sea. The prospects of getting out
+this year seeming almost less promising than those of the last year, an
+abortive attempt was made to saw a channel from a half-way point. Still,
+life to Scott and Wilson in a tent at Cape Royds was very pleasant after
+sledging, and the view of the blue sea framed in the tent door was very
+beautiful on a morning in January when two ships sailed into the frame.
+Why two? One was of course the Morning; the second proved to be the Terra
+Nova.
+
+It seemed that the authorities at home had been alarmed at the reports
+brought back the previous year by the relief ship of the detention of the
+Discovery and certain outbreaks of scurvy which had occurred both on the
+ship and on sledge journeys. To make sure of relief two ships had been
+sent. That was nothing to worry about, but the orders they brought were
+staggering to sailors who had come to love their ship "with a depth of
+sentiment which cannot be surprising when it is remembered what we had
+been through in her and what a comfortable home she had proved."[21]
+Scott was ordered to abandon the Discovery if she could not be freed in
+time to accompany the relief ships to the north. For weeks there was
+little or no daily change. They started to transport the specimens and
+make the other necessary preparations. They almost despaired of freedom.
+Explosions in the ice were started in the beginning of February with
+little effect. But suddenly there came a change, and on the 11th, amidst
+intense excitement, the ice was breaking up fast. The next day the relief
+ships were but four miles away. On the 14th a shout of "The ships are
+coming, sir!" brought out all the men racing to the slopes above Arrival
+Bay. Scott wrote:
+
+"The ice was breaking up right across the Strait, and with a rapidity
+which we had not thought possible. No sooner was one great floe borne
+away than a dark streak cut its way into the solid sheet that remained,
+and carved out another, to feed the broad stream of pack which was
+hurrying away to the north-west.
+
+"I have never witnessed a more impressive sight; the sun was low behind
+us, the surface of the ice-sheet in front was intensely white, and in
+contrast the distant sea and its leads looked almost black. The wind had
+fallen to a calm, and not a sound disturbed the stillness about us.
+
+"Yet in the midst of this peaceful silence was an awful unseen agency
+rending that great ice-sheet as though it had been naught but the
+thinnest paper. We knew well by this time the nature of our prison bars;
+we had not plodded again and again over those long dreary miles of snow
+without realizing the formidable strength of the great barrier which held
+us bound; we knew that the heaviest battle-ship would have shattered
+itself ineffectually against it, and we had seen a million-ton iceberg
+brought to rest at its edge. For weeks we had been struggling with this
+mighty obstacle ... but now without a word, without an effort on our
+part, it was all melting away, and we knew that in an hour or two not a
+vestige of it would be left, and that the open sea would be lapping on
+the black rocks of Hut Point."[22]
+
+Almost more dramatic was the grounding of the Discovery off the shoal at
+Hut Point owing to the rise of a blizzard immediately after her release
+from the ice. Hour after hour she lay pounding on the shore, and when it
+seemed most certain that she had been freed only to be destroyed, and
+when all hope was nearly gone, the wind lulled, and the waters of the
+Sound, driven out by the force of the wind, returned and the Discovery
+floated off with little damage. The whole story of the release from the
+ice and subsequent grounding of the Discovery is wonderfully told by
+Scott in his book.
+
+Some years after this I met Wilson in a shooting lodge in Scotland. He
+was working upon grouse disease for the Royal Commission which had been
+appointed, and I saw then for the first time something of his magnetic
+personality and glimpses also of his methods of work. He and Scott both
+meant to go back and finish the job, and I then settled that when they
+went I would go too if wishing could do anything. Meanwhile Shackleton
+was either in the South or making his preparations to go there.
+
+He left England in 1908, and in the following Antarctic summer two
+wonderful journeys were made. The first, led by Shackleton himself,
+consisted of four men and four ponies. Leaving Cape Royds, where the
+expedition wintered in a hut, in November, they marched due south on the
+Barrier outside Scott's track until they were stopped by the eastward
+trend of the range of mountains, and by the chaotic pressure caused by
+the discharge of a Brobdingnagian glacier.
+
+But away from the main stream of the glacier, and separated from it by
+land now known as Hope Island, was a narrow and steep snow slope forming
+a gateway which opened on to the main glacier stream. Boldly plunging
+through this, the party made its way up the Beardmore Glacier, a giant of
+its kind, being more than twice as large as any other known. The history
+of their adventures will make anybody's flesh creep. From the top they
+travelled due south toward the Pole under the trying conditions of the
+plateau and reached the high latitude of 88° 23´ S. before they were
+forced to turn by lack of food.
+
+While Shackleton was essaying the geographical Pole another party of
+three men under Professor David reached the magnetic Pole, travelling a
+distance of 1260 miles, of which 740 miles were relay work, relying
+entirely on man-haulage, and with no additional help. This was a very
+wonderful journey, and when Shackleton returned in 1909 he and his
+expedition had made good. During the same year the North Pole was reached
+by Peary after some twelve years of travelling in Arctic regions.
+
+Scott published the plans of his second expedition in 1909. This
+expedition is the subject of the present history.
+
+The Terra Nova sailed from the West India Dock, London, on June 1, 1910,
+and from Cardiff on June 15. She made her way to New Zealand, refitted
+and restowed her cargo, took on board ponies, dogs, motor sledges,
+certain further provisions and equipment, as well as such members of her
+executive officers and scientists as had not travelled out in her, and
+left finally for the South on November 29, 1910. She arrived in McMurdo
+Sound on January 4, 1911, and our hut had been built on Cape Evans and
+all stores landed in less than a fortnight. Shortly afterwards the ship
+sailed. The party which was left at Cape Evans under Scott is known as
+the Main Party.
+
+But the scientific objects of the expedition included the landing of a
+second but much smaller party under Campbell on King Edward VII.'s Land.
+While returning from an abortive attempt to land here they found a
+Norwegian expedition under Captain Roald Amundsen in Nansen's old ship
+the Fram in the Bay of Whales: reference to this expedition will be found
+elsewhere.[23] One member of Amundsen's party was Johansen, the only
+companion of Nansen on his famous Arctic sledge journey, of which a brief
+outline has been given above.[24] Campbell and his five companions were
+finally landed at Cape Adare, and built their hut close to
+Borchgrevinck's old winter quarters.[25] The ship returned to New Zealand
+under Pennell: came back to the Antarctic a year later with further
+equipment and provisions, and again two years later to bring back to
+civilization the survivors of the expedition.
+
+The adventures and journeyings of the various members of the Main Party
+are so numerous and simultaneous that I believe it will help the reader
+who approaches this book without previous knowledge of the history of
+the expedition to give here a brief summary of the course of events.
+Those who are familiar already with these facts can easily skip a page or
+two.
+
+Two parties were sent out during the first autumn: the one under Scott to
+lay a large depôt on the Barrier for the Polar Journey, and this is
+called the Depôt Journey; the other to carry out geological work among
+the Western Mountains, so called because they form the western side of
+McMurdo Sound: this is called the First Geological Journey, and another
+similar journey during the following summer is called the Second
+Geological Journey.
+
+Both parties joined up at the old Discovery Hut at Hut Point in March
+1911, and here waited for the sea to freeze a passage northwards to Cape
+Evans. Meanwhile the men left at Cape Evans were continuing the complex
+scientific work of the station. All the members of the Main Party were
+not gathered together at Cape Evans for the winter until May 12. During
+the latter half of the winter a journey was made by three men led by
+Wilson to Cape Crozier to investigate the embryology of the Emperor
+penguin: this is called the Winter Journey.
+
+The journey to the South Pole absorbed the energies of most of the
+sledging members during the following summer of 1911-12. The motor party
+turned back on the Barrier; the dog party at the bottom of the Beardmore
+Glacier. From this point twelve men went forward. Four of these men under
+Atkinson returned from the top of the glacier in latitude 85° 3´ S.: they
+are known as the First Return Party. A fortnight later in latitude 87°
+32´ S. three more men returned under Lieutenant Evans: these are the
+Second Return Party. Five men went forward, Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates
+and Seaman Evans. They reached the Pole on January 17 to find that
+Amundsen had reached it thirty-four days earlier. They returned 721
+statute miles and perished 177 miles from their winter quarters.
+
+The supporting parties got back safely, but Lieutenant Evans was very
+seriously ill with scurvy. The food necessary for the return of the Polar
+Party from One Ton Camp had not been taken out at the end of February
+1912. Evans' illness caused a hurried reorganization of plans, and I was
+ordered to take out this food with one lad and two dog-teams. This was
+done, and the journey may be called the Dog Journey to One Ton Camp.
+
+We must now go back to the six men led by Campbell who were landed at
+Cape Adare in the beginning of 1911. They were much disappointed by the
+small amount of sledge work which they were able to do in the summer of
+1911-1912, for the sea-ice in front of them was blown out early in the
+year, and they were unable to find a way up through the mountains behind
+them on to the plateau. Therefore, when the Terra Nova appeared on
+January 4, it was decided that she should land them with six weeks'
+sledging rations and some extra biscuits, pemmican and general food near
+Mount Melbourne at Evans Coves, some 250 geographical miles south of Cape
+Adare, and some 200 geographical miles from our Winter Quarters at Cape
+Evans. Late on the night of January 8, 1912, they were camped in this
+spot and saw the last of the ship steaming out of the bay. They had
+arranged to be picked up again on February 18.
+
+Let us return to McMurdo Sound. My two dog-teams arrived at Hut Point
+from One Ton Depôt on March 16 exhausted. The sea-ice was still in from
+the Barrier to Hut Point, but from there onwards was open water, and
+therefore no communication was possible with Cape Evans. Atkinson, with
+one seaman, was at Hut Point and the situation which he outlined to me on
+arrival was something as follows:
+
+The ship had left and there was now no possibility of her returning owing
+to the lateness of the season, and she carried in her Lieut. Evans, sick
+with scurvy, and five other officers and three men who were returning
+home this year. This left only four officers and four men at Cape Evans,
+in addition to the four of us at Hut Point.
+
+The serious part of the news was that owing to a heavy pack the ship had
+been absolutely unable to reach Campbell's party at Evans Coves. Attempt
+after attempt had made without success. Would Campbell winter where he
+was? Would he try to sledge down the coast?
+
+In the absence of Scott the command of the expedition under the
+extraordinarily difficult circumstances which arose, both now and during
+the coming year, would naturally have devolved upon Lieutenant Evans. But
+Evans, very sick, was on his way to England. The task fell to Atkinson,
+and I hope that these pages will show how difficult it was, and how well
+he tackled it.
+
+There were now, that is since the arrival of the dog-teams four of us at
+Hut Point; and no help could be got from Cape Evans owing to the open
+water which intervened. Two of us were useless for further sledging and
+the dogs were absolutely done. As time went on anxiety concerning the
+non-arrival of the Polar Party was added to the alarm we already felt
+about Campbell and his men; winter was fast closing down, and the weather
+was bad. So little could be done by two men. What was to be done? When
+was it to be done with the greatest possible chance of success? Added to
+all his greater anxieties Atkinson had me on his hands--and I was pretty
+ill.
+
+In the end he made two attempts.
+
+The first with one seaman, Keohane, to sledge out on to the Barrier,
+leaving on March 26. They found the conditions very bad, but reached a
+point a few miles south of Corner Camp and returned. Soon after we knew
+the Southern Party must be dead.
+
+Nothing more could be done until communication was effected with Winter
+Quarters at Cape Evans. This was done by a sledge journey over the newly
+frozen ice in the bays on April 10. Help arrived at Hut Point on April
+14.
+
+The second attempt was then made, and this consisted of a party of four
+men who tried to sledge up the Western Coast in order to meet and help
+Campbell if he was trying to sledge to us. This plucky attempt failed, as
+indeed it was practically certain it would.
+
+The story of the winter that followed will be told, and of the decision
+which had to be taken to abandon either the search for the Polar Party
+(who must be dead) and their records, or Campbell and his men (who might
+be alive). There were not enough men left to do both. We believed that
+the Polar Party had come to grief through scurvy, or through falling into
+a crevasse--the true solution never occurred to us, for we felt sure that
+except for accident or disease they could find their way home without
+difficulty. We decided to leave Campbell to find his way unaided down the
+coast, and to try and find the Polar Party's records. To our amazement we
+found their snowed-up tent some 140 geographical miles from Hut Point,
+only 11 geographical miles from One Ton Camp. They had arrived there on
+March 19. Inside the tent were the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers.
+Oates had willingly walked out to his death some eighteen miles before in
+a blizzard. Seaman Evans lay dead at the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Having found the bodies and the records the Search Party returned,
+proposing to make their way up the Western Coast in search of Campbell.
+On arrival at Hut Point with the dog-teams, I must have gone to open the
+hut door and found pinned on to it a note in Campbell's handwriting; but
+my recollection of this apparently memorable incident is extraordinarily
+vague. It was many long months since we had had good news. This was their
+story.
+
+When Campbell originally landed at Evans Coves he brought with him
+sledging provisions for six weeks, in addition to two weeks' provisions
+for six men, 56 lbs. sugar, 24 lbs. cocoa, 36 lbs. chocolate and 210 lbs.
+of biscuit, some Oxo and spare clothing. In short, after the sledge work
+which they proposed, and actually carried out, the men were left with
+skeleton rations for four weeks. They had also a spare tent and an extra
+sleeping-bag. It was not seriously anticipated that the ship would have
+great difficulty in picking them up in the latter half of February.
+
+Campbell's party had carried out successful sledging and useful
+geological work in the region of Evans Coves. They had then camped on the
+beach and looked for the ship to relieve them. There was open water
+lashed to fury by the wind so far as they could see, and yet she did not
+come. They concluded that she must have been wrecked. The actual fact was
+that thick pack ice lay beyond their vision through which Pennell was
+trying to drive his ship time after time, until he had either to go or to
+be frozen in. He never succeeded in approaching nearer than 27 miles.
+
+It was now that a blizzard wind started to blow down from the plateau
+behind them out into the continually open sea in front. The situation was
+bad enough already, but of course such weather conditions made it
+infinitely worse. Evans Coves is paved with boulders over which all
+journeys had to be fought leaning against the wind as it blew: when a
+lull came the luckless traveller fell forward on to his face. Under these
+circumstances it was decided that preparations must be made to winter
+where they were, and to sledge down the coast to Cape Evans in the
+following spring. The alternative of sledging down the coast in March and
+April never seems to have been seriously considered. At Hut Point, of
+course, we were entirely in the dark as to what the party would do, hence
+Atkinson's journey over to the western side in April 1912.
+
+Meanwhile the stranded men divided into two parties of three men each.
+The first under Campbell sank a shaft six feet down into a large
+snow-drift and thence, with pick and shovel, excavated a passage and at
+the end of it a cave, twelve feet by nine feet, and five feet six inches
+high. The second under Levick sought out and killed all the seal and
+penguin they could find, but their supply was pitifully small, and the
+men never had a full meal until mid-winter night. One man always had to
+be left to look after the tents, which were already so worn and damaged
+that it was unsafe to leave them in the wind.
+
+By March 17 the cave was sufficiently advanced for three men to move in.
+Priestley must tell how this was done, but it should not be supposed that
+the weather conditions were in any way abnormal on what they afterwards
+called Inexpressible Island:
+
+"March 17. 7 P.M. Strong south-west breeze all day, freshening to a full
+gale at night. We have had an awful day, but have managed to shift
+enough gear into the cave to live there temporarily. Our tempers have
+never been so tried during the whole of our life together, but they have
+stood the strain pretty successfully.... May I never have such another
+three trips as were those to-day. Every time the wind lulled a little I
+fell over to windward, and at every gust I was pitched to leeward, while
+a dozen times or more I was taken off my feet and dashed against the
+ground or against unfriendly boulders. The other two had equally bad
+times. Dickason hurt his knee and ankle and lost his sheath knife, and
+Campbell lost a compass and some revolver cartridges in the two trips
+they made. Altogether it was lucky we got across at all."[26]
+
+It was a fortunate thing that this wind often blew quite clear without
+snowfall or drift. Two days later in the same gale the tent of the other
+three men collapsed on top of them at 8 A.M. At 4 P.M. the sun was going
+down and they settled to make their way across to their comrades. Levick
+tells the story as follows:
+
+"Having done this [securing the remains of the tent, etc.], we started on
+our journey. This lay, first of all, across half a mile of clear blue
+ice, swept by the unbroken wind, which met us almost straight in the
+face. We could never stand up, so had to scramble the whole distance on
+'all fours,' lying flat on our bellies in the gusts. By the time we had
+reached the other side we had had enough. Our faces had been rather badly
+bitten, and I have a very strong recollection of the men's countenances,
+which were a leaden blue, streaked with white patches of frost-bite. Once
+across, however, we reached the shelter of some large boulders on the
+shore of the island, and waited here long enough to thaw out our noses,
+ears, and cheeks. A scramble of another six hundred yards brought us to
+the half-finished igloo, into which we found that the rest of the party
+had barricaded themselves, and, after a little shouting, they came and
+let us in, giving us a warm welcome, and about the most welcome hot meal
+that I think any of us had ever eaten."
+
+[Illustration: PRIESTLEY AND CAMPBELL]
+
+Priestley continues:
+
+"After the arrival of the evicted party we made hoosh, and as we warmed
+up from the meal, we cheered up and had one of the most successful
+sing-songs we had ever had forgetting all our troubles for an hour or
+two. It is a pleasing picture to look back upon now, and, if I close my
+eyes, I can see again the little cave cut out in snow and ice with the
+tent flapping in the doorway, barely secured by ice-axe and shovel
+arranged crosswise against the side of the shaft. The cave is lighted up
+with three or four small blubber lamps, which give a soft yellow light.
+At one end lie Campbell, Dickason and myself in our sleeping-bags,
+resting after the day's work, and, opposite to us, on a raised dais
+formed by a portion of the floor not yet levelled, Levick, Browning and
+Abbott sit discussing their seal hoosh, while the primus hums cheerily
+under the cooker containing the coloured water which served with us
+instead of cocoa. As the diners warm up jests begin to fly between the
+rival tents and the interchange is brisk, though we have the upper hand
+to-day, having an inexhaustible subject in the recent disaster to their
+tent, and their forced abandonment of their household gods. Suddenly some
+one starts a song with a chorus, and the noise from the primus is dwarfed
+immediately. One by one we go through our favourites, and the concert
+lasts for a couple of hours. By this time the lamps are getting low, and
+gradually the cold begins to overcome the effects of the hoosh and the
+cocoa. One after another the singers begin to shiver, and all thoughts of
+song disappear as we realize what we are in for. A night with one one-man
+bag between two men! There is a whole world of discomfort in the very
+thought, and no one feels inclined to jest about that for the moment.
+Those jests will come all right to-morrow when the night is safely past,
+but this evening it is anything but a cheery subject of contemplation.
+There is no help for it, however, and each of us prepares to take another
+man in so far as he can."[27]
+
+In such spirit and under very similar conditions this dauntless party
+set about passing through one of the most horrible winters which God has
+invented. They were very hungry, for the wind which kept the sea open
+also made the shore almost impossible for seals. There were red-letter
+days, however, such as when Browning found and killed a seal, and in its
+stomach, "not too far digested to be still eatable," were thirty-six
+fish. And what visions of joy for the future. "We never again found a
+seal with an eatable meal inside him, but we were always hoping to do so,
+and a kill was, therefore, always a gamble. Whenever a seal was sighted
+in future, some one said, 'Fish!' and there was always a scramble to
+search the beast first."[28]
+
+They ate blubber, cooked with blubber, had blubber lamps. Their clothes
+and gear were soaked with blubber, and the soot blackened them, their
+sleeping-bags, cookers, walls and roof, choked their throats and inflamed
+their eyes. Blubbery clothes are cold, and theirs were soon so torn as to
+afford little protection against the wind, and so stiff with blubber that
+they would stand up by themselves, in spite of frequent scrapings with
+knives and rubbings with penguin skins, and always there were underfoot
+the great granite boulders which made walking difficult even in daylight
+and calm weather. As Levick said, "the road to hell might be paved with
+good intentions, but it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved
+something after the style of Inexpressible Island."
+
+But there were consolations; the long-waited-for lump of sugar: the
+sing-songs--and about these there hangs a story. When Campbell's Party
+and the remains of the Main Party forgathered at Cape Evans in November
+1912, Campbell would give out the hymns for Church. The first Sunday we
+had 'Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him,' and the second, and the
+third. We suggested a change, to which Campbell asked, "Why?" We said it
+got a bit monotonous. "Oh no," said Campbell, "we always sang it on
+Inexpressible Island." It was also about the only one he knew. Apart from
+this I do not know whether 'Old King Cole' or the Te Deum was more
+popular. For reading they had David Copperfield, the Decameron, the Life
+of Stevenson and a New Testament. And they did Swedish drill, and they
+gave lectures.
+
+Their worst difficulties were scurvy[29] and ptomaine poisoning, for
+which the enforced diet was responsible. From the first they decided to
+keep nearly all their unused rations for sledging down the coast in the
+following spring, and this meant that they must live till then on the
+seal and penguin which they could kill. The first dysentery was early in
+the winter, and was caused by using the salt from the sea-water. They had
+some Cerebos salt, however, in their sledging rations, and used it for a
+week, which stopped the disorder and they gradually got used to the
+sea-ice salt. Browning, however, who had had enteric fever in the past,
+had dysentery almost continually right through the winter. Had he not
+been the plucky, cheerful man he is, he would have died.
+
+In June again there was another bad attack of dysentery. Another thing
+which worried them somewhat was the 'igloo back,' a semi-permanent kink
+caused by seldom being able to stand upright.
+
+Then, in the beginning of September, they had ptomaine poisoning from
+meat which had been too long in what they called the oven, which was a
+biscuit box, hung over the blubber stove, into which they placed the
+frozen meat to thaw it out. This oven was found to be not quite level,
+and in a corner a pool of old blood, water and scraps of meat had
+collected. This and a tainted hoosh which they did not have the strength
+of mind to throw away in their hungry condition, seems to have caused the
+outbreak, which was severe. Browning and Dickason were especially bad.
+
+They had their bad days: those first days of realization that they would
+not be relieved: days of depression, disease and hunger, all at once:
+when the seal seemed as if they would give out and they were thinking
+they would have to travel down the coast in the winter--but Abbott killed
+two seals with a greasy knife, losing the use of three fingers in the
+process, and saved the situation.
+
+But they also had their good, or less-bad, days: such was mid-winter
+night when they held food in their hands and did not want to eat it, for
+they were full: or when they got through the Te Deum without a hitch: or
+when they killed some penguins; or got a ration of mustard plaster from
+the medical stores.
+
+Never was a more cheerful or good-tempered party. They set out to see the
+humorous side of everything, and, if they could not do so one day, at any
+rate they determined to see to it the next. What is more they succeeded,
+and I have never seen a company of better welded men than that which
+joined us for those last two months in McMurdo Sound.
+
+On September 30 they started home--so they called it. This meant a sledge
+journey of some two hundred miles along the coast, and its possibility
+depended upon the presence of sea-ice, which we have seen to have been
+absent at Evans Coves. It also meant crossing the Drygalski Ice Tongue,
+an obstacle which bulked very formidably in their imaginations during the
+winter. They reached the last rise of this glacier in the evening of
+October 10, and then saw Erebus, one hundred and fifty miles off. The
+igloo and the past were behind: Cape Evans and the future were in
+front--and the sea-ice was in as far as they could see.
+
+Dickason was half crippled with dysentery when they started, but
+improved. Browning, however, was still very ill, but now they were able
+to eat a ration of four biscuits a day and a small amount of pemmican and
+cocoa which gave him a better chance than the continual meat. As they
+neared Granite Harbour, a month after starting, his condition was so
+serious that they discussed leaving him there with Levick until they
+could get medicine and suitable food from Cape Evans.
+
+But their troubles were nearly over, for on reaching Cape Roberts they
+suddenly sighted the depôt left by Taylor in the previous year. They
+searched round, like dogs, scratching in the drifts, and found--a whole
+case of biscuits: and there were butter and raisins and lard. Day and
+night merged into one long lingering feast, and when they started on
+again their mouths were sore[30] with eating biscuits. More, there is
+little doubt that the change of diet saved Browning's life. As they moved
+down the coast they found another depôt, and yet another. They reached
+Hut Point on November 5.
+
+The story of this, our Northern Party, has been told in full by the two
+men most able to tell it: by Campbell in the second volume of Scott's
+book, by Priestley in a separate volume called Antarctic Adventure.[31] I
+have added only these few pages because, save in so far as their
+adventures touch the Main Party or the Ship, it is better that I should
+refer the reader to these two accounts than that I should try and write
+again at second hand what has been already twice told. I will only say
+here that the history of what these men did and suffered has been
+overshadowed by the more tragic tale of the Polar Party. They are not men
+who wish for public applause, but that is no reason why the story of a
+great adventure should not be known; indeed, it is all the more reason
+why it should be known. To those who have not read it I recommend
+Priestley's book mentioned above, or Campbell's equally modest account in
+Scott's Last Expedition.[32]
+
+The Terra Nova arrived at Cape Evans on January 18, 1913, just as we had
+started to prepare for another year. And so the remains of the expedition
+came home that spring. Scott's book was published in the autumn.
+
+The story of Scott's Last Expedition of 1910-13 is a book of two volumes,
+the first volume of which is Scott's personal diary of the expedition,
+written from day to day before he turned into his sleeping-bag for the
+night when sledging, or in the intervals of the many details of
+organization and preparation in the hut, when at Winter Quarters. The
+readers of this book will probably have read that diary and the accounts
+of the Winter Journey, the last year, the adventures of Campbell's Party
+and the travels of the Terra Nova which follow. With an object which I
+will explain presently I quote a review of Scott's book from the pen of
+one of Mr. Punch's staff:[33]
+
+"There is courage and strength and loyalty and love shining out of the
+second volume no less than out of the first; there were gallant gentlemen
+who lived as well as gallant gentlemen who died; but it is the story of
+Scott, told by himself, which will give the book a place among the great
+books of the world. That story begins in November 1910, and ends on March
+29, 1912, and it is because when you come to the end, you will have lived
+with Scott for sixteen months, that you will not be able to read the last
+pages without tears. That message to the public was heartrending enough
+when it first came to us, but it was as the story of how a great hero
+fell that we read it; now it is just the tale of how a dear friend died.
+To have read this book is to have known Scott; and if I were asked to
+describe him, I think I should use some such words as those which, six
+months before he died, he used of the gallant gentleman who went with
+him, 'Bill' Wilson. 'Words must always fail when I talk of him,' he
+wrote; 'I believe he is the finest character I ever met--the closer one
+gets to him the more there is to admire. Every quality is so solid and
+dependable. Whatever the matter, one knows Bill will be sound, shrewdly
+practical, intensely loyal, and quite unselfish.' That is true of Wilson,
+if Scott says so, for he knew men; but most of it is also true of Scott
+himself. I have never met a more beautiful character than that which is
+revealed unconsciously in these journals. His humanity, his courage, his
+faith, his steadfastness, above all, his simplicity, mark him as a man
+among men. It is because of his simplicity that his last message, the
+last entries in his diary, his last letters, are of such undying beauty.
+The letter of consolation (and almost of apology) which, on the verge of
+death, he wrote to Mrs. Wilson, wife of the man dying at his side, may
+well be Scott's monument. He could have no finer. And he has raised a
+monument for those other gallant gentlemen who died--Wilson, Oates,
+Bowers, Evans. They are all drawn for us clearly by him in these pages;
+they stand out unmistakably. They, too, come to be friends of ours, their
+death is as noble and as heartbreaking. And there were gallant gentlemen,
+I said, who lived--you may read amazing stories of them. Indeed, it is a
+wonderful tale of manliness that these two volumes tell us. I put them
+down now; but I have been for a few days in the company of the brave ...
+and every hour with them has made me more proud for those that died and
+more humble for myself."
+
+I have quoted this review at length, because it gives the atmosphere of
+hero-worship into which we were plunged on our return. That atmosphere
+was very agreeable; but it was a refracting medium through which the
+expedition could not be seen with scientific accuracy--and the expedition
+was nothing if not scientific. Whilst we knew what we had suffered and
+risked better than any one else, we also knew that science takes no
+account of such things; that a man is no better for having made the worst
+journey in the world; and that whether he returns alive or drops by the
+way will be all the same a hundred years hence if his records and
+specimens come safely to hand.
+
+In addition to Scott's Last Expedition and Priestley's Antarctic
+Adventures, Griffith Taylor, who was physiographer to the Main Party, has
+written an account of the two geological journeys of which he was the
+leader, and of the domestic life of the expedition at Hut Point and at
+Cape Evans, up to February 1912, in a book called With Scott: The Silver
+Lining. This book gives a true glimpse into the more boisterous side of
+our life, with much useful information about the scientific part.
+
+Though it bears little upon this book I cannot refrain from drawing the
+reader's attention to, and earning some of his thanks for, a little book
+called Antarctic Penguins, written by Levick, the Surgeon of Campbell's
+Party. It is almost entirely about Adélie penguins. The author spent the
+greater part of a summer living, as it were, upon sufferance, in the
+middle of one of the largest penguin rookeries in the world. He has
+described the story of their crowded life with a humour with which,
+perhaps, we hardly credited him, and with a simplicity which many writers
+of children's stories might envy. If you think your own life hard, and
+would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or
+steal this tale, and read and see how the penguins live. It is all quite
+true.
+
+So there is already a considerable literature about the expedition, but
+no connected account of it as a whole. Scott's diary, had he lived, would
+merely have formed the basis of the book he would have written. As his
+personal diary it has an interest which no other book could have had. But
+a diary in this life is one of the only ways in which a man can blow off
+steam, and so it is that Scott's book accentuates the depression which
+used to come over him sometimes.
+
+We have seen the importance which must attach to the proper record of
+improvements, weights and methods of each and every expedition. We have
+seen how Scott took the system developed by the Arctic Explorers at the
+point of development to which it had been brought by Nansen, and applied
+it for the first time to Antarctic sledge travelling. Scott's Voyage of
+the Discovery gives a vivid picture of mistakes rectified, and of
+improvements of every kind. Shackleton applied the knowledge they gained
+in his first expedition, Scott in this, his second and last. On the whole
+I believe this expedition was the best equipped there has ever been, when
+the double purpose, exploratory and scientific, for which it was
+organized, is taken into consideration. It is comparatively easy to put
+all your eggs into one basket, to organize your material and to equip and
+choose your men entirely for one object, whether it be the attainment of
+the Pole, or the running of a perfect series of scientific observations.
+Your difficulties increase many-fold directly you combine the one with
+the other, as was done in this case. Neither Scott nor the men with him
+would have gone for the Pole alone. Yet they considered the Pole to be an
+achievement worthy of a great attempt, and "We took risks, we knew we
+took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no
+cause for complaint...."
+
+It is, it must be, of the first importance that a system, I will not say
+perfected, but developed, to a pitch of high excellence at such a cost
+should be handed down as completely as possible to those who are to
+follow. I want to so tell this story that the leader of some future
+Antarctic expedition, perhaps more than one, will be able to take it up
+and say: "I have here the material from which I can order the articles
+and quantities which will be wanted for so many men for such and such a
+time; I have also a record of how this material was used by Scott, of the
+plans of his journeys and how his plans worked out, and of the
+improvements which his parties were able to make on the spot or suggest
+for the future. I don't agree with such and such, but this is a
+foundation and will save me many months of work in preparation, and give
+me useful knowledge for the actual work of my expedition." If this book
+can guide the future explorer by the light of the past, it will not have
+been written in vain.
+
+But this was not my main object in writing this book. When I undertook in
+1913 to write, for the Antarctic Committee, an Official Narrative on
+condition that I was given a free hand, what I wanted to do above all
+things was to show what work was done; who did it; to whom the credit of
+the work was due; who took the responsibility; who did the hard sledging;
+and who pulled us through that last and most ghastly year when two
+parties were adrift, and God only knew what was best to be done; when,
+had things gone on much longer, men would undoubtedly have gone mad.
+There is no record of these things, though perhaps the world thinks there
+is. Generally as a mere follower, without much responsibility, and often
+scared out of my wits, I was in the thick of it all, and I know.
+
+Unfortunately I could not reconcile a sincere personal confession with
+the decorous obliquity of an Official Narrative; and I found that I had
+put the Antarctic Committee in a difficulty from which I could rescue
+them only by taking the book off their hands; for it was clear that what
+I had written was not what is expected from a Committee, even though no
+member may disapprove of a word of it. A proper Official Narrative
+presented itself to our imaginations and sense of propriety as a quarto
+volume, uniform with the scientific reports, dustily invisible on Museum
+shelves, and replete with--in the words of my Commission--"times of
+starting, hours of march, ground and weather conditions," not very useful
+as material for future Antarcticists, and in no wise effecting any
+catharsis of the writer's conscience. I could not pretend that I had
+fulfilled these conditions; and so I decided to take the undivided
+responsibility on my own shoulders. None the less the Committee, having
+given me access to its information, is entitled to all the credit of a
+formal Official Narrative, without the least responsibility for the
+passages which I have studied to make as personal in style as possible,
+so that no greater authority may be attached to them than I deserve.
+
+I need hardly add that the nine years' delay in the appearance of my book
+was caused by the war. Before I had recovered from the heavy overdraft
+made on my strength by the expedition I found myself in Flanders looking
+after a fleet of armoured cars. A war is like the Antarctic in one
+respect. There is no getting out of it with honour as long as you can put
+one foot before the other. I came back badly invalided; and the book had
+to wait accordingly.
+
+[Illustration: FROM NEW ZEALAND TO THE SOUTH POLE--Apsley Cherry-Garrard,
+del.--Emery Walker Ltd., Collotypers.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+     [1] Cook, _A Voyage towards the South Pole_, Introduction.
+
+     [2] Cook, _A Voyage towards the South Pole_, vol. i. p. 23.
+
+     [3] Ibid. p. 28.
+
+     [4] Cook, _A Voyage towards the South Pole_, vol. i. p. 268.
+
+     [5] Ibid. p. 275.
+
+     [6] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 9.
+
+     [7] Ibid. p. 14.
+
+     [8] Ross, _Voyage to the Southern Seas_, vol. i. p. 117.
+
+     [9] Ross, _Voyage to the Southern Seas_, vol. i. pp. 216-218.
+
+    [10] Ross, _Voyage to the Southern Seas_, vol. i. pp. 244-245.
+
+    [11] Leonard Huxley, _Life of Sir J. D. Hooker_, vol. ii. p. 443.
+
+    [12] Ibid. p. 441.
+
+    [13] Nansen, _Farthest North_, vol. i. p. 52.
+
+    [14] Nansen, _Farthest North_, vol. ii. pp. 19-20.
+
+    [15] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 229.
+
+    [16] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. vii.
+
+    [17] Ibid. p. 273.
+
+    [18] See Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii. pp. 5, 6, 490.
+
+    [19] Wilson, _Nat. Ant. Exp., 1901-1904_, "Zoology," Part ii. pp.
+         8-9.
+
+    [20] Wilson, _Nat. Ant. Exp., 1901-1904_, "Zoology," Part ii. p.
+         31.
+
+    [21] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii. p. 327.
+
+    [22] Scott, _The Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii. pp. 347-348.
+
+    [23] See pp. 128-134.
+
+    [24] See pp. xxxi-xxxii.
+
+    [25] See p. xxviii.
+
+    [26] Priestley, _Antarctic Adventure_, pp. 232-233.
+
+    [27] Priestley, _Antarctic Adventure_, pp. 236-237.
+
+    [28] Priestley, _Antarctic Adventure_, p. 243.
+
+    [29] Atkinson has no doubt that the symptoms of the Northern Party
+         were those of early scurvy. Conditions of temperature in the
+         igloo allowed of decomposition occurring in seal meat. Fresh
+         seal meat brought in from outside reduced the scurvy
+         symptoms.
+
+    [30] This tenderness of gums and tongue is additional evidence of
+         scurvy.
+
+    [31] Published by Fisher Unwin, 1914.
+
+    [32] Vol. ii., Narrative of the Northern Party.
+
+    [33] A. A. Milne.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+FROM ENGLAND TO SOUTH AFRICA
+
+    Take a bowsy short leave of your nymphs on the shore,
+    And silence their mourning with vows of returning,
+    Though never intending to visit them more.
+                                         _Dido and Aeneas._
+
+
+Scott used to say that the worst part of an expedition was over when the
+preparation was finished. So no doubt it was with a sigh of relief that
+he saw the Terra Nova out from Cardiff into the Atlantic on June 15,
+1910. Cardiff had given the expedition a most generous and enthusiastic
+send-off, and Scott announced that it should be his first port on
+returning to England. Just three years more and the Terra Nova, worked
+back from New Zealand by Pennell, reached Cardiff again on June 14, 1913,
+and paid off there.
+
+From the first everything was informal and most pleasant, and those who
+had the good fortune to help in working the ship out to New Zealand,
+under steam or sail, must, in spite of five months of considerable
+discomfort and very hard work, look back upon the voyage as one of the
+very happiest times of the expedition. To some of us perhaps the voyage
+out, the three weeks in the pack ice going South, and the Robinson Crusoe
+life at Hut Point are the pleasantest of many happy memories.
+
+Scott made a great point that so far as was possible the personnel of the
+expedition must go out with the Terra Nova. Possibly he gave
+instructions that they were to be worked hard, and no doubt it was a good
+opportunity of testing our mettle. We had been chosen out of 8000
+volunteers, executive officers, scientific staff, crew, and all.
+
+We differed entirely from the crew of an ordinary merchant ship both in
+our personnel and in our methods of working. The executive officers were
+drawn from the Navy, as were also the crew. In addition there was the
+scientific staff, including one doctor who was not a naval surgeon, but
+who was also a scientist, and two others called by Scott 'adaptable
+helpers,' namely Oates and myself. The scientific staff of the expedition
+numbered twelve members all told, but only six were on board: the
+remainder were to join the ship at Lyttelton, New Zealand, when we made
+our final embarcation for the South. Of those on the ship Wilson was
+chief of the scientific staff, and united in himself the various
+functions of vertebral zoologist, doctor, artist, and, as this book will
+soon show, the unfailing friend-in-need of all on board. Lieutenant Evans
+was in command, with Campbell as first officer. Watches were of course
+assigned immediately to the executive officers. The crew was divided into
+a port and starboard watch, and the ordinary routine of a sailing ship
+with auxiliary steam was followed. Beyond this no work was definitely
+assigned to any individual on board. How the custom of the ship arose I
+do not know, but in effect most things were done by volunteer labour. It
+was recognized that every one whose work allowed turned to immediately on
+any job which was wanted, but it was an absolutely voluntary
+duty--Volunteers to shorten sail? To coal? To shift cargo? To pump? To
+paint or wash down paintwork? They were constant calls--some of them
+almost hourly calls, day and night--and there was never any failure to
+respond fully. This applied not only to the scientific staff but also,
+whenever their regular duties allowed, to the executive officers. There
+wasn't an officer on the ship who did not shift coal till he was sick of
+the sight of it, but I heard no complaints. Such a system soon singles
+out the real willing workers, but it is apt to put an undue strain upon
+them. Meanwhile most of the executive officers as well as the scientific
+staff had their own work to do, which they were left to fit in as most
+convenient.
+
+The first days out from England were spent in such hard and crowded work
+that we shook down very quickly. I then noticed for the first time
+Wilson's great gift of tact, and how quick he was to see the small things
+which make so much difference. At the same time his passion for work set
+a high standard. Pennell was another glutton.
+
+We dropped anchor in Funchal Harbour, Madeira, about 4 P.M. on June 23,
+eight days out. The ship had already been running under sail and steam,
+the decks were as clear as possible, there was some paintwork to show,
+and with a good harbour stow she looked thoroughly workmanlike and neat.
+Some scientific work, in particular tow netting and magnetic
+observations, had already been done. But even as early as this we had
+spent hours on the pumps, and it was evident that these pumps were going
+to be a constant nightmare.
+
+In Madeira, as everywhere, we were given freely of such things as we
+required. We left in the early morning of June 26, after Pennell had done
+some hours' magnetic work with the Lloyd Creak and Barrow Dip Circle.
+
+On June 29 (noon position lat. 27° 10´ N., long. 20° 21´ W.) it was
+possible to write: "A fortnight out to-day, and from the general
+appearance of the wardroom we might have been out a year."
+
+We were to a great extent strangers to one another when we left England,
+but officers and crew settled down to their jobs quickly, and when men
+live as close as we did they settle down or quarrel before very long. Let
+us walk into the cabins which surround the small wardroom aft. The first
+on the left is that of Scott and Lieutenant Evans, but Scott is not on
+board, and Wilson has taken his place. In the next cabin to them is
+Drake, the secretary. On the starboard side of the screw are Oates,
+Atkinson and Levick, the two latter being doctors, and on the port side
+Campbell and Pennell, who is navigator. Then Rennick and Bowers, the
+latter just home from the Persian Gulf--both of these are watchkeepers.
+In the next cabin are Simpson, meteorologist, back from Simla, with
+Nelson and Lillie, marine biologists. In the last cabin, the Nursery, are
+the youngest, and necessarily the best behaved, of this community,
+Wright, the physicist and chemist, Gran the Norwegian ski-expert, and
+myself, Wilson's helper and assistant zoologist. It is difficult to put a
+man down as performing any special job where each did so many, but that
+is roughly what we were.
+
+Certain men already began to stand out. Wilson, with an apparently
+inexhaustible stock of knowledge on little things and big; always ready
+to give help, and always ready with sympathy and insight, a tremendous
+worker, and as unselfish as possible; a universal adviser. Pennell, as
+happy as the day was long, working out sights, taking his watch on the
+bridge, or if not on watch full of energy aloft, trimming coal, or any
+other job that came along; withal spending hours a day on magnetic work,
+which he did as a hobby, and not in any way as his job. Bowers was
+proving himself the best seaman on board, with an exact knowledge of the
+whereabouts and contents of every case, box and bale, and with a supreme
+contempt for heat or cold. Simpson was obviously a first-class scientist,
+devoted to his work, in which Wright gave him very great and unselfish
+help, while at the same time doing much of the ship's work. Oates and
+Atkinson generally worked together in a solid, dependable and somewhat
+humorous way.
+
+Evans, who will always be called Lieutenant Evans in this book to
+distinguish him from Seaman Evans, was in charge of the ship, and did
+much to cement together the rough material into a nucleus which was
+capable of standing without any friction the strains of nearly three
+years of crowded, isolated and difficult life, ably seconded by Victor
+Campbell, first officer, commonly called The Mate, in whose hands the
+routine and discipline of the ship was most efficiently maintained. I was
+very frightened of Campbell.
+
+Scott himself was unable to travel all the way out to New Zealand in the
+Terra Nova owing to the business affairs of the expedition, but he
+joined the ship from Simon's Bay to Melbourne.
+
+The voyage itself on the sailing track from Madeira to the Cape was at
+first uneventful. We soon got into hot weather, and at night every
+available bit of deck space was used on which to sleep. The more
+particular slung hammocks, but generally men used such deck space as they
+could find, such as the top of the icehouse, where they were free from
+the running tackle, and rolled themselves into their blankets. So long as
+we had a wind we ran under sail alone, and on those days men would bathe
+over the side in the morning, but when the engines were going we could
+get the hose in the morning, which was preferred, especially after a
+shark was seen making for Bowers' red breast as he swam.
+
+The scene on deck in the early morning was always interesting. All hands
+were roused before six and turned on to the pumps, for the ship was
+leaking considerably. Normally, the well showed about ten inches of water
+when the ship was dry. Before pumping, the sinker would show anything
+over two feet. The ship was generally dry after an hour to an hour and a
+half's pumping, and by that time we had had quite enough of it. As soon
+as the officer of the watch had given the order, "Vast pumping," the
+first thing to do was to strip, and the deck was dotted with men trying
+to get the maximum amount of water from the sea in a small bucket let
+down on a line from the moving ship. First efforts in this direction
+would have been amusing had it not been for the caustic eye of the 'Mate'
+on the bridge. If the reader ever gets the chance to try the experiment,
+especially in a swell, he will soon find himself with neither bucket nor
+water. The poor Mate was annoyed by the loss of his buckets.
+
+Everybody was working very hard during these days; shifting coal, reefing
+and furling sail aloft, hauling on the ropes on deck, together with
+magnetic and meteorological observations, tow-netting, collecting and
+making skins and so forth. During the first weeks there was more cargo
+stowing and paintwork than at other times, otherwise the work ran in
+very much the same lines all the way out--a period of nearly five months.
+On July 1 we were overhauled by the only ship we ever saw, so far as I
+can remember, during all that time, the Inverclyde, a barque out from
+Glasgow to Buenos Ayres. It was an oily, calm day with a sea like glass,
+and she looked, as Wilson quoted, "like a painted ship upon a painted
+ocean," as she lay with all sail set.
+
+We picked up the N.E. Trade two days later, being then north of the Cape
+Verde Islands (lat. 22° 28´ N., long. 23° 5´ W. at noon). It was a
+Sunday, and there was a general 'make and mend' throughout the ship, the
+first since we sailed. During the day we ran from deep clear blue water
+into a darkish and thick green sea. This remarkable change of colour,
+which was observed by the Discovery Expedition in much the same place,
+was supposed to be due to a large mass of pelagic fauna called plankton.
+The plankton, which drifts upon the surface of the sea, is distinct from
+the nekton, which swims submerged. The Terra Nova was fitted with tow
+nets with very fine meshes for collecting these inhabitants of the open
+sea, together with the algae, or minute plant organisms, which afford
+them an abundant food supply.
+
+The plankton nets can be lowered when the ship is running at full speed,
+and a great many such hauls were made during the expedition.
+
+July 5 had an unpleasant surprise in store. At 10.30 A.M. the ship's bell
+rang and there was a sudden cry of "Fire quarters." Two Minimax fire
+extinguishers finished the fire, which was in the lazarette, and was
+caused by a lighted lamp which was upset by the roll of the ship. The
+result was a good deal of smoke, a certain amount of water below, and
+some singed paper, but we realized that a fire on such an old wooden ship
+would be a very serious matter, and greater care was taken after this.
+
+Such a voyage shows Nature in her most attractive form, and always there
+was a man close by whose special knowledge was in the whales, porpoises,
+dolphins, fish, birds, parasites, plankton, radium and other things which
+we watched through microscopes or field-glasses. Nelson caught a
+Portuguese man-of-war (Arethusa) as it sailed past us close under the
+counter. These animals are common, but few can realize how beautiful they
+are until they see them, fresh-coloured from the deep sea, floating and
+sailing in a big glass bowl. It vainly tried to sail out, and vigorously
+tried to sting all who touched it. Wilson painted it.
+
+From first to last the study of life of all kinds was of absorbing
+interest to all on board, and, when we landed in the Antarctic, as well
+as on the ship, everybody worked and was genuinely interested in all that
+lived and had its being on the fringe of that great sterile continent.
+Not only did officers who had no direct interest in anything but their
+own particular work or scientific subject spend a large part of their
+time in helping, making notes and keeping observations, but the seamen
+also had a large share in the specimens and data of all descriptions
+which have been brought back. Several of them became good pupils for
+skinning birds.
+
+Meanwhile, perhaps the constant cries of "Whale, whale!" or "New bird!"
+or "Dolphins!" sometimes found the biologist concerned less eager to
+leave his meal than the observers were to call him forth. Good
+opportunities of studying the life of sea birds, whales, dolphins and
+other forms of life in the sea, even those comparatively few forms which
+are visible from the surface, are not too common. A modern liner moves so
+quickly that it does not attract life to it in the same way as a
+slow-moving ship like the Terra Nova, and when specimens are seen they
+are gone almost as soon as they are observed. Those who wish to study sea
+life--and there is much to be done in this field--should travel by tramp
+steamers, or, better still, sailing vessels.
+
+Dolphins were constantly playing under the bows of the ship, giving a
+very good chance for identification, and whales were also frequently
+sighted, and would sometimes follow the ship, as did also hundreds of sea
+birds, petrels, shearwaters and albatross. It says much for the interest
+and keenness of the officers on board that a complete hourly log was
+kept from beginning to end of the numbers and species which were seen,
+generally with the most complete notes as to any peculiarity or habit
+which was noticed. It is to be hoped that full use will be made, by those
+in charge of the working out of these results, of these logs which were
+kept so thoroughly and sometimes under such difficult circumstances and
+conditions of weather and sea. Though many helped, this log was largely
+the work of Pennell, who was an untiring and exact observer.
+
+We lost the N.E. Trade about July 7, and ran into the Doldrums. On the
+whole we could not complain of the weather. We never had a gale or big
+sea until after leaving South Trinidad, and though an old ship with no
+modern ventilation is bound to be stuffy in the tropics, we lived and
+slept on deck so long as it was not raining. If it rained at night, as it
+frequently does in this part of the world, a number of rolled-up forms
+could be heard discussing as to whether it was best to stick it above or
+face the heat below; and if the rain persisted, sleepy and somewhat
+snappy individuals were to be seen trying to force themselves and a
+maximum amount of damp bedding down the wardroom gangway. At the same
+time a thick wooden ship will keep fairly cool in the not severe heat
+through which we passed.
+
+One want which was unavoidable was the lack of fresh water. There was
+none to wash in, though a glass of water was allowed for shaving! With an
+unlimited amount of sea water this may not seem much of a hardship; nor
+is it unless you have very dirty work to do. But inasmuch as some of the
+officers were coaling almost daily, they found that any amount of cold
+sea water, even with a euphemistically named 'sea-water soap,' had no
+very great effect in removing the coal dust. The alternative was to make
+friends with the engine-room authorities and draw some water from the
+boilers.
+
+Perhaps therefore it was not with purely disinterested motives that some
+of us undertook to do the stoking during the morning watch, and also
+later in the day during our passage through the tropics, since the
+engine-room staff was reduced by sickness. A very short time will
+convince anybody that the ease with which men accustomed to this work get
+through their watch is mainly due to custom and method. The ship had no
+forced draught nor modern ventilating apparatus. Four hours in the
+boiling fiery furnace which the Terra Nova's stokehold formed in the
+tropics, unless there was a good wind to blow down the one canvas shaft,
+was a real test of staying power, and the actual shovelling of the coal
+into the furnaces, one after the other, was as child's play to handling
+the 'devil,' as the weighty instrument used for breaking up the clinker
+and shaping the fire was called. The boilers were cylindrical marine or
+return tube boilers, the furnaces being six feet long by three feet wide,
+slightly lower at the back than at the front. The fire on the bars was
+kept wedge-shape, that is, some nine inches high at the back, tapering to
+about six inches in front against the furnace doors. The furnaces were
+corrugated for strength. We were supposed to keep the pressure on the
+gauge between 70 and 80, but it wanted some doing. For the most part it
+was done.
+
+We did, however, get uncomfortable days with the rain sluicing down and a
+high temperature--everything wet on deck and below. But it had its
+advantages in the fresh water it produced. Every bucket was on duty, and
+the ship's company stripped naked and ran about the decks or sat in the
+stream between the laboratories and wardroom skylight and washed their
+very dirty clothes. The stream came through into our bunks, and no amount
+of caulking ever stopped it. To sleep with a constant drip of water
+falling upon you is a real trial. These hot, wet days were more trying to
+the nerves than the months of wet, rough but cooler weather to come, and
+it says much for the good spirit which prevailed that there was no
+friction, though we were crowded together like sardines in a tin.
+
+July 12 was a typical day (lat. 4° 57´ N., long. 22° 4´ W.). A very hot,
+rainy night, followed by a squall which struck us while we were having
+breakfast, so we went up and set all sail, which took until about 9.30
+A.M. We then sat in the water on the deck and washed clothes until just
+before mid-day, when the wind dropped, though the rain continued. So we
+went up and furled all sail, a tedious business when the sails are wet
+and heavy. Then work on cargo or coal till 7 P.M., supper, and glad to
+get to sleep.
+
+On July 15 (lat. 0° 40´ N., long. 21° 56´ W.) we crossed the Line with
+all pomp and ceremony. At 1.15 P.M. Neptune in the person of Seaman Evans
+hailed and stopped the ship. He came on board with his motley company,
+who solemnly paced aft to the break of the poop, where he was met by
+Lieutenant Evans. His wife (Browning), a doctor (Paton), barber
+(Cheetham), two policemen and four bears, of whom Atkinson and Oates were
+two, grouped themselves round him while the barrister (Abbott) read an
+address to the captain, and then the procession moved round to the bath,
+a sail full of water slung in the break of the poop on the starboard
+side.
+
+Nelson was the first victim. He was examined, then overhauled by the
+doctor, given a pill and a dose, and handed over to the barber, who
+lathered him with a black mixture consisting of soot, flour and water,
+was shaved by Cheetham with a great wooden razor, and then the policemen
+tipped him backwards into the bath where the bears were waiting. As he
+was being pushed in he seized the barber and took him with him.
+
+Wright, Lillie, Simpson and Levick followed, with about six of the crew.
+Finally Gran, the Norwegian, was caught as an extra--never having been
+across the Line in a British ship. But he threw the pill-distributing
+doctor over his head into the bath, after which he was lathered very
+gingerly, and Cheetham having been in once, refused to shave him at all,
+so they tipped him in and wished they had never caught him.
+
+The procession re-formed, and Neptune presented certificates to those who
+had been initiated. The proceedings closed with a sing-song in the
+evening.
+
+These sing-songs were of very frequent occurrence. The expedition was
+very fond of singing, though there was hardly anybody in it who could
+sing. The usual custom at this time was that every one had to contribute
+a song in turn all round the table after supper. If he could not sing he
+had to compose a limerick. If he could not compose a limerick he had to
+contribute a fine towards the wine fund, which was to make some
+much-discussed purchases when we reached Cape Town. At other times we
+played the most childish games--there was one called 'The Priest of the
+Parish has lost his Cap,' over which we laughed till we cried, and much
+money was added to the wine fund.
+
+As always happens, certain songs became conspicuous for a time. One of
+these I am sure that Campbell, who was always at work and upon whom the
+routine of the ship depended, will never forget. I do not know who it was
+that started singing
+
+    "Everybody works but Father,
+    That poor old man,"
+
+but Campbell, who was the only father on board and whose hair was
+popularly supposed to be getting thin on the top of his head, may
+remember.
+
+We began to make preparations for a run ashore--a real adventure on an
+uninhabited and unknown island. The sailing track of ships from England
+round the Cape of Good Hope lies out towards the coast of Brazil, and not
+far from the mysterious island of South Trinidad, 680 miles east of
+Brazil, in 20° 30´ S. and 29° 30´ W.
+
+This island is difficult of access, owing to its steep rocky coast and
+the big Atlantic swell which seldom ceases. It has therefore been little
+visited, and as it is infested with land crabs the stay of the few
+parties which have been there has been short. But scientifically it is of
+interest, not only for the number of new species which may be obtained
+there, but also for the extraordinary attitude of wild sea birds towards
+human beings whom they have never learnt to fear. Before we left England
+it had been decided to attempt a landing and spend a day there if we
+should pass sufficiently near to it.
+
+Those who have visited it in the past include the astronomer Halley, who
+occupied it, in 1700. Sir James Ross, outward bound for the Antarctic in
+1839, spent a day there, landing "in a small cove a short distance to
+the northward of the Nine Pin Rock of Halley, the surf on all other parts
+being too great to admit of it without hazarding the destruction of our
+boats." Ross also writes that "Horsburgh mentions ... 'that the island
+abounds with wild pig and goats; one of the latter was seen. With the
+view to add somewhat to the stock of useful creatures, a cock and two
+hens were put on shore; they seemed to enjoy the change, and, I have no
+doubt, in so unfrequented a situation, and so delightful a climate, will
+quickly increase in numbers.' I am afraid we did not find any of their
+descendants, nor those of the pig and goats."[34] I doubt whether fowls
+would survive the land crabs very long. There are many wild birds on the
+island, however, which may feed the shipwrecked, and also a depôt left by
+the Government for that purpose. Another visitor was Knight, who wrote a
+book called The Cruise of the Falcon, concerning his efforts to discover
+the treasure which is said to have been left there. Scott also visited it
+in the Discovery in 1901, when a new petrel was found which was
+afterwards called 'Oestrelata wilsoni,' after the same 'Uncle Bill' who
+was zoologist of both Scott's Expeditions.
+
+And so it came about that on the evening of July 25 we furled sail and
+lay five miles from South Trinidad with all our preparations made for a
+very thorough search of this island of treasure. Everything was to be
+captured, alive or dead, animal, vegetable or mineral.
+
+At half-past five the next morning we were steaming slowly towards what
+looked like a quite impregnable face of rock, with bare cliffs standing
+straight out of the water, which, luckily for us, was comparatively
+smooth. As we coasted to try and find a landing-place the sun was rising
+behind the island, which reaches to a height of two thousand feet, and
+the jagged cliffs stood up finely against the rosy sky.
+
+[Illustration: SOUTH TRINIDAD--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+We dropped our anchor to the south of the island and a boat's crew left
+to prospect for a landing-place, whilst Wilson seized the opportunity to
+shoot some birds as specimens, including two species of frigate bird,
+and the seamen caught some of the multitudinous fish. We also fired shots
+at the sharks which soon thronged round the ship, and about which we were
+to think more before the day was done.
+
+The boat came back with the news that a possible landing-place had been
+found, and the landing parties got off about 8.30. The landing was very
+bad--a ledge of rock weathered out of the cliff to our right formed, as
+it were, a staging along which it was possible to pass on to a steeply
+shelving talus slope in front of us. The sea being comparatively smooth,
+everybody was landed dry, with their guns and collecting gear.
+
+The best account of South Trinidad is contained in a letter written by
+Bowers to his mother, which is printed here. But some brief notes which I
+jotted down at the time may also be of interest, since they give an
+account of a different part of the island:
+
+"Having made a small depôt of cartridges, together with a little fluffy
+tern and a tern's egg, which Wilson found on the rocks, we climbed
+westward, round and up, to a point from which we could see into the East
+Bay. This was our first stand, and we shot several white-breasted petrel
+(Oestrelata trinitatis), and also black-breasted petrel (Oestrelata
+arminjoniana). Later on we got over the brow of a cliff where the petrel
+were nesting. We took two nests, on each of which a white-breasted and a
+black-breasted petrel were paired. Wilson caught one in his hands and I
+caught another on its nest; it really did not know whether it ought to
+fly away or not. This gives rise to an interesting problem, since these
+two birds have been classified as different species, and it now looks as
+though they are the same.
+
+"The gannets and terns were quite extraordinary, like all the living
+things there. If you stay still enough the terns perch on your head. In
+any case they will not fly off the rocks till you are two or three feet
+away. Several gannets were caught in the men's hands. All the fish which
+the biologist collected to-day can travel quite fast on land. When the
+Discovery was here Wilson saw a fish come out of the sea, seize a land
+crab about eighteen inches away and take it back into the water.
+
+"The land crabs were all over the place in thousands; it seems probable
+that their chief enemies are themselves. They are regular cannibals.
+
+"Then we did a real long climb northwards, over rocks and tufty grass
+till 1.30 P.M. From the point we had reached we could see both sides of
+the island, and the little Martin Vas islands in the distance.
+
+"We found lots of little tern and terns' eggs, lying out on the bare rock
+with no nest at all. Hooper also brought us two little gannets--all
+fluffy, but even at this age larger than a rook. As we got further up we
+began to come across the fossilized trees for which the island is well
+known.
+
+"Four or five Captain biscuits made an excellent lunch, and afterwards we
+started to the real top of the island, a hill rising to the west of us.
+It was covered with a high scrubby bush and rocks, and was quite thick;
+in fact there was more vegetation here than on all the rest we had seen,
+and in making our way through it we had to keep calling in order to keep
+touch with one another.
+
+"The tree ferns were numerous, but stunted. The gannets were sleeping on
+the tops of the bushes, and some of the crabs had climbed up the bushes
+and were sunning themselves on the top. These crabs were round us in
+thousands--I counted seven watching me out of one crack between two
+rocks.
+
+"We sat down under the lee of the summit, and thought it would not be bad
+to be thrown away on a desert island, little thinking how near we were to
+being stranded, for a time at any rate.
+
+"The crabs gathered round us in a circle, with their eyes turning towards
+us--as if they were waiting for us to die to come and eat us. One big
+fellow left his place in the circle and waddled up to my feet and
+examined my boots. First with one claw and then with the other he took a
+taste of my boot. He went away obviously disgusted: one could almost see
+him shake his head.
+
+"We collected, as well as our birds and eggs, some spiders, very large
+grasshoppers, wood-lice, cockchafers, with big and small centipedes. In
+fact, the place teemed with insect life. I should add that their names
+are given rather from the general appearance of the animals than from
+their true scientific classes.
+
+"We had a big and fast scramble down, and about half way, when we could
+watch the sea breaking on the rocks far below, we saw that there was a
+bigger swell running. It was getting late, and we made our way down as
+fast as we could--denting our guns as we slipped on the rocks.
+
+"The lower we got the bigger the sea which had risen in our absence
+appeared to be. No doubt it was the swell of a big disturbance far away,
+and when we reached the débris slope where we had landed, flanked by big
+cliffs, we found everybody gathered there and the boats lying off--it
+being quite impossible for them to get near the shore.
+
+"They had just got a life-line ashore on a buoy. Bowers went out on to
+the rocks and secured it. We put our guns and specimens into a pile, out
+of reach, as we thought, of any possible sea. But just afterwards two
+very large waves took us--we were hauling in the rope, and must have been
+a good thirty feet above the base of the wave. It hit us hard and knocked
+us all over the place, and wetted the guns and specimens above us through
+and through.
+
+"We then stowed all gear and specimens well out of the reach of the seas,
+and then went out through the surf one by one, passing ourselves out on
+the line. It was ticklish work, but Hooper was the only one who really
+had a bad time. He did not get far enough out among the rocks which
+fringed the steep slope from which he started as a wave began to roll
+back. The next wave caught him and crashed him back, and he let go of the
+line. He was under quite a long time, and as the waves washed back all
+that we could do was to try and get the line to him. Luckily he succeeded
+in finding the slack of the line and got out.
+
+"When we first got down to the shore and things were looking nasty,
+Wilson sat down on the top of a rock and ate a biscuit in the coolest
+possible manner. It was an example to avoid all panicking, for he did
+not want the biscuit.
+
+"He remarked afterwards to me, apropos to Hooper, that it was a curious
+thing that a number of men, knowing that there was nothing they could do,
+could quietly watch a man fighting for his life, and he did not think
+that any but the British temperament could do so. I also found out later
+that he and I had both had a touch of cramp while waiting for our turn to
+swim out through the surf."
+
+The following is Bowers' letter:
+
+    "_Sunday, 31st July._
+
+    "The past week has been so crowded with incident, really, that I
+    don't know where to start. Getting to land made me long for the
+    mails from you, which are such a feature of getting to port.
+    However, the strange uninhabited island which we visited will
+    have to make up for my disappointment till we get to Capetown--or
+    rather Simon's Town. Campbell and I sighted S. Trinidad from the
+    fore yardarm on 25th, and on 26th, at first thing in the morning,
+    we crept up to an anchorage in a sea of glass. The S.E. Trades,
+    making a considerable sea, were beating on the eastern sides,
+    while the western was like a mill-pond. The great rocks and hills
+    to over 2000 feet towered above us as we went in very close in
+    order to get our anchor down, as the water is very deep to quite
+    a short distance from the shore. West Bay was our selection, and
+    so clear was the water that we could see the anchor at the bottom
+    in 15 fathoms. A number of sharks and other fish appeared at once
+    and several birds. Evans wanted to explore, so Oates, Rennick,
+    Atkinson and myself went away with him--pulling the boat. We
+    examined the various landings and found them all rocky and
+    dangerous. There was a slight surf although the sea looked like a
+    mill-pond. We finally decided on a previously unused place, which
+    was a little inlet among the rocks.
+
+    "There was nothing but rock, but there was a little nook where we
+    decided to try and land. We returned to breakfast and found that
+    Wilson and Cherry-Garrard had shot several Frigate and other
+    birds from the ship, the little Norwegian boat--called a
+    Pram--being used to pick them up. By way of explanation I may say
+    that Wilson is a specialist in birds and is making a collection
+    for the British Museum.
+
+    "We all landed as soon as possible. Wilson and Garrard with their
+    guns for birds: Oates with the dogs, and Atkinson with a small
+    rifle: Lillie after plants and geological specimens: Nelson and
+    Simpson along the shore after sea beasts, etc.: and last but not
+    least came the entomological party, under yours truly, with
+    Wright and, later, Evans, as assistants. Pennell joined up with
+    Wilson, so altogether we were ready to 'do' the island. I have
+    taken over the collection of insects for the expedition, as the
+    other scientists all have so much to do that they were only too
+    glad to shove the small beasts on me. Atkinson is a specialist in
+    parasites: it is called 'Helminthology.' I never heard that name
+    before. He turns out the interior of every beast that is killed,
+    and being also a surgeon, I suppose the subject must be
+    interesting. White terns abounded on the island. They were
+    ghost-like and so tame that they would sit on one's hat. They
+    laid their eggs on pinnacles of rock without a vestige of nest,
+    and singly. They looked just like stones. I suppose this was a
+    protection from the land-crabs, about which you will have heard.
+    The land-crabs of Trinidad are a byword and they certainly
+    deserve the name, as they abound from sea-level to the top of the
+    island. The higher up the bigger they were. The surface of the
+    hills and valleys was covered with loose boulders, and the whole
+    island being of volcanic origin, coarse grass is everywhere, and
+    at about 1500 feet is an area of tree ferns and subtropical
+    vegetation, extending up to nearly the highest parts. The
+    withered trees of a former forest are everywhere and their
+    existence unexplained, though Lillie had many ingenious theories.
+    The island has been in our hands, the Germans', and is now
+    Brazilian. Nobody has been able to settle there permanently,
+    owing to the land-crabs. These also exclude mammal life. Captain
+    Kidd made a treasure depôt there, and some five years ago a chap
+    named Knight lived on the island for six months with a party of
+    Newcastle miners--trying to get at it. He had the place all
+    right, but a huge landslide has covered up three-quarters of a
+    million of the pirate's gold. The land-crabs are little short of
+    a nightmare. They peep out at you from every nook and boulder.
+    Their dead staring eyes follow your every step as if to say, 'If
+    only you will drop down we will do the rest.' To lie down and
+    sleep on any part of the island would be suicidal. Of course,
+    Knight had a specially cleared place with all sorts of
+    precautions, otherwise he would never have survived these beasts,
+    which even tried to nibble your boots as you stood--staring hard
+    at you the whole time. One feature that would soon send a lonely
+    man off his chump is that no matter how many are in sight they
+    are all looking at you, and they follow step by step with a
+    sickly deliberation. They are all yellow and pink, and next to
+    spiders seem the most loathsome creatures on God's earth. Talking
+    about spiders [Bowers always had the greatest horror of
+    spiders]--I have to collect them as well as insects. Needless to
+    say I caught them with a butterfly net, and never touched one.
+    Only five species were known before, and I found fifteen or
+    more--at any rate I have fifteen for certain. Others helped me to
+    catch them, of course. Another interesting item to science is the
+    fact that I caught a moth hitherto unknown to exist on the
+    island, also various flies, ants, etc. Altogether it was a most
+    successful day. Wilson got dozens of birds, and Lillie plants,
+    etc. On our return to the landing-place we found to our horror
+    that a southerly swell was rolling in, and great breakers were
+    bursting on the beach. About five P.M. we all collected and
+    looked at the whaler and pram on one side of the rollers and
+    ourselves on the other. First it was impossible to take off the
+    guns and specimens, so we made them all up to leave for the
+    morrow. Second, a sick man had come ashore for exercise, and he
+    could not be got off: finally, Atkinson stayed ashore with him.
+    The breakers made the most awe-inspiring cauldron in our little
+    nook, and it meant a tough swim for all of us. Three of us swam
+    out first and took a line to the pram, and finally we got a good
+    rope from the whaler, which had anchored well out, to the shore.
+    I then manoeuvred the pram, and everybody plunged into the surf
+    and hauled himself out with the rope. All well, but minus our
+    belongings, and got back to the ship; very wet and ravenous was a
+    mild way to put it. During my 12 to 4 watch that night the surf
+    roared like thunder, and the ship herself was rolling like
+    anything, and looked horribly close to the shore. Of course she
+    was quite safe really. It transpired that Atkinson and the seaman
+    had a horrible night with salt water soaked food, and the crabs
+    and white terns which sat and watched them all night, squawking
+    in chorus whenever they moved. It must have been horrible, though
+    I would like to have stayed, and had I known anybody was staying
+    would have volunteered. This with the noise of the surf and the
+    cold made it pretty rotten for them. In the morning, Evans,
+    Rennick, Oates and I, with two seamen and Gran, took the whaler
+    and pram in to rescue the maroons. At first we thought we would
+    do it by a rocket line to the end of the sheer cliff. The
+    impossibility of such an idea was at once evident, so Gran and I
+    went in close in the pram, and hove them lines to get off the
+    gear first. I found the spoon-shaped pram a wonderful boat to
+    handle. You could go in to the very edge of the breaking surf,
+    lifted like a cork on top of the waves, and as long as you kept
+    head to sea and kept your own head, you need never have got on
+    the rocks, as the tremendous back-swish took you out like a shot
+    every time. It was quite exciting, however, as we would slip in
+    close in a lull, and the chaps in the whaler would yell, 'Look
+    out!' if a big wave passed them, in which case you would pull out
+    for dear life. Our first lines carried away, and then, with
+    others, Rennick and I this time took the pram while Atkinson got
+    as near the edge as safe to throw us the gear. I was pulling, and
+    by watching our chances we rescued the cameras and glasses, once
+    being carried over 12 feet above the rocks and only escaping by
+    the back-swish. Then the luckiest incident of the day occurred,
+    when in a lull we got our sick man down, and I jumped out, and he
+    in, as I steadied the boat's stern. The next minute the boat
+    flew out on the back-wash with the seaman absolutely dry, and I
+    was of course enveloped in foam and blackness two seconds later
+    by a following wave. Twice the day before this had happened, but
+    this time for a moment I thought, 'Where will my head strike?' as
+    I was like a feather in a breeze in that swirl. When I banked it
+    was about 15 feet above, and, very scratched and winded, I clung
+    on with my nails and scrambled up higher. The next wave, a bigger
+    one, nearly had me, but I was just too high to be sucked back.
+    Atkinson and I then started getting the gear down, Evans having
+    taken my place in the pram. By running down between waves we hove
+    some items into the boat, including the guns and rifles, which I
+    went right down to throw. These were caught and put into the
+    boat, but Evans was too keen to save a bunch of boots that
+    Atkinson threw down, and the next minute the pram passed over my
+    head and landed high and dry, like a bridge, over the rocks
+    between which I was wedged. I then scrambled out as the next wave
+    washed her still higher, right over and over, with Evans and
+    Rennick just out in time. The next wave--a huge one--picked her
+    up, and out she bumped over the rocks and out to sea she went,
+    water-logged, with the guns, fortunately, jammed under the
+    thwarts. She was rescued by the whaler, baled out, and then Gran
+    and one of the seamen manned her battered remains again, and we,
+    unable to save the gear otherwise, lashed it to life-buoys, threw
+    it into the sea and let it drift out with the back-wash to be
+    picked up by the pram.
+
+    "Clothes, watches and ancient guns, rifles, ammunition, birds
+    (dead) and all specimens were, with the basket of crockery and
+    food, soaked with salt water. However, the choice was between
+    that or leaving them altogether, as anybody would have said had
+    they seen the huge rollers breaking among the rocks and washing
+    30 to 40 feet up with the spray; in fact, we were often knocked
+    over and submerged for a time, clinging hard to some rock or one
+    of the ropes for dear life. Evans swam off first. Then I was
+    about half an hour trying to rescue a hawser and some lines
+    entangled among the rocks. It was an amusing job. I would wait
+    for a lull, run down and haul away, staying under for smaller
+    waves and running up the rocks like a hare when the warning came
+    from the boat that a series of big ones were coming in. I finally
+    rescued most of it--had to cut off some and got it to the place
+    opposite the boat, and with Rennick secured it and sent it out to
+    sea to be picked up. My pair of brown tennis shoes (old ones) had
+    been washed off my feet in one of the scrambles, so I was wearing
+    a pair of sea-boots--Nelson's, I found--which, fortunately for
+    him, was one of the few pairs saved. The pram came in, and
+    waiting for a back-wash Rennick swam off. I ran down after the
+    following wave, and securing my green hat, which by the bye is a
+    most useful asset, struck out through the boiling, and grabbed
+    the pram safely as we were lifted on the crest of an immense
+    roller. However, we were just beyond its breaking-point, so all
+    was well, and we arrived aboard after eight hours' wash and
+    wetness, and none the worse, except for a few scratches, and
+    yours truly in high spirits. We stayed there that night, and the
+    following, Thursday, morning left. Winds are not too favourable
+    so far, as we dropped the S.E. Trades almost immediately, and
+    these are the variables between the Trades and the Westerlies.
+    Still 2500 miles off our destination. Evans has therefore decided
+    to steer straight for Simon's Town and miss out the other
+    islands. It is a pity, but as it is winter down here, and the
+    worst month of the year for storms at Tristan Da Cunha, it is
+    perhaps just as well. I am longing to get to the Cape to have
+    your letters and hear all about you. Except for the absence of
+    news, life aboard is much to be desired. I simply love it, and
+    enjoy every day of my existence here. Time flies like anything,
+    and though it must have been long to you, to us it goes like the
+    wind--so different to that fortnight on the passage home from
+    India."[35]
+
+After the return of the boat's crew we left South Trinidad, and the
+zoologists had a busy time trying to save as many as possible of the bird
+skins which had been procured. They skinned on all through the following
+night, and, considering that the birds had been lying out in the tropics
+for twenty-four hours soaked with sea-water and had been finally capsized
+in the overturned boat, the result was not so disappointing as was
+expected. But the eggs and many other articles were lost. Since the
+black-breasted and white-breasted petrels were seen flying and nesting
+paired together, it is reasonable to suppose that their former
+classification as two separate species will have to be revised.
+
+Soon after leaving South Trinidad we picked up our first big long swell,
+logged at 8, and began to learn that the Terra Nova can roll as few ships
+can. This was followed by a stiff gale on our port beam, and we took over
+our first green seas. Bowers wrote home as follows:
+
+    _August 7th, Sunday._
+
+"All chances of going to Tristan are over, and we are at last booming
+along with strong Westerlies with the enormous Southern rollers lifting
+us like a cork on their crests. We have had a stiff gale and a very high
+sea, which is now over, though it is still blowing a moderate gale, and
+the usual crowd of Albatross, Mollymawks, Cape Hens, Cape Pigeons, etc.,
+are following us. These will be our companions down to the South.
+Wilson's idea is that, as the prevailing winds round the forties are
+Westerlies, these birds simply fly round and round the world--via Cape
+Horn, New Zealand and the Cape of Good Hope. We have had a really good
+opportunity now of testing the ship's behaviour, having been becalmed
+with a huge beam swell rolling 35° each way, and having stood out a heavy
+gale with a high sea. In both she has turned up trumps, and really I
+think a better little sea boat never floated. Compared to the Loch
+Torridon--which was always awash in bad weather--we are as dry as a cork,
+and never once shipped a really heavy sea. Of course a wooden ship has
+some buoyancy of herself, and we are no exception. We are certainly an
+exception for general seaworthiness--if not for speed--and a safer,
+sounder ship there could not be. The weather is now cool too--cold, some
+people call it. I am still comfortable in cotton shirts and whites, while
+some are wearing Shetland gear. Nearly everybody is provided with
+Shetland things. I am glad you have marked mine, as they are all so much
+alike. I am certainly as well provided with private gear as anybody, and
+far better than most, so, being as well a generator of heat in myself, I
+should be O.K. in any temperature. By the bye Evans and Wilson are very
+keen on my being in the Western Party, while Campbell wants me with him
+in the Eastern Party. I have not asked to go ashore, but am keen on
+anything and am ready to do anything. In fact there is so much going on
+that I feel I should like to be in all three places at once--East, West
+and Ship."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+    [34] Ross, _Voyage to the Southern Seas_, vol. i. pp. 22-24.
+
+    [35] Bowers' letter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+MAKING OUR EASTING DOWN
+
+
+"Ten minutes to four, sir!"
+
+It is an oilskinned and dripping seaman, and the officer of the watch, or
+his so-called snotty, as the case may be, wakes sufficiently to ask:
+
+"What's it like?"
+
+"Two hoops, sir!" answers the seaman, and makes his way out.
+
+The sleepy man who has been wakened wedges himself more securely into his
+six foot by two--which is all his private room on the ship--and collects
+his thoughts, amid the general hubbub of engines, screw and the roll of
+articles which have worked loose, to consider how he will best prevent
+being hurled out of his bunk in climbing down, and just where he left his
+oilskins and sea-boots.
+
+If, as is possible, he sleeps in the Nursery, his task may not be so
+simple as it may seem, for this cabin, which proclaims on one of the
+beams that it is designed to accommodate four seamen, will house six
+scientists or pseudo-scientists, in addition to a pianola. Since these
+scientists are the youngest in the expedition their cabin is named the
+Nursery.
+
+Incidentally it forms also the gangway from the wardroom to the
+engine-room, from which it is divided only by a wooden door, which has a
+bad habit of swinging open and shutting with the roll of the ship and the
+weight of the oilskins hung upon it, and as it does so, wave upon wave,
+the clatter of the engines advances and recedes.
+
+If, however, it is the officer of the watch he will be in a smaller
+cabin farther aft which he shares with one other man only, and his
+troubles are simplified.
+
+Owing to the fact that the seams in the deck above have travelled many
+voyages, and have been strained in addition by the boat davits and
+deck-houses built on the poop, a good deal of water from this part of the
+deck, which is always awash in bad weather, finds its way below, that is
+into the upper bunks of our cabins. In order that only a minimum of this
+may find its way into our blankets a series of shoots, invented and
+carefully tended by the occupants of these bunks, are arranged to catch
+this water as it falls and carry it over our heads on to the deck of the
+cabin.
+
+Thus it is that when this sleepy officer or scientist clambers down on to
+the deck he will, if he is lucky, find the water there, instead of
+leaving it in his bunk. He searches round for his sea-boots, gets into
+his oilskins, curses if the strings of his sou'wester break as he tries
+to tie them extra firmly round his neck, and pushes along to the open
+door into the wardroom. It is still quite dark, for the sun does not rise
+for another hour and a half, but the diminished light from the swinging
+oil-lamp which hangs there shows him a desolate early morning scene which
+he comes to hate--especially if he is inclined to be sick.
+
+As likely as not more than one sea has partially found its way down
+during the night, and a small stream runs over the floor each time the
+ship rolls. The white oilcloth has slipped off the table, and various
+oddments, dirty cocoa cups, ash-trays, and other litter from the night
+are rolling about too. The tin cups and plates and crockery in the pantry
+forrard of the wardroom come together with a sickening crash.
+
+The screw keeps up a ceaseless chonk-chonk-chonk (pause),
+chonk-chonk-chonk (pause), chonk-chonk-chonk.
+
+Watching his opportunity he slides down across the wet linoleum to the
+starboard side, whence the gangway runs up to the chart-house and so out
+on to the deck. Having glanced at the barograph slung up in the
+chart-room, and using all his strength to force the door out enough to
+squeeze through, he scrambles out into blackness.
+
+The wind is howling through the rigging, the decks are awash. It is hard
+to say whether it is raining, for the spray cut off by the wind makes
+rain a somewhat insignificant event. As he makes his way up on to the
+bridge, not a very lofty climb, he looks to see what sail is set, and
+judges so far as he can the force of the wind.
+
+Campbell, for he is the officer of the morning watch (4 A.M.-8 A.M.) has
+a talk with the officer he is relieving, Bowers. He is given the course,
+the last hour's reading on the Cherub patent log trailing out over the
+stern, and the experiences of the middle watch of the wind, whether
+rising or falling or squalling, and its effect on the sails and the ship.
+"If you keep her on her present course, she's all right, but if you try
+and bring her up any more she begins to shake. And, by the way, Penelope
+wants to be called at 4.30." Bowers' 'snotty,' who is Oates, probably
+makes some ribald remarks, such as no midshipman should to a full
+lieutenant, and they both disappear below. Campbell's snotty, myself,
+appears about five minutes afterwards trying to look as though some
+important duty and not bed had kept him from making an earlier
+appearance. Meanwhile the leading hand musters the watch on deck and
+reports them all present.
+
+"How about that cocoa?" says Campbell. Cocoa is a useful thing in the
+morning watch, and Gran, who used to be Campbell's snotty, and whose
+English was not then perfect, said he was glad of a change because he
+"did not like being turned into a drumstick" (he meant a domestic).
+
+So cocoa is the word and the snotty starts on an adventurous voyage over
+the deck to the galley which is forrard; if he is unlucky he gets a sea
+over him on the way. Here he finds the hands of the watch, smoking and
+keeping warm, and he forages round for some hot water, which he gets
+safely back to the pantry down in the wardroom. Here he mixes the cocoa
+and collects sufficient clean mugs (if he can find them), spoons, sugar
+and biscuits to go round. These he carefully "chocks off" while he goes
+and calls Wilson and gives him his share--for Wilson gets up at 4.30
+every morning to sketch the sunrise, work at his scientific paintings
+and watch the sea-birds flying round the ship. Then back to the bridge,
+and woe betide him if he falls on the way, for then it all has to be done
+over again.
+
+Pennell, who sleeps under the chart table on the bridge, is also fed and
+inquires anxiously whether there are any stars showing. If there are he
+is up immediately to get an observation, and then retires below to work
+it out and to tabulate the endless masses of figures which go to make up
+the results of his magnetic observations--dip, horizontal force and total
+force of the magnetic needle.
+
+A squall strikes the ship. Two blasts of the whistle fetches the watch
+out, and "Stand by topsail halyards," "In inner jib," sends one hand to
+one halyard, the midshipman of the watch to the other, and the rest on to
+foc'stle and to the jib downhaul. Down comes the jib and the man standing
+by the fore topsail halyard, which is on the weather side of the galley,
+is drenched by the crests of two big seas which come over the rail.
+
+But he has little time to worry about things like this, for the wind is
+increasing and "Let go topsail halyards" comes through the megaphone from
+the bridge, and he wants all his wits to let go the halyard from the
+belaying-pins and jump clear of the rope tearing through the block as the
+topsail yard comes sliding down the mast.
+
+"Clew up" is the next order, and then "All hands furl fore and main upper
+topsails," and up we go out on to the yard. Luckily the dawn is just
+turning the sea grey and the ratlines begin to show up in relief. It is
+far harder for the first and middle watches, who have to go aloft in
+complete darkness. Once on the yard you are flattened against it by the
+wind. The order to take in sail always fetches Pennell out of his
+chart-house to come and take a hand.
+
+The two sodden sails safely furled--luckily they are small ones--the men
+reach the deck to find that the wind has shifted a little farther aft and
+they are to brace round. This finished, it is broad daylight, and the men
+set to work to coil up preparatory to washing decks--not that this would
+seem very necessary. Certainly there is no hose wanted this morning, and
+a general kind of tidying up and coiling down ropes is more what is done.
+
+The two stewards, Hooper, who is to land with the Main Party, and Neale,
+who will remain with the Ship's Party, turn out at six and rouse the
+afterguard for the pumps, a daily evolution, and soon an unholy din may
+be heard coming up from the wardroom. "Rouse and shine, rouse and shine:
+show a leg, show a leg" (a relic of the old days when seamen took their
+wives to sea). "Come on, Mr. Nelson, it's seven o'clock. All hands on the
+pumps!"
+
+From first to last these pumps were a source of much exercise and hearty
+curses. A wooden ship always leaks a little, but the amount of water
+taken in by the Terra Nova even in calm weather was extraordinary, and
+could not be traced until the ship was dry-docked in Lyttelton, New
+Zealand, and the forepart was flooded.
+
+In the meantime the ship had to be kept as dry as possible, a process
+which was not facilitated by forty gallons of oil which got loose during
+the rough weather after leaving South Trinidad, and found its way into
+the bilges. As we found later, some never-to-be-sufficiently-cursed
+stevedore had left one of the bottom boards only half-fitted into its
+neighbours. In consequence the coal dust and small pieces of coal, which
+was stowed in this hold, found their way into the bilges. Forty gallons
+of oil completed the havoc and the pumps would gradually get more and
+more blocked until it was necessary to send for Davies, the carpenter, to
+take parts of them to pieces and clear out the oily coal balls which had
+stopped them. This pumping would sometimes take till nearly eight, and
+then would always have to be repeated again in the evening, and sometimes
+every watch had to take a turn. At any rate it was good for our muscles.
+
+The pumps were placed amidships, just abaft the main mast, and ran down a
+shaft adjoining the after hatch, which led into the holds which were
+generally used for coal and patent fuel. The spout of the pump opened
+about a foot above the deck, and the plungers were worked by means of
+two horizontal handles, much as a bucket is wound up on the drum of a
+cottage well. Unfortunately, this part of the main deck, which is just
+forward of the break of the poop, is more subject to seas breaking
+inboard than any other part of the ship, so when the ship was labouring
+the task of those on the pump was not an enviable one. During the big
+gale going South the water was up to the men's waists as they tried to
+turn the handles, and the pumps themselves were feet under water.
+
+From England to Cape Town these small handles were a great inconvenience.
+There was very much pumping to be done and there were plenty of men to do
+it, but the handles were not long enough to allow more than four men to
+each handle. Also they gave no secure purchase when the ship was rolling
+heavily, and when a big roll came there was nothing to do but practically
+stop pumping and hold on, or you found yourself in the scuppers.
+
+At Cape Town a great improvement was made by extending the crank handles
+right across the decks, the outside end turning in a socket under the
+rail. Fourteen men could then get a good purchase on the handles and
+pumping became a more pleasant exercise and less of a nuisance.
+
+Periodically the well was sounded by an iron rod being lowered on the end
+of a rope, by which the part that came up wet showed the depth of water
+left in the bilge. When this had been reduced to about a foot in the
+well, the ship was practically dry, and the afterguard free to bathe and
+go to breakfast.
+
+Meanwhile the hands of the watch had been employed on ropes and sails as
+the wind made necessary, and, when running under steam as well as sail,
+hoisting ashes up the two shoots from the ash-pits of the furnaces to the
+deck, whence they went into the ditch.
+
+It is eight bells (8 o'clock) and the two stewards are hurrying along the
+decks, hoping to get the breakfast safely from galley to wardroom. A few
+naked officers are pouring sea-water over their heads on deck, for we are
+under sail alone and there is no steam to work the hose. The watch
+keepers and their snotties of the night before are tumbling out of their
+bunks, and a great noise of conversation is coming from the wardroom,
+among which some such remarks as: "Give the jam a wind, Marie"; "After
+you with the coffee"; "Push along the butter" are frequent. There are few
+cobwebs that have not been blown away by breakfast-time.
+
+Rennick is busy breakfasting preparatory to relieving Campbell on the
+bridge. Meanwhile, the hourly and four-hourly ship's log is being made
+up--force of the wind, state of the sea, height of the barometer, and all
+the details which a log has to carry--including a reading of the distance
+run as shown by the patent log line--(many is the time I have forgotten
+to take it just at the hour and have put down what I thought it ought to
+be, and not what it was).
+
+The morning watch is finished.
+
+Suddenly there is a yell from somewhere amidships--"STEADY"--a stranger
+might have thought there was something wrong, but it is a familiar sound,
+answered by a "STEADY IT IS, Sir," from the man at the wheel, and an
+anything but respectful, "One--two--three--STEADY," from everybody having
+breakfast. It is Pennell who has caused this uproar. And the origin is as
+follows:
+
+Pennell is the navigator, and the standard compass, owing to its
+remoteness from iron in this position, is placed on the top of the
+ice-house. The steersman, however, steers by a binnacle compass placed
+aft in front of his wheel. But these two compasses for various reasons do
+not read alike at a given moment, while the standard is the truer of the
+two.
+
+At intervals, then, Pennell or the officer of the watch orders the
+steersman to "Stand by for a steady," and goes up to the standard
+compass, and watches the needle. Suppose the course laid down is S. 40 E.
+A liner would steer almost true to this course unless there was a big
+wind or sea. But not so the old Terra Nova. Even with a good steersman
+the needle swings a good many degrees either side of the S. 40 E. But as
+it steadies momentarily on the exact course Pennell shouts his "Steady,"
+the steersman reads just where the needle is pointing on the compass
+card before him, say S. 47 E., and knows that this is the course which is
+to be steered by the binnacle compass.
+
+Pennell's yells were so frequent and ear-piercing that he became famous
+for them, and many times in working on the ropes in rough seas and big
+winds, we have been cheered by this unmusical noise over our heads.
+
+We left Simon's Bay on Friday, September 2, 'to make our Easting down'
+from the Cape of Good Hope to New Zealand, that famous passage in the
+Roaring Forties which can give so much discomfort or worse to sailing
+ships on their way.
+
+South Africa had been hospitable. The Admiral Commanding the Station, the
+Naval Dockyard, and H.M.S. Mutine and H.M.S. Pandora, had been more than
+kind. They had done many repairs and fittings for us and had sent fatigue
+parties to do it, thus releasing men for a certain amount of freedom on
+shore, which was appreciated after some nine weeks at sea. I can remember
+my first long bath now.
+
+Scott, who was up country when we arrived, joined the ship here, and
+Wilson travelled ahead of us to Melbourne to carry out some expedition
+work, chiefly dealing with the Australian members who were to join us in
+New Zealand.
+
+One or two of us went out to Wynberg, which Oates knew well, having been
+invalided there in the South African War with a broken leg, the result of
+a fight against big odds when, his whole party wounded, he refused to
+surrender. He told me later how he had thought he would bleed to death,
+and the man who lay next to him was convinced he had a bullet in the
+middle of his brain--he could feel it wobbling about there! Just now his
+recollections only went so far as to tell of a badly wounded Boer who lay
+in the next bed to him when he was convalescent, and how the Boer
+insisted on getting up to open the door for him every time he left the
+ward, much to his own discomfort.
+
+Otherwise the recollections which survive of South Africa are an
+excellent speech made on the expedition by John Xavier Merriman, and the
+remark of a seaman who came out to dinner concerning one John, the
+waiter, that "he moved about as quick as a piece of sticking-plaster!"
+
+Leaving Simon's Town at daybreak we did magnetic work all day, sailing
+out from False Bay with a biggish swell in the evening. We ran southerly
+in good weather until Sunday morning, when the swell was logged at 8 and
+the glass was falling fast. By the middle watch it was blowing a full
+gale and for some thirty hours we ran under reefed foresail, lower
+topsails and occasionally reefed upper topsails, and many of us were
+sick.
+
+Then after two days of comparative calm we had a most extraordinary gale
+from the east, a thing almost unheard of in these latitudes (38° S. to
+39° S.). All that we could do was to put the engines at dead slow and
+sail northerly as close to the wind as possible. Friday night, September
+9, it blew force 10 in the night, and the morning watch was very lively
+with the lee rail under water.
+
+Directly after breakfast on Saturday, September 10, we wore ship, and
+directly afterwards the gale broke and it was raining, with little wind,
+during the day.
+
+The morning watch had a merry time on Tuesday, September 13, when a fresh
+gale struck them while they were squaring yards. So unexpected was it
+that the main yards were squared and the fore were still round, but it
+did not last long and was followed by two splendid days--fine weather
+with sun, a good fair wind and the swell astern.
+
+[Illustration: THE ROARING FORTIES--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+The big swell which so often prevails in these latitudes is a most
+inspiring sight, and must be seen from a comparatively small ship like
+the Terra Nova for its magnitude to be truly appreciated. As the ship
+rose on the crest of one great hill of water the next big ridge was
+nearly a mile away, with a sloping valley between. At times these seas
+are rounded in giant slopes as smooth as glass; at others they curl over,
+leaving a milk-white foam, and their slopes are marbled with a beautiful
+spumy tracery. Very wonderful are these mottled waves: with a following
+sea, at one moment it seems impossible that the great mountain which is
+overtaking the ship will not overwhelm her, at another it appears
+inevitable that the ship will fall into the space over which she seems to
+be suspended and crash into the gulf which lies below.
+
+But the seas are so long that they are neither dangerous nor
+uncomfortable--though the Terra Nova rolled to an extraordinary extent,
+quite constantly over 50° each way, and sometimes 55°.
+
+The cooks, however, had a bad time trying to cook for some fifty hands in
+the little galley on the open deck. Poor Archer's efforts to make bread
+sometimes ended in the scuppers, and the occasional jangle of the ship's
+bell gave rise to the saying that "a moderate roll rings the bell, and a
+big roll brings out the cook."
+
+Noon on Sunday, September 18, found us in latitude 39° 20´ S. and
+longitude 66° 9´ E., after a very good run, for the Terra Nova, of 200
+miles in the last twenty-four hours. This made us about two days' run
+from St. Paul, an uninhabited island formed by the remains of an old
+volcano, the crater of which, surrounded as it were by a horse-shoe of
+land, forms an almost landlocked harbour. It was hoped to make a landing
+here for scientific work, but it is a difficult harbour to make. We ran
+another two hundred miles on Monday, and on Tuesday all preparations were
+made for the landing, with suitable equipment, and we were not a little
+excited at the opportunity.
+
+At 4.30 A.M. the next morning all hands were turned out to take in sail
+preparatory to rounding St. Paul which was just visible. The weather was
+squally, but not bad. By 5 A.M., however, it was blowing a moderate gale,
+and by the time we had taken in all sail we had to give up hopes of a
+landing. We were thoroughly sick of sails by the time we finally reefed
+the foresail and ran before the wind under this and lower topsails.
+
+We passed quite close to the island and could see into the crater, and
+the cliffs beyond which rose from it, covered with greenish grass. There
+were no trees, and of birds we only saw those which frequent these seas.
+We had hoped to find penguins and albatross nesting on the island at this
+time of the year, and this failure to land was most disappointing. The
+island is 860 feet high, and, for its size, precipitous. It extends some
+two miles in length and one mile in breadth.
+
+The following day all the afterguard were turned on to shift coal. It
+should be explained that up to this time the bunkers, which lay one on
+the port and the other on the starboard side of the furnaces, had been
+entirely filled as required by two or more officers who volunteered from
+day to day.
+
+We took on board 450 tons of Crown Patent Fuel at Cardiff in June 1910.
+This coal is in the form of bricks, and is most handy since it can be
+thrown by hand from the holds through the bunker doors in the boiler-room
+bulkhead which after a time was left higher than the sinking level of the
+coal. The coal to be landed was this patent fuel, and it was now decided
+to shift farther aft all the patent fuel which was left, and stack it
+against the boiler-room bulkhead, the coal which was originally there
+having been fed to the furnaces. Thus the dust which was finding its way
+through the floorboards, and choking the pumps, could be swept up, and a
+good stow could be made preparatory to the final fit-out in New Zealand,
+while the coal which was to be taken on board at Lyttelton could be
+loaded through the main hatch.
+
+In the meantime the gale which had sprung up six days before and
+prevented us landing had died down. After leaving St. Paul we had let the
+fires out and run under sail alone, and the following two days we ran 119
+and 141 miles respectively, being practically becalmed at times on the
+following day, and only running 66 miles.
+
+By Tuesday night, September 27, we had finished the coaling, and we
+celebrated the occasion by a champagne dinner. At the same time we raised
+steam. Scott was anxious to push on, and so indeed was everybody else.
+But the wind was not disposed to help us, and headed us a good deal
+during the next few days, and it was not until October 2 that we were
+able to set all plain sail in the morning watch.
+
+This absence of westerly winds in a region in which they are usually too
+strong for comfort was explained by Pennell by a theory that we were
+travelling in an anticyclone, which itself was travelling in front of a
+cyclone behind us. We were probably moving under steam about the same
+pace as the disturbance, which would average some 150 miles a day.
+
+From this may be explained many of the reports of continual bad weather
+met by sailing ships and steamers in these latitudes. If we had been a
+sailing ship without auxiliary steam the cyclone would have caught us up,
+and we should have been travelling with it, and consequently in continual
+bad weather. On the other hand, a steamer pure and simple would have
+steamed through good and bad alike. But we, with our auxiliary steam,
+only made much the same headway as the disturbance travelling in our
+wake, and so remained in the anticyclone.
+
+Physical observations were made on the outward voyage by Simpson and
+Wright[36] into the atmospheric electricity over the ocean, one set of
+which consisted of an inquiry into the potential gradient, and
+observations were undertaken at Melbourne for the determination of the
+absolute value of the potential gradient over the sea.[37] Numerous
+observations were also made on the radium content of the atmosphere over
+the ocean, to be compared afterwards with observations in the Antarctic
+air. The variations in radium content were not large. Results were also
+obtained on the voyage of the Terra Nova to New Zealand upon the subject
+of natural ionization in closed vessels.
+
+In addition to the work of the ship and the physical work above
+mentioned, work in vertebrate zoology, marine biology and magnetism,
+together with four-hourly observations of the salinity and temperature of
+the sea, was carried out during the whole voyage.
+
+In vertebrate zoology Wilson kept an accurate record of birds, and he and
+Lillie another record of whales and dolphins. All the birds which could
+be caught, both at sea and on South Trinidad Island, were skinned and
+made up into museum specimens. They were also examined for external and
+internal parasites by Wilson, Atkinson and myself, as were also such fish
+and other animals as could be caught, including flying fish, a shark, and
+last but not least, whales in New Zealand.
+
+The method of catching these birds may be worth describing. A bent nail
+was tied to a line, the other end of which was made fast to the halyards
+over the stern. Sufficient length of line was allowed either to cause the
+nail to just trail in the sea in the wake of the ship or for the line to
+just clear the sea. Thus when the halyard was hoisted to some thirty or
+forty feet above the deck, the line would be covering a considerable
+distance of sea.
+
+The birds flying round the ship congregate for the main part in the wake,
+for here they find the scraps thrown overboard on which they feed. I have
+seen six albatross all together trying to eat up an empty treacle tin.
+
+As they fly to and fro their wings are liable to touch the line which is
+spread out over the sea. Sometimes they will hit the line with the tips
+of their wings, and then there is no resulting capture, but sooner or
+later a bird will touch the line with the part of the wing above the
+elbow-joint (humerus). It seems that on feeling the contact the bird
+suddenly wheels in the air, thereby causing a loop in the line which
+tightens round the bone. At any rate the next thing that happens is that
+the bird is struggling on the line and may be hauled on board.
+
+The difficulty is to get a line which is light enough to fly in the air,
+but yet strong enough to hold the large birds, such as albatross, without
+breaking. We tried fishing line with no success, but eventually managed
+to buy some 5-ply extra strong cobbler's thread, which is excellent for
+the purpose. But we wanted not only specimens, but also observations of
+the species, the numbers which appeared, and their habits, for little is
+known as yet of these sea birds. And so we enlisted the help of all who
+were interested, and it may be said that all the officers and many of the
+seamen had a hand in producing the log of sea birds, to which additions
+were made almost hourly throughout the daylight hours. Most officers and
+men knew the more common sea birds in the open ocean, and certainly of
+those in the pack and fringes of the Antarctic continent, which, with
+rare exceptions, is the southern limit of bird life.
+
+A number of observations of whales, illustrated by Wilson, were made, but
+the results so far as the seas from England to the Cape and New Zealand
+are concerned, are not of great importance, partly because close views
+were seldom obtained, and partly because the whales inhabiting these seas
+are fairly well known. On October 3, 1910, in latitude 42° 17´ S. and
+longitude 111° 18´ E., two adults of Balaenoptera borealis (Northern
+Rorqual) were following the ship close under the counter, length 50 feet,
+with a light-coloured calf some 18-20 feet long swimming with them. It
+was established by this and by a later observation in New Zealand, when
+Lillie helped to cut up a similar whale at the Norwegian Whaling Station
+at the Bay of Islands, that this Rorqual which frequents the
+sub-Antarctic seas is identical with our Northern Rorqual;[38] but this
+was the only close observation of any whales obtained before we left New
+Zealand.
+
+General information with regard to such animals is useful, however, as
+showing the relative abundance of plankton on which the whales feed in
+the ocean. There are, for instance, more whales in the Antarctic than in
+warmer seas; and some whales at any rate (e.g. Humpback whales) probably
+come north into warmer waters in the winter rather for breeding purposes
+than to get food.[39]
+
+With regard to dolphins four species were observed beyond question. The
+rarest dolphin seen was Tersio peronii, the peculiarity of which is that
+it has no dorsal fin. This was seen on October 20, 1910, in latitude 42°
+51´ S. and longitude 153° 56´ E.
+
+Reports of whales and dolphins which are not based upon carcases and
+skeletons must be accepted with caution. It is most difficult to place
+species with scientific accuracy which can only be observed swimming in
+the water, and of which more often than not only blows and the dorsal
+fins can be observed. The nomenclature of dolphins especially leaves much
+to be desired, and it is to be hoped that some expedition in the future
+will carry a Norwegian harpooner, who could do other work as well since
+they are very good sailors. Wilson was strongly of this opinion and tried
+hard to get a harpooner, but they are expensive people so long as the
+present boom in whaling lasts, and perhaps it was on the score of expense
+that the idea was regretfully abandoned. We carried whaling gear formerly
+taken on the Discovery Expedition, and kindly lent for this expedition by
+the Royal Geographical Society of London. A few shots were tried, but an
+unskilled harpooner stands very little chance. If you go whaling you must
+have had experience.
+
+The ship was not slowed down to enable marine biological observations to
+be taken on this part of the expedition, but something like forty samples
+of plankton were taken with a full-speed net. We were unable to trawl on
+the bottom until we reached Melbourne, when a trawl was made in Port
+Phillip Harbour to try the gear and accustom men to its use. It was not a
+purpose of the expedition to spend time in deep-sea work until it reached
+Antarctic seas.
+
+For four days the wind, such as there was of it, was dead ahead; it is
+not very often in the Forties that a ship cannot make progress for want
+of wind. But having set all plain sail on October 2 with a falling glass
+we got a certain amount of wind on the port beam, and did 158 miles in
+the next twenty-four hours. Sunday being quiet Scott read service while
+the officers and men grouped round the wheel. We seldom had service on
+deck; for Sundays became proverbial days for a blow on the way out, and
+service, if held at all, was generally in the ward-room. On one famous
+occasion we tried to play the pianola to accompany the hymns, but, since
+the rolls were scored rather for musical effect than for church services,
+the pianola was suddenly found to be playing something quite different
+from what was being sung. All through the expedition the want of some one
+who could play the piano was felt, and such a man is certainly a great
+asset in a life so far removed from all the pleasures of civilization.
+As Scott wrote in The Voyage of the Discovery, where one of the officers
+used to play each evening: "This hour of music has become an institution
+which none of us would willingly forgo. I don't know what thoughts it
+brings to others, though I can readily guess; but of such things one does
+not care to write. I can well believe, however, that our music smooths
+over many a ruffle and brings us to dinner each night in that excellent
+humour, where all seem good-tempered, though 'cleared for action' and
+ready for fresh argument."
+
+The wind freshened to our joy; Scott was impatient; there was much to be
+done and the time for doing it was not too long, for it had been decided
+to leave New Zealand at an earlier date than had been attempted by any
+previous expedition, in order to penetrate the pack sooner and make an
+early start on the depôt journey. The faintest glow of the Aurora
+Australis which was to become so familiar to us was seen at this time,
+but what aroused still more interest was the capture of several albatross
+on the lines flowing out over the stern.
+
+The first was a 'sooty' (cornicoides). We put him down on the deck, where
+he strutted about in the proudest way, his feet going flop--flop--flop as
+he walked. He was a most beautiful bird, sooty black body, a great black
+head with a line of white over each eye and a gorgeous violet line
+running along his black beak. He treated us with the greatest contempt,
+which, from such a beautiful creature, we had every appearance of
+deserving. Another day a little later we caught a wandering albatross, a
+black-browed albatross, and a sooty albatross all together, and set them
+on the deck tethered to the ventilators while their photographs were
+taken. They were such beautiful birds that we were loath to kill them,
+but their value as scientific specimens outweighed the wish to set them
+free, and we gave them ether so that they did not suffer.
+
+The Southern Ocean is the home of these and many species of birds, but
+among them the albatross is pre-eminent. It has been mentioned that
+Wilson believed that the albatross, at any rate, fly round and round the
+world over these stormy seas before the westerly winds, landing but once
+a year on such islands as Kerguelen, St. Paul, the Auckland Islands and
+others to breed. If so, the rest that they can obtain upon the big
+breaking rollers which prevail in these latitudes must be unsatisfactory
+judged by the standard of more civilized birds. I have watched sea birds
+elsewhere of which the same individuals appeared to follow the ship day
+after day for many thousands of miles, but on this voyage I came to the
+conclusion that a different set of birds appeared each morning, and that
+they were hungry when they arrived. Certainly they flew astern and nearer
+to the ship in the morning, feeding on the scraps thrown overboard. As
+the day went on and the birds' hunger was satisfied, they scattered, and
+such of them as continued to fly astern of the ship were a long way off.
+Hence we caught the birds in the early morning, and only one bird was
+caught after mid-day.
+
+The wind continued favourable and was soon blowing quite hard. On Friday,
+October 7, we were doing 7.8 knots under sail alone, which was very good
+for the old Terra Push, as she was familiarly called: and we were then
+just 1000 miles from Melbourne. By Saturday night we were standing by
+topgallant halyards. Campbell took over the watch at 4 A.M. on Sunday
+morning. It was blowing hard and squally, but the ship still carried
+topgallants. There was a big following sea.
+
+At 6.30 A.M. there occurred one of those incidents of sea life which are
+interesting though not important. Quite suddenly the first really big
+squall we had experienced on the voyage struck us. Topgallant halyards
+were let go, and the fore topgallant yard came down, but the main
+topgallant yard jammed when only half down. It transpired afterwards that
+a gasket which had been blown over the yard had fouled the block of the
+sheet of the main upper topsail. The topgallant yard was all tilted to
+starboard and swaying from side to side, the sail seemed as though it
+might blow out at any moment, and was making a noise like big guns, and
+the mast was shaking badly.
+
+It was expected that the topgallant mast would go, but nothing could be
+done while the full fury of the wind lasted. Campbell paced quietly up
+and down the bridge with a smile on his face. The watch was grouped round
+the ratlines ready to go aloft, and Crean volunteered to go up alone and
+try and free the yard, but permission was refused. It was touch and go
+with the mast and there was nothing to be done.
+
+The squall passed, the sail was freed and furled, and the next big squall
+found us ready to lower upper topsails and all was well. Finally the
+damage was a split sail and a strained mast.
+
+The next morning a new topgallant sail was bent, but quite the biggest
+hailstorm I have ever seen came on in the middle of the operation. Much
+of the hail must have been inches in circumference, and hurt even through
+thick clothes and oilskins. At the same time there were several
+waterspouts formed. The men on the topgallant yard had a beastly time.
+Below on deck men made hail-balls and pretended they were snow.
+
+From now onwards we ran on our course before a gale. By the early morning
+of October 12 Cape Otway light was in sight. Working double tides in the
+engine-room, and with every stitch of sail set, we just failed to reach
+Port Phillip Heads by mid-day, when the tide turned, and it was
+impossible to get through. We went up Melbourne Harbour that evening,
+very dark and blowing hard.
+
+A telegram was waiting for Scott:
+
+    "Madeira. Am going South. AMUNDSEN."
+
+This telegram was dramatically important, as will appear when we come to
+the last act of the tragedy. Captain Roald Amundsen was one of the most
+notable of living explorers, and was in the prime of life--forty-one, two
+years younger than Scott. He had been in the Antarctic before Scott, with
+the Belgica Expedition in 1897-99, and therefore did not consider the
+South Pole in any sense our property. Since then he had realized the
+dream of centuries of exploration by passing through the North-West
+Passage, and actually doing so in a 60-ton schooner in 1905. The last we
+had heard of him was that he had equipped Nansen's old ship, the Fram,
+for further exploration in the Arctic. This was only a feint. Once at
+sea, he had told his men that he was going south instead of north; and
+when he reached Madeira he sent this brief telegram, which meant, "I
+shall be at the South Pole before you." It also meant, though we did not
+appreciate it at the time, that we were up against a very big man.
+
+The Admiral Commanding the Australian Station came on board. The event of
+the inspection was Nigger, the black ship's cat, distinguished by a white
+whisker on the port side of his face, who made one adventurous voyage to
+the Antarctic and came to an untimely end during the second. The seamen
+made a hammock for him with blanket and pillow, and slung it forward
+among their own bedding. Nigger had turned in, not feeling very well,
+owing to the number of moths he had eaten, the ship being full of them.
+When awakened by the Admiral, Nigger had no idea of the importance of the
+occasion, but stretched himself, yawned in the most natural manner,
+turned over and went to sleep again.
+
+This cat became a well-known and much photographed member of the crew of
+the Terra Nova. He is said to have imitated the Romans of old, being a
+greedy beast, by having eaten as much seal blubber as he could hold, made
+himself sick, and gone back and resumed his meal. He had most beautiful
+fur. When the ship was returning from the Antarctic in 1911 Nigger was
+frightened by something on deck and jumped into the sea, which was
+running fairly rough. However, the ship was hove to, a boat lowered, and
+Nigger was rescued. He spent another happy year on board, but disappeared
+one dark night when the ship was returning from her second journey to the
+South in 1912, during a big gale. He often went aloft with the men, of
+his own accord. This night he was seen on the main lower topsail yard,
+higher than which he never would go. He disappeared in a big squall,
+probably because the yard was covered with ice.
+
+Wilson rejoined the ship at Melbourne; and Scott left her, to arrange
+further business matters, and to rejoin in New Zealand. When he landed I
+think he had seen enough of the personnel of the expedition to be able to
+pass a fair judgment upon them. I cannot but think that he was pleased.
+Such enthusiasm and comradeship as prevailed on board could bear only
+good fruit. It would certainly have been possible to find a body of men
+who could work a sailing ship with greater skill, but not men who were
+more willing, and that in the midst of considerable discomfort, to work
+hard at distasteful jobs and be always cheerful. And it must have been
+clear that with all the energy which was being freely expended, the
+expedition came first, and the individual nowhere. It is to the honour of
+all concerned that from the time it left London to the time it returned
+to New Zealand after three years, this spirit always prevailed.
+
+Among the executive officers Scott was putting more and more trust in
+Campbell, who was to lead the Northern Party. He was showing those
+characteristics which enabled him to bring his small party safely through
+one of the hardest winters that men have ever survived. Bowers also had
+shown seamanlike qualities which are an excellent test by which to judge
+the Antarctic traveller; a good seaman in sail will probably make a
+useful sledger: but at this time Scott can hardly have foreseen that
+Bowers was to prove "the hardest traveller that ever undertook a Polar
+journey, as well as one of the most undaunted." But he had already proved
+himself a first-rate sailor. Among the junior scientific staff too,
+several were showing qualities as seamen which were a good sign for the
+future. Altogether I think it must have been with a cheerful mind that
+Scott landed in Australia.
+
+When we left Melbourne for New Zealand we were all a bit stale, which was
+not altogether surprising, and a run ashore was to do us a world of good
+after five months of solid grind, crowded up in a ship which thought
+nothing of rolling 50° each way. Also, though everything had been done
+that could be done to provide them, the want of fresh meat and
+vegetables was being felt, and it was an excellent thing that a body of
+men, for whom every precaution against scurvy that modern science could
+suggest was being taken, should have a good course of antiscorbutic food
+and an equally beneficial change of life before leaving civilization.
+
+And so it was with some anticipation that on Monday morning, October 24,
+we could smell the land--New Zealand, that home of so many Antarctic
+expeditions, where we knew that we should be welcomed. Scott's Discovery,
+Shackleton's Nimrod, and now again Scott's Terra Nova have all in turn
+been berthed at the same quay in Lyttelton, for aught I know at the same
+No. 5 Shed, into which they have spilled out their holds, and from which
+they have been restowed with the addition of all that New Zealand,
+scorning payment, could give. And from there they have sailed, and
+thither their relief ships have returned year after year. Scott's words
+of the Discovery apply just as much to the Terra Nova. Not only did New
+Zealand do all in her power to help the expedition in an official
+capacity, but the New Zealanders welcomed both officers and men with open
+arms, and "gave them to understand that although already separated by
+many thousands of miles from their native land, here in this new land
+they would find a second home, and those who would equally think of them
+in their absence, and welcome them on their return."
+
+But we had to sail round the southern coast of New Zealand and northwards
+up the eastern coast before we could arrive at our last port of call. The
+wind went ahead, and it was not until the morning of October 28 that we
+sailed through Lyttelton Heads. The word had gone forth that we should
+sail away on November 27, and there was much to be done in the brief
+month that lay ahead.
+
+There followed four weeks of strenuous work into which was sandwiched a
+considerable amount of play. The ship was unloaded, when, as usual, men
+and officers acted alike as stevedores, and she was docked, that an
+examination for the source of the leak might be made by Mr. H. J. Miller
+of Lyttelton, who has performed a like service for more than one
+Antarctic ship. But the different layers of sheathing protecting a ship
+which is destined to fight against ice are so complicated that it is a
+very difficult matter to find the origin of a leak. All that can be said
+with any certainty is that the point where the water appears inside the
+skin of the ship is almost certainly not the locality in which it has
+penetrated the outside sheathing. "Our good friend Miller," wrote Scott,
+"attacked the leak and traced it to the stern. We found the false stern
+split, and in one case a hole bored for a long-stern through-bolt which
+was much too large for the bolt.... The ship still leaks but the water
+can now be kept under with the hand pump by two daily efforts of a
+quarter of an hour to twenty minutes." This in Lyttelton; but in a not
+far distant future every pump was choked, and we were baling with three
+buckets, literally for our lives.
+
+Bowers' feat of sorting and restowing not only the stores we had but the
+cheese, butter, tinned foods, bacon, hams and numerous other products
+which are grown in New Zealand, and which any expedition leaving that
+country should always buy there in preference to carrying them through
+the tropics, was a masterstroke of clear-headedness and organization.
+These stores were all relisted before stowing and the green-banded or
+Northern Party and red-banded or Main Party stores were not only easily
+distinguishable, but also stowed in such a way that they were forthcoming
+without difficulty at the right time and in their due order.
+
+The two huts which were to form the homes of our two parties down South
+had been brought out in the ship and were now erected on a piece of waste
+ground near, by the same men who would be given the work to do in the
+South.
+
+The gear peculiar to the various kinds of scientific work which it was
+the object of the expedition to carry out was also stowed with great
+care. The more bulky objects included a petrol engine and small dynamo, a
+very delicate instrument for making pendulum observations to test the
+gravity of the earth, meteorological screens, and a Dines anemometer.
+There was also a special hut for magnetic observations, of which only the
+framework was finally taken, with the necessary but bulky magnetic
+instruments. The biological and photographic gear was also of
+considerable size.
+
+For the interior of the huts there were beds with spring mattresses--a
+real luxury but one well worth the space and money,--tables, chairs,
+cooking ranges and piping, and a complete acetylene gas plant for both
+parties. There were also extensive ventilators which were not a great
+success. The problem of ventilation in polar regions still remains to be
+solved.
+
+Food can be packed into a comparatively small space, but not so fuel, and
+this is one of the greatest difficulties which confront the polar
+traveller. It must be conceded that in this respect Norway, with her
+wonderful petrol-driven Fram, is far ahead of us. The Terra Nova depended
+on coal, and the length of the ship's stay in the South, and the amount
+of exploration she could do after landing the shore parties, depended
+almost entirely upon how much coal she could be persuaded to hold after
+all the necessaries of modern scientific exploration had been wedged
+tightly into her.
+
+The Terra Nova sailed from New Zealand with 425 tons of coal in her holds
+and bunkers, and 30 tons on deck in sacks. We were to hear more of those
+sacks.
+
+Meanwhile stalls were being built under the forecastle for fifteen
+ponies, and, since room could not be found below for the remaining four,
+stalls were built on the port side of the fore hatch; the decks were
+caulked, and deck houses and other fittings which might carry away in the
+stormy seas of the South were further secured.
+
+As the time of departure drew near, and each day of civilization appeared
+to be more and more desirable, the scene in Lyttelton became animated and
+congested. Here is a scientist trying to force just one more case into
+his small laboratory, or decanting a mass of clothing, just issued, into
+the bottom of his bunk, to be slept on since there was no room for it on
+the deck of his cabin. On the main deck Bowers is trying to get one more
+frozen sheep into the ice-house, in the rigging working parties are
+overhauling the running gear. The engine-room staff are busy on the
+engine, and though the ship is crowded there is order everywhere, and it
+is clean.
+
+But the scene on the morning of Saturday, November 26, baffles
+description. There is no deck visible: in addition to 30 tons of coal in
+sacks on deck there are 2½ tons of petrol, stowed in drums which in turn
+are cased in wood. On the top of sacks and cases, and on the roof of the
+ice-house are thirty-three dogs, chained far enough apart to keep them
+from following their first instinct--to fight the nearest animal they can
+see: the ship is a hubbub of howls. In the forecastle and in the four
+stalls on deck are the nineteen ponies, wedged tightly in their wooden
+stalls, and dwarfing everything are the three motor sledges in their huge
+crates, 16´ x 5´ x 4´, two of them on either side of the main hatch, the
+third across the break of the poop. They are covered with tarpaulins and
+secured in every possible way, but it is clear that in a big sea their
+weight will throw a great strain upon the deck. It is not altogether a
+cheerful sight. But all that care and skill can do has been done to
+ensure that the deck cargo will not shift, and that the animals may be as
+sheltered as possible from wind and seas. And it's no good worrying about
+what can't be helped.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+    [36] Vide _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. pp. 454-456.
+
+    [37] "Atmospheric Electricity over Ocean," by G. C. Simpson and
+         C. S. Wright, _Pro. Roy. Soc._ A, vol. 85, 1911.
+
+    [38] _See_ B.A.E., 1910, Nat. Hist. Report, vol. i. No. 3, p. 117.
+
+    [39] Ibid. p. 111.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SOUTHWARD
+
+
+    Open the bones, and you shall nothing find
+    In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in Thee
+    The beauty lies in the discovery.
+                                         GEORGE HERBERT.
+
+
+Telegrams from all parts of the world, special trains, all ships dressed,
+crowds and waving hands, steamers out to the Heads and a general
+hullabaloo--these were the incidents of Saturday, November 26, 1910, when
+we slipped from the wharf at Lyttelton at 3 P.M. We were to call at
+Dunedin before leaving civilization, and arrived there on Sunday night.
+Here we took on the remainder of our coal. On Monday night we danced, in
+fantastic clothing for we had left our grand clothes behind, and sailed
+finally for the South the following afternoon amidst the greatest
+enthusiasm. The wives remained with us until we reached the open sea.
+
+Amongst those who only left us at the last minute was Mr. Kinsey of
+Christchurch. He acted for Scott in New Zealand during the Discovery
+days, and for Shackleton in 1907. We all owe him a deep debt of gratitude
+for his help. "His interest in the expedition is wonderful, and such
+interest on the part of a thoroughly shrewd business man is an asset of
+which I have taken full advantage. Kinsey will act as my agent in
+Christchurch during my absence; I have given him an ordinary power of
+attorney, and I think have left him in possession of all the facts. His
+kindness to us was beyond words."[40]
+
+"Evening.--Loom of land and Cape Saunders Light blinking."[41]
+
+The ponies and dogs were the first consideration. Even in quite ordinary
+weather the dogs had a wretched time. "The seas continually break on the
+weather bulwarks and scatter clouds of heavy spray over the backs of all
+who must venture into the waist of the ship. The dogs sit with their
+tails to this invading water, their coats wet and dripping. It is a
+pathetic attitude deeply significant of cold and misery; occasionally
+some poor beast emits a long pathetic whine. The group forms a picture of
+wretched dejection; such a life is truly hard for these poor
+creatures."[42]
+
+The ponies were better off. Four of them were on deck amidships and they
+were well boarded round. It is significant that these ponies had a much
+easier time in rough weather than those in the bows of the ship. "Under
+the forecastle fifteen ponies close side by side, seven one side, eight
+the other, heads together, and groom between--swaying, swaying
+continually to the plunging, irregular motion."
+
+"One takes a look through a hole in the bulkhead and sees a row of heads
+with sad, patient eyes come swinging up together from the starboard side,
+whilst those on the port swing back; then up come the port heads, while
+the starboard recede. It seems a terrible ordeal for these poor beasts to
+stand this day after day for weeks together, and indeed though they
+continue to feed well the strain quickly drags down their weight and
+condition; but nevertheless the trial cannot be gauged from human
+standards."[43]
+
+The seas through which we had to pass to reach the pack-ice must be the
+most stormy in the world. Dante tells us that those who have committed
+carnal sin are tossed about ceaselessly by the most furious winds in the
+second circle of Hell. The corresponding hell on earth is found in the
+southern oceans, which encircle the world without break, tempest-tossed
+by the gales which follow one another round and round the world from West
+to East. You will find albatross there--great Wanderers, and Sooties,
+and Mollymawks--sailing as lightly before these furious winds as ever do
+Paolo and Francesca. Round the world they go. I doubt whether they land
+more than once a year, and then they come to the islands of these seas to
+breed.
+
+There are many other beautiful sea-birds, but most beautiful of all are
+the Snowy petrels, which approach nearer to the fairies than anything
+else on earth. They are quite white, and seemingly transparent. They are
+the familiar spirits of the pack, which, except to nest, they seldom if
+ever leave, flying "here and there independently in a mazy fashion,
+glittering against the blue sky like so many white moths, or shining
+snowflakes."[44] And then there are the Giant petrels, whose coloration
+is a puzzle. Some are nearly white, others brown, and they exhibit every
+variation between the one and the other. And, on the whole, the white
+forms become more general the farther south you go. But the usual theory
+of protective coloration will not fit in, for there are no enemies
+against which this bird must protect itself. Is it something to do with
+radiation of heat from the body?
+
+A ship which sets out upon this journey generally has a bad time, and for
+this reason the overladen state of the Terra Nova was a cause of anxiety.
+The Australasian meteorologists had done their best to forecast the
+weather we must expect. Everything which was not absolutely necessary had
+been ruthlessly scrapped. Yet there was not a square inch of the hold and
+between-decks which was not crammed almost to bursting, and there was as
+much on the deck as could be expected to stay there. Officers and men
+could hardly move in their living quarters when standing up, and
+certainly they could not all sit down. To say that we were heavy laden is
+a very moderate statement of the facts.
+
+Thursday, December 1, we ran into a gale. We shortened sail in the
+afternoon to lower topsails, jib and stay-sail. Both wind and sea rose
+with great rapidity, and before the night came our deck cargo had begun
+to work loose. "You know how carefully everything had been lashed, but no
+lashings could have withstood the onslaught of these coal sacks for
+long. There was nothing for it but to grapple with the evil, and nearly
+all hands were labouring for hours in the waist of the ship, heaving coal
+sacks overboard and re-lashing the petrol cases, etc., in the best manner
+possible under such difficult and dangerous circumstances. The seas were
+continually breaking over these people and now and again they would be
+completely submerged. At such times they had to cling for dear life to
+some fixture to prevent themselves being washed overboard, and with coal
+bags and loose cases washing about, there was every risk of such hold
+being torn away.
+
+"No sooner was some semblance of order restored than some exceptionally
+heavy wave would tear away the lashing, and the work had to be done all
+over again."[45]
+
+The conditions became much worse during the night and things were
+complicated for some of us by sea-sickness. I have lively recollections
+of being aloft for two hours in the morning watch on Friday and being
+sick at intervals all the time. For sheer downright misery give me a
+hurricane, not too warm, the yard of a sailing ship, a wet sail and a
+bout of sea-sickness.
+
+It must have been about this time that orders were given to clew up the
+jib and then to furl it. Bowers and four others went out on the bowsprit,
+being buried deep in the enormous seas every time the ship plunged her
+nose into them with great force. It was an education to see him lead
+those men out into that roaring inferno. He has left his own vivid
+impression of this gale in a letter home. His tendency was always to
+underestimate difficulties, whether the force of wind in a blizzard, or
+the troubles of a polar traveller. This should be remembered when reading
+the vivid accounts which his mother has so kindly given me permission to
+use:
+
+"We got through the forties with splendid speed and were just over the
+fifties when one of those tremendous gales got us. Our Lat. was about 52°
+S., a part of the world absolutely unfrequented by shipping of any sort,
+and as we had already been blown off Campbell Island we had nothing but
+a clear sweep to Cape Horn to leeward. One realized then how in the
+Nimrod--in spite of the weather--they always had the security of a big
+steamer to look to if things came to the worst. We were indeed alone, by
+many hundreds of miles, and never having felt anxious about a ship
+before, the old whaler was to give me a new experience.
+
+"In the afternoon of the beginning of the gale I helped make fast the
+T.G. sails, upper topsails and foresail, and was horrified on arrival on
+deck to find that the heavy water we continued to ship, was starting the
+coal bags floating in places. These, acting as battering-rams, tore
+adrift some of my carefully stowed petrol cases and endangered the lot. I
+had started to make sail fast at 3 P.M. and it was 9.30 P.M. when I had
+finished putting on additional lashings to everything I could. So rapidly
+did the sea get up that one was continually afloat and swimming about. I
+turned in for 2 hours and lay awake hearing the crash of the seas and
+thinking how long those cases would stand it, till my watch came at
+midnight as a relief. We were under 2 lower topsails and hove to, the
+engines going dead slow to assist keeping head to wind. At another time I
+should have been easy in my mind; now the water that came aboard was
+simply fearful, and the wrenching on the old ship was enough to worry any
+sailor called upon to fill his decks with garbage fore and aft. Still
+'Risk nothing and do nothing,' if funds could not supply another ship, we
+simply had to overload the one we had, or suffer worse things down south.
+The watch was eventful as the shaking up got the fine coal into the
+bilges, and this mixing with the oil from the engines formed balls of
+coal and grease which, ordinarily, went up the pumps easily; now however
+with the great strains, and hundreds of tons on deck, as she continually
+filled, the water started to come in too fast for the half-clogged pumps
+to cope with. An alternative was offered to me in going faster so as to
+shake up the big pump on the main engines, and this I did--in spite of
+myself--and in defiance of the first principles of seamanship. Of course,
+we shipped water more and more, and only to save a clean breach of the
+decks did I slow down again and let the water gain. My next card was to
+get the watch on the hand-pumps as well, and these were choked, too, or
+nearly so.
+
+"Anyhow with every pump,--hand and steam,--going, the water continued to
+rise in the stokehold. At 4 A.M. all hands took in the fore lower
+topsail, leaving us under a minimum of sail. The gale increased to storm
+force (force 11 out of 12) and such a sea got up as only the Southern
+Fifties can produce. All the afterguard turned out and the pumps were
+vigorously shaken up,--sickening work as only a dribble came out. We had
+to throw some coal overboard to clear the after deck round the pumps, and
+I set to work to rescue cases of petrol which were smashed adrift. I
+broke away a plank or two of the lee bulwarks to give the seas some
+outlet as they were right over the level of the rail, and one was
+constantly on the verge of floating clean over the side with the cataract
+force of the backwash. I had all the swimming I wanted that day. Every
+case I rescued was put on the weather side of the poop to help get us on
+a more even keel. She sagged horribly and the unfortunate ponies,--though
+under cover,--were so jerked about that the weather ones could not keep
+their feet in their stalls, so great was the slope and strain on their
+forelegs. Oates and Atkinson worked among them like Trojans, but morning
+saw the death of one, and the loss of one dog overboard. The dogs, made
+fast on deck, were washed to and fro, chained by the neck, and often
+submerged for a considerable time. Though we did everything in our power
+to get them up as high as possible, the sea went everywhere. The wardroom
+was a swamp and so were our bunks with all our nice clothing, books, etc.
+However, of this we cared little, when the water had crept up to the
+furnaces and put the fires out, and we realized for the first time that
+the ship had met her match and was slowly filling. Without a pump to suck
+we started the forlorn hope of buckets and began to bale her out. Had we
+been able to open a hatch we could have cleared the main pump well at
+once, but with those appalling seas literally covering her, it would
+have meant less than 10 minutes to float, had we uncovered a hatch.
+
+"The Chief Engineer (Williams) and carpenter (Davies), after we had all
+put our heads together, started cutting a hole in the engine room
+bulkhead, to enable us to get into the pump-well from the engine room; it
+was iron and, therefore, at least a 12 hours job. Captain Scott was
+simply splendid, he might have been at Cowes, and to do him and Teddy
+Evans credit, at our worst strait none of our landsmen who were working
+so hard knew how serious things were. Capt. Scott said to me quietly--'I
+am afraid it's a bad business for us--What do you think?' I said we were
+by no means dead yet, though at that moment, Oates, at peril of his life,
+got aft to report another horse dead; and more down. And then an awful
+sea swept away our lee bulwarks clean, between the fore and main
+riggings,--only our chain lashings saved the lee motor sledge then, and I
+was soon diving after petrol cases. Captain Scott calmly told me that
+they 'did not matter'--This was our great project for getting to the
+Pole--the much advertised motors that 'did not matter'; our dogs looked
+finished, and horses were finishing, and I went to bale with a strenuous
+prayer in my heart, and 'Yip-i-addy' on my lips, and so we pulled through
+that day. We sang and re-sang every silly song we ever knew, and then
+everybody in the ship later on was put on 2-hour reliefs to bale, as it
+was impossible for flesh to keep heart with no food or rest. Even the
+fresh-water pump had gone wrong so we drank neat lime juice, or anything
+that came along, and sat in our saturated state awaiting our next spell.
+My dressing gown was my great comfort as it was not very wet, and it is a
+lovely warm thing.
+
+"To make a long yarn short, we found later in the day that the storm was
+easing a bit and that though there was a terrible lot of water in the
+ship, which, try as we could, we could not reduce, it certainly had
+ceased to rise to any great extent. We had reason to hope then that we
+might keep her afloat till the pump wells could be cleared. Had the storm
+lasted another day, God knows what our state would have been, if we had
+been above water at all. You cannot imagine how utterly helpless we felt
+in such a sea with a tiny ship,--the great expedition with all its hopes
+thrown aside for its life. God had shown us the weakness of man's hand
+and it was enough for the best of us,--the people who had been made such
+a lot of lately--the whole scene was one of pathos really. However, at 11
+P.M. Evans and I with the carpenter were able to crawl through a tiny
+hole in the bulkhead, burrow over the coal to the pump-well cofferdam,
+where, another hole having been easily made in the wood, we got down
+below with Davy lamps and set to work. The water was so deep that you had
+to continually dive to get your hand on to the suction. After 2 hours or
+so it was cleared for the time being and the pumps worked merrily. I went
+in again at 4.30 A.M. and had another lap at clearing it. Not till the
+afternoon of the following day, though, did we see the last of the water
+and the last of the great gale. During the time the pumps were working,
+we continued the baling till the water got below the furnaces. As soon as
+we could light up, we did, and got the other pumps under weigh, and, once
+the ship was empty, clearing away the suction was a simple matter. I was
+pleased to find that after all I had only lost about 100 gallons of the
+petrol and bad as things had been they might have been worse....
+
+"You will ask where all the water came from seeing our forward leak had
+been stopped. Thank God we did not have that to cope with as well. The
+water came chiefly through the deck where the tremendous strain,--not
+only of the deck load, but of the smashing seas,--was beyond conception.
+She was caught at a tremendous disadvantage and we were dependent for our
+lives on each plank standing its own strain. Had one gone we would all
+have gone, and the great anxiety was not so much the existing water as
+what was going to open up if the storm continued. We might have dumped
+the deck cargo, a difficult job at best, but were too busy baling to do
+anything else....
+
+"That Captain Scott's account will be moderate you may be sure. Still,
+take my word for it, he is one of the best, and behaved up to our best
+traditions at a time when his own outlook must have been the blackness of
+darkness...."
+
+Characteristically Bowers ends his account:
+
+"Under its worst conditions this earth is a good place to live in."
+
+Priestley wrote in his diary:
+
+"If Dante had seen our ship as she was at her worst, I fancy he would
+have got a good idea for another Circle of Hell, though he would have
+been at a loss to account for such a cheerful and ribald lot of Souls."
+
+The situation narrowed down to a fight between the incoming water and the
+men who were trying to keep it in check by baling her out. The Terra Nova
+will never be more full of water, nearly up to the furnaces, than she was
+that Friday morning, when we were told to go and do our damndest with
+three iron buckets. The constructors had not allowed for baling, only for
+the passage of one man at a time up and down the two iron ladders which
+connected the engine-room floor plates with the deck. If we used more
+than three buckets the business of passing them rapidly up, emptying them
+out of the hatchway, and returning them empty, became unprofitable. We
+were divided into two gangs, and all Friday and Friday night we worked
+two hours on and two hours off, like fiends.
+
+Wilson's Journal describes the scene:
+
+"It was a weird night's work with the howling gale and the darkness and
+the immense seas running over the ship every few minutes and no engines
+and no sail, and we all in the engine-room oil and bilge water, singing
+chanties as we passed up slopping buckets full of bilge, each man above
+slopping a little over the heads of all below him; wet through to the
+skin, so much so that some of the party worked altogether naked like
+Chinese coolies; and the rush of the wave backwards and forwards at the
+bottom grew hourly less in the dim light of a couple of engine-room oil
+lamps whose light just made the darkness visible, the ship all the time
+rolling like a sodden lifeless log, her lee gunwale under water every
+time."
+
+"There was one thrilling moment in the midst of the worst hour on Friday
+when we were realizing that the fires must be drawn, and when every pump
+had failed to act, and when the bulwarks began to go to pieces and the
+petrol cases were all afloat and going overboard, and the word was
+suddenly passed in a shout from the hands at work in the waist of the
+ship trying to save petrol cases that smoke was coming up through the
+seams in the afterhold. As this was full of coal and patent fuel and was
+next the engine-room, and as it had not been opened for the airing it
+required to get rid of gas, on account of the flood of water on deck
+making it impossible to open the hatchway, the possibility of a fire
+there was patent to every one, and it could not possibly have been dealt
+with in any way short of opening the hatches and flooding the ship, when
+she must have foundered. It was therefore a thrilling moment or two until
+it was discovered that the smoke was really steam, arising from the bilge
+at the bottom having risen to the heated coal."[46]
+
+Meanwhile men were working for all our lives to cut through two bulkheads
+which cut off all communication with the suction of the hand-pumps. One
+bulkhead was iron, the other wood.
+
+Scott wrote at this time:
+
+"We are not out of the wood, but hope dawns, as indeed it should for me,
+when I find myself so wonderfully served. Officers and men are singing
+chanties over their arduous work. Williams is working in sweltering heat
+behind the boiler to get the door made in the bulkhead. Not a single one
+has lost his good spirits. A dog was drowned last night, one pony is dead
+and two others in a bad condition--probably they too will go.
+Occasionally a heavy sea would bear one of them away, and he was only
+saved by his chain. Meares with some helpers had constantly to be
+rescuing these wretched creatures from hanging, and trying to find them
+better shelter, an almost hopeless task. One poor beast was found hanging
+when dead; one was washed away with such force that his chain broke and
+he disappeared overboard; the next wave miraculously washed him on board
+again and he is fit and well. [I believe the dog was Osman.] The gale has
+exacted heavy toll, but I feel all will be well if we can only cope with
+the water. Another dog has just been washed overboard--alas! Thank God
+the gale is abating. The sea is still mountainously high but the ship is
+not labouring so heavily as she was."[47]
+
+The highest waves of which I can find any record were 36 feet high. These
+were observed by Sir James C. Ross in the North Atlantic.[48]
+
+On December 2 the waves were logged, probably by Pennell, who was
+extremely careful in his measurements, as being 'thirty-five feet high
+(estimated).' At one time I saw Scott, standing on the weather rail of
+the poop, buried to his waist in green sea. The reader can then imagine
+the condition of things in the waist of the ship, "over and over again
+the rail, from the fore-rigging to the main, was covered by a solid sheet
+of curling water which swept aft and high on the poop."[49] At another
+time Bowers and Campbell were standing upon the bridge, and the ship
+rolled sluggishly over until the lee combings of the main hatch were
+under the sea. They watched anxiously, and slowly she righted herself,
+but "she won't do that often," said Bowers. As a rule if a ship gets that
+far over she goes down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Our journey was uneventful for a time, but of course it was not by any
+means smooth. "I was much disturbed last night by the motion; the ship
+was pitching and twisting with short sharp movements on a confused sea,
+and with every plunge my thoughts flew to our poor ponies. This afternoon
+they are fairly well, but one knows that they must be getting weaker as
+time goes on, and one longs to give them a good sound rest with a ship on
+an even keel. Poor patient beasts! One wonders how far the memory of
+such fearful discomfort will remain with them--animals so often remember
+places and conditions where they have encountered difficulties or hurt.
+Do they only recollect circumstances which are deeply impressed by some
+shock of fear or sudden pain, and does the remembrance of prolonged
+strain pass away? Who can tell? But it would seem strangely merciful if
+nature should blot out these weeks of slow but inevitable torture."[50]
+
+On December 7, noon position 61° 22´ S., 179° 56´ W., one berg was
+sighted far away to the west, as it gleamed every now and then in the
+sun. Two more were seen the next day, and at 6.22 A.M. on December 9,
+noon position 65° 8´ S., 177° 41´ W., the pack was sighted ahead by
+Rennick. All that day we passed bergs and streams of ice. The air became
+dry and bracing, the sea was calm, and the sun shining on the islands of
+ice was more than beautiful. And then Bump! We had just charged the first
+big floe, and we were in the pack.
+
+"The sky has been wonderful, with every form of cloud in every condition
+of light and shade; the sun has continually appeared through breaks in
+the cloudy heavens from time to time, brilliantly illuminating some field
+of pack, some steep-walled berg, or some patch of bluest sea. So sunlight
+and shadow have chased each other across our scene. To-night there is
+little or no swell--the ship is on an even keel, steady, save for the
+occasional shocks on striking ice.
+
+"It is difficult to express the sense of relief this steadiness gives
+after our storm-tossed passage. One can only imagine the relief and
+comfort afforded to the ponies, but the dogs are visibly cheered and the
+human element is full of gaiety. The voyage seems full of promise in
+spite of the imminence of delay."[51]
+
+We had met the pack farther north than any other ship.
+
+What is pack? Speaking very generally indeed, in this region it is the
+sea-ice which forms over the Ross Sea area during the winter, and is
+blown northwards by the southerly blizzards. But as we shall see, the
+ice which forms over this area is of infinite variety. As a rule great
+sheets spread over the seas which fringe the Antarctic continent in the
+autumn, grow thicker and thicker during the winter and spring, and break
+up when the temperatures of sea and air rise in summer. Such is the ice
+which forms in normal seasons round the shores of McMurdo Sound, and up
+the coast of the western mountains of Victoria Land. In sheltered bays
+this ice will sometimes remain in for two years or even more, growing all
+the time, until some phenomenal break-up releases it. We found an example
+of this in the sea-ice which formed between Hut Point and the Barrier.
+But there are great waters which can never freeze for very long. Cape
+Crozier, for instance, where the Emperor penguins nest in winter, is one
+of the windiest places in the world. In July it was completely frozen
+over as far as we could see in the darkness from a height of 900 feet.
+Within a few days a hurricane had blown it all away, and the sea was
+black.
+
+I believe, and we had experiences to prove me right, that there is a
+critical period early in the winter, and that if sea-ice has not frozen
+thick enough to remain fast by that time, it is probable that the sea
+will remain open for the rest of the year. But this does not mean that no
+ice will form. So great is the wish of the sea to freeze, and so cold is
+the air, that the wind has only to lull for one instant and the surface
+is covered with a thin film of ice, as though by magic. But the next
+blizzard tears it out by force or a spring tide coaxes it out by stealth,
+whether it be a foot thick or only a fraction of an inch. Such an example
+we had at our very doors during our last winter, and the untamed winds
+which blew as a result were atrocious.
+
+Thus it is that floes from a few inches to twenty feet thick go voyaging
+out to join the belt of ice which is known as the pack. Scott seems to
+have thought that the whole Ross Sea freezes over.[52] I myself think
+this doubtful, and I am, I believe, the only person living who has seen
+the Ross Sea open in mid-winter. This was on the Winter Journey
+undertaken by Wilson, Bowers and myself in pursuit of Emperor penguin
+eggs--but of that later.
+
+It is clear that winds and currents are, broadly speaking, the governing
+factors of the density of pack-ice. By experience we know that clear
+water may be found in the autumn where great tracts of ice barred the way
+in summer. The tendency of the pack is northwards, where the ice melts
+into the warmer waters. But the bergs remain when all traces of the pack
+have disappeared, and, drifting northwards still, form the menace to
+shipping so well known to sailors rounding the Horn. It is not hard to
+imagine that one monster ice island of twenty miles in length, such as do
+haunt these seas, drifting into navigated waters and calving into
+hundreds of great bergs as it goes, will in itself produce what seamen
+call a bad year for ice. And the last stages of these, when the bergs
+have degenerated into 'growlers,' are even worse, for then the sharpest
+eye can hardly distinguish them as they float nearly submerged though
+they have lost but little of their powers of evil.
+
+There are two main types of Antarctic berg. The first and most common is
+the tabular form. Bergs of this shape cruise about in thousands and
+thousands. A less common form is known as the pinnacled berg, and in
+almost every case this is a tabular berg which has been weathered or has
+capsized. The number of bergs which calve direct from a mountain glacier
+into the sea is probably not very great. Whence then do they come?
+
+The origin of the tabular bergs was debated until a few years ago. They
+have been recorded up to forty and even fifty miles in length, and they
+have been called floe bergs, because it was supposed that they froze
+first as ordinary sea-ice and increased by subsequent additions from
+below. But now we know that these bergs calve off from the Antarctic
+Barriers, the largest of which is known as the Great Ice Barrier, which
+forms the southern boundary of the Ross Sea. We were to become very
+familiar with this vast field of ice. We know that its northern face is
+afloat, we guess that it may all be afloat. At any rate the open sea now
+washes against its face at least forty miles south of where it ran in
+the days of Ross. Though this Barrier may be the largest in the world, it
+is one of many. The most modern review of this mystery, Scott's article
+on The Great Ice Barrier, must serve until the next first-hand
+examination by some future explorer.
+
+A berg shows only about one-eighth of its total mass above water, and a
+berg two hundred feet high will therefore reach approximately fourteen
+hundred feet below the surface of the sea. Winds and currents have far
+more influence upon them than they have upon the pack, through which
+these bergs plough their way with a total disregard for such flimsy
+obstacles, and cause much chaos as they go. For the rest woe betide the
+ship which is so fixed into the pack that she cannot move if one of these
+monsters bears down upon her.
+
+Words cannot tell the beauty of the scenes through which we were to pass
+during the next three weeks. I suppose the pack in winter must be a
+terrible place enough: a place of darkness and desolation hardly to be
+found elsewhere. But forms which under different conditions can only
+betoken horror now conveyed to us impressions of the utmost peace and
+beauty, for the sun had kissed them all.
+
+"We have had a marvellous day. The morning watch was cloudy, but it
+gradually cleared until the sky was a brilliant blue, fading on the
+horizon into green and pink. The floes were pink, floating in a deep blue
+sea, and all the shadows were mauve. We passed right under a monster
+berg, and all day have been threading lake after lake and lead after
+lead. 'There is Regent Street,' said somebody, and for some time we drove
+through great streets of perpendicular walls of ice. Many a time they
+were so straight that one imagined they had been cut off with a ruler
+some hundreds of yards in length."[53]
+
+
+[Illustration: MIDNIGHT--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+On another occasion:
+
+"Stayed on deck till midnight. The sun just dipped below the southern
+horizon. The scene was incomparable. The northern sky was gloriously rosy
+and reflected in the calm sea between the ice, which varied from
+burnished copper to salmon pink; bergs and pack to the north had a
+pale greenish hue with deep purple shadows, the sky shaded to saffron and
+pale green. We gazed long at these beautiful effects."[54]
+
+But this was not always so. There was one day with rain, there were days
+of snow and hail and cold wet slush, and fog. "The position to-night is
+very cheerless. All hope that this easterly wind will open the pack seems
+to have vanished. We are surrounded with compacted floes of immense area.
+Openings appear between these floes and we slide crab-like from one to
+another with long delays between. It is difficult to keep hope alive.
+There are streaks of water sky over open leads to the north, but
+everywhere to the south we have the uniform white sky. The day has been
+overcast and the wind force 3 to 5 from the E.N.E.--snow has fallen from
+time to time. There could scarcely be a more dreary prospect for the eye
+to rest upon."[55]
+
+With the open water we left behind the albatross and the Cape pigeon
+which had accompanied us lately for many months. In their place we found
+the Antarctic petrel, "a richly piebald bird that appeared to be almost
+black and white against the ice floes,"[56] and the Snowy petrel, of
+which I have already spoken.
+
+No one of us whose privilege it was to be there will forget our first
+sight of the penguins, our first meal of seal meat, or that first big
+berg along which we coasted close in order that London might see it on
+the film. Hardly had we reached the thick pack, which prevailed after the
+suburbs had been passed, when we saw the little Adélie penguins hurrying
+to meet us. Great Scott, they seemed to say, what's this, and soon we
+could hear the cry which we shall never forget. "Aark, aark," they said,
+and full of wonder and curiosity, and perhaps a little out of breath,
+they stopped every now and then to express their feelings, "and to gaze
+and cry in wonder to their companions; now walking along the edge of a
+floe in search of a narrow spot to jump and so avoid the water, and with
+head down and much hesitation judging the width of the narrow gap, to
+give a little standing jump across as would a child, and running on the
+faster to make up for its delay. Again, coming to a wider lead of water
+necessitating a plunge, our inquisitive visitor would be lost for a
+moment, to reappear like a jack-in-the-box on a nearer floe, where
+wagging his tail, he immediately resumed his race towards the ship. Being
+now but a hundred yards or so from us he pokes his head constantly
+forward on this side and on that, to try and make out something of the
+new strange sight, crying aloud to his friends in his amazement, and
+exhibiting the most amusing indecision between his desire for further
+investigation and doubt as to the wisdom and propriety of closer contact
+with so huge a beast."[57]
+
+They are extraordinarily like children, these little people of the
+Antarctic world, either like children, or like old men, full of their own
+importance and late for dinner, in their black tail-coats and white
+shirt-fronts--and rather portly withal. We used to sing to them, as they
+to us, and you might often see "a group of explorers on the poop, singing
+'She has rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she shall have
+music wherever she goes,' and so on at the top of their voices to an
+admiring group of Adélie penguins."[58]
+
+Meares used to sing to them what he called 'God save,' and declared that
+it would always send them headlong into the water. He sang flat: perhaps
+that was why.
+
+Two or more penguins will combine to push a third in front of them
+against a skua gull, which is one of their enemies, for he eats their
+eggs or their young if he gets the chance. They will refuse to dive off
+an ice-foot until they have persuaded one of their companions to take the
+first jump, for fear of the sea-leopard which may be waiting in the water
+below, ready to seize them and play with them much as a cat will play
+with a mouse. As Levick describes in his book about the penguins at Cape
+Adare: "At the place where they most often went in, a long terrace of ice
+about six feet in height ran for some hundreds of yards along the edge
+of the water, and here, just as on the sea-ice, crowds would stand near
+the brink. When they had succeeded in pushing one of their number over,
+all would crane their necks over the edge, and when they saw the pioneer
+safe in the water, the rest followed."[59]
+
+It is clear then that the Adélie penguin will show a certain spirit of
+selfishness in tackling his hereditary enemies. But when it comes to the
+danger of which he is ignorant his courage betrays want of caution.
+Meares and Dimitri exercised the dog-teams out upon the larger floes when
+we were held up for any length of time. One day a team was tethered by
+the side of the ship, and a penguin sighted them and hurried from afar
+off. The dogs became frantic with excitement as he neared them: he
+supposed it was a greeting, and the louder they barked and the more they
+strained at their ropes, the faster he bustled to meet them. He was
+extremely angry with a man who went and saved him from a very sudden end,
+clinging to his trousers with his beak, and furiously beating his shins
+with his flippers. It was not an uncommon sight to see a little Adélie
+penguin standing within a few inches of the nose of a dog which was
+almost frantic with desire and passion.
+
+The pack-ice is the home of the immature penguins, both Emperor and
+Adélie. But we did not see any large numbers of immature Emperors during
+this voyage.
+
+We soon became acquainted with the sea-leopard, which waits under the
+ice-foot for the little penguins; he is a brute, but sinuous and graceful
+as the seal world goes. He preys especially upon the Adélie penguin, and
+Levick found no less than eighteen penguins, together with the remains of
+many others, in the stomach of one sea-leopard. In the water the leopard
+seems "a trifle faster than the Adélies, as one of them occasionally
+would catch up with one of the fugitives, who then, realizing that speed
+alone would not avail him, started dodging from side to side, and
+sometimes swam rapidly round and round in a circle of about twelve feet
+diameter for a full minute or more, doubtless knowing that he was
+quicker in turning than his great heavy pursuer, but exhaustion would
+overtake him in the end, and we could see the head and jaws of the great
+sea-leopard rise to the surface as he grabbed his victim. The sight of a
+panic-stricken little Adélie tearing round and round in this manner was
+sadly common late in the season."[60]
+
+Fish and small seal have also been found in its stomach. With long
+powerful head and neck and a sinuous body, it is equipped with most
+formidable teeth with which it tears strips out of the still living
+birds, and flippers which are adapted entirely for speed in the water. It
+is a solitary animal with a large range of distribution. It has been
+supposed to bring forth its young in the pack, but nothing definite is
+known on this subject. One day we saw a big sea-leopard swimming along
+with the ship. He dived under the floes and reappeared from floe to floe
+as we went, and for a time we thought he was interested in us. But soon
+we sighted another lying away on a floe, and our friend in the water
+began to rear his head up perpendicularly, and seemed to be trying to
+wind his mate, as we supposed. He was down wind from her, and appeared to
+find her at a distance of 150 to 200 yards, and the last we saw of him he
+was heading up the side of the floe where she lay.
+
+There are four kinds of seal in the Antarctic; of one of these, the
+sea-leopard, I have already spoken. Another is called the Ross seal, for
+Sir James Ross discovered it in 1840. It seems to be a solitary beast,
+living in the pack, and is peculiar for its "pug-like expression of
+countenance."[61] It has always been rare, and no single specimen was
+seen on this expedition, though the Terra Nova must have passed through
+more pack than most whalers see in a life-time. It looks as if the Ross
+seal is more rare than was supposed.
+
+[Illustration: A SEA LEOPARD]
+
+[Illustration: A WEDDELL SEAL]
+
+The very common seal of the Antarctic is the Weddell, which seldom lives
+in the pack but spends its life catching fish close to the shores of the
+continent, and digesting them, when caught, lying sluggishly upon the
+ice-foot. We came to know them later in their hundreds in McMurdo Sound,
+for the Weddell is a land-loving seal and is only found in large numbers
+near the coast. Just at this time it was the crab-eating seal which we
+saw very fairly often, generally several of them together, but never in
+large numbers.
+
+Wilson has pointed out in his article upon seals in the Discovery
+Report[62] that the Weddell and the crab-eater seal, which are the two
+commoner of the Antarctic seals, have agreed to differ both in habit and
+in diet, and therefore they share the field successfully. He shows that
+"the two penguins which share the same area have differentiated in a
+somewhat similar manner." The Weddell seal and the Emperor penguin "have
+the following points in common, namely, a littoral distribution, a fish
+diet and residential non-migratory habit, remaining as far south the
+whole year round as open water will allow; whereas the other two (the
+crab-eating seal and the Adélie penguin) have in common a more pelagic
+habit, a crustacean diet, and a distribution definitely migratory in the
+case of the penguin, and although not so definitely migratory in the case
+of the seal, yet checked from coming so far south as Weddell's seal in
+winter by a strong tendency to keep in touch with pelagic ice."[63]
+Wilson considers that the advantage lies in each case with the
+"non-migratory and more southern species," i.e. the Weddell seal and
+the Emperor penguin. I doubt whether he would confirm this now. The
+Emperor penguin, weighing six stones and more, seems to me to have a very
+much harder fight for life than the little Adélie.
+
+Before the Discovery started from England in 1901 an 'Antarctic Manual'
+was produced by the Royal Geographical Society, giving a summary of the
+information which existed up to that date about this part of the world.
+It is interesting reading, and to the Antarctic student it proves how
+little was known in some branches of science at that date, and what
+strides were made during the next few years. To read what was known of
+the birds and beasts of the Antarctic and then to read Wilson's
+Zoological Report of the Discovery Expedition is an education in what one
+man can still do in an out-of-the-way part of the world to elucidate the
+problems which await him.
+
+The teeth of a crab-eating seal "are surmounted by perhaps the most
+complicated arrangement of cusps found in any living mammal."[64] The
+mouth is so arranged that the teeth of the upper jaw fit into those of
+the lower, and "the cusps form a perfect sieve ... a hitherto
+unparalleled function for the teeth of a mammal."[65] The food of this
+seal consists mainly of Euphausiae, animals much like shrimps, which it
+doubtless keeps in its mouth while it expels the water through its teeth,
+like those whales which sift their food through their baleen plates."
+This development of cusps in the teeth of the [crab-eating seal] is
+probably a more perfect adaptation to this purpose than in any other
+mammal, and has been produced at the cost of all usefulness in the teeth
+as grinders. The grit, however, which forms a fairly constant part of the
+contents of the stomach and intestines, serves, no doubt, to grind up the
+shells of the crustaceans, and in this way the necessity for grinders is
+completely obviated."[66]
+
+The sea-leopard has a very formidable set of teeth suitable for his
+carnivorous diet. The Weddell, living on fish, has a more simple group,
+but these are liable to become very worn in old age, due to his habit of
+gnawing out holes in the ice for himself, so graphically displayed on
+Ponting's cinematograph. When he feels death approaching, the crab-eating
+seal, never inclined to live in the company of more than a few of his
+kind, becomes still more solitary. The Weddell seal will travel far up
+the glaciers of South Victoria Land, and there we have found them lying
+dead. But the crab-eating seal will wander even farther. He leaves the
+pack. "Thirty miles from the sea-shore and 3000 feet above sea-level,
+their carcases were found on quite a number of occasions, and it is hard
+to account for such vagaries on other grounds than that a sick animal
+will go any distance to get away from its companions"[67] (and perhaps it
+should be added from its enemies).
+
+Often the under sides of the floes were coloured a peculiar yellow. This
+coloration is caused by minute unicellular plants called diatoms. The
+floating life of the Antarctic is most dense. "Diatoms were so abundant
+in parts of the Ross Sea, that a large plankton net (18 meshes to an
+inch) became choked in a few minutes with them and other members of the
+Phytoplankton. It is extremely probable that in such localities whales
+feed upon the plants as well as the animals of the plankton."[68] I do
+not know to what extent these open waters are frequented by whales during
+the winter, but in the summer months they are full of them, right down to
+the fringe of the continent. Most common of all is the kind of sea-wolf
+known as the Killer Whale, who measures 30 feet long. He hunts in packs
+up to at least a hundred strong, and as we now know, he does not confine
+his attacks to seal and other whales, but will also hunt man, though
+perhaps he mistakes him for a seal. This whale is a toothed beast and a
+flesh-eater, and is more properly a dolphin. But it seems that there are
+at least five or six other kinds of whales, some of which do not
+penetrate south of the pack, while others cruise in large numbers right
+up to the edge of the fast ice. They feed upon the minute surface life of
+these seas, and large numbers of them were seen not only by the Terra
+Nova on her various cruises, but also by the shore parties in the waters
+of McMurdo Sound. In both Wilson and Lillie we had skilled whale
+observers, and their work has gone far to elucidate the still obscure
+questions of whale distribution in the South.
+
+The pack-ice offers excellent opportunities for the identification of
+whales, because their movements are more restricted than in the open
+ocean. In order to identify, the observer generally has only the blow,
+and then the shape of the back and fin as the whale goes down, to guide
+him. In the pack he sometimes gets more, as in the case of Balaenoptera
+acutorostrata (Piked whale) on March 3, 1911. The ship "was ploughing her
+way through thick pack-ice, in which the water was freezing between the
+floes, so that the only open spaces for miles around were those made by
+the slow movement of the ship. We saw several of these whales during the
+day, making use of the holes in the ice near the ship for the purpose of
+blowing. There was scarcely room between the floes for the whales to come
+up to blow in their usual manner, which consists in rising almost
+horizontally, and breaking the surface of the water with their backs. On
+this occasion they pushed their snouts obliquely out of the water, nearly
+as far as the eye, and after blowing, withdrew them below the water
+again. Commander Pennell noted that several times one rested its head on
+a floe not twenty feet from the ship, with its nostrils just on the
+water-line; raising itself a few inches, it would blow and then subside
+again for a few minutes to its original position with its snout resting
+on the floe. They took no notice of pieces of coal which were thrown at
+them by the men on board the ship."[69]
+
+But no whale which we saw in the pack, and we often saw it elsewhere
+also, was so imposing as the great Blue whale, some of which were
+possibly more than 100 feet long. "We used to watch this huge whale come
+to the surface again and again to blow, at intervals of thirty to forty
+seconds, and from the fact that at each of four or five appearances no
+vestige of a dorsal fin was visible, we began to wonder whether we had
+not found the Right whale that was once reported to be so abundant in
+Ross Sea. Again and again the spout went up into the cold air, a white
+twelve-foot column of condensed moisture, followed by a smooth broad
+back, and yet no fin. For some time we remained uncertain as to its
+identity, till at last in sounding for a longer disappearance and a
+greater depth than usual, the hinder third of the enormous beast appeared
+above the surface for the first time with its little angular dorsal fin,
+at once dispelling any doubts we might have had."[70]
+
+It is supposed to be the largest mammal that has ever existed.[71] As it
+comes up to blow, "one sees first a small dark hump appear and then
+immediately a jet of grey fog squirted upwards fifteen to eighteen feet,
+gradually spreading as it rises vertically into the frosty air. I have
+been nearly in these blows once or twice and had the moisture in my face
+with a sickening smell of shrimpy oil. Then the hump elongates and up
+rolls an immense blue-grey or blackish-grey round back with a faint ridge
+along the top, on which presently appears a small hook-like dorsal fin,
+and then the whole sinks and disappears."[72]
+
+To the biologist the pack is of absorbing interest. If you want to see
+life, naked and unashamed, study the struggles of this ice-world, from
+the diatom in the ice-floe to the big killer whale; each stage essential
+to the life of the stage above, and living on the stage below:
+
+                  THE PROTOPLASMIC CYCLE
+
+    Big floes have little floes all around about 'em,
+      And all the yellow diatoms[73] couldn't do without 'em.
+    Forty million shrimplets feed upon the latter,
+      And _they_ make the penguin and the seals and whales
+                                                            Much fatter.
+
+    Along comes the Orca[74] and kills these down below,
+      While up above the Afterguard[75] attack them on the floe:
+    And if a sailor tumbles in and stoves the mushy pack in,
+      He's crumpled up between the floes, and so they get
+                                                     _Their_ whack in.
+
+    Then there's no doubt he soon becomes a Patent Fertilizer,
+      Invigorating diatoms, although they're none the wiser,
+    So the protoplasm passes on its never-ceasing round,
+      Like a huge recurring decimal ... to which no
+                                                   End is found.[76]
+
+We were early on the scene compared with previous expeditions, but I do
+not suppose this alone can explain the extremely heavy ice conditions we
+met. Possibly we were too far east. Our progress was very slow, and often
+we were hung up for days at a time, motionless and immovable, the pack
+all close about us. Patience and always more patience! "From the masthead
+one can see a few patches of open water in different directions, but the
+main outlook is the same scene of desolate hummocky pack."[77] And again:
+"We have scarcely moved all day, but bergs which have become quite old
+friends are on the move, and one has approached and almost circled
+us."[78]
+
+And then without warning and reason, as far as we could see, it would
+open out again, and broad black leads and lakes would appear where there
+had been only white snow and ice before, and we would make just a few
+more miles, and sometimes we would raise steam only to suffer further
+disappointment. Generally speaking, a dark black sky means open water,
+and this is known as an open-water sky; high lights in the sky mean ice,
+and this is known as ice-blink.
+
+The changes were as sudden as they were unexpected. Thus early in the
+morning of Christmas Eve, about a fortnight after we had entered the
+pack, "we have come into a region of where the open water exceeds the
+ice; the former lies in great irregular pools three or four miles or more
+across and connecting with many leads. The latter--and the fact is
+puzzling--still contain floes of enormous dimensions; we have just passed
+one which is at least two miles in diameter...." And then, "Alas! alas!
+at 7 A.M. this morning we were brought up with a solid sheet of pack
+extending in all directions, save that from which we had come."[79]
+
+Delay was always irksome to Scott. As time went on this waiting in the
+pack became almost intolerable. He began to think we might have to winter
+in the pack. And all the time our scanty supply of coal was being eaten
+up, until it was said that Campbell's party would never be taken to King
+Edward VII.'s Land. Scott found decisions to bank fires, to raise steam
+or to let fires out, most difficult at this time. "If one lets fires out
+it means a dead loss of over two tons, when the boiler has to be heated
+again. But this two tons would only cover a day under banked fires, so
+that for anything longer than twenty-four hours it is economy to put the
+fires out. At each stoppage one is called upon to decide whether it is to
+be for more or less than twenty-four hours."[80] Certainly England should
+have an oil-driven ship for polar work.
+
+The Terra Nova proved a wonderfully fine ice ship. Bowers' middle watch
+especially became famous for the way in which he put the ship at the ice,
+and more than once Scott was alarmed by the great shock and collisions
+which were the result: I have seen him hurry up from his cabin to put a
+stop to it! But Bowers never hurt the ship, and she gallantly responded
+to the calls made upon her. Sometimes it was a matter of forcing two
+floes apart, at others of charging and breaking one. Often we went again
+and again at some stubborn bit, backing and charging alternately, as well
+as the space behind us would allow. If sufficient momentum was gained the
+ship rode upon the thicker floes, rising up upon it and pressing it down
+beneath her, until suddenly, perhaps when its nearest edge was almost
+amidships, the weight became too great and the ice split beneath us. At
+other times a tiny crack, no larger than a vein, would run shivering from
+our bows, which widened and widened until the whole ship passed through
+without difficulty. Always when below one heard the grumbling of the ice
+as it passed along the side. But it was slow work, and hard on the
+engines. There were days when we never moved at all.
+
+"I can imagine few things more trying to the patience than the long
+wasted days of waiting. Exasperating as it is to see the tons of coal
+melting away with the smallest mileage to our credit, one has at least
+the satisfaction of active fighting and the hope of better fortune. To
+wait idly is the worst of conditions. You can imagine how often and how
+restlessly we climbed to the crow's nest and studied the outlook. And
+strangely enough there was generally some change to note. A water lead
+would mysteriously open up a few miles away, or the place where it had
+been would as mysteriously close. Huge icebergs crept silently towards or
+past us, and continually we were observing these formidable objects with
+range finder and compass to determine the relative movement, sometimes
+with misgivings as to our ability to clear them. Under steam the change
+of conditions was even more marked. Sometimes we would enter a lead of
+open water and proceed for a mile or two without hindrance; sometimes we
+would come to big sheets of thin ice which broke easily as our iron-shod
+prow struck them, and sometimes even a thin sheet would resist all our
+attempts to break it; sometimes we would push big floes with comparative
+ease and sometimes a small floe would bar our passage with such obstinacy
+that one would almost believe it possessed of an evil spirit; sometimes
+we passed through acres of sludgy sodden ice which hissed as it swept
+along the side, and sometimes the hissing ceased seemingly without rhyme
+or reason, and we found our screw churning the sea without any effect.
+
+"Thus the steaming days passed away in an ever-changing environment and
+are remembered as an unceasing struggle.
+
+"The ship behaved splendidly--no other ship, not even the Discovery,
+would have come through so well. Certainly the Nimrod would never have
+reached the south water had she been caught in such pack. As a result I
+have grown strangely attached to the Terra Nova. As she bumped the floes
+with mighty shocks, crushing and grinding a way through some, twisting
+and turning to avoid others, she seemed like a living thing fighting a
+great fight. If only she had more economical engines she would be
+suitable in all respects.
+
+[Illustration: TERRA NOVA]
+
+"Once or twice we got among floes which stood 7 or 8 feet above water,
+with hummocks and pinnacles as high as 25 feet. The ship could have stood
+no chance had such floes pressed against her, and at first we were a
+little alarmed in such situations. But familiarity breeds contempt;
+there never was any pressure in the heavy ice, and I'm inclined to think
+there never would be.
+
+"The weather changed frequently during our journey through the pack. The
+wind blew strong from the west and from the east; the sky was often
+darkly overcast; we had snowstorms, flaky snow, and even light rain. In
+all such circumstances we were better placed in the pack than outside of
+it. The foulest weather could do us little harm. During quite a large
+percentage of days, however, we had bright sunshine, which, even with the
+temperature well below freezing, made everything look bright and
+cheerful. The sun also brought us wonderful cloud effects, marvellously
+delicate tints of sky, cloud and ice, such effects as one might travel
+far to see. In spite of our impatience we would not willingly have missed
+many of the beautiful scenes which our sojourn in the pack afforded us.
+Ponting and Wilson have been busy catching these effects, but no art can
+reproduce such colours as the deep blue of the icebergs."[81]
+
+As a rule the officer of the watch conned from the crow's nest, shouting
+his orders to the steersman direct, and to the engine-room through the
+midshipman of the watch, who stood upon the bridge. It is thrilling work
+to the officer in charge, who not only has to face the immediate problem
+of what floes he dare and what he dare not charge, but also to puzzle out
+the best course for the future,--but I expect he soon gets sick of it.
+
+About this time Bowers made a fancy sketch of the Terra Nova hitting an
+enormous piece of ice. The masts are all whipped forward, and from the
+crow's nest is shot first the officer of the watch, followed by cigarette
+ends and empty cocoa mugs, and lastly the hay with which the floor was
+covered. Upon the forecastle stands Farmer Hayseed (Oates) chewing a
+straw with the greatest composure, and waiting until the hay shall fall
+at his feet, at which time he will feed it to his ponies. This crow's
+nest, which was a barrel lashed to the top of the mainmast, to which
+entrance was gained by a hinged trap-door, shielded the occupant from
+most of the wind. I am not sure that the steersman did not have the most
+uninviting job, but hot cocoa is a most comforting drink and there was
+always plenty to be had.
+
+Rennick was busy sounding. The depths varied from 1804 to at least 3890
+fathoms, and the bottom generally showed volcanic deposits. Our line of
+soundings showed the transition from the ocean depths to the continental
+shelf. A series of temperatures was gained by Nelson by means of
+reversible thermometers down to 3891 metres.
+
+The winch upon which the sounding line was wound was worked by hand on
+this cruise. It was worked mechanically afterwards, and of course this
+ought always to be done if possible. Just now it was a wearisome
+business, especially when we lowered a water-sample bottle one day to
+1800 metres, spent hours in winding it up and found it still open when it
+arrived at the surface! Water samples were also obtained at the various
+depths. Lillie and Nelson were both busy tow-netting for plankton with
+full-speed, Apstein, Nansen, 24-and 180-mesh nets.
+
+I don't think many at home had a more pleasant Christmas Day than we. It
+was beautifully calm with the pack all round. At 10 we had church with
+lots of Christmas hymns, and then decorated the ward-room with all our
+sledging flags. These flags are carried by officers on Arctic
+expeditions, and are formed of the St. George's Cross with a continuation
+ending in a swallow-tail in the heraldic colours to which the individual
+is entitled, and upon this is embroidered his crest. The men forrard had
+their Christmas dinner of fresh mutton at mid-day; there was plenty of
+penguin for them, but curiously enough they did not think it good enough
+for a Christmas dinner. The ward-room ate penguin in the evening, and
+after the toast of 'absent friends' we began to sing, and twice round the
+table everybody had to contribute a song. Ponting's banjo songs were a
+great success, also Oates's 'The Vly on the tu-urmuts.' Meares sang "a
+little song about our Expedition, and many of the members that Southward
+would go," of his own composition. The general result was that the
+watches were all over the place that night. At 4 A.M. Day whispered in
+my ear that there was nothing to do, and Pennell promised to call me if
+there was--so I remembered no more until past six.
+
+And Crean's rabbit gave birth to seventeen little ones, and it was said
+that Crean had already given away twenty-two.
+
+We had stopped and banked fires against an immense composite floe on the
+evening of Christmas Eve. How we watched the little changes in the ice
+and the wind, and scanned the horizon for those black patches which meant
+open water ahead. But always there was that same white sky to the south
+of us. And then one day there came the shadow of movement on the sea, the
+faintest crush on the brash ice, the whisper of great disturbances afar
+off. It settled again: our hopes were dashed to the ground. Then came the
+wind. It was so thick that we could not see far; but even in our
+restricted field changes were in progress.
+
+"We commence to move between two floes, make 200 or 300 yards, and are
+then brought up bows on to a large lump. This may mean a wait of anything
+from ten minutes to half-an-hour, whilst the ship swings round, falls
+away, and drifts to leeward. When clear she forges ahead again and the
+operation is repeated. Occasionally when she can get a little way on she
+cracks the obstacle and slowly passes through it. There is a distinct
+swell--very long, very low. I counted the period as about nine seconds.
+Every one says the ice is breaking up."[82]
+
+On December 28 the gale abated. The sky cleared, and showed signs of open
+water ahead. It was cold in the wind but the sun was wonderful, and we
+lay out on deck and basked in its warmth, a cheerful, careless crowd.
+After breakfast there was a consultation between Scott and Wilson in the
+crow's nest. It was decided to raise steam.
+
+Meanwhile we sounded, and found a volcanic muddy bottom at 2035 fathoms.
+The last sounding showed 1400 fathoms; we had passed over a bank.
+
+Steam came at 8 P.M. and we began to push forward. At first it was hard
+going, but slowly we elbowed our way until the spaces of open water
+became more frequent. Soon we found one or two large pools, several miles
+in extent; then the floes became smaller. Later we could see no really
+big floes at all; "the sheets of thin ice are broken into comparatively
+regular figures, none more than thirty yards across," and "we are
+steaming amongst floes of small area evidently broken by swell, and with
+edges abraded by contact."[83]
+
+We could not be far from the southern edge of the pack. Twenty-four hours
+after raising steam we were still making good progress, checking
+sometimes to carve our way through some obstacle. At last we were getting
+a return for the precious coal expended. The sky was overcast, the
+outlook from the masthead flat and dreary, but hour by hour it became
+more obvious that we neared the threshold of the open sea. At 1 A.M. on
+Friday, December 30 (lat. about 71½° S., noon observation 72° 17´ S.,
+177° 9´ E.) Bowers steered through the last ice stream. Behind was some
+400 miles of ice. Cape Crozier was 334 miles (geog.) ahead.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+    [40] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 6.
+
+    [41] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 7.
+
+    [42] Ibid. p. 9.
+
+    [43] Ibid. p. 8.
+
+    [44] Wilson in the _Discovery Natural History Reports._
+
+    [45] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 11-12.
+
+    [46] Wilson's Journal.
+
+    [47] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 14-15.
+
+    [48] Raper, _Practice of Navigation_, article 547.
+
+    [49] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 13.
+
+    [50] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 21-22.
+
+    [51] Ibid. pp. 24-25.
+
+    [52] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 2.
+
+    [53] My own diary.
+
+    [54] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 25.
+
+    [55] Ibid. p. 60.
+
+    [56] Wilson.
+
+    [57] Wilson, _Discovery Natural History Report_, vol. ii. part ii.
+         p. 38.
+
+    [58] Wilson's Journal.
+
+    [59] Levick, _Antarctic Penguins_, p. 83.
+
+    [60] Levick, _Antarctic Penguins_, p. 85.
+
+    [61] Wilson in the _Discovery Natural History Report, Zoology_,
+         vol. ii. part i. p. 44.
+
+    [62] _Discovery Natural History Report, Zoology_, vol. ii. part i.
+         Wilson, pp. 32, 33.
+
+    [63] Ibid. p. 33.
+
+    [64] _Antarctic Manual: Seals_, by Barrett-Hamilton, p. 216.
+
+    [65] Ibid. p. 217.
+
+    [66] _Discovery Natural History Report, Zoology_, vol. ii. part i.
+         by E. A. Wilson, p. 36.
+
+    [67] _Discovery Natural History Report, Zoology_, vol. ii. part i.
+         by E. A. Wilson.
+
+    [68] _Terra Nova Natural History Report, Cetacea_, vol. i. No. 3,
+         p. 111, by Lillie.
+
+    [69] _Terra Nova Natural History Report, Zoology_, vol. i. No. 3,
+         _Cetacea_, by D. G. Lillie, p. 114.
+
+    [70] _Discovery Natural History Report, Zoology_, vol. ii. part i.
+         pp. 3-4, by E. A. Wilson.
+
+    [71] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 22.
+
+    [72] Wilson's Journal, _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 613.
+
+    [73] Minute plants.
+
+    [74] Killer whale.
+
+    [75] Officers' mess on the Terra Nova.
+
+    [76] Griffith Taylor in _South Polar Times_.
+
+    [77] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 35.
+
+    [78] Ibid. p. 39.
+
+    [79] Ibid. pp. 54, 55.
+
+    [80] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 56.
+
+    [81] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 73-75.
+
+    [82] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 62.
+
+    [83] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 68, 69.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+LAND
+
+    Beyond this flood a frozen continent
+    Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual storms
+    Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
+    Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
+    Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice....
+                                  MILTON, _Paradise Lost_, II.
+
+
+"They say it's going to blow like hell. Go and look at the glass." Thus
+Titus Oates quietly to me a few hours before we left the pack.
+
+I went and looked at the barograph and it made me feel sea-sick. Within a
+few hours I was sick, _very_ sick; but we newcomers to the Antarctic had
+yet to learn that we knew nothing about its barometer. Nothing very
+terrible happened after all. When I got up to the bridge for the morning
+watch we were in open water and it was blowing fresh. It freshened all
+day, and by the evening it was blowing a southerly with a short choppy
+North Sea swell, and very warm. By 4 A.M. the next morning there was a
+big sea running and the dogs and ponies were having a bad time. Rennick
+had the morning watch these days, and I was his humble midshipman.
+
+At 5.45 we sighted what we thought was a berg on the port bow. About
+three minutes later Rennick said, "There's a bit of pack," and I went
+below and reported to Evans. It was very thick with driving snow and also
+foggy, and before Evans got up to the bridge we were quite near the pack,
+and amongst bits which had floated from it, one of which must have been
+our berg. We took in the headsails as quickly as possible, these being
+the only sails set, and nosed along dead slow to leeward under steam
+alone. Gradually we could see either pack or the blink of it all along
+our port and starboard beam, while gradually we felt our way down a big
+patch of open water.
+
+There was quite a meeting on the bridge, and it was decided to get well
+in, and lie in open water under lee of the pack till the gale blew itself
+out. "Under ordinary circumstances the safe course would have been to go
+about and stand to the east. But in our case we must risk trouble to get
+smoother water for the ponies. We passed a stream of ice over which the
+sea was breaking heavily, and one realized the danger of being amongst
+loose floes in such a sea. But soon we came to a compacter body of floes,
+and running behind this we were agreeably surprised to find comparatively
+smooth water. We ran on for a bit, then stopped and lay to."[84]
+
+All that day we lay behind that pack, steaming slowly to leeward every
+now and then, as the ice drifted down upon us. Towards night it began to
+clear. It was New Year's Eve.
+
+I turned in, thinking to wake in 1911. But I had not been long asleep
+when I found Atkinson at my side. "Have you seen the land?" he said.
+"Wrap your blankets round you, and go and see." And when I got up on deck
+I could see nothing for a while. Then he said: "All the high lights are
+snow lit up by the sun." And there they were: the most glorious peaks
+appearing, as it were like satin, above the clouds, the only white in a
+dark horizon. The first glimpse of Antarctic land, Sabine and the great
+mountains of the Admiralty Range. They were 110 miles away. But
+
+          Icy mountains high on mountains pil'd
+    Seem to the shivering sailor from afar
+    Shapeless and white, an atmosphere of cloud;[85]
+
+and, truth to tell, I went back to my warm bunk. At midnight a rowdy mob,
+ringing the New Year in with the dinner-bell, burst into our Nursery. I
+expected to be hauled out, but got off with a dig in the ribs from
+Birdie Bowers.
+
+In brilliant sunshine we coasted down Victoria Land. "To-night it is
+absolutely calm, with glorious bright sunshine. Several people were
+sunning themselves at 11 o'clock! Sitting on deck and reading."[86]
+
+At 8.30 on Monday night, January 2, we sighted Erebus, 115 miles away.
+The next morning most of us were on the yards furling sail. We were
+heading for Cape Crozier, the northern face of Ross Island was open to
+our fascinated gaze, and away to the east stretched the Barrier face
+until it disappeared below the horizon. Adélie penguins and Killer whales
+were abundant in the water through which we steamed.
+
+I have seen Fuji, the most dainty and graceful of all mountains; and also
+Kinchinjunga: only Michael Angelo among men could have conceived such
+grandeur. But give me Erebus for my friend. Whoever made Erebus knew all
+the charm of horizontal lines, and the lines of Erebus are for the most
+part nearer the horizontal than the vertical. And so he is the most
+restful mountain in the world, and I was glad when I knew that our hut
+would lie at his feet. And always there floated from his crater the lazy
+banner of his cloud of steam.
+
+Now we had reached the Barrier face some five miles east of the point at
+which it joins the basalt cliffs of Cape Crozier. We could see the great
+pressure waves which had proved such an obstacle to travellers from the
+Discovery to the Emperor penguin rookery. The Knoll was clear, but the
+summit of Mount Terror was in the clouds. As for the Barrier we seemed to
+have known it all our lives, it was so exactly like what we had imagined
+it to be, and seen in the pictures and photographs.
+
+Scott had a whaler launched, and we pulled in under the cliffs. There was
+a considerable swell.
+
+"We were to examine the possibilities of landing, but the swell was so
+heavy in its break among the floating blocks of ice along the actual
+beach and ice foot that a landing was out of the question. We should
+have broken up the boat and have all been in the water together. But I
+assure you it was tantalizing to me, for there about six feet above us on
+a small dirty piece of the old bay ice about ten feet square one living
+Emperor penguin chick was standing disconsolately stranded, and close by
+stood one faithful old Emperor parent asleep. This young Emperor was
+still in the down, a most interesting fact in the bird's life history at
+which we had rightly guessed, but which no one had actually observed
+before. It was in a stage never yet seen or collected, for the wings were
+already quite clean of down and feathered as in the adult, also a line
+down the breast was shed of down and part of the head. This bird would
+have been a treasure to me, but we could not risk life for it, so it had
+to remain where it was. It was a curious fact that with as much clean ice
+to live on as they could have wished for, these destitute derelicts of a
+flourishing colony, now gone north to sea on floating bay ice, should
+have preferred to remain standing on the only piece of bay ice left, a
+piece about ten feet square and now pressed up six feet above water
+level, evidently wondering why it was so long in starting north with the
+general exodus which must have taken place just a month ago. The whole
+incident was most interesting and full of suggestion as to the slow
+working of the brain of these queer people. Another point was most weird
+to see, that on the _under_ side of this very dirty piece of sea-ice,
+which was about two feet thick and which hung over the water as a sort of
+cave, we could see the legs and lower halves of dead Emperor chicks
+hanging through, and even in one place a dead adult. I hope to make a
+picture of the whole quaint incident, for it was a corner crammed full of
+Imperial history in the light of what we already knew, and it would
+otherwise have been about as unintelligible as any group of animate or
+inanimate nature could possibly have been. As it is, it throws more light
+on the life history of this strangely primitive bird....
+
+"We were joking in the boat as we rowed under these cliffs and saying it
+would be a short-lived amusement to see the overhanging cliff part
+company and fall on us. So we were glad to find that we were rowing back
+to the ship and already 200 or 300 yards away from the place and in open
+water when there was a noise like crackling thunder and a huge plunge
+into the sea and a smother of rock dust like the smoke of an explosion,
+and we realized that the very thing had happened which we had just been
+talking about. Altogether it was a very exciting row, for before we got
+on board we had the pleasure of seeing the ship shoved in so close to
+these cliffs by a belt of heavy pack ice that to us it appeared a toss-up
+whether she got out again or got forced in against the rocks. She had no
+time or room to turn, and got clear by backing out through the belt of
+pack stern first, getting heavy bumps under the counter and on the rudder
+as she did so, for the ice was heavy and the swell considerable."[87]
+
+Westward of Cape Crozier the sides of Mount Terror slope down to the sea,
+forming a possible landing-place in calm weather. Here there is a large
+Adélie penguin rookery in summer, and it was here that the Discovery left
+a record of her movements tied to a post to guide the relieving ship the
+following year. It was the return of a sledge party which tried to reach
+this record from the Barrier that led to Vince's terrible death.[88] As
+we coasted along we could see this post quite plainly, looking as new as
+the day it was erected, and we know now that there is communication with
+the Barrier behind, while this rookery itself is free from the blizzards
+which sweep out to sea by Cape Crozier. It was therefore an excellent
+place to winter and it was a considerable disappointment to find that it
+was impossible to land.
+
+This was the first sight we had of a rookery of the little Adélie
+penguin. Hundreds of thousands of birds dotted the shore, and there were
+many thousands in the sea round the ship. As we came to know these
+rookeries better we came to look upon these quaint creatures more as
+familiar friends than as casual acquaintances. Whatever a penguin does
+has individuality, and he lays bare his whole life for all to see. He
+cannot fly away. And because he is quaint in all that he does, but still
+more because he is fighting against bigger odds than any other bird, and
+fighting always with the most gallant pluck, he comes to be considered as
+something apart from the ordinary bird--sometimes solemn, sometimes
+humorous, enterprising, chivalrous, cheeky--and always (unless you are
+driving a dog-team) a welcome and, in some ways, an almost human friend.
+
+The alternative landing-place to Cape Crozier was somewhere in McMurdo
+Sound, the essential thing being that we should have access to and from
+the Barrier, such communication having to be by sea-ice, since the land
+is for the most part impassable. As we steamed from Cape Crozier to Cape
+Bird, the N.W. extremity of Ross Island, we carried out a detailed
+running survey.
+
+When we neared Cape Bird and Beaufort Island we could see that there was
+much pack in the mouth of the Strait. By keeping close in to the land we
+avoided the worst of the trouble, and "as we rounded Cape Bird we came in
+sight of the old well-remembered landmarks--Mount Discovery and the
+Western Mountains--seen dimly through a hazy atmosphere. It was good to
+see them again, and perhaps after all we are better this side of the
+Island. It gives one a homely feeling to see such a familiar scene."[89]
+
+Right round from Cape Crozier to Cape Royds the coast is cold and
+forbidding, and for the most part heavily crevassed. West of Cape Bird
+are some small penguin rookeries, and high up on the ice slopes could be
+seen some grey granite boulders. These are erratics, brought by ice from
+the Western Mountains, and are evidence of a warmer past when the Barrier
+rose some two thousand feet higher than it does now, and stretched many
+hundreds of miles farther out to sea. But now the Antarctic is becoming
+colder, the deposition of snow is therefore farther north, and the
+formation of ice correspondingly less.
+
+[Illustration: SOUNDING--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+[Illustration: KRISRAVITZA]
+
+Many watched all night, as this new world unfolded itself, cape by cape
+and mountain by mountain. We pushed through some heavy floes and "at 6
+A.M. (on January 4) we came through the last of the Strait pack some
+three miles north of Cape Royds. We steered for the Cape, fully expecting
+to find the edge of the pack-ice ranging westward from it. To our
+astonishment we ran on past the Cape with clear water or thin sludge ice
+on all sides of us. Past Cape Royds, past Cape Barne, past the glacier on
+its south side, and finally round and past Inaccessible Island, a good
+two miles south of Cape Royds. The Cape itself was cut off from the
+south. We could have gone farther, but the last sludge ice seemed to be
+increasing in thickness, and there was no wintering spot to aim for but
+Cape Armitage.[90] I have never seen the ice of the Sound in such a
+condition or the land so free from snow. Taking these facts in
+conjunction with the exceptional warmth of the air, I came to the
+conclusion that it had been an exceptionally warm summer. At this point
+it was evident that we had a considerable choice of wintering spots. We
+could have gone to either of the small islands, to the mainland, the
+Glacier Tongue, or pretty well anywhere except Hut Point. My main wish
+was to choose a place that would not be easily cut off from the Barrier,
+and my eye fell on a cape which we used to call the Skuary, a little
+behind us. It was separated from the old Discovery quarters by two deep
+bays on either side of the Glacier Tongue, and I thought that these bays
+would remain frozen until late in the season, and that when they froze
+over again the ice would soon become firm. I called a council and put
+these propositions. To push on to the Glacier Tongue and winter there; to
+push west to the 'tombstone' ice and to make our way to an inviting spot
+to the northward of the cape we used to call 'the Skuary.' I favoured the
+latter course, and on discussion we found it obviously the best, so we
+turned back close around Inaccessible Island and steered for the fast ice
+off the Cape at full speed. After piercing a small fringe of thin ice at
+the edge of the fast floe the ship's stem struck heavily on hard bay ice
+about a mile and a half from the shore. Here was a road to the Cape and a
+solid wharf on which to land our stores. We made fast with
+ice-anchors."[91]
+
+Scott, Wilson and Evans walked away over the sea-ice, but were soon back.
+They reported an excellent site for a hut on a shelving beach on the
+northern side of the Cape before us, which was henceforward called Cape
+Evans, after our second in command. Landing was to begin forthwith.
+
+First came the two big motor sledges which took up so much of our deck
+space. In spite of the hundreds of tons of sea-water which had washed
+over and about them they came out of their big crates looking "as fresh
+and clean as if they had been packed on the previous day."[92] They were
+running that same afternoon.
+
+We had a horse-box for the ponies, which came next, but it wanted all
+Oates' skill and persuasion to get them into it. All seventeen of them
+were soon on the floe, rolling and kicking with joy, and thence they were
+led across to the beach where they were carefully picketed to a rope run
+over a snow slope where they could not eat sand. Shackleton lost four out
+of eight ponies within a month of his arrival. His ponies were picketed
+on rubbly ground at Cape Royds, and ate the sand for the salt flavour it
+possessed. The fourth pony died from eating shavings in which chemicals
+had been packed. This does not mean that they were hungry, merely that
+these Manchurian ponies eat the first thing that comes in their way,
+whether it be a bit of sugar or a bit of Erebus.
+
+Meanwhile the dog-teams were running light loads between the ship and the
+shore. "The great trouble with them has been due to the fatuous conduct
+of the penguins. Groups of these have been constantly leaping on to our
+floe. From the moment of landing on their feet their whole attitude
+expressed devouring curiosity and a pig-headed disregard for their own
+safety. They waddle forward, poking their heads to and fro in their
+usually absurd way, in spite of a string of howling dogs straining to get
+at them. 'Hulloa!' they seem to say, 'here's a game--what do all you
+ridiculous things want?' And they come a few steps nearer. The dogs make
+a rush as far as their harness or leashes allow. The penguins are not
+daunted in the least, but their ruffs go up and they squawk with
+semblance of anger, for all the world as though they were rebutting a
+rude stranger--their attitude might be imagined to convey, 'Oh, that's
+the sort of animal you are; well, you've come to the wrong place--we
+aren't going to be bluffed and bounced by you,' and then the final fatal
+steps forward are taken and they come within reach. There is a spring, a
+squawk, a horrid red patch on the snow, and the incident is closed."[93]
+
+Everything had to be sledged nearly a mile and a half across the sea-ice,
+but at midnight, after seventeen hours' continuous work, the position was
+most satisfactory. The large amount of timber which went to make the hut
+was mostly landed. The ponies and dogs were sleeping in the sun on shore.
+A large green tent housed the hut builders, and the site for the hut was
+levelled.
+
+"Such weather in such a place comes nearer to satisfying my ideal of
+perfection than any condition I have ever experienced. The warm glow of
+the sun with the keen invigorating cold of the air forms a combination
+which is inexpressibly health-giving and satisfying to me, whilst the
+golden light on this wonderful scene of mountain and ice satisfies every
+claim of scenic magnificence. No words of mine can convey the
+impressiveness of the wonderful panorama displayed to our eyes.... It's
+splendid to see at last the effect of all the months of preparation and
+organisation. There is much snoring about me as I write (2 A.M.) from men
+tired after a hard day's work and preparing for such another to-morrow. I
+also must sleep, for I have had none for 48 hours--but it should be to
+dream happily."[94]
+
+Getting to bed about midnight and turning out at 5 A.M. we kept it up day
+after day. Petrol, paraffin, pony food, dog food, sledges and sledging
+gear, hut furniture, provisions of all kinds both for life at the hut and
+for sledging, coal, scientific instruments and gear, carbide, medical
+stores, clothing--I do not know how many times we sledged over that
+sea-ice, but I do know that we were landed as regards all essentials in
+six days. "Nothing like it has been done before; nothing so expeditious
+and complete."[95] ... and "Words cannot express the splendid way in
+which every one works."[96]
+
+The two motors, the two dog-teams, man-hauling parties, and, as they were
+passed for work by Oates, the ponies; all took part in this transport. As
+usual Bowers knew just where everything was, and where it was to go, and
+he was most ably seconded on the ship by Rennick and Bruce. Both
+man-hauling parties and pony-leaders commonly did ten journeys a day, a
+distance of over thirty miles. The ponies themselves did one to three or
+four journeys as they were considered fit.
+
+Generally speaking the transport seemed satisfactory, but it soon became
+clear that sea-ice was very hard on the motor sledge runners. "The motor
+sledges are working well, but not very well; the small difficulties will
+be got over, but I rather fear they will never draw the loads we expect
+of them. Still they promise to be a help, and they are a lively and
+attractive feature of our present scene as they drone along over the
+floe. At a little distance, without silencers, they sound exactly like
+threshing machines."[97]
+
+The ponies were the real problem. It was to be expected that they would
+be helpless and exhausted after their long and trying voyage. Not a bit
+of it! They were soon rolling about, biting one another, kicking one
+another, and any one else, with the best will in the world. After two
+days' rest on shore, twelve of them were thought fit to do one journey,
+on which they pulled loads varying from 700 to 1000 lbs. with ease on the
+hard sea-ice surface. But it was soon clear that these ponies were an
+uneven lot. There were the steady workers like Punch and Nobby; there
+were one or two definitely weak ponies like Blossom, Blücher and Jehu;
+and there were one or two strong but rather impossible beasts. One of
+these was soon known as Weary Willie. His outward appearance belied him,
+for he looked like a pony. A brief acquaintance soon convinced me that
+he was without doubt a cross between a pig and a mule. He was obviously a
+strong beast and, since he always went as slowly as possible and stopped
+as often as possible it was most difficult to form any opinion as to what
+load he was really able to draw. Consequently I am afraid there is little
+doubt that he was generally overloaded until that grim day on the Barrier
+when he was set upon by a dog-team. It was his final collapse at the end
+of the Depôt journey which caused Scott to stay behind when we went out
+on the sea-ice. But of that I shall speak again.
+
+Twice only have I ever seen Weary Willie trot. We were leading the ponies
+now as always with halters and without bits. Consequently our control was
+limited, especially on ice, but doubtless the ponies' comfort was
+increased, especially in cold weather when a metal bit would have been
+difficult if not impossible. On this occasion he and I had just arrived
+at the ship after a trudge in which I seemed to be pulling both Weary and
+the sledge. Just then a motor back-fired, and we started back across that
+floe at a pace which surprised Weary even more than myself, for he fell
+over the sledge, himself and me, and for days I felt like a big black
+bruise. The second occasion on which he got a move on was during the
+Depôt journey when Gran on ski tried to lead him.
+
+Christopher and Hackenschmidt were impossible ponies. Christopher, as we
+shall see, died on the Barrier a year after this, fighting almost to the
+last. Hackenschmidt, so called "from his vicious habit of using both fore
+and hind legs in attacking those who came near him,"[98] led an even more
+lurid life but had a more peaceful end. Whether Oates could have tamed
+him I do not know: he would have done it if it were possible, for his
+management of horses was wonderful. But in any case Hackenschmidt
+sickened at the hut while we were absent on the Depôt journey, for no
+cause which could be ascertained, gradually became too weak to stand, and
+was finally put out of his misery.
+
+There was a breathless minute when Hackenschmidt, with a sledge attached
+to him, went galloping over the hills and boulders. Below him, all
+unconscious of his impending fate, was Ponting, adjusting a large camera
+with his usual accuracy. Both survived. There were runaways innumerable,
+and all kinds of falls. But these ponies could tumble about unharmed in a
+way which would cause an English horse to lie up for a week. "There is no
+doubt that the bumping of the sledges close at the heels of the animals
+is the root of the evil."[99]
+
+There were two adventures during this first week of landing stores which
+might well have had a more disastrous conclusion. The first of these was
+the adventure of Ponting and the Killer whales.
+
+"I was a little late on the scene this morning, and thereby witnessed a
+most extraordinary scene. Some six or seven killer whales, old and young,
+were skirting the fast floe edge ahead of the ship; they seemed excited
+and dived rapidly, almost touching the floe. As we watched, they suddenly
+appeared astern, raising their snouts out of water. I had heard weird
+stories of these beasts, but had never associated serious danger with
+them. Close to the water's edge lay the wire stern rope of the ship, and
+our two Esquimaux dogs were tethered to this. I did not think of
+connecting the movement of the whales with this fact, and seeing them so
+close I shouted to Ponting, who was standing abreast of the ship. He
+seized his camera and ran towards the floe edge to get a close picture of
+the beasts, which had momentarily disappeared. The next moment the whole
+floe under him and the dogs heaved up and split into fragments. One could
+hear the booming noise as the whales rose under the ice and struck it
+with their backs. Whale after whale rose under the ice, setting it
+rocking fiercely; luckily Ponting kept his feet and was able to fly to
+security. By an extraordinary chance also, the splits had been made
+around and between the dogs, so that neither of them fell into the water.
+Then it was clear that the whales shared our astonishment, for one after
+another their huge hideous heads shot vertically into the air through
+the cracks which they had made. As they reared them to a height of six
+or eight feet it was possible to see their tawny head markings, their
+small glistening eyes, and their terrible array of teeth--by far the
+largest and most terrifying in the world. There cannot be a doubt that
+they looked up to see what had happened to Ponting and the dogs.
+
+"The latter were horribly frightened and strained to their chains,
+whining; the head of one killer must certainly have been within five feet
+of one of the dogs.
+
+"After this, whether they thought the game insignificant, or whether they
+missed Ponting is uncertain, but the terrifying creatures passed on to
+other hunting grounds, and we were able to rescue the dogs, and what was
+even more important, our petrol--five or six tons of which was waiting on
+a piece of ice which was not split away from the main mass.
+
+"Of course, we have known well that killer whales continually skirt the
+edge of the floes and that they would undoubtedly snap up any one who was
+unfortunate enough to fall into the water; but the facts that they could
+display such deliberate cunning, that they were able to break ice of such
+thickness (at least 2½ feet), and that they could act in unison, were a
+revelation to us. It is clear that they are endowed with singular
+intelligence, and in future we shall treat that intelligence with every
+respect."[100]
+
+We were to be hunted by these Killer whales again.
+
+The second adventure was the loss of the third motor sledge. It was
+Sunday morning, January 8, and Scott had given orders that this motor was
+to be hoisted out of the ship. "This was done first thing and the motor
+placed on firm ice. Later Campbell told me one of the men had dropped a
+leg through crossing a sludgy patch some 200 yards from the ship. I
+didn't consider it very serious, as I imagined the man had only gone
+through the surface crust. About 7 A.M. I started for the shore with a
+single man load, leaving Campbell looking about for the best crossing for
+the motor."[101]
+
+I find a note in my own diary as to what happened after that: "Last night
+the ice was getting very soft in places, and I was a little doubtful
+about leading ponies over a spot on the route to the hut which is about a
+quarter of a mile from the ship. It has been thawing very fast the last
+few days, and has been very hot as Antarctic weather goes. This morning
+was the same, and Bailey went in up to his neck.
+
+"Some half-hour after the motor was put on to the floe, we were told to
+tow it on to firm ice as that near the ship was breaking up. All hands
+started on a long tow line. We got on to the rotten piece, and somebody
+behind shouted 'You must run.' From that moment everything happened very
+quickly. Williamson fell right in through the ice; immediately afterwards
+we were all brought up with a jerk. Then the line began to pull us
+backwards; the stern of the motor had sunk through the ice, and the whole
+car began to sink. It slowly went right through and disappeared and then
+the tow line followed it. Everything possible was done to hang on to the
+rope, but in the end we had to let it go, each man keeping his hold until
+he was dragged to the lip of the hole. Then we made for the fast ice,
+leaving the rotten bit between us and the ship.
+
+"Pennell and Priestley sounded their way back to the ship, and Day asked
+Priestley to bring his goggles when he returned. They came back with a
+life-line, Pennell leading. Suddenly the ice gave way under Priestley,
+who disappeared entirely and came up, so we learned afterwards, under the
+ice, there being a big current. In a moment Pennell was lying flat upon
+the floe on his chest, got his hand under Priestley's arm, and so pulled
+him out. All Priestley said was, 'Day, here are your goggles.' We all got
+back to the ship, but communication between the ship and the shore was
+interrupted for the rest of the day, when a solid road was found right up
+to the ship in another place."[102]
+
+Meanwhile the hut was rising very quickly, and Davies, who was Chippy
+Chap, the carpenter, deserves much credit. He was a leading shipwright
+in the navy, always willing and bright, and with a very thorough
+knowledge of his job. I have seen him called up hour after hour, day and
+night, on the ship, when the pumps were choked by the coal balls which
+formed in the bilges, and he always arrived with a smile on his face.
+Altogether he was one of our most useful men. In this job of hut-building
+he was helped by two of our seamen, Keohane and Abbott, and others.
+Latterly I believe there were more people working than there were
+hammers!
+
+A plan of this hut is given here. It was 50 feet long, by 25 feet wide,
+and 9 feet to the eaves. The insulation, which was very satisfactory, was
+seaweed, sewn up in the form of a quilt.
+
+"The sides have double [match-] boarding inside and outside the frames,
+with a layer of our excellent quilted seaweed insulation between each
+pair of boardings. The roof has a single match-boarding inside, but on
+the outside is a match-boarding, then a layer of 2-ply ruberoid, then a
+layer of quilted seaweed, then a second match-boarding, and finally a
+cover of 3-ply ruberoid."[103]
+
+The floor consisted of a wooden boarding next the frame, then a quilt of
+seaweed, then a layer of felt upon which was a second boarding and
+finally linoleum.
+
+We thought we should be warm, and we were. In fact, during the winter,
+with twenty-five men living there, and the cooking range going, and
+perhaps also the stove at the other end, the hut not infrequently became
+fuggy, big though it was.
+
+The entrance was through a door in a porch before you got to the main
+door. In the porch were the generators of the acetylene gas, which was
+fitted throughout by Day, who was also responsible for the fittings of
+the ventilator, cooking range, and stove, the chimney pipes from these
+running along through the middle of the hut before entering a common
+vent. Little heat was lost. The pipes were fitted with dampers, and air
+inlets which could be opened or shut at will to control the ventilation.
+Besides a big ventilator in the top of the hut there was an adjustable
+air inlet also at the base of the chamber which formed the junction of
+the two chimneys. The purpose of this was also ventilation, but it was
+not successful.
+
+The bulkhead which separated the men's quarters, or mess deck, from the
+rest of the hut, was formed of such cases as contained goods in glass,
+including wine, which would have frozen and broken outside. The bulkhead
+did not go as high as the top of the hut. When the contents of a case
+were wanted, a side of the box was taken out, and the empty case then
+formed a shelf.
+
+We started to live in the hut on January 18, beautifully warm, the
+gramophone going, and everybody happy. But for a long time before this
+most of the landing party had been living in tents on shore. It was very
+comfortable, far more so than might be supposed, judging only by the
+popular idea of a polar life. We were now almost landed, there were just
+a few things more to come over from the ship. "It was blowing a mild
+blizzard from the south, and I took a sledge over to the ship, which was
+quite blotted out in blinding snow at times. It was as hard to get an
+empty sledge over, as generally it is to drag a full one. Tea on the
+ship, which was very full of welcome, but also very full of the
+superiority of their own comforts over those of the land. Their own
+comforts were not so very obvious, since they had tried to get the stove
+in the wardroom going for the first time. They were all coughing in the
+smoke, and everything inside was covered with smuts."[104]
+
+The hut itself was some twelve feet above the sea, and situated upon what
+was now an almost sandy beach of black lava. It was thought that this was
+high enough to be protected from any swell likely to arrive in such a
+sheltered place, but, as we shall see, Scott was very anxious as to the
+fate of the hut, when, on the Depôt journey, a swell removed not only
+miles of sea-ice and a good deal of Barrier, but also the end of Glacier
+Tongue. We never saw this beach again, for the autumn gales covered it
+with thick drifts of snow, and the thaw was never enough to remove this
+for the two other summers we spent here. There is no doubt this was an
+exceptional year for thaw. We never again saw a little waterfall such as
+was now tumbling down the rocks from Skua Lake into the sea.
+
+The little hill of 66 feet high behind us was soon named Wind Vane Hill,
+and there were other meteorological instruments there besides. A
+snow-drift or ice-drift always forms to leeward of any such projection,
+and that beneath this hill was large enough for us to drive into it two
+ice caves. The first of these was to contain our larder, notably the
+frozen mutton carcasses brought down by us from New Zealand in the
+ice-house on deck. These, however, showed signs of mildew, and we never
+ate very freely of them. Seal and penguin were our stock meat foods, and
+mutton was considered to be a luxury.
+
+The second cave, 13 feet long by 5 feet wide, hollowed out by Simpson and
+Wright, was for the magnetic instruments. The temperature of these caves
+was found to be fairly constant. Unfortunately, this was the only drift
+into which we could tunnel, and we had no such mass of snow and ice as is
+afforded by the Barrier, which can be burrowed, and was burrowed
+extensively by Amundsen and his men.
+
+The cases containing the bulk of our stores were placed in stacks
+arranged by Bowers up on the sloping ground to the west of the hut,
+beginning close to the entrance door. The sledges lay on the hill side
+above them. This arrangement was very satisfactory during the first
+winter, but the excessive blizzards of the second winter and the immense
+amount of snow which was gathering about the camp caused us to move
+everything up to the top of the ridge behind the hut where the wind kept
+them more clear. Amundsen found it advisable to put his cases in two long
+lines.[105]
+
+The dogs were tethered to a long chain or rope. The ponies' stable was
+built against the northern side of the hut, and was thus sheltered from
+the blizzards which always blow here from the south. Against the south
+side of the hut Bowers built himself a store-room. "Every day he
+conceives or carries out some plan to benefit the camp."[106]
+
+"Scott seems very cheery about things," I find in my diary about this
+time. And well he might be. A man could hardly be better served. We
+slaved until we were nearly dead-beat, and then we found something else
+to do until we were quite dead-beat. Ship's company and landing parties
+alike, not only now but all through this job, did their very utmost, and
+their utmost was very good. The way men worked was fierce.
+
+"If you can picture our house nestling below this small hill on a long
+stretch of black sand, with many tons of provision cases ranged in neat
+blocks in front of it and the sea lapping the ice-foot below, you will
+have some idea of our immediate vicinity. As for our wider surroundings
+it would be difficult to describe their beauty in sufficiently glowing
+terms. Cape Evans is one of the many spurs of Erebus and the one that
+stands closest under the mountain, so that always towering above us we
+have the grand snowy peak with its smoking summit. North and south of us
+are deep bays, beyond which great glaciers come rippling over the lower
+slopes to thrust high blue-walled snouts into the sea. The sea is blue
+before us, dotted with shining bergs or ice floes, whilst far over the
+Sound, yet so bold and magnificent as to appear near, stand the beautiful
+Western Mountains with their numerous lofty peaks, their deep glacial
+valley and clear cut scarps, a vision of mountain scenery that can have
+few rivals."[107]
+
+[Illustration: MT. EREBUS, THE RAMP AND THE HUT]
+
+"Before I left England people were always telling me the Antarctic must
+be dull without much life. Now we are in ourselves a perfect farmyard.
+There are nineteen ponies fifty yards off and thirty dogs just behind,
+and they howl like the wolves they are at intervals, led by Dyk. The
+skuas are nesting all round and fighting over the remains of the seals
+which we have killed, and the penguins which the dogs have killed,
+whenever they have got the chance. The collie bitch which we have
+brought down for breeding purposes wanders about the camp. A penguin is
+standing outside my tent, presumably because he thinks he is going to
+moult here. A seal has just walked up into the horse lines--there are
+plenty of Weddell and penguins and whales. On board we have Nigger and a
+blue Persian kitten, with rabbits and squirrels. The whole place teems
+with life.
+
+"Franky Drake is employed all day wandering round for ice for watering
+the ship. Yesterday he had made a pile out on the floe, and the men
+wanted to have a flag put on it, and have it photographed, and called
+'Mr. Drake's Furthest South.'"[108]
+
+January 25 was fixed as the day upon which twelve of us, with eight
+ponies and the two dog-teams, were to start south to lay a depôt upon the
+Barrier for the Polar Journey. Scott was of opinion that the bays between
+us and the Hut Point Peninsula would freeze over in March, probably early
+in March, and that we should most of us get back to Cape Evans then. At
+the same time the ponies could not come down over the cliffs of this
+tongue of land, and preparations had to be made for a lengthy stay at Hut
+Point for them and their keepers. For this purpose Scott meant to use the
+old Discovery hut at Hut Point.[109]
+
+On January 15 he took Meares and one dog-team, and started for Hut Point,
+which was fifteen statute miles to the south of us. They crossed Glacier
+Tongue, finding upon it a depôt of compressed fodder and maize which had
+been left by Shackleton. The open water to the west nearly reached the
+Tongue.
+
+On arrival at the hut Scott was shocked to find it full of snow and ice.
+This was serious, and, as we found afterwards the drifted snow had thawed
+down into ice: the whole of the inside of this hut was a big ice block.
+In the middle of this ice was a pile of cases left by the Discovery as a
+depôt. They were, we knew, full of biscuit.
+
+"There was something too depressing in finding the old hut in such a
+desolate condition. I had had so much interest in seeing all the old
+landmarks and the huts apparently intact. To camp outside and feel that
+all the old comforts and cheer had departed was dreadfully
+heartrending."[110]
+
+That night "we slept badly till the morning and, therefore, late. After
+breakfast we went up the hills; there was a keen S.E. breeze, but the sun
+shone and my spirits revived. There was very much less snow everywhere
+than I had ever seen. The ski run was completely cut through in two
+places, the Gap and Observation Hill almost bare, a great bare slope on
+the side of Arrival Heights, and on top of Crater Heights an immense bare
+table-land. How delighted we should have been to see it like this in the
+old days! The pond was thawed and the confervae green in fresh water. The
+hole which we had dug in the mound in the pond was still there, as Meares
+discovered by falling into it up to his waist, and getting very wet.
+
+"On the south side we could see the pressure ridges beyond Pram Point as
+of old--Horseshoe Bay calm and unpressed--the sea-ice pressed on Pram
+Point and along the Gap ice front, and a new ridge running around C.
+Armitage about 2 miles off. We saw Ferrar's old thermometer tubes
+standing out of the snow slope as though they'd been placed yesterday.
+Vince's cross might have been placed yesterday--the paint was so fresh
+and the inscription so legible."[111]
+
+We had two officers who had been with Shackleton in his 1908
+Expedition--Priestley, who was in our Northern Party, and Day, who was in
+charge of our motors. Priestley with two others sledged over to Cape
+Royds and has left an account of the old hut there:
+
+"After pitching tent Levick and I went over to the hut to forage. On the
+way I visited Derrick Point and took a large seven-pound tin of butter
+while Levick opened up the hut. It was very dark inside but I pulled the
+boarding down from the windows so that we could see all right. It was
+very funny to see everything lying about just as we had left it, in that
+last rush to get off in the lull of the blizzard. On Marston's bunk was a
+sixpenny copy of the Story of Bessie Costrell, which some one had
+evidently read and left open. Perhaps what brought the old times back
+again more than anything else was the fact that as I came out of the
+larder the sleeve of my wind clothes caught the tap of the copper and
+turned it on. When I heard the drip of the water I turned instinctively
+and turned the tap off, almost expecting to hear Bobs' raucous voice
+cursing me for my clumsiness. Perhaps what strikes one more forcibly than
+anything else is the fact that nothing has been disturbed. On the table
+was the remains of a batch of bread that Bobs had cooked for us and that
+was only partially consumed before the Nimrod called for us. Some of the
+rolls showed the impression of bites given to them in 1909. All round the
+bread were the sauces, pickles, pepper and salt of our usual standing
+lunch, and a half-opened tin of gingerbreads was a witness to the dryness
+of the climate for they were still crisp as the day they were opened.
+
+"In the cubicle near the larder were the loose tins that poor Armytage
+and myself had collected from all round the hut before we left.
+
+"On the shelves of my cubicle are still stacked the magazines and paper
+brought down by the relief ship. Nothing is changed at all except the
+company. It is almost dismal. I expect to see people come in through the
+door after a walk over the surrounding hills.
+
+"We had not much time to look round us; for Campbell was cooking in the
+tent, so we slung a few tins of jam, a plum-pudding, some tea, and
+gingerbreads into a sack, and returned to camp. By this time it was
+snowing heavily and continued to do so after dinner so that we turned in
+immediately (1.30 P.M.) and went off to sleep. One thing worth mentioning
+is that on several of the drifts are well-defined hoof marks, some of
+them looking so new that we could have sworn that they had been made this
+year.
+
+"The Old Sport [Levick] gave us a start by suddenly announcing that he
+could see a ship quite close, and for some time we were on tenterhooks,
+but his ship proved to be the Terra Nova ice-anchored off the Skuary.
+
+"The whole place is very eerie, there is such a feeling of life about it.
+Not only do I feel it but the others do also. Last night after I turned
+in I could have sworn that I heard people shouting to each other.
+
+"I thought that I had only got an attack of nerves but Campbell asked me
+if I had heard any shouting, for he had certainly done so. It must have
+been the seals calling to each other, but it certainly did sound most
+human. We are getting so worked up that we should not be a bit surprised
+to see a settlement of Japanese or some other such people some day when
+we stroll round towards Blacksand Beach. The Old Sport created some
+amusement this evening by opening a tin of Nestlé's milk at both ends
+instead of making the two holes at one end. He informed us that he had
+got so used to using two whole tins of milk for cocoa for fourteen people
+at night that he always opened them that way.
+
+"As a consequence we have to spend most of our spare time making bungs to
+keep the milk in the tin."[112]
+
+Meanwhile, as was to be expected, the action of the, I suspect, abnormal
+summer sea temperature was showing its effect upon the sea-ice. Sea-ice
+thaws from below when the temperature of the water rises. The northern
+ice goes out first here, being next to the open water, but big thaw pools
+form at the same time wherever a current of water flows over shallows, as
+at the end of Cape Evans, Hut Point and Cape Armitage.
+
+On January 17 the ice was breaking away between the point of Cape Evans
+and the ship, although a road still remained fast between the ship and
+the shore. The ship began to get up steam, but the fast ice broke away
+quickly that night. I believe they got steam in three hours, twelve hours
+being the time generally allowed: only just in time, however, for she
+broke adrift as it was reported. The next morning she made fast to the
+ice only 200 yards from the ice-foot of the Cape.
+
+"For the present the position is extraordinarily comfortable. With a
+southerly blow she would simply bind on to the ice, receiving great
+shelter from the end of the Cape. With a northerly blow she might turn
+rather close to the shore, where the soundings run to three fathoms, but
+behind such a stretch of ice she could scarcely get a sea or swell
+without warning. It looks a wonderfully comfortable little nook, but of
+course one can be certain of nothing in this place; one knows from
+experience how deceptive the appearance of security may be."[113]
+
+The ship's difficulties were largely due to the shortage of coal. Again
+on the night of January 20-21 we had an anxious time.
+
+"Fearing a little trouble I went out of the hut in the middle of the
+night and saw at once that she was having a bad time--the ice was
+breaking with a northerly swell and the wind increasing, with the ship on
+dead lee shore; luckily the ice anchors had been put well in on the floe
+and some still held. Pennell was getting up steam and his men struggling
+to replace the anchors.
+
+"We got out the men and gave some help. At 6 steam was up, and I was
+right glad to see the ship back out to windward, leaving us to recover
+anchors and hawsers."[114]
+
+A big berg drove in just after the ship had got away, and grounded where
+she had been lying. The ship returned in the afternoon, and it seems that
+she was searching round for an anchorage, and trying to look behind this
+berg. There was a strongish northerly wind blowing. The currents and
+soundings round Cape Evans were then unknown. The current was setting
+strongly from the north through the strip of sea which divides
+Inaccessible Island from Cape Evans, a distance of some two-thirds of a
+mile. The engines were going astern, but the current and wind were too
+much for her, and the ship ran aground, being fast for some considerable
+distance aft--some said as far as the mainmast.
+
+"Visions of the ship failing to return to New Zealand and of sixty people
+waiting here arose in my mind with sickening pertinacity, and the only
+consolation I could draw from such imaginations was the determination
+that the southern work should go on as before--meanwhile the least ill
+possible seemed to be an extensive lightening of the ship with boats as
+the tide was evidently high when she struck--a terribly depressing
+prospect.
+
+"Some three or four of us watched it gloomily from the shore whilst all
+was bustle on board, the men shifting cargo aft. Pennell tells me they
+shifted 10 tons in a very short time.
+
+"The first ray of hope came when by careful watching one could see that
+the ship was turning very slowly, then one saw the men running from side
+to side and knew that an attempt was being made to roll her off. The
+rolling produced a more rapid turning movement at first, and then she
+seemed to hang again. But only for a short time; the engines had been
+going astern all the time and presently a slight movement became
+apparent. But we only knew she was getting clear when we heard cheers on
+board, and more cheers from the whaler.
+
+"Then she gathered stern way and was clear. The relief was
+enormous."[115]
+
+All this took some time, and Scott himself came back into the hut with us
+and went on bagging provisions for the Depôt journey. At such times of
+real disaster he was a very philosophical man. We were not yet ready to
+go sledging, but on January 23 the ice in North Bay all went out, and
+that in South Bay began to follow it. Because this was our road to the
+Barrier, it was suddenly decided that we must start on the Depôt journey
+the following day or perhaps not at all. Already it was impossible to get
+sledges south off the Cape: but there was a way to walk the ponies along
+the land until they could be scrambled down a steep rubbly slope on to
+sea-ice which still remained. Would it float away before we got there? It
+was touch and go. "One breathes a prayer that the Road holds for the few
+remaining hours. It goes in one place between a berg in open water and a
+large pool of the Glacier face--it may be weak in that part, and at any
+moment the narrow isthmus may break away. We are doing it on a very
+narrow margin."[116]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+    [84] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 77.
+
+    [85] Thomson.
+
+    [86] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 80.
+
+    [87] Wilson's Journal, _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 613,
+         614.
+
+    [88] See Introduction, p. xxxv.
+
+    [89] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 87.
+
+    [90] The extreme south point of the island, a dozen miles farther,
+         on one of whose minor headlands, Hut Point, stood the
+         Discovery hut.
+
+    [91] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 88-90.
+
+    [92] Ibid. p. 91.
+
+    [93] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 52-93.
+
+    [94] Ibid. pp. 92-94.
+
+    [95] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 111.
+
+    [96] Ibid. p. 94.
+
+    [97] Ibid. p. 100.
+
+    [98] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 230.
+
+    [99] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 113-114.
+
+   [100] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 94-96.
+
+   [101] Ibid. p. 106.
+
+   [102] My own diary.
+
+   [103] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 111.
+
+   [104] My own diary.
+
+   [105] _The South Pole_, vol. i. p. 278.
+
+   [106] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 128.
+
+   [107] Ibid. p. 129.
+
+   [108] My own diary.
+
+   [109] See Introduction, p. xxxiv.
+
+   [110] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 122.
+
+   [111] Ibid. pp. 122-123.
+
+   [112] Priestley's diary.
+
+   [113] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 127.
+
+   [114] Ibid. p. 134.
+
+   [115] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 136.
+
+   [116] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 138.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE DEPÔT JOURNEY
+
+    The dropping of the daylight in the west.
+                                    ROBERT BROWNING.
+
+
+                  January to March 1911
+
+      SCOTT              MEARES               CREAN
+      WILSON             ATKINSON             FORDE
+      LIEUT. EVANS       CHERRY-GARRARD       DIMITRI
+      BOWERS             GRAN
+      OATES              KEOHANE
+
+Imaginative friends of the thirteen men who started from Cape Evans on
+January 24, 1911, may have thought of them as athletes, trained for some
+weeks or months to endure the strains which they were to face, sleeping a
+good nine hours a night, eating carefully regulated meals and doing an
+allotted task each day under scientific control.
+
+They would be far from the mark. For weeks we had turned in at midnight
+too tired to take off our clothes, and had been lucky if we were allowed
+to sleep until 5 A.M. We had eaten our meals when we could, and we had
+worked in the meantime just as hard as it was physically possible to do.
+If we sat down on a packing-case we went to sleep.
+
+And we finally left the camp in a state of hurry bordering upon panic.
+Since the ice to the south of us, the road to the Barrier, was being
+nibbled away by thaw, winds and tides, it was impossible to lead the
+ponies down from the Cape on to the sea-ice. The open sea was before us
+and on our right front. It was necessary to lead them up among the lava
+blocks which lay on the escarpment of Erebus, south-eastwards towards
+Land's End, and thence to slide them down a steep but rubbly slope to the
+ice which still remained. As a matter of fact that ice went out the very
+next day.
+
+During the last two days provisions had been bagged with the utmost
+despatch; sledges packed; letters scribbled; clothing sorted and rough
+alterations to it made. Scott was busy, with Bowers' help, making such
+arrangements as could be suggested for a further year's stay, for which
+the ship was to order the necessaries. Oates was busy weighing out the
+pony food for the journey, sorting harness, and generally managing a most
+unruly mob of ponies. Many were the arguments as to the relative value of
+a pair of socks or their equivalent weight in tobacco, for we were
+allowed 12 lbs. of private gear apiece, to consist of everything which we
+did not habitually wear on our bodies. This included such things as:
+
+    Sleeping-boots.
+    Sleeping-socks.
+    Extra pair of day socks.
+    A shirt.
+    Tobacco and pipe.
+    Notebook for diary and pencil.
+    Extra balaclava helmet.
+    Extra woollen mitts.
+    Housewife containing buttons, needles, darning needles,
+           thread and wool.
+    Extra pair of finnesko.
+    Big safety-pins with which to hang up our socks.
+    And perhaps one small book.
+
+My most vivid recollection of the day we started is the sight of Bowers,
+out of breath, very hot, and in great pain from a bad knock which he had
+given his knee against a rock, being led forward by his big pony Uncle
+Bill, over whom temporarily he had but little control. He had been left
+behind in the camp, giving last instructions about the storage of cases
+and management of provisions, and had practically lost himself in trying
+to follow us over what was then unknown ground. He was wearing all the
+clothing which was not included in his personal gear, for he did not
+think it fair to give the pony the extra weight. He had bruised his leg
+in an ugly way, and for many days he came to me to bandage it. He was
+afraid that if he let the doctors see it they would forbid him to go
+forward. He had had no sleep for seventy-two hours.
+
+That first night (January 24) we pitched our inexperienced camp not far
+from Hut Point. But our first taste of sledging was not without incident.
+Starting with the ponies only we walked them to Glacier Tongue, where the
+ice and open water joined, and as we went we watched the ship pass us out
+in the Strait and moor up to the end of the Tongue. Getting the ponies
+across the Tongue with its shallow but numerous crevasses and holes was
+ticklish work, but we tethered them safely off the Terra Nova, which
+meanwhile was landing dogs, sledges and gear. Then we got some lunch on
+board. A large lead in the sea-ice to the south of the Tongue
+necessitated some hours' work in man-hauling all sledges along the back
+of the Tongue until a way could be found down on to safe ice. We then
+followed with the ponies. "If a pony falls into one of these holes I
+shall sit down and cry," said Oates. Within three minutes my pony was
+wallowing, with only his head and forelegs visible, in a mess of brash
+and snow, which had concealed a crack in the sea-ice which was obviously
+not going to remain much longer in its present position. We got lashings
+round him and hauled him out. Poor Guts! He was fated to drown: but in an
+hour he appeared to have forgotten all about his mishap, and was pulling
+his first load towards Hut Point as gallantly as always.
+
+The next day we took further stores from the ship to the camp which had
+formed. Some of these loads were to be left on the edge of the Barrier
+when we got there, but for the present we had to relay, that is, take one
+load forward and come back for another.
+
+On the 26th we sledged back to the ship for our last load, and said
+good-bye on the sea-ice to those men with whom we had already worked so
+long, to Campbell and his five companions who were to suffer so much, to
+cheery Pennell and his ship's company.
+
+Before we left, Scott thanked Pennell and his men "for their splendid
+work. They have behaved like bricks, and a finer lot of men never sailed
+in a ship.... It was a little sad to say farewell to all these good
+fellows and Campbell and his men. I do most heartily trust that all will
+be successful in their ventures, for indeed their unselfishness and their
+generous high spirit deserve reward. God bless them."
+
+Four of that Depôt party were never to see these men again, and Pennell,
+Commander of the Queen Mary, went down with his ship in the battle of
+Jutland.
+
+Two days later, January 28, we sledged our first loads on to the Barrier.
+By that day we had done nearly ninety miles of relay work, first from the
+ship at Glacier Tongue to our camp off Hut Point, and then onwards. Those
+first days of sledging were wonderful! What memories they must have
+brought to Scott and Wilson when to us, who had never seen them before,
+these much-discussed landmarks were almost like old friends. As we made
+our way over the frozen sea every seal-hole was of interest, and every
+type of wind-swept snow a novelty. The peak of Terror opened out behind
+the crater of Erebus, and we walked under Castle Rock and Danger Slope
+until, rounding the promontory, we saw the little jagged Hut Point, and
+on it the cross placed there to Vince's memory, all unchanged. There was
+the old Discovery hut and the Bay in which the Discovery lay, and from
+which she was almost miraculously freed at the last moment, only to be
+flung upon the shoal which runs out from the Point, where some tins of
+the old Discovery days lie on the bottom still and glint in the evening
+sun. And round about the Bay were the Heights of which we had read,
+Observation Hill, and Crater Hill separated from it by The Gap--through
+which the wind was streaming; of course it was, for this must be the
+famous Hut Point wind.
+
+A few hundred more blizzards had swept over it since those days, but it
+was all just the same, even to Ferrar's little stakes placed across the
+glacierets to mark their movement, more, even to the footsteps still
+plainly visible on the slopes.
+
+The ponies were dragging up to 900 lbs. each these days, and though they
+did not seem to be unduly distressed, two of them soon showed signs of
+lameness. This caused some anxiety, but the trouble was mended by rest.
+On the whole, though the surface was hard, I think we were giving them
+too much weight.
+
+The sea-ice off Hut Point and Observation Hill was already very
+dangerous, and had we then had the experience and knowledge of sea-ice
+with which we can now look back, it is probable that we should not have
+slept so easily upon its surface. Parties travelling to Hut Point and
+beyond in summer must keep well out from the Point and Cape Armitage. But
+all haste was being made to transport the necessary stores on to the
+Barrier surface, where a big home depôt could be made, so far as we could
+judge, in safety. The pressure ridges in the sea-ice between Cape
+Armitage and Pram Point, which are formed by the movement of the Barrier,
+were large, and in some of the hollows countless seals were playing in
+the water. Judging by the size of these ridges and by the thickness of
+this ice when it broke up, the ice south of Hut Point was at least two
+years old.
+
+I well remember the day we took the first of our loads on to the Barrier.
+I expect we were all a little excited, for to walk upon the Barrier for
+the first time was indeed an adventure: what kind of surface was it, and
+how about these beastly crevasses of which we had read so much? Scott was
+ahead, and so far as we could see there was nothing but the same level of
+ice all round--when suddenly he was above us, walking up the sloping and
+quite invisible drift. A minute after and our ponies and sledges were up
+and over the tide crack, and beneath us soft and yielding snow, very
+different from the hard wind-swept surface of the frozen sea, which we
+had just left. Really it was rather prosaic and a tame entrance. But the
+Barrier is a tricky place, and it takes years to get to know her.
+
+On our outward journey this day Oates did his best to kill a seal. My own
+tent was promised some kidneys if we were good, and our mouths watered
+with the prospect of the hoosh before us. The seal had been left for
+dead, and when on our homeward way we neared the place of his demise
+Titus went off to carve our dinner from him. The next thing we saw was
+the seal lolloping straight for his hole, while Oates did his best to
+stab him. The quarry made off safely not much hurt, for, as we discovered
+later, a clasp-knife is quite useless to kill a seal. Oates returned with
+a bad cut, as his hand had slipped down the knife; and it was a long time
+before he was allowed to forget it.
+
+This Barrier, which we were to know so well, was soft, too soft for the
+ponies, and apparently flat. Only to our left, some hundreds of yards
+distant, there were two little snowy mounds. We got out the telescope
+which we carried, but could make nothing of them. While we held our
+ponies Scott walked towards them, and soon we saw him brushing away snow
+and uncovering something dark beneath. They were tents, obviously left by
+Shackleton or his men when the Nimrod was embarking his Southern party
+from the Barrier. They were snowed up outside, and iced up inside almost
+to the caps. Afterwards we dug them out, a good evening's work. The
+fabric was absolutely rotten, we just tore it down with our hands, but
+the bamboos and caps were as sound as ever. When we had dug down to the
+floor-cloth we found everything intact as when it was left. The cooker
+was there and a primus--Scott lighted it and cooked a meal; we often used
+it afterwards. And there were Rowntree's cocoa, Bovril, Brand's extract
+of beef, sheep's tongues, cheese and biscuits--all open to the snow and
+all quite good. We ate them for several days. There is something
+impressive in these first meals off food which has been exposed for
+years.
+
+It was on a Saturday, January 28, that we took our first load a short
+half-mile on to the Barrier and left it at a place afterwards known as
+the Fodder Depôt. Two days later we moved our camp 1 mile 1200 yards
+farther on to the Barrier and here was erected the main depôt, known as
+Safety Camp. 'Safety' because it was supposed that even if a phenomenal
+break-up of sea-ice should occur, and take with it part of the Barrier,
+this place would remain. Subsequent events proved the supposition well
+founded. This short bit of Barrier sledging gave all of us food for
+thought, for the surface was appallingly soft, and the poor ponies were
+sinking deep. It was obvious that no animals could last long under such
+conditions. But somehow Shackleton had got his four a long way.
+
+There was now no hurry, for there was plenty of food. It was only when we
+went on from here that we must economize food and travel fast. It was
+determined to give the ponies a rest while we made the depôt and
+rearranged sledges, which we did on the following day. We had with us one
+pair of pony snow-shoes, a circle of wire as a foundation, hooped round
+with bamboo, and with beckets of the same material. The surface suggested
+their trial, which was completely successful. The question of snow-shoes
+had been long and anxiously considered, and shoes for all the ponies were
+at Cape Evans; but as we had so lately landed from the ship the ponies
+had not been trained in their use, and they had not been brought.
+
+Scott immediately sent Wilson and Meares with a dog-team to see whether
+the sea-ice would allow them to reach Cape Evans and bring back shoes for
+the other ponies. Meanwhile the next morning saw us trying to accustom
+the animals to wearing snow-shoes by exercising them in the one pair we
+possessed. But it seemed no use continuing to do this after the dog party
+came in. They had found the sea-ice gone between Glacier Tongue and
+Winter Quarters and so were empty-handed. They reported that a crevasse
+at the edge of the Tongue had opened under the sledge, which had tilted
+back into the crevasse but had run over it. These Glacier Tongue
+crevasses are shallow things; Gran fell into one later and walked out of
+the side of the Tongue on to the sea-ice beyond!
+
+It was determined to start on the following day with five weeks'
+provisions for men and animals; to go forward for about fourteen days,
+depôt two weeks' provisions and return. Most unfortunately Atkinson would
+have to be left behind with Crean to look after him. He had chafed his
+foot, and the chafe had suppurated. To his great disappointment there was
+no alternative but to lie up. Luckily we had another tent, and there was
+the cooker and primus we had dug out of Shackleton's tent. Poor Crean was
+to spend his spare time in bringing up loads from the Fodder Depôt to
+Safety Camp and, worse still from his point of view, dig a hole downwards
+into the Barrier for scientific observations!
+
+We left the following morning, February 2, and marched on a patchy
+surface for five miles (Camp 4). The temperature was above zero and Scott
+decided to see whether the surface was not better at night. On the whole,
+it is problematical whether this is the case--we came to the conclusion
+later that the ideal surface for pulling a sledge on ski was found at a
+temperature of about +16°. But there is no doubt whatever that ponies
+should do their work at night, when the temperature is colder, and rest
+and sleep when the sun has its greatest altitude and power. And so we
+camped and turned in to our sleeping-bags at 4 P.M. and marched again
+soon after midnight, doing five miles before and five miles after lunch:
+lunch, if you please, being about 1 A.M., and a very good time, for just
+then the daylight seemed to be thin and bleak and one always felt the
+cold.
+
+Our road lay eastwards through the Strait, some twenty-five miles in
+width, which runs between the low, rather uninteresting scarp of White
+Island to the south, and the beautiful slopes of Erebus and Terror to the
+north. This part of the Barrier is stagnant, but the main stream in front
+of us, unchecked by land, flows uninterruptedly northwards towards the
+Ross Sea. Only where the stream presses against the Bluff, White Island
+and, most important of all, Cape Crozier, and rubs itself against the
+nearly stationary ice upon which we were travelling, pressures and
+rendings take place, forming some nasty crevasses. It was intended to
+steer nearly east until this line was crossed some distance north of
+White Island, and then steer due south.
+
+It is most difficult on a large snow surface to say whether it is flat.
+Certainly there are plenty of big crevasses for several miles in this
+neighbourhood, though they are generally well covered, and we found only
+very small ones on this outward journey. I am inclined to think there are
+also some considerable pressure waves. As we came up to Camp 5 we
+floundered into a pocket of soft snow in which one pony after another
+plunged deeper and deeper until they were buried up to their bellies and
+could move no more. I suppose it was an old crevasse filled with soft
+snow, or perhaps one of the pressure-ridge hollows which had been
+recently drifted up. My own pony somehow got through with his sledge to
+the other side, and every moment I expected the ground to fall below us
+and a chasm to swallow us up. The others had to be unharnessed and led
+out. The only set of snow-shoes was then put on to Bowers' big pony and
+he went back and drew the stranded sledges out. Beyond we pitched our
+camp.
+
+On February 3-4 we marched for ten miles to Camp 6. In the last five
+miles we crossed several crevasses, our first; and I heard Oates ask some
+one what they looked like. "Black as hell," he said, but we saw no more
+just now, for this march carried us beyond the line of pressure which
+runs between White Island and Cape Crozier. This halt was called Corner
+Camp, as we turned here and marched due south. Corner Camp will be heard
+of again and again in this story: it is thirty miles from Hut Point.
+
+By 4 P.M. it was blowing our first Barrier blizzard. We were to find out
+afterwards that a Corner Camp blizzard blows nearly as often as a Hut
+Point wind. The Bluff seems to be the breeding-place for these
+disturbances, which pour out towards the sea by way of Cape Crozier.
+Corner Camp is in the direct line between the two.
+
+One summer blizzard is much like another. The temperature, never very
+low, rises, and you are not cold in the tent. Sometimes a blizzard is a
+very welcome rest: after weeks of hard pulling, dragging yourself awake
+each morning, feeling as though you had only just gone to sleep, with
+the mental strain perhaps which work among crevasses entails, it is most
+pleasant to be put to bed for two or three days. You may sleep
+dreamlessly nearly all the time, rousing out for meals, or waking
+occasionally to hear from the soft warmth of your reindeer bag the deep
+boom of the tent flapping in the wind, or drowsily you may visit other
+parts of the world, while the drifting snow purrs against the green tent
+at your head.
+
+But outside there is raging chaos. It is blowing a full gale: the air is
+full of falling snow, and the wind drives this along and adds to it the
+loose snow which is lying on the surface of the Barrier. Fight your way a
+few steps away from the tent, and it will be gone. Lose your sense of
+direction and there is nothing to guide you back. Expose your face and
+hands to the wind, and they will very soon be frost-bitten. And this at
+midsummer. Imagine the added cold of spring and autumn: the cold and
+darkness of winter.
+
+The animals suffer most, and during this first blizzard all our ponies
+were weakened, and two of them became practically useless. It must be
+remembered that they had stood for five weeks upon a heaving deck; they
+had been through one very bad gale: the time during which we were
+unloading the ship was limited, and since that time they had dragged
+heavy loads the greater part of 200 miles. Nothing was left undone for
+them which we could manage, but necessarily the Antarctic is a grim place
+for ponies. I think Scott felt the sufferings of the ponies more than the
+animals themselves. It was different for the dogs. These fairly warm
+blizzards were only a rest for them. Snugly curled up in a hole in the
+snow they allowed themselves to be drifted over. Bieleglas and Vaida, two
+half brothers who pulled side by side, always insisted upon sharing one
+hole, and for greater warmth one would lie on the top of the other. At
+intervals of two hours or so they fraternally changed places.
+
+This blizzard lasted three days.
+
+We now marched nearly due south, the open Barrier in front, Mount Terror
+and the sea behind, for five days, covering fifty-four miles, when, being
+now level with the southern extremity of the Bluff, we laid the Bluff
+Depôt. The bearings of Bluff Depôt, as well as those of Corner Camp, are
+given in Scott's Last Expedition.
+
+The characteristics of these days were the collapse of two of the ponies,
+Blücher and Blossom, and the partial collapse of a third, Jimmy Pigg,
+although the surface hardened, becoming a marbled series of wind-swept
+ridges and domes in this region. For the rest the new hands were finding
+out how to keep warm on the Barrier, how to pitch a tent and cook a meal
+in twenty minutes, and the thousand and one little tips which only
+experience can teach. But all the care in the world could do little for
+the poor ponies.
+
+It must be confessed at once that some of these ponies were very poor
+material, and it must be conceded that Oates who was in charge of them
+started with a very great handicap. From first to last it was Oates'
+consummate management, seconded by the care and kindness of the ponies'
+leaders, which obtained results which often exceeded the most sanguine
+hopes.
+
+One evening we watched Scott digging crumbly blocks of snow out of the
+Barrier and building a rough wall, something like a grouse butt, to the
+south of his pony. In our inmost hearts I fear we viewed these
+proceedings with distrust, and saw in it but little usefulness,--one
+little bit of leaky wall in a great plain of snow. But a very little wind
+(which you must understand comes almost invariably from the south)
+convinced us from personal experience what a boon these walls could be.
+Henceforward every night on camping each pony leader built a wall behind
+his pony while his pemmican was cooking, and came out after supper to
+finish this wall before he turned in to his sleeping-bag--no small thing
+when you consider that the warmth of your hours of rest depends largely
+upon getting into your bag immediately you have eaten your hoosh and
+cocoa. And not seldom you might hear a voice in your dreams: "Bill!
+Nobby's kicked his wall down"; and out Bill would go to build it up
+again.
+
+[Illustration: DOGSKIN 'MITTS']
+
+[Illustration: SLEDGING SPOON, CUP AND PANNIKIN]
+
+Oates wished to take certain of the ponies as far south as possible on
+the Depôt journey, and then to kill them and leave the meat there as a
+depôt of dog food for the Polar Journey. Scott was against this plan.
+Here at Bluff Depôt he decided to send back the three weakest ponies
+(Blossom, Blücher and Jimmy Pigg, with their leaders, Lieutenant Evans,
+Forde and Keohane). They started back the next morning (February 13)
+while the remainder of the party went forward over a surface which
+gradually became softer as we left behind the windy region of the Bluff.
+We now had with us the two teams of dogs, driven by Meares and Wilson,
+and five ponies.
+
+    Scott with 'Nobby.'
+    Oates with 'Punch.'
+    Bowers with 'Uncle Bill.'
+    Gran with 'Weary Willie.'
+    Cherry-Garrard with 'Guts.'
+
+Scott, Wilson, Meares and myself inhabited one tent, Bowers, Oates and
+Gran the other. Scott was evolving in his mind means by which ponies
+should follow one another in a string, the second pony with his leading
+rein fastened to the back of the sledge of the first and so on, the
+cavalcade to be managed by two or three men only, instead of one man to
+lead each pony.
+
+Sunday night (February 12) we started from Bluff Depôt and did seven
+miles before lunch against a considerable drift and wind. It was pretty
+cold, and ten minutes after we left our lunch camp with the ponies it was
+blowing a full blizzard. The dog party had not started, so we camped and
+slept five in the four-man tent, and it was by no means uncomfortable.
+Probably this was the time when Scott first thought of taking a five-man
+party to the Pole. By Monday evening the blizzard was over, the dogs came
+up, and we did 6½ miles of very heavy going. Gran's pony, Weary Willie, a
+sluggish and obstinate animal, was far behind, as usual, when we halted
+our ponies at the camping place. Farther off the dog-teams were coming
+up. What happened never became clear. Poor Weary, it seems, was in
+difficulties in a snow-drift: the dogs of one team being very hungry
+took charge of their sledge and in a moment were on the horse, to all
+purposes a pack of ravenous wolves. Gran and Weary made a good fight and
+the dogs were driven off, but Weary came into camp without his sledge,
+covered with blood and looking very sick.
+
+We halted after doing only ¾ mile more after lunch; for the pony was
+done, and little wonder. The following day we did 7½ miles with
+difficulty, both Uncle Bill and Weary Willie going very slowly and
+stopping frequently. The going was very deep. The ponies were fast giving
+out, and it was evident that we had much to learn as to their use on the
+Barrier; they were thin and very hungry; their rations were
+unsatisfactory; and the autumn temperatures and winds were beyond their
+strength. We went on one more day in a minus twenty temperature and light
+airs, and then in latitude 79° 29´ S. it was determined to lay the depôt,
+which was afterwards known as One Ton, and return. In view of subsequent
+events it should be realized that this depôt was just a cairn of snow in
+which were buried food and oil, and over which a flag waved on a bamboo.
+There is no land visible from One Ton except on a very clear day and it
+is 130 geographical miles from Hut Point.
+
+We spent a day making up the mound which contained about a ton of
+provisions, oil, compressed fodder, oats and other necessaries for the
+forthcoming Polar Journey. Scott was satisfied with the result, and
+indeed this depôt ensured that we could start southwards for the Pole
+fully laden from this point.
+
+Here the party was again split into two for the return. Scott was anxious
+to get such news about the landing of Campbell's party on King Edward
+VII.'s Land as the ship should have left at Hut Point on her return
+journey. He decided to take the two dog-teams, the first with himself and
+Meares, the second with Wilson and myself, and make a quick return,
+leaving Bowers with Oates and Gran to help him to bring back the five
+ponies, driving them one behind the other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE RETURN OF THE PONY PARTY FROM ONE TON DEPÔT
+
+(_From a Letter written by Bowers_)
+
+As our loads were so light Titus thought it would be better for the
+ponies to do their full march in one stretch and so have a longer rest.
+We, therefore, decided to forgo lunch and have a good meal on camping.
+The recent trails were fresh enough to follow and so saved us steering by
+compass, which is very difficult as the needle will only come to rest
+after you have been standing still for about a minute. That march was
+extraordinary, the snowy mist hid all distant objects and made all close
+ones look gigantic. Although we were walking on a flat undulating plain,
+one could not get away from the impression that the ground was
+hilly--quite steep in places with deep hollows by the wayside. Suddenly a
+herd of apparent cattle would appear in the distance, then you would
+think, 'No, it's a team of dogs broken loose and rushing towards you.' In
+another moment one would be walking over the black dots of some old horse
+droppings which had been the cause of the hallucinations. Since then I
+have often been completely taken in by appearances under certain
+conditions of light, and the novelty has worn off. Sastrugi are the hard
+waves formed by wind on a snow surface; these are seldom more than a foot
+or so in height, and often so obscured as to be imperceptible
+irregularities. On this occasion they often appeared like immense ridges
+until you walked over them. After going about 10 miles we spotted a tiny
+black triangle in the dead white void ahead, it was over a mile away and
+was the lunch camp of the dogs. We were fairly close before they broke
+camp and hurriedly packed up. I thought they looked rather sheepish at
+having been caught up, like the hare and the tortoise again. Still we had
+been marching very quickly and Scott was delighted to see Weary Willie
+going so well. They then dashed off, and after completing just over 12
+miles we reached Pagoda Cairn where a bale of fodder had been left.
+
+Here we camped and threw up our walls as quickly as possible to shelter
+the beasts from the cold wind. Weary was the most annoying, he would
+deliberately back into his wall and knock the whole structure down. In
+the case of my own pony, I had to put the wall out of his reach as his
+aim in life was to eat it, generally beginning at the bottom. He would
+diligently dislodge a block, and bring down the whole fabric. One cannot
+be angry with the silly beggars--Titus says a horse has practically no
+reasoning power, the thing to do is simply to throw up another wall and
+keep on at it.
+
+The weather cleared during the night, and the next day, February 19, we
+started off under ideal conditions, the sun was already dipping pretty
+low, marks easy to pick up, and on this occasion we could plainly see a
+cairn over seven miles away, raised by the mirage; the only trouble about
+seeing things so far off is that they take such an awful time to reach.
+Mirage is a great feature down here and one of the most common of optical
+phenomena on the Barrier; it is often difficult to persuade oneself that
+open water does not lie ahead. We passed the scene of Weary Willie's
+fight with the dogs during the march and also had an amusing argument as
+to a dark object on the snow ahead. At first we thought it was the dog
+camp again, but it turned out to be an empty biscuit tin, such is the
+deceptive nature of the light. Later we sighted our old blizzard camp and
+decided to utilize the walls again. Weary Willie was decidedly worse and
+had to be literally jumped along by the pony to which he was attached.
+Within half a mile of the walls Weary refused to go farther, and after
+wasting some time in vain efforts to urge him on we had to camp where we
+were, having only done 10½ miles. This was very sad, but I took hope from
+the fact that Titus, who is usually pretty pessimistic, had not yet given
+up hopes of getting him back alive. He had an extra whack of oats at the
+expense of the other ponies, and my big beast made up for his shortage by
+hauling the sledge towards him with his tethered leg, and forcing his
+nose into our precious biscuit tank, out of which he helped himself
+liberally at our expense. The sledges were now too light to anchor the
+animals, so we had to peg them down with anything we could and bank them
+up with snow.
+
+Weary was better the next day (February 20) but we decided at the outset
+to go no farther than the Bluff Camp where we had left some fodder. This
+was barely 10 miles off, yet my old animal showed signs of lassitude
+before the end; there was nothing alarming, however, and we saw the depôt
+over five miles off which interested the beasts, who see these things and
+somehow connect them, in the backs of their silly old heads, with food
+and rest. Weary Willie made a decided improvement, so we camped in high
+spirits. Captain Scott had asked me if possible to take some theodolite
+observations for the determination of the position of Bluff Camp. Ours is
+much farther off and farther beyond the Bluff than the old Discovery
+Depôt A, which was practically the same position Shackleton used. In both
+cases, Scott and Shackleton were keeping nearer the coast; now, however,
+that the Beardmore has been discovered we can aim straight for that,
+which takes one farther east by at least 15 miles off the Bluff. This is
+rather an advantage, I think, as close in to this remarkable headland the
+onward movement of the Barrier arrested by the immovable hills causes a
+terrific chaos of crevasses off the cliffs at the end. These extend many
+miles and include some chasms big enough to take the Terra Nova all
+standing. Needless to remark, one is well clear of this sort of scenery
+with ponies--hence our course. I was unable to get any observations,
+unfortunately, as it clouded over almost at once and later in the day
+started to snow without wind. This often happens before a bliz, and as we
+were anxious about the ponies to say nothing of our own shortage of
+biscuit we felt a trifle apprehensive. It was very gloomy when we left
+camp at midnight, as the midnight sun was already cartwheeling the
+southern horizon, the first sign of autumn, also the season had
+undoubtedly broken up, and the sky was covered with low stratus clouds as
+thick as a hedge. We lost sight of the cairn almost at once and followed
+the remains of old tracks for a little while till the snowy gloom made it
+impossible to see them. You will remember that it was at the Bluff Camp
+that Teddy Evans returned with the three weak ponies, so there were
+plenty of traces of our march now. Just on four miles from the start I
+saw a small mound some distance to the west, and struck over there: it
+was a small cairn without the signs of a camp and rather puzzled me at
+the time. As I shall mention it later I will call it X for convenience.
+We then pushed on and I found steering most difficult. In the fuzzy
+nothingness ahead one could see no point on which to fix the eye, and the
+compass required standing still to look at it every time. Our sledging
+compasses are spirit ones, and as steady as a small hand compass could
+possibly be. You will understand, however, that owing to the proximity of
+the Magnetic Pole the pull on the needle is chiefly downwards. It is
+forced into a horizontal position by a balancing weight on the N. side,
+so it is obvious that its direction power is greatly reduced. On the
+ship, owing to the vibration of the engines and the motors, we were
+absolutely unable to steer by the compass at all when off the region of
+the Magnetic Pole.
+
+On this occasion (February 21) we zig-zagged all over the place--first I
+went ahead, and Oates said I zig-zagged, then he went ahead, and I
+understood at once, as it was impossible to walk straight for two
+consecutive minutes. However, we plodded along with frequent stoppages
+till the wind came away, and then having determined the direction of
+that, steered by keeping the snow on our backs. The wind was not strong
+enough to be unpleasant, and all was well. We legged it into the void for
+nearly seven miles beyond X Cairn when I suddenly found myself only a few
+yards away from another cairn. This shows that somehow, without the use
+of tracks or landmarks, we had marched seven miles without being able to
+see thirty yards, and had yet hit off the direct track to a T; of course,
+it was only coincidence, though some people might credit themselves with
+superlative navigating powers on such evidence. The wind increased, and
+with the knowledge I now have of blizzards I would camp at once. Then I
+thought it better to shove on, as the ponies were marching splendidly.
+The danger lay in the fact that though it is easy enough for you to
+march with the wind behind, you can't march for ever and you will
+probably get tired before the wind does. Camping in a stiff breeze is
+always difficult, to say nothing of a gale; and for three men with five
+ponies to manage would be wellnigh impossible. Fortunately for us this
+was not really a blizzard, though it was quite near enough to one. The
+sky broke later and showed the Bluff and White Island, and then the
+scurrying clouds of drift would encircle us to break again and come on
+again.
+
+After having done seventeen miles we got a lull and stopped to camp right
+away. We were pretty quick about it, and fortunately got the ponies
+picketed, and tent pitched, before the wind came down on us again. We
+were pretty hungry by the time the walls were erected. Still we were
+quite happy, ate everything we could get, except the three lumps of sugar
+I always kept for old Uncle Bill out of my whack. The little blow blew
+itself out towards evening and in perfect calm and sunshine I got a
+splendid set of observations. Erebus and Terror were showing up as clear
+as a bell and I got a large number of angles for Evans' survey. We
+started out as usual, and had the most pleasant, as well as the longest,
+of our return marches on the last day of summer, February 22. We did
+eighteen miles right off the reel, the sun was brilliant from midnight
+onwards. He now half immersed himself below the horizon for a short
+interval once in 24 hours. All old cairns were visible a tremendous
+distance, six or seven miles at least for big ones. Mount Terror lay
+straight ahead and looked so clear that it seemed impossible to imagine
+it 70 miles away. At the end of our march we saw a small cairn beyond our
+8th outward camp mound. Nobody would have rigged up another cairn so
+close without an object, so the thought of a dead horse flashed through
+my mind at once. Titus was so sure that Blücher would never get back,
+that he had bet Gran a biscuit on it. I saw the cairn had a fodder bale
+on the top, and later saw a note made fast to the wire. It was in Teddy
+Evans' handwriting and to our surprise recorded Blossom's death. Titus
+was so sure that Blossom would survive Blücher that we started to think
+back and thus the mystery of X Cairn was clear to me. I was quite certain
+now that both the ancient ponies had died and that Jimmy Pigg had
+returned alone. The following day (February 23) was a good marching day
+also, but a bit cloudy latterly. We did fourteen miles as this evidence
+of pony failure made us all the more anxious about ours, though really
+they were going very well. About eight miles on we came to one of Evans'
+camps and the solitary pony wall told its own tale of the death of the
+other two. He must have had a miserable return. At eleven miles there
+were two bales of fodder depôted, we were only 50 miles odd from our
+destination off Cape Armitage, and had one meal over three days' food.
+If, therefore, we could average 15 miles a day that would suffice. It was
+a silly risk in view of blizzards and other possibilities, chiefly our
+own inexperience. As it was I took it and left the fodder there for next
+year.
+
+February 24 was another march into impenetrable gloom. Fortunately Corner
+Camp, though dark enough, was not shaded in mist. I examined it for notes
+and evidence and found some. The sun set properly now, and had we been
+farther from home I should have changed to day marching. I have seldom
+seen such a scene of utter desolation as Corner Camp presented on that
+gloomy day. The fog then settled down and like people of the mist, we
+struck off blindly to the N.W. At 3.15 A.M. a light S. breeze came away;
+I dreaded a blizzard with so little pony food, and already regretted my
+folly in leaving the fodder. After doing twelve miles we had to camp, as
+it was impossible even to march straight in the white haze. We made five
+colossal walls and turned in, hoping for the best. Fortune favours the
+reckless, as well as the brave, at times, and it did this time, as the
+blizzard still held off. The signs of one impending were unmistakable
+notwithstanding. Weary Willie did less well on February 25, and as the
+surface became heavier, we had to camp after only doing eleven miles.
+
+I thought best in view of the threatening appearance of the weather to
+have a six hours' rest, and march into Safety Camp the same day, a
+distance of eight miles. We found to our horror that Gran had dropped
+the top cap of our primus at the last camp. Cold food stared us in face!
+
+However, we did manage to melt some snow for a cheering drink by cutting
+a piece of tin as near the shape of the cap as possible. Our biscuit was
+finished owing to the ravages of my pony. Before turning in I saw some
+specks to the N. and skipping my theodolite on its tripod, looked through
+the telescope and saw two tents and a number of ski stuck up. [This was
+Scott's man-hauling party together with Jimmy Pigg, going out to Corner
+Camp.] This we concluded was either a man-hauling, or man and beast party
+bound for Corner Camp. We overslept and so did not get away till the
+afternoon. It was still very cloudy and threatening. I found that I had
+steered considerably to the southward of the right direction in the fog,
+and it is lucky we met with no crevasses off White Island. Safety Camp at
+last appeared, and the last four miles seemed interminable. We had given
+the animals their last feed before starting, not a particle remained, but
+they stuck it. The surface was very heavy. Once, however, that they had
+seen the camp they never stopped. I suppose they knew they were nearly
+home. We marched in about 9.30 P.M. I said 'Thank God' when I looked at
+the weather, and the empty sledges. The dogs were in camp, also the dome
+tent [we had some tents shaped like a dome in addition to those we used
+for sledging], out of which Uncle Bill (the real 'Uncle Bill Wilson') and
+Meares emerged. We soon had the ponies behind walls and well fed,
+borrowed their primus for ourselves, and had a square meal of pemmican
+and biscuit with fids of seal liver in it.
+
+(End of Bowers' Account.)
+
+
+THE RETURN OF THE DOG PARTY
+
+The history of the dog-teams was eventful. We travelled fast, doing
+nearly 78 miles in the first three days, by which time we were
+approaching Corner Camp. The dogs were thin and hungry and we were
+pushing them each day just so long as they could pull, running ourselves
+for the most part. Scott determined to cut the corner, that is to miss
+Corner Camp and cut diagonally across our outward track. It was not
+expected that this would bring us across any badly crevassed area.
+
+We started on the evening of February 20 in a very bad light. It was
+coldish, with no wind. After going about three miles I saw a drop in the
+level of the Barrier which the sledge was just going to run over. I
+shouted to Wilson to look out, but he had already jumped on to the sledge
+(for he was running) having seen Stareek put his paws through. It was a
+nasty crevasse, about twenty feet across with blue holes on both sides.
+The sledge ran over and immediately on the opposite side was brought up
+by a large 'haystack' of pressure which we had not seen owing to the
+light. Meares' team, on our left, never saw any sign of pressure. The
+light was so bad that we never saw this cairn of ice until we ran into
+it.
+
+We ran level for another two miles, Meares and Scott on our left. We were
+evidently crossing many crevasses. Quite suddenly we saw the dogs of
+their team disappearing, following one another, just like dogs going down
+a hole after some animal.
+
+"In a moment," wrote Scott, "the whole team were sinking--two by two we
+lost sight of them, each pair struggling for foothold. Osman the leader
+exerted all his strength and kept a foothold--it was wonderful to see
+him. The sledge stopped and we leapt aside. The situation was clear in
+another moment. We had been actually travelling along the bridge [or snow
+covering] of a crevasse, the sledge had stopped on it, whilst the dogs
+hung in their harness in the abyss, suspended between the sledge and the
+leading dog. Why the sledge and ourselves didn't follow the dogs we shall
+never know."
+
+We of the other sledge stopped hurriedly, tethered our team and went to
+their assistance with the Alpine rope. Osman, the big leader, was in
+great difficulties. He crouched resisting with all his enormous strength
+the pull of the rope upon which the team hung in their harness in mid
+air. It was clear that if Osman gave way the sledge and dogs would
+probably all be lost down the crevasse.
+
+First we pulled the sledge off the crevasse, and drove the tethering peg
+and driving stick through the cross pieces to hold it firm. Scott and
+Meares then tried to pull up the rope from Osman's end, while we hung on
+to the sledge to prevent it slipping down the crevasse. They could not
+move it an inch. We then put the strain as much as possible on to a peg.
+Meanwhile two dogs had fallen out of their harness into the crevasse and
+could be seen lying on a snow-ledge some 65 feet down. Later they curled
+up and went to sleep. Another dog as he hung managed to get some purchase
+for his feet on the side of the crevasse, and a free fight took place
+among several more of them, as they dangled, those that hung highest
+using the backs of those under them to get a purchase.
+
+"It takes one a little time," wrote Scott, "to make plans under such
+sudden circumstances, and for some minutes our efforts were rather
+futile. We could not get an inch on the main trace of the sledge or on
+the leading rope, which was binding Osman to the snow with a throttling
+pressure. Then thought became clearer. We unloaded our sledge, putting in
+safety our sleeping-bags with the tent and cooker. Choking sounds from
+Osman made it clear that the pressure on him must soon be relieved. I
+seized the lashing off Meares' sleeping-bag, passed the tent poles across
+the crevasse, and with Meares managed to get a few inches on the leading
+line; this freed Osman, whose harness was immediately cut.
+
+"Then securing the Alpine rope to the main trace we tried to haul up
+together. One dog came up and was unlashed, but by this time the rope had
+cut so far back at the edge that it was useless to attempt to get more of
+it. But we could now unbend the sledge, and do that for which we should
+have aimed from the first, namely, run the sledge across the gap and work
+from it. We managed to do this, our fingers constantly numbed. Wilson
+held on to the anchored trace whilst the rest of us laboured at the
+leader end. The leading rope was very small and I was fearful of its
+breaking, so Meares was lowered down a foot or two to secure the Alpine
+rope to the leading end of the trace; this done, the work of rescue
+proceeded in better order. Two by two we hauled the animals up to the
+sledge and one by one cut them out of their harness. Strangely the last
+dogs were the most difficult, as they were close under the lip of the
+gap, bound in by the snow-covered rope. Finally, with a gasp we got the
+last poor creature on to firm snow. We had recovered eleven of the
+thirteen."[117]
+
+The dogs had been dangling for over an hour, and some of them showed
+signs of internal injuries. Meanwhile the two remaining dogs were lying
+down the crevasse on a snow-ledge. Scott proposed going down on the
+Alpine rope to get them; all his instincts of kindness were aroused, as
+well as the thought of the loss of two of the team. Wilson thought it was
+a mad idea and very dangerous, and said so, asking however whether he
+might not go down instead of Scott if anybody had to go. Scott insisted,
+and we paid down the 90-foot Alpine rope to test the distance. The ledge
+was about 65 feet below. We lowered Scott, who stood on the ledge while
+we hauled up the two dogs in turn. They were glad to see him, and little
+wonder!
+
+But the rescued dogs which were necessarily running about loose on the
+Barrier, in their mangled harnesses, chose this moment to start a free
+fight with the other team. With a hurried shout down the crevasse we had
+to rush off to separate them. Nougis I. had been considerably mauled
+before this was done--also, incidentally, my heel! But at last we
+separated them, and hauled Scott to the surface. It was all three of us
+could do and our fingers were frost-bitten towards the end.
+
+Scott's interest in the incident, apart from the recovery of the dogs,
+was scientific. Since we were running across the line of cleavage when
+the dogs went down, it was to be expected that we should be crossing the
+crevasses at right angles, and not be travelling, as actually happened,
+parallel to, or along them. While we were getting him up the sixty odd
+feet to which we had lowered him he kept muttering: "I wonder why this is
+running the way it is--you expect to find them at right angles," and
+when down the crevasse he wanted to go off exploring, but we managed to
+persuade him that the snow-ledge upon which he was standing was utterly
+unsafe, and indeed we could see the nothingness below through the blue
+holes in the shelf. Another regret was that we had no thermometer: the
+temperature of the inside of the Barrier is of great interest and a
+fairly reliable record of the average temperature throughout the year
+might have been obtained when so far down into it. Altogether we could
+congratulate ourselves on a fortunate ending to a nasty business. We
+expected several more miles of crevasses, and the wind was getting up,
+driving the surface drift like smoke over the ground, with a very black
+sky to the south. We pitched the tent, had a good meal and mended the dog
+harness which had been ruthlessly cut in clearing the dogs. Luckily we
+found no more crevasses for it was now blowing hard, and rescue work
+would have been difficult, and we pushed on as far as possible that
+night, doing eleven miles after lunch, and sixteen for the day. It had
+been strenuous, for we had been working in or over the crevasse for 2½
+hours, and dogs and men were tired out. It cleared and became quite warm
+as we camped. There was a pleasant air of friendship in the tent that
+night, rather more than usual. That is generally the result of this kind
+of business.
+
+We reached Safety Camp next day (February 22) anxious for news of the
+ship's doings, the landing of Campbell's party, and of the ponies which
+had been sent back from the Bluff Depôt. Lieutenant Evans, Forde and
+Keohane, the pony leaders, were there, but only one pony. The other two
+had died of exhaustion soon after they left us and we had passed the
+cairns which marked their graves without knowledge. Their story was grim,
+and they had had a mournful journey back. First Blossom, and then Blücher
+collapsed, their ends being hastened by the blizzard of February 1.
+
+This crevasse incident, followed by the news of the loss of the ponies,
+was a blow to Scott, and his mind was also uneasy about Atkinson and
+Crean, whom we had left here, and who had disappeared leaving no record.
+Nor was the report from the Terra Nova here, so we judged that the
+missing men and the report must be at Hut Point. After three or four
+hours' sleep, and a cup of tea and a biscuit, we started man-hauling with
+cooker and sleeping-bags: the former because we were to have our good
+meal at the hut, the latter in case we were hung up. Travelling over the
+sea-ice as far as the Gap, from which we saw that the open sea reached to
+Hut Point, we made our way into the hut, and there was a mystery. The
+accumulations of ice which we found in it were dug away: there was a
+notice outside dated February 8 saying, "mail for Captain Scott is in bag
+inside south door." We hunted everywhere, but there was no Atkinson nor
+Crean, nor mail, nor the things which the ship was to have brought. All
+kinds of wild theories were advanced. By the presence of a fresh onion
+and some bread it was clear that the ship's party had been there, but the
+rest was utterly vague. It was then suggested that we were expected back
+about this time, and that the missing men had been sledging to Safety
+Camp round Cape Armitage on the very shaky sea-ice while we passed them
+as we came through the Gap. Sledge tracks were found leading on to the
+sea-ice: we started back in doubt. Scott was terribly anxious, we were
+all tired, and the depôt never seemed to come nearer. It was not until we
+were some two hundred yards from it that we saw the extra tent. "Thank
+God!" I heard Scott mutter under his breath, and "I believe you were even
+more anxious than I was, Bill."
+
+Atkinson had the ship's mail, signed by Campbell. "Every incident of the
+day," Scott wrote, "pales before the startling contents of the mail-bag
+which Atkinson gave me--a letter from Campbell setting out his doings and
+the finding of Amundsen established in the Bay of Whales."
+
+[Illustration: HUT POINT--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+Strongly as Scott tries to word this, it quite fails to convey how he
+felt, and how we all felt more or less, in spite of the warning conveyed
+in the telegram from Madeira to Melbourne. For an hour or so we were
+furiously angry, and were possessed with an insane sense that we must go
+straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his
+men in some undefined fashion or other there and then. Such a mood could
+not and did not bear a moment's reflection; but it was natural enough. We
+had just paid the first instalment of the heart-breaking labour of making
+a path to the Pole; and we felt, however unreasonably, that we had earned
+the first right of way. Our sense of co-operation and solidarity had been
+wrought up to an extraordinary pitch; and we had so completely forgotten
+the spirit of competition that its sudden intrusion jarred frightfully. I
+do not defend our burst of rage--for such it was--I simply record it as
+an integral human part of my narrative. It passed harmlessly; and Scott's
+account proceeds as follows:
+
+"One thing only fixes itself definitely in my mind. The proper, as well
+as the wiser, course for us is to proceed exactly as though this had not
+happened. To go forward and do our best for the honour of the country
+without fear or panic. There is no doubt that Amundsen's plan is a very
+serious menace to ours. He has a shorter distance to the Pole by 60
+miles--I never thought he could have got so many dogs safely to the ice.
+His plan of running them seems excellent. But, above and beyond all, he
+can start his journey early in the season--an impossible condition with
+ponies."[118]
+
+We read that on leaving McMurdo Sound the Terra Nova coasted eastward
+along the Barrier face, with Campbell and his men who were to be landed
+on King Edward VII.'s Land if possible. She surveyed the face of the
+Barrier as she went from Cape Crozier to longitude 170° W., whence she
+shaped a course direct for Cape Colbeck, which Priestley states in his
+diary "is only 200 feet high according to our measurement and looks
+uncommonly like common or garden Barrier."
+
+Here they met heavy pack, and were forced to return without finding any
+place where the cliff was low enough to allow Campbell and his five men
+to land. They coasted back, making for an inlet known as Balloon Bight.
+Priestley tells the story:
+
+"February 1, 1911. Our trip has not been without outcome after all, and
+all our doubts about wintering here or in South Victoria Land have been
+settled in a startling fashion. About ten o'clock we steamed into a deep
+bay in the Barrier which proved to be Shackleton's Bay of Whales, and our
+observations in the last expedition [Shackleton's] have been wonderfully
+upheld. Our present sights and angles Pennell tells me are almost a
+duplicate of those that we got. Every one has always been doubtful about
+the Bay of Whales we reported, but now the matter has been set at rest
+finally. There is no doubt now that Balloon Bight and the neighbouring
+bay marked on the Discovery's chart have become merged into one, and
+further, that since that period the resulting bight has broken back
+considerably more: indeed it seems to have altered a good deal on its
+western border since our visit to it in 1908. Otherwise it is the same,
+the same deceptive caves and shadows having from a distance the
+appearance of rock exposures, the same pressure-ridged cliffs, the same
+undulations behind, the same expanse of sea-ice and even the same crowds
+of whales. I hope that before we leave we shall find it possible to
+survey the bight, but that depends on the weather. It was satisfactory to
+find all our observations coming right and everybody backing up
+Shackleton, and I turned in last night feeling quite cheerful and
+believing that there would be a really good chance of the Eastern Party
+finding a home on the Barrier here--our last chance of surveying King
+Edward's Land.
+
+"However, man proposes but God disposes, and I was waked up by Lillie at
+one o'clock this morning by the astounding news that there was a ship in
+the bay at anchor to the sea-ice. All was confusion on board for a few
+minutes, everybody rushing up on deck with cameras and clothes.
+
+"It was no false alarm, there she was within a few yards of us, and what
+is more, those of us who had read Nansen's books recognized the Fram.
+
+"She is rigged with fore and aft sails and as she has petrol engines she
+has no funnel. Soon afterwards the men forward declared that they sighted
+a hut on the Barrier, and the more excited declared that there was a
+party coming out to meet us. Campbell, Levick, and myself were therefore
+lowered over the side of the ship while she was being made fast, and set
+off on ski towards the dark spot we could see. This proved to be only an
+abandoned depôt and we returned to the ship, where Campbell, who in his
+anxiety to be the first to meet them had left us beginners far behind,
+had opened up conversation with the night watchman.
+
+"He informed us that there were only three men on board and that the
+remainder of them were settling Amundsen in winter quarters about as far
+from the depôt as the depôt was from the ship. Amundsen is coming to
+visit the Fram to-morrow, and we are staying long enough to allow Pennell
+and Campbell to interview him. They reached the pack about January 6 and
+were through it by the 12th, so they did not have as bad a time as we
+did. They inform us that Amundsen does not intend to make his descent on
+the Pole until next year. This is encouraging as it means a fair race for
+the next summer, though the news we are bringing to them will keep the
+Western [Main] Party on tenterhooks of excitement all the winter.
+
+"Our plans have of course been decided for us. We cannot according to
+etiquette trench on their winter quarters, but must return to McMurdo
+Sound and then go off towards Robertson Bay and settle ourselves as best
+we can. While we are waiting events we have not been by any means idle.
+Rennick got a sounding, 180 fathoms, and the crew have killed three
+seals, including one beautiful silver crab-eater, Lillie has secured
+water samples at 50, 100, 150, and 170 fathoms and has had a haul with
+the plankton net, and Williams is endeavouring to fit up the trawl for a
+haul to-morrow if we get time and appropriate weather. I got a roll of
+films and gave the roll to Drake to take home and get developed in
+Christchurch. There are photographs of the Fram, of the Fram and Terra
+Nova together, of their depôt, and of the ice-cliffs and the sea-ice
+which is decidedly overcut, the thick snow having been removed in places
+by the swell until a ledge several yards wide is lying just submerged.
+
+"It has been calm all the night with the snow falling at intervals.
+
+"February 4, 1911. I was waked at seven o'clock this morning by Levick
+demanding the loan of my camera. It appears that Amundsen, Johansen and
+six men had arrived at the Fram this morning at about 6.30 A.M., and had
+come over to interview Campbell and Pennell. Campbell, Pennell and Levick
+then went back to breakfast with them and stayed until nearly noon when
+they returned telling us to expect Amundsen, Nilsen, the first lieutenant
+of the Fram who is taking her back after landing the party, and a young
+lieutenant whose name none of us caught, to lunch. After lunch a party of
+officers and men went to see the rest of the Norwegians, see over the
+ship, and say good-bye. I did not go and was able to show Lieut. Jensen
+over the ship in the meantime. About three o'clock we let go the ice
+anchor and parted from the Fram, steaming along the ice very slowly in
+order to dredge from 190 to 300 fathoms. The haul was successful, about
+two bucketsful of the muddy bottom being secured, and a still more
+valuable catch from the biological point of view were two long crinoids,
+about a couple of feet in length and in fairly perfect condition, which
+had become attached to the outside of the net.
+
+"We are now standing along the Barrier continuing our survey to the bight
+we first struck, after which we sail to Cape Evans, stay a day there and
+then make up North to try and effect a lodgment on the coast beyond Cape
+Adare.
+
+"During the morning Browning and I examined the ice-face forming the
+eastern face of the bight. We found it to be made of clear ice of grain
+from a quarter to three-eighths of an inch in size and full of bubbles.
+
+"On the way there I took a couple of photographs of some of Amundsen's
+dogs, and when we were there I got a few of crevasses and caves in the
+Barrier face.
+
+"Well! we have left the Norwegians and our thoughts are full, too full,
+of them at present. The impression they have left with me is that of a
+set of men of distinctive personality, hard, and evidently inured to
+hardship, good goers and pleasant and good-humoured. All these qualities
+combine to make them very dangerous rivals, but even did one want not to,
+one cannot help liking them individually in spite of the rivalry.
+
+"One thing I have particularly noticed is the way in which they are
+refraining from getting information from us which might be useful to
+them. We have news which will make the Western Party as uneasy as
+ourselves and the world will watch with interest a race for the Pole next
+year, a race which may go any way, and may be decided by luck or by
+dogged energy and perseverance on either side.
+
+"The Norwegians are in dangerous winter quarters, for the ice is breaking
+out rapidly from the Bay of Whales which they believe to be
+Borchgrevink's Bight, and they are camped directly in front of a distinct
+line of weakness. On the other hand if they get through the winter safely
+(and they are aware of their danger), they have unlimited dogs, the
+energy of a nation as northern as ourselves, and experience with
+snow-travelling that could be beaten by no collection of men in the
+world.
+
+"There remains the Beardmore Glacier. Can their dogs face it, and if so,
+who will get there first. One thing I feel and that is that our Southern
+Party will go far before they permit themselves to be beaten by any one,
+and I think that two parties are very likely to reach the Pole next year,
+but God only knows which will get there first.
+
+"A few of the things we learnt about the Norwegians are as follows:
+
+"The engines of the Fram occupy only half the size of our wardroom, the
+petrol tanks have not needed replenishment since they left Norway, and
+their propeller can be lifted by three men. They kept fresh potatoes from
+Norway to the Barrier. (Some of them must surely be renegade Irishmen.)
+They have each a separate cabin 'tween-decks in the Fram, and are very
+comfortable. They are using for transporting their stores to the hut,
+eight teams of five dogs each, working every alternate day.
+
+"They intend to use for the Polar Journey teams of ten dogs, each team
+working one day out of two. Their dogs stop at a whistle, and if they
+make a break they can be stopped by overturning the sledge, empty or full
+as the case may be. They are nine in the shore party and ten in the ship.
+Their ship is going back to Buenos Ayres with Nilsen in charge and during
+the winter is to encircle the world, sounding all the way.
+
+"They are not starting on the dash South this year and do not yet know
+whether they will lay depôts this year. They have 116 dogs and ten of
+these are bitches, so that they can rear pups, and have done so very
+successfully on the way out. The Fram acts like a cork in the sea; she
+rolls tremendously but does not ship water, and during the voyage they
+have had the dogs running loose about the decks. There is a lot more
+miscellaneous information, but I may remember it more coherently a little
+later when the main impressions of the rencontre are a little more
+faint."[119]
+
+It will be seen that Priestley missed three points. First, he was left
+with a conventional but very erroneous impression of Amundsen as a blunt
+Norwegian sailor, not in the least an intellectual. Second, he thought
+Amundsen had camped on the ice and not on terra firma. Third, he thought
+Amundsen was going to the Pole by the old route over the Beardmore. The
+truth was that Amundsen was an explorer of the markedly intellectual
+type, rather Jewish than Scandinavian, who had proved his sagacity by
+discovering solid footing for the winter by pure judgment. For the
+moment, let it be confessed, we all underrated Amundsen, and could not
+shake off the feeling that he had stolen a march on us.
+
+Back to McMurdo Sound, and the news left at Hut Point. Then the two
+ponies which had been allotted to Campbell were swum ashore at Cape
+Evans, since he thought that now they would be of more use to Scott than
+to himself. Subsequent events proved the extreme usefulness of this
+unselfish act. The Terra Nova would steam north and try and land
+Campbell's party on the extreme northern shores of Queen Victoria Land.
+At the same time there was so little coal left that it might be necessary
+to go straight back to New Zealand. Campbell regretted not being able to
+see Scott, supposing that the altered circumstances caused Scott to wish
+to rearrange his parties, and also because Amundsen had asked Campbell to
+land his party at the Bay of Whales, giving him the area to the east to
+explore, and Campbell did not wish to accept before getting Scott's
+permission.
+
+As we know now coal ran so short that it came to an alternative of
+dumping Campbell, his men and gear hastily on the beach at Cape Adare, or
+taking them back to New Zealand. As one member of the crew said:
+"Exploring is all very well in its way, but it is a thing which can be
+very easily overdone." The ship was as ready to get rid of them as they
+were to get rid of the ship. They were landed, working to their waists in
+the surf, and the ship got safely back to New Zealand.
+
+Scott decided that the period of waiting until the pony party arrived
+from One Ton should be employed in sledging stores out to Corner Camp.
+But the dog-teams were done, "the dogs are thin as rakes; they are
+ravenous and very tired. I feel this should not be, and that it is
+evident that they are underfed. The ration must be increased next year
+and we must have some properly-thought-out diet. The biscuit alone is not
+good enough."[120] In addition, several dogs were feeling the effects of
+injuries due to the crevasse incident. There remained the men and the one
+pony which had survived out of the three sent back from Bluff Depôt,
+namely Jimmy Pigg.
+
+The party started on Friday, February 24, marching by day. It consisted
+of Scott, Crean and myself with one sledge and tent, Lieutenant Evans,
+Atkinson and Forde with a second sledge and tent, and Keohane leading
+James Pigg. On the second night out we saw the pony party pass us in the
+distance on their way to Safety Camp.[121] At Corner Camp Scott decided
+to leave Lieutenant Evans' party to come in with the pony more slowly,
+and himself to push on with Crean and myself at top speed for Safety
+Camp. We made a forced march well into the night, doing twenty-six miles
+for the day, and camped some ten miles from Safety Camp, where the pony
+party must by this time have arrived.
+
+The events which followed were disastrous, and the steps which led to a
+catastrophe which entailed the loss of much of our best transport, and
+only by a miracle did not lead to the loss of several lives, were
+complicated. At this moment, the night of February 26, there were three
+parties on the Barrier. Behind Scott was Lieutenant Evans' party and the
+pony, James Pigg. Scott himself was camped within easy marching distance
+of Safety Camp with Crean and myself. At Safety Camp were the two
+dog-teams with Wilson and Meares, while the pony party from One Ton Depôt
+had just arrived with five ponies which were for the most part thin,
+hungry and worn. Between Safety Camp and Hut Point lay the frozen sea,
+which might or might not break up this year, but we knew from our
+observations a few days before that the ice was in a shaky condition. At
+that time the ice sheet extended some seven miles to the north of Hut
+Point. The season was fast closing in: temperatures of fifty or sixty
+degrees of frost had been common for the last fortnight, and this was bad
+for the ponies. We had been unfortunate in having several severe
+blizzards, and it was already clear that it was these autumn blizzards
+more than cold temperatures and soft surfaces which the ponies could not
+endure. Scott was most anxious to get the animals into such shelter as we
+could make for them at Hut Point.
+
+The next morning, February 27, we woke to a regular cold autumn
+blizzard--very thick, wind force 9 and temperature about minus twenty.
+This was disheartening, and indeed with our six worn ponies still on the
+Barrier the outlook for them was discouraging. The blizzard came to an
+end the next morning. Scott must take up the first part of that day's
+story:
+
+"Packed up at 6 A.M. and marched into Safety Camp. Found every one very
+cold and depressed. Wilson and Meares had had continuous bad weather
+since we left, Bowers and Oates since their arrival. The blizzard had
+raged for two days. The animals looked in a sorry condition, but all were
+alive. The wind blew keen and cold from the east. There could be no
+advantage in waiting here, and soon all arrangements were made for a
+general shift to Hut Point. Packing took a long time. The snowfall had
+been prodigious, and parts of the sledges were 3 or 4 feet under drift.
+About 4 o'clock the two dog-teams got safely away. Then the pony party
+prepared to go. As the cloths were stript from the ponies the ravages of
+the blizzard became evident. The animals, without exception, were
+terribly emaciated, and Weary Willie was in a pitiable condition.
+
+"The plan was for the ponies to follow the dog tracks, our small party to
+start last and get in front of the ponies on the sea-ice. I was very
+anxious about the sea-ice passage owing to the spread of the water
+holes."[122]
+
+The two dog-teams left with Meares and Wilson some time before the
+ponies, and for the moment they go out of this story.
+
+Bowers' pony, Uncle Bill, was ready first, and he started with him. We
+got three more ponies harnessed, Punch, Nobby and Guts, and tried to
+harness Weary Willie, but when we attempted to lead him forward he
+immediately fell down.
+
+Scott rapidly reorganized. He sent Crean and me forward with the three
+better ponies to join Bowers, now waiting a mile ahead. Oates and Gran he
+kept with himself, to try and help the sick pony. His diary tells how "we
+made desperate efforts to save the poor creature, got him once more on
+his legs, gave him a hot oat mash. Then, after a wait of an hour, Oates
+led him off, and we packed the sledge and followed on ski; 500 yards from
+the camp the poor creature fell again and I felt it was the last effort.
+We camped, built a snow wall round him, and did all we possibly could to
+get him on his feet. Every effort was fruitless, though the poor thing
+made pitiful struggles. Towards midnight we propped him up as
+comfortably as we could and went to bed.
+
+"Wednesday, March 1. A.M. Our pony died in the night. It is hard to have
+got him back so far only for this. It is clear that these blizzards are
+terrible for the poor animals. Their coats are not good, but even with
+the best of coats it is certain they would lose condition badly if caught
+in one, and we cannot afford to lose condition at the beginning of a
+journey. It makes a late start necessary for next year.
+
+"Well, we have done our best and bought our experience at a heavy cost.
+Now every effort must be bent on saving the remaining animals."[123]
+
+A letter from Bowers home, which certainly does not overstate the
+adventures of himself and the two men sent forward to join him, is
+probably the best description of the incidents which followed. It will be
+remembered that Crean and I with three ponies were sent from Safety Camp
+to join him: he was already leading one pony. Night was beginning to
+fall, and the light was bad, but from the edge of the Barrier the two
+dog-teams could still be seen as black dots in the distance towards Cape
+Armitage.
+
+"On the night of February 28 I led off with my pony and was surprised at
+the delay in the others leaving--knowing nothing of Weary's collapse.
+Over the edge of the Barrier I went, and at the bottom of the snow
+incline awaited the others. To my surprise Cherry and Crean appeared with
+Punch, Nobby and Guts in a string, and then I heard the reason for Oates
+and Scott not having come on. My orders were to push on to Hut Point over
+the sea-ice without delay, and to follow the dogs; previously I had been
+told to camp on the sea-ice only in case of the beasts being unable to go
+on. We had four pretty heavy sledges, as we were taking six weeks' man
+food and oil to the hut, as well as a lot of gear from the depôt, and
+pony food, etc. Unfortunately the dogs misunderstood their orders and,
+instead of piloting us, dashed off on their own. We saw them like specks
+in the distance in the direction of the old seal crack. Having crossed
+this they wheeled to the right in the direction of Cape Armitage and
+disappeared into a black indefinite mist, which seemed to pervade
+everything in that direction. We heard afterwards that in a mile or two
+they came to some alarming signs and, turning, made for the Gap where
+they got up on to the land about midnight.
+
+"I plugged on in their tracks, till we came to the seal crack which was
+an old pressure-ridge running many miles S.W. from Pram Point. We
+considered the ice behind this crack--over which we had just come--fast
+ice; it was older ice than that beyond, as it had undoubtedly frozen over
+first. Having crossed the crack we streaked on for Cape Armitage. The
+animals were going badly, owing to the effects of the blizzard, and
+frequent stoppages were necessary. On coming to some shaky ice we headed
+farther west as there were always some bad places off the cape, and I
+thought it better to make a good circuit. Crean, who had been over the
+ice recently, told me it was all right farther round. However, about a
+mile farther on I began to have misgivings; the cracks became too
+frequent to be pleasant, and although the ice was from five to ten feet
+thick, one does not like to see water squelching between them, as we did
+later. It spells motion, and motion on sea-ice means breakage. I shoved
+on in the hope of getting on better ice round the cape, but at last came
+a moving crack, and that decided me to turn back. We could see nothing
+owing to the black mist, everything looked solid as ever, but I knew
+enough to mistrust moving ice, however solid it seemed. It was a beastly
+march back: dark, gloomy and depressing. The beasts got more and more
+down in their spirits and stopped so frequently that I thought we would
+never reach the seal crack. I said to Cherry, however, that I would take
+no risks, and camp well over the other side on the old sound ice if we
+could get there. This we managed to do eventually. Here there was soft
+snow, whereas on the sea side of the crack it was hard: that is the
+reason we lost the dogs' tracks at once on crossing. Even over this crack
+I thought it best to march as far in as possible. We got well into the
+bay, as far as our exhausted ponies would drag, before I camped and
+threw up the walls, fed the beasts, and retired to feed ourselves. We had
+only the primus with the missing cap and it took over 1½ hours to heat up
+the water; however, we had a cup of pemmican. It was very dark, and I
+mistook a small bag of curry powder for the cocoa bag, and made cocoa
+with that, mixed with sugar; Crean drank his right down before
+discovering anything was wrong. It was 2 P.M. before we were ready to
+turn in. I went out and saw everything quiet: the mist still hung to the
+west, but you could see a good mile and all was still. The sky was very
+dark over the Strait though, the unmistakable sign of open water. I
+turned in. Two and a half hours later I awoke, hearing a noise. Both my
+companions were snoring, I thought it was that and was on the point of
+turning in again having seen that it was only 4.30, when I heard the
+noise again. I thought--'my pony is at the oats!' and went out.
+
+"I cannot describe either the scene or my feelings. I must leave those to
+your imagination. We were in the middle of a floating pack of broken-up
+ice. The tops of the hills were visible, but all below was thin mist and
+as far as the eye could see there was nothing solid; it was all broken
+up, and heaving up and down with the swell. Long black tongues of water
+were everywhere. The floe on which we were had split right under our
+picketing line, and cut poor Guts' wall in half. Guts himself had gone,
+and a dark streak of water alone showed the place where the ice had
+opened under him. The two sledges securing the other end of the line were
+on the next floe and had been pulled right to the edge. Our camp was on a
+floe not more than 30 yards across. I shouted to Cherry and Crean, and
+rushed out in my socks to save the two sledges; the two floes were
+touching farther on and I dragged them to this place and got them on to
+our floe. At that moment our own floe split in two, but we were all
+together on one piece. I then got my finnesko on, remarking that we had
+been in a few tight places, but this was about the limit. I have been
+told since that I was quixotic not to leave everything and make for
+safety. You will understand, however, that I never for one moment
+considered the abandonment of anything.
+
+"We packed up camp and harnessed up our ponies in remarkably quick time.
+When ready to move I had to decide which way to go. Obviously towards
+Cape Armitage was impossible, and to the eastward also, as the wind was
+from that direction, and we were already floating west towards the open
+sound. Our only hope lay to the south, and thither I went. We found the
+ponies would jump the intervals well. At least Punch would and the other
+two would follow him. My idea was never to separate, but to get
+everything on to one floe at a time; and then wait till it touched or
+nearly touched another in the right direction, and then jump the ponies
+over and drag the four sledges across ourselves. In this way we made
+slow, but sure progress. While one was acting all was well, the waiting
+for a lead to close was the worst trial. Sometimes it would take 10
+minutes or more, but there was so much motion in the ice that sooner or
+later bump you would go against another piece, and then it was up and
+over. Sometimes they split, sometimes they bounced back so quickly that
+only one horse could get over, and then we had to wait again. We had to
+make frequent detours and were moving west all the time with the pack,
+still we were getting south, too.
+
+"Very little was said. Crean like most bluejackets behaved as if he had
+done this sort of thing often before. Cherry, the practical, after an
+hour or two dug out some chocolate and biscuit, during one of our
+enforced waits, and distributed it. I felt at that time that food was the
+last thing on earth I wanted, and put it in my pocket; in less than half
+an hour, though, I had eaten the lot. The ponies behaved as well as my
+companions, and jumped the floes in great style. After getting them on a
+new floe we simply left them, and there they stood chewing at each
+others' head ropes or harness till we were over with the sledges and
+ready to take them on again. Their implicit trust in us was touching to
+behold. A 12-feet sledge makes an excellent bridge if an opening is too
+wide to jump. After some hours we saw fast ice ahead, and thanked God for
+it. Meanwhile a further unpleasantness occurred in the arrival of a host
+of the terrible 'killer' whales. These were reaping a harvest of seal in
+the broken-up ice, and cruised among the floes with their immense black
+fins sticking up, and blowing with a terrific roar. The Killer is
+scientifically known as the Orca, and, though far smaller than the sperm
+and other large whales, is a much more dangerous animal. He is armed with
+a huge iron jaw and great blunt socket teeth. Killers act in concert,
+too, and, as you may remember, nearly got Ponting when we were unloading
+the ship, by pressing up the thin ice from beneath and splitting it in
+all directions.
+
+"It took us over six hours to get close to the fast ice, which proved to
+be the Barrier, some immense chunks of which we actually saw break off
+and join the pack. Close in, the motion was less owing to the jambing up
+of the ice somewhere farther west. We had only just cleared the Strait in
+time though, as all the ice in the centre, released beyond Cape Armitage,
+headed off into the middle of the Strait, and thence to the Ross Sea. Our
+spirits rose as we neared the Barrier edge, and I made for a big sloping
+floe which I expected would be touching; at any rate I anticipated no
+difficulty. We rushed up the slope towards safety, and were little
+prepared for the scene that met our eyes at the top. All along the
+Barrier face a broad lane of water from thirty to forty feet wide
+extended. This was filled with smashed-up brash ice, which was heaving up
+and down to the swell like the contents of a cauldron. Killers were
+cruising there with fiendish activity, and the Barrier edge was a sheer
+cliff of ice on the other side fifteen to twenty feet high. It was a case
+of so near and yet so far. Suddenly our great sloping floe calved in two,
+so we beat a hasty retreat. I selected a sound-looking floe just clear of
+this turmoil, that was at least ten feet thick, and fairly rounded, with
+a flat surface. Here we collected everything and having done all that man
+could do, we fed the beasts and took counsel.
+
+"Cherry and Crean both volunteered to do anything, in the spirit they had
+shown right through. It appeared of first necessity to communicate with
+Captain Scott. I guessed his anxiety on our behalf, and, as we could do
+nothing more, we wanted help of some sort. It occurred to me that a man
+working up to windward along the Barrier face might happen upon a floe
+touching [the Barrier]. It was obviously impossible to take ponies up
+there anywhere, but an active man might wait his opportunity. Going to
+windward, too, he could always retreat on to our floe, as the ice was
+being pushed together in our direction. The next consideration was, whom
+to send. To go myself was out of the question. The problem was whether to
+send one, or both, my companions. As my object was to save the animals
+and gear, it appeared to me that one man remaining would be helpless in
+the event of the floe splitting up, as he would be busy saving himself. I
+therefore decided to send one only. This would have to be Crean, as
+Cherry, who wears glasses, could not see so well. Both volunteered, but
+as I say, I thought out all the pros and cons and sent Crean, knowing
+that, at the worst, he could get back to us at any time. I sent a note to
+Captain Scott, and, stuffing Crean's pockets with food, we saw him
+depart.
+
+"Practical Cherry suggested pitching the tent as a mark of our
+whereabouts, and having done this I mounted the theodolite to watch Crean
+through the telescope. The rise and fall of the floe made this difficult,
+especially as a number of Emperor penguins came up and looked just like
+men in the distance. Fortunately the sunlight cleared the frost smoke,
+and as it fell calm our westerly motion began to decrease. The swell
+started to go down. Outside us in the centre of the Strait all the ice
+had gone out, and open water remained. We were one of a line of loose
+floes floating near the Barrier edge. Crean was hours moving to and fro
+before I had the satisfaction of seeing him up on the Barrier. I said:
+'Thank God one of us is out of the wood, anyhow.'
+
+"It was not a pleasant day that Cherry and I spent all alone there,
+knowing as we did that it only wanted a zephyr from the south to send us
+irretrievably out to sea; still there is satisfaction in knowing that one
+has done one's utmost, and I felt that having been delivered so
+wonderfully so far, the same Hand would not forsake us at the last.
+
+"We gave the ponies all they could eat that day. The Killers were too
+interested in us to be pleasant. They had a habit of bobbing up and down
+perpendicularly, so as to see over the edge of a floe, in looking for
+seals. The huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes only a few
+yards from us at times, and always around us, are among the most
+disconcerting recollections I have of that day. The immense fins were bad
+enough, but when they started a perpendicular dodge they were positively
+beastly. As the day wore on skua gulls, looking upon us as certain
+carrion, settled down comfortably near us to await developments. The
+swell, however, was getting less and less and it resolved itself into a
+question of speed, as to whether the wind or Captain Scott would reach us
+first.
+
+"Crean had got up into the Barrier at great risks to himself as I
+gathered afterwards from his very modest account. He had reached Captain
+Scott some time after his [Scott's] meeting with Wilson.[124] I heard
+that at the time Captain Scott was very angry with me for not abandoning
+everything and getting away safely myself. For my own part I must say
+that the abandoning of the ponies was the one thing that had never
+entered my head. It was a long way round, but at 7 P.M. he arrived at the
+edge of the Barrier opposite us with Oates and Crean. Everything was
+still, and Cherry and I could have got on safe ice at any time during the
+last half hour by using the sledge as a ladder. A big overturned fragment
+had jambed in the lane, between a high floe and the Barrier edge, and,
+there being no wind, it remained there. However, there was the
+consideration of the ponies, so we waited.
+
+"Scott, instead of blowing me up, was too relieved at our safety to be
+anything but pleased. I said: 'What about the ponies and the sledges?' He
+said: 'I don't care a damn about the ponies and sledges. It's you I want,
+and I am going to see you safe here up on the Barrier before I do
+anything else.' Cherry and I had got everything ready, so, dragging up
+two sledges, we dumped the gear off them, and using them as ladders, one
+down from the berg on to the buffer piece of ice, and the other up to the
+top of the Barrier, we got up without difficulty. Captain Scott was so
+pleased, that I realized the feeling he must have had all day. He had
+been blaming himself for our deaths, and here we were very much alive. He
+said: 'My dear chaps, you can't think how glad I am to see you
+safe--Cherry likewise.'
+
+"I was all for saving the beasts and sledges, however, so he let us go
+back and haul the sledges on to the nearest floe. We did this one by one
+and brought the ponies along, while Titus dug down a slope from the
+Barrier edge in the hope of getting the ponies up it. Scott knew more
+about ice than any of us, and realizing the danger we didn't, still
+wanted to abandon things. I fought for my point tooth and nail, and got
+him to concede one article and then another, and still the ice did not
+move till we had thrown and hauled up every article on to the Barrier
+except the two ladders and the ponies.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"To my intense disappointment at this juncture the ice started to move
+again. Titus had been digging down a road in the Barrier edge, and I
+hoped to dig down a similar slope from the floe, the snow thus shovelled
+down would go over the blue ice chunk, cover up the slippery ice and
+level it up. It would have taken hours, but was the only chance of
+getting the animals up. We dug like fury until Captain Scott peremptorily
+ordered us up. I ran up on the floe and took the nosebags off the ponies
+before we got on to the Barrier, and hauled the sledges up. It was only
+just in time. There was the faintest south-easterly air, but, like a
+black snake, the lane of water stretched between the ponies and
+ourselves. It widened almost imperceptibly, 2 feet, 6 feet, 10 feet, 20
+feet, and, sick as we were about the ponies, we were glad to be on the
+safe side of that.
+
+"We dragged the sledges in a little way, and, leaving them, pitched the
+two tents half a mile farther in, for bits of the Barrier were
+continually calving. While supper (it was about 3 A.M.) was being cooked,
+Scott and I walked down again. The wind had gone to the east, and all the
+ice was under weigh. A lane 70 feet wide extended along the Barrier edge,
+and Killers were chasing up and down it like racehorses. Our three
+unfortunate beasts were some way out, sailing parallel to the Barrier. We
+returned, and if ever one could feel miserable I did then. My feelings
+were nothing to what poor Captain Scott had had to endure that day. I at
+once broached the hopeful side of the subject, remarking that, with the
+two Campbell had left, we had ten ponies at Winter quarters. He said,
+however, that he had no confidence whatever in the motors after the way
+their rollers had become messed up unloading the ship. He had had his
+confidence in the dogs much shaken on the return journey, and now he had
+lost the most solid asset--the best of his pony transport. He said: 'Of
+course we shall have a run for our money next season, but as far as the
+Pole is concerned I have but very little hope.' We had a mournful meal,
+but after the others turned in I went down again, and by striking across
+diagonally came abreast of the ponies' floe, over a mile away. They were
+moving west fast, but they saw me, and remained huddled together not the
+least disturbed, or doubting that we would bring them their breakfast
+nosebags as usual in the morning. Poor trustful creatures! If I could
+have done it then, I would gladly have killed them rather than picture
+them starving on that floe out on the Ross Sea, or eaten by the exultant
+Killers that cruised around.
+
+"After breakfast Captain Scott sent me to bring up the sledges. It was
+dead calm again. Hope always springs, so I took his pair of glasses and
+looked west from the Barrier edge. Nearly all the ice had gone, but a
+medley of floes had been hurled up against a long point of Barrier much
+farther west. To my delight I saw three green specks on one of these--the
+pony rugs--and all four of us legged it back to the tent to tell Captain
+Scott. We were soon off over the Barrier. It was a long way, but we had a
+tent and some food. Crean had a bad day of snow-blindness, and could see
+absolutely nothing. So, on arrival at the place, we pitched the tent and
+left him there. The ponies were in a much worse place than the day
+before, but the ice was still there, and some floes actually touched the
+Barrier.
+
+"After our recent experience Captain Scott would only let us go on
+condition that as soon as he gave the order we were to drop everything
+and run for the Barrier. I was in a feverish hurry, and with Titus and
+Cherry selected a possible route over about six floes, and some low brash
+ice. The hardest jump was the first one, but it was nothing to what they
+had done the day before, so we put Punch at it. Why he hung fire I cannot
+think,[125] but he did, at the very edge, and the next moment was in the
+water. I will draw a veil over our struggle to get the plucky little pony
+out. We could not manage it, and Titus had at last to put an end to his
+struggles with a pick.
+
+"There was now my pony and Nobby. We abandoned that route, while Captain
+Scott looked out another and longer one by going right out on the
+sea-floes. This we decided on, if we could get the animals off their
+present floe, which necessitated a good jump on any side. Captain Scott
+said he would have no repetition of Punch's misfortune if he could help
+it. He would rather kill them on the floe. Anyhow, we rushed old Nobby at
+the jump, but he refused. It seemed no good, but I rushed him at it again
+and again. Scott was for killing them [it should be remembered that this
+ice, with the men on it, might drift away from the Barrier at any moment,
+and then there might be no further chance of saving the men] but I was
+not, and, pretending not to hear him, I rushed the old beast again. He
+cleared it beautifully, and Titus, seizing the opportunity, ran my pony
+at it with similar success. We then returned to the Barrier and worked
+along westward till a suitable place for getting up was found. There
+Scott and Cherry started digging a road, while Titus and I went out via
+the sea-ice to get the ponies. We had an empty sledge as a bridge or
+ladder, in case of emergency, and had to negotiate about forty floes to
+reach the animals. It was pretty easy going, though, and we brought them
+along with great success as far as the two nearest floes. At this place
+the ice was jambed.
+
+"Nobby cleared the last jump splendidly, when suddenly in the open water
+pond on one side a school of over a dozen of the terrible whales arose.
+This must have flurried my horse just as he was jumping, as instead of
+going straight he jumped [sideways] and just missed the floe with his
+hind legs. It was another horrible situation, but Scott rushed Nobby up
+on the Barrier, while Titus, Cherry and I struggled with poor old Uncle
+Bill. Why the whales did not come under the ice and attack him I cannot
+say--perhaps they were full of seal, perhaps they were so engaged in
+looking at us on the top of the floe that they forgot to look below;
+anyhow, we got him safely as far as [the bottom of the Barrier cliff],
+pulling him through the thin ice towards a low patch of brash.
+
+"Captain Scott was afraid of something happening to us with those
+devilish whales so close, and was for abandoning the horse right away. I
+had no eyes or ears for anything but the horse just then, and getting on
+to the thin brash ice got the Alpine rope fast to each of the pony's
+forefeet. Crean was too blind to do anything but hold the rescued horse
+on the Barrier, but the other four of us pulled might and main till we
+got the old horse out and lying on his side. The brash ice was so thin
+that, had a 'Killer' come up then he would have scattered it, and the lot
+of us into the water like chaff. I was sick with disappointment when I
+found that my horse could not rise. Titus said: 'He's done; we shall
+never get him up alive.' The cold water and shock on top of all his
+recent troubles, had been too much for the undefeated old sportsman. In
+vain I tried to get him to his feet; three times he tried and then fell
+over backwards into the water again. At that moment a new danger arose.
+The whole piece of Barrier itself started to subside.
+
+"It had evidently been broken before, and the tide was doing the rest. We
+were ordered up and it certainly was all too necessary; still Titus and I
+hung over the old Uncle Bill's head. I said: 'I can't leave him to be
+eaten alive by those whales.' There was a pick lying up on the floe.
+Titus said: 'I shall be sick if I have to kill another horse like I did
+the last.' I had no intention that anybody should kill my own horse but
+myself, and getting the pick I struck where Titus told me. I made sure of
+my job before we ran up and jumped the opening in the Barrier, carrying a
+blood-stained pick-axe instead of leading the pony I had almost
+considered safe.
+
+"We returned to our old camp that night (March 2) with Nobby, the only
+one saved of the five that left One Ton Depôt. I was fearfully cut up
+about my pony and Punch, but it was better than last night; we knew they
+would not have to starve and that all their troubles were now at an end.
+Before supper I went for a walk along the Barrier with Scott, and the
+next day we started back. We left one tent, two sledges and a lot of gear
+as Nobby could only pull two light sledges, and we could not pull an
+excessive weight on that bad surface. As it was we had over 800 lbs. on
+the sledge when we left. It was a glaring day with the surface soft and
+sandy, a combination of unpleasant circumstances. It took five hours to
+drag as far as the place we had originally gone down on to the sea-ice
+from the Barrier.
+
+"Evans and his party should now have arrived from Corner Camp, and as
+Captain Scott wanted to see if they had left a note at Safety Camp, I
+walked up there while the tea was being brewed. It was about 1¼ miles
+away, and I found traces of the party in the snow, but no note. It fed me
+up to see the walls so recently occupied by our ponies, and I was glad to
+leave. The afternoon march was interminable; it seemed as if we would
+never reach the coast. At last we came to the Pram Point Pressure Ridges
+where the Barrier joins the peninsula to eastward of Cape Armitage. They
+are waves of ice up to 20 feet in height running along parallel to each
+other with a valley in between each, and are only crevassed badly at the
+outer end as far as we have seen, though there are smaller crevasses
+right along. We camped in one of these valleys about 9.30 P.M.; I was
+thoroughly tired, so I think was everybody else. We were about a mile
+from the ice edge; and the problem was where to get Nobby up the
+precipitous slopes. This was solved by the arrival of Evans, Atkinson,
+Forde and Keohane about midnight. They had seen us coming in from the
+heights, and had come down for news. Teddy Evans had arrived the day
+before, and, being warned off the Barrier edge by a note left by Captain
+Scott, had made for the land with his party, and one horse Jimmy Pigg. He
+had found a good way up a mile or so farther east, almost under Castle
+Rock. He had walked to Hut Point with Atkinson the next day and heard of
+the loss of Cherry, myself and the animals from Bill Wilson and Meares
+who had been left there to look after their teams. I hadn't seen Atkinson
+for quite a while when we met this time.
+
+"The next day we relayed the sledges up the slope which was about 700
+feet high rising from a small bay. It was so steep that the pony could
+only be led up and we had to put on crampons to grip the ice. These are
+merely a sole of leather with light metal plates for foot and heel
+containing spikes. [These were altered afterwards.] They have leather
+beckets and a lanyard rove off for making them fast over the finnesko. It
+took us all the morning to get everything up to the top and then it
+started to blow. The camp was wonderfully sheltered. Jimmy Pigg and Nobby
+were reunited after many weeks, and to show their friendliness the former
+bit the latter in the back of the neck as a first introduction. Atkinson
+had gone to Hut Point to reassure Uncle Bill as to our safety and arrived
+again with Gran just as we got the last load up. There was no sugar at
+the hut except what the dogs had brought in, so Gran, who was quite
+fresh, volunteered to get a couple of bags from the depôt at Safety Camp,
+which could plainly be seen out on the Barrier. We all went to the edge
+of the slope to see him go down it on ski. He did it splendidly and must
+have been going with the speed of an express train down the incline, as
+he was on the Barrier in an incredibly short time compared to the hours
+we had dragged up the same slope with the loads. Teddy, Titus and Keohane
+were left at the camp to be joined by Gran later. Scott started off for
+Hut Point with Crean and Cherry on his sledge, while I followed with
+Forde and Atkinson. The others helped us up several hundred feet of slope
+and left us under Castle Rock.
+
+"It was here that they mistook their way in the blizzard and lost a man
+from the Discovery. Though it was fine below it was blowing like anything
+on the heights. I was too busily occupied to see much of the hills and
+snow-slopes which I got to know so well later. It was about three miles
+direct to the hut, but very up and down hill. At the last, however, you
+see the Bay in panorama with Cape Armitage on one side, and Hut Point on
+the other, where the Discovery lay two whole years. It is a magnificent
+view from the heights and for wild desolate grandeur would take some
+beating; the Western Mountains and the great dome of Mount Discovery
+across the black strait of water, covered with dark frost smoke, and here
+and there an iceberg driving fast towards the sea. About half a mile
+below us was the little hut and, on the left, the 800-feet pyramid of
+Observation Hill. It is a perfect chaos of hills and extinct craters just
+here.
+
+"It was blowing like fun. We left one sledge on the top of ski-slope and
+just took what was necessary on the other, such as our bags, etc. It was
+my first experience of steep downhill sledging. Instead of anybody
+pulling forward we all had to hang back and guide the sledge down the
+slippery incline without letting it take charge or getting upset. It is
+great fun. On reaching the head of the Bay, however, we had quite a
+dangerous little bit to cross. Here it was swept of snow and there was
+nothing but glassy ice and the incline ended in a low ice-cliff with the
+water below it. Attached as we were to the sledge we should have been at
+a disadvantage had it come to swimming, which a slip might easily have
+brought about. We scratched carefully across this and then headed down on
+the snow, arriving at the hut all well. The old hut had changed
+tremendously since I last saw it, having been dug out and cleared of snow
+and ice. Two unrecognizable sweeps greeted us heartily, they were Bill
+and Meares; the dogs howled a chorus for our benefit; it was quite like
+coming home. Inside the hut, the cause of the blackness was apparent,
+they had a blubber fire going, an open one, with no chimney or uptake for
+the smoke. After such a long open-air life it fairly choked me, and for
+once I could not eat a square meal. We all slept in a row against the
+west wall of the hut with our feet inboard.
+
+"The next morning Captain Scott, Bill, Cherry and I set out to walk to
+Castle Rock and meet the other party. It was fairly fizzing from the sea,
+but clear. Once up on the Heights, however, we seemed to get less wind. A
+couple of hours later we were at the great rock, Castle Rock, which is
+one of the best landmarks about here. The party in the Saddle Camp had
+relayed two of the sledges up the slope; these we hauled on to the top
+while the two ponies were harnessed and brought up. There were three
+sledges left to take on altogether, so the ponies took one each and we
+the other. Meanwhile Captain Scott walked over the shoulder under Castle
+Rock to see down the Strait and came back with the intelligence that he
+could hardly believe his eyes, but half the Glacier Tongue had broken off
+and disappeared. This great Tongue of ice had stood there on arrival of
+the Discovery, ten years before, and had remained ever since; it had a
+depôt of Shackleton's on it, and Campbell had depôted his fodder on it
+for us. On the eventful night of the break-up of the ice at least three
+miles of the Tongue which had been considered practically terra firma had
+gone, after having been there probably for centuries. We headed for the
+hut: Bill had looked out a route for the ponies, to avoid slippery
+places. It started to bliz, but was not too thick for us to see our
+bearings. At the top of Ski Slope the ponies were taken out of the
+sledges and led down a circuitous route over the rocks. The rest of us
+put everything we wanted on one sledge and leaving the others up there
+went down the slope as before. The two ponies arrived before us and were
+stabled in the verandah.
+
+"That night for the first time since the establishment of Safety Camp the
+depôt party were all together again, minus six ponies. In concluding my
+report to Captain Scott on the 'floe' incident, which he asked me to set
+down long afterwards, I said, 'In reconsidering the foregoing I have come
+to the conclusion that I underestimated the danger signs on the sea-ice
+on February 28, and on the following day might have attached more
+importance to the safety of my companions. As it was, however, all
+circumstances seemed to conspire together to make the situation
+unavoidable.' I did not forget to mention the splendid behaviour of
+Cherry and Crean, and, for my own part, I have no regrets. I took the
+blame for my lack of experience, but knew that having done everything I
+could do, it did not concern me if anybody liked to criticize my action.
+My own opinion is that it just had to be, the circumstances leading to it
+were too devious for mere coincidence. Six hours earlier we could have
+walked to the hut on sound sea-ice. A few hours later we should have seen
+open water on arrival at the Barrier edge. The blizzard that knocked out
+the beasts, the death of Weary, the misunderstanding of the dogs,
+everything, fitted in to place us on the sea-ice during the only two
+hours of the whole year that we could possibly have been in such a
+position. Let those who believe in coincidence carry on believing. Nobody
+will ever convince me that there was not something more. Perhaps in the
+light of next year we shall see what was meant by such an apparent blow
+to our hopes. Certainly we shall start for the Pole with less of that
+foolish spirit of blatant boast and ridiculous blind self-assurance, that
+characterized some of us on leaving Cardiff.
+
+"Poor Captain Scott had now a new anxiety thrust upon him. The Winter
+Station with ponies, stores and motors was all situated on a low beach
+not twenty yards from the water's edge, and now that the ice had gone out
+(and the hut was not six feet above sea-level at the floor) how had they
+fared in the storm? This was a problem we could not solve without going
+to see. Cape Evans, though dimly in sight, was as far off as New Zealand
+till the sea froze over. The idea of attempting the shoulder of Erebus
+did occur to Captain Scott, but it was so heavily crevassed as to make a
+journey from our side almost impossible. On the other side Professor
+David's party got up to the Summit without finding a crevasse. Captain
+Scott took his reverses like a brick. I often went out for a walk with
+him and sometimes he discussed his plans for next season. He took his
+losses very philosophically and never blamed any of us."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This is the end of that part of Bowers' letter which deals with the
+incident. Crean told me afterwards how he got on to the Barrier. He first
+made for the Gap, following the best path of the ice, but then had to
+retrace his steps and make for White Island jumping from floe to floe.
+But then "I was pretty lively," said he: and "there were lots of penguins
+and seals and killers knocking round that day."
+
+Crean had one of the ski sticks and that "was a great help to me for
+getting over the floes. It was a sloping piece like what you were on and
+it was very near touching the Barrier, in one corner of it only. Well, I
+dug a hole with the ski stick in the side of the Barrier for a step for
+one foot, and when I finished the hole I straddled my legs and got one on
+the floe and one in the side of the Barrier. Then I got the stick and dug
+it in on top and I gave myself a bit of a spring and got my outside leg
+up top. It was a terrible place but I thought it was the only chance.
+
+"I made straight for Safety Camp and they must have spotted me: for I
+think it was Gran that met me on skis. Then Scott and Wilson and Oates
+met me a long way out: I explained how it happened. He was
+worried-looking a bit, but he never said anything out of the way. He told
+Oates to go inside and light the primus and give me a meal."
+
+A more detailed account of the behaviour of the hundreds of whales which
+infested the lanes of open water between the broken floes and calved
+bergs is of interest. Most of them at any rate were Killer whales (Orca
+gladiator), and they were cruising about in great numbers, snorting and
+blowing, while occasionally they would in some extraordinary way raise
+themselves and look about over the ice, resting the fore part of their
+enormous yellow and black bodies on the edge of the floes. They were
+undisguisedly interested in us and the ponies, and we felt that if we
+once got into the water our ends would be swift and bloody.
+
+But I have a very distinct recollection that the whales were not all
+Killers, and that some, at any rate, were Bottle-nosed whales. This was
+impressed upon me by one of the most dramatic moments of that night and
+day.
+
+We made our way very slowly, sometimes waiting twenty minutes for the
+floe on which we were to touch the next one in the direction we were
+trying to go, but before us in the distance was a region of sea-ice which
+appeared to slope gradually up on to the fast Barrier beyond. As we got
+nearer we saw a dark line appear at intervals between the two. This we
+considered was a crevasse at the edge of the Barrier which was opening
+and shutting with the very big swell which was running, and on which all
+the floes were bobbing up and down. We told one another that we could
+rush the ponies over this as it closed.
+
+We approached the Barrier and began to rise up on the sloping floes which
+had edged the Barrier and so on to small bergs which had calved from the
+Barrier itself. Leaving Crean with the ponies, Bowers and I went forward
+to prospect, and rose on to a berg from which we hoped to reach the
+Barrier.
+
+I can never forget the scene that met us. Between us and the Barrier was
+a lane of some fifty yards wide, a seething cauldron. Bergs were calving
+off as we watched: and capsizing: and hitting other bergs, splitting into
+two and falling apart. The Killers filled the whole place. Looking
+downwards into a hole between our berg and the next, a hole not bigger
+than a small room, we saw at least six whales. They were so crowded that
+they could only lie so as to get their snouts out of the water, and my
+memory is that their snouts were bottle-nosed. At this moment our berg
+split into two parts and we hastily retreated to the lower and safer
+floes.
+
+Now in the Zoological Report of the Discovery Expedition Wilson states
+that the true identity of the Bottle-nosed whale (Hyperoodon rostrata) in
+Antarctic Seas has not been conclusively established. But that inasmuch
+as it certainly frequents seas so far as 48° S. latitude it is probable
+that certain whales which he and other members of that expedition saw
+frequenting the edge of the ice were, as they appeared to be,
+Bottle-nosed whales. For my part, without great knowledge of whales, I am
+convinced that these whales which lay but twenty feet below us were
+whales of this species.
+
+After our rescue by Scott we pitched our tents, as has been described, at
+least half a mile from the fast edge of the Barrier. All night long, or
+as it really was, early morning, the Killers were snorting and blowing
+under the Barrier, and sometimes, it seemed, under our tents. Time and
+again some member of the party went out of the tent to see if the Barrier
+had not broken farther back, but there was no visible change, and it must
+have been that the apparently solid ice on which we were, was split up by
+crevasses by the big swell which had been running, and that round us,
+hidden by snow bridges, were leads of water in which whales were cruising
+in search of seal.
+
+The next day most of the ice had gone out to sea, and I do not think the
+whales were so numerous. The most noticeable thing about them that day
+was the organization shown by the band of whales which appeared after
+Bowers' pony, Uncle Bill, had fallen between two floes, and we were
+trying to get him towards the Barrier. "Good God, look at the whales,"
+said some one, and there, in a pool of water behind the floe on which we
+were working, lay twelve great whales in perfect line, facing the floe.
+And out in front of them, like the captain of a company of soldiers, was
+another. As we turned they dived as one whale, led by the big fellow in
+front, and we certainly expected that they would attack the floe on which
+we stood. Whether they never did so, or whether they tried and failed,
+for the floes here were fifteen or sixteen feet thick, I do not know; we
+never saw them again.
+
+One other incident of those days is worth recalling. "Cherry, Crean,
+we're floating out to sea," was the startling awakening from Bowers,
+standing in his socks outside the tent at 4.30 A.M. that Wednesday
+morning. And indeed at first sight on getting outside the tent it looked
+a quite hopeless situation. I thought it was madness to try and save the
+ponies and gear when, it seemed, the only chance at all of saving the men
+was an immediate rush for the Barrier, and I said so. "Well, I'm going to
+try," was Bowers' answer, and, quixotic or no, he largely succeeded. I
+never knew a man who treated difficulties with such scorn.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There must be some of my companions who look back upon Hut Point with a
+peculiar fondness, such as men get for places where they have experienced
+great joys and great trials. And Hut Point has an atmosphere of its own.
+I do not know what it is. Partly aesthetic, for the sea and great
+mountains, and the glorious colour effects which prevail in spring and
+autumn, would fascinate the least imaginative; partly mysterious, with
+the Great Barrier knocking at your door, and the smoke of Erebus by day
+and the curtain of Aurora by night; partly the associations of the
+place--the old hut, the old landmarks, so familiar to those who know the
+history of the Discovery Expedition, the stakes in the snow, the holes
+for which ice was dug to water the ship, Vince's Cross on the Point. Now
+there is another Cross, on Observation Hill.
+
+And yet when we first arrived the hut was comfortless enough. Wilson and
+Meares and Gran had been there some days; they had found some old bricks
+and a grid, and there was an open blubber fire in the middle of the
+floor. There was no outlet for the smoke and smuts and it was impossible
+to see your neighbour, to speak without coughing, or to open your eyes
+long before they began to smart. Atkinson and Crean had cleared the floor
+of ice in our absence, but the space between the lower and upper roofs
+was solid with blue ice, and the lower roof sagged down in places in a
+dangerous way. The wind howled continuously and to say that the hut was
+cold is a very mild expression of the reality.
+
+This hut was built by the Discovery Expedition, who themselves lived in
+the ship which lay off the shore frozen into the sea-ice, as a workroom
+and as a refuge in case of shipwreck. It was useful to them in some ways,
+but was too large to heat with the amount of coal available, and was
+rather a white elephant. Scott wrote of it that "on the whole our large
+hut has been and will be of use to us, but its uses are never likely to
+be of such importance as to render it indispensable, nor cause it to be
+said that circumstances have justified the outlay made on it, or the
+expenditure of space and trouble in bringing it to its final home. It is
+here now, however, and here it will stand for many a long year with such
+supplies as will afford the necessaries of life to any less fortunate
+party who may follow in our footsteps and be forced to search for food
+and shelter."[126]
+
+Well! It was to be more useful to Scott in 1910 to 1913 than he imagined
+in 1902. We found the place with its verandah complete, the remains of
+the two magnetic huts and a rubbish heap. It was wonderful what that
+rubbish heap yielded up. Bricks to build a blubber stove, a sheet of iron
+to put over the top of it, a length of stove piping to form a chimney.
+Somehow somebody made cement, and built the bricks together, and one of
+the magnetic huts gave up its asbestos sheeting to insulate the chimney
+from the woodwork of the roofs. An old door made a cook's table, old
+cases turned upside down made seats. The provisions left by the Discovery
+were biscuits contained in some forty large packing cases. These we piled
+up across the middle of our house as a bulkhead and the old Discovery
+winter awning was dug out of the snow outside and fixed against the wall
+thus made to keep the warmth in. At night we cleared the floor space and
+spread our bags.
+
+[Illustration: HUT POINT FROM OBSERVATION HILL]
+
+The two precious survivors of the eight ponies with which we started on
+our journey were housed in the verandah, which was made wind-proof and
+snow-proof. The more truculent dogs lay tethered outside, the more docile
+were allowed their freedom, but even so the dog fights were not
+infrequent. We had one poor little dog, Makaka by name. When unloading
+the ship this dog had been overrun by the sledge which he was helping to
+pull; he suffered again when the team of dogs fell down the crevasse, and
+was now partially paralysed. He was a wretched object, for the hair
+refused to grow on his hind quarters, but he was a real sportsman and had
+no idea of giving in. Meares and I went out one night when it was blowing
+hard, attracted by the cries of a dog. It was Makaka who had ventured to
+climb a steep slope and was now afraid to return. When the dogs finally
+returned to Cape Evans, Makaka was allowed to run by the side of the
+team; but when Cape Evans was reached he was gone. Search failed to find
+him and, after some weeks, hope of him was abandoned. But a month
+afterwards Gran and Debenham went over to Hut Point, and here at the
+entrance of the hut they found Makaka, pitifully weak but able to bark to
+them. He must have lived on seal, but how he did so in that condition is
+a mystery.
+
+The reader may ask how it was that being so near our Winter Quarters at
+Cape Evans we were unable to reach them immediately. Cape Evans is
+fifteen miles across the sea from Hut Point, and though both huts are on
+the same island--Hut Point being at the end of a peninsula and Cape Evans
+on the remains of a flow of lava which juts out into the sea--the land
+which joins the two has never yet been crossed by a sledge party owing to
+the great ice falls which cover the slopes of Erebus. A glance at the map
+will show that although Hut Point is surrounded with sea, or sea-ice, on
+every side except that of Arrival Heights, the Barrier abuts upon the Hut
+Point Peninsula to the south beyond Pram Point. Thus there is always
+communication with the Barrier by a devious route by which indeed we had
+just arrived, but farther progress north is cut off until the cold
+temperature of the autumn and winter causes the open sea to freeze. We
+arrived at Hut Point on March 5 and Scott expected to be able to cross on
+the newly-frozen ice by about March 21. However, it was nearly a month
+after that when the first party could pass to Cape Evans, and then only
+the Bays were frozen and the Sound was still open water, owing to the
+winds which swept the ice out to sea almost as soon as it was formed.
+
+On the top of all the anxieties which had oppressed him lately Scott had
+a great fear that a swell so phenomenal as to break up Glacier Tongue, a
+landmark which had probably been there for centuries, might have swept
+away our hut at Cape Evans. He was so alarmed about it that he told
+Wilson and myself to prepare to form a sledging party with him to
+penetrate the Erebus icefalls and reach Cape Evans. "Went yesterday to
+Castle Rock with Wilson to see what chance there might be of getting to
+Cape Evans. The day was bright and it was quite warm walking in the sun.
+There is no doubt the route to Cape Evans lies over the worst corner of
+Erebus. From this distance (some 7 or 8 miles at least) the whole
+mountain side looks a mass of crevasses, but a route might be found at a
+level of 3000 or 4000 feet."[127] After some days the project was
+abandoned as being hopeless.
+
+On March 8 Bowers led a party to bring in the gear and provisions which
+had been left at Disaster Camp, the material, that is, which had been
+rescued from the sea-ice. They were away three days and found the pulling
+very hard. "At the corner of the bay the Barrier was buckled into round
+ridges which took a couple of hours to cross. We marched for some time
+alongside an enormous crevasse, which lay like a street near us. I
+examined it at one point which must have been 15 feet wide, and though it
+was impossible to see the bottom for snow cornices it was undoubtedly
+open as I could hear a seal blowing below."[128]
+
+Bowers' letter describes them dragging their heavy load up the slope to
+Castle Rock: "It took us all the morning to reach Saddle Camp with the
+loads in two journeys. I found a steady plod up a steep hill without
+spells is better and less exhausting than a rush and a number of rests.
+This theory I put into practice with great success. I don't know whether
+everybody saw eye to eye with me over the idea of getting to the top
+without a spell. After the second sledge was up Atkinson said: 'I don't
+mind you as a rule, but there are times when I positively hate you.'"
+
+Defoe could have written another Robinson Crusoe with Hut Point instead
+of San Juan Fernandez. Our sledging supplies were mostly exhausted and we
+depended upon the seals we could kill for food, fuel and light. We were
+smutty as sweeps from the blubber we burned; and a more
+blackguard-looking crew would have been hard to find. We spent our fine
+days killing, cutting up and carrying in seal when we could find them, or
+climbing the various interesting hills and craters which abound here, and
+our evenings in long discussions which seldom settled anything. Some
+looked after dogs, and others after ponies; some made geological
+collections; others sketched the wonderful sunsets; but before and above
+all we ate and slept. We must have spent a good twelve hours asleep in
+our bags every day after our six weeks' sledging. And we rested. Perhaps
+this is not everybody's notion of a very good time, but it was good
+enough for us.
+
+The Weddell seal which frequents the seas which fringe the Antarctic
+continent was a standby for most of our wants; for he can at a pinch
+provide not only meat to eat, fuel for your fire and oil for your lamp,
+but also leather for your finnesko and an antidote to scurvy. As he lies
+out on the sea-ice, a great ungainly shape, nothing short of an actual
+prod will persuade him to take much notice of an Antarctic explorer. Even
+then he is as likely as not to yawn in your face and go to sleep again.
+His instincts are all to avoid the water when alarmed, for he knows his
+enemies the killer whales live there: but if you drive him into the water
+he is transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a thing of beauty and
+grace, which can travel and turn with extreme celerity and which can
+successfully chase the fish on which he feeds.
+
+We were lucky now in that a small bay of sea-ice, about an acre in
+extent, still remained within two miles of us at a corner where Barrier,
+sea, and land meet, called Pram Point by Scott in the Discovery days.
+
+Now Pram Point during the summer months is one of the most populous seal
+nurseries in McMurdo Sound. In this neighbourhood the Barrier, moving
+slowly towards the Peninsula, buckles the sea-ice into pressure ridges.
+As the trough of each ridge is forced downwards, so in summer pools of
+sea water are formed in which the seal make their holes and among these
+ridges they lie and bask in the sun: the males fight their battles, the
+females bring forth their young: the children play and chase their tails
+just like kittens. Now that the sea-ice had broken up, many seal were to
+be found in this sheltered corner under the green and blue ice-cliffs of
+Crater Hill.
+
+If you go seal killing you want a big stick, a bayonet, a flensing knife
+and a steel. Any big stick will do, so long as it will hit the seal a
+heavy blow on the nose: this stuns him and afterwards mercifully he feels
+no more. The bayonet knife (which should be fitted into a handle with a
+cross-piece to prevent the slipping of the hand down on to the blade)
+should be at least 14 inches long without the handle; this is used to
+reach the seal's heart. Our flensing knives were one foot long including
+the handle, the blades were seven inches long by 1¼ inches broad: some
+were pointed and others round and I do not know which was best. The
+handles should be of wood as being warmer to hold.
+
+Killing and cutting up seals is a gruesome but very necessary business,
+and the provision of suitable implements is humane as well as economic in
+time and labour. The skin is first cut off with the blubber attached: the
+meat is then cut from the skeleton, the entrails cleaned out, the liver
+carefully excised. The whole is then left to freeze in pieces on the
+snow, which are afterwards collected as rock-like lumps. The carcass can
+be cut up with an axe when needed and fed to the dogs. Nothing except
+entrails was wasted.
+
+[Illustration: SEALS]
+
+[Illustration: SEALS]
+
+[Illustration: FROM THE SEA--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+[Illustration: FROM THE SEA--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+Lighting was literally a burning question. I do not know that any lamp
+was better than a tin matchbox fed with blubber, with strands of lamp
+wick sticking up in it, but all kinds of patterns big and small were made
+by proud inventors; they generally gave some light, though not a
+brilliant one. There were more ambitious attempts than blubber. The worst
+of these perhaps was produced by Oates. Somebody found some carbide and
+Oates immediately schemed to light the hut with acetylene. I think he was
+the only person who did not view the preparation with ill-concealed
+nervousness. However, Wilson took the situation into his tactful hands.
+For several days Oates and Wilson were deep in the acetylene plant scheme
+and then, apparently without reason, it was found that it could not be
+done. It was a successful piece of strategy which no woman could have
+bettered.
+
+Bowers, Wilson, Atkinson and I were on Crater Hill one morning when we
+espied a sledge party approaching from the direction of Castle Rock. As
+we expected, this was the Geological party, consisting of Griffith
+Taylor, Wright, Debenham and Seaman Evans, home from the Western
+Mountains. They entirely failed to recognize in our black faces the men
+whom they had last seen from the ship at Glacier Tongue. I hope their
+story will be told by Debenham. For days their doings were the topic of
+conversation. Both numerically and intellectually they were an addition
+to our party, which now numbered sixteen. Taylor especially is seldom at
+a loss for conversation and his remarks are generally original, if
+sometimes crude. Most of us were glad to listen when the discussions in
+which he was a leading figure raged round the blubber stove. Scott and
+Wilson were always in the thick of it, and the others chimed in as their
+interest, knowledge and experience led. Rash statements on questions of
+fact were always dangerous, for our small community contained so many
+specialists that errors were soon exposed. At the same time there were
+few parts of the world that one or other of us had not visited at least
+once. Later, when we came to our own limited quarters, books of reference
+were constantly in demand to settle disputes. Such books as the Times
+Atlas, a good encyclopaedia and even a Latin Dictionary are invaluable to
+such expeditions for this purpose. To them I would add Who's Who.
+
+From odd corners we unearthed some Contemporary Reviews, the Girls' Own
+Paper and the Family Herald, all of ten years ago! We also found encased
+in ice an incomplete copy of Stanley Weyman's My Lady Rotha; it was
+carefully thawed out and read by everybody, and the excitement was
+increased by the fact that the end of the book was missing.
+
+"Who's going to cook?" was one of the last queries each night, and two
+men would volunteer. It is not great fun lighting an ordinary coal fire
+on a cold winter's morning, but lighting the blubber fire at Hut Point
+when the metal frosted your fingers and the frozen blubber had to be
+induced to drip was a far more arduous task. The water was converted from
+its icy state and, by that time, the stove was getting hot, in inverse
+proportion to your temper. Seal liver fry and cocoa with unlimited
+Discovery Cabin biscuits were the standard dish for breakfast, and when
+it was ready a sustained cry of 'hoosh' brought the sleepers from their
+bags, wiping reindeer hairs from their eyes. I think I was responsible
+for the greatest breakfast failure when I fried some biscuits and
+sardines (we only had one tin). Leaving the biscuits in the frying pan,
+the lid of a cooker, after taking it from the fire, they went on cooking
+and became as charcoal. This meal was known as 'the burnt-offering.' On
+April 1 Bowers prepared to make a fool of two of us by putting chaff in
+our pannikins and covering the top only with seal meat. The plan turned
+back upon the maker, for he had not enough left to make up the
+deficiency, and, as I found out many weeks afterwards, surreptitiously
+gave up his own hoosh to the April fools and went without himself. Of
+such are the small incidents which afforded real amusement and even live
+in the memory as outstanding features of our existence.
+
+Breakfast done, there was a general clean-up. One seized the apology for
+a broom which existed: day foot-gear, finnesko, hair socks, ordinary
+socks and puttees, took the place of fleecy sleeping-socks and fur-lined
+sleeping-boots: lunch cooks began to make their preparations: ice was
+fetched for water: a frozen chunk of red seal meat or liver was levered
+and chopped with an ice axe from the general store of seal meat: fids of
+sealskin, with the blubber attached, a good three inches of it perhaps,
+were brought in and placed by the stove, much as we bring in a scuttle of
+coal. Gradually the community scattered as duty or inclination led,
+leaving some members to dig away the snow-drifts which had accumulated
+round the door and windows during the night.
+
+By lunch time every one had some new item of interest. Wright had found a
+new form of ice crystal: Scott had tested the ice off the Point and found
+it five inches thick: Wilson had found new seal holes off Cape Armitage,
+and we had hopes of finding our food and fuel nearer home: Atkinson had
+killed an Emperor penguin which weighed over ninety pounds, a record: and
+the assistant zoologist felt he would have to skin it, and did not want
+to do so: Meares had found an excellent place to roll stones down Arrival
+Heights into the sea: Debenham had a new theory to account for the Great
+Boulder, as a mammoth block different in structure from the surrounding
+geological features was called: Bowers had a scheme for returning from
+the Pole by the Plateau instead of the Barrier: Oates might be heard
+saying that he thought he could do with another chupattie. A favourite
+pastime was the making of knots. Could you make a clove hitch with one
+hand?
+
+The afternoon was like the morning, save that the sun was now sinking
+behind the Western Mountains. These autumn effects were among the most
+beautiful sights of the world, and it was now that Wilson made the
+sketches for many of the water-colours which he afterwards painted at
+Winter Quarters. The majority were taken from the summit of Observation
+Hill, crouching under the lee of the rocks into which, nearly two years
+after, we built the Cross which now stands to commemorate his death and
+that of his companions. He sketched quickly with bare fingers and
+mittened hands, jotting down the outlines of hills and clouds, and
+pencilling in the colours by name. After a minute, more or less, the
+fingers become too cold for such work, and they must be put back into the
+wool and fur mitts until they are again warm enough to continue. Pencil
+and sketch book, a Winsor and Newton, were carried in a little
+blubber-stained wallet on his belt. Scott carried his sledge diaries in
+similar books in a similar wallet made of green Willesden canvas and
+fastened with a lanyard.
+
+There was a good fug in the hut by dinner time: this was a mixed
+blessing. It was good for our gear: sleeping-bags, finnesko, mitts, socks
+were all hung up and dried, most necessary after sledging, and most
+important for the preservation of the skins; but it also started the most
+infernal drip-drip from the roof. I have spoken of the double roof of the
+old Discovery hut. This was still full of solid ice; indeed some time
+afterwards a large portion of it fell, but luckily the inhabitants were
+outside. The immediate problem was to prevent the leaks falling on
+ourselves, our food or our clothing and bags. And so every tin was
+brought into use and hung from leaky spots, while water chutes came into
+their own. As the stove cooled so did the drip cease, and in no
+prehistoric cavern did more stalactites and stalagmites grow apace.
+
+On March 16 the last sledge party to the Barrier that season started for
+Corner Camp with provisions to increase the existing depôt there. The
+party was in charge of Lieutenant Evans, and consisted of Bowers, Oates,
+Atkinson, Wright, and myself, with two seamen, Crean and Forde. The
+journey out and back took eight days and was uneventful as sledge
+journeys go. Thick weather prevailed for several days, and after running
+down our distance to Corner Camp we waited for it to clear. We found
+ourselves six miles from the depôt and among crevasses, which goes to
+show how easy it is to steer off the course under such conditions, and
+how creditable the navigation is when a course is kept correctly,
+sometimes more by instinct than by skill.
+
+But we got our first experience of cold weather sledging which was
+useful. The minus thirties and forties are not very cold as we were to
+understand cold afterwards, but quite cold enough to start with; cold
+enough to teach you how to look after your footgear, handle metal and
+not to waste time. However, the sun was still well up during the day, and
+this makes all the difference, since any sun does more drying of clothes
+and gear than none at all. At the same time we began to realize the
+difficulties which attend upon spring journeys, though we could only
+imagine what might be the trials on a journey in mid-winter, such as we
+intended to essay.
+
+It is easy to be wise after the event, but, in looking back upon the
+expedition as a whole, and the tragedy which was to come, mainly from the
+unforeseen cold of the autumn on the Barrier (such as minus forties in
+February) it seems that we might have grasped that these temperatures
+were lower than might have been expected in the middle of March quite
+near the open sea. Even if this had occurred to any one, and I do not
+think that it did, I doubt whether the next step of reasoning would have
+followed, namely, the possibility that the interior of the Barrier would,
+as actually happened, prove to be much colder than was expected at this
+date. On the contrary I several times heard Scott mention the possibility
+of the Polar Party not returning until April. At the same time it must be
+realized that pony transport to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier made a
+late start inevitable, for the blizzards our ponies had already suffered
+proved that spring weather on the Barrier would be intolerable to them.
+As a matter of fact, Scott says in his Message to the Public, "no one in
+the world would have expected the temperature and surfaces which we
+encountered at this time of the year."
+
+We returned to find everything at Hut Point, including the hut, covered
+with frozen spray. This was the result of a blizzard of which we only
+felt the tail end on the Barrier. Scott wrote: "The sea was breaking
+constantly and heavily on the ice foot. The spray carried right over the
+Point--covering all things and raining on the roof of the hut. Poor
+Vince's cross, some 30 feet above the water, was enveloped in it. Of
+course the dogs had a very poor time, and we went and released two or
+three, getting covered in spray during the operation--our wind clothes
+very wet. This is the third gale from the South since our arrival here
+(i.e. in 2½ weeks). Any one of these would have rendered the Bay
+impossible for a ship, and, therefore, it is extraordinary that we should
+have entirely escaped such a blow when the Discovery was in it in
+1902."[129]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is difficult to see long distances across open water at this time of
+year because the comparatively warm water throws up into the air a fog,
+known as frost-smoke. If there is a wind this smoke is carried over the
+surface of the sea, but if calm the smoke rises and forms a dense
+curtain. Standing on Arrival Heights, which form the nail of the
+finger-like Peninsula on which we now lived, we could see the four
+islands which lie near Cape Evans, and a black smudge in the face of the
+glaciers which descend from Erebus, which we knew to be the face of the
+steep slope above Cape Evans, afterwards named The Ramp. But, for the
+present, our comfortable hut might have been thousands of miles away for
+all the good it was to us. As soon as the wind fell calm the sea was
+covered by a thin layer of ice, in twenty-four hours it might be four or
+five inches thick, but as yet it never proved strong enough to resist the
+next blizzard. In March the ice to the south was safe; there was
+appearance of ice in the two bays at the foot of Erebus' slopes in the
+beginning of April.
+
+We treated newly formed ice with far too little respect. It was on April
+7 that Scott asked whether any of us would like to walk northwards over
+the newly formed ice towards Castle Rock. We had walked about two miles,
+the ice heaving up and down as we went, dodging the open pools and leads
+to the best of our ability, when Taylor went right in. Luckily he could
+lever himself out without help, and returned to the hut with all speed.
+We prepared to cross this ice to Cape Evans the next day, but the whole
+of it went out in the night. On another occasion we were prepared to set
+out the following morning, but the ice on which we were to cross went
+out on the turn of the tide some five hours before we timed ourselves to
+start.
+
+Scott was of opinion that the ice in the two Bays under Erebus was firm,
+and prepared to essay this route. The first of these bays is formed by
+the junction of the Hut Point Peninsula with Erebus to the south, and by
+Glacier Tongue to the north. Crossing Glacier Tongue a party can descend
+on to the second bay beyond, the northern boundary of which is Cape
+Evans. The Dellbridge Islands, of which Great Razorback is in direct line
+between Glacier Tongue and Cape Evans, help to hold in any ice which
+forms here. The route had never been attempted before, but it was hoped
+that a way down from the Peninsula on to the frozen sea might be found at
+the Hutton Cliffs, an outcrop of lava rock in the irregular ice face.
+
+"A party consisting of Scott, Bowers, Taylor, and Seaman Evans with one
+tent, and Lieutenant Evans, Wright, Debenham, Gran and Crean with
+another, started for Hut Point. It was dark to the south and snowing by
+the time they reached the top of Ski Slope. We helped them past Third
+Crater. The ice from Hut Point to Glacier Tongue was impossible, and so
+they went on past Castle Rock and were to try and get down somewhere by
+the Hutton Cliffs on to some fast sea-ice which seemed to have held there
+some time, and so across Glacier Tongue on to sea-ice which also seemed
+to be fast as far as Cape Evans.
+
+"After lunch Wilson and I started about 4 P.M. in half a blizzard. It was
+much better on the Heights and fairly clear towards Erebus, but we could
+not see any traces of the party on the ice.
+
+"April 12. This morning as it was beginning to get light a blizzard
+started, and it is blowing very hard now. The large amount of snow which
+has fallen will make it very thick. We are all anxious about the
+returning party, for Scott talked of camping on the sea-ice. The ice in
+Arrival Bay (just north of Hut Point) has gone out. They have
+sleeping-bags, food for two meals, and a full primus for each tent.
+
+"April 13. We were very anxious about the returning party, especially
+when all the ice north of Hut Point went out. The blizzard blew itself
+out this morning, and it was a great change to see White Island and The
+Bluff once more. Atkinson came in before lunch and told me that, looking
+from the Heights, the ice from Glacier Tongue to Cape Evans appeared to
+have gone out. This sobered our lunch. We all made our way to Second
+Crater afterwards, and found the ice from the Hutton Cliffs to Glacier
+Tongue and thence to Cape Evans was still in.
+
+"Before leaving, Scott arranged to give Véry Lights at 10 P.M. from Cape
+Evans on the first clear night of the next three. To-night is the third,
+and the first clear night. We were out punctually, and then as we watched
+a flare blazed up, followed by quite a firework display. We all went wild
+with excitement--knowing that all was well. Meares ran in and soaked some
+awning with paraffin, and we lifted it as an answering flare and threw it
+into the air again and again, until it was burning in little bits all
+over the snow. The relief was great."[130]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bowers must tell the story of the returning party:
+
+"We topped the ridges and headed for Erebus beyond Castle Rock. It looked
+a little threatening at first, but cleared a bit as we got on. It was
+quite interesting to be breaking new ground. Scott is a fine stepper in a
+sledge, and he set a fast and easy swing all the time. It was snowing and
+misty when we got beyond the Hutton Cliffs, but we pitched the tents for
+lunch before going down the slope. There was no doubt that a blizzard was
+coming up. It cleared during lunch, which we finished about 3.30 P.M., as
+it had been a long morning march.
+
+"It was just as well for us that the mist cleared, for the slope was not
+only crevassed in one direction, but it ended in a high ice-cliff. By
+working along we found a lowish place about thirty feet down from top to
+bottom. Over this we lowered men and sledges. It had started to blow and
+the drift was flying off the cliff in clouds. We put in a couple of
+strong male bamboos to lower the last man away, leaving the Alpine rope
+there to facilitate ascent (i.e. for any party returning to Hut Point
+with food). We then repacked the sledges and headed across the bay
+towards the Glacier Tongue, where we arrived after dark about 6 P.M. The
+young sea-ice was covered in a salt deposit which made it like pulling a
+sledge over treacle instead of ice, and it was very heavy going after the
+snow uplands. The Tongue was mostly hard blue ice, which is slipperiness
+itself, and crevassed every few yards. Most of these were bridged, but
+you were continually pushing a foot, or sometimes two, into nothingness,
+in the semi-darkness. None of us, however, went down to the extent of our
+harness.
+
+"Arrived on the other side we struck a sheltered dip, where we decided to
+camp for something to eat. It was after 8 P.M. and I was for camping
+there for the night, as it seemed to me folly to venture upon a piece of
+untried newly frozen sea-ice in inky darkness, with a blizzard coming up
+behind us. Against this of course we were only five miles from Cape
+Evans, and though we had hardly any grub with us, not having anticipated
+the cliff or the saltness of the sea-ice, and having to set out to do the
+journey in one day, I thought hunger in a sleeping-bag better than lying
+out in a blizzard on less than one foot of young ice.
+
+"After a meal we started off at 9.30 P.M. in a snowy mist in which we
+could literally see nothing. It had fallen calm though, and at last we
+could see the outline of the nearest of the Dellbridge Islands called the
+Great Razorback; our course lay for a smaller island ahead called the
+Little Razorback. As we neared the Little Razorback Island the snow hid
+everything; in fact we could hardly see the island itself when we were
+right under it. It was impossible to go wandering on, so we had after all
+to camp on the sea-ice. There was scarcely any snow to put on the
+valances of the tents, and the wet salt soaked the bags, and you knew
+that there was only about six or ten inches of precarious ice between you
+and the black waters beneath. Altogether I decided that I for one would
+lie awake in such an insecure camp.
+
+"As expected the blizzard overtook us shortly after midnight, and the
+shrieking of the wind among the rocks above might have been pretty
+unpleasant had it not assured me that we were still close to the island
+and not moving seaward. Needless to say, I said that I was sure the camp
+was as safe as a church. At daylight Taylor dived out and in until the
+wind from the door blew out the ice valance and the next moment the tent
+closed on us like an umbrella. We would never have spread it again had
+not some of the drift settled round us, and so we were able to secure it
+after an hour or two. The air was full of thick drift, and to work off
+some of Taylor's energy I said we might climb the island and look for
+Cape Evans.
+
+"The island rose up straight from the sea at a sharp angle all round, and
+we climbed it with difficulty. On the top we saw the reason of its name,
+as it was absolutely so sharp right along that you could bestride the top
+as though sitting in a saddle. It was too windy sitting up there to be
+pleasant, so we descended, having seen nothing but clouds of flying snow,
+and the peak of Inaccessible Island. At the bottom of the weather side we
+found a small ledge perfectly flat and just big enough to take two tents
+pitched close together. At this place the island made a wind buffer and
+it was practically calm though the blizzard yelled all round. I urged
+Captain Scott to camp on this ledge and Taylor fizzled for making for
+Cape Evans, so Scott decided to ensure Taylor's safety, as he put it, and
+we made for the ledge. Once there we had an ideal camp on good hard
+ground and no wind, and had we had food the blizzard might have lasted a
+week for aught I cared.
+
+[Illustration: THE HUT, EREBUS AND WHALE-BACK CLOUDS]
+
+"We were two nights there and on the morning of the 13th it took off
+enough for us to head for home. We saw Sunny Jim's [Simpson's]
+Observatory on the Hill, but still did not know how the hut had fared
+till we got round the cape into North Bay. There was the Winter Station
+all intact, however, and though North Bay had only just frozen in, it was
+strong enough to bear us safely. Somebody saw us and in another moment
+the hut poured out her little party, consisting of Sunny Jim, Ponting,
+Nelson, Day, Lashly, Hooper, Clissold, Dimitri and Anton. Ponting's face
+was a study as he ran up; he failed to recognize any of us and stopped
+dead with a blank look--as he admitted afterwards, he thought it was the
+Norwegian expedition for the space of a moment; and then we were all
+being greeted as heartily as if we had really done something to be proud
+of.
+
+"The motors had had to be shifted, and a lot of gear placed higher up the
+beach, but the water had never reached near the hut, so all was well.
+Inside it looked tremendous, and we looked at our grimy selves in a glass
+for the first time for three months; no wonder Ponting did not recognize
+the ruffians. He photographed a group of us, which will amuse you some
+day, when it is permissible to send photos. We ate heartily and had hot
+baths and generally civilized ourselves. I have since concluded that the
+hut is the finest place in the southern hemisphere, but then I could not
+shake down to it at once. I hankered for a sleeping-bag out on the snow,
+or for the blubbery atmosphere of Hut Point. I expect the truth of the
+matter was that all my special pals, Bill, Cherry, Titus, and Atch, had
+been left behind.
+
+"We found eight ponies at Winter Quarters in the stable, Hackenschmidt
+having died. These with our two at Hut Point left us with ten to start
+the winter with. I at once looked out the other big Siberian horse that
+had been a pair with my late lamented (they were the only Siberian
+ponies, all the rest being Manchurians) and singled him out for myself,
+should 'the powers that be' be willing.
+
+"A party had to return to Hut Point with some provision in a day or two,
+so I asked to go. Captain Scott had decided to go himself, but said he
+would be very pleased if I would go too; so it being a fine day we left
+the following Monday. The two teams consisted of Captain Scott, Lashly,
+Day and Dimitri with one tent and sledge, and Crean, Hooper, Nelson and
+myself with the other. We had it fine as far as the Glacier Tongue; and
+then along came the cheery old south wind in our faces; we crossed the
+Tongue and struggled against this till we could camp under the Hutton
+Cliffs where we got some shelter. All of us had our faces frost-bitten,
+the washing and shaving having made mine quite tender. It was a bit of a
+job getting up the cliff: we had to stand on top of a pile of fallen ice
+and hoist a 10-feet sledge on to our shoulders, at least on to the
+shoulders of the tall ones; this just touched the overhanging cornice. A
+cornice of snow is caused by continual drift over a sharp edge: it takes
+all sorts of fantastic shapes, but usually hangs over like this. Looking
+edgeways it looks as if it must fall down, but as a matter of fact is
+usually very tough indeed. In this case steps were cut in it with an ice
+axe from our extemporary ladder, and Captain Scott and I got up first.
+With the aid of a rope and the ladder we got the light ones up first, and
+hauled up the gear last of all; hanging the sledge from the top with one
+rope enabled the last two to struggle up it assisted by a rope round them
+from above. It was a cold job and more frost-bites occurred in two of our
+novices, one on a foot and the other on a finger.
+
+"We faced the blast again, but got it partially behind us on reaching the
+Heights. We camped for the night under Castle Rock on an inclined slope.
+It calmed down to a glorious night with a low temperature. Crean and I
+lay head down hill to make Nelson and Hooper--who had never sledged
+before--more comfortable. As a result Crean slipped half out of the tent
+and let in a cold stream of air under the valance, for which I was at a
+loss to account until the morning disclosed him thus, fast asleep of
+course. It takes a lot to worry Captain Scott's coxswain.
+
+"We arrived at Hut Point and had a great reception there, chiefly on
+account of the food we brought, particularly the sugar. We had been
+living on some paraffin sugar when I left before, and even this was
+finished. The next day we stayed there to kill seals. Cherry and I
+skinned one and then went for a walk round Cape Armitage. It was blowing
+big guns off the cape, fairly fizzing in fact. We went as far as Pram
+Point and then turned, coming in with it behind us. I only had a thin
+balaclava and my ears were nearly nipped."[131]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile those of us who had been left at Hut Point with the ponies and
+dogs journeyed out one afternoon to Safety Camp to get some more bales of
+compressed fodder. Easter Sunday we spent in a howling blizzard, which
+cleared in the afternoon sufficiently to see a golden sun sinking into a
+sea of purple frost-smoke and drift.
+
+I have it on record that we had tinned haddock this day for breakfast,
+made by Oates with great care, a biscuit and cheese hoosh for lunch, and
+a pemmican fry this evening, followed by cocoa with a tin of sweetened
+Nestlé's milk in it, truly a great luxury. For the rest we mended our
+finnesko, and read Bleak House. Meares told us how the Chinese who were
+going to war with the Lolos (who are one of the Eighteen tribes on the
+borders of Thibet and China) tied the Lolo hostage to a bench, and,
+having cut his throat, caught the blood which dripped from it. Into this
+they dipped their flag, and then cut out the heart and liver, which the
+officers ate, while the men ate the rest!
+
+The relief party arrived on April 18: "We had spent such a happy week,
+just the seven of us, at the Discovery hut that I think, glad as we were
+to see the men, we would most of us have rather been left undisturbed,
+and I expected that it would mean that we should have to move homewards,
+as it turned out.
+
+"Meares is to be left in charge of the party which remains, namely Forde
+and Keohane of the old stagers, and Nelson, Day, Lashly and Dimitri of
+the new-comers. He is very amusing with the stores and is evidently
+afraid that the food which has just been brought in (sugar, self-raising
+flour, chocolate, etc.) will all be eaten up by those who have brought
+it. So we have dampers without butter, and a minimum of chocolate.
+
+"Tuesday and Tuesday night was one of our few still, cold days, nearly
+minus thirty. The sea northwards from Hut Point, whence the ice had
+previously all gone out, froze nearly five inches by Wednesday mid-day,
+when we got three more seal. Scott was evidently thinking that on
+Thursday, when we were to start, we might go by the sea-ice all the
+way--when suddenly with no warning it silently floated out to sea."[132]
+
+[Illustration: A CORNICE OF SNOW]
+
+The following two teams travelled to Cape Evans via the Hutton Cliffs on
+April 21: 1st team Scott, Wilson, Atkinson, Crean; 2nd team Bowers,
+Oates, Cherry-Garrard, Hooper. It was blowing hard, as usual, at the
+Hutton Cliffs, and we got rather frost-bitten when lowering the sledges
+on to the sea-ice. The sun was leaving us for the next four months, but
+luckily the light just lasted for this operation, though not for the
+subsequent meal which we hastily ate under the cliffs, nor for the
+crossing of Glacier Tongue. Bowers wrote home:
+
+"I had the lighter team and, knowing what a flier Captain Scott is I took
+care to have the new sledge myself. Our weights were nothing and the
+difference was only in the sledge runners, but it made all the difference
+to us that day. Scott fairly legged it, as I expected, and we came along
+gaily behind him. He could not understand it when the pace began to tell
+more on his heavy team than on us. After lowering down the sledges over
+the cliffs we recovered the rope we had left in the first place, and then
+struck out over the sea-ice. Then our good runners told so much that I
+owned up to mine being the better sledge, and offered to give them one of
+my team. This was declined, but after we crossed the Tongue Captain Scott
+said he would like to change sledges at the Little Razorback. At any time
+over this stretch we could have run away from his team, and once they got
+our sledge they started that game on us. We expected it, and never had I
+stepped out so hard before. We had been marching hard for nearly 12 hours
+and now we had two miles' spurt to do, and we should have stuck it, bad
+runners and all, had we had smooth ice. As it was we struck a belt of
+rough ice, and in the dark we all stumbled and I went down a whack, that
+nearly knocked me out. This was not noticed fortunately, and still we
+hung on to the end of their sledge while I turned hot and cold and
+sick and went through the various symptoms before I got my equilibrium
+back, which I fortunately did while legging it at full speed. They
+started to go ahead soon after that though, and we could not hold our
+own, although we were close to the cape. I had the same thing happen
+again after another fall but we stuck it round the cape and arrived only
+about 50 yards behind. I have never felt so done, and so was my team. Of
+course we need not have raced, but we did, and I would do the same thing
+every time. Titus produced a mug of brandy he had sharked from the ship
+and we all lapped it up with avidity. The other team were just about laid
+out, too, so I don't think there was much to be said either way."[133]
+
+Two days later the sun appeared for the last time for four months.
+
+Looking back I realized two things. That sledging, at any rate in summer
+and autumn, was a much less terrible ordeal than my imagination had
+painted it, and that those Hut Point days would prove some of the
+happiest in my life. Just enough to eat and keep us warm, no more--no
+frills nor trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life. The
+necessaries of civilization were luxuries to us: and as Priestley found
+under circumstances compared to which our life at Hut Point was a Sunday
+School treat, the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which
+they themselves create.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [117] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 180-81.
+
+   [118] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 187-188. Scott
+         started for the Pole on November 1, 1911. Amundsen started
+         on September 8, 1911, but had to turn back owing to low
+         temperatures; he started again on October 19.
+
+   [119] Priestley's diary.
+
+   [120] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 185.
+
+   [121] See p. 123.
+
+   [122] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 190-191.
+
+   [123] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 191-192.
+
+   [124] Wilson camped with the two dog-teams on the land, and in the
+         morning saw us floating on the ice-floes through his
+         field-glasses. He made his way along the peninsula until he
+         could descend on to the Barrier, where he joined Scott.
+
+   [125] I think he was stiff after standing so many hours.--A. C.-G.
+
+   [126] Scott, _The Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 350.
+
+   [127] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 201.
+
+   [128] Bowers.
+
+   [129] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 207.
+
+   [130] My own diary.
+
+   [131] Bowers.
+
+   [132] My own diary.
+
+   [133] Bowers' letter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE FIRST WINTER
+
+    The highest object that human beings can set before themselves is
+    not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the
+    unknown; it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its
+    boundaries a little further from our little sphere of
+    action.--HUXLEY.
+
+
+And so we came back to our comfortable hut. Whatever merit there may be
+in going to the Antarctic, once there you must not credit yourself for
+being there. To spend a year in the hut at Cape Evans because you explore
+is no more laudable than to spend a month at Davos because you have
+consumption, or to spend an English winter at the Berkeley Hotel. It is
+just the most comfortable thing and the easiest thing to do under the
+circumstances.
+
+In our case the best thing was not at all bad, for the hut, as Arctic
+huts go, was as palatial as is the Ritz, as hotels go. Whatever the
+conditions of darkness, cold and wind, might be outside, there was
+comfort and warmth and good cheer within.
+
+And there was a mass of work to be done, as well as at least two journeys
+of the first magnitude ahead.
+
+When Scott first sat down at his little table at Winter Quarters to start
+working out a most complicated scheme of weights and averages for the
+Southern Journey, his thoughts were gloomy, I know. "This is the end of
+the Pole," he said to me, when he pulled us off the bergs after the
+sea-ice had broken up; the loss of six ponies out of the eight with which
+we started the Depôt Journey, the increasing emaciation and weakness of
+the pony transport as we travelled farther on the Barrier, the arrival
+of the dogs after their rapid journey home, starved rakes which looked as
+though they were absolutely done--these were not cheerful recollections
+with which to start to plan a journey of eighteen hundred miles.
+
+On the other hand, we had ten ponies left, though two or three of them
+were of more than doubtful quality; and it was obvious that considerable
+improvement could and must be made in the feeding of both ponies and
+dogs. With regard to the dogs the remedy was plain; their ration was too
+small. With regard to the ponies the question was not so simple. One of
+the main foods for the ponies which we had brought was compressed fodder
+in the shape of bales. Theoretically this fodder was excellent food
+value, and was made of wheat which was cut green and pressed. Whether it
+was really wheat or not I do not know, but there could be no two opinions
+about its nourishing qualities for our ponies. When fed upon it they lost
+weight until they were just skin and bone. Poor beasts! It was pitiful to
+see them.
+
+In Oates we had a man who had forgotten as much as most men know about
+horses. It was no fault of his that this fodder was inadequate, nor that
+we had lost so many of the best ponies which we had. Oates had always
+been for taking the worst ponies out on the Depôt Journey: travelling as
+far on to the Barrier as they could go, and there killing them and
+depôting their flesh. Now Oates took the ten remaining ponies into his
+capable hands. Some of them were scarecrows, especially poor Jehu, who
+was never expected to start at all, and ended by gallantly pulling his
+somewhat diminished load eight marches beyond One Ton Camp, a distance of
+238 miles. Another, Christopher, was a man-killer if ever a horse was; he
+had to be thrown in order to attach him to the sledge; to the end he
+would lay out any man who was rash enough to give him the chance; once
+started, and it took four men to achieve this, it was impossible to halt
+him during the day's march, and so Oates and his three tent mates and
+their ponies had to go without any lunch meal for 130 miles of the
+Southern Journey.
+
+Oates trained them and fed them as though they were to run in the Derby.
+They were exercised whenever possible throughout the winter and spring by
+those who were to lead them on the actual journey. Fresh and good food
+was found in the shape of oilcake and oats, a limited quantity of each of
+which had been brought and was saved for the actual Polar Journey, and
+everything which care and foresight could devise was done to save them
+discomfort. It is a grim life for animals, but in the end we were to know
+that up to the time of that bad blizzard almost at the Glacier Gateway,
+which was the finishing post of these plucky animals, they had fed all
+they needed, slept as well and lived as well as any, and better than most
+horses in ordinary life at home. "I congratulate you, Titus," said
+Wilson, as we stood under the shadow of Mount Hope, with the ponies' task
+accomplished, and "I thank you," said Scott.
+
+Titus grunted and was pleased.
+
+Transport difficulties for the Polar Journey were considerable, but in
+every other direction the outlook was bright. The men who were to do the
+sledging had been away from Winter Quarters for three months. They had
+had plenty of sledging experience, some of it none too soft. The sledges,
+clothing, man-food, and outfit generally were excellent, although some
+changes were suggested and could be put into effect. There was no obvious
+means, however, of effecting the improvement most desired, a satisfactory
+snow-shoe for the ponies.
+
+The work already accomplished was enormous. On the Polar Journey the
+ponies and dogs could now travel light for the first hundred and thirty
+geographical miles, when, at One Ton Camp, they would for the first time
+take their full loads: the advantage of being able to start again with
+full loads when so far on your way is obvious when it is considered that
+the distance travelled depends upon the weight of food that can be
+carried. During the geological journey on the western side of the Sound,
+Taylor and his party had carried out much useful geological work in Dry
+Valley and on the Ferrar and Koettlitz Glaciers, which had been
+accurately plotted for the charts, and had been examined for the first
+time by an expert physiographer and ice specialist. The ordinary routine
+of scientific and meteorological observations usual with all Scott's
+sledging parties was observed.
+
+Further, at Cape Evans there had been running for more than three months
+a scientific station, which rivalled in thoroughness and exactitude any
+other such station in the world. I hope that later a more detailed
+account may be given of this continuous series of observations, some of
+them demanding the most complex mechanism, and all of them watched over
+by enthusiastic experts. It must here suffice to say that we who on our
+return saw for the first time the hut and its annexes completely equipped
+were amazed; though perhaps the gadget which appealed most to us at first
+was the electric apparatus by which the cook, whose invention it was,
+controlled the rising of his excellent bread.
+
+Glad as we were to find it all and to enjoy the food, bath and comfort
+which it offered, we had no illusions about Cape Evans itself. It is
+uninteresting, as only a low-lying spit of black lava covered for the
+most part with snow, and swept constantly by high winds and drift, can be
+uninteresting. The kenyte lava of which it is formed is a remarkable
+rock, and is found in few parts of the world: but when you have seen one
+bit of kenyte you have seen all. Unlike the spacious and lofty Hut Point
+Peninsula, thirteen miles to the south, it has no outstanding hills and
+craters; no landmarks such as Castle Rock. Unlike the broad folds of Cape
+Royds, six miles to the north, it has none of the rambling walks and
+varied lakes, in which is found most of the limited plant life which
+exists in these latitudes, and though a few McCormick skuas meet here,
+there is no nursery of penguins such as that which makes Cape Royds so
+attractive in summer. Nor has the Great Ice Sheet, which reached up
+Erebus and spread over the Ross Sea in the past, spilled over Cape Evans
+in its retreat a wealth of foreign granites, dolerites, porphyrys and
+sandstone such as cover the otherwise dull surface round Shackleton's old
+Winter Quarters.
+
+Cape Evans is a low lava flow jutting out some three thousand feet from
+the face of the glaciers which clothe the slopes of Erebus. It is roughly
+an equilateral triangle in shape, at its base some three thousand feet
+(9/16th mile) across. This base-line, which divides the cape from the
+slopes of Erebus and the crevassed glaciers and giant ice-falls which
+clothe them, consists of a ramp with a slope of thirty degrees, and a
+varying height of some 100 to 150 feet. From our hut, four hundred yards
+away, it looks like a great embankment behind which rises the majestic
+volcano Erebus, with its plume of steam and smoke.
+
+The cape itself does not rise on the average more than thirty feet, and
+somewhat resembles the back of a hog with several backbones. The hollows
+between the ridges are for the most part filled with snow and ice, while
+in one or two places where the accumulation of snow is great enough there
+are little glacierets which do not travel far before they ignominiously
+peter out. There are two small lakes, called Skua Lake and Island Lake
+respectively. There is only one hill which is almost behind the hut, and
+is called Wind Vane Hill, for on it were placed one of our wind vanes and
+certain other meteorological instruments. Into the glacieret which flowed
+down in the lee of this hill we drove two caves, which gave both an even
+low temperature and excellent insulation. One of them was therefore used
+for our magnetic observations, and the other as an ice-house for the
+mutton we had brought from New Zealand.
+
+The north side, upon which we had built our hut, slopes down by way of a
+rubbly beach to the sea in North Bay. We knew there was a beach for we
+landed upon it, but we never saw it again even in the height of summer,
+for the winter blizzards formed an ice foot several feet thick. The other
+side of the cape ends abruptly in black bastions and baby cliffs some
+thirty feet high. The apex of the triangle which forms as it were the
+cape proper is a similar kenyte bluff. The whole makes a tricky place on
+which to walk in the dark, for the surface is strewn with boulders of all
+sizes and furrowed and channelled by drifts of hard and icy snow, and
+quite suddenly you may find yourself prostrate upon a surface of slippery
+blue ice. It may be easily imagined that it is no seemly place to
+exercise skittish ponies or mules in a cold wind, but there is no other
+place when the sea-ice is unsafe.
+
+Come and stand outside the hut door. All round you, except where the cape
+joins the mountain, is the sea. You are facing north with your back to
+the Great Ice Barrier and the Pole, with your eyes looking out of the
+mouth of McMurdo Sound over the Ross Sea towards New Zealand, two
+thousand miles of open water, pack and bergs. Look over the sea to your
+left. It is mid-day, and though the sun will not appear above the horizon
+he is still near enough to throw a soft yellow light over the Western
+Mountains. These form the coast-line thirty miles across the Sound, and
+as they disappear northwards are miraged up into the air and float, black
+islands in a lemon sky. Straight ahead of you there is nothing to be seen
+but black open sea, with a high light over the horizon, which you know
+betokens pack; this is ice blink. But as you watch there appears and
+disappears a little dark smudge. This puzzles you for some time, and then
+you realize that this is the mirage of some far mountain or of Beaufort
+Island, which guards the mouth of McMurdo Sound against such traffic as
+ever comes that way, by piling up the ice floes across the entrance.
+
+As you still look north, in the middle distance, jutting out into the
+sea, is a low black line of land, with one excrescence. This is Cape
+Royds, with Shackleton's old hut upon it; the excrescence is High Peak,
+and this line marks the first land upon the eastern side of McMurdo Sound
+which you can see, and indeed is actually the most eastern point of Ross
+Island. It disappears abruptly behind a high wall, and if you let your
+eyes travel round towards your right front you see that the wall is a
+perpendicular cliff two hundred feet high of pure green and blue ice,
+which falls sheer into the sea, and forms, with Cape Evans, on which we
+stand, the bay which lies in front of our hut, and which we called North
+Bay. This great ice-cliff with its crevasses, towers, bastions and
+cornices, was a never-ending source of delight to us; it forms the snout
+of one of the many glaciers which slide down the slopes of Erebus: in
+smooth slopes and contours where the mountain underneath is of regular
+shape: in impassable icefalls where the underlying surface is steep or
+broken. This particular ice stream is called the Barne Glacier, and is
+about two miles across. The whole background from our right front to our
+right rear, that is from N.E. to S.E., is occupied by our massive and
+volcanic neighbour, Erebus. He stands 13,500 feet high. We live beneath
+his shadow and have both admiration and friendship for him, sometimes
+perhaps tinged with respect. However, there are no signs of dangerous
+eruptive disturbances in modern times, and we feel pretty safe, despite
+the fact that the smoke which issues from his crater sometimes rises in
+dense clouds for many thousands of feet, and at others the trail of his
+plume can be measured for at least a hundred miles.
+
+If you are not too cold standing about (it does not pay to stand about at
+Cape Evans) let us make our way behind the hut and up Wind Vane Hill.
+This is only some sixty-five feet high, yet it dominates the rest of the
+cape and is steep enough to require a scramble, even now when the wind is
+calm. Look out that you do not step on the electric wires which connect
+the wind-vane cups on the hill with the recording dial in the hut. These
+cups revolve in the wind, the revolutions being registered electrically:
+every four miles a signal was sent to the hut, and a pen working upon a
+chronograph registered one more step. There is also a meteorological
+screen on the summit, which has to be visited at eight o'clock each
+morning in all weathers.
+
+[Illustration: A SUMMER VIEW OVER CAPE EVANS AND MCMURDO SOUND FROM THE
+RAMP--Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+Arrived on the top you will now be facing south, that is in the opposite
+direction to which you were facing before. The first thing that will
+strike you is that the sea, now frozen in the bays though still unfrozen
+in the open sound, flows in nearly to your feet. The second, that though
+the sea stretches back for nearly twenty miles, yet the horizon shows
+land or ice in every direction. For a ship this is a cul-de-sac, as Ross
+found seventy years ago. But as soon as you have grasped these two
+facts your whole attention will be riveted to the amazing sight on your
+left. Here are the southern slopes of Erebus; but how different from
+those which you have lately seen. Northwards they fell in broad calm
+lines to a beautiful stately cliff which edged the sea. But here--all the
+epithets and all the adjectives which denote chaotic immensity could not
+adequately tell of them. Visualize a torrent ten miles long and twenty
+miles broad; imagine it falling over mountainous rocks and tumbling over
+itself in giant waves; imagine it arrested in the twinkling of an eye,
+frozen and white. Countless blizzards have swept their drifts over it,
+but have failed to hide it. And it continues to move. As you stand in the
+still cold air you may sometimes hear the silence broken by the sharp
+reports as the cold contracts it or its own weight splits it. Nature is
+tearing up that ice as human beings tear paper.
+
+The sea-cliff is not so high here, and is more broken up by crevasses and
+caves, and more covered with snow. Some five miles along the coast the
+white line is broken by a bluff and black outcrop of rock; this is Turk's
+Head, and beyond it is the low white line of Glacier Tongue, jutting out
+for miles into the sea. We know, for we have already crossed it, that
+there is a small frozen bay of sea-ice beyond, but all we can see from
+Cape Evans is the base of the Hut Point Peninsula, with a rock outcrop
+just showing where the Hutton Cliffs lie. The Peninsula prevents us from
+seeing the Barrier, though the Barrier wind is constantly flowing over
+it, as the clouds of drift now smoking over the Cliffs bear witness.
+Farther to the right still, the land is clear: Castle Rock stands up like
+a sentinel, and beyond are Arrival Heights and the old craters we have
+got to know so well during our stay at Hut Point. The Discovery hut,
+which would, in any case, be invisible at fifteen miles, is round that
+steep rocky corner which ends the Peninsula, due south from where we
+stand.
+
+There remains undescribed the quadrant which stretches to our right front
+from south to west. Just as we have previously seen the line of the
+Western Mountains disappearing to the north miraged up in the light of
+the mid-day sun, so now we see the same line of mountains running south,
+with many miles of sea or Barrier between us and them. On the far
+southern horizon, almost in transit with Hut Point, stands Minna Bluff,
+some ninety miles away, beyond which we have laid the One Ton Depôt, and
+from this point, as our eyes move round to the right, we see peak after
+peak of these great mountain ranges--Discovery, Morning, Lister, Hooker,
+and the glaciers which divide them one from another. They rise almost
+without a break to a height of thirteen thousand feet. Between us and
+them is the Barrier to the south, and the sea to the north. Unless a
+blizzard is impending or blowing, they are clearly visible, a gigantic
+wall of snow and ice and rock, which bounds our view to the west,
+constantly varied by the ever-changing colour of the Antarctic. Beyond is
+the plateau.
+
+We have not yet mentioned four islands which lie within a radius of about
+three miles from where we stand. The most important is a mile from the
+end of Cape Evans and is called Inaccessible Island, owing to the
+inhospitality of its steep lava side, even when the sea is frozen; we
+found a way up, but it is not a very interesting place. Tent Island lies
+farther out and to the south-west. The remaining two, which are more
+islets than islands, rise in front of us in South Bay. They are called
+Great and Little Razorback, being ribs of rock with a sharp divide in the
+centre. The latter of these is the refuge upon which Scott's party
+returning to Cape Evans pitched their camp when overtaken by a blizzard
+some weeks ago. All these islands are of volcanic origin and black in
+general colour, but I believe there is evidence to show that the lava
+stream which created them flowed from McMurdo Sound rather than from the
+more obvious craters of Erebus. Their importance in this story is the
+indirect help they gave in holding in sea-ice against southerly
+blizzards, and in forming landmarks which proved useful more than once to
+men who had lost their bearings in darkness and thick weather. In this
+respect also several icebergs which sailed in from the Ross Sea and
+grounded on the shallows which run between Inaccessible Island and the
+cape, as well as in South Bay, were most useful as well as being
+interesting and beautiful. For two years we watched the weathering of
+these great towers and bastions of ice by sea and sun and wind, and left
+them still lying in the same positions, but mere tumbled ruins of their
+former selves.
+
+Many places in the panorama we have examined show black rock, and the
+cape on which we stand exposes at times more black than white. This fact
+always puzzles those who naturally conclude that all the Antarctic is
+covered with ice and snow. The explanation is simple, that winds of the
+great velocity which prevails in this region will not only prevent snow
+resting to windward of out-cropping rocks and cliffs, but will even wear
+away the rocks themselves. The fact that these winds always blow from the
+south, or southerly, causes a tendency for this aspect of any projecting
+rock to be blown free from snow, while the north or lee side is drifted
+up by a marbled and extremely hard tongue of snow, which disappears into
+a point at a distance which depends upon the size of the rock.
+
+Of course for the most part the land is covered to such a depth by
+glaciers and snow that no wind will do more than pack the snow or expose
+the ice beneath. At the same time, to visualize the Antarctic as a white
+land is a mistake, for, not only is there much rock projecting wherever
+mountains or rocky capes and islands rise, but the snow seldom looks
+white, and if carefully looked at will be found to be shaded with many
+colours, but chiefly with cobalt blue or rose-madder, and all the
+gradations of lilac and mauve which the mixture of these colours will
+produce. A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out
+from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow
+really looked white. When to the beautiful tints in the sky and the
+delicate shading on the snow are added perhaps the deep colours of the
+open sea, with reflections from the ice foot and ice-cliffs in it, all
+brilliant blues and emerald greens, then indeed a man may realize how
+beautiful this world can be, and how clean.
+
+Though I may struggle with inadequate expression to show the reader that
+this pure Land of the South has many gifts to squander upon those who
+woo her, chiefest of these gifts is that of her beauty. Next, perhaps, is
+that of grandeur and immensity, of giant mountains and limitless spaces,
+which must awe the most casual, and may well terrify the least
+imaginative of mortals. And there is one other gift which she gives with
+both hands, more prosaic, but almost more desirable. That is the gift of
+sleep. Perhaps it is true of others as is certainly the case with me,
+that the more horrible the conditions in which we sleep, the more
+soothing and wonderful are the dreams which visit us. Some of us have
+slept in a hurricane of wind and a hell of drifting snow and darkness,
+with no roof above our heads, with no tent to help us home, with no
+conceivable chance that we should ever see our friends again, with no
+food that we could eat, and only the snow which drifted into our
+sleeping-bags which we could drink day after day and night after night.
+We slept not only soundly the greater part of these days and nights, but
+with a certain numbed pleasure. We wanted something sweet to eat: for
+preference tinned peaches in syrup! Well! That is the kind of sleep the
+Antarctic offers you at her worst, or nearly at her worst. And if the
+worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes
+disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than as
+a gruesome foe. She treats you thus when you are in the extremity of
+peril and hardship; perhaps then you can imagine what draughts of deep
+and healthy slumber she will give a tired sledger at the end of a long
+day's march in summer, when after a nice hot supper he tucks his soft dry
+warm furry bag round him with the light beating in through the green silk
+tent, the homely smell of tobacco in the air, and the only noise that of
+the ponies tethered outside, munching their supper in the sun.
+
+And so it came about that during our sojourn at Cape Evans, in our
+comfortable warm roomy home, we took our full allotted span of sleep.
+Most were in their bunks by 10 P.M., sometimes with a candle and a book,
+not rarely with a piece of chocolate. The acetylene was turned off at
+10.30, for we had a limited quantity of carbide, and soon the room was
+in complete darkness, save for the glow of the galley stove and where a
+splash of light showed the night watchman preparing his supper. Some
+snored loudly, but none so loud as Bowers; others talked in their sleep,
+the more so when some nasty experience had lately set their nerves on
+edge. There was always the ticking of many instruments, and sometimes the
+ring of a little bell: to this day I do not know what most of them meant.
+On a calm night no sound penetrated except, perhaps, the whine of a dog,
+or the occasional kick of a pony in the stable outside. Any disturbance
+was the night watchman's job. But on a bad blizzard night the wind, as it
+tore seawards over the hut, roared and howled in the ventilator let into
+the roof: in the more furious gusts the whole hut shook, and the pebbles
+picked up by the hurricane scattered themselves noisily against the
+woodwork of the southern wall. We did not get many nights like these the
+first winter; during the second we seemed to get nothing else. One
+ghastly blizzard blew for six weeks.
+
+The night watchman took his last hourly observation at 7 A.M., and was
+free to turn in after waking the cook and making up the fire. Frequently,
+however, he had so much work to do that he preferred to forgo his sleep
+and remain up. For instance, if the weather looked threatening, he would
+take his pony out for exercise as soon as possible in the morning, or
+those lists of stores were not finished, or that fish trap had to be
+looked after: all kinds of things.
+
+A sizzling on the fire and a smell of porridge and fried seal liver
+heralded breakfast, which was at 8 A.M. in theory and a good deal later
+in practice. A sleepy eye might see the meteorologist stumping out
+(Simpson always stumped) to change the records in his magnetic cave and
+visit his instruments on the Hill. Twenty minutes later he would be back,
+as often as not covered with drift and his wind helmet all iced up.
+Meanwhile, the more hardy ones were washing: that is, they rubbed
+themselves, all shivering, with snow, of a minus temperature, and
+pretended they liked it. Perhaps they were right, but we told them it was
+swank. I'm not sure that it wasn't! It should be explained that water
+was seldom possible in a land where ice is more abundant than coal.
+
+One great danger threatened all our meals in this hut, namely that of a
+Cag. A Cag is an argument, sometimes well informed and always heated,
+upon any subject under the sun, or temporarily in our case, the moon.
+They ranged from the Pole to the Equator, from the Barrier to Portsmouth
+Hard and Plymouth Hoe. They began on the smallest of excuses, they
+continued through the widest field, they never ended; they were left in
+mid air, perhaps to be caught up again and twisted and tortured months
+after. What caused the cones on the Ramp; the formation of ice crystals;
+the names and order of the public-houses if you left the Main Gate of
+Portsmouth Dockyard and walked to the Unicorn Gate (if you ever reached
+so far); the best kinds of crampons in the Antarctic, and the best place
+in London for oysters; the ideal pony rug; would the wine steward at the
+Ritz look surprised if you asked him for a pint of bitter? Though the
+Times Atlas does not rise to public-houses nor Chambers's Encyclopaedia
+sink to behaviour at our more expensive hotels, yet they settled more of
+these disputes than anything else.
+
+On the day we are discussing, though mutterings can still be heard from
+Nelson's cubicle, the long table has been cleared and every one is busy
+by 9.30. From now until supper at 7 work is done by all in some form or
+other, except for a short luncheon interval. I do not mean for a minute
+that we all sit down, as a man may do in an office at home, and solidly
+grind away for upwards of nine hours or more. Not a bit of it. We have
+much work out of doors, and exercise is a consideration of the utmost
+importance. But when we go out, each individual quite naturally takes the
+opportunity to carry out such work as concerns him, whether it deals with
+ice or rocks, dogs or horses, meteorology or biology, tide-gauges or
+balloons.
+
+When blizzards allowed, the ponies were exercised by their respective
+leaders between breakfast and mid-day, when they were fed. This
+exercising of animals might be a pleasant business, on the other hand it
+could be the deuce and all: it depended on the pony and the weather. A
+blubber fire was kept burning in the snug stable, which was built against
+the lee wall of the hut: the ponies were, therefore, quite warm, and
+found it chilly directly they were led outside, even if there was no
+wind.
+
+The difficulties of exercising them in the dark were so great that with
+the best intentions in the world it was difficult to give them sufficient
+work for the good feeding they received. Add to this the fact that one at
+any rate of these variable animals was really savage, and that most of
+them were keen to break away if possible, and the hour of exercise was
+not without its thrills even on the calmest and most moonlight days. The
+worst days were those when it was difficult to say whether the ponies
+should be taken out on the sea-ice or not. It was thick weather that was
+to be feared, for then, if the leader once lost his bearings, it was most
+difficult for him to return. An overcast sky, light falling snow, perhaps
+a light northerly wind generally meant a blizzard, but the blizzard might
+not break for twenty-four hours, it might be upon you in four seconds. It
+was difficult to say whether the pony should miss his exercise, whether
+the fish trap should be raised, whether to put off your intended trip to
+Cape Royds. Generally the risks were taken, for, on the whole, it is
+better to be a little over-bold than a little over-cautious, while always
+there was a something inside urging you to do it just because there was a
+certain risk, and you hardly liked not to do it. It is so easy to be
+afraid of being afraid!
+
+Let me give one instance: it must be typical of many. It was thick as it
+could be, no moon, no stars, light falling snow, and not even a light
+breeze to keep in your face to give direction. Bowers and I decided to
+take our ponies out, and once over the tide crack, where the working
+sea-ice joins the fast land-ice, we kept close under the tall cliffs of
+the Barne Glacier. So far all was well, and also when we struck along a
+small crack into the middle of the bay, where there was a thermometer
+screen. This we read with some difficulty by the light of a match and
+started back towards the hut. In about a quarter of an hour we knew we
+were quite lost until an iceberg which we recognized showed us that we
+had been walking at right angles to our course, and got us safe home.
+
+On a clear crisp day, with the full moon to show you the ridges and
+cracks and sastrugi, it was most pleasant to put on your ski and wander
+forth with no object but that of healthy pleasure. Perhaps you would make
+your way round the bluff end of the cape and strike southwards. Here you
+may visit Nelson working with his thermometers and current meters and
+other instruments over a circular hole in the ice, which he keeps open
+from day to day by breaking out the 'biscuit' of newly formed ice. He has
+connected himself with the hut by telephone, and built round himself an
+igloo of drifted snow and the aforesaid 'biscuits,' which effectually
+shelter him from the wind. Or you may meet Meares and Dimitri returning
+with the dog-teams from a visit to Hut Point. A little farther on the
+silence is complete. But now your ear catches the metallic scratch of ski
+sticks on hard ice; there is some one else ski-ing over there, it may be
+many miles away, for sound travels in an amazing way. Every now and then
+there comes a sharp crack like a pistol shot; it is the ice contracting
+in the glaciers of Erebus, and you know that it is getting colder. Your
+breath smokes, forming white rime over your face, and ice in your beard;
+if it is very cold you may actually hear it crackle as it freezes in mid
+air!
+
+These were the days which remain visibly in the mind as the most
+enjoyable during this first winter season. It was all so novel, these
+much-dreaded, and amongst us much-derided, terrors of the Long Winter
+Night. The atmosphere is very clear when it is not filled with snow or
+ice crystals, and the moonlight lay upon the land so that we could see
+the main outlines of the Hut Point Peninsula, and even Minna Bluff out on
+the Barrier ninety miles away. The ice-cliffs of Erebus showed as great
+dark walls, but above them the blue ice of the glaciers gleamed silvery,
+and the steam flowed lazily from the crater carried away in a long line,
+showing us that the northerly breezes prevailed up there, and were
+storing up trouble in the south. Sometimes a shooting star would seem to
+fall right into the mountain, and for the most part the Aurora flitted
+uneasily about in the sky.
+
+The importance of plenty of out-door exercise was generally recognized,
+and our experience showed us that the happiest and healthiest members of
+our party during this first year were those who spent the longest period
+in the fresh air. As a rule we walked and worked and ski-ed alone, not I
+feel sure because of any individual distaste for the company of our
+fellows but rather because of a general inclination to spend a short
+period of the day without company. At least this is certainly true of the
+officers: I am not so sure about the men. Under the circumstances, the
+only time in the year that a man could be alone was in his walks abroad
+from Winter Quarters, for the hut, of course, was always occupied, and
+when sledging this sardine-like existence was continuous night and day.
+
+There was one regular exception to this rule. Every possible evening,
+that is to say if it was not blowing a full blizzard, Wilson and Bowers
+went up the Ramp together 'to read Bertram.' Now this phrase will convey
+little meaning without some explanation. I have already spoken of the
+Ramp as the steep rubbly slope partly covered by snow and partly by ice
+which divided the cape on which we lived from the glaciated slopes of
+Erebus. After a breathless scramble up this embankment one came upon a
+belt of rough boulder-strewn ground from which arose at intervals conical
+mounds, the origin of which puzzled us for many months. At length, by the
+obvious means of cutting a section through one of them, it was proved
+that there was a solid kenyte lava block in the centre of this cone,
+proving that the whole was formed by the weathering of a single rock.
+Threading your way for some hundreds of yards through this terrain, a
+scramble attended by many slips and falls on a dark night, you reached
+the first signs of glaciation. A little farther, isolated in the ice
+stream, is another group of debris cones, and on the largest of these we
+placed meteorological Screen "B," commonly called Bertram. This screen,
+together with "A" (Algernon) and "C" (Clarence), which were in North and
+South Bays respectively, were erected by Bowers, who thought, rightly,
+that they would form an object to which men could guide their walks, and
+that at the same time the observations of maximum, minimum and present
+temperatures would be a useful check to the meteorologist when he came to
+compare them with those taken at the hut. As a matter of fact the book in
+which we used to enter these observations shows that the air temperatures
+out on the sea-ice vary considerably from those on the cape, and that the
+temperatures several hundred feet up on the slopes of Erebus are often
+several degrees higher than those taken at sea-level. I believe that much
+of the weather in this part of the world is an intensely local affair,
+and these screens produced useful data.
+
+Wilson and Bowers would go up the Ramp when it was blowing and drifting
+fairly hard, so that although the rocks and landmarks immediately round
+them were visible, all beyond was blotted out. It is quite possible to
+walk thus among landmarks which you know at a time when it is most unwise
+to go out on to the sea-ice where there are no fixed points to act as a
+guide.
+
+It was Wilson's pleasant conceit to keep his balaclava rolled up, so that
+his face was bare, on such occasions, being somewhat proud of the fact
+that he had not, as yet, been frost-bitten. Imagine our joy when he
+entered the hut one cold windy evening with two white spots on his cheeks
+which he vainly tried to hide behind his dogskin mitts.
+
+[Illustration: MCMURDO SOUND--Apsley Cherry-Garrard, del.--Emery Walker
+Ltd., Collotypers.]
+
+The ponies' lunch came at mid-day, when they were given snow to drink and
+compressed fodder with oats or oil-cake on alternate days to eat, the
+proportion of which was arranged according to the work they were able to
+do in the present, or expected to do in the future. Our own lunch was
+soon after one, and a few minutes before that time Hooper's voice would
+be heard: "Table please, Mr. Debenham," and all writing materials,
+charts, instruments and books would have to be removed. On Sunday, this
+table displayed a dark blue cloth, but for meals and at all other times
+it was covered with white oilcloth.
+
+Lunch itself was a pleasant meatless meal, consisting of limited bread
+and butter with plenty of jam or cheese, tea or cocoa, the latter being
+undoubtedly a most useful drink in a cold country. Many controversies
+raged over the rival merits of tea and cocoa. Some of us made for
+ourselves buttered toast at the galley fire; I must myself confess to a
+weakness for Welsh Rarebit, and others followed my example on cheese days
+in making messes of which we were not a little proud. Scott sat at the
+head of the table, that is at the east end, but otherwise we all took our
+places haphazard from meal to meal as our conversation, or want of it,
+merited, or as our arrival found a vacant chair. Thus if you felt
+talkative you might always find a listener in Debenham; if inclined to
+listen yourself it was only necessary to sit near Taylor or Nelson; if,
+on the other hand, you just wanted to be quiet, Atkinson or Oates would,
+probably, give you a congenial atmosphere.
+
+There was never any want of conversation, largely due to the fact that no
+conversation was expected: we most of us know the horrible blankness
+which comes over our minds when we realize that because we are eating we
+are also supposed to talk, whether we have anything to say or not. It was
+also due to the more primitive reason that in a company of specialists,
+whose travels extended over most parts of the earth, and whose subjects
+overlapped and interlocked at so many points, topics of conversation were
+not only numerous but full of possibilities of expansion. Add to this
+that from the nature of our work we were probably people of an
+inquisitive turn of mind and wanted to get to the bottom of the subjects
+which presented themselves, and you may expect to find, as was in fact
+the case, an atmosphere of pleasant and quite interesting conversation
+which sometimes degenerated into heated and noisy argument.
+
+The business of eating over, pipes were lit without further formality. I
+mention pipes only because while we had a most bountiful supply of
+tobacco, the kindly present of Mr. Wills, our supply of cigarettes from
+the same source was purposely limited and only a small quantity were
+landed, allowing of a ration to such members who wished. Consequently
+cigarettes were an article of some value, and in a land where the
+ordinary forms of currency are valueless they became a frequent stake to
+venture when making bets. Indeed, "I bet you ten cigarettes," or "I bet
+you a dinner when we get back to London," became the most frequent bids
+of the argumentative gambler, occasionally varied when the bettor was
+more than usually certain of the issue by the offer of a pair of socks.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: THE SEA'S FRINGE OF ICE]
+
+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;[134] 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.[135]
+
+He will go down to history as the Englishman who conquered the South Pole
+and who died as fine a death as any man has had the honour to die. His
+triumphs are many--but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of
+them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self,
+and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Scott had under him this first year in his Main Party a total of 15
+officers and 9 men. These officers may be divided into three executive
+officers and twelve scientific staff, but the distinction is very rough,
+inasmuch as a scientist such as Wilson was every bit as executive as
+anybody else, and the executive officers also did much scientific work. I
+will try here briefly to give the reader some idea of the personality and
+activities of these men as they work any ordinary day in the hut. It
+should be noticed that not all the men we had with us were brought to do
+sledging work. Some were chosen rather for their scientific knowledge
+than for their physical or other fitness for sledging. The regular
+sledgers in this party of officers were Scott, Wilson, Evans, Bowers,
+Oates (ponies), Meares (dogs), Atkinson (surgeon), Wright (physicist),
+Taylor (physiographer), Debenham (geologist), Gran and myself, while Day
+was to drive his motors as far as they would go on the Polar Journey.
+This leaves Simpson, who was the meteorologist and whose observations had
+of necessity to be continuous; Nelson, whose observations into marine
+biology, temperatures of sea, salinity, currents and tides came under the
+same heading; and Ponting, whose job was photography, and whose success
+in this art everybody recognizes.
+
+However much of good I may write of Wilson, his many friends in England,
+those who served with him on the ship or in the hut, and most of all
+those who had the good fortune to sledge with him (for it is sledging
+which is far the greatest test) will all be dissatisfied, for I know that
+I cannot do justice to his value. If you knew him you could not like him:
+you simply had to love him. Bill was of the salt of the earth. If I were
+asked what quality it was before others that made him so useful, and so
+lovable, I think I should answer that it was because he never for one
+moment thought of himself. In this respect also Bowers, of whom I will
+speak in a moment, was most extraordinary, and in passing may I be
+allowed to say that this is a most necessary characteristic of a good
+Antarctic traveller? We had many such, officers and seamen, and the
+success of the expedition was in no small measure due to the general and
+unselfish way in which personal likes and dislikes, wishes or tastes were
+ungrudgingly subordinated to the common weal. Wilson and Pennell set an
+example of expedition first and the rest nowhere which others followed
+ungrudgingly: it pulled us through more than one difficulty which might
+have led to friction.
+
+Wilson was a man of many parts. He was Scott's right-hand man, he was the
+expedition's Chief of the Scientific Staff: he was a doctor of St.
+George's Hospital, and a zoologist specializing in vertebrates. His
+published work on whales, penguins and seals contained in the Scientific
+Report of the Discovery Expedition is still the best available, and makes
+excellent reading even to the non-scientist. On the outward journey of
+the Terra Nova he was still writing up his work for the Royal Commission
+on Grouse Disease, the published report of which he never lived to see.
+But those who knew him best will probably remember Wilson by his
+water-colour paintings rather than by any other form of his many-sided
+work.
+
+As a boy his father sent him away on rambling holidays, the only
+condition being that he should return with a certain number of drawings.
+I have spoken of the drawings which he made when sledging or when
+otherwise engaged away from painting facilities, as at Hut Point. He
+brought back to Winter Quarters a note-book filled with such sketches of
+outlines and colours: of sunsets behind the Western Mountains: of lights
+reflected in the freezing sea or in the glass houses of the ice foot: of
+the steam clouds on Erebus by day and of the Aurora Australis by night.
+Next door to Scott he rigged up for himself a table, consisting of two
+venesta cases on end supporting a large drawing-board some four feet
+square. On this he set to work systematically to paint the effects which
+he had seen and noted. He painted with his paper wet, and necessarily
+therefore, he worked quickly. An admirer of Ruskin, he wished to paint
+what he saw as truly as possible. If he failed to catch the effect he
+wished, he tore up the picture however beautiful the result he had
+obtained. There is no doubt as to the faithfulness of his colouring: the
+pictures recalled then and will still recall now in intimate detail the
+effects which we saw together. As to the accuracy of his drawing it is
+sufficient to say that in the Discovery Expedition Scott wrote on his
+Southern Journey:
+
+"Wilson is the most indefatigable person. When it is fine and clear, at
+the end of our fatiguing days he will spend two or three hours seated in
+the door of the tent, sketching each detail of the splendid mountainous
+coast-scene to the west. His sketches are most astonishingly accurate; I
+have tested his proportions by actual angular measurement and found them
+correct."[136]
+
+In addition to the drawings of land, pack, icebergs and Barrier, the
+primary object of which was scientific and geographical, Wilson has left
+a number of paintings of atmospheric phenomena which are not only
+scientifically accurate but are also exceedingly beautiful. Of such are
+the records of auroral displays, parhelions, paraselene, lunar halos, fog
+bows, irridescent clouds, refracted images of mountains and mirage
+generally. If you look at a picture of a parhelion by Wilson not only can
+you be sure that the mock suns, circles and shafts appeared in the sky as
+they are shown on paper, but you can also rest assured that the number of
+degrees between, say, the sun and the outer ring of light were in fact
+such as he has represented them. You can also be certain in looking at
+his pictures that if cirrus cloud is shown, then cirrus and not stratus
+cloud was in the sky: if it is not shown, then the sky was clear. It is
+accuracy such as this which gives an exceptional value to work viewed
+from a scientific standpoint. Mention should also be made of the
+paintings and drawings made constantly by Wilson for the various
+specialists on the expedition whenever they wished for colour records of
+their specimens; in this connection the paintings of fish and various
+parasites are especially valuable.
+
+I am not specially qualified to judge Wilson from the artistic point of
+view. But if you want accuracy of drawing, truth of colour, and a
+reproduction of the soft and delicate atmospheric effects which obtain in
+this part of the world, then you have them here. Whatever may be said of
+the painting as such, it is undeniable that an artist of this type is of
+inestimable value to an expedition which is doing scientific and
+geographical work in a little-known part of the earth.
+
+Wilson himself set a low value on his artistic capacity. We used to
+discuss what Turner would have produced in a land which offered colour
+effects of such beauty. If we urged him to try and paint some peculiar
+effect and he felt that to do so was beyond his powers he made no scruple
+of saying so. His colour is clear, his brush-work clean: and he handled
+sledging subjects with the vigour of a professional who knew all there
+was to be known about a sledging life.
+
+[Illustration: LEADING PONIES ON THE BARRIER--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+Scott and Wilson worked hand in hand to further the scientific objects of
+the expedition. For Scott, though no specialist in any one branch, had a
+most genuine love of science. "Science--the rock foundation of all
+effort," he wrote; and whether discussing ice problems with Wright,
+meteorology with Simpson, or geology with Taylor, he showed not only a
+mind which was receptive and keen to learn, but a knowledge which was
+quick to offer valuable suggestions. I remember Pennell condemning
+anything but scientific learning in dealing with the problems round us;
+'no guesswork' was his argument. But he emphatically made an exception of
+Scott, who had an uncanny knack of hitting upon a solution. Over and
+over again in his diary we can read of the interest he took in pure and
+applied science, and it is doubtful whether this side of an expedition in
+high northern or southern latitudes has ever been more fortunate in their
+leader.
+
+Wilson's own share in the scientific results is more obvious because he
+was the director of the work. But no published reports will give an
+adequate idea of the ability he showed in co-ordinating the various
+interests of a varied community, nor of the tact he displayed in dealing
+with the difficulties which arose. Above all his judgment was excellent,
+and Scott as well as the rest of us relied upon him to a very great
+extent. The value of judgment in a land where a wrong decision may mean
+disaster as well as loss of life is beyond all price; weather in which
+changes are most sudden is a case in point, also the state of sea-ice,
+the direction to be followed in difficult country when sledging, the best
+way of taking crevassed areas when they must be crossed, and all the ways
+by which the maximum of result may be combined with the minimum of danger
+in a land where Nature is sometimes almost too big an enemy to fight: all
+this wants judgment, and if possible experience. Wilson could supply
+both, for his experience was as wide as that of Scott, and I have
+constantly known Scott change his mind after a talk with Bill. For the
+rest I give quotations from Scott's diary:
+
+"He has had a hand in almost every lecture given, and has been consulted
+in almost every effort which has been made towards the solution of the
+practical or theoretical problems of our Polar world."[137]
+
+Again:
+
+"Words must always fail me when I talk of Bill Wilson. I believe he
+really is the finest character I ever met--the closer one gets to him the
+more there is to admire. Every quality is so solid and dependable; cannot
+you imagine how that counts down here? Whatever the matter, one knows
+Bill will be sound, shrewdly practical, intensely loyal and quite
+unselfish. Add to this a wider knowledge of persons and things than is
+at first guessable, a quiet vein of humour and really consummate tact,
+and you have some idea of his values. I think he is the most popular
+member of the party, and that is saying much."[138]
+
+And at the end, when Scott himself lay dying, he wrote to Mrs. Wilson:
+
+"I can do no more to comfort you, than to tell you that he died as he
+lived, a brave, true man--the best of comrades and staunchest of
+friends."[139]
+
+Physically Scott had been a delicate boy but developed into a strong man,
+5 feet 9 inches in height, 11 stone 6 lbs. in weight, with a chest
+measurement of 39¼ inches. Wilson was not a particularly strong man. On
+leaving with the Discovery he was but lately cured of consumption, yet he
+went with Scott to his farthest South, and helped to get Shackleton back
+alive. Shackleton owed his life to those two. Wilson was of a slimmer,
+more athletic build, a great walker, 5 feet 10½ inches in height, 11
+stones in weight, with a chest measurement of 36 inches. He was an ideal
+example of my contention, which I believe can be proved many times over
+to be a fact, that it is not strength of body but rather strength of will
+which carries a man farthest where mind and body are taxed at the same
+time to their utmost limit. Scott was 43 years of age at his death, and
+Wilson 39.
+
+Bowers was of a very different build. Aged 28, he was only 5 feet 4
+inches in height while his chest measurement (which I give more as a
+general guide to his physique than for any other reason) was 40 inches,
+and his weight 12 stones. He was recommended to Scott by Sir Clements
+Markham, who was dining one day with Captain Wilson-Barker on the
+Worcester, on which ship Bowers was trained. Bowers was then home from
+India, and the talk turned to the Antarctic. Wilson-Barker turned to Sir
+Clements in the course of conversation and alluding to Bowers said: "Here
+is a man who will be leading one of those expeditions some day."
+
+He lived a rough life after passing from the Worcester into the merchant
+service, sailing five times round the world in the Loch Torridon. Thence
+he passed into the service of the Royal Indian Marine, commanded a river
+gunboat on the Irrawaddy, and afterwards served on H.M.S. Fox, where he
+had considerable experience, often in open boats, preventing the
+gun-running which was carried on by the Afghans in the Persian Gulf.
+
+Thence he came to us.
+
+It is at any rate a curious fact, and it may be a significant one, that
+Bowers, who enjoyed a greater resistance to cold than any man on this
+expedition, joined it direct from one of the hottest places on the globe.
+My knowledge is insufficient to say whether it is possible that any trace
+can be found here of cause and effect, especially since the opposite
+seems to be the more common experience, in that such people as return
+from India to England generally find the English winter trying. I give
+the fact for what it may be worth, remarking only that the cold of an
+English winter is generally damp, while that of the Antarctic is dry, so
+far at any rate as the atmosphere is concerned. Bowers himself always
+professed the greatest indifference not only to cold, but also to heat,
+and his indifference was not that of a 'poseur,' as many experiences will
+show.
+
+At the same time he was temperamentally one who refused to admit
+difficulties. Indeed, if he did not actually welcome them he greeted them
+with scorn, and in scorning went far to master them. Scott believed that
+difficulties were made to be overcome: Bowers certainly believed that he
+was the man to overcome them. This self-confidence was based on a very
+deep and broad religious feeling, and carried conviction with it. The men
+swore by him both on the ship and ashore. "He's all right," was their
+judgment of his seamanship, which was admirable. "I like being with
+Birdie, because I always know where I am," was the remark made to me by
+an officer one evening as we pitched the tent. We had just been spending
+some time in picking up a depôt which a less able man might well have
+missed.
+
+As he was one of the two or three greatest friends of my life I find it
+hard to give the reader a mental picture of Birdie Bowers which will not
+appear extravagant. There were times when his optimism appeared forced
+and formal though I believe it was not really so: there were times when I
+have almost hated him for his infernal cheerfulness. To those accustomed
+to judge men by the standards of their fashionable and corseted
+drawing-rooms Bowers appeared crude. "You couldn't kill that man if you
+took a pole-axe to him," was the comment of a New Zealander at a dance at
+Christchurch. Such men may be at a discount in conventional life; but
+give me a snowy ice-floe waving about on the top of a black swell, a ship
+thrown aback, a sledge-party almost shattered, or one that has just upset
+their supper on to the floorcloth of the tent (which is much the same
+thing), and I will lie down and cry for Bowers to come and lead me to
+food and safety.
+
+Those whom the gods love die young. The gods loved him, if indeed it be
+benevolent to show your favourites a clear, straight, shining path of
+life, with plenty of discomfort and not a little pain, but with few
+doubts and no fears. Browning might well have had Bowers in mind when he
+wrote of
+
+    One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward;
+        Never doubted clouds would break;
+    Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph;
+        Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
+            Sleep to wake.
+
+There was nothing subtle about him. He was transparently simple,
+straightforward and unselfish. His capacity for work was prodigious, and
+when his own work happened to take less than his full time he
+characteristically found activity in serving a scientist or exercising an
+animal. So he used to help to send up balloons with self-recording
+instruments attached to them, and track the threads which led to them
+when detached. He was responsible for putting up the three outlying
+meteorological screens and read them more often than anybody else. At
+times he looked after some of the dogs because at the moment there was
+nobody else whose proper job it happened to be, and he took a particular
+fancy to one of our strongest huskies called Krisravitza, which is the
+Russian (so I'm told) for 'most beautiful.' This fancy originated in the
+fact that to Kris, as the most truculent of our untamed devils, fell a
+large share of well-deserved punishment. A living thing in trouble be it
+dog or man was something to be helped. Being the smallest man in the
+party he schemed to have allotted to him the largest pony available both
+for the Depôt and Polar Journeys. Their exercise, when he succeeded, was
+a matter for experiment, for his knowledge of horses was as limited as
+his love of animals was intense. He started to exercise his second pony
+(for the first was lost on the floe) by riding him. "I'll soon get used
+to him," he said one day when Victor had just deposited him in the
+tide-crack, "to say nothing of his getting used to me," he added in a
+more subdued voice.
+
+This was open-air work, and as such more congenial than that which had to
+be done inside the hut. But his most important work was indoors, and he
+brought to it just the same restless enthusiasm which allowed no leisure
+for reading or relaxation.
+
+He joined as one of the ship's officers in London. Given charge of the
+stores, the way in which he stowed the ship aroused the admiration of
+even the stevedores, especially when he fell down the main hatch one
+morning on to the pig-iron below, recovered consciousness in about half a
+minute, and continued work for the rest of the day as though nothing had
+happened.
+
+As the voyage out proceeded it became obvious that his knowledge of the
+stores and undefeatable personality would be of great value to the shore
+party, and it was decided that he should land, to his great delight. He
+was personally responsible for all food supplies, whether for home
+consumption or for sledging, for all sledging stores and the distribution
+of weights, the loading of sledges, the consumption of coal, the issue of
+clothing, bosun's stores, and carpenter's stores. Incidentally the keeper
+of stores wanted a very exact knowledge of the cases which contained
+them, for the drifts of snow soon buried them as they lay in the camp
+outside.
+
+As time proved his capacity Scott left one thing after another in
+Bowers' hands. Scott was a leader of men, and it is a good quality in
+such to delegate work from themselves on to those who prove their power
+to shoulder the burden. Undoubtedly Bowers saved Scott a great deal of
+work, and gave him time which he might not otherwise have been able to
+spare to interest himself in the scientific work of the station, greatly
+to its benefit, and do a good deal of useful writing. The two ways in
+which Bowers helped Scott most this winter were in the preparation of the
+plans and the working out of the weights of the Southern Journey, which
+shall be discussed later, and in the routine work of the station, for
+which he was largely responsible, and which ran so smoothly that I am
+unable to tell the reader how the stores were issued, or the dinner
+settled, by what rule the working parties for fetching ice for water and
+other kindred jobs about the camp were ordered. They just happened, and I
+don't know how. I only know that Bowers had the bunk above mine in the
+hut, and that when I was going to sleep he was generally standing on a
+chair and using his own bunk as a desk, and I conclude from the numerous
+lists of stores and weights which are now in my hands that these were
+being produced. Anyway the job was done, and the fact that we knew
+nothing about it goes far to prove how efficiently it was carried
+through.
+
+For him difficulties simply did not exist. I have never known a more
+buoyant, virile nature. Scott's writings abound in references to the
+extraordinary value he placed upon his help, and after the share which he
+took in the Depôt and Winter Journeys it was clear that he would probably
+be taken in the Polar Party, as indeed proved to be the case. No man of
+that party better deserved his place. "I believe he is the hardest
+traveller that ever undertook a Polar Journey, as well as one of the most
+undaunted."[140]
+
+The standard is high.
+
+[Illustration: FROZEN SEA AND CLIFFS OF ICE]
+
+Bowers gave us two of our best lectures, the first on the Evolution of
+Sledge Foods, at the end of which he discussed our own rations on the
+Depôt Journey, and made suggestions which he had worked out
+scientifically for those of the Polar Journey. His arguments were sound
+enough to disarm the hostility if not to convert to his opinions at least
+one scientist who had come to hear him strongly of opinion that an
+untrained man should not discuss so complex a subject. The second
+lecture, on the Evolution of Polar Clothing, was also the fruit of much
+work. The general conclusion come to (and this was after the Winter
+Journey) was that our own clothing and equipment could not be bettered in
+any important respect, though it must be always understood that the
+expedition wore wind-proof clothing and not furs, except for hands and
+feet. When man-hauling, wind-proof, I am convinced, cannot be improved
+upon, but for dog-driving in cold weather I suspect that furs may be
+better.
+
+The table was cleared after supper and we sat round it for these lectures
+three times a week. There was no compulsion about them, and the seamen
+only turned up for those which especially interested them, such as
+Meares' vivid account of his journeyings on the Eastern or Chinese
+borderland of Thibet. This land is inhabited by the 'Eighteen Tribes,'
+the original inhabitants of Thibet who were driven out by the present
+inhabitants, and Meares told us chiefly of the Lolos who killed his
+companion Brook after having persuaded him that they were friendly and
+anxious to help him. "He had no pictures and very makeshift maps, yet he
+held us really entranced for nearly two hours by the sheer interest of
+his adventures. The spirit of the wanderer is in Meares' blood: he has no
+happiness but in the wild places of the earth. I have never met so
+extreme a type. Even now he is looking forward to getting away by himself
+to Hut Point, tired already of our scant measure of civilization."[141]
+
+Three lectures a week were too many in the opinion of the majority. The
+second winter with our very reduced company we had two a week, and I feel
+sure that this was an improvement. No officer nor seaman, however, could
+have had too many of Ponting's lectures, which gave us glimpses into
+many lands illustrated by his own inimitable slides. Thus we lived every
+now and then for a short hour in Burmah, India or Japan, in scenes of
+trees and flowers and feminine charm which were the very antithesis of
+our present situation, and we were all the better for it. Ponting also
+illustrated the subjects of other lectures with home-made slides of
+photographs taken during the autumn or from printed books. But for the
+most part the lecturers were perforce content with designs and plans,
+drawn on paper and pinned one on the top of the other upon a large
+drawing-board propped up on the table and torn off sheet by sheet.
+
+From the practical point of view the most interesting evening to us was
+that on which Scott produced the Plan of the Southern Journey. The reader
+may ask why this was not really prepared until the winter previous to the
+journey itself, and the answer clearly is that it was impossible to
+arrange more than a rough idea until the autumn sledging had taught its
+lesson in food, equipment, relative reliability of dogs, ponies and men,
+and until the changes and chances of our life showed exactly what
+transport would be available for the following sledging season. Thus it
+was with lively anticipation that we sat down on May 8, an advisory
+committee as it were, to hear and give our suggestions on the scheme
+which Scott had evolved in the early weeks of the winter after the
+adventures of the Depôt Journey and the loss of six ponies.
+
+It was on just such a winter night, too, that Scott read his interesting
+paper on the Ice Barrier and Inland Ice which will probably form the
+basis for all future work on these subjects. The Barrier, he maintained,
+is probably afloat, and covers at least five times the extent of the
+North Sea with an average thickness of some 400 feet, though it has only
+been possible to get the very roughest of levels. According to the
+movement of a depôt laid in the Discovery days the Barrier moved 608
+yards towards the open Ross Sea in 13½ months. It must be admitted that
+the inclination of the ice-sheet is not sufficient to cause this, and the
+old idea that the glacier streams flowing down from Inland Plateau
+provide the necessary impetus is imperfect. It was Simpson's suggestion
+that "the deposition of snow on the Barrier leads to an expansion due to
+the increase of weight." Some admittedly vague ideas as to the extent and
+character of the inland ice-sheet ended a clever and convincing paper
+which contained a lot of good reasoning.
+
+Simpson proved an excellent lecturer, and in meteorology and in the
+explanation of the many instruments with which his corner of the hut was
+full he possessed subjects which interested and concerned everybody.
+Nelson on Biological Problems and Taylor on Physiography were always
+interesting. "Taylor, I dreamt of your lecture last night. How could I
+live so long in the world and not know something of so fascinating a
+subject!" Thus Scott on the morning following one of these lectures.[142]
+Wright on Ice Problems, Radium, and the Origin of Matter had highly
+technical subjects which left many of us somewhat befogged. But Atkinson
+on Scurvy had an audience each member of which felt that he had a
+personal interest in the subject under discussion. Indeed one of his
+hearers was to suffer the advanced stage of this dread disease within six
+months. Atkinson inclined to Almroth Wright's theory that scurvy is due
+to an acid intoxication of the blood caused by bacteria. He described the
+litmus-paper test which was practised on us monthly, and before and after
+sledge journeys. In this the blood of each individual is drawn and
+various strengths of dilute sulphuric acid are added to it until it is
+neutralized, the healthy man showing normal 30 to 50, while the man with
+scorbutic signs will be normal 50 to 90 according to the stage to which
+he has reached. The only thing which is certain to stop scurvy is fresh
+vegetables: fresh meat when life is otherwise under extreme conditions
+will not do so, an instance being the Siege of Paris when they had plenty
+of horse meat. In 1795 voyages were being ruined by scurvy and Anson lost
+300 out of 500 men, but in that year the first discoveries were made and
+lime-juice was introduced by Blaine. From this time scurvy practically
+disappeared from the Navy, and there was little scurvy in Nelson's days;
+but the reason is not clear, since, according to modern research,
+lime-juice only helps to prevent it. It continued in the Merchant
+Service, and in a decade from about 1865 some 400 cases were admitted
+into the Dreadnought Hospital, whereas in the decade 1887 to 1896 there
+were only 38 cases. We had, at Cape Evans, a salt of sodium to be used to
+alkalize the blood as an experiment, if necessity arose. Darkness, cold,
+and hard work are in Atkinson's opinion important causes of scurvy.
+
+Nansen was an advocate of variety of diet as being anti-scorbutic, and
+Scott recalled a story told him by Nansen which he had never understood.
+It appeared that some men had eaten tins of tainted food. Some of it was
+slightly tainted, some of it was really bad. They rejected the really bad
+ones, and ate those only which were slightly tainted. "And of course,"
+said Nansen, "they should have eaten the worst."
+
+I have since asked Nansen about this story. He tells me that he must have
+been referring to the crew of the Windward, the ship of the
+Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition to Franz Josef Land in 1894-97. The crew of
+this ship, which was travelling to and from civilization, got scurvy,
+though the land party kept healthy. Of this Jackson writes: "In the case
+of the crew of the Windward I fear that there was considerable
+carelessness in the use of tinned meats that were not free from taint,
+although tins quite gone were rejected.... We [on shore] largely used
+fresh bear's meat, and the crew of the Windward were also allowed as much
+as they could be induced to eat. They, however, preferred tinned meat
+several days a week to a diet of bear's meat alone; and some of the crew
+had such a prejudice against bear's meat as to refuse to eat it at
+all."[143]
+
+Of course tainted food should not have been eaten at all, but if it had
+to be eaten, then, according to Nansen, the ptomaines which cause scurvy
+in the earlier stages of decomposition are destroyed by the ferment which
+forms in the later stages. They should therefore have taken the worst
+tins, if any at all.
+
+Wilson was strongly of opinion that fresh meat alone would stop scurvy:
+on the Discovery seal meat cured it. As to scurvy on Scott's Discovery
+Southern Journey, he made light of it: however, during the Winter Journey
+I remember Wilson stating that Shackleton several times fell in a faint
+as he got outside the tent, and he seems to have been seriously ill:
+Wilson knew that he himself had scurvy some time before the others knew
+it, because the discoloration of his gums did not show in front for some
+time. He did not think their dogs on that journey had scurvy, but
+ptomaine poisoning from fish which had travelled through the tropics. He
+was of opinion that on returning from sledge journeys on the Discovery
+they had wrongly attributed to scurvy such symptoms as rash on the body,
+swollen legs and ankles, which were rather the result of excessive
+fatigue. I may add that we had these signs on our return from the Winter
+Journey.
+
+Then there were lectures on Geology by Debenham, on birds and beasts and
+also on Sketching by Wilson, on Surveying by Evans: but perhaps no
+lecture remains more vividly in my memory than that given by Oates on
+what _we_ called 'The Mismanagement of Horses.' Of course to all of us
+who were relying upon the ponies for the first stage of the Southern
+Journey the subject was of interest as well as utility, but the greater
+share of interest centred upon the lecturer, for it was certainly
+supposed that taciturn Titus could not have concealed about his person
+the gift of the gab, and it was as certain as it could be that the whole
+business was most distasteful to him. Imagine our delight when he proved
+to have an elaborate discourse with full notes of which no one had seen
+the preparation. "I have been fortunate in securing another night," he
+mentioned amidst mirth, and proceeded to give us the most interesting and
+able account of the minds and bodies of horses in general and ours in
+particular. He ended with a story of a dinner-party at which he was a
+guest, probably against his will. A young lady was so late that the party
+sat down to dinner without waiting longer. Soon she arrived covered with
+blushes and confusion. "I'm so sorry," she said, "but that horse was the
+limit, he ..." "Perhaps it was a jibber," suggested her hostess to help
+her out. "No, he was a ----. I heard the cabby tell him so several
+times."
+
+Titus Oates was the most cheerful and lovable old pessimist that you
+could imagine. Often, after tethering and feeding our ponies at a night
+camp on the Barrier, we would watch the dog-teams coming up into camp.
+"I'll give these dogs ten days more," he would murmur in a voice such as
+some people used when they heard of a British victory. I am acquainted
+with so few dragoons that I do not know their general characteristics.
+Few of them, I imagine, would have gone about with the slouch which
+characterized his method of locomotion, nor would many of them have dined
+in a hat so shabby that it was picked off the peg and passed round as a
+curiosity.
+
+He came to look after the horses, and as an officer in the Inniskillings
+he, no doubt, had excellent training. But his skill went far deeper than
+that. There was little he didn't know about horses, and the pity is that
+he did not choose our ponies for us in Siberia: we should have had a very
+different lot. In addition to his general charge of them all, Oates took
+as his own pony the aforesaid devil Christopher for the Southern Journey
+and for previous training. We shall hear much more of Christopher, who
+appeared to have come down to the Antarctic to initiate the well-behaved
+inhabitants into all the vices of civilization, but from beginning to end
+Oates' management of this animal might have proved a model to any
+governor of a lunatic asylum. His tact, patience and courage, for
+Christopher was a very dangerous beast, remain some of the most vivid
+recollections of a very gallant gentleman.
+
+In this connection let me add that no animals could have had more
+considerate and often self-sacrificing treatment than these ponies of
+ours. Granted that they must be used at all (and I do not mean to enter
+into that question) they were fed, trained, and even clothed as friends
+and companions rather than as beasts of burden. They were never hit, a
+condition to which they were clearly unaccustomed. They lived far better
+than they had before, and all this was done for them in spite of the
+conditions under which we ourselves lived. We became very fond of our
+beasts but we could not be blind to their faults. The mind of a horse is
+a very limited concern, relying almost entirely upon memory. He rivals
+our politicians in that he has little real intellect. Consequently, when
+the pony was faced with conditions different from those to which he was
+accustomed, he showed but little adaptability; and when you add to this
+frozen harness and rugs, with all their straps and buckles and lashings,
+an incredible facility for eating anything within reach including his own
+tethering ropes and the headstalls, fringes and whatnots of his
+companions, together with our own scanty provisions and a general wish to
+do anything except the job of the moment, it must be admitted that the
+pony leader's lot was full of occasions for bad temper. Nevertheless
+leaders and ponies were on the best of terms (excepting always
+Christopher), which is really not surprising when you come to think that
+most of the leaders were sailors whose love of animals is profound.
+
+A lean-to roof was built against the northern side of the hut, and the
+ends and open side were boarded up. This building when buttressed by the
+bricks of coal which formed our fuel, and drifted up with snow by the
+blizzards, formed an extremely sheltered and even warm stable. The ponies
+stood in stalls with their heads towards the hut and divided from it by a
+corridor; the bars which kept them in carried also their food boxes. They
+lay down very little, the ground was too cold, and Oates was of opinion
+that litter would not have benefited them if we had had space in the ship
+to bring it. The floor of their stall was formed of the gravel on which
+the hut was built. On any future occasion it might be worth consideration
+whether a flooring of wood might add to their comfort. As you walked down
+this narrow passage you passed a line of heads, many of which would have
+a nip at you in the semi-darkness, and at the far end Oates had rigged up
+for himself a blubber stove, more elaborate than the one we had made
+with the odds and ends at Hut Point, but in principle the same, in that
+the fids of sealskin with the blubber attached to them were placed on a
+grid, and the heat generated caused them to drop their oil on to ashes
+below which formed the fire. This fire not only warmed the stable, but
+melted the snow to water the ponies and heated their bran mashes. I do
+not wonder that this warm companionable home appealed to their minds when
+they were exercising in the cold, dark, windy sea-ice: they were always
+trying to get rid of their leader, and if successful generally went
+straight back to the hut. Here they would dodge their pursuers until such
+time as they were sick of the game, when they quietly walked into the
+stable of their own accord to be welcomed with triumphant squeals and
+kickings by their companions.
+
+I have already spoken of their exercise. Their ration during the winter
+was as follows:
+
+    8 A.M. Chaff.
+
+    12 NOON. Snow. Chaff and oats or oil-cake alternate days.
+
+    5 P.M. Snow. Hot bran mash with oil-cake, or boiled oats and chaff;
+    finally a small quantity of hay.
+
+In the spring they were got into condition on hard food all cold, and by
+a carefully increased scale of exercise during the latter part of which
+they drew sledges with very light loads.
+
+Unfortunately I have no record as to what changes of feeding stuffs Oates
+would have made if it had been possible. Certainly we should not have
+brought the bales of compressed fodder, which as I have already
+explained,[144] was theoretically green wheat cut young, but practically
+no manner of use as a food, though of some use perhaps as bulk. Probably
+he would have used hay for this purpose at Winter Quarters had our stock
+of it not been very limited, for hay takes up too much room on a ship
+when every square inch of stowage space is of value. The original weights
+of fodder with which we left New Zealand were: compressed chaff, 30
+tons; hay, 5 tons; oil-cake, 5-6 tons; bran, 4-5 tons; and two kinds of
+oats, of which the white was better than the black. We wanted more bran
+than we had.[145] This does not exhaust our list of feeding stuffs, for
+one of our ponies called Snippets would eat blubber, and so far as I know
+it agreed with him.
+
+We left New Zealand with nineteen ponies, seventeen of which were
+destined for the Main Party and two for the help of Campbell in the
+exploration of King Edward VII.'s Land. Two of these died in the big gale
+at sea, and we landed fifteen ponies at Cape Evans in January. Of these
+we lost six on the Depôt Journey, while Hackenschmidt, who was a vicious
+beast, sickened and wasted away in our absence, for no particular reason
+that we could discover, until there was nothing to do but shoot him. Thus
+eight only out of the original seventeen Main Party ponies which started
+from New Zealand were left by the beginning of the winter.
+
+I have told[146] how, during our absence on the Depôt Journey, the ship
+had tried to land Campbell with his two ponies on King Edward VII.'s
+Land, but had been prevented from reaching it by pack ice. Coasting back
+in search of a landing place they found Amundsen in the Bay of Whales.
+Under the circumstances Campbell decided not to land his party there but
+to try and land on the north coast of South Victoria Land, in which he
+was finally successful. In the interval the ship returned to Cape Evans
+with the news, and since he was of opinion that his animals would be
+useless to him in that region he took the opportunity to swim the two
+ponies ashore, a distance of half a mile, for the ship could get no
+nearer and the sea-ice had gone. Thus we started the winter with
+Campbell's two ponies (Jehu and Chinaman), two ponies which had survived
+the Depôt Journey (Nobby and James Pigg), and six ponies which had been
+left at Cape Evans (Snatcher, Snippets, Bones, Victor, Michael and
+Christopher) a total of ten.
+
+Of these ten Christopher was the only real devil with vice, but he was a
+strong pony, and it was clear that he would be useful if he could be
+managed. Bones, Snatcher, Victor and Snippets were all useful ponies.
+Michael was a highly-strung nice beast, but his value was doubtful;
+Chinaman was more doubtful still, and it was questionable sometimes
+whether Jehu would be able to pull anything at all. This leaves Nobby and
+Jimmy Pigg, both of which were with us on the Depôt Journey. Nobby was
+the best of the two; he was the only survivor from the sea-ice disaster,
+and I am not sure that his rescue did not save the situation with regard
+to the Pole. Jimmy Pigg was wending his way slowly back from Corner Camp
+at this time and so was also saved. He was a weak pony but did extremely
+well on the Polar Journey. It may be coincidence that these two ponies,
+the only ponies which had gained previous sledging experience, did better
+according to their strength than any of the others, but I am inclined to
+believe that their familiarity with the conditions on the Barrier was of
+great value to them, doing away with much useless worry and exhaustion.
+
+And so it will be understood with what feelings of anxiety any cases of
+injury or illness to our ponies were regarded. The cases of injury were
+few and of small importance, thanks to the care with which they were
+exercised in the dark on ice which was by no means free from
+inequalities. Let me explain in passing that this ice is almost always
+covered by at least a thin layer of drifted snow and for the most part is
+not slippery. Every now and then there would be a great banging and
+crashing heard through the walls of the hut in the middle of the night.
+The watchman would run out, Oates put on his boots, Scott be audibly
+uneasy. It was generally Bones or Chinaman kicking their stalls, perhaps
+to keep themselves warm, but by the time the watchman had reached the
+stable he would be met by a line of sleepy faces blinking at him in the
+light of the electric torch, each saying plainly that he could not
+possibly have been responsible for a breach of the peace!
+
+But antics might easily lead to accidents, and more than once a pony was
+found twisted up in some way in his stall, or even to have fallen to the
+ground. Their heads were tied on either side to the stanchions of the
+stall, and so if they tried to lie down complications might arise. More
+alarming was the one serious case of illness, preceded by a slighter case
+of a similar nature in another pony. Jimmy Pigg had a slight attack of
+colic in the middle of June, but he was feeding all right again during
+the evening of the same day. It was at noon, July 14, that Bones went off
+his feed. This was followed by spasms of acute pain. "Every now and again
+he attempted to lie down, and Oates eventually thought it was wiser to
+allow him to do so. Once down, his head gradually drooped until he lay at
+length, every now and then twitching very horribly with the pain, and
+from time to time raising his head and even scrambling to his legs when
+it grew intense. I don't think I ever realized before how pathetic a
+horse could be under such conditions; no sound escapes him, his misery
+can only be indicated by those distressing spasms and by dumb movement of
+the head with a patient expression always suggestive of appeal."[147]
+Towards midnight it seemed that we were to lose him, and, apart from
+other considerations, we knew that unless we could keep all the surviving
+animals alive the risks of failure in the coming journey were much
+increased.
+
+"It was shortly after midnight when I [Scott] was told that the animal
+seemed a little easier. At 2.30 I was again in the stable and found the
+improvement had been maintained; the horse still lay on its side with
+outstretched head, but the spasms had ceased, its eye looked less
+distressed, and its ears pricked to occasional noises. As I stood looking
+it suddenly raised its head and rose without effort to its legs; then in
+a moment, as though some bad dream had passed, it began to nose at some
+hay and at its neighbour. Within three minutes it had drunk a bucket of
+water and had started to feed."[148]
+
+The immediate cause of the trouble was indicated by "a small ball of
+semi-fermented hay covered with mucus and containing tape-worms; so far
+not very serious, but unfortunately attached to this mass was a strip of
+the lining of the intestine."[149]
+
+The recovery of Bones was uninterrupted. Two day later another pony went
+off his feed and lay down, but was soon well again.
+
+Considerable speculation as to the original cause of this illness never
+found a satisfactory answer. Some traced it to a want of ventilation, and
+it is necessary to say that both the ponies who were ill stood next to
+the blubber stove; at any rate a big ventilator was fitted and more fresh
+air let in. Others traced it to the want of water, supposing that the
+animals would not eat as much snow as they would have drunk water; the
+easy remedy for this was to give them water instead of snow. We also gave
+them more salt than they had had before. Whatever the cause may have been
+we had no more of this colic, and the improvement in their condition
+until we started sledging was uninterrupted.
+
+All the ponies were treated for worms; it was also found that they had
+lice, which were eradicated after some time and difficulty by a wash of
+tobacco and water. I know that Oates wished that he had clipped the
+ponies at the beginning of the winter, believing that they would have
+grown far better coats if this had been done. He also would have wished
+for a loose box for each pony.
+
+No account of the ponies would be complete without mention of our Russian
+pony boy, Anton. He was small in height, but he was exceedingly strong
+and had a chest measurement of 40 inches.
+
+[Illustration: EREBUS AND LANDS END]
+
+[Illustration: EREBUS BEHIND GREAT RAZORBACK]
+
+I believe both Anton and Dimitri, the Russian dog driver, were brought
+originally to look after the ponies and dogs on their way from Siberia to
+New Zealand. But they proved such good fellows and so useful that we were
+very glad to take them on the strength of the landing party. I fear that
+Anton, at any rate, did not realize what he was in for. When we arrived
+at Cape Crozier in the ship on our voyage south, and he saw the two great
+peaks of Ross Island in front and the Barrier Cliff disappearing in an
+unbroken wall below the eastern horizon, he imagined that he reached
+the South Pole, and was suitably elated. When the darkness of the winter
+closed down upon us, this apparently unnatural order of things so preyed
+upon his superstitious mind that he became seriously alarmed. Where the
+sea-ice joined the land in front of the hut was of course a working
+crack, caused by the rise and fall of the tide. Sometimes the sea-water
+found its way up, and Anton was convinced that the weird phosphorescent
+lights which danced up out of the sea were devils. In propitiation we
+found that he had sacrificed to them his most cherished luxury, his
+scanty allowance of cigarettes, which he had literally cast upon the
+waters in the darkness. It was natural that his thoughts should turn to
+the comforts of his Siberian home, and the one-legged wife whom he was
+going to marry there, and when it became clear that a another year would
+be spent in the South his mind was troubled. And so he went to Oates and
+asked him, "If I go away at the end of this year, will Captain Scott
+disinherit me?" In order to try and express his idea, for he knew little
+English, he had some days before been asking "what we called it when a
+father died and left his son nothing." Poor Anton!
+
+He looked long and anxiously for the ship, and with his kit-bag on his
+shoulder was amongst the first to trek across the ice to meet her. Having
+asked for and obtained a job of work there was no happier man on board:
+he never left her until she reached New Zealand. Nevertheless he was
+always cheerful, always working, and a most useful addition to our small
+community.
+
+It is still usual to talk of people living in complete married happiness
+when we really mean, so Mr. Bernard Shaw tells me, that they confine
+their quarrels to Thursday nights. If then I say that we lived this life
+for nearly three years, from the day when we left England until the day
+we returned to New Zealand, without any friction of any kind, I shall be
+supposed to be making a formal statement of somewhat limited truth. May I
+say that there is really no formality about it, and nothing but the
+truth. To be absolutely accurate I must admit to having seen a man in a
+very 'prickly' state on one occasion. That was all. It didn't last and
+may have been well justified for aught I know: I have forgotten what it
+was all about. Why we should have been more fortunate than polar
+travellers in general it is hard to say, but undoubtedly a very powerful
+reason was that we had no idle hours: there was no time to quarrel.
+
+Before we went South people were always saying, "You will get fed up with
+one another. What will you do all the dark winter?" As a matter of fact
+the difficulty was to get through with the work. Often after working all
+through a long night-watch officers carried on as a matter of course
+through the following day in order to clear off arrears. There was little
+reading or general relaxation during the day: certainly not before
+supper, if at all. And while no fixed hours for work were laid down, the
+custom was general that all hours between breakfast and supper should be
+so used.
+
+Our small company was desperately keen to obtain results. The youngest
+and most cynical pessimist must have had cause for wonder to see a body
+of healthy and not unintellectual men striving thus single-mindedly to
+add their small quota of scientific and geographical knowledge to the sum
+total of the world--with no immediate prospect of its practical utility.
+Laymen and scientists alike were determined to attain the objects to gain
+which they had set forth.
+
+And I believe that in a vague intangible way there was an ideal in front
+of and behind this work. It is really not desirable for men who do not
+believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind
+of life. The question constantly put to us in civilization was and still
+is: "What is the use? Is there gold? or Is there coal?" The commercial
+spirit of the present day can see no good in pure science: the English
+manufacturer is not interested in research which will not give him a
+financial return within one year: the city man sees in it only so much
+energy wasted on unproductive work: truly they are bound to the wheel of
+conventional life.
+
+Now unless a man believes that such a view is wrong he has no business to
+be 'down South.' Our magnetic and meteorological work may, I suppose,
+have a fairly immediate bearing upon commerce and shipping: otherwise I
+cannot imagine any branch of our labours which will do more at present
+than swell the central pool of unapplied knowledge. The members of this
+expedition believed that it was worth while to discover new land and new
+life, to reach the Southern Pole of the earth, to make elaborate
+meteorological and magnetic observations and extended geological surveys
+with all the other branches of research for which we were equipped. They
+were prepared to suffer great hardship; and some of them died for their
+beliefs. Without such ideals the spirit which certainly existed in our
+small community would have been impossible.
+
+But if the reasons for this happy state of our domestic life were due
+largely to the adaptability and keenness of the members of our small
+community, I doubt whether the frictions which have caused other
+expeditions to be less comfortable than they might have been, would have
+been avoided in our case, had it not been for the qualities in some of
+our men which set a fashion of hard work without any thought of personal
+gain.
+
+With all its troubles it is a good life. We came back from the Barrier,
+telling one another we loathed the place and nothing on earth should make
+us return. But now the Barrier comes back to us, with its clean, open
+life, and the smell of the cooker, and its soft sound sleep. So much of
+the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember
+half.
+
+We have forgotten--or nearly forgotten--how the loss of a biscuit crumb
+left a sense of injury which lasted for a week; how the greatest friends
+were so much on one another's nerves that they did not speak for days for
+fear of quarrelling; how angry we felt when the cook ran short on the
+weekly bag; how sick we were after the first meals when we could eat as
+much as we liked; how anxious we were when a man fell ill many hundreds
+of miles from home, and we had a fortnight of thick weather and had to
+find our depôts or starve. We remember the cry of _Camp Ho!_ which
+preceded the cup of tea which gave us five more miles that evening; the
+good fellowship which completed our supper after safely crossing a bad
+patch of crevasses; the square inch of plum pudding which celebrated our
+Christmas Day; the chanties we sang all over the Barrier as we marched
+our ponies along.
+
+We travelled for Science. Those three small embryos from Cape Crozier,
+that weight of fossils from Buckley Island, and that mass of material,
+less spectacular, but gathered just as carefully hour by hour in wind and
+drift, darkness and cold, were striven for in order that the world may
+have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead
+of on what it thinks.
+
+Some of our men were ambitious: some wanted money, others a name; some a
+help up the scientific ladder, others an F.R.S. Why not? But we had men
+who did not care a rap for money or fame. I do not believe it mattered to
+Wilson when he found that Amundsen had reached the Pole a few days before
+him--not much. Pennell would have been very bored if you had given him a
+knighthood. Lillie, Bowers, Priestley, Debenham, Atkinson and many others
+were much the same.
+
+But there is no love lost between the class of men who go out and do such
+work and the authorities at home who deal with their collections. I
+remember a conversation in the hut during the last bad winter. Men were
+arguing fiercely that professionally they lost a lot by being down South,
+that they fell behindhand in current work, got out of the running and so
+forth. There is a lot in that. And then the talk went on to the
+publication of results, and the way in which they would wish them done. A
+said he wasn't going to hand over his work to be mucked up by such and
+such a body at home; B said he wasn't going to have his buried in museum
+book-shelves never to be seen again; C said he would jolly well publish
+his own results in the scientific journals. And the ears of the armchair
+scientists who might deal with our hard-won specimens and observations
+should have been warm that night.
+
+At the time I felt a little indignant. It seemed to me that these men
+ought to think themselves lucky to be down South at all: there were
+thousands who would have liked to take their place. But now I
+understand quite a lot more than I did then. Science is a big thing if
+you can travel a Winter Journey in her cause and not regret it. I am
+not sure she is not bigger still if you can have dealings with
+scientists and continue to follow in her path.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [134] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 604.
+
+   [135] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 599, 602, 607.
+
+   [136] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii. p. 53.
+
+   [137] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 295.
+
+   [138] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 432-433.
+
+   [139] Ibid. p. 597.
+
+   [140] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 362.
+
+   [141] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 396.
+
+   [142] _With Scott: The Silver Lining_, Taylor, p. 240.
+
+   [143] F. G. Jackson, _A Thousand Days in the Arctic_, vol. ii. pp.
+         380-381.
+
+   [144] See p. 179.
+
+   [145] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 4.
+
+   [146] See pp. 130-134.
+
+   [147] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 352.
+
+   [148] Ibid. p. 353.
+
+   [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
+Butter                                                         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 sennegrass                                                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 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[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.
+
+[Illustration: 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 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.
+
+[Illustration: 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 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.
+
+By now we had realized that we must reverse the usual sledging routine
+and do everything slowly, wearing when possible the fur mitts which
+fitted over our woollen mitts, and always stopping whatever we were
+doing, directly we felt that any part of us was getting frozen, until the
+circulation was restored. Henceforward it was common for one or other of
+us to leave the other two to continue the camp work while he stamped
+about in the snow, beat his arms, or nursed some exposed part. But we
+could not restore the circulation of our feet like this--the only way
+then was to camp and get some hot water into ourselves before we took our
+foot-gear off. The difficulty was to know whether our feet were frozen or
+not, for the only thing we knew for certain was that we had lost all
+feeling in them. Wilson's knowledge as a doctor came in here: many a time
+he had to decide from our descriptions of our feet whether to camp or to
+go on for another hour. A wrong decision meant disaster, for if one of us
+had been crippled the whole party would have been placed in great
+difficulties. Probably we should all have died.
+
+On June 29 the temperature was -50° all day and there was sometimes a
+light breeze which was inclined to frost-bite our faces and hands. Owing
+to the weight of our two sledges and the bad surface our pace was not
+more than a slow and very heavy plod: at our lunch camp Wilson had the
+heel and sole of one foot frost-bitten, and I had two big toes. Bowers
+was never worried by frost-bitten feet.
+
+That night was very cold, the temperature falling to -66°, and it was
+-55° at breakfast on June 30. We had not shipped the eider-down linings
+to our sleeping-bags, in order to keep them dry as long as possible. My
+own fur bag was too big for me, and throughout this journey was more
+difficult to thaw out than the other two: on the other hand, it never
+split, as did Bill's.
+
+We were now getting into that cold bay which lies between the Hut Point
+Peninsula and Terror Point. It was known from old Discovery days that the
+Barrier winds are deflected from this area, pouring out into McMurdo
+Sound behind us, and into the Ross Sea at Cape Crozier in front. In
+consequence of the lack of high winds the surface of the snow is never
+swept and hardened and polished as elsewhere: it was now a mass of the
+hardest and smallest snow crystals, to pull through which in cold
+temperatures was just like pulling through sand. I have spoken elsewhere
+of Barrier surfaces, and how, when the cold is very great, sledge runners
+cannot melt the crystal points but only advance by rolling them over and
+over upon one another. That was the surface we met on this journey, and
+in soft snow the effect is accentuated. Our feet were sinking deep at
+every step.
+
+And so when we tried to start on June 30 we found we could not move both
+sledges together. There was nothing for it but to take one on at a time
+and come back for the other. This has often been done in daylight when
+the only risks run are those of blizzards which may spring up suddenly
+and obliterate tracks. Now in darkness it was more complicated. From 11
+A.M. to 3 P.M. there was enough light to see the big holes made by our
+feet, and we took on one sledge, trudged back in our tracks, and brought
+on the second. Bowers used to toggle and untoggle our harnesses when we
+changed sledges. Of course in this relay work we covered three miles in
+distance for every one mile forward, and even the single sledges were
+very hard pulling. When we lunched the temperature was -61°. After lunch
+the little light had gone, and we carried a naked lighted candle back
+with us when we went to find our second sledge. It was the weirdest kind
+of procession, three frozen men and a little pool of light. Generally we
+steered by Jupiter, and I never see him now without recalling his
+friendship in those days.
+
+We were very silent, it was not very easy to talk: but sledging is always
+a silent business. I remember a long discussion which began just now
+about cold snaps--was this the normal condition of the Barrier, or was it
+a cold snap?--what constituted a cold snap? The discussion lasted about a
+week. Do things slowly, always slowly, that was the burden of Wilson's
+leadership: and every now and then the question, Shall we go on? and the
+answer Yes. "I think we are all right as long as our appetites are good,"
+said Bill. Always patient, self-possessed, unruffled, he was the only man
+on earth, as I believe, who could have led this journey.
+
+That day we made 3¼ miles, and travelled 10 miles to do it. The
+temperature was -66° when we camped, and we were already pretty badly
+iced up. That was the last night I lay (I had written slept) in my big
+reindeer bag without the lining of eider-down which we each carried. For
+me it was a very bad night: a succession of shivering fits which I was
+quite unable to stop, and which took possession of my body for many
+minutes at a time until I thought my back would break, such was the
+strain placed upon it. They talk of chattering teeth: but when your body
+chatters you may call yourself cold. I can only compare the strain to
+that which I have been unfortunate enough to see in a case of lock-jaw.
+One of my big toes was frost-bitten, but I do not know for how long.
+Wilson was fairly comfortable in his smaller bag, and Bowers was snoring
+loudly. The minimum temperature that night as taken under the sledge was
+-69°; and as taken on the sledge was -75°. That is a hundred and seven
+degrees of frost.
+
+We did the same relay work on July 1, but found the pulling still harder;
+and it was all that we could do to move the one sledge forward. From now
+onwards Wilson and I, but not to the same extent Bowers, experienced a
+curious optical delusion when returning in our tracks for the second
+sledge. I have said that we found our way back by the light of a candle,
+and we found it necessary to go back in our same footprints. These holes
+became to our tired brains not depressions but elevations: hummocks over
+which we stepped, raising our feet painfully and draggingly. And then we
+remembered, and said what fools we were, and for a while we compelled
+ourselves to walk through these phantom hills. But it was no lasting
+good, and as the days passed we realized that we must suffer this
+absurdity, for we could not do anything else. But of course it took it
+out of us.
+
+During these days the blisters on my fingers were very painful. Long
+before my hands were frost-bitten, or indeed anything but cold, which was
+of course a normal thing, the matter inside these big blisters, which
+rose all down my fingers with only a skin between them, was frozen into
+ice. To handle the cooking gear or the food bags was agony; to start the
+primus was worse; and when, one day, I was able to prick six or seven of
+the blisters after supper and let the liquid matter out, the relief was
+very great. Every night after that I treated such others as were ready in
+the same way until they gradually disappeared. Sometimes it was difficult
+not to howl.
+
+I _did_ want to howl many times every hour of these days and nights, but
+I invented a formula instead, which I repeated to myself continually.
+Especially, I remember, it came in useful when at the end of the march
+with my feet frost-bitten, my heart beating slowly, my vitality at its
+lowest ebb, my body solid with cold, I used to seize the shovel and go on
+digging snow on to the tent skirting while the cook inside was trying to
+light the primus. "You've got it in the neck--stick it--stick it--you've
+got it in the neck," was the refrain, and I wanted every little bit of
+encouragement it would give me: then I would find myself repeating "Stick
+it--stick it--stick it--stick it," and then "You've got it in the neck."
+One of the joys of summer sledging is that you can let your mind wander
+thousands of miles away for weeks and weeks. Oates used to provision his
+little yacht (there was a pickled herring he was going to have): I
+invented the compactest little revolving bookcase which was going to hold
+not books, but pemmican and chocolate and biscuit and cocoa and sugar,
+and have a cooker on the top, and was going to stand always ready to
+quench my hunger when I got home: and we visited restaurants and theatres
+and grouse moors, and we thought of a pretty girl, or girls, and.... But
+now that was all impossible. Our conditions forced themselves upon us
+without pause: it was not possible to think of anything else. We got no
+respite. I found it best to refuse to let myself think of the past or the
+future--to live only for the job of the moment, and to compel myself to
+think only how to do it most efficiently. Once you let yourself
+imagine....
+
+This day also (July 1) we were harassed by a nasty little wind which blew
+in our faces. The temperature was -66°, and in such temperatures the
+effect of even the lightest airs is blighting, and immediately freezes
+any exposed part. But we all fitted the bits of wind-proof lined with
+fur which we had made in the hut, across our balaclavas in front of our
+noses, and these were of the greatest comfort. They formed other places
+upon which our breath could freeze, and the lower parts of our faces were
+soon covered with solid sheets of ice, which was in itself an additional
+protection. This was a normal and not uncomfortable condition during the
+journey: the hair on our faces kept the ice away from the skin, and for
+myself I would rather have the ice than be without it, until I want to
+get my balaclava off to drink my hoosh. We only made 2¼ miles, and it
+took 8 hours.
+
+It blew force 3 that night with a temperature of -65.2°, and there was
+some drift. This was pretty bad, but luckily the wind dropped to a light
+breeze by the time we were ready to start the next morning (July 2). The
+temperature was then -60°, and continued so all day, falling lower in the
+evening. At 4 P.M. we watched a bank of fog form over the peninsula to
+our left and noticed at the same time that our frozen mitts thawed out on
+our hands, and the outlines of the land as shown by the stars became
+obscured. We made 2½ miles with the usual relaying, and camped at 8 P.M.
+with the temperature -65°. It really was a terrible march, and parts of
+both my feet were frozen at lunch. After supper I pricked six or seven of
+the worst blisters, and the relief was considerable.
+
+I have met with amusement people who say, "Oh, we had minus fifty
+temperatures in Canada; they didn't worry _me_," or "I've been down to
+minus sixty something in Siberia." And then you find that they had nice
+dry clothing, a nice night's sleep in a nice aired bed, and had just
+walked out after lunch for a few minutes from a nice warm hut or an
+overheated train. And they look back upon it as an experience to be
+remembered. Well! of course as an experience of cold this can only be
+compared to eating a vanilla ice with hot chocolate cream after an
+excellent dinner at Claridge's. But in our present state we began to look
+upon minus fifties as a luxury which we did not often get.
+
+That evening, for the first time, we discarded our naked candle in
+favour of the rising moon. We had started before the moon on purpose, but
+as we shall see she gave us little light. However, we owed our escape
+from a very sticky death to her on one occasion.
+
+It was a little later on when we were among crevasses, with Terror above
+us, but invisible, somewhere on our left, and the Barrier pressure on our
+right. We were quite lost in the darkness, and only knew that we were
+running downhill, the sledge almost catching our heels. There had been no
+light all day, clouds obscured the moon, we had not seen her since
+yesterday. And quite suddenly a little patch of clear sky drifted, as it
+were, over her face, and she showed us three paces ahead a great crevasse
+with just a shining icy lid not much thicker than glass. We should all
+have walked into it, and the sledge would certainly have followed us
+down. After that I felt we had a chance of pulling through: God could not
+be so cruel as to have saved us just to prolong our agony.
+
+But at present we need not worry about crevasses; for we had not reached
+the long stretch where the moving Barrier, with the weight of many
+hundred miles of ice behind it, comes butting up against the slopes of
+Mount Terror, itself some eleven thousand feet high. Now we were still
+plunging ankle-deep in the mass of soft sandy snow which lies in the
+windless area. It seemed to have no bottom at all, and since the snow was
+much the same temperature as the air, our feet, as well as our bodies,
+got colder and colder the longer we marched: in ordinary sledging you
+begin to warm up after a quarter of an hour's pulling, here it was just
+the reverse. Even now I find myself unconsciously kicking the toes of my
+right foot against the heel of my left: a habit I picked up on this
+journey by doing it every time we halted. Well no. Not always. For there
+was one halt when we just lay on our backs and gazed up into the sky,
+where, so the others said, there was blazing the most wonderful aurora
+they had ever seen. I did not see it, being so near-sighted and unable to
+wear spectacles owing to the cold. The aurora was always before us as we
+travelled east, more beautiful than any seen by previous expeditions
+wintering in McMurdo Sound, where Erebus must have hidden the most
+brilliant displays. Now most of the sky was covered with swinging,
+swaying curtains which met in a great whirl overhead: lemon yellow, green
+and orange.
+
+The minimum this night was -65°, and during July 3 it ranged between -52°
+and -58°. We got forward only 2½ miles, and by this time I had silently
+made up my mind that we had not the ghost of a chance of reaching the
+penguins. I am sure that Bill was having a very bad time these nights,
+though it was an impression rather than anything else, for he never said
+so. We knew we did sleep, for we heard one another snore, and also we
+used to have dreams and nightmares; but we had little consciousness of
+it, and we were now beginning to drop off when we halted on the march.
+
+Our sleeping-bags were getting really bad by now, and already it took a
+long time to thaw a way down into them at night. Bill spread his in the
+middle, Bowers was on his right, and I was on his left. Always he
+insisted that I should start getting my legs into mine before _he_
+started: we were rapidly cooling down after our hot supper, and this was
+very unselfish of him. Then came seven shivering hours and first thing on
+getting out of our sleeping-bags in the morning we stuffed our personal
+gear into the mouth of the bag before it could freeze: this made a plug
+which when removed formed a frozen hole for us to push into as a start in
+the evening.
+
+We got into some strange knots when trying to persuade our limbs into our
+bags, and suffered terribly from cramp in consequence. We would wait and
+rub, but directly we tried to move again down it would come and grip our
+legs in a vice. We also, especially Bowers, suffered agony from cramp in
+the stomach. We let the primus burn on after supper now for a time--it
+was the only thing which kept us going--and when one who was holding the
+primus was seized with cramp we hastily took the lamp from him until the
+spasm was over. It was horrible to see Birdie's stomach cramp sometimes:
+he certainly got it much worse than Bill or I. I suffered a lot from
+heartburn especially in my bag at nights: we were eating a great
+proportion of fat and this was probably the cause. Stupidly I said
+nothing about it for a long time. Later when Bill found out, he soon made
+it better with the medical case.
+
+Birdie always lit the candle in the morning--so called and this was an
+heroic business. Moisture collected on our matches if you looked at them.
+Partly I suppose it was bringing them from outside into a comparatively
+warm tent; partly from putting boxes into pockets in our clothing.
+Sometimes it was necessary to try four or five boxes before a match
+struck. The temperature of the boxes and matches was about a hundred
+degrees of frost, and the smallest touch of the metal on naked flesh
+caused a frost-bite. If you wore mitts you could scarcely feel
+anything--especially since the tips of our fingers were already very
+callous. To get the first light going in the morning was a beastly cold
+business, made worse by having to make sure that it was at last time to
+get up. Bill insisted that we must lie in our bags seven hours every
+night.
+
+In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so
+many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so
+little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the
+Winter Journey and lived: later they went through the Polar Journey and
+died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how
+good their companionship was.
+
+Through all these days, and those which were to follow, the worst I
+suppose in their dark severity that men have ever come through alive, no
+single hasty or angry word passed their lips. When, later, we were sure,
+so far as we can be sure of anything, that we must die, they were
+cheerful, and so far as I can judge their songs and cheery words were
+quite unforced. Nor were they ever flurried, though always as quick as
+the conditions would allow in moments of emergency. It is hard that often
+such men must go first when others far less worthy remain.
+
+[Illustration: CAMPING AFTER DARK--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+There are those who write of Polar Expeditions as though the whole
+thing was as easy as possible. They are trusting, I suspect, in a public
+who will say, "What a fine fellow this is! we know what horrors he has
+endured, yet see, how little he makes of all his difficulties and
+hardships." Others have gone to the opposite extreme. I do not know that
+there is any use in trying to make a -18° temperature appear formidable
+to an uninitiated reader by calling it fifty degrees of frost. I want to
+do neither of these things. I am not going to pretend that this was
+anything but a ghastly journey, made bearable and even pleasant to look
+back upon by the qualities of my two companions who have gone. At the
+same time I have no wish to make it appear more horrible than it actually
+was: the reader need not fear that I am trying to exaggerate.
+
+During the night of July 3 the temperature dropped to -65°, but in the
+morning we wakened (we really did wake that morning) to great relief. The
+temperature was only -27° with the wind blowing some 15 miles an hour
+with steadily falling snow. It only lasted a few hours, and we knew it
+must be blowing a howling blizzard outside the windless area in which we
+lay, but it gave us time to sleep and rest, and get thoroughly thawed,
+and wet, and warm, inside our sleeping-bags. To me at any rate this
+modified blizzard was a great relief, though we all knew that our gear
+would be worse than ever when the cold came back. It was quite impossible
+to march. During the course of the day the temperature dropped to -44°:
+during the following night to -54°.
+
+The soft new snow which had fallen made the surface the next day (July 5)
+almost impossible. We relayed as usual, and managed to do eight hours'
+pulling, but we got forward only 1½ miles. The temperature ranged between
+-55° and -61°, and there was at one time a considerable breeze, the
+effect of which was paralysing. There was the great circle of a halo
+round the moon with a vertical shaft, and mock moons. We hoped that we
+were rising on to the long snow cape which marks the beginning of Mount
+Terror. That night the temperature was -75°; at breakfast -70°; at noon
+nearly -77°. The day lives in my memory as that on which I found out
+that records are not worth making. The thermometer as swung by Bowers
+after lunch at 5.51 P.M. registered -77.5°, which is 109½ degrees of
+frost, and is I suppose as cold as any one will want to endure in
+darkness and iced-up gear and clothes. The lowest temperature recorded by
+a Discovery Spring Journey party was -67.7°,[151] and in those days
+fourteen days was a long time for a Spring Party to be away sledging and
+they were in daylight. This was our tenth day out and we hoped to be away
+for six weeks.
+
+Luckily we were spared wind. Our naked candle burnt steadily as we
+trudged back in our tracks to fetch our other sledge, but if we touched
+metal for a fraction of a second with naked fingers we were frost-bitten.
+To fasten the strap buckles over the loaded sledge was difficult: to
+handle the cooker, or mugs, or spoons, the primus or oil can was worse.
+How Bowers managed with the meteorological instruments I do not know, but
+the meteorological log is perfectly kept. Yet as soon as you breathed
+near the paper it was covered with a film of ice through which the pencil
+would not bite. To handle rope was always cold and in these very low
+temperatures dreadfully cold work. The toggling up of our harnesses to
+the sledge we were about to pull, the untoggling at the end of the stage,
+the lashing up of our sleeping-bags in the morning, the fastening of the
+cooker to the top of the instrument box, were bad, but not nearly so bad
+as the smaller lashings which were now strings of ice. One of the worst
+was round the weekly food bag, and those round the pemmican, tea and
+butter bags inside were thinner still. But the real devil was the lashing
+of the tent door: it was like wire, and yet had to be tied tight. If you
+had to get out of the tent during the seven hours spent in our
+sleeping-bags you must tie a string as stiff as a poker, and re-thaw your
+way into a bag already as hard as a board. Our paraffin was supplied at a
+flash point suitable to low temperatures and was only a little milky: it
+was very difficult to splinter bits off the butter.
+
+The temperature that night was -75.8°, and I will not pretend that it did
+not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice
+below the circles of fire. Still we slept sometimes, and always we lay
+for seven hours. Again and again Bill asked us how about going back, and
+always we said no. Yet there was nothing I should have liked better: I
+was quite sure that to dream of Cape Crozier was the wildest lunacy. That
+day we had advanced 1½ miles by the utmost labour, and the usual relay
+work. This was quite a good march--and Cape Crozier is 67 miles from Cape
+Evans!
+
+More than once in my short life I have been struck by the value of the
+man who is blind to what appears to be a common-sense certainty: he
+achieves the impossible. We never spoke our thoughts: we discussed the
+Age of Stone which was to come, when we built our cosy warm rock hut on
+the slopes of Mount Terror, and ran our stove with penguin blubber, and
+pickled little Emperors in warmth and dryness. We were quite intelligent
+people, and we must all have known that we were not going to see the
+penguins and that it was folly to go forward. And yet with quiet
+perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men
+led on. I just did what I was told.
+
+It is desirable that the body should work, feed and sleep at regular
+hours, and this is too often forgotten when sledging. But just now we
+found we were unable to fit 8 hours marching and 7 hours in our
+sleeping-bags into a 24-hour day: the routine camp work took more than 9
+hours, such were the conditions. We therefore ceased to observe the quite
+imaginary difference between night and day, and it was noon on Friday
+(July 7) before we got away. The temperature was -68° and there was a
+thick white fog: generally we had but the vaguest idea where we were, and
+we camped at 10 P.M. after managing 1¾ miles for the day. But what a
+relief. Instead of labouring away, our hearts were beating more
+naturally: it was easier to camp, we had some feeling in our hands, and
+our feet had not gone to sleep. Birdie swung the thermometer and found
+it only -55°. "Now if we tell people that to get only 87 degrees of frost
+can be an enormous relief they simply won't believe us," I remember
+saying. Perhaps you won't but it was, all the same: and I wrote that
+night: "There is something after all rather good in doing something never
+done before." Things were looking up, you see.
+
+Our hearts were doing very gallant work. Towards the end of the march
+they were getting beaten and were finding it difficult to pump the blood
+out to our extremities. There were few days that Wilson and I did not get
+some part of our feet frost-bitten. As we camped, I suspect our hearts
+were beating comparatively slowly and weakly. Nothing could be done until
+a hot drink was ready--tea for lunch, hot water for supper. Directly we
+started to drink then the effect was wonderful: it was, said Wilson, like
+putting a hot-water bottle against your heart. The beats became very
+rapid and strong and you felt the warmth travelling outwards and
+downwards. Then you got your foot-gear off--puttees (cut in half and
+wound round the bottom of the trousers), finnesko, saennegrass, hair
+socks, and two pairs of woollen socks. Then you nursed back your feet and
+tried to believe you were glad--a frost-bite does not hurt until it
+begins to thaw. Later came the blisters, and then the chunks of dead
+skin.
+
+Bill was anxious. It seems that Scott had twice gone for a walk with him
+during the Winter, and tried to persuade him not to go, and only finally
+consented on condition that Bill brought us all back unharmed: we were
+Southern Journey men. Bill had a tremendous respect for Scott, and later
+when we were about to make an effort to get back home over the Barrier,
+and our case was very desperate, he was most anxious to leave no gear
+behind at Cape Crozier, even the scientific gear which could be of no use
+to us and of which we had plenty more at the hut. "Scott will never
+forgive me if I leave gear behind," he said. It is a good sledging
+principle, and the party which does not follow it, or which leaves some
+of its load to be fetched in later is seldom a good one: but it is a
+principle which can be carried to excess.
+
+And now Bill was feeling terribly responsible for both of us. He kept on
+saying that he was sorry, but he had never dreamed it was going to be as
+bad as this. He felt that having asked us to come he was in some way
+chargeable with our troubles. When leaders have this kind of feeling
+about their men they get much better results, if the men are good: if men
+are bad or even moderate they will try and take advantage of what they
+consider to be softness.
+
+The temperature on the night of July 7 was -59°.
+
+On July 8 we found the first sign that we might be coming to an end of
+this soft, powdered, arrowrooty snow. It was frightfully hard pulling;
+but every now and then our finnesko pierced a thin crust before they sank
+right in. This meant a little wind, and every now and then our feet came
+down on a hard slippery patch under the soft snow. We were surrounded by
+fog which walked along with us, and far above us the moon was shining on
+its roof. Steering was as difficult as the pulling, and four hours of the
+hardest work only produced 1¼ miles in the morning, and three more hours
+1 mile in the afternoon--and the temperature was -57° with a
+breeze--horrible!
+
+In the early morning of the next day snow began to fall and the fog was
+dense: when we got up we could see nothing at all anywhere. After the
+usual four hours to get going in the morning we settled that it was
+impossible to relay, for we should never be able to track ourselves back
+to the second sledge. It was with very great relief that we found we
+could move both sledges together, and I think this was mainly due to the
+temperature which had risen to -36°.
+
+This was our fourth day of fog in addition to the normal darkness, and we
+knew we must be approaching the land. It would be Terror Point, and the
+fog is probably caused by the moist warm air coming up from the sea
+through the pressure cracks and crevasses; for it is supposed that the
+Barrier here is afloat.
+
+I wish I could take you on to the great Ice Barrier some calm evening
+when the sun is just dipping in the middle of the night and show you the
+autumn tints on Ross Island. A last look round before turning in, a good
+day's march behind, enough fine fat pemmican inside you to make you
+happy, the homely smell of tobacco from the tent, a pleasant sense of
+soft fur and the deep sleep to come. And all the softest colours God has
+made are in the snow; on Erebus to the west, where the wind can scarcely
+move his cloud of smoke; and on Terror to the east, not so high, and more
+regular in form. How peaceful and dignified it all is.
+
+That was what you might have seen four months ago had you been out on the
+Barrier plain. Low down on the extreme right or east of the land there
+was a black smudge of rock peeping out from great snow-drifts: that was
+the Knoll, and close under it were the cliffs of Cape Crozier, the Knoll
+looking quite low and the cliffs invisible, although they are eight
+hundred feet high, a sheer precipice falling to the sea.
+
+It is at Cape Crozier that the Barrier edge, which runs for four hundred
+miles as an ice-cliff up to 200 feet high, meets the land. The Barrier is
+moving against this land at a rate which is sometimes not much less than
+a mile in a year. Perhaps you can imagine the chaos which it piles up:
+there are pressure ridges compared to which the waves of the sea are like
+a ploughed field. These are worst at Cape Crozier itself, but they extend
+all along the southern slopes of Mount Terror, running parallel with the
+land, and the disturbance which Cape Crozier makes is apparent at Corner
+Camp some forty miles back on the Barrier in the crevasses we used to
+find and the occasional ridges we had to cross.
+
+In the Discovery days the pressure just where it hit Cape Crozier formed
+a small bay, and on the sea-ice frozen in this bay the men of the
+Discovery found the only Emperor penguin rookery which had ever been
+seen. The ice here was not blown out by the blizzards which cleared the
+Ross Sea, and open water or open leads were never far away. This gave the
+Emperors a place to lay their eggs and an opportunity to find their food.
+We had therefore to find our way along the pressure to the Knoll, and
+thence penetrate _through_ the pressure to the Emperors' Bay. And we had
+to do it in the dark.
+
+Terror Point, which we were approaching in the fog, is a short twenty
+miles from the Knoll, and ends in a long snow-tongue running out into the
+Barrier. The way had been travelled a good many times in Discovery days
+and in daylight, and Wilson knew there was a narrow path, free from
+crevasses, which skirted along between the mountain and the pressure
+ridges running parallel to it. But it is one thing to walk along a
+corridor by day, and quite another to try to do so at night, especially
+when there are no walls by which you can correct your course--only
+crevasses. Anyway, Terror Point must be somewhere close to us now, and
+vaguely in front of us was that strip of snow, neither Barrier nor
+mountain, which was our only way forward.
+
+We began to realize, now that our eyes were more or less out of action,
+how much we could do with our feet and ears. The effect of walking in
+finnesko is much the same as walking in gloves, and you get a sense of
+touch which nothing else except bare feet could give you. Thus we could
+feel every small variation in surface, every crust through which our feet
+broke, every hardened patch below the soft snow. And soon we began to
+rely more and more upon the sound of our footsteps to tell us whether we
+were on crevasses or solid ground. From now onwards we were working among
+crevasses fairly constantly. I loathe them in full daylight when much can
+be done to avoid them, and when if you fall into them you can at any rate
+see where the sides are, which way they run and how best to scramble out;
+when your companions can see how to stop the sledge to which you are all
+attached by your harness; how most safely to hold the sledge when
+stopped; how, if you are dangling fifteen feet down in a chasm, to work
+above you to get you up to the surface again. And then our clothes were
+generally something like clothes. Even under the ideal conditions of good
+light, warmth and no wind, crevasses are beastly, whether you are pulling
+over a level and uniform snow surface, never knowing what moment will
+find you dropping into some bottomless pit, or whether you are rushing
+for the Alpine rope and the sledge, to help some companion who has
+disappeared. I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore
+and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at
+the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour. On
+the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head
+first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25
+minutes. And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold
+when the jerk came. But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to
+our days of blind-man's buff with the Emperor penguins among the
+crevasses of Cape Crozier.
+
+Our troubles were greatly increased by the state of our clothes. If we
+had been dressed in lead we should have been able to move our arms and
+necks and heads more easily than we could now. If the same amount of
+icing had extended to our legs I believe we should still be there,
+standing unable to move: but happily the forks of our trousers still
+remained movable. To get into our canvas harnesses was the most absurd
+business. Quite in the early days of our journey we met with this
+difficulty, and somewhat foolishly decided not to take off our harness
+for lunch. The harnesses thawed in the tent, and froze back as hard as
+boards. Likewise our clothing was hard as boards and stuck out from our
+bodies in every imaginable fold and angle. To fit one board over the
+other required the united efforts of the would-be wearer and his two
+companions, and the process had to be repeated for each one of us twice a
+day. Goodness knows how long it took; but it cannot have been less than
+five minutes' thumping at each man.
+
+As we approached Terror Point in the fog we sensed that we had risen and
+fallen over several rises. Every now and then we felt hard slippery snow
+under our feet. Every now and then our feet went through crusts in the
+surface. And then quite suddenly, vague, indefinable, monstrous, there
+loomed a something ahead. I remember having a feeling as of ghosts about
+as we untoggled our harnesses from the sledge, tied them together, and
+thus roped walked upwards on that ice. The moon was showing a ghastly
+ragged mountainous edge above us in the fog, and as we rose we found that
+we were on a pressure ridge. We stopped, looked at one another, and then
+_bang_--right under our feet. More bangs, and creaks and groans; for that
+ice was moving and splitting like glass. The cracks went off all round
+us, and some of them ran along for hundreds of yards. Afterwards we got
+used to it, but at first the effect was very jumpy. From first to last
+during this journey we had plenty of variety and none of that monotony
+which is inevitable in sledging over long distances of Barrier in summer.
+Only the long shivering fits following close one after the other all the
+time we lay in our dreadful sleeping-bags, hour after hour and night
+after night in those temperatures--they were as monotonous as could be.
+Later we got frost-bitten even as we lay in our sleeping-bags. Things are
+getting pretty bad when you get frost-bitten in your bag.
+
+There was only a glow where the moon was; we stood in a moonlit fog, and
+this was sufficient to show the edge of another ridge ahead, and yet
+another on our left. We were utterly bewildered. The deep booming of the
+ice continued, and it may be that the tide has something to do with this,
+though we were many miles from the ordinary coastal ice. We went back,
+toggled up to our sledges again and pulled in what we thought was the
+right direction, always with that feeling that the earth may open
+underneath your feet which you have in crevassed areas. But all we found
+were more mounds and banks of snow and ice, into which we almost ran
+before we saw them. We were clearly lost. It was near midnight, and I
+wrote, "it may be the pressure ridges or it may be Terror, it is
+impossible to say,--and I should think it is impossible to move till it
+clears. We were steering N.E. when we got here and returned S.W. till we
+seemed to be in a hollow and camped."
+
+The temperature had been rising from -36° at 11 A.M. and it was now -27°;
+snow was falling and nothing whatever could be seen. From under the tent
+came noises as though some giant was banging a big empty tank. All the
+signs were for a blizzard, and indeed we had not long finished our supper
+and were thawing our way little by little into our bags when the wind
+came away from the south. Before it started we got a glimpse of black
+rock and knew we must be in the pressure ridges where they nearly join
+Mount Terror.
+
+It is with great surprise that in looking up the records I find that
+blizzard lasted three days, the temperature and wind both rising till it
+was +9° and blowing force 9 on the morning of the second day (July 11).
+On the morning of the third day (July 12) it was blowing storm force
+(10). The temperature had thus risen over eighty degrees.
+
+It was not an uncomfortable time. Wet and warm, the risen temperature
+allowed all our ice to turn to water, and we lay steaming and beautifully
+liquid, and wondered sometimes what we should be like when our gear froze
+up once more. But we did not do much wondering, I suspect: we slept. From
+that point of view these blizzards were a perfect Godsend.
+
+We also revised our food rations. From the moment we started to prepare
+for this journey we were asked by Scott to try certain experiments in
+view of the Plateau stage of the Polar Journey the following summer. It
+was supposed that the Plateau stage would be the really tough part of the
+Polar Journey, and no one then dreamed that harder conditions could be
+found in the middle of the Barrier in March than on the Plateau, ten
+thousand feet higher, in February. In view of the extreme conditions we
+knew we must meet on this winter journey, far harder of course in point
+of weather than anything experienced on the Polar Journey, we had
+determined to simplify our food to the last degree. We only brought
+pemmican, biscuit, butter and tea: and tea is not a food, only a pleasant
+stimulant, and hot: the pemmican was excellent and came from Beauvais,
+Copenhagen.
+
+[Illustration: CAMP WORK IN A BLIZZARD, PASSING IN THE COOKER--E. A.
+Wilson, del.]
+
+The immediate advantage of this was that we had few food bags to handle
+for each meal. If the air temperature is 100 degrees of frost, then
+everything in the air is about 100 degrees of frost too. You have only to
+untie the lashings of one bag in a -70° temperature, with your feet
+frozen and your fingers just nursed back after getting a match to strike
+for the candle (you will have tried several boxes--metal), to realize
+this as an advantage.
+
+The immediate and increasingly pressing disadvantage is that you have no
+sugar. Have you ever had a craving for sugar which never leaves you, even
+when asleep? It is unpleasant. As a matter of fact the craving for sweet
+things never seriously worried us on this journey, and there must have
+been some sugar in our biscuits which gave a pleasant sweetness to our
+mid-day tea or nightly hot water when broken up and soaked in it. These
+biscuits were specially made for us by Huntley and Palmer: their
+composition was worked out by Wilson and that firm's chemist, and is a
+secret. But they are probably the most satisfying biscuit ever made, and
+I doubt whether they can be improved upon. There were two kinds, called
+Emergency and Antarctic, but there was I think little difference between
+them except in the baking. A well-baked biscuit was good to eat when
+sledging if your supply of food was good: but if you were very hungry an
+underbaked one was much preferred. By taking individually different
+quantities of biscuit, pemmican and butter we were able roughly to test
+the proportions of proteids, fats and carbo-hydrates wanted by the human
+body under such extreme circumstances. Bill was all for fat, starting
+with 8 oz. butter, 12 oz. pemmican and only 12 oz. biscuit a day. Bowers
+told me he was going for proteids, 16 oz. pemmican and 16 oz. biscuit,
+and suggested I should go the whole hog on carbo-hydrates. I did not like
+this, since I knew I should want more fat, but the rations were to be
+altered as necessary during the journey, so there was no harm in trying.
+So I started with 20 oz. of biscuit and 12 oz. of pemmican a day.
+
+Bowers was all right (this was usual with him), but he did not eat all
+his extra pemmican. Bill could not eat all his extra butter, but was
+satisfied. I got hungry, certainly got more frost-bitten than the
+others, and wanted more fat. I also got heartburn. However, before taking
+more fat I increased my biscuits to 24 oz., but this did not satisfy me;
+I wanted fat. Bill and I now took the same diet, he giving me 4 oz. of
+butter which he could not eat, and I giving him 4 oz. of biscuit which
+did not satisfy my wants. We both therefore had 12 oz. pemmican, 16 oz
+biscuit and 4 oz. butter a day, but we did not always finish our butter.
+This is an extremely good ration, and we had enough to eat during most of
+this journey. We certainly could not have faced the conditions without.
+
+I will not say that I was entirely easy in my mind as we lay out that
+blizzard somewhere off Terror Point; I don't know how the others were
+feeling. The unearthly banging going on underneath us may have had
+something to do with it. But we were quite lost in the pressure and it
+might be the deuce and all to get out in the dark. The wind eddied and
+swirled quite out of its usual straightforward way, and the tent got
+badly snowed up: our sledge had disappeared long ago. The position was
+not altogether a comfortable one.
+
+Tuesday night and Wednesday it blew up to force 10, temperature from -7°
+to +2°. And then it began to modify and get squally. By 3 A.M. on
+Thursday (July 13) the wind had nearly ceased, the temperature was
+falling and the stars were shining through detached clouds. We were soon
+getting our breakfast, which always consisted of tea, followed by
+pemmican. We soaked our biscuits in both. Then we set to work to dig out
+the sledges and tent, a big job taking several hours. At last we got
+started. In that jerky way in which I was still managing to jot a few
+sentences down each night as a record, I wrote:
+
+"Did 7½ miles during day--seems a marvellous run--rose and fell over
+several ridges of Terror--in afternoon suddenly came on huge crevasse on
+one of these--we were quite high on Terror--moon saved us walking in--it
+might have taken sledge and all."
+
+To do seven miles in a day, a distance which had taken us nearly a week
+in the past, was very heartening. The temperature was between -20° and
+-30° all day, and that was good too. When crossing the undulations which
+ran down out of the mountain into the true pressure ridges on our right
+we found that the wind which came down off the mountain struck along the
+top of the undulation, and flowing each way, caused a N.E. breeze on one
+side and a N.W. breeze on the other. There seemed to be wind in the sky,
+and the blizzard had not cleared as far away as we should have wished.
+
+During the time through which we had come it was by burning more oil than
+is usually allowed for cooking that we kept going at all. After each meal
+was cooked we allowed the primus to burn on for a while and thus warmed
+up the tent. Then we could nurse back our frozen feet and do any
+necessary little odd jobs. More often we just sat and nodded for a few
+minutes, keeping one another from going too deeply to sleep. But it was
+running away with the oil. We started with 6 one-gallon tins (those tins
+Scott had criticized), and we had now used four of them. At first we said
+we must have at least two one-gallon tins with which to go back; but by
+now our estimate had come down to one full gallon tin, and two full
+primus lamps. Our sleeping-bags were awful. It took me, even as early in
+the journey as this, an hour of pushing and thumping and cramp every
+night to thaw out enough of mine to get into it at all. Even that was not
+so bad as lying in them when we got there.
+
+Only -35° but "a very bad night" according to my diary. We got away in
+good time, but it was a ghastly day and my nerves were quivering at the
+end, for we could not find that straight and narrow way which led between
+the crevasses on either hand. Time after time we found we were out of our
+course by the sudden fall of the ground beneath our feet--in we went and
+then--"are we too far right?"--nobody knows--"well let's try nearer in to
+the mountain," and so forth! "By hard slogging 2¾ miles this
+morning--then on in thick gloom which suddenly lifted and we found
+ourselves under a huge great mountain of pressure ridge looking black in
+shadow. We went on, bending to the left, when Bill fell and put his arm
+into a crevasse. We went over this and another, and some time after got
+somewhere up to the left, and both Bill and I put a foot into a crevasse.
+We sounded all about and everywhere was hollow, and so we ran the sledge
+down over it and all was well."[152] Once we got right into the pressure
+and took a longish time to get out again. Bill lengthened his trace out
+with the Alpine rope now and often afterwards so he found the crevasses
+well ahead of us and the sledge: nice for us but not so nice for Bill.
+Crevasses in the dark _do_ put your nerves on edge.
+
+When we started next morning (July 15) we could see on our left front and
+more or less on top of us the Knoll, which is a big hill whose
+precipitous cliffs to seaward form Cape Crozier. The sides of it sloped
+down towards us, and pressing against its ice-cliffs on ahead were miles
+and miles of great pressure ridges, along which we had travelled, and
+which hemmed us in. Mount Terror rose ten thousand feet high on our left,
+and was connected with the Knoll by a great cup-like drift of
+wind-polished snow. The slope of this in one place runs gently out on to
+the corridor along which we had sledged, and here we turned and started
+to pull our sledges up. There were no crevasses, only the great drift of
+snow, so hard that we used our crampons just as though we had been on
+ice, and as polished as the china sides of a giant cup which it
+resembled. For three miles we slogged up, until we were only 150 yards
+from the moraine shelf where we were going to build our hut of rocks and
+snow. This moraine was above us on our left, the twin peaks of the Knoll
+were across the cup on our right; and here, 800 feet up the mountain
+side, we pitched our last camp.
+
+We had arrived.
+
+What should we call our hut? How soon could we get our clothes and bags
+dry? How would the blubber stove work? Would the penguins be there? "It
+seems too good to be true, 19 days out. Surely seldom has any one been so
+wet; our bags hardly possible to get into, our wind-clothes just frozen
+boxes. Birdie's patent balaclava is like iron--it is wonderful how our
+cares have vanished."[153]
+
+It was evening, but we were so keen to begin that we went straight up to
+the ridge above our camp, where the rock cropped out from the snow. We
+found that most of it was _in situ_ but that there were plenty of
+boulders, some gravel, and of course any amount of the icy snow which
+fell away below us down to our tent, and the great pressure about a mile
+beyond. Between us and that pressure, as we were to find out afterwards,
+was a great ice-cliff. The pressure ridges, and the Great Ice Barrier
+beyond, were at our feet; the Ross Sea edge but some four miles away. The
+Emperors must be somewhere round that shoulder of the Knoll which hides
+Cape Crozier itself from our view.
+
+Our scheme was to build an igloo with rock walls, banked up with snow,
+using a nine-foot sledge as a ridge beam, and a large sheet of green
+Willesden canvas as a roof. We had also brought a board to form a lintel
+over the door. Here with the stove, which was to be fed with blubber from
+the penguins, we were to have a comfortable warm home whence we would
+make excursions to the rookery perhaps four miles away. Perhaps we would
+manage to get our tent down to the rookery itself and do our scientific
+work there on the spot, leaving our nice hut for a night or more. That is
+how we planned it.
+
+That same night "we started to dig in under a great boulder on the top of
+the hill, hoping to make this a large part of one of the walls of the
+hut, but the rock came close underneath and stopped us. We then chose a
+moderately level piece of moraine about twelve feet away, and just under
+the level of the top of the hill, hoping that here in the lee of the
+ridge we might escape a good deal of the tremendous winds which we knew
+were common. Birdie gathered rocks from over the hill, nothing was too
+big for him; Bill did the banking up outside while I built the wall with
+the boulders. The rocks were good, the snow, however, was blown so hard
+as to be practically ice; a pick made little impression upon it, and the
+only way was to chip out big blocks gradually with the small shovel. The
+gravel was scanty, but good when there was any. Altogether things looked
+very hopeful when we turned in to the tent some 150 yards down the slope,
+having done about half one of the long walls."[154]
+
+The view from eight hundred feet up the mountain was magnificent and I
+got my spectacles out and cleared the ice away time after time to look.
+To the east a great field of pressure ridges below, looking in the
+moonlight as if giants had been ploughing with ploughs which made furrows
+fifty or sixty feet deep: these ran right up to the Barrier edge, and
+beyond was the frozen Ross Sea, lying flat, white and peaceful as though
+such things as blizzards were unknown. To the north and north-east the
+Knoll. Behind us Mount Terror on which we stood, and over all the grey
+limitless Barrier seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague,
+ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness. God! What a
+place!
+
+"There was now little moonlight or daylight, but for the next forty-eight
+hours we used both to their utmost, being up at all times by day and
+night, and often working on when there was great difficulty in seeing
+anything; digging by the light of the hurricane lamp. By the end of two
+days we had the walls built, and banked up to one or two feet from the
+top; we were to fit the roof cloth close before banking up the rest. The
+great difficulty in banking was the hardness of the snow, it being
+impossible to fill in the cracks between the blocks which were more like
+paving-stones than anything else. The door was in, being a triangular
+tent doorway, with flaps which we built close in to the walls, cementing
+it with snow and rocks. The top folded over a plank and the bottom was
+dug into the ground."[155]
+
+Birdie was very disappointed that we could not finish the whole thing
+that day: he was nearly angry about it, but there was a lot to do yet and
+we were tired out. We turned out early the next morning (Tuesday 18th) to
+try and finish the igloo, but it was blowing too hard. When we got to
+the top we did some digging but it was quite impossible to get the roof
+on, and we had to leave it. We realized that day that it blew much harder
+at the top of the slope than where our tent was. It was bitterly cold up
+there that morning with a wind force 4-5 and a minus thirty temperature.
+
+The oil question was worrying us quite a lot. We were now well in to the
+fifth of our six tins, and economizing as much as possible, often having
+only two hot meals a day. We had to get down to the Emperor penguins
+somehow and get some blubber to run the stove which had been made for us
+in the hut. The 19th being a calm fine day we started at 9.30, with an
+empty sledge, two ice-axes, Alpine rope, harnesses and skinning tools.
+
+Wilson had made this journey through the Cape Crozier pressure ridges
+several times in the Discovery days. But then they had daylight, and they
+had found a practicable way close under the cliffs which at the present
+moment were between us and the ridges.
+
+As we neared the bottom of the mountain slope, farther to the north than
+we had previously gone, we had to be careful about crevasses, but we soon
+hit off the edge of the cliff and skirted along it until it petered out
+on the same level as the Barrier. Turning left handed we headed towards
+the sea-ice, knowing that there were some two miles of pressure between
+us and Cape Crozier itself. For about half a mile it was fair going,
+rounding big knobs of pressure but always managing to keep more or less
+on the flat and near the ice-cliff which soon rose to a very great height
+on our left. Bill's idea was to try and keep close under this cliff,
+along that same Discovery way which I have mentioned above. They never
+arrived there early enough for the eggs in those days; the chicks were
+hatched. Whether we should now find any Emperors, and if so whether they
+would have any eggs, was by no means certain.
+
+However, we soon began to get into trouble, meeting several crevasses
+every few yards, and I have no doubt crossing scores of others of which
+we had no knowledge. Though we hugged the cliffs as close as possible we
+found ourselves on the top of the first pressure ridge, separated by a
+deep gulf from the ice-slope which we wished to reach. Then we were in a
+great valley between the first and second ridges: we got into huge heaps
+of ice pressed up in every shape on every side, crevassed in every
+direction: we slithered over snow-slopes and crawled along drift ridges,
+trying to get in towards the cliffs. And always we came up against
+impossible places and had to crawl back. Bill led on a length of Alpine
+rope fastened to the toggle of the sledge; Birdie was in his harness also
+fastened to the toggle, and I was in my harness fastened to the rear of
+the sledge, which was of great use to us both as a bridge and a ladder.
+
+Two or three times we tried to get down the ice-slopes to the
+comparatively level road under the cliff, but it was always too great a
+drop. In that dim light every proportion was distorted; some of the
+places we actually did manage to negotiate with ice-axes and Alpine rope
+looked absolute precipices, and there were always crevasses at the bottom
+if you slipped. On the way back I did slip into one of these and was
+hauled out by the other two standing on the wall above me.
+
+We then worked our way down into the hollow between the first and second
+large pressure ridges, and I believe on to the top of the second. The
+crests here rose fifty or sixty feet. After this I don't know where we
+went. Our best landmarks were patches of crevasses, sometimes three or
+four in a few footsteps. The temperatures were lowish (-37°), it was
+impossible for me to wear spectacles, and this was a tremendous
+difficulty to me and handicap to the party: Bill would find a crevasse
+and point it out; Birdie would cross; and then time after time, in trying
+to step over or climb over on the sledge, I put my feet right into the
+middle of the cracks. This day I went well in at least six times; once,
+when we were close to the sea, rolling into and out of one and then down
+a steep slope until brought up by Birdie and Bill on the rope.
+
+[Illustration: A PROCESSION OF EMPERORS]
+
+[Illustration: THE KNOLL BEHIND THE CLIFFS OF CAPE CROZIER]
+
+We blundered along until we got into a great cul-de-sac which probably
+formed the end of the two ridges, where they butted on to the sea-ice. On
+all sides rose great walls of battered ice with steep snow-slopes in
+the middle, where we slithered about and blundered into crevasses. To the
+left rose the huge cliff of Cape Crozier, but we could not tell whether
+there were not two or three pressure ridges between us and it, and though
+we tried at least four ways, there was no possibility of getting forward.
+
+And then we heard the Emperors calling.
+
+Their cries came to us from the sea-ice we could not see, but which must
+have been a chaotic quarter of a mile away. They came echoing back from
+the cliffs, as we stood helpless and tantalized. We listened and realized
+that there was nothing for it but to return, for the little light which
+now came in the middle of the day was going fast, and to be caught in
+absolute darkness there was a horrible idea. We started back on our
+tracks and almost immediately I lost my footing and rolled down a slope
+into a crevasse. Birdie and Bill kept their balance and I clambered back
+to them. The tracks were very faint and we soon began to lose them.
+Birdie was the best man at following tracks that I have ever known, and
+he found them time after time. But at last even he lost them altogether
+and we settled we must just go ahead. As a matter of fact, we picked them
+up again, and by then were out of the worst: but we were glad to see the
+tent.
+
+The next morning (Thursday, June 20) we started work on the igloo at 3
+A.M. and managed to get the canvas roof on in spite of a wind which
+harried us all that day. Little did we think what that roof had in store
+for us as we packed it in with snow blocks, stretching it over our second
+sledge, which we put athwartships across the middle of the longer walls.
+The windward (south) end came right down to the ground and we tied it
+securely to rocks before packing it in. On the other three sides we had a
+good two feet or more of slack all round, and in every case we tied it to
+rocks by lanyards at intervals of two feet. The door was the difficulty,
+and for the present we left the cloth arching over the stones, forming a
+kind of portico. The whole was well packed in and over with slabs of hard
+snow, but there was no soft snow with which to fill up the gaps between
+the blocks. However, we felt already that nothing could drag that roof
+out of its packing, and subsequent events proved that we were right.
+
+It was a bleak job for three o'clock in the morning before breakfast, and
+we were glad to get back to the tent and a meal, for we meant to have
+another go at the Emperors that day. With the first glimpse of light we
+were off for the rookery again.
+
+But we now knew one or two things about that pressure which we had not
+known twenty-four hours ago; for instance, that there was a lot of
+alteration since the Discovery days and that probably the pressure was
+bigger. As a matter of fact it has been since proved by photographs that
+the ridges now ran out three-quarters of a mile farther into the sea than
+they did ten years before. We knew also that if we entered the pressure
+at the only place where the ice-cliffs came down to the level of the
+Barrier, as we did yesterday, we could neither penetrate to the rookery
+nor get in under the cliffs where formerly a possible way had been found.
+There was only one other thing to do--to go over the cliff. And this was
+what we proposed to try and do.
+
+Now these ice-cliffs are some two hundred feet high, and I felt
+uncomfortable, especially in the dark. But as we came back the day before
+we had noticed at one place a break in the cliffs from which there hung a
+snow-drift. It _might_ be possible to get down that drift.
+
+And so, all harnessed to the sledge, with Bill on a long lead out in
+front and Birdie and myself checking the sledge behind, we started down
+the slope which ended in the cliff, which of course we could not see. We
+crossed a number of small crevasses, and soon we knew we must be nearly
+there. Twice we crept up to the edge of the cliff with no success, and
+then we found the slope: more, we got down it without great difficulty
+and it brought us out just where we wanted to be, between the land cliffs
+and the pressure.
+
+[Illustration: THE BARRIER PRESSURE AT CAPE CROZIER]
+
+Then began the most exciting climb among the pressure that you can
+imagine. At first very much as it was the day before--pulling
+ourselves and one another up ridges, slithering down slopes, tumbling
+into and out of crevasses and holes of all sorts, we made our way along
+under the cliffs which rose higher and higher above us as we neared the
+black lava precipices which form Cape Crozier itself. We straddled along
+the top of a snow ridge with a razor-backed edge, balancing the sledge
+between us as we wriggled: on our right was a drop of great depth with
+crevasses at the bottom, on our left was a smaller drop also crevassed.
+We crawled along, and I can tell you it was exciting work in the more
+than half darkness. At the end was a series of slopes full of crevasses,
+and finally we got right in under the rock on to moraine, and here we had
+to leave the sledge.
+
+We roped up, and started to worry along under the cliffs, which had now
+changed from ice to rock, and rose 800 feet above us. The tumult of
+pressure which climbed against them showed no order here. Four hundred
+miles of moving ice behind it had just tossed and twisted those giant
+ridges until Job himself would have lacked words to reproach their Maker.
+We scrambled over and under, hanging on with our axes, and cutting steps
+where we could not find a foothold with our crampons. And always we got
+towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began to look as if we were
+going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a
+single glance told us we could never cross. One of the largest pressure
+ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff. We seemed to be
+stopped, when Bill found a black hole, something like a fox's earth,
+disappearing into the bowels of the ice. We looked at it: "Well, here
+goes!" he said, and put his head in, and disappeared. Bowers likewise. It
+was a longish way, but quite possible to wriggle along, and presently I
+found myself looking out of the other side with a deep gully below me,
+the rock face on one hand and the ice on the other. "Put your back
+against the ice and your feet against the rock and lever yourself along,"
+said Bill, who was already standing on firm ice at the far end in a snow
+pit. We cut some fifteen steps to get out of that hole. Excited by now,
+and thoroughly enjoying ourselves, we found the way ahead easier, until
+the penguins' call reached us again and we stood, three crystallized
+ragamuffins, above the Emperors' home. They were there all right, and we
+were going to reach them, but where were all the thousands of which we
+had heard?
+
+We stood on an ice-foot which was really a dwarf cliff some twelve feet
+high, and the sea-ice, with a good many ice-blocks strewn upon it, lay
+below. The cliff dropped straight, with a bit of an overhang and no
+snow-drift. This may have been because the sea had only frozen recently;
+whatever the reason may have been it meant that we should have a lot of
+difficulty in getting up again without help. It was decided that some one
+must stop on the top with the Alpine rope, and clearly that one should be
+I, for with short sight and fogged spectacles which I could not wear I
+was much the least useful of the party for the job immediately ahead. Had
+we had the sledge we could have used it as a ladder, but of course we had
+left this at the beginning of the moraine miles back.
+
+We saw the Emperors standing all together huddled under the Barrier cliff
+some hundreds of yards away. The little light was going fast: we were
+much more excited about the approach of complete darkness and the look of
+wind in the south than we were about our triumph. After indescribable
+effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and
+we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our
+grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we
+were turning theories into facts with every observation we made,--and we
+had but a moment to give.
+
+[Illustration: EMPERORS, BARRIER AND SEA ICE--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+The disturbed Emperors made a tremendous row, trumpeting with their
+curious metallic voices. There was no doubt they had eggs, for they tried
+to shuffle along the ground without losing them off their feet. But when
+they were hustled a good many eggs were dropped and left lying on the
+ice, and some of these were quickly picked up by eggless Emperors who had
+probably been waiting a long time for the opportunity. In these poor
+birds the maternal side seems to have necessarily swamped the other
+functions of life. Such is the struggle for existence that they can only
+live by a glut of maternity, and it would be interesting to know whether
+such a life leads to happiness or satisfaction.
+
+I have told[156] how the men of the Discovery found this rookery where we
+now stood. How they made journeys in the early spring but never arrived
+early enough to get eggs and only found parents and chicks. They
+concluded that the Emperor was an impossible kind of bird who, for some
+reason or other, nests in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the
+temperature anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards
+blowing, always blowing, against his devoted back. And they found him
+holding his precious chick balanced upon his big feet, and pressing it
+maternally, or paternally (for both sexes squabble for the privilege)
+against a bald patch in his breast. And when at last he simply must go
+and eat something in the open leads near by, he just puts the child down
+on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they
+fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can,
+it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and
+there it will freeze. Likewise many broken and addled eggs were found,
+and it is clear that the mortality is very great. But some survive, and
+summer comes; and when a big blizzard is going to blow (they know all
+about the weather), the parents take the children out for miles across
+the sea-ice, until they reach the threshold of the open sea. And there
+they sit until the wind comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
+ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
+pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.
+
+You must agree that a bird like this is an interesting beast, and when,
+seven months ago, we rowed a boat under those great black cliffs,[157]
+and found a disconsolate Emperor chick still in the down, we knew
+definitely why the Emperor has to nest in mid-winter. For if a June egg
+was still without feathers in the beginning of January, the same egg
+laid in the summer would leave its produce without practical covering for
+the following winter. Thus the Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake
+all kinds of hardships because his children insist on developing so
+slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same
+reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long
+a childhood.
+
+But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not
+travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs. We wanted
+the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and
+unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic
+sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the
+evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs,
+which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount
+Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the
+purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and
+skinned three birds--an Emperor weighs up to 6½ stones.
+
+The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight. There were
+only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned
+that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough
+estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. It is a
+mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked
+as though the ice had not formed very long. Were these the first
+arrivals? Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the
+beginning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?
+
+Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the
+penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a
+live one. They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated
+after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds were so anxious
+to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on
+ice! Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of
+ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard. Once a bird
+dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and
+tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one,
+however, when one was offered.
+
+Meanwhile a whole procession of Emperors came round under the cliff on
+which I stood. The light was already very bad and it was well that my
+companions were quick in returning: we had to do everything in a great
+hurry. I hauled up the eggs in their mitts (which we fastened together
+round our necks with lampwick lanyards) and then the skins, but failed to
+help Bill at all. "Pull," he cried, from the bottom: "I am pulling," I
+said. "But the line's quite slack down here," he shouted. And when he had
+reached the top by climbing up on Bowers' shoulders, and we were both
+pulling all we knew Birdie's end of the rope was still slack in his
+hands. Directly we put on a strain the rope cut into the ice edge and
+jammed--a very common difficulty when working among crevasses. We tried
+to run the rope over an ice-axe without success, and things began to look
+serious when Birdie, who had been running about prospecting and had
+meanwhile put one leg through a crack into the sea, found a place where
+the cliff did not overhang. He cut steps for himself, we hauled, and at
+last we were all together on the top--his foot being by now surrounded by
+a solid mass of ice.
+
+We legged it back as hard as we could go: five eggs in our fur mitts,
+Birdie with two skins tied to him and trailing behind, and myself with
+one. We were roped up, and climbing the ridges and getting through the
+holes was very difficult. In one place where there was a steep rubble and
+snow slope down I left the ice-axe half way up; in another it was too
+dark to see our former ice-axe footsteps, and I could see nothing, and so
+just let myself go and trusted to luck. With infinite patience Bill said:
+"Cherry, you _must_ learn how to use an ice-axe." For the rest of the
+trip my wind-clothes were in rags.
+
+We found the sledge, and none too soon, and now had three eggs left,
+more or less whole. Both mine had burst in my mitts: the first I emptied
+out, the second I left in my mitt to put into the cooker; it never got
+there, but on the return journey I had my mitts far more easily thawed
+out than Birdie's (Bill had none) and I believe the grease in the egg did
+them good. When we got into the hollows under the ridge where we had to
+cross, it was too dark to do anything but feel our way. We did so over
+many crevasses, found the ridge and crept over it. Higher up we could see
+more, but to follow our tracks soon became impossible, and we plugged
+straight ahead and luckily found the slope down which we had come. All
+day it had been blowing a nasty cold wind with a temperature between -20°
+and 30°, which we felt a good deal. Now it began to get worse. The
+weather was getting thick and things did not look very nice when we
+started up to find our tent. Soon it was blowing force 4, and soon we
+missed our way entirely. We got right up above the patch of rocks which
+marked our igloo and only found it after a good deal of search.
+
+I have heard tell of an English officer at the Dardanelles who was left,
+blinded, in No Man's Land between the English and Turkish trenches.
+Moving only at night, and having no sense to tell him which were his own
+trenches, he was fired at by Turk and English alike as he groped his
+ghastly way to and from them. Thus he spent days and nights until, one
+night, he crawled towards the English trenches, to be fired at as usual.
+"Oh God! what can I do!" some one heard him say, and he was brought in.
+
+Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured: madness or death may give
+relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to
+think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night,
+sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a
+crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.
+
+"Things must improve," said Bill next day, "I think we reached bed-rock
+last night." We hadn't, by a long way.
+
+It was like this.
+
+We moved into the igloo for the first time, for we had to save oil by
+using our blubber stove if we were to have any left to travel home with,
+and we did not wish to cover our tent with the oily black filth which the
+use of blubber necessitates. The blizzard blew all night, and we were
+covered with drift which came in through hundreds of leaks: in this
+wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our
+hard snow blocks. As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin
+skins the powdery drift covered everything we had.
+
+Though uncomfortable this was nothing to worry about overmuch. Some of
+the drift which the blizzard was bringing would collect to leeward of our
+hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to
+make our hut more weather-proof. Then with great difficulty we got the
+blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill's
+eye. For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans,
+obviously in very great pain: he told us afterwards that he thought his
+eye was gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove
+going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place. I
+got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof
+cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could
+with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.
+
+It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this
+life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.
+I never heard an angry word: once only (when this same day I could not
+pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient
+one: and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint. Most men
+would have howled. "I think we reached bed-rock last night," was strong
+language for Bill. "I was incapacitated for a short time," he says in his
+report to Scott.[158] Endurance was tested on this journey under unique
+circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of
+responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality
+which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make
+for success, self-control.
+
+We spent the next day--it was July 21--in collecting every scrap of soft
+snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard
+snow blocks. It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks
+when we had finished. To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on
+our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the
+canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge
+support. We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door. Both tent and
+igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror: both were
+below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the
+Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards. In front
+of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so
+wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it. Most of the tent
+was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof,
+while a segment of the tent itself jutted out beyond the igloo wall.
+
+That night we took much of our gear into the tent and lighted the blubber
+stove. I always mistrusted that stove, and every moment I expected it to
+flare up and burn the tent. But the heat it gave, as it burned furiously,
+with the double lining of the tent to contain it, was considerable.
+
+It did not matter, except for a routine which we never managed to keep,
+whether we started to thaw our way into our frozen sleeping-bags at 4 in
+the morning or 4 in the afternoon. I think we must have turned in during
+the afternoon of that Friday, leaving the cooker, our finnesko, a deal of
+our foot-gear, Bowers' bag of personal gear, and many other things in the
+tent. I expect we left the blubber stove there too, for it was quite
+useless at present to try and warm the igloo. The tent floor-cloth was
+under our sleeping-bags in the igloo.
+
+"Things must improve," said Bill. After all there was much for which to
+be thankful. I don't think anybody could have made a better igloo with
+the hard snow blocks and rocks which were all we had: we would get it
+air-tight by degrees. The blubber stove was working, and we had fuel for
+it: we had also found a way down to the penguins and had three complete,
+though frozen eggs: the two which had been in my mitts smashed when I
+fell about because I could not wear spectacles. Also the twilight given
+by the sun below the horizon at noon was getting longer.
+
+But already we had been out twice as long in winter as the longest
+previous journeys in spring. The men who made those journeys had daylight
+where we had darkness, they had never had such low temperatures,
+generally nothing approaching them, and they had seldom worked in such
+difficult country. The nearest approach to healthy sleep we had had for
+nearly a month was when during blizzards the temperature allowed the
+warmth of our bodies to thaw some of the ice in our clothing and
+sleeping-bags into water. The wear and tear on our minds was very great.
+We were certainly weaker. We had a little more than a tin of oil to get
+back on, and we knew the conditions we had to face on that journey across
+the Barrier: even with fresh men and fresh gear it had been almost
+unendurable.
+
+And so we spent half an hour or more getting into our bags. Cirrus cloud
+was moving across the face of the stars from the north, it looked rather
+hazy and thick to the south, but it is always difficult to judge weather
+in the dark. There was little wind and the temperature was in the minus
+twenties. We felt no particular uneasiness. Our tent was well dug in, and
+was also held down by rocks and the heavy tank off the sledge which were
+placed on the skirting as additional security. We felt that no power on
+earth could move the thick walls of our igloo, nor drag the canvas roof
+from the middle of the embankment into which it was packed and lashed.
+
+"Things must improve," said Bill.
+
+I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that
+absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances
+dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten
+minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of
+hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar
+of it all cannot be imagined.
+
+"Bill, Bill, the tent has gone," was the next I remember--from Bowers
+shouting at us again and again through the door. It is always these early
+morning shocks which hit one hardest: our slow minds suggested that this
+might mean a peculiarly lingering form of death. Journey after journey
+Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards which had separated the
+tent from the igloo door. I have never understood why so much of our gear
+which was in the tent remained, even in the lee of the igloo. The place
+where the tent had been was littered with gear, and when we came to
+reckon up afterwards we had everything except the bottom piece of the
+cooker, and the top of the outer cooker. We never saw these again. The
+most wonderful thing of all was that our finnesko were lying where they
+were left, which happened to be on the ground in the part of the tent
+which was under the lee of the igloo. Also Birdie's bag of personal gear
+was there, and a tin of sweets.
+
+Birdie brought two tins of sweets away with him. One we had to celebrate
+our arrival at the Knoll: this was the second, of which we knew nothing,
+and which was for Bill's birthday, the next day. We started eating them
+on Saturday, however, and the tin came in useful to Bill afterwards.
+
+To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of black snow which
+flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope. Once started nothing
+could have stopped us. I saw Birdie knocked over once, but he clawed his
+way back just in time. Having passed everything we could find in to Bill,
+we got back into the igloo, and started to collect things together,
+including our very dishevelled minds.
+
+There was no doubt that we were in the devil of a mess, and it was not
+altogether our fault. We had had to put our igloo more or less where we
+could get rocks with which to build it. Very naturally we had given both
+our tent and igloo all the shelter we could from the full force of the
+wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not because they were in the
+wind, but because they were not sufficiently in it. The main force of the
+hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over our heads and
+appeared to form by suction a vacuum below. Our tent had either been
+sucked upwards into this, or had been blown away because some of it was
+in the wind while some of it was not. The roof of our igloo was being
+wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes: the drift was
+spouting in, not it seemed because it was blown in from outside, but
+because it was sucked in from within: the lee, not the weather, wall was
+the worst. Already everything was six or eight inches under snow.
+
+Very soon we began to be alarmed about the igloo. For some time the heavy
+snow blocks we had heaved up on to the canvas roof kept it weighted down.
+But it seemed that they were being gradually moved off by the hurricane.
+The tension became well-nigh unendurable: the waiting in all that welter
+of noise was maddening. Minute after minute, hour after hour--those snow
+blocks were off now anyway, and the roof was smashed up and down--no
+canvas ever made could stand it indefinitely.
+
+We got a meal that Saturday morning, our last for a very long time as it
+happened. Oil being of such importance to us we tried to use the blubber
+stove, but after several preliminary spasms it came to pieces in our
+hands, some solder having melted; and a very good thing too, I thought,
+for it was more dangerous than useful. We finished cooking our meal on
+the primus. Two bits of the cooker having been blown away we had to
+balance it on the primus as best we could. We then settled that in view
+of the shortage of oil we would not have another meal for as long as
+possible. As a matter of fact God settled that for us.
+
+We did all we could to stop up the places where the drift was coming in,
+plugging the holes with our socks, mitts and other clothing. But it was
+no real good. Our igloo was a vacuum which was filling itself up as soon
+as possible: and when snow was not coming in a fine black moraine dust
+took its place, covering us and everything. For twenty-four hours we
+waited for the roof to go: things were so bad now that we dare not unlash
+the door.
+
+Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that
+our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were
+lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.
+
+Gradually the situation got more desperate. The distance between the
+taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting
+became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the
+canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not
+drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again
+were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our
+loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst
+places: our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks
+over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought
+they would fall.
+
+We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and
+get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers
+said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask
+men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag
+continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and
+prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.
+
+And then it went.
+
+Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the
+lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically
+out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.
+I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.
+
+The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden
+canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it
+takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above
+the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of
+the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks
+which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came
+in.
+
+Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a
+terrible lot of drift. Bill also--but he was better off: I was already
+half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your
+own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned
+over until his mouth was against my ear. "_Please_, Cherry," he said, and
+his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was
+he who had brought us to this ghastly end.
+
+The next I knew was Bowers' head across Bill's body. "We're all right,"
+he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we
+knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement
+was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the
+bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath
+us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.
+
+I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without
+a tent: and the one thing we had left was the floor-cloth upon which we
+were actually lying. Of course we could not speak at present, but later
+after the blizzard had stopped we discussed the possibility of digging a
+hole in the snow each night and covering it over with the floor-cloth. I
+do not think we had any idea that we could really get back in those
+temperatures in our present state of ice by such means, but no one ever
+hinted at such a thing. Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and
+hymns, snatches of which reached me every now and then, and I chimed in,
+somewhat feebly I suspect. Of course we were getting pretty badly drifted
+up. "I was resolved to keep warm," wrote Bowers, "and beneath my debris
+covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to
+pass the time. I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I
+knew he was alive all right--what a birthday for him!" Birdie was more
+drifted up than we, but at times we all had to hummock ourselves up to
+heave the snow off our bags. By opening the flaps of our bags we could
+get small pinches of soft drift which we pressed together and put into
+our mouths to melt. When our hands warmed up again we got some more; so
+we did not get very thirsty. A few ribbons of canvas still remained in
+the wall over our heads, and these produced volleys of cracks like pistol
+shots hour after hour. The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an
+inch. The wind made just the same noise as an express train running fast
+through a tunnel if you have both the windows down.
+
+I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an
+instant. They must have been frightened but they were never disturbed. As
+for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that
+this was the end. What else could I think? We had spent days in reaching
+this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been
+experienced by human beings. We had been out for four weeks under
+conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few
+days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer
+physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we
+had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and
+always in the dark. We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our
+feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot
+fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only
+part of our cooker. When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost
+wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our
+sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold
+temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were
+already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get
+into our sleeping-bags--so frozen were they and so long did it take us to
+thaw our way in. No! Without the tent we were dead men.
+
+[Illustration: MT. EREBUS]
+
+[Illustration: ICE PRESSURE AT A]
+
+And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our
+tent again. We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew
+about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a
+steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so
+slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop: this
+ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came
+miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as
+well look for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea. The
+chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken up into the air
+and dropped somewhere in this sea well on the way to New Zealand.
+Obviously the tent was gone.
+
+Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that
+torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill the good people with
+bliss. I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but
+candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no
+wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a
+bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road
+to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.
+
+I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what
+glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has the Persian said that when we come
+to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with
+remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day
+of Judgment.
+
+And I wanted peaches and syrup--badly. We had them at the hut, sweeter
+and more luscious than you can imagine. And we had been without sugar for
+a month. Yes--especially the syrup.
+
+Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going
+to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I
+would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.
+Not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men
+do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.
+
+And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would
+like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his
+death?) I fell asleep. I expect the temperature was pretty high during
+this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. That
+and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe
+marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.
+There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in
+worrying; and we were so _very_ tired. We were hungry, for the last meal
+we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very
+pressing.
+
+And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind
+roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts
+to something indescribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the
+biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 11, but he was
+always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate. I
+think it was blowing a full hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing,
+we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. I knew
+that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced
+blizzards which lasted eight or ten days. But this did not worry us as
+much as I think it did Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that
+Peary had survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn't that in the summer?
+
+It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the
+loss of the tent. Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.
+The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval
+because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move out of our bags
+except as a last necessity. By Sunday night we had been without a meal
+for some thirty-six hours.
+
+The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did no damage, and though
+we could not get out of our bags to move them, we could fit ourselves
+into them without difficulty. More serious was the drift which began to
+pile up all round and over us. It helped to keep us warm of course, but
+at the same time in these comparatively high temperatures it saturated
+our bags even worse than they were before. If we did not find the tent
+(and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of
+the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back
+across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.
+
+Meanwhile we had to wait. It was nearly 70 miles home and it had taken us
+the best part of three weeks to come. In our less miserable moments we
+tried to think out ways of getting back, but I do not remember very much
+about that time. Sunday morning faded into Sunday afternoon,--into Sunday
+night,--into Monday morning. Till then the blizzard had raged with
+monstrous fury; the winds of the world were there, and they had all gone
+mad. We had bad winds at Cape Evans this year, and we had far worse the
+next winter when the open water was at our doors. But I have never heard
+or felt or seen a wind like this. I wondered why it did not carry away
+the earth.
+
+In the early hours of Monday there was an occasional hint of a lull.
+Ordinarily in a big winter blizzard, when you have lived for several days
+and nights with that turmoil in your ears, the lulls are more trying than
+the noise: "the feel of not to feel it."[159] I do not remember noticing
+that now. Seven or eight more hours passed, and though it was still
+blowing we could make ourselves heard to one another without great
+difficulty. It was two days and two nights since we had had a meal.
+
+We decided to get out of our bags and make a search for the tent. We did
+so, bitterly cold and utterly miserable, though I do not think any of us
+showed it. In the darkness we could see very little, and no trace
+whatever of the tent. We returned against the wind, nursing our faces and
+hands, and settled that we must try and cook a meal somehow. We managed
+about the weirdest meal eaten north or south. We got the floor-cloth
+wedged under our bags, then got into our bags and drew the floor-cloth
+over our heads. Between us we got the primus alight somehow, and by hand
+we balanced the cooker on top of it, minus the two members which had been
+blown away. The flame flickered in the draughts. Very slowly the snow in
+the cooker melted, we threw in a plentiful supply of pemmican, and the
+smell of it was better than anything on earth. In time we got both tea
+and pemmican, which was full of hairs from our bags, penguin feathers,
+dirt and debris, but delicious. The blubber left in the cooker got burnt
+and gave the tea a burnt taste. None of us ever forgot that meal: I
+enjoyed it as much as such a meal could be enjoyed, and that burnt taste
+will always bring back the memory.
+
+It was still dark and we lay down in our bags again, but soon a little
+glow of light began to come up, and we turned out to have a further
+search for the tent. Birdie went off before Bill and me. Clumsily I
+dragged my eider-down out of my bag on my feet, all sopping wet: it was
+impossible to get it back and I let it freeze: it was soon just like a
+rock. The sky to the south was as black and sinister as it could possibly
+be. It looked as though the blizzard would be on us again at any moment.
+
+I followed Bill down the slope. We could find nothing. But, as we
+searched, we heard a shout somewhere below and to the right. We got on a
+slope, slipped, and went sliding down quite unable to stop ourselves, and
+came upon Birdie with the tent, the outer lining still on the bamboos.
+Our lives had been taken away and given back to us.
+
+We were so thankful we said nothing.
+
+The tent must have been gripped up into the air, shutting as it rose. The
+bamboos, with the inner lining lashed to them, had entangled the outer
+cover, and the whole went up together like a shut umbrella. This was our
+salvation. If it had opened in the air nothing could have prevented its
+destruction. As it was, with all the accumulated ice upon it, it must
+have weighed the best part of 100 lbs. It had been dropped about half a
+mile away, at the bottom of a steep slope: and it fell in a hollow, still
+shut up. The main force of the wind had passed over it, and there it was,
+with the bamboos and fastenings wrenched and strained, and the ends of
+two of the poles broken, but the silk untorn.
+
+If that tent went again we were going with it. We made our way back up
+the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as
+though it were something not quite of the earth. And we dug it in as
+tent was never dug in before; not by the igloo, but in the old place
+farther down where we had first arrived. And while Bill was doing this
+Birdie and I went back to the igloo and dug and scratched and shook away
+the drift inside until we had found nearly all our gear. It is wonderful
+how little we lost when the roof went. Most of our gear was hung on the
+sledge, which was part of the roof, or was packed into the holes of the
+hut to try and make it drift-proof, and the things must have been blown
+inwards into the bottom of the hut by the wind from the south and the
+back draught from the north. Then they were all drifted up. Of course a
+certain number of mitts and socks were blown away and lost, but the only
+important things were Bill's fur mitts, which were stuffed into a hole in
+the rocks of the hut. We loaded up the sledge and pushed it down the
+slope. I don't know how Birdie was feeling, but I felt so weak that it
+was the greatest labour. The blizzard looked right on top of us.
+
+We had another meal, and we wanted it: and as the good hoosh ran down
+into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we
+discussed what we would do next. Birdie was all for another go at the
+Emperor penguins. Dear Birdie, he never would admit that he was beaten--I
+don't know that he ever really was! "I think he (Wilson) thought he had
+landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though
+I was for one other tap at the Rookery. However, I had placed myself
+under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next
+day for home."[160] There could really be no common-sense doubt: we had
+to go back, and we were already very doubtful whether we should ever
+manage to get into our sleeping-bags in very low temperature, so ghastly
+had they become.
+
+I don't know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope--I don't
+know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker--and thinking
+that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances
+would not give for a good warm sleep. He would give everything he
+possessed: he would give--how many--years of his life. One or two at any
+rate--perhaps five? Yes--I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the
+view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:
+the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface
+of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting
+into my heart.
+
+For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining--his
+beautiful dry bag of the finest down--which he had never slipped into his
+own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it.
+
+We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in,
+utterly worn out. It was only -12° that night, but my left big toe was
+frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down
+lining, and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken several
+hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other. When we got
+up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly
+impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a
+lot to do, two or three hours' work, packing sledges and making a depôt
+of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo. We left the second
+sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.
+
+"We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and
+-15°. My job was to balance the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I
+don't believe I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the
+strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck,
+and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom we turned our faces to the
+Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it
+looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our
+hands going one after the other. We had nothing but the hardest
+wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business: there was only the
+smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would
+chafe the tent. Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to
+prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round
+the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the tent went
+he was going too.
+
+"I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It
+was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a
+brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which
+my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do
+less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I
+was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept
+most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without
+going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of
+these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep
+awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it
+fall: and sometimes he had the primus.
+
+"Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an
+eider-down and was splitting all over the place: great long holes. He
+never consciously slept for nights: he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.
+Except for this night, and the next when Birdie's eider-down was still
+fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for
+five or six nights running with the same nightmare--that we were drifted
+up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting
+it open to do so, or some other variation,--I did not know that I had
+been asleep at all."[161]
+
+"We had hardly reached the pit," wrote Bowers, "when a furious wind came
+on again and we had to camp. All that night the tent flapped like the
+noise of musketry, owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and
+the fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going altogether and
+lashed it down as much as I could, attaching the apex to a line round my
+own bag. The wind abated after 1½ days and we set out, doing five or six
+miles before we found ourselves among crevasses."[162]
+
+We had plugged ahead all that day (July 26) in a terrible light,
+blundering in among pressure and up on to the slopes of Terror. The
+temperature dropped from -21° to -45°. "Several times [we] stepped into
+rotten-lidded crevasses in smooth wind-swept ice. We continued, however,
+feeling our way along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the
+crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure
+ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no
+light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct
+silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance
+and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were
+approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror,
+miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of
+the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much
+of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the
+dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction."[163]
+And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely
+lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure."
+But there were pressure pops all night, as though some one was whacking
+an empty tub.
+
+It was Birdie's picture hat which made the trouble next day. "What do you
+think of _that_ for a hat, sir?" I heard him say to Scott a few days
+before we started, holding it out much as Lucille displays her latest
+Paris model. Scott looked at it quietly for a time: "I'll tell you when
+you come back, Birdie," he said. It was a complicated affair with all
+kinds of nose-guards and buttons and lanyards: he thought he was going to
+set it to suit the wind much as he would set the sails of a ship. We
+spent a long time with our housewifes before this and other trips, for
+everybody has their own ideas as to how to alter their clothing for the
+best. When finished some looked neat, like Bill: others baggy, like Scott
+or Seaman Evans: others rough and ready, like Oates and Bowers: a few
+perhaps more rough than ready, and I will not mention names. Anyway
+Birdie's hat became improper immediately it was well iced up.
+
+"When we got a little light in the morning we found we were a little
+north of the two patches of moraine on Terror. Though we did not know it,
+we were on the point where the pressure runs up against Terror, and we
+could dimly see that we were right up against something. We started to
+try and clear it, but soon had an enormous ridge, blotting out the
+moraine and half Terror, rising like a great hill on our right. Bill said
+the only thing was to go right on and hope it would lower; all the time,
+however, there was a bad feeling that we might be putting any number of
+ridges between us and the mountain. After a while we tried to cross this
+one, but had to turn back for crevasses, both Bill and I putting a leg
+down. We went on for about twenty minutes and found a lower place, and
+turned to rise up it diagonally, and reached the top. Just over the top
+Birdie went right down a crevasse, which was about wide enough to take
+him. He was out of sight and out of reach from the surface, hanging in
+his harness. Bill went for his harness, I went for the bow of the sledge:
+Bill told me to get the Alpine rope and Birdie directed from below what
+we could do. We could not possibly haul him up as he was, for the sides
+of the crevasse were soft and he could not help himself."[164]
+
+"My helmet was so frozen up," wrote Bowers, "that my head was encased in
+a solid block of ice, and I could not look down without inclining my
+whole body. As a result Bill stumbled one foot into a crevasse and I
+landed in it with both mine [even as I shouted a warning[165] ], the
+bridge gave way and down I went. Fortunately our sledge harness is made
+with a view to resisting this sort of thing, and there I hung with the
+bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that
+to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it.
+Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline
+for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got
+me out."[166] Meanwhile on the surface I lay over the crevasse and gave
+Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot,
+giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his
+foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the
+harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again.
+We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the
+temperature was -46°. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people
+out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that
+it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen
+man hanging in one himself.
+
+"In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many
+lay beyond that. Things looked pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the
+Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right. This method
+of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very
+useful. From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to
+the end. When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in
+a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I
+always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought
+about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain
+stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them. When on
+the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show
+us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without
+any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such
+a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great
+balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were
+lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with
+a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. I cannot
+write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were
+brought out of a very terrible series of experiences. When we started
+back I had a feeling that things were going to change for the better, and
+this day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad
+experience and that after that we could hope for better things.
+
+[Illustration: DOWN A CREVASSE]
+
+"By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure ridges, and
+continued all day up and down, but met no crevasses. Indeed, we met no
+more crevasses and no more pressure. I think it was upon this day that a
+wonderful glow stretched over the Barrier edge from Cape Crozier: at the
+base it was the most vivid crimson it is possible to imagine, shading
+upwards through every shade of red to light green, and so into a deep
+blue sky. It is the most vivid red I have ever seen in the sky."[167]
+
+It was -49° in the night and we were away early in -47°. By mid-day we
+were rising Terror Point, opening Erebus rapidly, and got the first
+really light day, though the sun would not appear over the horizon for
+another month. I cannot describe what a relief the light was to us. We
+crossed the point outside our former track, and saw inside us the ridges
+where we had been blizzed for three days on our outward journey.
+
+The minimum was -66° the next night and we were now back in the windless
+bight of Barrier with its soft snow, low temperatures, fogs and mists,
+and lingering settlements of the inside crusts. Saturday and Sunday, the
+29th and 30th, we plugged on across this waste, iced up as usual but
+always with Castle Rock getting bigger. Sometimes it looked like fog or
+wind, but it always cleared away. We were getting weak, how weak we can
+only realize now, but we got in good marches, though slow--days when we
+did 4½, 7¼ 6¾, 6½, 7½ miles. On our outward journey we had been relaying
+and getting forward about 4½ miles a day at this point. The surface which
+we had dreaded so much was not so sandy or soft as when we had come out,
+and the settlements were more marked. These are caused by a crust falling
+under your feet. Generally the area involved is some twenty yards or so
+round you, and the surface falls through an air space for two or three
+inches with a soft 'crush' which may at first make you think there are
+crevasses about. In the region where we now travelled they were much more
+pronounced than elsewhere, and one day, when Bill was inside the tent
+lighting the primus, I put my foot into a hole that I had dug. This
+started a big settlement; sledge, tent and all of us dropped about a
+foot, and the noise of it ran away for miles and miles: we listened to it
+until we began to get too cold. It must have lasted a full three minutes.
+
+In the pauses of our marching we halted in our harnesses the ropes of
+which lay slack in the powdery snow. We stood panting with our backs
+against the mountainous mass of frozen gear which was our load. There was
+no wind, at any rate no more than light airs: our breath crackled as it
+froze. There was no unnecessary conversation: I don't know why our
+tongues never got frozen, but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been
+killed, split to pieces. We had been going perhaps three hours since
+lunch.
+
+"How are your feet, Cherry?" from Bill.
+
+"Very cold."
+
+"That's all right; so are mine." We didn't worry to ask Birdie: he never
+had a frost-bitten foot from start to finish.
+
+Half an hour later, as we marched, Bill would ask the same question. I
+tell him that all feeling has gone: Bill still has some feeling in one of
+his but the other is lost. He settled we had better camp: another ghastly
+night ahead. We started to get out of our harnesses, while Bill, before
+doing anything else, would take the fur mitts from his hands, carefully
+shape any soft parts as they froze (generally, however, our mitts did not
+thaw on our hands), and lay them on the snow in front of him--two dark
+dots. His proper fur mitts were lost when the igloo roof went: these were
+the delicate dog-skin linings we had in addition, beautiful things to
+look at and to feel when new, excellent when dry to turn the screws of a
+theodolite, but too dainty for straps and lanyards. Just now I don't know
+what he could have done without them.
+
+Working with our woollen half-mitts and mitts on our hands all the time,
+and our fur mitts over them when possible, we gradually got the buckles
+undone, and spread the green canvas floor-cloth on the snow. This was
+also fitted to be used as a sail, but we never could have rigged a sail
+on this journey. The shovel and the bamboos, with a lining, itself lined
+with ice, lashed to them, were packed on the top of the load and were now
+put on the snow until wanted. Our next job was to lift our three
+sleeping-bags one by one on to the floor-cloth: they covered it, bulging
+over the sides--those obstinate coffins which were all our life to us....
+One of us is off by now to nurse his fingers back. The cooker was
+unlashed from the top of the instrument box; some parts of it were put on
+the bags with the primus, methylated spirit can, matches and so forth;
+others left to be filled with snow later. Taking a pole in each hand we
+three spread the bamboos over the whole. "All right? Down!" from Bill;
+and we lowered them gently on to the soft snow, that they might not sink
+too far. The ice on the inner lining of the tent was formed mostly from
+the steam of the cooker. This we had been unable to beat or chip off in
+the past, and we were now, truth to tell, past worrying about it. The
+little ventilator in the top, made to let out this steam, had been tied
+up in order to keep in all possible heat. Then over with the outer cover,
+and for one of us the third worst job of the day was to begin. The worst
+job was to get into our bags: the second or equal worst was to lie in
+them for six hours (we had brought it down to six): this third worst was,
+to get the primus lighted and a meal on the way.
+
+As cook of the day you took the broken metal framework, all that remained
+of our candlestick, and got yourself with difficulty into the funnel
+which formed the door. The enclosed space of the tent seemed much colder
+than the outside air: you tried three or four match-boxes and no match
+would strike: almost desperate, you asked for a new box to be given you
+from the sledge and got a light from this because it had not yet been in
+the warmth, so called, of the tent. The candle hung by a wire from the
+cap of the tent. It would be tedious to tell of the times we had getting
+the primus alight, and the lanyards of the weekly food bag unlashed.
+Probably by now the other two men have dug in the tent; squared up
+outside; filled and passed in the cooker; set the thermometer under the
+sledge and so forth. There were always one or two odd jobs which wanted
+doing as well: but you may be sure they came in as soon as possible when
+they heard the primus hissing, and saw the glow of light inside. Birdie
+made a bottom for the cooker out of an empty biscuit tin to take the
+place of the part which was blown away. On the whole this was a success,
+but we had to hold it steady--on Bill's sleeping-bag, for the flat frozen
+bags spread all over the floor space. Cooking was a longer business now.
+Some one whacked out the biscuit, and the cook put the ration of pemmican
+into the inner cooker which was by now half full of water. As opportunity
+offered we got out of our day, and into our night foot-gear--fleecy
+camel-hair stockings and fur boots. In the dim light we examined our feet
+for frost-bite.
+
+I do not think it took us less than an hour to get a hot meal to our
+lips: pemmican followed by hot water in which we soaked our biscuits. For
+lunch we had tea and biscuits: for breakfast, pemmican, biscuits and tea.
+We could not have managed more food bags--three were bad enough, and the
+lashings of everything were like wire. The lashing of the tent door,
+however, was the worst, and it _had_ to be tied tightly, especially if it
+was blowing. In the early days we took great pains to brush rime from the
+tent before packing it up, but we were long past that now.
+
+The hoosh got down into our feet: we nursed back frost-bites: and we were
+all the warmer for having got our dry foot-gear on before supper. Then we
+started to get into our bags.
+
+[Illustration: PANORAMA AND MAP OF THE WINTER JOURNEY--Copied at Hut
+Point by Apsley Cherry-Garrard from a drawing by E. A. Wilson]
+
+Birdie's bag fitted him beautifully, though perhaps it would have been a
+little small with an eider-down inside. He must have had a greater heat
+supply than other men; for he never had serious trouble with his feet,
+while ours were constantly frost-bitten: he slept, I should be afraid to
+say how much, longer than we did, even in these last days: it was a
+pleasure, lying awake practically all night, to hear his snores. He
+turned his bag inside out from fur to skin, and skin to fur, many times
+during the journey, and thus got rid of a lot of moisture which came
+out as snow or actual knobs of ice. When we did turn our bags the only
+way was to do so directly we turned out, and even then you had to be
+quick before the bag froze. Getting out of the tent at night it was quite
+a race to get back to your bag before it hardened. Of course this was in
+the lowest temperatures.
+
+We could not burn our bags and we tried putting the lighted primus into
+them to thaw them out, but this was not very successful. Before this
+time, when it was very cold, we lighted the primus in the morning while
+we were still in our bags: and in the evening we kept it going until we
+were just getting or had got the mouths of our bags levered open. But
+returning we had no oil for such luxuries, until the last day or two.
+
+I do not believe that any man, however sick he is, has a much worse time
+than we had in those bags, shaking with cold until our backs would almost
+break. One of the added troubles which came to us on our return was the
+sodden condition of our hands in our bags at night. We had to wear our
+mitts and half-mitts, and they were as wet as they could be: when we got
+up in the morning we had washer-women's hands--white, crinkled, sodden.
+That was an unhealthy way to start the day's work. We really wanted some
+bags of saennegrass for hands as well as feet; one of the blessings of
+that kind of bag being that you can shake the moisture from it: but we
+only had enough for our wretched feet.
+
+The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know
+they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of
+us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the
+penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not. We had
+been through a great deal since then. I know that we slept on the march;
+for I woke up when I bumped against Birdie, and Birdie woke when he
+bumped against me. I think Bill steering out in front managed to keep
+awake. I know we fell asleep if we waited in the comparatively warm tent
+when the primus was alight--with our pannikins or the primus in our
+hands. I know that our sleeping-bags were so full of ice that we did not
+worry if we spilt water or hoosh over them as they lay on the
+floor-cloth, when we cooked on them with our maimed cooker. They were so
+bad that we never rolled them up in the usual way when we got out of them
+in the morning: we opened their mouths as much as possible before they
+froze, and hoisted them more or less flat on to the sledge. All three of
+us helped to raise each bag, which looked rather like a squashed coffin
+and was probably a good deal harder. I know that if it was only -40° when
+we camped for the night we considered quite seriously that we were going
+to have a warm one, and that when we got up in the morning if the
+temperature was in the minus sixties we did not enquire what it was. The
+day's march was bliss compared to the night's rest, and both were awful.
+We were about as bad as men can be and do good travelling: but I never
+heard a word of complaint, nor, I believe, an oath, and I saw
+self-sacrifice standing every test.
+
+Always we were getting nearer home: and we were doing good marches. We
+were going to pull through; it was only a matter of sticking this for a
+few more days; six, five, four ... three perhaps now, if we were not
+blizzed. Our main hut was behind that ridge where the mist was always
+forming and blowing away, and there was Castle Rock: we might even see
+Observation Hill to-morrow, and the Discovery Hut furnished and trim was
+behind it, and they would have sent some dry sleeping-bags from Cape
+Evans to greet us there. We reckoned our troubles over at the Barrier
+edge, and assuredly it was not far away. "You've got it in the neck,
+stick it, you've got it in the neck"--it was always running in my head.
+
+And we _did_ stick it. How good the memories of those days are. With
+jokes about Birdie's picture hat: with songs we remembered off the
+gramophone: with ready words of sympathy for frost-bitten feet: with
+generous smiles for poor jests: with suggestions of happy beds to come.
+We did not forget the Please and Thank you, which mean much in such
+circumstances, and all the little links with decent civilization which
+we could still keep going. I'll swear there was still a grace about us
+when we staggered in. And we kept our tempers--even with God.
+
+We _might_ reach Hut Point to-night: we were burning more oil now, that
+one-gallon tin had lasted us well: and burning more candle too; at one
+time we feared they would give out. A hell of a morning we had: -57° in
+our present state. But it was calm, and the Barrier edge could not be
+much farther now. The surface was getting harder: there were a few
+wind-blown furrows, the crust was coming up to us. The sledge was
+dragging easier: we always suspected the Barrier sloped downwards
+hereabouts. Now the hard snow was on the surface, peeping out like great
+inverted basins on which we slipped, and our feet became warmer for not
+sinking into soft snow. Suddenly we saw a gleam of light in a line of
+darkness running across our course. It was the Barrier edge: we were all
+right now.
+
+We ran the sledge off a snow-drift on to the sea-ice, with the same cold
+stream of air flowing down it which wrecked my hands five weeks ago:
+pushed out of this, camped and had a meal: the temperature had already
+risen to -43°. We could almost feel it getting warmer as we went round
+Cape Armitage on the last three miles. We managed to haul our sledge up
+the ice foot, and dug the drift away from the door. The old hut struck us
+as fairly warm.
+
+Bill was convinced that we ought not to go into the warm hut at Cape
+Evans when we arrived there--to-morrow night! We ought to get back to
+warmth gradually, live in a tent outside, or in the annexe for a day or
+two. But I'm sure we never meant to do it. Just now Hut Point did not
+prejudice us in favour of such abstinence. It was just as we had left it:
+there was nothing sent down for us there--no sleeping-bags, nor sugar:
+but there was plenty of oil. Inside the hut we pitched a dry tent left
+there since Depôt Journey days, set two primuses going in it; sat dozing
+on our bags; and drank cocoa without sugar so thick that next morning we
+were gorged with it. We were very happy, falling asleep between each
+mouthful, and after several hours discussed schemes of not getting into
+our bags at all. But some one would have to keep the primus going to
+prevent frost-bite, and we could not trust ourselves to keep awake. Bill
+and I tried to sing a part-song. Finally we sopped our way into our bags.
+We only stuck _them_ three hours, and thankfully turned out at 3 A.M.,
+and were ready to pack up when we heard the wind come away. It was no
+good, so we sat in our tent and dozed again. The wind dropped at 9.30: we
+were off at 11. We walked out into what seemed to us a blaze of light. It
+was not until the following year that I understood that a great part of
+such twilight as there is in the latter part of the winter was cut off
+from us by the mountains under which we travelled. Now, with nothing
+between us and the northern horizon below which lay the sun, we saw as we
+had not seen for months, and the iridescent clouds that day were
+beautiful.
+
+We just pulled for all we were worth and did nearly two miles an hour:
+for two miles a baddish salt surface, then big undulating hard sastrugi
+and good going. We slept as we walked. We had done eight miles by 4 P.M.
+and were past Glacier Tongue. We lunched there.
+
+As we began to gather our gear together to pack up for the last time,
+Bill said quietly, "I want to thank you two for what you have done. I
+couldn't have found two better companions--and what is more I never
+shall."
+
+I am proud of that.
+
+Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as
+it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could
+express its horror.
+
+We trudged on for several more hours and it grew very dark. There was a
+discussion as to where Cape Evans lay. We rounded it at last: it must
+have been ten or eleven o'clock, and it was possible that some one might
+see us as we pulled towards the hut. "Spread out well," said Bill, "and
+they will be able to see that there are three men." But we pulled along
+the cape, over the tide-crack, up the bank to the very door of the hut
+without a sound. No noise from the stable, nor the bark of a dog from the
+snowdrifts above us. We halted and stood there trying to get ourselves
+and one another out of our frozen harnesses--the usual long job. The door
+opened--"Good God! here is the Crozier Party," said a voice, and
+disappeared.
+
+Thus ended the worst journey in the world.
+
+And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins' eggs for
+which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and
+three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance.
+
+Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the
+year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had
+written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself,
+C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian
+of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but
+the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows:
+
+FIRST CUSTODIAN. Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop.
+What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put
+the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't
+know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that
+varnishes the eggs.
+
+I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief
+Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably
+courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at
+least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily
+offensive even for an official man of science, for myself.
+
+I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins'
+eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody
+without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to
+discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation
+proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief
+Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it.
+
+CHIEF CUSTODIAN. You needn't wait.
+
+HEROIC EXPLORER. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you
+please.
+
+CHIEF CUSTODIAN. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn't wait.
+
+HEROIC EXPLORER. I should like to have a receipt.
+
+But by this time the Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly
+to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their
+conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves
+the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside,
+where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will
+tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But
+this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer's
+thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on,
+minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully
+and ask his business. The reply is always the same, "I am waiting for a
+receipt for some penguins' eggs." At last it becomes clear from the
+Explorer's expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a
+receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined
+victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes
+his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman,
+but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he
+continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have
+done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him
+manners.
+
+Some time after this I visited the Natural History Museum with Captain
+Scott's sister. After a slight preliminary skirmish in which we convinced
+a minor custodian that the specimens brought by the expedition from the
+Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying on some of them,
+Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the penguins' eggs. Thereupon the
+minor custodians flatly denied that any such eggs were in existence or in
+their possession. Now Miss Scott was her brother's sister; and she showed
+so little disposition to take this lying down that I was glad to get her
+away with no worse consequences than a profanely emphasized threat on my
+part that if we did not receive ample satisfaction in writing within
+twenty-four hours as to the safety of the eggs England would reverberate
+with the tale.
+
+The ultimatum was effectual; and due satisfaction was forthcoming in
+time; but I was relieved when I learnt later on that they had been
+entrusted to Professor Assheton for the necessary microscopic
+examination. But he died before he could approach the task; and the eggs
+passed into the hands of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University.
+
+His report is as follows:
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [150] See pp. xxxix-xlv.
+
+   [151] A thermometer which registered -77° at the Winter Quarters
+         of H.M.S. Alert on March 4, 1876, is preserved by the Royal
+         Geographical Society. I do not know whether it was screened.
+
+   [152] My own diary.
+
+   [153] My own diary.
+
+   [154] My own diary.
+
+   [155] Ibid.
+
+   [156] See Introduction, pp. xxxix-xlv.
+
+   [157] See p. 82.
+
+   [158] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 42.
+
+   [159] Keats.
+
+   [160] Bowers.
+
+   [161] My own diary.
+
+   [162] Bowers.
+
+   [163] Wilson in _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 58.
+
+   [164] My own diary.
+
+   [165] Wilson.
+
+   [166] Bowers.
+
+   [167] My own diary.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+PROFESSOR COSSAR EWART'S REPORT
+
+
+"It was a great disappointment to Dr. Wilson that no Emperor Penguin
+embryos were obtained during the cruise of the Discovery. But though
+embryos were conspicuous by their absence in the Emperor eggs brought
+home by the National Antarctic Expedition, it is well to bear in mind
+that the naturalists on board the Discovery learned much about the
+breeding habits of the largest living member of the ancient penguin
+family. Amongst other things it was ascertained (1) that in the case of
+the Emperor, as in the King Penguin, the egg during the period of
+incubation rests on the upper surface of the feet protected and kept in
+position by a fold of skin from the lower breast; and (2) that in the
+case of the Emperor the whole process of incubation is carried out on sea
+ice during the coldest and darkest months of the antarctic winter.
+
+"After devoting much time to the study of penguins Dr. Wilson came to the
+conclusion that Emperor embryos would throw new light on the origin and
+history of birds, and decided that if he again found his way to the
+Antarctic he would make a supreme effort to visit an Emperor rookery
+during the breeding season. When, and under what conditions, the Cape
+Crozier rookery was eventually visited and Emperor eggs secured is
+graphically told in The Winter Journey. The question now arises, Has 'the
+weirdest bird's-nesting expedition that has ever been made' added
+appreciably to our knowledge of birds?
+
+"It is admitted that birds are descended from bipedal reptiles which
+flourished some millions of years ago--reptiles in build not unlike the
+kangaroo. From Archaeopteryx of Jurassic times we know primeval birds had
+teeth, three fingers with claws on each hand, and a long lizard-like tail
+provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true feathers. But
+unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, nor yet the fossil birds
+found in America, throw any light on the origin of feathers.
+Ornithologists and others who have devoted much time to the study of
+birds have as a rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that
+the scales along the margin of the hand and forearm and along each side
+of the tail were elongated, frayed and otherwise modified to form the
+wing and tail quills, and that later other scales were altered to provide
+a coat capable of preventing loss of heat. But as it happens, a study of
+the development of feathers affords no evidence that they were made out
+of scales. There are neither rudiments of scales nor feathers in very
+young bird embryos. In the youngest of the three Emperor embryos there
+are, however, feather rudiments in the tail region,--the embryo was
+probably seven or eight days old--but in the two older embryos there are
+a countless number of feather rudiments, i.e. of minute pimples known
+as papillae.
+
+"In penguins as in many other birds there are two distinct crops of
+feather papillae, viz.: a crop of relatively large papillae which develop
+into prepennae, the forerunners of true feathers (pennae), and a crop of
+small papillae which develop into preplumulae, the forerunners of true
+down feathers (plumulae).
+
+"In considering the origin of feathers we are not concerned with the true
+feathers (pennae), but with the nestling feathers (prepennae), and more
+especially with the papillae from which the prepennae are developed. What
+we want to know is, Do the papillae which in birds develop into the
+first generation of feathers correspond to the papillae which in lizards
+develop into scales?
+
+"The late Professor Assheton, who undertook the examination of some of
+the material brought home by the Terra Nova, made a special study of the
+feather papillae of the Emperor Penguin embryos from Cape Crozier.
+Drawings were made to indicate the number, size and time of appearance of
+the feather papillae, but unfortunately in the notes left by the
+distinguished embryologist there is no indication whether the feather
+papillae were regarded as modified scale papillae or new creations
+resulting from the appearance of special feather-forming factors in the
+germ-plasm.
+
+"When eventually the three Emperor Penguin embryos reached me that their
+feather rudiments might be compared with the feather rudiments of other
+birds, I noticed that in Emperor embryos the feather papillae appeared
+before the scale papillae. Evidence of this was especially afforded by
+the largest embryo, which had reached about the same stage in its
+development as a 16-days goose embryo.
+
+"In the largest Emperor embryo feather papillae occur all over the
+hind-quarters and on the legs to within a short distance of the tarsal
+joint. Beyond the tarsal joint even in the largest embryo no attempt had
+been made to produce the papillae which in older penguin embryos
+represent, and ultimately develop into, the scaly covering of the foot.
+The absence of papillae on the foot implied either that the scale
+papillae were fundamentally different from feather papillae or that for
+some reason or other the development of the papillae destined to give
+rise to the foot scales had been retarded. There is no evidence as far as
+I can ascertain that in modern lizards the scale papillae above the
+tarsal joint appear before the scale papillae beyond this joint.
+
+"The absence of papillae below the tarsal joint in Emperor embryos,
+together with the fact that in many birds each large feather papilla is
+accompanied by two or more very small feather papillae, led me to study
+the papillae of the limbs of other birds. The most striking results were
+obtained from the embryos of Chinese geese in which the legs are
+relatively longer than in penguins. In a 13-days goose embryo the whole
+of the skin below and for some distance above the tarsal joint is quite
+smooth, whereas the skin of the rest of the leg is studded with feather
+papillae. On the other hand, in an 18-days goose embryo in which the
+feather papillae of the legs have developed into filaments, each
+containing a fairly well-formed feather, scale papillae occur not only on
+the foot below and for some distance above the tarsal joint but also
+between the roots of the feather filaments between the tarsal and the
+knee joints. More important still, in a 20-days goose embryo a number of
+the papillae situated between the feather filaments of the leg were
+actually developing into scales each of which overlapped the root
+(calamus) of a feather just as scales overlap the foot feathers in grouse
+and other feather-footed birds.
+
+"As in bird embryos there is no evidence that feather papillae ever
+develop into scales or that scale papillae ever develop into feathers it
+may be assumed that feather papillae are fundamentally different from
+scale papillae, the difference presumably being due to the presence of
+special factors in the germ-plasm. Just as in armadillos hairs are found
+emerging from under the scales, in ancient birds as in the feet of some
+modern birds the coat probably consisted of both feathers and scales. But
+in course of time, owing perhaps to the growth of the scales being
+arrested, the coat of the birds, instead of consisting throughout of
+well-developed scales and small inconspicuous feathers, was almost
+entirely made up of a countless number of downy feathers, well-developed
+scales only persisting below the tarsal joint.
+
+"If the conclusions arrived at with the help of the Emperor Penguin
+embryos about the origin of feathers are justified, the worst journey in
+the world in the interest of science was not made in vain."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+END OF VOLUME ONE
+
+_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: A HALO ROUND THE MOON--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+
+
+
+THE WORST JOURNEY
+
+IN THE WORLD
+
+ANTARCTIC
+
+1910-1913
+
+BY
+
+APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD
+
+WITH PANORAMAS, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE LATE
+
+DOCTOR EDWARD A. WILSON AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION
+
+IN TWO VOLUMES
+
+
+VOLUME TWO
+
+CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED
+
+LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY
+
+_First published 1922_
+
+PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+CHAPTER  VIII     SPRING                                           301
+CHAPTER    IX     THE POLAR JOURNEY.   I. THE BARRIER STAGE        317
+CHAPTER     X     THE POLAR JOURNEY.  II. THE BEARDMORE GLACIER    350
+CHAPTER    XI     THE POLAR JOURNEY. III. THE PLATEAU TO 87° 32´ S 368
+CHAPTER   XII     THE POLAR JOURNEY.  IV. RETURNING PARTIES        380
+CHAPTER  XIII     SUSPENSE                                         408
+CHAPTER   XIV     THE LAST WINTER                                  436
+CHAPTER    XV     ANOTHER SPRING                                   459
+CHAPTER   XVI     THE SEARCH JOURNEY                               472
+CHAPTER  XVII     THE POLAR JOURNEY. V. THE POLE AND AFTER         496
+CHAPTER XVIII     THE POLAR JOURNEY. VI. FARTHEST SOUTH            527
+CHAPTER   XIX     NEVER AGAIN                                      543
+GLOSSARY                                                           579
+INDEX                                                              581
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+A Halo round the Moon, showing vertical and horizontal shafts
+    and mock Moons.                                       _Frontispiece_
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+                                                            FACING PAGE
+
+Camp on the Barrier. November 22, 1911. A rough sketch
+    for future use.                                                 322
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Parhelia. For description, see text. November 14, 1911. A
+    rough sketch for future use.                                    332
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+PLATE III. The Mountains which lie between the Barrier and
+    the Plateau as seen on December 1, 1911.                        338
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+A Pony Camp on the Barrier.                                         346
+
+The Dog Teams leaving the Beardmore Glacier. Mount Hope
+    and the Gateway before them.                                    346
+      _From photographs by C. S. Wright._
+
+PLATE IV. Transit sketch for the Lower Glacier Depôt.
+    December 11, 1911. Showing the Pillar Rock, mainland
+    mountains, the Gateway or Gap, and the beginning of the
+    main Beardmore Glacier outlet on to the Barrier.                352
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+PLATE V. Mount F. L. Smith and the land to the North-West.
+    December 12, 1911.                                              354
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+PLATE VI. Mount Elizabeth, Mount Anne and Socks Glacier.
+    December 13, 1911.                                              356
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Mount Patrick. December 16, 1911.                                   358
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+PLATE VII. From Mount Deakin to Mount Kinsey, showing
+    the outlet of the Keltie Glacier, and Mount Usher in the
+    distance. December 19, 1911.                                    362
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Our night Camp at the foot of the Buckley Island ice-falls.
+    December 20, 1911. Buckley Island in the background.
+    Note ablation pits in the snow.                                 364
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+The Adams Mountains.                                                382
+
+The First Return Party on the Beardmore Glacier.                    382
+      _From photographs by C. S. Wright._
+
+Camp below the Cloudmaker. Note pressure ridges in the
+    middle distance.                                                390
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+PLATE VIII. From Mount Kyffin to Mount Patrick. December
+    14, 1911.                                                       392
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+View from Arrival Heights northwards to Cape Evans and the
+    Dellbridge Islands.                                             428
+
+Cape Royds from Cape Barne, with the frozen McMurdo Sound.          428
+      _From photographs by F. Debenham._
+
+Cape Evans in Winter. This view is drawn when looking
+    northwards from under the Ramp.                                 440
+      _From a water-colour drawing by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+North Bay and the snout of the Barne Glacier from Cape Evans.       448
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+The Mule Party leaves Cape Evans. October 29, 1912.                 472
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+The Dog Party leaves Hut Point. November 1, 1912.                   478
+      _From a photograph by F. Debenham._
+
+"Atch": E. L. Atkinson, commanding the Main Landing
+    Party after the death of Scott.                                 492
+
+"Titus" Oates.                                                      492
+      _From photographs by C. S. Wright._
+
+The Tent left by Amundsen at the South Pole (Polheim).              506
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Buckley Island, where the fossils were found.                       518
+      _From a photograph by C. S. Wright._
+
+PLATE IX. Buckley Island, sketched during the evening of
+    December 21, 1911.                                              522
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Mount Kyffin, sketched on December 13, 1911.                        524
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Where Evans died, showing the Pillar Rock near which the
+    Lower Glacier Depôt was made. Sketched on December 11, 1911.    526
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+Sledging in a high wind: the floor-cloth of the tent is the sail.   530
+      _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+PLATE X. Mount Longstaff, sketched on December 1, 1911.
+    See also PLATE III., p. 338                                     532
+      _From sketches by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+A Blizzard Camp: the half-buried sledge is in the foreground.       536
+    _From a sketch by Dr. Edward A. Wilson._
+
+
+MAP
+
+The Polar Journey                                                   542
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+SPRING
+
+
+Inside was pandemonium. Most men had gone to bed, and I have a blurred
+memory of men in pyjamas and dressing-gowns getting hold of me and trying
+to get the chunks of armour which were my clothes to leave my body.
+Finally they cut them off and threw them into an angular heap at the foot
+of my bunk. Next morning they were a sodden mass weighing 24 lbs. Bread
+and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest
+journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on the
+gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we found it
+difficult to stop. I have no doubt that I had not stood the journey as
+well as Wilson: my jaw had dropped when I came in, so they tell me. Then
+into my warm blanket bag, and I managed to keep awake just long enough to
+think that Paradise must feel something like this.
+
+We slept ten thousand thousand years, were wakened to find everybody at
+breakfast, and passed a wonderful day, lazying about, half asleep and
+wholly happy, listening to the news and answering questions. "We are
+looked upon as beings who have come from another world. This afternoon I
+had a shave after soaking my face in a hot sponge, and then a bath.
+Lashly had already cut my hair. Bill looks very thin and we are all very
+blear-eyed from want of sleep. I have not much appetite, my mouth is very
+dry and throat sore with a troublesome hacking cough which I have had all
+the journey. My taste is gone. We are getting badly spoiled, but our
+beds are the height of all our pleasures."[168]
+
+But this did not last long:
+
+"Another very happy day doing nothing. After falling asleep two or three
+times I went to bed, read Kim, and slept. About two hours after each meal
+we all want another, and after a tremendous supper last night we had
+another meal before turning in. I have my taste back but all our fingers
+are impossible, they might be so many pieces of lead except for the pins
+and needles feeling in them which we have also got in our feet. My toes
+are very bulbous and some toe-nails are coming off. My left heel is one
+big burst blister. Going straight out of a warm bed into a strong wind
+outside nearly bowled me over. I felt quite faint, and pulled myself
+together thinking it was all nerves: but it began to come on again and I
+had to make for the hut as quickly as possible. Birdie is now full of
+schemes for doing the trip again next year. Bill says it is too great a
+risk in the darkness, and he will not consider it, though he thinks that
+to go in August might be possible."[169]
+
+And again a day or two later:
+
+"I came in covered with a red rash which is rather ticklish. My ankles
+and knees are a bit puffy, but my feet are not so painful as Bill's and
+Birdie's. Hands itch a bit. We must be very weak and worn out, though I
+think Birdie is the strongest of us. He seems to be picking up very
+quickly. Bill is still very worn and rather haggard. The kindness of
+everybody would spoil an angel."[170]
+
+I have put these personal experiences down from my diary because they are
+the only contemporary record I possess. Scott's own diary at this time
+contains the statement: "The Crozier party returned last night after
+enduring for five weeks the hardest conditions on record. They looked
+more weather-worn than any one I have yet seen. Their faces were scarred
+and wrinkled, their eyes dull, their hands whitened and creased with the
+constant exposure to damp and cold, yet the scars of frost-bite were
+very few ... to-day after a night's rest our travellers are very
+different in appearance and mental capacity."[171]
+
+"Atch has been lost in a blizzard," was the news which we got as soon as
+we could grasp anything. Since then he has spent a year of war in the
+North Sea, seen the Dardanelles campaign, and much fighting in France,
+and has been blown up in a monitor. I doubt whether he does not reckon
+that night the worst of the lot. He ought to have been blown into
+hundreds of little bits, but always like some hardy indiarubber ball he
+turns up again, a little dented, but with the same tough elasticity which
+refuses to be hurt. And with the same quiet voice he volunteers for the
+next, and tells you how splendid everybody was except himself.
+
+It was the blizzard of July 4, when we were lying in the windless bight
+on our way to Cape Crozier, and we knew it must be blowing all round us.
+At any rate it was blowing at Cape Evans, though it eased up in the
+afternoon, and Atkinson and Taylor went up the Ramp to read the
+thermometers there. They returned without great difficulty, and some
+discussion seems to have arisen as to whether it was possible to read the
+two screens on the sea-ice. Atkinson said he would go and read that in
+North Bay: Gran said he was going to South Bay. They started
+independently at 5.30 P.M. Gran returned an hour and a quarter
+afterwards. He had gone about two hundred yards.
+
+Atkinson had not gone much farther when he decided that he had better
+give it up, so he turned and faced the wind, steering by keeping it on
+his cheek. We discovered afterwards that the wind does not blow quite in
+the same direction at the end of the Cape as it does just where the hut
+lies. Perhaps it was this, perhaps his left leg carried him a little
+farther than his right, perhaps it was that the numbing effect of a
+blizzard on a man's brain was already having its effect, certainly
+Atkinson does not know himself, but instead of striking the Cape which
+ran across his true front, he found himself by an old fish trap which he
+knew was 200 yards out on the sea-ice. He made a great effort to steady
+himself and make for the Cape, but any one who has stood in a blizzard
+will understand how difficult that is. The snow was a blanket raging all
+round him, and it was quite dark. He walked on, and found nothing.
+
+Everything else is vague. Hour after hour he staggered about: he got his
+hand badly frost-bitten: he found pressure: he fell over it: he was
+crawling in it, on his hands and knees. Stumbling, tumbling, tripping,
+buffeted by the endless lash of the wind, sprawling through miles of
+punishing snow, he still seems to have kept his brain working. He found
+an island, thought it was Inaccessible, spent ages in coasting along it,
+lost it, found more pressure, and crawled along it. He found another
+island, and the same horrible, almost senseless, search went on. Under
+the lee of some rocks he waited for a time. His clothing was thin though
+he had his wind-clothes, and, a horrible thought if this was to go on, he
+had boots on his feet instead of warm finnesko. Here also he kicked out a
+hole in a drift where he might have more chance if he were forced to lie
+down. For sleep is the end of men who get lost in blizzards. Though he
+did not know it he must now have been out more than four hours.
+
+There was little chance for him if the blizzard continued, but hope
+revived when the moon showed in a partial lull. It is wonderful that he
+was sufficiently active to grasp the significance of this, and groping
+back in his brain he found he could remember the bearing of the moon from
+Cape Evans when he went to bed the night before. The hut must be
+somewhere over there: this must be Inaccessible Island! He left the
+island and made in that direction, but the blizzard came down again with
+added force and the moon was blotted out. He tried to return to the
+island and failed: then he stumbled on another island, perhaps the same
+one, and waited. Again the lull came, and again he set off, and walked
+and walked, until he recognized Inaccessible Island on his left. Clearly
+he must have been under Great Razorback Island and this is some four
+miles from Cape Evans. The moon still showed, and on he walked and then
+at last he saw a flame.
+
+Atkinson's continued absence was not noticed at the hut until dinner was
+nearly over at 7.15; that is, until he had been absent about two hours.
+The wind at Cape Evans had dropped though it was thick all round, and no
+great anxiety was felt: some went out and shouted, others went north with
+a lantern, and Day arranged to light a paraffin flare on Wind Vane Hill.
+Atkinson never experienced this lull, and having seen the way blizzards
+will sweep down the Strait though the coastline is comparatively clear
+and calm, I can understand how he was in the thick of it all the time. I
+feel convinced that most of these blizzards are local affairs. The party
+which had gone north returned at 9.30 without news, and Scott became
+seriously alarmed. Between 9.30 and 10 six search parties started out.
+But time was passing and Atkinson had been away more than six hours.
+
+The light which Atkinson had seen was a flare of tow soaked in petrol lit
+by Day at Cape Evans. He corrected his course and before long was under
+the rock upon which Day could be seen working like some lanky devil in
+one of Dante's hells. Atkinson shouted again and again but could not
+attract his attention, and finally walked almost into the hut before he
+was found by two men searching the Cape. "It was all my own damned
+fault," he said, "but Scott never slanged me at all." I really think we
+should all have been as merciful! Wouldn't _you_?
+
+And that was that: but he had a beastly hand.
+
+Theoretically the sun returned to us on August 23. Practically there was
+nothing to be seen except blinding drift. But we saw his upper limb two
+days later. In Scott's words the daylight came "rushing" at us. Two
+spring journeys were contemplated; and with preparations for the Polar
+Journey, and the ordinary routine work of the station, everybody had as
+much on his hands as he could get through.
+
+Lieutenant Evans, Gran and Forde volunteered to go out to Corner Camp and
+dig out this depôt as well as that of Safety Camp. They started on
+September 9 and camped on the sea-ice beyond Cape Armitage that night,
+the minimum temperature being -45°. They dug out Safety Camp next
+morning, and marched on towards Corner Camp. The minimum that night was
+-62.3°. The next evening they made their night camp as a blizzard was
+coming up, the temperature at the same time being -34.5° and minimum for
+the night -40°. This is an extremely low temperature for a blizzard. They
+made a start in a very cold wind the next afternoon (September 12) and
+camped at 8.30 P.M. That night was bitterly cold and they found that the
+minimum showed -73.3° for that night. Evans reports adversely on the use
+of the eider-down bag and inner tent, but here none of our Winter Journey
+men would agree with him.[172] Most of September 13th was spent in
+digging out Corner Camp which they left at 5 P.M., intending to travel
+back to Hut Point without stopping except for meals. They marched all
+through that night with two halts for meals and arrived at Hut Point at 3
+P.M. on September 14, having covered a distance of 34.6 statute miles.
+They reached Cape Evans the following day after an absence of 6½
+days.[173]
+
+During this journey Forde got his hand badly frost-bitten which
+necessitated his return in the Terra Nova in March 1912. He owed a good
+deal to the skilful treatment Atkinson gave it.
+
+Wilson was still looking grey and drawn some days, and I was not too fit,
+but Bowers was indefatigable. Soon after we got in from Cape Crozier he
+heard that Scott was going over to the Western Mountains: somehow or
+other he persuaded Scott to take him, and they started with Seaman Evans
+and Simpson on September 15 on what Scott calls "a remarkably pleasant
+and instructive little spring journey,"[174] and what Bowers called a
+jolly picnic.
+
+This picnic started from the hut in a -40° temperature, dragging 180 lbs.
+per man, mainly composed of stores for the geological party of the
+summer. They penetrated as far north as Dunlop Island and turned back
+from there on September 24, reaching Cape Evans on September 29, marching
+twenty-one miles (statute) into a blizzard wind with occasional storms of
+drift and a temperature of -16°: and they marched a little too long; for
+a storm of drift came against them and they had to camp. It is never very
+easy pitching a tent on sea-ice because there is not very much snow on
+the ice: on this occasion it was only after they had detached the inner
+tent, which was fastened to the bamboos, that they could hold the
+bamboos, and then it was only inch by inch that they got the outer cover
+on. At 9 P.M. the drift took off though the wind was as strong as ever,
+and they decided to make for Cape Evans. They arrived at 1.15 A.M. after
+one of the most strenuous days which Scott could remember: and that meant
+a good deal. Simpson's face was a sight! During his absence Griffith
+Taylor became meteorologist-in-chief. He was a greedy scientist, and he
+also wielded a fluent pen. Consequently his output during the year and a
+half which he spent with us was large, and ranged from the results of the
+two excellent scientific journeys which he led in the Western Mountains,
+to this work during the latter half of September. He was a most valued
+contributor to The South Polar Times, and his prose and poetry both had a
+bite which was never equalled by any other of our amateur journalists.
+When his pen was still, his tongue wagged, and the arguments he led were
+legion. The hut was a merrier place for his presence. When the weather
+was good he might be seen striding over the rocks with a complete
+disregard of the effect on his clothes: he wore through a pair of boots
+quicker than anybody I have ever known, and his socks had to be mended
+with string. Ice movement and erosion were also of interest to him, and
+almost every day he spent some time in studying the slopes and huge
+ice-cliffs of the Barne Glacier, and other points of interest. With equal
+ferocity he would throw himself into his curtained bunk because he was
+bored, or emerge from it to take part in some argument which was
+troubling the table. His diary must have been almost as long as the
+reports he wrote for Scott of his geological explorations. He was a
+demon note-taker, and he had a passion for being equipped so that he
+could cope with any observation which might turn up. Thus Old Griff on a
+sledge journey might have notebooks protruding from every pocket, and
+hung about his person, a sundial, a prismatic compass, a sheath knife, a
+pair of binoculars, a geological hammer, chronometer, pedometer, camera,
+aneroid and other items of surveying gear, as well as his goggles and
+mitts. And in his hand might be an ice-axe which he used as he went along
+to the possible advancement of science, but the certain disorganization
+of his companions.
+
+His gaunt, untamed appearance was atoned for by a halo of good-fellowship
+which hovered about his head. I am sure he must have been an untidy
+person to have in your tent: I feel equally sure that his tent-mates
+would have been sorry to lose him. His gear took up more room than was
+strictly his share, and his mind also filled up a considerable amount of
+space. He always bulked large, and when he returned to the Australian
+Government, which had lent him for the first two sledging seasons, he
+left a noticeable gap in our company.
+
+From the time we returned from Cape Crozier until now Scott had been full
+of buck. Our return had taken a weight off his mind: the return of the
+daylight was stimulating to everybody: and to a man of his impatient and
+impetuous temperament the end of the long period of waiting was a relief.
+Also everything was going well. On September 10 he writes with a sigh of
+relief that the detailed plans for the Southern Journey are finished at
+last. "Every figure has been checked by Bowers, who has been an enormous
+help to me. If the motors are successful, we shall have no difficulty in
+getting to the Glacier, and if they fail, we shall still get there with
+any ordinary degree of good fortune. To work three units of four men from
+that point onwards requires no small provision, but with the proper
+provision it should take a good deal to stop the attainment of our
+object. I have tried to take every reasonable possibility of misfortune
+into consideration, and to so organize the parties as to be prepared to
+meet them. I fear to be too sanguine, yet taking everything into
+consideration I feel that our chances ought to be good."[175]
+
+And again he writes: "Of hopeful signs for the future none are more
+remarkable than the health and spirit of our people. It would be
+impossible to imagine a more vigorous community, and there does not seem
+to be a single weak spot in the twelve good men and true who are chosen
+for the Southern advance. All are now experienced sledge travellers, knit
+together with a bond of friendship that has never been equalled under
+such circumstances. Thanks to these people, and more especially to Bowers
+and Petty Officer Evans, there is not a single detail of our equipment
+which is not arranged with the utmost care and in accordance with the
+tests of experience."[176]
+
+Indeed Bowers had been of the very greatest use to Scott in the working
+out of these plans. Not only had he all the details of stores at his
+finger-tips, but he had studied polar clothing and polar food, was full
+of plans and alternative plans, and, best of all, refused to be beaten by
+any problem which presented itself. The actual distribution of weights
+between dogs, motors and ponies, and between the different ponies, was
+largely left in his hands. We had only to lead our ponies out on the day
+of the start and we were sure to find our sledges ready, each with the
+right load and weight. To the leader of an expedition such a man was
+worth his weight in gold.
+
+But now Scott became worried and unhappy. We were running things on a
+fine margin of transport, and during the month before we were due to
+start mishap followed mishap in the most disgusting way. Three men were
+more or less incapacitated: Forde with his frozen hand, Clissold who
+concussed himself by a fall from a berg, and Debenham who hurt his knee
+seriously when playing foot-ball. One of the ponies, Jehu, was such a
+crock that at one time it was decided not to take him out at all: and
+very bad opinions were also held of Chinaman. Another dog died of a
+mysterious disease. "It is trying," writes Scott, "but I am past
+despondency. Things must take their course."[177] And "if this waiting
+were to continue it looks as though we should become a regular party of
+'crocks.'"[178]
+
+Then on the top of all this came a bad accident to one of the motor axles
+on the eve of departure. "To-night the motors were to be taken on to the
+floe. The drifts made the road very uneven, and the first and best motor
+overrode its chain; the chain was replaced and the machine proceeded, but
+just short of the floe was thrust to a steep inclination by a ridge, and
+the chain again overrode the sprockets; this time by ill fortune Day
+slipped at the critical moment and without intention jammed the throttle
+full on. The engine brought up, but there was an ominous trickle of oil
+under the back axle, and investigation showed that the axle casing
+(aluminium) had split. The casing had been stripped and brought into the
+hut: we may be able to do something to it, but time presses. It all goes
+to show that we want more experience and workshops. I am secretly
+convinced that we shall not get much help from the motors, yet nothing
+has ever happened to them that was unavoidable. A little more care and
+foresight would make them splendid allies. The trouble is that if they
+fail, no one will ever believe this."[179]
+
+In the meantime Meares and Dimitri ran out to Corner Camp from Hut Point
+twice with the two dog-teams. The first time they journeyed out and back
+in two days and a night, returning on October 15; and another very
+similar run was made before the end of the month.
+
+The motor party was to start first, but was delayed until October 24.
+They were to wait for us in latitude 80° 30´, man-hauling certain loads
+on if the motors broke down. The two engineers were Day and Lashly, and
+their two helpers, who steered by pulling on a rope in front, were
+Lieutenant Evans and Hooper. Scott was "immensely eager that these
+tractors should succeed, even though they may not be of great help to our
+Southern advance. A small measure of success will be enough to show their
+possibilities, their ability to revolutionize polar transport."[180]
+
+Lashly, as the reader may know by now, was a chief stoker in the Navy,
+and accompanied Scott on his Plateau Journey in the Discovery days. The
+following account of the motors' chequered career is from his diary, and
+for permission to include here both it and the story of the adventures of
+the Second Return Party, an extraordinarily vivid and simple narrative, I
+cannot be too grateful.
+
+After the motors had been two days on the sea-ice on their way to Hut
+Point Lashly writes on 26th October 1911:
+
+"Kicked off at 9.30; engine going well, surface much better, dropped one
+can of petrol each and lubricating oil, lunched about two miles from Hut
+Point. Captain Scott and supporting party came from Cape Evans to help us
+over blue ice, but they were not required. Got away again after lunch but
+was delayed by the other sledge not being able to get along, it is
+beginning to dawn on me the sledges are not powerful enough for the work
+as it is one continual drag over this sea-ice, perhaps it will improve on
+the barrier, it seems we are going to be troubled with engine
+overheating; after we have run about three-quarters to a mile it is
+necessary to stop at least half an hour to cool the engine down, then we
+have to close up for a few minutes to allow the carbrutta to warm up or
+we can't get the petrol to vaporize; we are getting new experiences every
+day. We arrived at Hut Point and proceeded to Cape Armitage it having
+come on to snow pretty thickly, so we pitched our tent and waited for the
+other car to come up, she has been delayed all the afternoon and not made
+much headway. At 6.30 Mr. Bowers and Mr. Garrard came out to us and told
+us to come back to Hut Point for the night, where we all enjoyed
+ourselves with a good hoosh and a nice night with all hands.
+
+
+    "_27th October 1911._
+
+"This morning being fine made our way out to the cars and got them going
+after a bit of trouble, the temperature being a bit low. I got away in
+good style, the surface seems to be improving, it is better for running
+on but very rough and the overheating is not overcome nor likely to be as
+far as I can see. Just before arriving at the Barrier my car began to
+develop some strange knocking in the engine, but with the help of the
+party with us I managed to get on the Barrier, the other car got up the
+slope in fine style and waited for me to come up; as my engine is giving
+trouble we decided to camp, have lunch and see what is the matter. On
+opening the crank chamber we found the crank brasses broke into little
+pieces, so there is nothing left to do but replace them with the spare
+ones; of course this meant a cold job for Mr. Day and myself, as handling
+metal on the Barrier is not a thing one looks forward to with pleasure.
+Anyhow we set about it after Lieutenant Evans and Hooper had rigged up a
+screen to shelter us a bit, and by 10 P.M. we were finished and ready to
+proceed, but owing to a very low temperature we found it difficult to get
+the engines to go, so we decided to camp for the night.
+
+
+    "_28th October 1911._
+
+"Turned out and had another go at starting which took some little time
+owing again to the low temperature. We got away but again the trouble is
+always staring us in the face, overheating, and the surface is so bad and
+the pull so heavy and constant that it looks we are in for a rough time.
+We are continually waiting for one another to come up, and every time we
+stop something has to be done, my fan got jammed and delayed us some
+time, but have got it right again. Mr. Evans had to go back for his spare
+gear owing to some one [not] bringing it out in mistake; he had a good
+tramp as we were about 15 miles out from Hut Point.
+
+
+    "_29th October 1911._
+
+"Again we got away, but did not get far before the other car began to
+give trouble. I went back to see what was the matter, it seems the petrol
+is dirty due perhaps to putting in a new drum, anyhow got her up and
+camped for lunch. After lunch made a move, and all seemed to be going
+well when Mr. Day's car gave out at the crank brasses the same as mine,
+so we shall have to see what is the next best thing to do.
+
+
+    "_30th October 1911._
+
+"This morning before getting the car on the way had to reconstruct our
+loads as Mr. Day's car is finished and no more use for further service.
+We have got all four of us with one car now, things seems to be going
+fairly well, but we are still troubled with the overheating which means
+to say half our time is wasted. We can see dawning on us the harness
+before long. We covered seven miles and camped for the night. We are now
+about six miles from Corner Camp.
+
+
+    "_31st October 1911._
+
+"Got away with difficulty, and nearly reached Corner Camp, but the
+weather was unkind and forced us to camp early. One thing we have been
+able to bring along a good supply of pony food and most of the man food,
+but so far the motor sledges have proved a failure.
+
+
+    "_1st November 1911._
+
+"Started away with the usual amount of agony, and soon arrived at Corner
+Camp where we left a note to Captain Scott explaining the cause of our
+breakdown. I told Mr. Evans to say this sledge won't go much farther.
+After getting about a mile past Corner Camp my engine gave out finally,
+so here is an end to the motor sledges. I can't say I am sorry because I
+am not, and the others are, I think, of the same opinion as myself. We
+have had a heavy task pulling the heavy sledges up every time we stopped,
+which was pretty frequent, even now we have to start man-hauling we shall
+not be much more tired than we have already been at night when we had
+finished. Now comes the man-hauling part of the show, after reorganizing
+our sledge and taking aboard all the man food we can pull, we started
+with 190 lbs. per man, a strong head wind made it a bit uncomfortable for
+getting along, anyhow we made good about three miles and camped for the
+night. The surface not being very good made the travelling a bit heavy.
+
+"After three days' man-hauling.
+
+
+    "_5th November 1911._
+
+"Made good about 14½ miles, if the surface would only remain as it is
+now we could get along pretty well. We are now thinking of the ponies
+being on their way, hope they will get better luck than we had with the
+motor sledges, but by what I can see they will have a tough time of it.
+
+
+    "_6th November 1911._
+
+"To-day we have worked hard and covered a good distance 12 miles, surface
+rough but slippery, all seems to be going pretty well, but we have
+generally had enough by the time comes for us to camp.
+
+
+    "_7th November 1911._
+
+"We have again made good progress, but the light was very trying,
+sometimes we could not see at all where we were going. I tried to find
+some of the Cairns that were built by the Depôt Party last year, came
+upon one this afternoon which is about 20 miles from One Ton Depôt, so at
+the rate we have been travelling we ought to reach there some time
+to-morrow night. Temperature to-day was pretty low, but we are beginning
+to get hardened into it now.
+
+
+    "_8th November 1911._
+
+"Made a good start, but the surface is getting softer every day and makes
+our legs ache; we arrived at One Ton Depôt and camped. Then proceeded to
+dig out some of the provisions, we have to take on all the man food we
+can, this is a wild-looking place no doubt, have not seen anything of the
+ponies.
+
+
+    "_9th November 1911._
+
+"To-day we have started on the second stage of our journey. Our orders
+are to proceed one degree south of One Ton Depôt and wait for the ponies
+and dogs to come up with us; as we have been making good distances each
+day, the party will hardly overtake us, but we have found to-day the load
+is much heavier to drag. We have just over 200 lbs. per man, and we have
+been brought up on several occasions, and to start again required a
+pretty good strain on the rope, anyhow we done 10½ miles, a pretty good
+show considering all things.
+
+
+    "_10th November 1911._
+
+"Again we started off with plenty of vim, but it was jolly tough work,
+and it begins to tell on all of us; the surface to-day is covered with
+soft crystals which don't improve things. To-night Hooper is pretty well
+done up, but he have stuck it well and I hope he will, although he could
+not tackle the food in the best of spirits, we know he wanted it. Mr.
+Evans, Mr. Day and myself could eat more, as we are just beginning to
+feel the tightening of the belt. Made good 11¼ miles and we are now
+building cairns all the way, one about three miles: then again at lunch
+and one in the afternoon and one at night. This will keep us employed.
+
+
+    "_11th November 1911._
+
+"To-day it has been very heavy work. The surface is very bad and we are
+pretty well full up, but not with food; man-hauling is no doubt the
+hardest work one can do, no wonder the motor sledges could not stand it.
+I have been thinking of the trials I witnessed of the motor engines in
+Wolseley's works in Birmingham, they were pretty stiff but nothing
+compared to the drag of a heavy load on the Barrier surface.
+
+
+    "_12th November 1911._
+
+"To-day have been similar to the two previous days, but the light have
+been bad and snow have been falling which do not improve the surface; we
+have been doing 10 miles a day Geographical and quite enough too as we
+have all had enough by time it goes Camp.
+
+
+    "_13th November 1911._
+
+"The weather seems to be on the change. Should not be surprised if we
+don't get a blizzard before long, but of course we don't want that.
+Hooper seems a bit fagged but he sticks it pretty well. Mr. Day keeps on
+plodding, his only complaint is should like a little more to eat.
+
+
+    "_14th November 1911._
+
+"When we started this morning Mr. Evans said we had about 15 miles to go
+to reach the required distance. The hauling have been about the same,
+but the weather is somewhat finer and the blizzard gone off. We did 10
+miles and camped; have not seen anything of the main party yet but shall
+not be surprised to see them at any time.
+
+
+    "_15th November 1911._
+
+"We are camped after doing five miles where we are supposed to be [lat.
+80° 32´]; now we have to wait the others coming up. Mr. Evans is quite
+proud to think we have arrived before the others caught us, but we don't
+expect they will be long although we have nothing to be ashamed of as our
+daily distance have been good. We have built a large cairn this afternoon
+before turning in. The weather is cold but excellent."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They waited there six days before the pony party arrived, when the Upper
+Barrier Depôt (Mount Hooper) was left in the cairn.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [168] My own diary.
+
+   [169] Ibid.
+
+   [170] Ibid.
+
+   [171] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 361.
+
+   [172] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 293.
+
+   [173] Ibid. pp. 291-297; written by Lieutenant Evans.
+
+   [174] Ibid. vol. i. p. 409.
+
+   [175] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 403.
+
+   [176] Ibid. p. 404.
+
+   [177] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 425.
+
+   [178] Ibid. p. 437.
+
+   [179] Ibid. p. 429.
+
+   [180] Ibid. p. 438.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY
+
+                                Come, my friends,
+    'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
+    Push off, and sitting well in order smite
+    The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
+    To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
+    Of all the western stars, until I die.
+    It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
+    It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
+    And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
+    Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
+    We are not now that strength which in old days
+    Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
+    One equal temper of heroic hearts,
+    Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
+    To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
+                                    TENNYSON, _Ulysses._
+
+    Take it all in all it is wonderful that the South Pole was
+    reached so soon after the North Pole had been conquered. From
+    Cape Columbia to the North Pole, straight going, is 413
+    geographical miles, and Peary who took on his expedition 246
+    dogs, covered this distance in 37 days. From Hut Point to the
+    South Pole and back is 1532 geographical or 1766 statute miles,
+    the distance to the top of the Beardmore Glacier alone being more
+    than 100 miles farther than Peary had to cover to the North Pole.
+    Scott travelled from Hut Point to the South Pole in 75 days, and
+    to the Pole and back to his last camp in 147 days, a period of
+    five months. A. C.-G.
+
+(All miles are geographical unless otherwise stated.)
+
+
+I. THE BARRIER STAGE
+
+The departure from Cape Evans at 11 P.M. on November 1 is described by
+Griffith Taylor, who started a few days later on the second Geological
+Journey with his own party:
+
+"On the 31st October the pony parties started. Two weak ponies led by
+Atkinson and Keohane were sent off first at 4.30, and I accompanied them
+for about a mile. Keohane's pony rejoiced in the name of Jimmy Pigg, and
+he stepped out much better than his fleeter-named mate Jehu. We heard
+through the telephone of their safe arrival at Hut Point.
+
+"Next morning the Southern Party finished their mail, posting it in the
+packing case on Atkinson's bunk, and then at 11 A.M. the last party were
+ready for the Pole. They had packed the sledges overnight, and they took
+20 lbs. personal baggage. The Owner had asked me what book he should
+take. He wanted something fairly filling. I recommended Tyndall's
+Glaciers--if he wouldn't find it 'coolish.' He didn't fancy this! So then
+I said, 'Why not take Browning, as I'm doing?' And I believe that he did
+so.
+
+"Wright's pony was the first harnessed to its sledge. Chinaman is Jehu's
+rival for last place, and as some compensation is easy to harness. Seaman
+Evans led Snatcher, who used to rush ahead and take the lead as soon as
+he was harnessed. Cherry had Michael, a steady goer, and Wilson led
+Nobby--the pony rescued from the killer whales in March. Scott led out
+Snippets to the sledges, and harnessed him to the foremost, with little
+Anton's help--only it turned out to be Bowers' sledge! However he
+transferred in a few minutes and marched off rapidly to the south.
+Christopher, as usual, behaved like a demon. First they had to trice his
+front leg up tight under his shoulder, then it took five minutes to throw
+him. The sledge was brought up and he was harnessed in while his head was
+held down on the floe. Finally he rose up, still on three legs, and
+started off galloping as well as he was able. After several violent kicks
+his foreleg was released, and after more watch-spring flicks with his
+hind legs he set off fairly steadily. Titus can't stop him when once he
+has started, and will have to do the fifteen miles in one lap probably!
+
+"Dear old Titus--that was my last memory of him. Imperturbable as ever;
+never hasty, never angry, but soothing that vicious animal, and
+determined to get the best out of most unpromising material in his
+endeavour to do his simple duty.
+
+"Bowers was last to leave. His pony, Victor, nervous but not vicious, was
+soon in the traces. I ran to the end of the Cape and watched the little
+cavalcade--already strung out into remote units--rapidly fade into the
+lonely white waste to southward.
+
+"That evening I had a chat with Wilson over the telephone from the
+Discovery Hut--my last communication with those five gallant
+spirits."[181]
+
+All the ponies arrived at Hut Point by 4 P.M., just in time to escape a
+stiff blow. Three of them were housed with ourselves inside the hut, the
+rest being put into the verandah. The march showed that with their loads
+the speed of the different ponies varied to such an extent that
+individuals were soon separated by miles. "It reminded me of a regatta or
+a somewhat disorganized fleet with ships of very unequal speed."[182]
+
+It was decided to change to night marching, and the following evening we
+proceeded in the following order, which was the way of our going for the
+present. The three slowest ponies started first, namely, Jehu with
+Atkinson, Chinaman with Wright, James Pigg with Keohane. This party was
+known as the Baltic Fleet.
+
+Two hours later Scott's party followed; Scott with Snippets, Wilson with
+Nobby, and myself with Michael.
+
+Both these parties camped for lunch in the middle of the night's march.
+After another hour the remaining four men set to work to get Christopher
+into his sledge; when he was started they harnessed in their own ponies
+as quickly as possible and followed, making a non-stop run right through
+the night's march. It was bad for men and ponies, but it was impossible
+to camp in the middle of the march owing to Christopher. The composition
+of this party was, Oates with Christopher, Bowers with Victor, Seaman
+Evans with Snatcher, Crean with Bones.
+
+Each of these three parties was self-contained with tent, cooker and
+weekly bag, and the times of starting were so planned that the three
+parties arrived at the end of the march about the same time.
+
+There was a strong head wind and low drift as we rounded Cape Armitage on
+our way to the Barrier and the future. Probably there were few of us who
+did not wonder when we should see the old familiar place again.
+
+Scott's party camped at Safety Camp as the Baltic fleet were getting
+under weigh again. Soon afterwards Ponting appeared with a dog sledge and
+a cinematograph,--how anomalous it seemed--which "was up in time to catch
+the flying rearguard which came along in fine form, Snatcher leading and
+being stopped every now and again--a wonderful little beast. Christopher
+had given the usual trouble when harnessed, but was evidently subdued by
+the Barrier Surface. However, it was not thought advisable to halt him,
+and so the party fled through in the wake of the advance guard."[183]
+
+Immediately afterwards Scott's party packed up. "Good-bye and good luck,"
+from Ponting, a wave of the hand not holding in a frisky pony and we had
+left the last link with the hut. "The future is in the lap of the gods; I
+can think of nothing left undone to deserve success."[184]
+
+The general scheme was to average 10 miles (11.5 statute) a day from Hut
+Point to One Ton Depôt with the ponies lightly laden. From One Ton to the
+Gateway a daily average of 13 miles (15 statute) was necessary to carry
+twenty-four weekly units of food for four men each to the bottom of the
+glacier. This was the Barrier Stage of the journey, a distance of 369
+miles (425 statute) as actually run on our sledge-meter. The twenty-four
+weekly units of food were to carry the Polar Party and two supporting
+parties forward to their farthest point, and back again to the bottom of
+the Beardmore, where three more units were to be left in a depôt.[185]
+
+All went well this first day on the Barrier, and encouraging messages
+left on empty petrol drums told us that the motors were going well when
+they passed. But the next day we passed five petrol drums which had been
+dumped. This meant that there was trouble, and some 14 miles from Hut
+Point we learned that the big end of the No. 2 cylinder of Day's motor
+had broken, and half a mile beyond we found the motor itself, drifted up
+with snow, and looking a mournful wreck. The next day's march (Sunday,
+November 5, A.M.) brought us to Corner Camp. There were a few legs down
+crevasses during the day but nothing to worry about.
+
+From here we could see to the South an ominous mark in the snow which we
+hoped might not prove to be the second motor. It was: "the big end of No.
+1 cylinder had cracked, the machine otherwise in good order. Evidently
+the engines are not fitted to working in this climate, a fact that should
+be certainly capable of correction. One thing is proved; the system of
+propulsion is altogether satisfactory."[186] And again: "It is a
+disappointment. I had hoped better of the machines once they got away on
+the Barrier Surface."[187]
+
+Scott had set his heart upon the success of the motors. He had run them
+in Norway and Switzerland; and everything was done that care and
+forethought could suggest. At the back of his mind, I feel sure, was the
+wish to abolish the cruelty which the use of ponies and dogs necessarily
+entails. "A small measure of success will be enough to show their
+possibilities, their ability to revolutionize polar transport. Seeing the
+machines at work to-day [leaving Cape Evans] and remembering that every
+defect so far shown is purely mechanical, it is impossible not to be
+convinced of their value. But the trifling mechanical defects and lack of
+experience show the risk of cutting out trials. A season of experiment
+with a small workshop at hand may be all that stands between success and
+failure."[188] I do not believe that Scott built high hopes on these
+motors: but it was a chance to help those who followed him. Scott was
+always trying to do that.
+
+Did they succeed or fail? They certainly did not help us much, the motor
+which travelled farthest drawing a heavy load to just beyond Corner Camp.
+But even so fifty statute miles is fifty miles, and that they did it at
+all was an enormous advance. The distance travelled included hard and
+soft surfaces, and we found later when the snow bridges fell in during
+the summer that this car had crossed safely some broad crevasses. Also
+they worked in temperatures down to -30° Fahr. All this was to the good,
+for no motor-driven machine had travelled on the Barrier before. The
+general design seemed to be right, all that was now wanted was
+experience. As an experiment they were successful in the South, but Scott
+never knew their true possibilities; for they were the direct ancestors
+of the 'tanks' in France.
+
+Night-marching had its advantages and disadvantages. The ponies were
+pulling in the colder part of the day and resting in the warm, which was
+good. Their coats dried well in the sun, and after a few days to get
+accustomed to the new conditions, they slept and fed in comparative
+comfort. On the other hand the pulling surface was undoubtedly better
+when the sun was high and the temperature warmer. Taking one thing with
+another there was no doubt that night-marching was better for ponies, but
+we seldom if ever tried it man-hauling.
+
+[Illustration: CAMP ON THE BARRIER--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+Just now there was an amazing difference between day and night
+conditions. At midnight one was making short work of everything, nursing
+fingers after doing up harness with minus temperatures and nasty cold
+winds: by supper time the next morning we were sitting on our sledges
+writing up our diaries or meteorological logs, and even dabbling our bare
+toes in the snow, but not for long! Shades of darkness! How different all
+this was from what we had been through. My personal impression of this
+early summer sledging on the Barrier was one of constant wonder at its
+comfort. One had forgotten that a tent could be warm and a sleeping-bag
+dry: so deep were the contrary impressions that only actual experience
+was convincing. "It is a sweltering day, the air breathless, the glare
+intense--one loses sight of the fact that the temperature is low [-22°],
+one's mind seeks comparison in hot sunlit streets and scorching
+pavements, yet six hours ago my thumb was frost-bitten. All the
+inconveniences of frozen footwear and damp clothes and sleeping-bags have
+vanished entirely."[189]
+
+We could not expect to get through this windy area of Corner Camp without
+some bad weather. The wind-blown surface improved, the ponies took their
+heavier loads with ease, but as we came to our next camp it was banking
+up to the S.E. and the breeze freshened almost immediately. We built pony
+walls hurriedly and by the time we had finished supper it was blowing
+force 5 (A.M. November 6, Camp 4). There was a moderate gale with some
+drift all day which increased to force 8 with more drift at night. It was
+impossible to march. The drift took off a bit the next morning, and
+Meares and Dimitri with the two dog-teams appeared and camped astern of
+us. This was according to previous plan by which the dog-teams were to
+start after us and catch us up, since they travelled faster than the
+ponies. "The snow and drift necessitated digging out ponies again and
+again to keep them well sheltered from the wind. The walls made a
+splendid lee, but some sledges at the extremities were buried altogether,
+and our tent being rather close to windward of our wall got the back eddy
+and was continually being snowed up above the door. After noon the snow
+ceased except for surface drift. Snatcher knocked his section of the wall
+over, and Jehu did so more than ever. All ponies looked pretty miserable,
+as in spite of the shelter they were bunged up, eyes and all, in drift
+which had become ice and could not be removed without considerable
+difficulty."[190]
+
+Towards evening it ceased drifting altogether, but a wind, force 4, kept
+up with disconcerting regularity. Eventually Atkinson's party got away at
+midnight. "Castle Rock is still visible, but will be closed by the north
+end of White Island in the next march--then good-bye to the old landmarks
+for many a long day."[191]
+
+The next day (November 8-9) "started at midnight and had a very pleasant
+march. Truly sledging in such weather is great. Mounts Discovery and
+Morning, which we gradually closed, looked fine in the general panorama
+of mountains. We are now nearly abreast the north end of the Bluff. We
+all came up to camp together this morning: it looked like a meet of the
+hounds, and Jehu ran away!!!"[192]
+
+The next march was just the opposite. Wind force 5 to 6 and falling snow.
+"The surface was very slippery in parts and on the hard sastrugi it was a
+case of falling or stumbling continually. The light got so bad that one
+might have been walking in the clouds for all that could be discerned,
+and yet it was only snowing slightly. The Bluff became completely
+obscured, and the usual signs of a blizzard were accentuated.
+
+"At lunch camp Scott packed up and followed us. We overhauled Atkinson
+about 1½ hours later, he having camped, and we were not sorry, as in
+addition to marching against a fresh southerly breeze the light brought a
+tremendous strain on the eyes in following tracks."[193] A little more
+than eight miles for the day's total.
+
+We carried these depressing conditions for three more marches, that is
+till the morning of November 13. The surface was wretched, the weather
+horrid, the snow persistent, covering everything with soft downy flakes,
+inch upon inch, and mile upon mile. There are glimpses of despondency in
+the diaries. "If this should come as an exception, our luck will be truly
+awful. The camp is very silent and cheerless, signs that things are going
+awry."[194] "The weather was horrid, overcast, gloomy, snowy. One's
+spirits became very low."[195] "I expected these marches to be a little
+difficult, but not near so bad as to-day."[196] Indefinite conditions
+always tried Scott most: positive disasters put him into more cheerful
+spirits than most. In the big gale coming South when the ship nearly
+sank, and when we lost one of the cherished motors through the sea-ice,
+his was one of the few cheerful faces I saw. Even when the ship ran
+aground off Cape Evans he was not despondent. But this kind of thing
+irked him. Bowers wrote: "The unpleasant weather and bad surface, and
+Chinaman's indisposition, combined to make the outlook unpleasant, and on
+arrival [in camp] I was not surprised to find that Scott had a grievance.
+He felt that in arranging the consumption of forage his own unit had not
+been favoured with the same reduction as ours, in fact accused me of
+putting upon his three horses to save my own. We went through the weights
+in detail after our meal, and, after a certain amount of argument,
+decided to carry on as we were going. I can quite understand his
+feelings, and after our experience of last year a bad day like this makes
+him fear our beasts are going to fail us. The Talent [i.e. the doctors]
+examined Chinaman, who begins to show signs of wear. Poor ancient little
+beggar, he ought to be a pensioner instead of finishing his days on a job
+of this sort. Jehu looks pretty rocky too, but seeing that we did not
+expect him to reach the Glacier Tongue, and that he has now done more
+than 100 miles from Cape Evans, one really does not know what to expect
+of these creatures. Certainly Titus thinks, as he has always said, that
+they are the most unsuitable scrap-heap crowd of unfit creatures that
+could possibly be got together."[197]
+
+"The weather was about as poisonous as one could wish; a fresh breeze and
+driving snow from the E. with an awful surface. The recently fallen snow
+thickly covered the ground with powdery stuff that the unfortunate ponies
+fairly wallowed in. If it was only ourselves to consider I should not
+mind a bit, but to see our best ponies being hit like this at the start
+is most distressing. A single march like that of last night must shorten
+their usefulness by days, and here we are a fortnight out, and barely
+one-third of the distance to the glacier covered, with every pony showing
+signs of wear. Victor looks a lean and lanky beast compared with his
+condition two weeks ago."[198]
+
+But the ponies began to go better; and it was about this time that Jehu
+was styled the Barrier Wonder, and Chinaman the Thunderbolt. "Our four
+ponies have suffered most," writes Bowers. "I don't agree with Titus that
+it is best to march them right through without a lunch camp. They were
+undoubtedly pretty tired, and worst of all did not go their feeds
+properly. It was a fine warm morning for them (Nov. 13); +15°, our
+warmest temperature hitherto. In the afternoon it came on to snow in
+large flakes like one would get at home. I have never seen such snow down
+here before; it makes the surface very bad for the sledges. The ponies'
+manes and rugs were covered in little knots of ice."
+
+The next march (November 13-14) was rather better, though the going was
+very deep and heavy, and all the ponies were showing signs of wear and
+tear. This was followed by a delightfully warm day, and all the animals
+were standing drowsily in the sunshine. We could see the land far away
+behind us, the first sight of land we had had for many days. On November
+15 we reached One Ton Depôt, having travelled a hundred and thirty miles
+from Hut Point.
+
+The two sledges left standing were still upright, and the tattered
+remains of a flag flapped over the main cairn. In a salt tin lashed to
+the bamboo flag-pole was a note from Lieutenant Evans to say that he had
+gone on with the motor party five days before, and would continue
+man-hauling to 80° 30´ S. and await us there. "He has done something over
+30 miles in 2½ days--exceedingly good going."[199] We dug out the cairn,
+which we found just as we had left it except that there was a big tongue
+of drift, level with the top of the cairn to leeward, and running about
+150 yards to N.E., showing that the prevailing wind here is S.W. Nine
+months before we had sprinkled some oats on the surface of the snow
+hoping to get a measurement of the accretion of snow during the winter.
+Unfortunately we were unable to find the oats again, but other evidence
+went to show that the snow deposit was very small. A minimum thermometer
+which was lashed with great care to a framework registered -73°. After
+the temperatures already experienced by us on the Barrier during the
+winter and spring this was surprisingly high, especially as our minimum
+temperatures were taken under the sledge, which means that the
+thermometer is shaded from radiation, while this thermometer at One Ton
+was left open to the sky. On the Winter Journey we found that a shaded
+thermometer registered -69° when an unshaded one registered -75°, a
+difference of 6°. All the provisions left here were found to be in
+excellent condition.
+
+We then had a prolonged council of war. This meant that Scott called
+Bowers, and perhaps Oates, into our tent after supper was finished in the
+morning. Somehow these conferences were always rather serio-comic. On
+this occasion, as was usually the case, the question was ponies. It was
+decided to wait here one day and rest them, as there was ample food. The
+main discussion centred round the amount of forage to be taken on from
+here, while the state of the ponies, the amount they could pull and the
+distance they could go had to be taken into consideration.
+
+"Oates thinks the ponies will get through, but that they have lost
+condition quicker than he expected. Considering his usually pessimistic
+attitude this must be thought a hopeful view. Personally I am much more
+hopeful. I think that a good many of the beasts are actually in better
+form than when they started, and that there is no need to be alarmed
+about the remainder, always excepting the weak ones which we have always
+regarded with doubt. Well, we must wait and see how things go."[200]
+
+The decision made was to take just enough food to get the ponies to the
+glacier, allowing for the killing of some of them before that date. It
+was obvious that Jehu and Chinaman could not go very much farther, and
+it was also necessary that ponies should be killed in order to feed the
+dogs. The two dog-teams were carrying about a week's pony food, but they
+were unable to advance more than a fortnight from One Ton without killing
+ponies.
+
+This decision practically meant that Scott abandoned the idea of taking
+ponies up the glacier. This was a great relief, for the crevassed state
+of the lower reaches of the glacier as described by Shackleton led us to
+believe that the attempt was suicidal. All the winter our brains were
+exercised to try and devise some method by which the ponies could be
+driven from behind, and by which the connection between pony and sledge
+could be loosed if the pony fell into a crevasse, but I confess that
+there seemed little chance of this happening. From all we saw of the
+glacier I am convinced that there is no reasonable chance of getting
+ponies up it, and that dogs could only be driven down it if the way up
+was most carefully surveyed and kept on the return. I am sure that in
+this kind of uncertainty the mental strain on the leader of a party is
+less than that on his men. The leader knows quite well what he thinks
+worth while risking or not: in this case Scott probably was always of the
+opinion that it would not be worth while taking ponies on to the glacier.
+The pony leaders, however, only knew that the possibility was ahead of
+them. I can remember now the relief with which we heard that it was not
+intended that Wilson should take Nobby, the fittest of our ponies,
+farther than the Gateway.
+
+Up to now Christopher had lived up to his reputation, as the following
+extracts from Bowers' diary will show: "Three times we downed him, and he
+got up and threw us about, with all four of us hanging on like grim
+death. He nearly had me under him once; he seems fearfully strong, but it
+is a pity he wastes so much good energy.... Christopher, as usual, was
+strapped on three legs and then got down on his knees. He gets more
+cunning each time, and if he does not succeed in biting or kicking one of
+us before long it won't be his fault. He finds the soft snow does not
+hurt his knees like the sea-ice, and so plunges about on them _ad lib_.
+One's finnesko are so slippery that it is difficult to exert full
+strength on him, and to-day he bowled Oates over and got away altogether.
+Fortunately the lashing on his fourth leg held fast, and we were able to
+secure him when he rejoined the other animals. Finally he lay down, and
+thought he had defeated us, but we had the sledge connected up by that
+time, and as he got up we rushed him forward before he had time to kick
+over the traces.... Dimitri came and gave us a hand with Chris. Three of
+us hung on to him while the other two connected up the sledge. We had a
+struggle for over twenty minutes, and he managed to tread on me, but no
+damage done.... Got Chris in by a dodge. Titus did away with his back
+strap, and nearly had him away unaided before he realized that the hated
+sledge was fast to him. Unfortunately he started off just too soon, and
+bolted with only one trace fast. This pivoted him to starboard, and he
+charged the line. I expected a mix-up, but he stopped at the wall between
+Bones and Snatcher, and we cast off and cleared sledge before trying
+again. By laying the traces down the side of the sledge instead of ahead
+we got him off his guard again, and he was away before he knew what had
+occurred.... We had a bad time with Chris again. He remembered having
+been bluffed before, and could not be got near the sledge at all. Three
+times he broke away, but fortunately he always ran back among the other
+ponies, and not out on to the Barrier. Finally we had to down him, and he
+was so tired with his recent struggles that after one abortive attempt we
+got him fast and away."
+
+Meanwhile it was not so much the difficulties of sledging as the
+depressing blank conditions in which our march was so often made, that
+gave us such troubles as we had. The routine of a tent makes a lot of
+difference. Scott's tent was a comfortable one to live in, and I was
+always glad when I was told to join it, and sorry to leave. He was
+himself extraordinarily quick, and no time was ever lost by his party in
+camping or breaking camp. He was most careful, some said over-careful
+but I do not think so, that everything should be neat and shipshape, and
+there was a recognized place for everything. On the Depôt Journey we were
+bidden to see that every particle of snow was beaten off our clothing and
+finnesko before entering the tent: if it was drifting we had to do this
+after entering and the snow was carefully cleared off the floor-cloth.
+Afterwards each tent was supplied with a small brush with which to
+perform this office. In addition to other obvious advantages this
+materially helped to keep clothing, finnesko, and sleeping-bags dry, and
+thus prolong the life of furs. "After all is said and done," said Wilson
+one day after supper, "the best sledger is the man who sees what has to
+be done, and does it--and says nothing about it." Scott agreed. And if
+you were "sledging with the Owner" you had to keep your eyes wide open
+for the little things which cropped up, and do them quickly, and say
+nothing about them. There is nothing so irritating as the man who is
+always coming in and informing all and sundry that he has repaired his
+sledge, or built a wall, or filled the cooker, or mended his socks.
+
+I moved into Scott's tent for the first time in the middle of the Depôt
+Journey, and was enormously impressed by the comfort which a careful
+routine of this nature evoked. There was a homelike air about the tent at
+supper time, and, though a lunch camp in the middle of the night is
+always rather bleak, there was never anything slovenly. Another thing
+which struck me even more forcibly was the cooking. We were of course on
+just the same ration as the tent from which I had come. I was hungry and
+said so. "Bad cooking," said Wilson shortly; and so it was. For in two or
+three days the sharpest edge was off my hunger. Wilson and Scott had
+learned many a cooking tip in the past, and, instead of the same old meal
+day by day, the weekly ration was so manoeuvred by a clever cook that
+it was seldom quite the same meal. Sometimes pemmican plain, or thicker
+pemmican with some arrowroot mixed with it: at others we surrendered a
+biscuit and a half apiece and had a dry hoosh, i.e. biscuit fried in
+pemmican with a little water added, and a good big cup of cocoa to
+follow. Dry hooshes also saved oil. There were cocoa and tea upon which
+to ring the changes, or better still 'teaco' which combined the
+stimulating qualities of tea with the food value of cocoa. Then much
+could be done with the dessert-spoonful of raisins which was our daily
+whack. They were good soaked in the tea, but best perhaps in with the
+biscuits and pemmican as a dry hoosh. "You are going far to earn my
+undying gratitude, Cherry," was a satisfied remark of Scott one evening
+when, having saved, unbeknownst to my companions, some of their daily
+ration of cocoa, arrowroot, sugar and raisins, I made a "chocolate
+hoosh." But I am afraid he had indigestion next morning. There were meals
+when we had interesting little talks, as when I find in my diary that:
+"we had a jolly lunch meal, discussing authors. Barrie, Galsworthy and
+others are personal friends of Scott. Some one told Max Beerbohm that he
+was like Captain Scott, and immediately, so Scott assured us, he grew a
+beard."
+
+But about three weeks out the topics of conversation became threadbare.
+From then onwards it was often that whole days passed without
+conversation beyond the routine Camp ho! All ready? Pack up. Spell ho.
+The latter after some two hours' pulling. When man-hauling we used to
+start pulling immediately we had the tent down, the sledge packed and our
+harness over our bodies and ski on our feet. After about a quarter of an
+hour the effects of the marching would be felt in the warming of hands
+and feet and the consequent thawing of our mitts and finnesko. We then
+halted long enough for everybody to adjust their ski and clothing: then
+on, perhaps for two hours or more, before we halted again.
+
+Since it had been decided to lighten the ponies' weights, we left at
+least 100 lbs. of pony forage behind when we started from One Ton on the
+night of November 16-17 on our first 13-mile march. This was a distinct
+saving, and instead of 695 lbs. each with which the six stronger ponies
+left Corner Camp, they now pulled only 625 lbs. Jehu had only 455 lbs.
+and Chinaman 448 lbs. The dog-teams had 860 lbs. of pony food between
+them, and according to plan the two teams were to carry 1570 lbs. from
+One Ton between them. These weights included the sledges, with straps and
+fittings, which weighed about 45 lbs.
+
+Summer seemed long in coming for we marched into a considerable breeze
+and the temperature was -18°. Oates and Seaman Evans had quite a crop of
+frost-bites. I pointed out to Meares that his nose was gone; but he left
+it, saying that he had got tired of it, and it would thaw out by and by.
+The ponies were going better for their rest. The next day's march was
+over crusty snow with a layer of loose powdery snow at the top, and a
+temperature of -21° was chilly. Towards the end of it Scott got
+frightened that the ponies were not going as well as they should. Another
+council of war was held, and it was decided that an average of thirteen
+miles a day must be done at all costs, and that another sack of forage
+should be dumped here, putting the ponies on short rations later, if
+necessary. Oates agreed, but said the ponies were going better than he
+expected: that Jehu and Chinaman might go a week, and almost certainly
+would go three days. Bowers was always against this dumping. Meanwhile
+Scott wrote: "It's touch and go whether we scrape up to the glacier;
+meanwhile we get along somehow."[201]
+
+[Illustration: PARHELIA--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+As a result of one of Christopher's tantrums Bowers records that his
+sledge-meter was carried away this morning: "I took my sledge-meter into
+the tent after breakfast and rigged up a fancy lashing with raw hide
+thongs so as to give it the necessary play with security. A splendid
+parhelia exhibition was caused by the ice-crystals. Round the sun was a
+22° halo [that is a halo 22° from the sun's image], with four mock suns
+in rainbow colours, and outside this another halo in complete rainbow
+colours. Above the sun were the arcs of two other circles touching these
+halos, and the arcs of the great all-round circle could be seen faintly
+on either side. Below was a dome-shaped glare of white which contained an
+exaggerated mock sun, which was as dazzling as the sun himself.
+Altogether a fine example of a pretty common phenomenon down here."
+And the next day: "We saw the party ahead in inverted mirage some
+distance above their heads."
+
+In the next three marches we covered our daily 13 miles, for the most
+part without very great difficulty. But poor Jehu was in a bad way,
+stopping every few hundred yards. It was a funereal business for the
+leaders of these crock ponies; and at this stage of the journey Atkinson,
+Wright and Keohane had many more difficulties than most of us, and the
+success of their ponies was largely due to their patience and care.
+Incidentally big icicles formed upon the ponies' noses during the march
+and Chinaman used Wright's windproof blouse as a handkerchief. During the
+last of these marches, that is on the morning of November 21, we saw a
+massive cairn ahead, and found there the motor party, consisting of
+Lieutenant Evans, Day, Lashly and Hooper. The cairn was in 80° 32´, and
+under the name Mount Hooper formed our Upper Barrier Depôt. We left there
+three S (summit) rations, two cases of emergency biscuits and two cases
+of oil, which constituted three weekly food units for the three parties
+which were to advance from the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier. This food
+was to take them back from 80° 32´ to One Ton Camp. We all camped for the
+night 3 miles farther on: sixteen men, five tents, ten ponies,
+twenty-three dogs and thirteen sledges.
+
+The man-hauling party had been waiting for six days; and, having expected
+us before, were getting anxious about us. They declared that they were
+very hungry, and Day, who was always long and thin, looked quite gaunt.
+Some spare biscuits which we gave them from our tent were carried off
+with gratitude. The rest of us who were driving dogs or leading ponies
+still found our Barrier ration satisfying.
+
+We had now been out three weeks and had travelled 192 miles, and formed a
+very good idea as to what the ponies could do. The crocks had done
+wonderfully:--"We hope Jehu will last three days; he will then be
+finished in any case and fed to the dogs. It is amusing to see Meares
+looking eagerly for the chance of a feed for his animals; he has been
+expecting it daily. On the other hand, Atkinson and Oates are eager to
+get the poor animal beyond the point at which Shackleton killed his first
+beast. Reports on Chinaman are very favourable, and it really looks as
+though the ponies are going to do what is hoped of them."[202] From first
+to last Nobby, who was rescued from the floe, was the strongest pony we
+had, and was now drawing a heavier load than any other pony by 50 lbs. He
+was a well-shaped, contented kind of animal, misnamed a pony. Indeed
+several of our beasts were too large to fit this description.
+Christopher, of course, was wearing himself out quicker than most, but
+all of them had lost a lot of weight in spite of the fact that they had
+all the oats and oil-cake they could eat. Bowers writes of his pony:
+
+"Victor, my pony, has taken to leading the line, like his opposite number
+last season. He is a steady goer, and as gentle as a dear old sheep. I
+can hardly realize the strenuous times I had with him only a month ago,
+when it took about four of us to get him harnessed to a sledge, and two
+of us every time with all our strength to keep him from bolting when in
+it. Even at the start of the journey he was as nearly unmanageable as any
+beast could be, and always liable to bolt from sheer excess of spirits.
+He is more sober now after three weeks of featureless Barrier, but I
+think I am more fond of him than ever. He has lost his rotundity, like
+all the other horses, and is a long-legged, angular beast, very ugly as
+horses go, but still I would not change him for any other."
+
+The ponies were fed by their leaders at the lunch and supper halts, and
+by Oates and Bowers during the sleep halt about four hours before we
+marched. Several of them developed a troublesome habit of swinging their
+nosebags off, some as soon as they were put on, others in their anxiety
+to reach the corn still left uneaten in the bottom of the bag. We had to
+lash their bags on to their headstalls. "Victor got hold of his head rope
+yesterday, and devoured it: not because he is hungry, as he won't eat all
+his allowance even now."[203]
+
+The original intention was that Day and Hooper should return from 80°
+30´, but it was now decided that their unit of four should remain intact
+for a few days, and constitute a light man-hauling advance party to make
+the track.
+
+The weather was much more pleasant and we saw the sun most days, while I
+note only one temperature below -20° since leaving One Ton. The ponies
+sank in a cruel distance some days, but we were certainly not overworking
+them and they had as much food as they could eat. We knew the grim part
+was to come, but we never realized how grim it was to be. From this
+Northern Barrier Depôt the ponies were mostly drawing less than 500 lbs.
+and we had hopes of getting through to the glacier without much
+difficulty. All depended on the weather, and just now it was glorious,
+and the ponies were going steadily together. Jehu, the crockiest of the
+crocks, was led back along the track and shot on the evening of November
+24, having reached a point at least 15 miles beyond that where Shackleton
+shot his first pony. When it is considered that it was doubtful whether
+he could start at all this must be conceded to have been a triumph of
+horse-management in which both Oates and Atkinson shared, though neither
+so much as Jehu himself, for he must have had a good spirit to have
+dragged his poor body so far. "A year's care and good feeding, three
+weeks' work with good treatment, a reasonable load and a good ration, and
+then a painless end. If anybody can call that cruel I cannot either
+understand it or agree with them." Thus Bowers, who continues: "The
+midnight sun reflected from the snow has started to burn my face and
+lips. I smear them with hazeline before turning in, and find it a good
+thing. Wearing goggles has absolutely prevented any recurrence of
+snow-blindness. Captain Scott says they make me see everything through
+rose-coloured spectacles."
+
+We said good-bye to Day and Hooper next morning, and they set their faces
+northwards and homewards.[204] Two-men parties on the Barrier are not
+much fun. Day had certainly done his best about the motors and they had
+helped us over a bad bit of initial surface. That night Scott wrote:
+"Only a few more marches to feel safe in getting to our goal."[205] At
+the lunch halt on November 26, in lat. 81° 35´, we left our Middle
+Barrier Depôt, containing one week's provisions for each returning unit
+as at Mount Hooper, a reduction of 200 lbs. in our weights. The march
+that day was very trying. "It is always rather dismal work walking over
+the great snow plain when sky and surface merge in one pall of dead
+whiteness, but it is cheering to be in such good company with everything
+going on steadily and well."[206]
+
+There was no doubt that the animals were tiring, and "a tired animal
+makes a tired man, I find."[207] The next day (November 28) was no
+better: "the most dismal start imaginable. Thick as a hedge, snow falling
+and drifting with keen southerly wind."[208]
+
+Bowers notes: "We have now run down a whole degree of latitude without a
+fine day, or anything but clouds, mist, and driving snow from the south."
+We certainly did have some difficult marches, one of the worst effects of
+which was that we knew we must be making a winding course and we had to
+pick up our depôts on the return somehow. Here is a typical bad morning
+from Bowers' diary:
+
+"The first four miles of the march were utter misery for me, as Victor,
+either through lassitude or because he did not like having to plug into
+the wind, went as slow as a funeral horse. The light was so bad that
+wearing goggles was most necessary, and the driving snow filled them up
+as fast as you cleared them. I dropped a long way astern of the
+cavalcade, could hardly see them at times through the snow, but the fear
+that Victor, of all the beasts, should give out was like a nightmare. I
+have always been used to starting later than the others by a quarter of a
+mile, and catching them up. At the four-mile cairn I was about fed up to
+the neck with it, but I said very little as everybody was so disgusted
+with the weather and things in general that I saw that I was not the only
+one in tribulation. Victor turned up trumps after that. He stepped out
+and led the line in his old place, and at a good swinging pace
+considering the surface, my temper and spirits improving at every step.
+In the afternoon he went splendidly again, and finished up by rolling in
+the snow when I had taken his harness off, a thing he has not done for
+ten or twelve days. It certainly does not look like exhaustion!"
+
+Indeed these days we were fighting for our marches, and Chinaman who was
+killed this night seemed well out of it. He reached a point less than 90
+miles from the glacier, though this was small comfort to him.
+
+Stumbling and groping our way along as we had been during the last
+blizzard we were totally unprepared for the sight which met us during our
+next march on November 29. The great ramp of mountains which ran to the
+west of us, and would soon bar our way to the South, partly cleared: and
+right on top of us it seemed were the triple peaks of Mount Markham.
+After some 300 miles of bleak, monotonous Barrier it was a wonderful
+sight indeed. We camped at night in latitude 82° 21´ S., four miles
+beyond Scott's previous Farthest South in 1902. Then they had the best of
+luck in clear fine weather, which Shackleton has also recorded at this
+stage of his southern journey.
+
+It is curious to see how depressed all our diaries become when this bad
+weather obtained, and how quickly we must have cheered up whenever the
+sun came out. There is no doubt that a similar effect was produced upon
+the ponies. Truth to tell, the mental strain upon those responsible was
+very great in these early days, and there is little of outside interest
+to relieve the mind. The crystal surface which was an invisible carpet
+yesterday becomes a shining glorious sheet of many colours to-day: the
+irregularities which caused you so many falls are now quite clear and you
+step on or over them without a thought: and when there is added some of
+the most wonderful scenery in the world it is hard to recall in the
+enjoyment of the present how irritable and weary you felt only twenty
+hours ago. The whisper of the sledge, the hiss of the primus, the smell
+of the hoosh and the soft folds of your sleeping-bag: how jolly they can
+all be, and generally were.
+
+    I would that I could once again
+      Around the cooker sit
+    And hearken to its soft refrain
+      And feel so jolly fit.
+
+    Instead of home-life's silken chains,
+      The uneventful round,
+    I long to be mid snow-swept plains,
+      In harness, outward bound.
+
+    With the pad, pad, pad, of fin'skoed feet,
+      With two hundred pounds per man,
+    Not enough hoosh or biscuit to eat,
+      Well done, lads! Up tent! Outspan.
+                (NELSON in _The South Polar Times._)
+
+Certainly as we skirted these mountains, range upon range, during the
+next two marches (November 30 and December 1), we felt we could have
+little cause for complaint. They brought us to lat. 82° 47´ S., and here
+we left our last depôt on the Barrier, called the Southern Barrier Depôt,
+with a week's ration for each returning party as usual. "The man food is
+enough for one week for each returning unit of four men, the next depôt
+beyond being the Middle Barrier Depôt, 73 miles north. As we ought easily
+to do over 100 miles a week on the return journey, there is little
+likelihood of our having to go on short commons if all goes well."[209]
+And this was what we all felt--until we found the Polar Party. This was
+our twenty-seventh camp, and we had been out a month.
+
+[Illustration: THE MOUNTAINS WHICH LIE BETWEEN THE BARRIER AND THE
+PLATEAU AS SEEN ON DECEMBER 1, 1911--From the drawings by Dr. E. A.
+Wilson, Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+It was important that we should have fine clear weather during the next
+few days when we should be approaching the land. On his previous southern
+journey Scott had been prevented from reaching the range of mountains
+which ran along to our right by a huge chasm. This phenomenon is known to
+geologists as a shear crack and is formed by the movement of a glacier
+away from the land which bounds it. In this case a mass of many hundred
+miles of Barrier has moved away from the mountains, and the disturbance
+is correspondingly great. Shackleton has described how he approached the
+Gateway, as he named the passage between Mount Hope and the mainland, by
+means of which he passed through on to the Beardmore Glacier. As he and
+his companions were exploring the way they came upon an enormous chasm,
+80 feet wide and 300 feet deep, which barred their path. Moving along to
+the right they found a place where the chasm was filled with snow, and
+here they crossed to the land some miles ahead. At our Southern Barrier
+Depôt we reckoned we were some forty-four miles from this Gateway and in
+three more marches we hoped to be camped under this land.
+
+Christopher was shot at the depôt. He was the only pony who did not die
+instantaneously. Perhaps Oates was not so calm as usual, for Chris was
+his own horse though such a brute. Just as Oates fired he moved, and
+charged into the camp with the bullet in his head. He was caught with
+difficulty, nearly giving Keohane a bad bite, led back and finished. We
+were well rid of him: while he was strong he fought, and once the Barrier
+had tamed him, as we were not able to do, he never pulled a fair load. He
+could have gone several more days, but there was not enough pony food to
+take all the animals forward. We began to wonder if we had done right to
+leave so much behind. Each pony provided at least four days' food for the
+dog-teams, some of them more, and there was quite a lot of fat on
+them--even on Jehu. This was comforting, as going to prove that their
+hardships were not too great. Also we put the undercut into our own
+hoosh, and it was very good, though we had little oil to cook it.
+
+We had been starting later each night, in order that the transition from
+night to day marching might be gradual. For we intended to march by day
+when we started pulling up the glacier, and there were no ponies to rest
+when the sun was high. It may be said therefore that our next march was
+on December 2.
+
+Before we started Scott walked over to Bowers. "I have come to a decision
+which will shock you." Victor was to go at the end of the march, because
+pony food was running so short. Birdie wrote at the end of the day:--He
+"did a splendid march and kept ahead all day, and as usual marched into
+camp first, pulling over 450 lbs. easily. It seemed an awful pity to have
+to shoot a great strong animal, and it seemed like the irony of fate to
+me, as I had been downed for over-provisioning the ponies with needless
+excess of food, and the drastic reductions had been made against my
+strenuous opposition up to the last. It is poor satisfaction to me to
+know that I was right now that my horse is dead. Good old Victor! He has
+always had a biscuit out of my ration, and he ate his last before the
+bullet sent him to his rest. Here ends my second horse in 83° S., not
+quite so tragically as my first when the sea-ice broke up, but none the
+less I feel sorry for a beast that has been my constant companion and
+care for so long. He has done his share in our undertaking anyhow, and
+may I do my share as well when I get into harness myself.
+
+"The snow has started to fall over his bleak resting-place, and it looks
+like a blizzard. The outlook is dark, stormy and threatening."
+
+Indeed it had been a dismal march into a blank white wall, and the ponies
+were sinking badly in the snow, leaving holes a full foot deep. The
+temperature was +17° and the flakes of snow melted when they lay on the
+dark colours of the tents and our furs. After building the pony walls
+water was running down our windproofs.
+
+I note "we are doing well on pony meat and go to bed very content."
+Notwithstanding the fact that we could not do more than heat the meat by
+throwing it into the pemmican we found it sweet and good, though tough.
+The man-hauling party consisted of Lieut. Evans and Lashly who had lost
+their motors, and Atkinson and Wright who had lost their ponies. They
+were really quite hungry by now, and most of us pretty well looked
+forward to our meals and kept a biscuit to eat in our bags if we could.
+The pony meat therefore came as a relief. I think we ought to have
+depôted more of it on the cairns. As it was, what we did not eat was
+given to the dogs. With some tins of extra oil and a depôted pony the
+Polar Party would probably have got home in safety.
+
+On December 3 we roused out at 2.30 A.M. It was thick and snowy. As we
+breakfasted the blizzard started from the south-east, and was soon
+blowing force 9, a full gale, with heavy drift. "The strongest wind I
+have known here in summer."[210] It was impossible to start, but we
+turned out and made up the pony walls in heavy drift, one of them being
+blown down three times. By 1.30 P.M. the sun was shining, and the land
+was clear. We started at 2, with what we thought was Mount Hope showing
+up ahead, but soon great snow-clouds were banking up and in two hours we
+were walking in a deep gloom which made it difficult to find the track
+made by the man-hauling party ahead. By the time we reached the cairn,
+which was always built at the end of the first four miles, it was blowing
+hard from the N.N.W. of all the unlikely quarters of the compass. Bowers
+and Scott were on ski.
+
+"I put on my windproof blouse and nosed out the track for two miles, when
+we suddenly came upon the tent of the leading party. They had camped
+owing to the difficulty of steering a course in such thick weather. The
+ponies, however, with the wind abaft the beam were going along
+splendidly, and Scott thought it worth while to shove on. We therefore
+carried on another four miles, making ten in all, a good half march,
+before we camped. On ski it was simply ripping, except for the inability
+to see anything at all. With the wind behind, and the good sliding
+surface made by the wind-hardened snow, one fairly slithered along.
+Camping was less pleasant as it was blowing a gale by that time. We are
+all in our bags again now, with a good hot meal inside one, and blow high
+or blow low one might be in a worse place than a reindeer bag."[211]
+
+It was all right for the people on ski (and this in itself gave us a
+certain sense of grievance), but things had not been so easy with the
+ponies, who were sinking very deeply in places, while we ourselves were
+sinking well over our ankles. This day we began to cross the great
+undulations in the Barrier, with the crests some mile apart, which here
+mark the approach to the land. We had built the walls to the north of the
+ponies on camping, because the wind was from that direction, but by
+breakfast on December 4 it was blowing a thick blizzard from the
+south-east. We began to feel bewildered by these extraordinary weather
+changes, and not a little exasperated too. Again we could not march, and
+again we had to dig out the sledges and ponies, and to move them all
+round to the other side of the walls which we had partly to rebuild. "Oh
+for the simple man-hauling life!" was our thought, and "poor helpless
+beasts--this is no country for live stock." By this time we could not see
+the neighbouring tents for the drift. The situation was not improved by
+the fact that our tent doors, the tents having been pitched for the
+strong north wind then blowing, were now facing the blizzard, and sheets
+of snow entered with each individual. The man-hauling party came up just
+before the worst of the blizzard started. The dogs alone were
+comfortable, buried deep beneath the drifted snow. The sailors began to
+debate who was the Jonah. They said he was the cameras. The great
+blizzard was brewing all about us.
+
+But at mid-day as though a curtain was rolled back, the thick snow fog
+cleared off, while at the same time the wind fell calm, and a great
+mountain appeared almost on the top of us. Far away to the south-east we
+could distinguish, by looking very carefully, a break in the level
+Barrier horizon--a new mountain which we reckoned must be at least in
+latitude 86° and very high. Towards it the ranges stretched away, peak
+upon peak, range upon range, as far as the eye could see. "The mountains
+surpassed anything I have ever seen: beside the least of these giants Ben
+Nevis would be a mere mound, and yet they are so immense as to dwarf each
+other. They are intersected at every turn with mighty glaciers and
+ice-falls and eternally ice-filled valleys that defy description. So
+clear was everything that every rock seemed to stand out, and the effect
+of the sun as he came round (between us and the mountains) was to make
+the scene still more beautiful."[212]
+
+Altogether we marched eleven miles this day, and camped right in front of
+the Gateway, which we reckoned to be some thirteen miles away. We saw no
+crevasses but crossed ten or twelve very large undulations, and estimated
+that the dips between them were twelve to fifteen feet. Mount Hope was
+bigger than we expected, and beyond it, stretching out into the Barrier
+as far as we could see, was a great white line of jagged edges, the chaos
+of pressure which this vast glacier makes as it flows into the
+comparatively stationary ice of the Barrier.
+
+My own pony Michael was shot after we came into camp. He was as
+attractive a little beast as we had. His light weight helped him on soft
+surfaces, but his small hoofs let him in farther than most and I notice
+in Scott's diary that on November 19 the ponies were sinking half-way to
+the hock, and Michael once or twice almost to the hock itself. A highly
+strung, spirited animal, his off days took the form of fidgets, during
+which he would be constantly trying to stop and eat snow, and then rush
+forward to catch up the other ponies. Life was a constant source of
+wonder to him, and no movement in the camp escaped his notice. Before we
+had been long on the Barrier he developed mischievous habits and became a
+rope eater and gnawer of other ponies' fringes, as we called the coloured
+tassels we hung over their eyes to ward off snow-blindness. However, he
+was by no means the only culprit, and he lost his own fringe to Nobby
+quite early in the proceedings. It was not that he was hungry, for he
+never quite finished his own feed. At any rate he enjoyed the few weeks
+before he died, pricking up his ears and getting quite excited when
+anything happened, and the arrival of the dog-teams each morning after he
+had been tethered sent him to bed with much to dream of. And I must say
+his master dreamed pretty regularly too. Michael was killed right in
+front of the Gateway on December 4, just before the big blizzard, which,
+though we did not know it, was on the point of breaking upon us, and he
+was untying his cloth and chewing up everything he could reach to the
+last. "It was decided after we camped, and he had his feed already on:
+Meares reported that he had no more food for the dogs. He walked away,
+and rolled in the snow on the way down, not having done so when we got
+in. He was just like a naughty child all the way, and pulled all out. He
+has been a good friend, and has a good record, 82° 23´ S. He was a bit
+done to-day: the blizzard had knocked him. Gallant little Michael!"[213]
+
+As we got into our bags the mountain tops were fuzzy with drift. We
+wanted one clear day to get across the chasm: one short march and the
+ponies' task was done. Their food was nearly finished. Scott wrote that
+night: "We are practically through with the first stage of our
+journey."[214]
+
+"Tuesday, December 5. Camp 30. Noon. We awoke this morning to a raging
+howling blizzard. The blows we have had hitherto have lacked the very
+fine powdering snow, that especial feature of the blizzard. To-day we
+have it fully developed. After a minute or two in the open one is covered
+from head to foot. The temperature is high, so that what falls or drives
+against one sticks. The ponies--heads, tails, legs and all parts not
+protected by their rugs--are covered with ice; the animals are standing
+deep in snow, the sledges are almost covered, and huge drifts above the
+tents. We have had breakfast, rebuilt the walls, and are now again in our
+bags. One cannot see the next tent, let alone the land. What on earth
+does such weather mean at this time of year? It is more than our share of
+ill-fortune, I think, but the luck may turn yet....
+
+"11 P.M. It has blown hard all day with quite the greatest snowfall I
+remember. The drifts about the tents are simply huge. The temperature was
+-27° this forenoon, and rose to +31° in the afternoon, at which time the
+snow melted as it fell on anything but the snow, and, as a consequence,
+there are pools of water on everything, the tents are wet through, also
+the wind-clothes, night-boots, etc.; water drips from the tent poles and
+door, lies on the floor-cloth, soaks the sleeping-bags, and makes
+everything pretty wretched. If a cold snap follows before we have had
+time to dry our things, we shall be mighty uncomfortable. Yet after all
+it would be humorous enough if it were not for the seriousness of
+delay--we can't afford that, and it's real hard luck that it should come
+at such a time. The wind shows signs of easing down, but the temperature
+does not fall and the snow is as wet as ever, not promising signs of
+abatement.
+
+"Wednesday, December 6. Camp 30. Noon. Miserable, utterly miserable. We
+have camped in the 'Slough of Despond.' The tempest rages with unabated
+violence. The temperature has gone to +33°; everything in the tent is
+soaking. People returning from the outside look exactly as though they
+had been in a heavy shower of rain. They drip pools on the floor-cloth.
+The snow is steadily climbing higher about walls, ponies, tents and
+sledges. The ponies look utterly desolate. Oh! But this is too crushing,
+and we are only 12 miles from the glacier. A hopeless feeling descends on
+one and is hard to fight off. What immense patience is needed for such
+occasions!"[215]
+
+Bowers describes the situation as follows:
+
+"It is blowing a blizzard such as one might expect to be driven at us by
+all the powers of darkness. It may be interesting to describe it, as it
+is my first experience of a really warm blizzard, and I hope to be
+troubled by cold ones only, or at least moderate ones only, in future as
+regards temperature.
+
+"When I swung the thermometer this morning I looked and looked again, but
+unmistakably the temperature was +33°F., above freezing point (out of the
+sun's direct rays) for the first time since we came down here. What this
+means to us nobody can conceive. We try to treat it as a huge joke, but
+our wretched condition might be amusing to read of it later. We are wet
+through, our tents are wet, our bags which are our life to us and the
+objects of our greatest care, are wet; the poor ponies are soaked and
+shivering far more than they would be ordinarily in a temperature fifty
+degrees lower. Our sledges--the parts that are dug out--are wet, our food
+is wet, everything on and around and about us is the same--wet as
+ourselves and our cold, clammy clothes. Water trickles down the tent
+poles and only forms icicles in contact with the snow floor. The warmth
+of our bodies has formed a snow bath in the floor for each of us to lie
+in. This is a nice little catchwater for stray streams to run into before
+they freeze. This they cannot do while a warm human lies there, so they
+remain liquid and the accommodating bag mops them up. When we go out to
+do the duties of life, fill the cooker, etc., for the next meal, dig out
+or feed the ponies, or anything else, we are bunged up with snow. Not the
+driving, sandlike snow we are used to, but great slushy flakes that run
+down in water immediately and stream off you. The drifts are tremendous,
+the rest of the show is indescribable. I feel most for the unfortunate
+animals and am thankful that poor old Victor is spared this. I mended a
+pair of half mitts to-day, and we are having two meals instead of three.
+This idleness when one is simply jumping to go on is bad enough for most,
+but must be worse for Captain Scott. I feel glad that he has Dr. Bill
+(Wilson) in his tent; there is something always so reassuring about Bill,
+he comes out best in adversity."[216]
+
+"Thursday, December 7. Camp 30. The storm continues and the situation is
+now serious. One small feed remains for the ponies after to-day, so that
+we must either march to-morrow or sacrifice the animals. That is not the
+worst; with the help of the dogs we could get on, without doubt. The
+serious part is that we have this morning started our Summit
+rations--that is to say, the food calculated from the Glacier Depôt has
+been begun. The first supporting party can only go on a fortnight from
+this date and so forth."[217]
+
+[Illustration: A PONY CAMP ON THE BARRIER]
+
+[Illustration: THE DOG TEAMS LEAVING THE BEARDMORE GLACIER]
+
+This day was just as warm, and wetter--much wetter. The temperature was
++35.5°, and our bags were like sponges. The huge drifts had covered
+everything, including most of the tent, the pony walls and sledges. At
+intervals we dug our way out and dug up the wretched ponies, and got them
+on to the top again. "Henceforward our full ration will be 16 oz.
+biscuit, 12 oz. pemmican, 2 oz. butter, 0.57 oz. cocoa, 3.0 oz. sugar and
+0.86 oz. tea. This is the Summit ration, total 34.43 oz., with a little
+onion powder and salt. I am all for this: Seaman Evans and others are
+much regretting the loss of chocolate, raisins and cereals. For the first
+week up the glacier we are to go one biscuit short to provision Meares on
+the way back. The motors depôted too much and Meares has been brought on
+far farther than his orders were originally bringing him. Originally he
+was to be back at Hut Point on December 10. The dogs, however, are
+getting all the horse that is good for them, and are very fit. He has to
+average 24 miles a day going back. Michael is well out of this: we are
+now eating him. He was in excellent condition and tastes very good,
+though tough."[218]
+
+By this time there was little sleep left for us as we lay in our
+sleeping-bags. Three days generally see these blizzards out, and we hoped
+much from Friday, December 8. But when we breakfasted at 10 A.M. (we were
+getting into day-marching routine) wind and snow were monotonously the
+same. The temperature rose to +34.3°. These temperatures and those
+recorded by Meares on his way home must be a record for the interior of
+the Barrier. So far as we were concerned it did not much matter now
+whether it was +40° or +34°. Things did look really gloomy that morning.
+
+But at noon there came a gleam of comfort. The wind dropped, and
+immediately we were out plunging about, always up to our knees in soft
+downy snow, and often much farther. First we shifted our tents, digging
+them up with the greatest care that the shovel might not tear them. The
+valances were encased in solid ice from the water which had run down.
+Then we started to find our sledges which were about four feet down: they
+were dragged out, and everything on them was wringing wet. There was a
+gleam of sunshine, which soon gave place to snow and gloom, but we
+started to make experiments in haulage. Four men on ski managed to move a
+sledge with four others sitting upon it. Nobby was led out, but sank to
+his belly. As for the drifts I saw Oates standing behind one, and only
+his head appeared, and this was all loose snow.
+
+"We are all sitting round now after some tea--it is much better than
+getting into the bags. I can hardly think that the ponies can pull on,
+but Titus thinks they can pull to-morrow; all the food is finished, and
+what they have had to-day was only what they would not eat out of their
+last feed yesterday. It is a terrible end--driven to death on no more
+food, to be then cut up, poor devils. I have swopped the Little Minister
+with Silas Wright for Dante's Inferno!"[219] The steady patter of the
+falling snow upon the tents was depressing as we turned in, but the
+temperature was below freezing.
+
+The next morning (Saturday, December 9) we turned out to a cloudy snowy
+day at 5.30 A.M. By 8.30 we had hauled the sledges some way out of the
+camp and started to lead out the ponies. "The horses could hardly move,
+sank up to their bellies, and finally lay down. They had to be driven,
+lashed on. It was a grim business."[220]
+
+My impressions of that day are of groping our way, for Bowers and I were
+pulling a light sledge ahead to make the track, through a vague white
+wall. First a confused crowd of men behind us gathered round the leading
+pony sledge, pushing it forward, the poor beast barely able to struggle
+out of the holes it made as it plunged forward. The others were induced
+to follow, and after a start had been made the regular man-hauling party
+went back to fetch their load. There was not one man there who would
+willingly have caused pain to a living thing. But what else was to be
+done--we could not leave our pony depôt in that bog. Hour after hour we
+plugged on: and we dare not halt for lunch, we knew we could never start
+again. After crossing many waves huge pressure ridges suddenly showed
+themselves all round, and we got on to a steep rise with the coastal
+chasm on our right hand appearing as a great dip full of enormous
+pressure. Scott was naturally worried about crevasses, and though we knew
+there was a way through, the finding of it in the gloom was most
+difficult. For two hours we zig-zagged about, getting forward it is true,
+but much bewildered, and once at any rate almost bogged. Scott joined us,
+and we took off our ski so as to find the crevasses, and if possible a
+hard way through. Every step we sank about fifteen inches, and often
+above our knees. Meanwhile Snatcher was saving the situation in
+snow-shoes, and led the line of ponies. Snippets nearly fell back into a
+big crevasse, into which his hind quarters fell: but they managed to
+unharness him, and scramble him out.
+
+I do not know how long we had been going when Scott decided to follow the
+chasm. We found a big dip with hard ice underneath, and it was probably
+here that we made the crossing: we could now see the ring of pressure
+behind us. Almost it was decided to make the depôt here, but the ponies
+still plugged on in the most plucky way, though they had to be driven.
+Scott settled to go as far as they could be induced to march, and they
+did wonderfully. We had never thought that they would go a mile: but
+painfully they marched for eleven hours without a long halt, and covered
+a distance which we then estimated at seven miles. But our sledge-meters
+were useless being clogged with the soft snow, and we afterwards came to
+believe the distance was not so great: probably not more than five. When
+we had reached a point some two miles from the top of the snow divide
+which fills the Gateway we camped, thankful to rest, but more thankful
+still that we need drive those weary ponies no more. Their rest was near.
+It was a horrid business, and the place was known as Shambles Camp.
+
+Oates came up to Scott as he stood in the shadow of Mount Hope. "Well! I
+congratulate you, Titus," said Wilson. "And _I_ thank you, Titus," said
+Scott.
+
+And that was the end of the Barrier Stage.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [181] Taylor, with Scott, _The Silver Lining_, pp. 325-326.
+
+   [182] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 448.
+
+   [183] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 449.
+
+   [184] Ibid. p. 446.
+
+   [185] See pp. 350, 552-556.
+
+   [186] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 453.
+
+   [187] Ibid. p. 452.
+
+   [188] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 438-439.
+
+   [189] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 450.
+
+   [190] Bowers.
+
+   [191] Bowers.
+
+   [192] My own diary.
+
+   [193] Bowers.
+
+   [194] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 463.
+
+   [195] Ibid. p. 462.
+
+   [196] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 461.
+
+   [197] Bowers.
+
+   [198] Bowers.
+
+   [199] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 465.
+
+   [200] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 465.
+
+   [201] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 468.
+
+   [202] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 470, 471.
+
+   [203] Bowers.
+
+   [204] A note to Cape Evans is as follows:--MY DEAR SIMPSON. This
+         goes with Day and Hooper now returning. We are making fair
+         progress and the ponies doing fairly well. I hope we shall
+         get through to the glacier without difficulty, but to make
+         sure I am carrying the dog-teams farther than I intended at
+         first--the teams may be late returning, unfit for further
+         work or non-existent....--R. SCOTT.
+
+   [205] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 474.
+
+   [206] Ibid. p. 475.
+
+   [207] Ibid. p. 476.
+
+   [208] Ibid. p. 476.
+
+   [209] Bowers.
+
+   [210] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 483.
+
+   [211] Bowers.
+
+   [212] Bowers.
+
+   [213] My own diary.
+
+   [214] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 486.
+
+   [215] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 486-489.
+
+   [216] Bowers.
+
+   [217] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 489.
+
+   [218] My own diary.
+
+   [219] My own diary.
+
+   [220] Ibid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY (_continued_)
+
+    The Southern Journey involves the most important object of the
+    Expedition.... One cannot affect to be blind to the situation:
+    the scientific public, as well as the more general public, will
+    gauge the result of the scientific work of the Expedition largely
+    in accordance with the success or failure of the main object.
+    With success all roads will be made easy, all work will receive
+    its proper consideration. With failure even the most brilliant
+    work may be neglected and forgotten, at least for a time.--SCOTT.
+
+II. THE BEARDMORE GLACIER
+
+
+The ponies had dragged twenty-four weekly units of food for four men to
+some five miles from the bottom of the glacier, but we were late. For
+some days we had been eating the Summit ration, that is the food which
+should not have been touched until the Glacier Depôt had been laid, and
+we were still a day's run from the place where this was to be done: it
+was of course the result of the blizzard which no one could have expected
+in December, usually one of the two most settled months. Still more
+serious was the deep snow which lay like down upon the surface, and into
+which we sank commonly to our knees, our sledges digging themselves in
+until the crosspieces were ploughing through the drift. Shackleton had
+fine weather, and found blue ice in the bottom reaches of the glacier,
+and Scott lamented what was unquestionably bad luck.
+
+It was noon of December 10 before we had made the readjustments necessary
+for man-hauling. We left here pony meat for man and dog food, three
+ten-foot sledges, one twelve-foot sledge, and a good many oddments of
+clothing and pony gear. We started with three four-man teams, each
+pulling for these first few miles about 500 lbs., as follows: (I) Scott,
+Wilson, Oates, Seaman Evans: (II) Lieut. Evans, Atkinson, Wright, Lashly:
+(III) Bowers, Cherry-Garrard, Crean, Keohane. The team numbered (II) had
+been man-hauling together some days, and two members of it, Lieut. Evans
+and Lashly, had already been man-hauling since the breakdown of the
+second motor at Corner Camp; it was certainly not so fit as the other
+two. In addition to these three sledges the two dog-teams, which had been
+doing splendid work, were carrying 600 lbs. of our weight as well as the
+provisions for the Lower Glacier Depôt, weighing 200 lbs. It began to
+look as if Amundsen had chosen the right form of transport.
+
+The Gateway is a gap in the mountains, a side door, as it were, to the
+great tumbled glacier. By lunch we were on the top of the divide, but it
+took six hours of the hardest hauling to cover the mile which formed the
+rise. As long as possible we stuck to ski, but we reached a point at
+which we could not move the sledges on ski: once we had taken them off we
+were up to our knees, and the sledges were ploughing the snow which would
+not support them. But our gear was drying in the bright sunshine, our
+bags were spread out at every opportunity, and the great jagged cliffs of
+red granite were welcome to the eyes after 425 statute miles of snow. The
+Gateway is filled by a giant snowdrift which has been formed between
+Mount Hope on our left and the mainland on our right. From Shackleton's
+book we gathered that the Beardmore was a very bad glacier indeed. Once
+on the top of the divide we lunched, and we descended in the evening,
+camping at midnight on the edge of the glacier, which we found, as we had
+feared, covered with soft snow which was so deep as to give no indication
+whatever of the hard ice which Shackleton found here. "We camped in
+considerable drift and a blizzard wind, which is still blowing, and I
+hope will go on, for every hour it is sweeping away inches of this soft
+powdery snow into which we have been sinking all day."[221]
+
+Before setting out on December 11 we rigged up the Lower Glacier Depôt,
+three weekly Summit units of provisions, two cases of emergency biscuit
+which was the ration for three weekly units, and two cans of oil. These
+provisions were calculated to carry the three returning parties as far as
+the Southern Barrier Depôt. We also left one can of spirit, used for
+lighting the primus, one bottle of medical brandy and certain spare and
+personal gear not required. On the sledges themselves we stowed eighteen
+weekly Summit units, besides the three ready bags containing the ration
+for the current week, and the complement of biscuit, for this was ten
+cases in addition to the three boxes of biscuit which the three parties
+were using. Then there were eighteen cans of oil, with two cans of
+lighting spirit and a little additional Christmas fare which Bowers had
+packed. Every unit of food was worked out for four men for one week.
+
+[Illustration: TRANSIT SKETCH FOR THE LOWER GLACIER DEPÔT.--E. A. Wilson,
+del. Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+During this time of deep snow the sledge-meters would not work and we
+were compelled to estimate the distance marched each day. "It has been a
+tremendous slog, but I think a most hopeful day. Before starting it took
+us about two hours to make the depôt and then we got straight into the
+midst of the big pressure. The dogs, with ten cases of biscuit, came
+behind and pulled very well. We soon caught sight of a big boulder, and
+Bill and I roped up and went over to it. It was a block of very coarse
+granite, nearly gneiss, with large crystals of quartz in it, rusty
+outside and quite pinkish when chipped, and with veins of quartz running
+through it. It was a vast thing to be carried along on the ice, and
+looked very typical of the rock round. Instead of keeping under the great
+cliff where Shackleton made his depôt, we steered for Mount Kyffin, that
+is towards the middle of the glacier, until lunch, when we had probably
+done about two or three miles. There was a crevasse wherever we went, but
+we managed to pull on ski and had no one down, and the deep snow saved
+the dogs."[222] The dog-teams were certainly running very big risks that
+morning. They turned back after lunch, having been brought on far
+longer than had been originally intended, for, as I have said, they were
+to have been back at Hut Point before now, and their provision allowance
+would not allow of further advance. Perhaps we rather overestimated the
+dogs' capacities when Bowers wrote: "The dogs are wonderfully fit and
+will rush Meares and Dimitri back like the wind. I expect he will be
+nearly back by Christmas, as they will do about thirty miles a day." But
+Meares told us when we got back to the hut that the dogs had by no means
+had an easy journey home. Now, however, "with a whirl and a rush they
+were off on the homeward trail. I could not see them (being snow-blind),
+but heard the familiar orders as the last of our animal transport left
+us."[223]
+
+Our difficulties during the next four days were increased by the
+snow-blindness of half the men. The evening we reached the glacier Bowers
+wrote: "I am afraid I am going to pay dearly for not wearing goggles
+yesterday when piloting the ponies. My right eye has gone bung, and my
+left one is pretty dicky. If I am in for a dose of snow glare it will
+take three or four days to leave me, and I am afraid I am in the ditch
+this time. It is painful to look at this paper, and my eyes are fairly
+burning as if some one had thrown sand into them." And then: "I have
+missed my journal for four days, having been enduring the pains of hell
+with my eyes as well as doing the most back-breaking work I have ever
+come up against.... I was as blind as a bat, and so was Keohane in my
+team. Cherry pulled alongside me, with Crean and Keohane behind. By
+sticking plaster over my glasses except one small central spot I shut off
+most light and could see the points of my ski, but the glasses were
+always fogged with perspiration and my eyes kept on streaming water which
+cannot be wiped off on the march as a ski stick is held in each hand; and
+so heavy were our weights [we had now taken on the weights which had been
+on the dog sledges] that if any of the pair slacked a hand even, the
+sledge stopped. It was all we could do to keep the sledge moving for
+short spells of a few hundred yards, the whole concern sinking so deeply
+into the soft snow as to form a snow-plough. The starting was worse than
+pulling as it required from ten to fifteen desperate jerks on the harness
+to move the sledge at all." Many others were also snowblind, caused
+partly by the strain of the last march of the ponies, partly by not
+having realized that now that we were day-marching the sun was more
+powerful and more precautions should be taken. The cocaine and zinc
+sulphate tablets which we had were excellent, but we also found that our
+tea leaves, which had been boiled twice and would otherwise have been
+thrown away, relieved the pain if tied into some cotton and kept pressed
+against the eyes. The tannic acid in the tea acted as an astringent. A
+snowblind man can see practically nothing anyhow and so he is not much
+worse off if a handkerchief is tied over his eyes.
+
+"_Beardmore Glacier._ Just a tiny note to be taken back by the dogs.
+Things are not so rosy as they might be, but we keep our spirits up and
+say the luck must turn. This is only to tell you that I find I can keep
+up with the rest as well as of old."[224]
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT F. L. SMITH AND THE LAND TO THE NORTH-WEST--E. A.
+Wilson, del. Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+Then for the first time we were left with our full loads of 800 lbs. a
+sledge. Even Bowers asked Scott whether he was going to try it without
+relaying. That night Scott's diary runs:
+
+"It was a very anxious business when we started after lunch, about 4.30.
+Could we pull our full loads or not? My own party got away first, and, to
+my joy, I found we could make fairly good headway. Every now and again
+the sledge sank in a soft patch, which brought us up, but we learned to
+treat such occasions with patience. We got sideways to the sledge and
+hauled it out, Evans (P.O.) getting out of his ski to get better
+purchase. The great thing is to keep the sledge moving, and for an hour
+or more there were dozens of critical moments when it all but stopped,
+and not a few when it brought up altogether. The latter were very trying
+and tiring."[225] Altogether it was an encouraging day and we reckoned we
+had made seven miles. Generally it was not Scott's team which made the
+heaviest weather these days but on December 12 they were in greater
+difficulties than any of us. It was indeed a gruelling day, for the
+surface was worse than ever and many men were snow-blind. After five
+hours' work in the morning we were about half a mile forward. We were in
+a sea of pressure, the waves coming at us from our starboard bow, the
+distance between the crests not being very great. We could not have
+advanced at all had it not been for our ski: "on foot one sinks to the
+knees, and if pulling on a sledge to half way between knee and
+thigh."[226]
+
+On December 13, "the sledges sank in over twelve inches, and all the
+gear, as well as the thwartship pieces, were acting as breaks. The tugs
+and heaves we enjoyed, and the number of times we had to get out of our
+ski to upright the sledge, were trifles compared with the strenuous
+exertion of every muscle and nerve to keep the wretched drag from
+stopping when once under weigh; and then it would stick, and all the
+starting operations had to be gone through afresh. We did perhaps half a
+mile in the forenoon. Anticipating a better surface in the afternoon we
+got a shock. Teddy [Evans] led off half an hour earlier to pilot a way,
+and Captain Scott tried some fake with his spare runners [he lashed them
+under the sledge to prevent the cross-pieces ploughing the snow] that
+involved about an hour's work. We had to continually turn our runners up
+to scrape the ice off them, for in these temperatures they are liable to
+get warm and melt the snow on them, and that freezes into knobs of ice
+which act like sandpaper or spikes on a pair of skates. We bust off
+second full of hope having done so well in the forenoon, but pride goeth
+[before a fall]. We stuck ten yards from the camp, and nine hours later
+found us little more than half a mile on. I have never seen a sledge sink
+so. I have never pulled so hard, or so nearly crushed my inside into my
+backbone by the everlasting jerking with all my strength on the canvas
+band round my unfortunate tummy. We were all in the same boat however.
+
+"I saw Teddy struggling ahead and Scott astern, but we were the worst off
+as the leading team had topped the rise and I was too blind to pick out a
+better trail. We fairly played ourselves out that time, and finally had
+to give it up and relay. Halving the load we went forward about a mile
+with it, and, leaving that lot, went back for the remainder. So done were
+my team that we could do little more than pull the half loads. Teddy's
+team did the same, and though Scott's did not, we camped practically the
+same time, having gone over our distance three times. Mount Kyffin was
+still ahead of us to the left: we seemed as if we can never come up with
+it. To-morrow Scott decided that if we could not move our full loads we
+would start relaying systematically. It was a most depressing outlook
+after such a day of strenuous labour."[227] We got soaked with
+perspiration these days, though generally pulling in vest, pants, and
+windproof trousers only. Directly we stopped we cooled quickly. Two skuas
+appeared at lunch, attracted probably by the pony flesh below, but it was
+a long way from the sea for them to come. On Thursday December 14, Scott
+wrote: "Indigestion and the soggy condition of my clothes kept me awake
+for some time last night, and the exceptional exercise gives bad attacks
+of cramp. Our lips are getting raw and blistered. The eyes of the party
+are improving, I am glad to say. We are just starting our march with no
+very hopeful outlook."
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT ELIZABETH, MOUNT ANNE AND SOCKS GLACIER--E. A.
+Wilson, del. Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+But we slogged along with much better results. "Once into the middle of
+the glacier we had been steering more or less for the Cloudmaker and by
+supper to-day were well past Mount Kyffin and were about 2000 feet up
+after an estimated run of 11 or 12 statute miles. But the most cheering
+sign was that the blue ice was gradually coming nearer the surface; at
+lunch it was two feet down, and at our supper camp only one foot. In
+pitching our tent Crean broke into a crevasse which ran about a foot in
+front of the door and there was another at Scott's door. We threw an
+empty oil can down and it echoed for a terribly long time."[228] We
+spent the morning of December 15 crossing a maze of crevasses though they
+were well bridged; I believe all these lower reaches of the glacier are
+badly crevassed, but the thick snow and our ski kept us from tumbling in.
+There was a great deal of competition between the teams which was perhaps
+unavoidable but probably a pity. This day Bowers' diary records, "Did a
+splendid bust off on ski, leaving Scott in the lurch, and eventually
+overhauling the party which had left some time before us. All the morning
+we kept up a steady, even swing which was quite a pleasure." But the same
+day Scott wrote, "Evans' is now decidedly the slowest unit, though
+Bowers' is not much faster. We keep up and overhaul either without
+difficulty." Bowers' team considered themselves quite good, but both
+teams were satisfied of their own superiority; as a matter of fact
+Scott's was the faster, as it should have been for it was certainly the
+heavier of the two.
+
+"It was a very bad light all day, but after lunch it began to get worse,
+and by 5 o'clock it was snowing hard and we could see nothing. We went on
+for nearly an hour, steering by the wind and any glimpse of sastrugi, and
+then, very reluctantly, Scott camped. It looks better now. The surface is
+much harder and more wind-swept, and as a rule the ice is only six inches
+underneath. We are beginning to talk about Christmas. We get very thirsty
+these days in the warm temperatures: we shall feel it farther up when the
+cold gets into our open pores and sunburnt hands and cracked lips. I am
+plastering some skin on mine to-night. Our routine now is: turn out 5.30,
+lunch 1, and camp at 7, and we get a short 8 hours' sleep, but we are so
+dead tired we could sleep half into the next day: we get about 9½ hours'
+march. Tea at lunch a positive godsend. We are raising the land to the
+south well, and are about 2500 feet up, latitude about 84° 8´ S."[229]
+
+The next day, December 16, Bowers wrote: "We have had a really enjoyable
+day's march, except the latter end of the afternoon. At the outset in the
+forenoon my sledge was a bit in the lurch, and Scott drew steadily away
+from us. I knew I could ordinarily hold my own with him, but for the
+first two hours we dropped till we were several hundred yards astern; try
+as I would to rally up my team we could gain nothing. On examining the
+runners however we soon discovered the cause by the presence of a thin
+film of ice. After that we ran easily. The thing one must avoid doing is
+to touch them with the hand or mitt, as anything damp will make ice on
+them. We usually turn the sledge on its side and scrape one runner at a
+time with the back of our knives so as to avoid any chance of cutting or
+chipping them. In the afternoon either the tea or the butter we had at
+lunch made us so strong that we fairly overran the other team."[230]
+
+"We must push on all we can, for we are now 6 days behind Shackleton, all
+due to that wretched storm. So far, since we got among the disturbances
+we have not seen such alarming crevasses as I had expected; certainly
+dogs could have come up as far as this."[231]
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT PATRICK--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+"At lunch we could see big pressure ahead having done first over five
+miles. Soon after lunch, having gone down a bit, we rose among very rough
+stuff. We plugged on until 4.30, when ski became quite impossible, and we
+put them on the sledges and started on foot. We immediately began putting
+legs down: one step would be on blue ice and the next two feet down into
+snow: very hard going. The pressure ahead seemed to stretch right into a
+big glacier next the Keltie Glacier to the east, and so we altered course
+for a small bluff point about two-thirds of the way along the base of the
+Cloudmaker. We were to camp at 6, but did not do so until about 6.30, the
+last 1½ hours in big pressure, crossing big and smaller waves, and
+hundreds of crevasses which one of us generally found. We are now camped
+in very big pressure, and with difficulty we found a patch big enough to
+pitch the tent free from crevasses. We are pretty well past the Keltie
+Glacier which is a vast tumbled mass: there is a long line of ice falls
+ahead, and I think there is a hard day ahead of us to-morrow among
+that pressure which must be enormous. We can't go farther inshore here,
+being under the north end of the Cloudmaker, and a fine mountain it is,
+rising precipitously above us.[232]
+
+"Sunday, December 17. Nearly 11 miles. Temp. 12.5°. 3500 feet. We have
+had an exciting day--this morning was just like the scenic railway at
+Earl's Court. We got straight on to the big pressure waves, and headed
+for the humpy rock at the base of the Cloudmaker. It was a hard plug up
+the waves, very often standing pulls, and all that we could do for a
+course was a very varied direction. Going down the other side was the
+exciting part: all we could do was to set the sledge straight, hang on to
+the straps, give her a little push and rush down the slope, which was
+sometimes so sheer that the sledge was in the air. Sometimes there was no
+chance to brake the sledge, and we all had to get on to the top, and we
+rushed down with the wind whistling in our ears. After three hours of
+this it levelled out again a bit, and we took the top of a wave, and ran
+south along it on blue ice: enormous pressure to our right, largely I
+think caused by the Keltie Glacier. Then we ascended a rise, snowy and
+crevassed, and camped after doing just under five miles, with big
+pressure ahead."[233]
+
+"In the afternoon we had a hard surface. Scott started off at a great
+speed, Teddy [Evans] and I following. There was something wrong with my
+team or my sledge, as we had a desperate job to keep up at first. We did
+keep up all right, but were heartily glad when after about 2½ hours Scott
+stopped for a spell. I rearranged our harness, putting Cherry and myself
+on the long span again, which we had temporarily discarded in the
+morning. We were both winded and felt wronged. The rearrangement was a
+success however, and the remainder of the march was a pleasure instead of
+a desperate struggle. It finished up on fields of blue rippled ice with
+sharp knife edges, and snow patches few and far between. We are all
+camped on a small snow patch in the middle of a pale blue rippled sea,
+about 3600 feet above sea level and past the Cloudmaker, which means
+that we are half way up the Glacier."[234] We had done 12½ miles
+(statute).
+
+The Beardmore Glacier is twice as large as the Malaspina in Alaska, which
+was the largest known glacier until Shackleton discovered the Beardmore.
+Those who knew the Ferrar Glacier professed to find the Beardmore
+unattractive, but to me at any rate it was grand. Its very vastness,
+however, tends to dwarf its surroundings, and great tributary glaciers
+and tumbled ice-falls, which anywhere else would have aroused admiration,
+were almost unnoticed in a stream which stretched in places forty miles
+from bank to bank. It was only when the theodolite was levelled that we
+realized how vast were the mountains which surrounded us: one of which we
+reckoned to be well over twenty thousand feet in height, and many of the
+others must have approached that measurement. Lieutenant Evans and Bowers
+were surveying whenever the opportunity offered, whilst Wilson sat on the
+sledge or on his sleeping-bag, and sketched.
+
+Before leaving on the morning of December 18 we bagged off three
+half-weekly units and made a depôt marked by a red flag on a bamboo which
+was stuck into a small mound. Unfortunately it began to snow in the night
+and no bearings were taken until the following morning when only the base
+of the mountains on the west side was visible. We knew we might have
+difficulty in picking up this depôt again, and certainly we all did.
+
+"It was thick, with low stratus clouds in the morning, and snow was
+falling in large crystals. Our socks and finnesko, hung out to dry, were
+covered with most beautiful feathery crystals. In the warm weather one
+gets fairly saturated with perspiration on the march, and foot-gear is
+always wet, except the outside covering which is as a rule more or less
+frozen according to existing temperature. On camping at night I shift to
+night foot-gear as soon as ever the tent is pitched, and generally slip
+on my windproof blouse, as one cools down like smoke after the exertion
+of man-hauling a heavy sledge for hours. At lunch camp one's feet often
+get pretty cold, but this goes off as soon as some hot tea is got into
+the system. As a rule, even when snowing, one's socks, etc., will dry if
+there is a bit of a breeze. They are always frozen stiff in the morning
+and can best be thawed out by bundling the lot [under one's] jersey
+during breakfast. They can then be put on tolerably warm even if wet.
+
+"We started off on a hard rippled blue surface like a sea frozen intact
+while the wind was playing on it. It soon got worse and we had to have
+one and sometimes two hands back to keep the sledge from skidding. Of
+course it was easy enough stuff to pull on, but the ground was very
+uneven, and sledges constantly capsized. It did not improve the runners
+either. There were few crevasses.
+
+"All day we went on in dull cloudy weather with hardly any land visible,
+and the glacier to be seen only for a short distance. In the afternoon
+the clouds lifted somewhat and showed us the Adam Mountains. The surface
+was better for the sledges but worse for us, as there were countless
+cracks and small crevasses, into which we constantly trod, barking our
+shins. As the afternoon sun came round the perspiration fairly streamed
+down, and it was impossible to keep goggles clear. The surface was so
+slippery and uneven that it was difficult to keep one's foothold. However
+we did 12½ miles, and felt that we had really done a good day's work when
+we camped. It was not clear enough to survey in the evening, so I took
+the sledge-meter in hand and worked at it half the night to repair
+Christopher's damage.[235] I ended up by making a fixing of which I was
+very proud, but did not dare to look at the time, so I don't know how
+much sleep I missed.
+
+"There is no doubt that Scott knows where to aim for in a glacier, as it
+was just here that Shackleton had two or three of his worst days' work,
+in such a maze of crevasses that he said that often a slip meant death
+for the whole party. He avoids the sides of the glacier and goes nowhere
+near the snow: he often heads straight for apparent chaos and somehow,
+when we appear to have reached a cul-de-sac, we find it an open
+road."[236] However, we all found the trouble on our way back.
+
+"On our right we have now a pretty good view of the Adam, Marshall and
+Wild Mountains, and their very curious horizontal stratification. Wright
+has found, amongst bits of wind-blown débris, an undoubted bit of
+sandstone and a bit of black basalt. We must get to know more of the
+geology before leaving the glacier finally."[237]
+
+December 19, +7°. Total height 5800 feet. "Things are certainly looking
+up, seeing that we have risen 1100 feet, and marched 17 to 18 statute
+miles during the day, whereas Shackleton's last march was 13 statute. It
+was still thick when we turned out at 5.45, but it soon cleared with a
+fresh southerly wind, and we could see Buckley Island and the land at the
+head of the glacier just rising. We started late for Birdie wanted to get
+our sledge-meter dished up: it has been quite a job to-day getting it on,
+but it rode well this afternoon. We started over the same crevassed
+stuff, but soon got on to blue ice, and for two hours had a most pleasant
+pull, and then up a steepish rise sometimes on blue ice and sometimes on
+snow. After the pleasantest morning we have had, we completed 8½ miles.
+
+[Illustration: FROM MOUNT DEAKIN TO MOUNT KINSEY--E. A. Wilson, del.
+Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+"Angles and observations were taken at lunch, and quite a lot of work was
+done. There is a general getting squared up with gear, for we know that
+those going on will not have many more days of warm temperatures. At one
+time to-day I think Scott meant trying the right hand of the island or
+nunatak, but as we rose this was obviously impossible, for there is a
+huge mass of pressure coming down there. From here the Dominion Range
+also looks as if it were a nunatak. Some of these mountains, which don't
+look very big, are huge (since the six thousand feet which we have risen
+have to be added on to them), and many of them are very grand indeed. The
+Mill Glacier is a vast thing, with big pressure across it. There also
+seems to be a big series of ice-falls between Buckley Island and the
+Dominion Range, for the centre of which Scott is going to-morrow. A
+pretty hard plug this afternoon, but no disturbance, and gradually we
+have left the bare ice, and are mostly travelling on _névé_. Much of the
+ice is white. I have been writing down angles and times for Birdie, and
+writing this in the intervals. Scott's heel is troubling him again. ['I
+have bad bruises on knee and thigh'],[238] and generally there has been a
+run on the medical cases for chafes, and minor ailments. There is now a
+keen southerly wind blowing. It gets a little colder each day, and we are
+already beginning to feel it on our sunburnt faces and hands."[239]
+
+Of the crevasses met in the morning Bowers wrote: "So far nobody has
+dropped down the length of his harness, as I did on the Cape Crozier
+journey. On this blue ice they are pretty conspicuous, and as they are
+mostly snow-bridged one is well advised to step over any line of snow.
+With my short legs this was strenuous work, especially as the weight of
+the sledge would often stop me with a jerk just before my leading foot
+quite cleared a crevasse, and the next minute one would be struggling out
+so as to keep the sledge on the move. It is fatal to stop the sledge as
+nobody waits for stragglers, and you have to pick up your lost ground by
+strenuous hurry. Of course some one often gets so far down a hole that it
+is necessary to stop and help him out."
+
+December 20. "To-day has been a great march--over two miles an hour, and
+on the whole rising a lot. Soon after starting we got on to the most
+beautiful icy surface, smooth except for cracks and only patches of snow,
+most of which we could avoid. We came along at a great rate.
+
+"The most interesting thing to see was that the Mill Glacier is not, as
+was supposed, a tributary, but probably is an outlet falling from this
+glacier, and a great size. However it was soon covered up with dense
+black cloud, and there were billows of cloud behind us and below.
+
+"At lunch Birdie made the disastrous discovery that the registering dial
+of his sledge-meter was off. A screw had shaken out on the bumpy ice,
+and the clockwork had fallen off. This is serious for it means that one
+of the three returning parties will have to go without, and their
+navigation will be much more difficult. Birdie is very upset, especially
+after all the trouble he has taken with it, and the hours which he has
+sat up. After lunch he and Bill walked back near two miles in the tracks,
+but could not see it. It was then getting very thick, coming over from
+the north."[240] "It appeared to be blizzing down the glacier, though
+clear to the south. The northerly wind drove up a back-draught of snow,
+and very soon fogged us completely. However we found our way back to camp
+by the crampon tracks on the blue ice and then packed up to leave."[241]
+
+"We started, making a course to hit the east side of the island where
+there seems to be the only break in the ice-falls which stretch right
+across. The weather lifted, and we are now camped with the island just to
+our right, the long strata of coal showing plainly in it, and just in
+front of us is this steep bit up through the falls. We have done nearly
+23 statute miles to-day, pulling 160 lbs. a man.
+
+"This evening has been rather a shock. As I was getting my finnesko on to
+the top of my ski beyond the tent Scott came up to me, and said that he
+was afraid he had rather a blow for me. Of course I knew what he was
+going to say, but could hardly grasp that I was going back--to-morrow
+night. The returning party is to be Atch, Silas, Keohane and self.
+
+[Illustration: NIGHT CAMP. BUCKLEY ISLAND--December 20, 1911]
+
+"Scott was very put about, said he had been thinking a lot about it but
+had come to the conclusion that the seamen with their special knowledge,
+would be needed: to rebuild the sledge, I suppose. Wilson told me it was
+a toss-up whether Titus or I should go on: that being so I think Titus
+will help him more than I can. I said all I could think of--he seemed so
+cut up about it, saying 'I think, somehow, it is specially hard on you.'
+I said I hoped I had not disappointed him, and he caught hold of me and
+said 'No--no--No,' so if that is the case all is well. He told me that at
+the bottom of the glacier he was hardly expecting to go on himself: I
+don't know what the trouble is, but his foot is troubling him, and also,
+I think, indigestion."[242]
+
+Scott just says in his diary, "I dreaded this necessity of
+choosing--nothing could be more heartrending." And then he goes on to sum
+up the situation, "I calculated our programme to start from 85° 10´ with
+12 units of food and eight men. We ought to be in this position to-morrow
+night, less one day's food. After all our harassing trouble one cannot
+but be satisfied with such a prospect."[243]
+
+December 21. Upper Glacier Depôt. "Started off with a nippy S.Wly. wind
+in our faces, but bright sunshine. One's nose and lips being chapped and
+much skinned with alternate heat and cold, a breeze in the face is
+absolute agony until you warm up. This does not take long, however, when
+pulling a sledge, so after the first quarter of an hour more or less one
+is comfortable unless the wind is very strong.
+
+"We made towards the only place where it seemed possible to cross the
+mass of pressure ice caused by the junction of the plateau with the
+glacier, and congested between the nunatak [Buckley Island] and the
+Dominion Range. Scott had considered at one time going up to westward of
+the nunatak, but this appeared more chaotic than the other side. We made
+for a slope close to the end of the island or nunatak, where Shackleton
+must have got up also; it is obviously the only place when you look at it
+from a commanding rise. We did not go quite so close to the land as
+Shackleton did, and therefore, as had been the case with us all the way
+up the glacier, found less difficulties than he met with. Scott is quite
+wonderful in his selections of route, as we have escaped excessive
+dangers and difficulties all along. In this case we had fairly good
+going, but got into a perfect mass of crevasses into which we all
+continually fell; mostly one foot, but often two, and occasionally we
+went down altogether, some to the length of their harness to be hauled
+out with the Alpine rope. Most of them could be seen by the strip of snow
+on the blue ice. They were often too wide to jump though, and the only
+thing was to plant your feet on the bridge and try not to tread heavily.
+As a rule the centre of a bridged crevasse is the safest place, the
+rotten places are at the edges. We had to go over dozens by hopping right
+on to the bridge and then over on to the ice. It is a bit of a jar when
+it gives way under you, but the friendly harness is made to trust one's
+life to. The Lord only knows how deep these vast chasms go down, they
+seem to extend into blue black nothingness thousands of feet below.
+
+"Before reaching the rise we had to go up and down many steep slopes, and
+on the one side the sledges were overrunning us, and on the other it
+fairly took the juice out of you to reach the top. We saw the
+stratification on the nunatak which Shackleton supposed to be coal: there
+was also much sandstone and red granite. I should like to have scratched
+round these rocks: we may get a chance on our return journey. As we
+topped each rise we found another one beyond it, and so on.
+
+"About noon some clouds settled in a fog round us, and being fairly in a
+trough of crevasses we could not get on. Fortunately we found a snow
+patch to pitch the tents on, but even there were crevasses under us.
+However, we enjoyed a hearty lunch, and I improved the shining hour by
+preparing my rations for the Upper Glacier Depôt.
+
+"At 3 P.M. it cleared, and Mount Darwin, a nunatak to the S.W. of the
+others, could be seen. This we made for, and some two miles on exchanged
+blue ice for the new snow which was much harder pulling. Scott was fairly
+wound up, and he went on and on. Every rise topped seemed to fire him
+with a desire to top the next, and every rise had another beyond and
+above it. We camped at 8 P.M., all pretty weary, having come up nearly
+1500 feet, and done over eleven miles in a S.W. direction. We were south
+of Mount Darwin in 85° 7´ S., and our corrected altitude proved to be
+7000 feet above the Barrier. I worked up till a very late hour getting
+the depôt stores ready, and also weighing out and arranging allowances
+for the returning party, and arranging the stores and distribution of
+weights of the two parties going on. The temperature was down to zero
+to-day, the lowest it has been for some time this summer weather."[244]
+
+"There is a very mournful air to-night--those going on and those turning
+back. Bill came in while I was cooking, to say good-bye. He told me he
+fully expected to come back with the next party: that he could see Scott
+was going to take on the strongest fellows, perhaps three seamen. It
+would be a great disappointment if Bill did not go on."[245]
+
+We gave away any gear which we could spare to those going on, and I find
+the following in my diary:
+
+"I have been trying to give away my spare gear where it may be most
+acceptable: finnesko to Birdie, pyjama trousers to Bill, and a bag of
+baccy for Bill to give Scott on Christmas Day, some baccy to Titus,
+jaeger socks and half my scarf to Crean, and a bit of handkerchief to
+Birdie. Very tired to-night."
+
+Scott wrote: "We are struggling on, considering all things against odds.
+The weather is a constant anxiety, otherwise arrangements are working
+exactly as planned.
+
+"Here we are practically on the summit and up to date in the provision
+line. We ought to get through."[246]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [221] My own diary.
+
+   [222] My own diary.
+
+   [223] Bowers.
+
+   [224] Scott.
+
+   [225] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 497.
+
+   [226] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 499.
+
+   [227] Bowers.
+
+   [228] My own diary.
+
+   [229] Ibid.
+
+   [230] Bowers.
+
+   [231] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 506.
+
+   [232] My own diary.
+
+   [233] Ibid.
+
+   [234] Bowers.
+
+   [235] See p. 332.
+
+   [236] Bowers.
+
+   [237] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 509.
+
+   [238] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 510.
+
+   [239] My own diary.
+
+   [240] My own diary.
+
+   [241] Bowers.
+
+   [242] My own diary.
+
+   [243] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 511-512.
+
+   [244] Bowers.
+
+   [245] My own diary.
+
+   [246] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 513.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY (_continued_)
+
+    People, perhaps, still exist who believe that it is of no
+    importance to explore the unknown polar regions. This, of course,
+    shows ignorance. It is hardly necessary to mention here of what
+    scientific importance it is that these regions should be
+    thoroughly explored. The history of the human race is a continual
+    struggle from darkness towards light. It is, therefore, to no
+    purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and
+    when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.--NANSEN.
+
+III. THE PLATEAU FROM MOUNT DARWIN TO LAT. 87° 32´ S.
+
+
+_First Sledge_                        _Second Sledge_
+SCOTT                                  LIEUT. EVANS
+WILSON                                 BOWERS
+OATES                                  LASHLY
+SEAMAN EVANS                           CREAN
+
+For the first week on the plateau Bowers wrote a full diary, which I give
+below. After December 28 there are little more than fragmentary notes
+until January 19, the day the party started to return from the Pole. From
+then until January 25, he wrote fully; nothing after that until January
+29, followed by more fragments to "February 3rd (I suppose)." That is the
+last entry he made.
+
+But this is not surprising, even in a man of Bowers' energy. The time a
+man can give to writing under such conditions is limited, and Bowers had
+a great deal of it to do before he could think of a diary--the
+meteorological log; sights for position as well as rating sights for
+time; and all the routine work of weights, provisions and depôts. He
+wrote no diary at the Pole, but he made a very full meteorological report
+while there in addition to working out sights. The wonder is that he kept
+a diary at all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_From Bowers' Diary_
+
+December 22. _Midsummer Day._ We have had a brilliant day with a
+temperature about zero and no wind, altogether charming conditions. I
+rigged up the Upper Glacier Depôt after breakfast. We depôted two
+half-weekly units for return of the two parties, also all crampons and
+glacier gear, such as ice-axes, crowbar, spare Alpine rope, etc.,
+personal gear, medical, and in fact everything we could dispense with. I
+left my old finnesko, wind trousers and some other spare gear in a bag
+for going back.
+
+The two advance parties' weights amounted to 190 lbs. per man. They
+consisted of the permanent weights, twelve weeks' food and oil, spare
+sledge runners, etc. We said good-bye and sent back messages and photo
+films with the First Returning Party, which consisted of Atch, Cherry,
+Silas and Keohane. It was quite touching saying farewell to our good
+pals--they wished us luck, and Cherry, Atch and Silas quite overwhelmed
+me.
+
+We went forward, the Owner's team as before consisting of Dr. Bill, Titus
+and [Seaman] Evans, and [Lieut.] Teddy Evans and Lashly coming over to my
+sledge and tent to join up with Crean and myself. We all left the depôt
+cairn marked with two spare 10-feet sledge runners and a large black flag
+on one. Our morning march was not so long as usual owing to making up the
+depôt, but we did five miles uphill, hauling our heavier loads more
+easily than the lighter ones yesterday. A fall in the temperature had
+improved the surface. We had also sandpapered our runners after the
+tearing up they had had on the glacier; this made a tremendous
+difference. The afternoon march brought our total up to 10.6 miles for
+the day on a S.W. course.
+
+We are steering S.W. with a view to avoiding ice-falls which Shackleton
+met with. We came across very few crevasses; the few we found were as
+broad as a street, and crossing them the whole party, sledge and all,
+would be on the bridge at once. They only gave way at the edges, and we
+did nothing worse than put our feet through now and then. The surface is
+all snow now, névé and hard sastrugi, which seem to point to a strong
+prevalent S.S.E. wind here.
+
+We are well clear of the land now, and it is a beautiful evening. I have
+just taken six photographs of the Dominion Range. We can see many new
+mountains. Our position by observation is 85° 13´ 29" S., 161° 54´ 45"
+E., variation being 175° 45´.
+
+December 23. Turned out at usual time, 5.45 A.M. I am cook this week in
+our tent. After breakfast built two cairns to mark spot and shoved off at
+quarter to eight.
+
+We started up a big slope on a S.W. course to avoid the pressure which
+lay across our track to the southward. It was a pretty useful slog up the
+rise, at one time it seemed as if we would never top the slope. We
+stopped for five minutes to look round after 2½ hours' hard plugging and
+about 1½ hours later reached the top, from which we could see the distant
+mountains which have so recently been our companions. They are beginning
+to look pretty magnificent. The top of the great pressure ridge was
+running roughly S.E. and N.W.: it was one of a succession of ridges which
+probably cover an area of fifty or sixty square miles. In this
+neighbourhood Shackleton met them almost to 86½° south. At the top of the
+ridge were vast crevasses into which we could have dropped the Terra Nova
+easily. The bridges were firm, however, except at the sides, though we
+had frequent stumbles into the conservatory roof, so to speak. The
+sledges were rushed over them without mishap. We had to head farther west
+to clear disturbances, and at one time were going W.N.W.
+
+At lunch camp we had done 8½ miles, and in the afternoon we completed
+fifteen on a S.W. course over improved ground. Our routine is to actually
+haul our sledges for nine hours a day; five in the morning, 7.15 A.M.
+till 1 P.M.; and four in the afternoon, 2.30 P.M.-6.30 P.M. We turn out
+at 5.45 A.M. just now. The loads are still pretty heavy, but the surface
+is remarkably good considering all things. One gets pretty weary towards
+the end of the day; all my muscles have had their turn at being
+[stiffened] up. These hills are giving my back ones a reminder, but they
+will ache less to-morrow and finally cease to do so, as is the case with
+legs, etc., which had their turn first.
+
+December 24. _Christmas Eve._ We started off heading due south this
+morning, as we are many miles to the westward of Shackleton's course and
+should if anywhere be clear of the ice-falls and pressure. Of course no
+mortals having been here, one can only conjecture; as a matter of fact,
+we found later in the day that we were not clear by any means, and had to
+do a bit of dodging about to avoid disturbances, as well as mount vast
+ridges with the tops of them a chaos of crevasses. The tops are pretty
+hard ice-snow, over which the sledges run easily; it is quite a holiday
+after slogging up the slopes on the softer surface with our heavy loads,
+which amount to over 190 lbs. per man.
+
+We mark our night camp by two cairns and our lunch camp by single ones.
+It is doubtful, however, among these ridges, if we will ever pick them up
+again, and it does not really matter, as we have excellent land for the
+Upper Glacier Depôt. We completed fourteen miles and turned in as usual
+pretty tired.
+
+December 25. _Christmas Day._ A strange and strenuous Christmas for me,
+with plenty of snow to look at and very little else. The breeze that had
+blown in our faces all yesterday blew more freshly to-day, with surface
+drift. It fairly nipped one's nose and face starting off--until one got
+warmed up. We had to pull in wind blouses, as though one's body kept warm
+enough on the march the arms got numbed with the penetrating wind no
+matter how vigorously they were swung. Another thing is that one cannot
+stop the team on the march to get clothes on and off, so it is better to
+go the whole hog and be too hot than cause delays. We had the addition of
+a little pony meat for breakfast to celebrate the day. I am the cook of
+our tent this week.
+
+We steered south again and struck our friends the crevasses and climbed
+ridges again. About the middle of the morning we were all falling in
+continually, but Lashly in my team had the worst drop. He fell to the
+length of his harness and the trace. I was glad that having noticed his
+rope rather worn, I had given him a new one a few days before. He jerked
+Crean and me off our feet backwards, and Crean's harness being jammed
+under the sledge, which was half across an eight-feet bridge, he could do
+nothing. I was a little afraid of sledge and all going down, but
+fortunately the crevasse ran diagonally. We could not see Lashly, for a
+great overhanging piece of ice was over him. Teddy Evans and I cleared
+Crean and we all three got Lashly up with the Alpine rope cut into the
+snow sides which overhung the hole. We then got the sledge into safety.
+
+To-day is Lashly's birthday; he is married and has a family; is 44 years
+of age, and due for his pension from the service. He is as strong as most
+and is an undefeated old sportsman. Being a chief stoker, R.N., his
+original job was charge of one of the ill-fated motor sledges.
+
+[The following is Lashly's own account:
+
+"Christmas Day and a good one. We have done 15 miles over a very changing
+surface. First of all it was very much crevassed and pretty rotten; we
+were often in difficulties as to which way we should tackle it. I had the
+misfortune to drop clean through, but was stopped with a jerk when at the
+end of my harness. It was not of course a very nice sensation, especially
+on Christmas Day, and being my birthday as well. While spinning round in
+space like I was it took me a few seconds to gather together my thoughts
+and see what kind of a place I was in. It certainly was not a fairy's
+place. When I had collected myself I heard some one calling from above,
+'Are you all right, Lashly?' I was all right it is true, but I did not
+care to be dangling in the air on a piece of rope, especially when I
+looked round and saw what kind of a place it was. It seemed about 50 feet
+deep and 8 feet wide, and 120 feet long. This information I had ample
+time to gain while dangling there. I could measure the width with my ski
+sticks, as I had them on my wrists. It seemed a long time before I saw
+the rope come down alongside me with a bowline in it for me to put my
+foot in and get dragged out. It was not a job I should care to have to go
+through often, as by being in the crevasse I had got cold and a bit
+frost-bitten on the hands and face, which made it more difficult for me
+to help myself. Anyhow Mr. Evans, Bowers and Crean hauled me out and
+Crean wished me many happy returns of the day, and of course I thanked
+him politely and the others laughed, but all were pleased I was not hurt
+bar a bit of a shake. It was funny although they called to the other team
+to stop they did not hear, but went trudging on and did not know until
+they looked round just in time to see me arrive on top again. They then
+waited for us to come up with them. The Captain asked if I was all right
+and could go on again, which I could honestly say 'Yes' to, and at night
+when we stopped for dinner I felt I could do two dinners in. Anyhow we
+had a pretty good tuck-in. Dinner consisted of pemmican, biscuits,
+chocolate éclair, pony meat, plum pudding and crystallized ginger and
+four caramels each. We none of us could hardly move."[247]]
+
+We had done over eight miles at lunch. I had managed to scrape together
+from the Barrier rations enough extra food to allow us a stick of
+chocolate each for lunch, with two spoonfuls of raisins each in our tea.
+In the afternoon we got clear of crevasses pretty soon, but towards the
+end of the afternoon Captain Scott got fairly wound up and went on and
+on. The breeze died down and my breath kept fogging my glasses, and our
+windproofs got oppressively warm and altogether things were pretty
+rotten. At last he stopped and we found we had done 14¾ miles. He said,
+"What about fifteen miles for Christmas Day?" so we gladly went
+on--anything definite is better than indefinite trudging.
+
+We had a great feed which I had kept hidden and out of the official
+weights since our departure from Winter Quarters. It consisted of a good
+fat hoosh with pony meat and ground biscuit; a chocolate hoosh made of
+water, cocoa, sugar, biscuit, raisins, and thickened with a spoonful of
+arrowroot. (This is the most satisfying stuff imaginable.) Then came 2½
+square inches of plum-duff each, and a good mug of cocoa washed down the
+whole. In addition to this we had four caramels each and four squares of
+crystallized ginger. I positively could not eat all mine, and turned in
+feeling as if I had made a beast of myself. I wrote up my journal--in
+fact I should have liked somebody to put me to bed.
+
+December 26. We have seen many new ranges of mountains extending to the
+S.E. of the Dominion Range. They are very distant, however, and must
+evidently be the top of those bounding the Barrier. They could only be
+seen from the tops of the ridges as waves up which we are continually
+mounting. Our height yesterday morning by hypsometer was 8000 feet. That
+is our last hypsometer record, as I had the misfortune to break the
+thermometer. The hypsometer was one of my chief delights, and nobody
+could have been more disgusted than myself at its breaking. However, we
+have the aneroid to check the height. We are going gradually up and up.
+As one would expect, a considerable amount of lassitude was felt over
+breakfast after our feed last night. The last thing on earth I wanted to
+do was to ship the harness round my poor tummy when we started. As usual
+a stiff breeze from the south and a temperature of -7° blew in our faces.
+Strange to say, however, we don't get frost-bitten. I suppose it is the
+open-air life.
+
+I could not tell if I had a frost-bite on my face now, as it is all
+scales, so are my lips and nose. A considerable amount of red hair is
+endeavouring to cover up matters. We crossed several ridges, and after
+the effects of over-feeding had worn off did a pretty good march of
+thirteen miles.
+
+[No more Christmas Days, so no more big hooshes.[248]]
+
+December 27. There is something the matter with our sledge or our team,
+as we have an awful slog to keep up with the others. I asked Dr. Bill and
+he said their sledge ran very easily. Ours is nothing but a desperate
+drag with constant rallies to keep up. We certainly manage to do so, but
+I am sure we cannot keep this up for long. We are all pretty well done up
+to-night after doing 13.3 miles.
+
+Our salvation is on the summits of the ridges, where hard névé and
+sastrugi obtain, and we skip over this slippery stuff and make up lost
+ground easily. In soft snow the other team draw steadily ahead, and it is
+fairly heart-breaking to know you are putting your life out hour after
+hour while they go along with little apparent effort.
+
+December 28. The last few days have been absolutely cloudless, with
+unbroken sunshine for twenty-four hours. It sounds very nice, but the
+temperature never comes above zero and what Shackleton called "the
+pitiless increasing wind" of the great plateau continues to blow at all
+times from the south. It never ceases, and all night it whistles round
+the tents, all day it blows in our faces. Sometimes it is S.S.E., or S.E.
+to S., and sometimes even S. to W., but always southerly, chiefly
+accompanied by low drift which at night forms quite a deposit round the
+sledges. We expected this wind, so we must not growl at getting it. It
+will be great fun sailing the sledges back before it. As far as weather
+is concerned we have had remarkably fine days up here on this limitless
+snow plain. I should like to know what there is beneath us--mountains and
+valleys simply levelled off to the top with ice? We constantly come
+across disturbances which I can only imagine are caused by the peaks of
+ice-covered mountains, and no doubt some of the ice-falls and crevasses
+are accountable to the same source. Our coming west has not cleared them,
+as we have seen more disturbances to the west, many miles away. However,
+they are getting less and less, and are now nothing but featureless rises
+with apparently no crevasses. Our first two hours' pulling to-day....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_From Lashly's Diary_
+
+December 29, 1911. A nasty head wind all day and low drift which
+accumulates in patches and makes it the deuce of a job to get along. We
+have got to put in long days to do the distance.
+
+December 30, 1911. Sledges going heavy, surface and wind the same as
+yesterday. We depôted our ski to-night, that is the party returning
+_to-morrow_, when we march in the forenoon and camp to change our sledge
+runners into 10 feet. Done 11 miles but a bit stiff.
+
+December 31, 1911. After doing 7 miles we camped and done the sledges
+which took us until 11 P.M., and we had to dig out to get them done by
+then, made a depôt and saw the old year out and the new year in. We all
+wondered where we should be next New Year. It was so still and quiet; the
+weather was dull and overcast all night, in fact we have not seen much of
+the sun lately; it would be so nice if we could sometimes get a glimpse
+of it, the sun is always cheering.
+
+January 1912. _New Year's Day._ We pushed on as usual, but were rather
+late getting away, 9.10--something unusual for us to be as late. The
+temperature and wind is still very troublesome. We are now ahead of
+Shackleton's dates and have passed the 87th parallel, so it is only 180
+miles to the Pole.
+
+January 2, 1912. The dragging is still very heavy and we seem to be
+always climbing higher. We are now over 10,000 feet above sea level. It
+makes it bad as we don't get enough heat in our food and the tea is not
+strong enough to run out of the pot. Everything gets cold so quickly, the
+water boils at about 196° F.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Scott's own diary of this first fortnight on the plateau shows the
+immense shove of the man: he was getting every inch out of the miles,
+every ounce out of his companions. Also he was in a hurry, he always was.
+That blizzard which had delayed him just before the Gateway, and the
+resulting surfaces which had delayed him in the lower reaches of the
+glacier! One can feel the averages running through his brain: so many
+miles to-day: so many more to-morrow. When shall we come to an end of
+this pressure? Can we go straight or must we go more west? And then the
+great undulating waves with troughs eight miles wide, and the buried
+mountains, causing whirlpools in the ice--how immense, and how annoying.
+The monotonous march: the necessity to keep the mind concentrated to
+steer amongst disturbances: the relief of a steady plod when the
+disturbances cease for a time: then more pressure and more crevasses.
+Always slog on, slog on. Always a fraction of a mile more.... On December
+30 he writes, "We have caught up Shackleton's dates."[249]
+
+They made wonderful marches, averaging nearly fifteen statute miles (13
+geog.) a day for the whole-day marches until the Second Return Party
+turned back on January 4. Scott writes on December 26, "It seems
+astonishing to be disappointed with a march of 15 (statute) miles when I
+had contemplated doing little more than 10 with full loads."[250]
+
+The Last Returning Party came back with the news that Scott must reach
+the Pole with the greatest ease. This seemed almost a certainty: and yet
+it was, as we know now, a false impression. Scott's plans were based on
+Shackleton's averages over the same country. The blizzard came and put
+him badly behind: but despite this he caught Shackleton up. No doubt the
+general idea then was that Scott was going to have a much easier time
+than he had expected. We certainly did not realize then, and I do not
+think Scott himself had any notion of, the price which had been paid.
+
+Of the three teams of four men each which started from the bottom of the
+Beardmore, Scott's team was a very long way the strongest: it was the
+team which, with one addition, went to the Pole. Lieutenant Evans' team
+had mostly done a lot of man-hauling already: it was hungry and I think a
+bit stale. Bowers' team was fresh and managed to keep up for the most
+part, but it was very done at the end of the day. Scott's own team went
+along with comparative ease. From the top of the glacier two teams went
+on during the last fortnight of which we have been speaking. The first of
+them was Scott's unit complete, just as it had pulled up the glacier. The
+second team consisted, I believe, of the men whom Scott considered to be
+the strongest; two from Evans' team, and two from Bowers'. All Scott's
+team were fresh to the extent that they had done no man-hauling until we
+started up the glacier. But two of the other team, Lieutenant Evans and
+Lashly, had been man-hauling since the breakdown of the second motor on
+November 1. They had man-hauled four hundred statute miles farther than
+the rest. Indeed Lashly's man-hauling journey from Corner Camp to beyond
+87° 32´ S., and back, is one of the great feats of polar travelling.
+
+Surely and not very slowly, Scott's team began to wear down the other
+team. They were going easily when the others were making heavy weather
+and were sometimes far behind. During the fortnight they rose, according
+to the corrected observations, from 7151 feet (Upper Glacier Depôt) to
+9392 feet above sea level (Three Degree Depôt). The rarefied air of the
+Plateau with its cold winds and lower temperatures, just now about -10°
+to -12° at night and -3° during the day, were having their effect on the
+second team, as well as the forced marches. This is quite clear from
+Scott's diary, and from the other diaries also. What did not appear until
+after the Last Returning Party had turned homewards was that the first
+team was getting worn out too. This team which had gone so strong up the
+glacier, which had done those amazingly good marches on the plateau,
+broke up unexpectedly and in some respects rapidly from the 88th parallel
+onwards.
+
+Seaman Evans was the first man to crack. He was the heaviest, largest,
+most muscular man we had, and that was probably one of the main reasons:
+for his allowance of food was the same as the others. But one mishap
+which contributed to his collapse seems to have happened during this
+first fortnight on the plateau. On December 31 the 12-feet sledges were
+turned into 10-feet ones by stripping off the old scratched runners which
+had come up the glacier and shipping new 10-feet ones which had been
+brought for the purpose. This job was done by the seamen, and Evans
+appears to have had some accident to his hand, which is mentioned several
+times afterwards.
+
+Meanwhile Scott had to decide whom he was going to take on with him to
+the Pole,--for it was becoming clear that in all probability he _would_
+reach the Pole: "What castles one builds now hopefully that the Pole is
+ours," he wrote the day after the supporting party left him. The final
+advance to the Pole was, according to plan, to have been made by four
+men. We were organized in four-man units: our rations were made up for
+four men for a week: our tents held four men: our cookers held four mugs,
+four pannikins and four spoons. Four days before the Supporting Party
+turned, Scott ordered the second sledge of four men to depôt their ski.
+It is clear, I suppose, that at this time he meant the Polar Party to
+consist of four men. I think there can be no doubt that he meant one of
+those men to be himself: "for your own ear also, I am exceedingly fit and
+can go with the best of them," he wrote from the top of the glacier.[251]
+
+He changed his mind and went forward a party of five: Scott, Wilson,
+Bowers, Oates and Seaman Evans. I am sure he wished to take as many men
+as possible to the Pole. He sent three men back: Lieutenant Evans in
+charge, and two seamen, Lashly and Crean. It is the vivid story of those
+three men, who turned on January 4 in latitude 87° 32´, which is told by
+Lashly in the next chapter. Scott wrote home: "A last note from a hopeful
+position. I think it's going to be all right. We have a fine party going
+forward and arrangements are all going well."[252]
+
+Ten months afterwards we found their bodies.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [247] Lashly's diary.
+
+   [248] Lashly's diary.
+
+   [249] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 525.
+
+   [250] Ibid. p. 521.
+
+   [251] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 513.
+
+   [252] Ibid. p. 529.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY (_continued_)
+
+    THE DEVIL. And these are the creatures in whom you discover what
+    you call a Life Force!
+
+    DON JUAN. Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the
+    whole business.
+
+    THE STATUE. What's that?
+
+    DON JUAN. Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by
+    simply putting an idea into his head.
+
+    THE STATUE. Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's
+    as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But
+    that about putting an idea into a man's head is stuff and
+    nonsense. In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little
+    hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than
+    to win.
+
+    DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men
+    never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting
+    to further a universal purpose--fighting for an idea, as they
+    call it.
+
+    BERNARD SHAW, _Man and Superman._
+
+IV. RETURNING PARTIES
+
+
+Two Dog Teams (Meares and Dimitri) turned back from the bottom of the
+Beardmore Glacier on December 11, 1911. They reached Hut Point on January
+4, 1912.
+
+First Supporting Party (Atkinson, Cherry-Garrard, Wright, Keohane) turned
+back in lat. 85° 15´ on December 22, 1911. They reached Hut Point January
+26, 1912.
+
+Last Supporting Party (Lieut. Evans, Lashly, Crean) turned back in lat.
+87° 32´ on January 4, 1912. They reached Hut Point February 22, 1912.
+
+Of the three teams which started up the Beardmore Glacier the first to
+return, a fortnight after starting the Summit Rations, was known as the
+First Supporting Party: the second to return, a month after starting the
+Summit Rations, was known as the Last Supporting Party. Of the two
+dog-teams under Meares, which had already turned homewards at the bottom
+of the glacier after having been brought forward farther than had been
+intended, I will speak later.[253]
+
+I am going to say very little about the First Return Party, which
+consisted of Atkinson, Wright, Keohane and myself. Atkinson was in
+command, and before we left Scott told him to bring the dog-teams out to
+meet the Polar Party if, as seemed likely, Meares returned home. Atkinson
+is a naval surgeon and you will find this party referred to in Lashly's
+diary as "the Doctor's."
+
+"It was a sad job saying good-bye. It was thick, snowing and drifting
+clouds when we started back after making the depôt, and the last we saw
+of them as we swung the sledge north was a black dot just disappearing
+over the next ridge and a big white pressure wave ahead of them.... Scott
+said some nice things when we said good-bye. Anyway he has only to
+average seven miles a day to get to the Pole on full rations--it's
+practically a cert for him. I do hope he takes Bill and Birdie. The view
+over the ice-falls and pressure by the Mill Glacier from the top of the
+ice-falls is one of the finest things I have ever seen. Atch is doing us
+proud."[254]
+
+No five hundred mile journey down the Beardmore and across the Barrier
+can be uneventful, even in midsummer. We had the same dreary drag, the
+same thick weather, fears and anxieties which other parties have had. A
+touch of the same dysentery and sickness: the same tumbles and crevasses:
+the same Christmas comforts, a layer of plum pudding at the bottom of our
+cocoa, and some rocks collected from a moraine under the Cloudmaker: the
+same groping for tracks: the same cairns lost and found, the same
+snow-blindness and weariness, nightmares, food dreams.... Why repeat?
+Comparatively speaking it was a very little journey: and yet the distance
+from Cape Evans to the top of the Beardmore Glacier and back is 1164
+statute miles. Scott's Southern Journey of 1902-3 was 950 statute miles.
+
+One day only is worth recalling. We got into the same big pressure above
+the Cloudmaker which both the other parties experienced. But where the
+other two parties made east to get out of it, we went west at Wright's
+suggestion: west was right. The day really lives in my memory because of
+the troubles of Keohane. He fell into crevasses to the full length of his
+harness eight times in twenty-five minutes. Little wonder he looked a bit
+dazed. And Atkinson went down into one chasm head foremost: the worst
+crevasse fall I've ever seen. But luckily the shoulder straps of his
+harness stood the strain and we pulled him up little the worse.
+
+All three parties off the plateau owed a good deal to Meares, who, on his
+return with the two dog-teams, built up the cairns which had been
+obliterated by the big blizzard of December 5-8. The ponies' walls were
+drifted level with the surface, and Meares himself had an anxious time
+finding his way home. The dog tracks also helped us a good deal: the dogs
+were sinking deeply and making heavy weather of it.
+
+[Illustration: ADAMS MOUNTAINS]
+
+[Illustration: Cherry-Garrard. Keohane. Atkinson--FIRST RETURN PARTY]
+
+At the Barrier Depôts we found rather despondent notes from Meares about
+his progress. To the Southern Barrier Depôt he had uncomfortably high
+temperatures and a very soft surface, and found the cairns drifted up and
+hard to see. At the Middle Barrier Depôt we found a note from him dated
+December 20. "Thick weather and blizzards had delayed him, and once he
+had got right off the tracks and had been out from his camp hunting for
+them. They were quite well: a little eye strain from searching for
+cairns. He was taking a little butter from each bag [of the three depôted
+weekly units], and with this would have enough to the next depôt on short
+rations."[255] At the Upper Glacier Depôt [Mount Hooper] the news from
+Meares was dated Christmas Eve, in the evening: "The dogs were going
+slowly but steadily in very soft stuff, especially his last two days.
+He was running short of food, having only biscuit crumbs, tea, some
+cornflour, and half a cup of pemmican. He was therefore taking fifty
+biscuits, and a day's provisions for two men from each of our units. He
+had killed one American dog some camps back: if he killed more he was
+going to kill Krisravitza who he said was the fattest and laziest. We
+shall take on thirty biscuits short."[256] Meares was to have turned
+homewards with the two dog-teams in lat. 81° 15´. Scott took him on to
+approximately 83° 35´. The dogs had the ponies on which to feed: to make
+up the deficiency of man-food we went one biscuit a day short when going
+up the Beardmore: but the dogs went back slower than was estimated and
+his provisions were insufficient. It was evident that the dog-teams would
+arrive too late and be too done to take out the food which had still to
+be sledged to One Ton for the three parties returning from the plateau.
+It was uncertain whether a man-hauling party with such of this food as
+they could drag would arrive at the depôt before us.[257] We might have
+to travel the 130 geographical miles from One Ton to Hut Point on the
+little food which was already at that depôt and we were saving food by
+going on short rations to meet this contingency if it arose. Judge
+therefore our joy when we reached One Ton in the evening of January 15 to
+find three of the five XS rations which were necessary for the three
+parties. A man-hauling party consisting of Day, Nelson, Hooper and
+Clissold had brought out this food; they left a note saying the crevasses
+near Corner Camp were bad and open. Day and Hooper had reached Cape Evans
+from the Barrier[258] on December 21: they started out again on this
+depôt-laying trip on December 26.
+
+It is a common experience for men who have been hungry to be ill after
+reaching plenty of food. Atkinson was not at all well during our journey
+in to Hut Point, which we reached without difficulty on January 26.
+
+When I was looking for data concerning the return of the Last Supporting
+Party of which no account has been published, I wrote to Lashly and asked
+him to meet and tell me all he could remember. He was very willing, and
+added that somewhere or other he had a diary which he had written:
+perhaps it might be of use? I asked him to send it me, and was sent some
+dirty thumbed sheets of paper. And this is what I read:
+
+    _3rd January 1912._
+
+Very heavy going to-day. This will be our last night together, as we are
+to return to-morrow after going on in the forenoon with the party chosen
+for the Pole, that is Capt. Scott, Dr. Wilson, Capt. Oates, Lieut. Bowers
+and Taff Evans. The Captain said he was satisfied we were all in good
+condition, fit to do the journey, but only so many could go on, so it was
+his wish Mr. Evans, Crean and myself should return. He was quite aware we
+should have a very stiff job, but we told him we did not mind that,
+providing he thought they could reach the Pole with the assistance we had
+been able to give them. The first time I have heard we were having mules
+coming down to assist us next year. I was offering to remain at Hut
+Point, to be there if any help was needed, but the Captain said it was
+his and also Capt. Oates' wish if the mules arrived I was to take charge
+of and look after them until their return; but if they did not arrive
+there was no reason why I should not come to Hut Point and wait their
+return. We had a long talk with the owner [Scott] in our tent about
+things in general and he seemed pretty confident of success. He seemed a
+bit afraid of us getting hung up, but as he said we had a splendid
+navigator, who he was sure he could trust to pull us through. He also
+thanked us all heartily for the way we had assisted in the Journey and he
+should be sorry when we parted. We are of course taking the mail, but
+what a time before we get back to send it. We are nearly as far as
+Shackleton was on his Journey. I shall not write more to-night, it is too
+cold.
+
+    _4th January 1912._
+
+We accompanied the Pole party for about five miles and everything seemed
+to be going pretty well and Capt. Scott said they felt confident they
+could pull the load quite well, so there was no more need for us to go
+on farther; so we stopped and did all the talking we could in a short
+time. We wished them every success and a safe return, and asked each one
+if there was anything we could do for them when we got back, but they
+were all satisfied they had left nothing undone, so the time came for the
+last handshake and good-bye. I think we all felt it very much. They then
+wished us a speedy return and safe, and then they moved off. We gave them
+three cheers, and watched them for a while until we began to feel cold.
+Then we turned and started for home. We soon lost sight of each other. We
+travelled a long time so as to make the best of it while the weather was
+suitable, as we have to keep up a good pace on the food allowance. It
+wont do to lay up much. One thing since we left Mt. Darwin, we have had
+weather we could travel in, although we have not seen the sun much of
+late. We did 13 miles as near as we can guess by the cairns we have
+passed. We have not got a sledge meter so shall have to go by guess all
+the way home.
+
+[Owing to the loss of a sledge meter on the Beardmore Glacier one of the
+three parties had to return without one. A sledge meter gives the
+navigator his dead reckoning, indicating the miles travelled, like the
+log of a ship. To be deprived of it in a wilderness of snow without
+landmarks adds enormously to the difficulties and anxieties of a sledge
+party.]
+
+    _5th January 1912._
+
+We were up and off this morning, the weather being fine but the surface
+is about the same, the temperature keeps low. We have got to change our
+pulling billets. Crean has become snow-blind to-day through being leader,
+so I shall have the job to-morrow, as Mr. Evans seems to get blind rather
+quickly, so if I lead and he directs me from behind we ought to get along
+pretty well. I hope my eyes will keep alright. We made good 17 miles and
+camped.
+
+    _6th January 1912._
+
+We are making good progress on the surface we have to contend with. We
+picked up the 3 Degree Depôt soon after noon, which puts us up to time.
+We took our provision for a week. We have got to reach Mt. Darwin Depôt,
+a distance of 120 miles, with 7 days' provisions. We picked up our ski
+and camped for the night. We have been wondering if the others have got
+the same wind as us. If so it is right in their face, whereas it is at
+our back, a treat to what it is facing it. Crean's eyes are pretty bad
+to-night. Snow-blindness is an awful complaint, and no one I can assure
+you looks forward with pleasure when it begins to attack.
+
+    _7th January 1912._
+
+We have had a very good day as far as travelling goes, the wind has been
+behind us and is a great help to us. We have been on ski all day for the
+first time. It seems a good change to footing it, the one thing day after
+day gets on one's nerves. Crean's eyes are a bit better to-day, but far
+from being well. The temperature is pretty low, which dont improve the
+surface for hauling, but we seem to be getting along pretty well. We have
+no sledge meter so we have to go by guess. Mr. Evans says we done 17½
+miles, but I say 16½. I am not going to over-estimate our day's run, as I
+am taking charge of the biscuits so that we dont over-step the mark. This
+we have all agreed to so that we should exactly know how we stand, from
+day to day. I am still leading, not very nice as the light is bad. We
+caught a glimpse of the land to the east of us, but could only have been
+a mirage.
+
+    _8th January 1912._
+
+On turning out this morning we found it was blowing a bliz. so it was
+almost a case of having to remain in camp, but on second thoughts we
+thought it best to kick off as we cant afford to lay up on account of
+food, so thought it best to push on. I wonder if the Pole Party have
+experienced this. If so they could not travel as it would be in their
+face, where we have got it at our back. We have lost the outward bound
+track, so have decided to make a straight line to Mt. Darwin, which will
+be on Shackleton's course according to his and Wild's Diary.
+
+[Each of the three parties which went forward up the Beardmore Glacier
+carried extracts from the above diaries. Wild was Shackleton's right-hand
+man in his Southern Journey in 1908.]
+
+    _9th January 1912._
+
+Travelling is very difficult, bad light and still blizzing; it would have
+been impossible to keep in touch with the cairns in this weather. I am
+giving 12 miles to-night. The weather have moderated a bit and looks a
+bit more promising. Can see land at times.
+
+    _10th January 1912._
+
+The light is still very bad, with a good deal of drift, but we must push
+on as we are a long way from our depôt, but we hope to reach it before
+our provisions run out. I am keeping a good eye on them. Crean's eyes
+have got alright again now.
+
+    _11th January 1912._
+
+Things are a bit better to-day. Could see the land alright and where to
+steer for. It is so nice to have something to look at, but I am thinking
+we shall all have our work cut out to reach the depôt before our
+provisions run short. I am deducting a small portion each meal so that we
+shall not have to go without altogether if we don't bring up at the
+proper time. Have done about 14 miles.
+
+    _12th January 1912._
+
+The day has been full of adventure. At first we got into some very rough
+stuff, with plenty of crevasses. Had to get rid of the ski and put our
+thinking cap on, as we had not got under way long before we were at the
+top of some ice-falls; these probably are what Shackleton spoke of. We
+could see it meant a descent of 600/700 feet, or make a big circuit,
+which meant a lot of time and a big delay, and this we cant afford just
+now, so we decided on the descent into the valley. This proved a
+difficult task, as we had no crampons, having left them at Mt. Darwin
+Depôt; but we managed after a time by getting hold of the sledge each
+side and allowing her to run into a big lump of pressure which was we
+knew a risky thing to do. It took us up to lunch time to reach the
+valley, where we camped for lunch, where we all felt greatly relieved,
+having accomplished the thing safely, no damage to ourselves or the
+sledge, but we lost one of Crean's ski sticks. Some of the crevasses we
+crossed were 100 to 200 feet wide, but well bridged in the centre, but
+the edges were very dangerous indeed. This is where the snow and ice
+begins to roll down the glacier. After starting on our way again we found
+we had to climb the hill. Things dont look very nice ahead again
+to-night. We dont seem to be more than a day's run from the depôt, but it
+will surprise me if we reach it by to-morrow night; if not we shall have
+to go on short rations, as our supply is nearly run out, and we have not
+lost any time, but we knew on starting we had to average 15½ miles per
+day to reach it in time.
+
+    _13th January 1912._
+
+This has been a very bad day for us, what with ice-falls and crevasses.
+We feel all full up to-night. The strain is tremendous some days. We are
+camped, but not at the depôt, but we hope to pick it up some time
+to-morrow. We shall be glad to get off the Summit, as the temperature is
+very low. We expected the party would have reached the Pole yesterday,
+providing they had anything of luck.
+
+[Scott reached the Pole on January 17.]
+
+    _14th January 1912._
+
+Sunday, we reached the Mt. Darwin Depôt at 2 P.M. and camped for lunch.
+We had just enough now for our meal; this is cutting it a bit fine. We
+have now taken our 3½ days' allowance, which has got to take us another
+57 miles to the Cloudmaker Depôt. This we shall do if we all keep as fit
+as we seem just now. We left a note at the depôt to inform the Captain of
+our safe arrival, wishing them the best of a journey home. We are quite
+cheerful here to-night, after having put things right at the depôt, where
+we found the sugar exposed to the sun; it had commenced to melt, but we
+put everything alright before we left, and picked up our crampons and
+got away as soon as we could. We know there is not much time to spare. We
+are now beginning to descend rapidly. To-night it is quite warm, and our
+tea and food is warmer. Things are going pretty favourable. We are
+looking forward to making good runs down the glacier. We have had some
+very heavy dragging lately [up] the sharp rises we found on the outward
+journey. After a sharp rise we found a long gradual run down, two and
+three miles in length. We noticed this on our outward journey and
+remarked on it, but coming back the long uphill drag we found out was
+pretty heavy work.
+
+    _15th January 1912._
+
+Had a good run to-day but the ice was very rough and very much crevassed,
+but with crampons on we made splendid progress. We did not like to stop,
+but we thought it would not be advisable to overdo our strength as it is
+a long way to go yet.
+
+    _16th January 1912._
+
+We made good headway again to-day, but to-night we camped in some very
+rough ice and pressure ridges. We are under the impression we are
+slightly out of our proper course, but Mr. Evans thinks we cant be very
+far out either way, and Crean and I are of the same opinion according to
+the marks on the land. Anyhow we hope to get out of it in the morning and
+make the Cloudmaker Depôt by night. We shall then feel safe, but the
+weather dont look over promising again to-night, I am thinking. So far we
+have not had to stop for weather. We have wondered if the Pole Party have
+been as lucky with the weather as we have. They ought by now to be
+homeward bound. We have more chance now of writing as the temperature is
+much better down here. To-night we have been discussing how the dogs got
+home, and also the progress made by the Doctor's [Atkinson] Party. They
+ought to be nearing home. We have thought of the time it will take us to
+reach it at the rate we are getting along now.
+
+    _17th January 1912._
+
+We have to-day experienced what we none of us ever wants to be our lot
+again. I cannot describe the maze we got into and the hairbreadth escapes
+we have had to pass through to-day. This day we shall remember all our
+lives. The more we tried to get clear the worse the pressure got; at
+times it seemed almost impossible for us to get along, and when we had
+got over the places it was more than we could face to try and retreat; so
+we struggled on for hours to try and free ourselves, but everything
+seemed against us. I was leading with a long trace so that I could get
+across some of the ridges when we thought it possible to get the sledge
+over without being dashed down into the fathomless pits each side of us
+which were too numerous to think of. Often and often we saw openings
+where it was possible to drop the biggest ship afloat in and loose her.
+This is what we have travelled over all day. It has been a great strain
+on us all, and Mr. Evans is rather down and thinks he has led us into
+such a hole, but as we have told him it is no fault of his, as it is
+impossible for anyone coming down the glacier to see what is ahead of
+them, so we must be thankful that we are so far safe. To-night we seem to
+be in a better place. We have camped not being able to reach the depôt,
+which we are certain is not far off. Dont want many days like this.
+
+[Illustration: BELOW THE CLOUDMAKER]
+
+    _18th January 1912._
+
+We started off all in good spirits trusting we should be able to reach
+the depôt all in good time, but we had not got far before we came into
+pressure far worse than we were in yesterday. My God! what a day this
+have been for us all. I cannot describe what we really have to-day come
+through, no one could believe that we came through with safety, if we had
+only had a camera we could have obtained some photographs that would have
+surprised anyone living. We travelled all day with very little food, as
+we are a day and a half overdue, but when we got clear, I can say "clear"
+now because I am dotting down this at the depôt where we have arrived. I
+had managed to keep behind just a small amount of biscuit and a drop of
+tea to liven us up to try and reach the depôt, which we reached at 11
+P.M. after one of the most trying days of my life. Shall have reason to
+never forget the 17 and 18 of January, 1912. To-night Mr. Evans is
+complaining of his eyes, more trouble ahead!
+
+    _19th January 1912._
+
+After putting the depôt in order and re-arranging things, we kicked off
+again for D. [Lower Glacier] Depôt. Mr. Evans' eyes were very bad on
+starting this morning, but we made a pretty good start. I picked some
+rock to-day which I intend to try and get back with, as it is the only
+chance we have had of getting any up to the present, and it seemed a
+funny thing: the rock I got some pieces of looked as if someone before me
+had been chipping some off. I wonder if it was the Doctor's party, but we
+could not see any trace of their sledge, but we could account for that,
+as it was all blue ice and not likely to leave any marks behind. After
+travelling for some distance we got on the same ridge as we ran along on
+the outward Journey and passed what we took to be the Doctor's Xmas Camp.
+We had not gone far past before we got into soft snow, so we decided to
+camp for lunch. Mr. Evans' eyes being very bad indeed, we are travelling
+now on our own, I am leading and telling him the course I am steering,
+that is the different marks on the mountains, but we shall keep on this
+ridge for some distance yet. After lunch to-day we did not proceed far
+before we decided to camp, the surface being so bad and Mr. Evans' eyes
+so bad, we thought it would do us all good to have a rest. Last night we
+left a note for Capt. Scott, but did not say much about our difficulties
+just above the Cloudmaker, as it would be better to tell him when we see
+him.
+
+    _20th January 1912._
+
+We did not get away very smart to-day, but as we found the surface very
+soft, we decided to go on ski. Mr. Evans is still suffering with his eyes
+and badly, after getting his ski on we tied him on to the trace so that
+he could help to drag a bit, when we were troubling about the ridges we
+came over on our outward Journey, but strange to say we never
+encountered any ridges at all and the surface, although very soft, was
+the best I have ever sledged over ever since I have been at it. We
+fancied on our left or to the west we saw what we took to be the ridges
+what we seem to have missed altogether, although Mr. Evans have been
+blind and could not see anything at all we have made splendid progress
+and covered at least 20 miles, as near as we can guess. We passed to-day
+one of the Doctor's homeward bound camps, and kept on their track for
+some time, but finally lost it. We are camped to-night and we all feel
+confident we shall, if the weather remains good, reach the depôt
+to-morrow night.
+
+    _21st January 1912._
+
+Sunday: We started off as usual, again on ski, the weather again being
+favourable. Mr. Evans' eyes is still bad, but improving. It will be a
+good job when they are better. I picked up our outward bound course soon
+after we started this morning and asked Mr. Evans if I should try and
+keep it, as it will save him the trouble of directing me, and another
+thing we came out without going through any crevasses and I have noticed
+a good many crevasses to-day what seems to be very dangerous ones, and on
+two occasions where our sledges [on the outward journey] had gone over,
+two of the crevasses had fallen through. We accomplished the journey from
+the Cloudmaker to this depôt in three days. We all feel quite proud of
+our performance. Mr. Evans is a lot better to-night and old Tom is giving
+us a song while he is covering up the tent with snow. We have re-arranged
+the depôt and left our usual note for Capt. Scott, wishing them a speedy
+return. To-morrow we hope to see and reach the Barrier, and be clear of
+the Beardmore for ever. We none of us minds the struggle we have been
+through to attain the amount of success so far reached. It is all for the
+good of science, as Crean says. We reached the depôt at 6.45 P.M.
+
+[Illustration: FROM MOUNT KYFFIN TO MOUNT PATRICK--E. A. Wilson, del.
+Emery Walker Limited, Collotypers.]
+
+    _22nd January 1912._
+
+We made a good start this morning and Mr. Evans' eyes is got pretty well
+alright again, so things looks a bit brighter. After starting we soon
+got round the corner from the Granite Pillars to between the mainland and
+Mt. Hope, on rising up on the slope between the mountain and the
+mainland, as soon as we sighted the Barrier, Crean let go one huge yell
+enough to frighten the ponies out of their graves of snow, and no more
+Beardmore for me after this. When we began to descend on to the Barrier
+it only required one of us to drag the sledge down to within a mile of
+the pony and sledge depôt, after exchanging our sledge as arranged,
+picking up a small amount of pony meat, and fitted up bamboo for mast so
+that we shall be able to fix up a sail when favourable, we proceeded on
+our way to cross the Barrier. We have now 360 miles to travel
+geographically to get to Hut Point. Mr. Evans complained to me while
+outside the tent that he had a stiffness at the back of his legs behind
+the knees. I asked him what he thought it was, and he said could not
+account for it, so if he dont soon get rid of it I am to have a look and
+see if anything is the matter with him, as I know from what I have seen
+and been told before the symptoms of scurvy is pains and swelling behind
+the knee round the ankle and loosening of the teeth, ulcerated gums.
+To-night I watched to see his gums, and I am convinced he is on the point
+of something anyhow, and this I have spoken to Crean about, but he dont
+seem to realise it. But I have asked him to wait developments for a time.
+It seems we are in for more trouble now, but lets hope for the best.
+
+    _23rd January 1912._
+
+We got away pretty well and did a good journey, having covered about 14
+miles over a fairly good surface. We have passed the Blizzard Camp and
+glad of it too, again to-day we saw in several places where the bridges
+on the crevasses had fallen through. A good job they none of them fell
+through when we were going over them as the width would have taken all
+through with them, and in every case where they had fallen through was
+where we had gone over, as the mark of the sledge was very distinct in
+each case. Mr. Evans seems better to-day.
+
+    _24th January 1912._
+
+Did a good run to-day over a good surface. The weather have been very
+warm, not much to write to-night as everything is going well.
+
+    _25th January 1912._
+
+Started off in very thick weather, the temperature is very high and the
+snow is wet and clogging all day on our ski, which made dragging heavy,
+and towards evening it got worse. After lunch we got a good breeze for an
+hour, when it changed to a blizzard and almost rained. We saw the depôt
+ahead sometimes, so we tried to reach it as we thought we might be in for
+another few days like we had near the land on our outward journey. Anyhow
+we reached it after a tremendous struggle owing to the wet and bad light.
+I took off my ski and carried them on my shoulder to finish up the last
+half a mile. The blizzard died down after we had camped and turned in for
+the night. Looked at the thermometer which showed 34.
+
+    _26th January 1912._
+
+This have been a most wonderful day for surface. This morning when we
+started the thermometer stood at 34, much too high for sledging. We were
+on ski or we might have been on stilts for the amount of snow clogging on
+our ski, dont know how we should have got on without our ski, as the snow
+was so very soft we sank right in when we tried to go on foot, but we
+were fortunate to get the wind behind us and able to make use of the
+sail. We made a very good day of it, did 13 miles: 8 of this after lunch.
+I did not feel well outside the tent this morning. I came over quite
+giddy and faint, but it passed off quickly and have felt no more of it
+all day.
+
+    _27th January 1912._
+
+We had a good run to-day with the sail up. It only required one of us to
+keep it straight, no need whatever to pull, but it was very hot, anyone
+could take off all their clothes and march. It is really too hot for this
+part of the world, but I daresay we shall soon get it a bit colder. Did
+14½ miles, it is nice to be able to see the tracks and cairns of our
+outward journey. We feel satisfied when we have done a good day and in
+good time. Mr. Evans is now suffering from looseness of the bowels. Crean
+had a touch of it a few days ago, but he is quite alright again.
+
+    _28th January 1912._
+
+To-day it have been a very heavy drag. The snow is still very soft and
+the sun very hot, it fairly scorches anyone's face. We are almost black
+now and our hair is long and getting white through being exposed to the
+light, it gets bleached. I am glad to say it is cooler to-night,
+generally. We got over 12½ miles again to-day. Mr. Evans is still very
+loose in his bowels. This, of course, hinders us, as we have had to stop
+several times. Only another few more Sundays and we hope to be safely
+housed at Hut Point, or Cape Evans. We have now been out 97 days.
+
+    _29th January 1912._
+
+Another good day was helped by the sail all day. One man could again
+manage for about two hours. The weather is still very warm, plus 20
+again. Did 16½ miles, only 14 to the next depôt. Mr. Evans is still
+suffering from the same complaint: have come to the conclusion to stop
+his pemmican, as I feel that it have got something to do with him being
+out of sorts. Anyhow we are going to try it. Gave him a little brandy and
+he is taking some chalk and opium pills to try and stop it. His legs are
+getting worse and we are quite certain he is suffering from scurvy, at
+least he is turning black and blue and several other colours as well.
+
+    _30th January 1912._
+
+Very bad light but fair wind, picked up the depôt this evening. Did the
+14 miles quite in good time, after taking our food we found a shortage of
+oil and have taken what we think will take us to the next depôt. There
+seems to have been some leakage in the one can, but how we could not
+account for that we have left a note telling Capt. Scott how we found it,
+but they will have sufficient to carry them on to the next depôt, but we
+all know the amount of oil allowed on the Journey is enough, but if any
+waste takes place it means extra precautions in the handling of it. Mr.
+Evans is still without pemmican and seems to have somewhat recovered from
+the looseness, but things are not by a long way with him as they should
+be. Only two more depôts now to pick up.
+
+    _31st January 1912._
+
+Another very good run to-day but the light being very bad we had to
+continually stop and steer by compass. This a difficult task, especially
+as there was no wind to help keep on the course, but it have cleared
+again to-night, the temperature is plus 20 in the day and 10 at night
+just now. Did 13 miles. Mr. Evans is allowed a little pemmican as the
+work is hard and it wants a little warm food to put life into anyone in
+this part of the world.
+
+
+    _1st February 1912._
+
+We had a very fine day but a very heavy pull, but we did 13 miles. Mr.
+Evans and myself have been out 100 days to-day. I have had to change my
+shirt again. This is the last clean side I have got. I have been wearing
+two shirts and each side will now have done duty next the skin, as I have
+changed round each month, and I have certainly found the benefit of it,
+and on the point we all three agree. Mr. Evans is still gradually worse:
+it is no good closing our eyes to the fact. We must push on as we have a
+long way to go yet.
+
+    _2nd February 1912._
+
+A very bad light again to-day: could not make much progress, only did 11
+miles, but we must think ourselves lucky we have not had to lay up and
+get delayed, but we have had the wind and more behind us, otherwise we
+should have had to stop. Mr. Evans is no better but seems to be in great
+pain, but he keeps quite cheerful we are pleased to say.
+
+    _3rd February 1912._
+
+This morning we were forced to put Mr. Evans on his ski and strap him on,
+as he could not lift his legs. I looked at them again and found they are
+rapidly getting worse, things are looking serious on his part, but we
+have been trying to pump him up he will get through alright, but he
+begins to think different himself, but if we get to One Ton and can get a
+change of food it may relieve him. He is a brick, there is plenty of
+pluck: one cannot but admire such pluck. The light have been dreadful all
+day and I seemed to have got a bit depressed at times, not being able to
+see anything to know where I was on the course or not and not getting a
+word from Mr. Evans. I deliberately went off the course to see if anyone
+was taking notice but to my surprise I was quickly told I was off the
+course. This I thought, but wanted to know if he was looking out, which
+he was. It came on to bliz after we camped, we ought to reach Mt. Hooper
+to-morrow night.
+
+    _4th February 1912._
+
+Started in splendid weather, but the surface was bad and dragging was
+very heavy, but it improved as the day went on, and we arrived at the
+depôt at 7.40 P.M. We are now 180 miles from Hut Point, and this Sunday
+night we hope to be only two more Sundays on the Barrier. No improvement
+in Mr. Evans, much worse. We have taken out our food and left nearly all
+the pemmican as we dont require it on account of none of us caring for
+it, therefore we are leaving it behind for the others. They may require
+it. We have left our note and wished them every success on their way, but
+we have decided it is best not to say anything about Mr. Evans being ill
+or suffering from scurvy. This old cairn have stood the weather and is
+still a huge thing.
+
+    _5th February 1912._
+
+Had a very fine day and a good light all day, which makes things much
+more cheerful. Did not get away before 9 o'clock but we did 11½ miles, it
+is gradually getting colder. Mr. Evans is still getting worse, to-day he
+is suffering from looseness in the bowels: shall have to stop his
+pemmican.
+
+    _6th February 1912._
+
+Another fine day but sun was very hot and caused us to sweat a good deal,
+but we dont mind as we are pretty used to such changes. We shall soon be
+looking for land ahead, which will be Mt. Discovery or Mt. Erebus, we
+have 155 miles to go to Hut Point: done alright again 13½ miles, we do
+wonderfully well especially as Mr. Evans have got to go very slowly first
+off after stopping until he gets the stiffness out of his legs, but he is
+suffering a good deal and in silence, he never complains, but he dont get
+much sleep. We shall all be glad when we arrive at One Ton, where there
+is a change of food for us all. The pemmican is too much, especially when
+the weather is warm.
+
+    _7th February 1912._
+
+A very fine day but heavy going. We are bringing the land in sight. The
+day have been simply lovely, did 12 miles. No better luck with our
+patient, he gets along without a murmur. We have got to help him in and
+out of the tent, but we have consulted on the matter and he is determined
+to go to the last, which we know is not far off, as it is difficult for
+him to stand, but he is the essence of a brick to keep it up, but we
+shall have to drag him on the sledge when he cant go any further.
+
+    _8th February 1912._
+
+To-day have been very favourable and fine, we had a good breeze and set
+sail after lunch. If we get a good day to-morrow we hope to reach One
+Ton. Mr. Evans have passed a good deal of blood to-day, which makes
+things look a lot worse. I have to do nearly everything for him now.
+
+    _9th February 1912._
+
+A very fine day and quite warm. Reached the depôt at 5.5 P.M. and we all
+had a good feed of oatmeal. Oh, what a God-send to get a change of food!
+We have taken enough food for 9 days, which if we still keep up our
+present rate of progress it ought to take us in to Hut Point. We cannot
+take too heavy a load, as there is only the two of us pulling now, and
+this our last port of call before we reach Hut Point, but things are not
+looking any too favourable for us, as our leader is gradually getting
+lower every day. It is almost impossible for him to get along, and we
+are still 120 miles from Hut Point.
+
+    _10th February 1912._
+
+We did a good march, in very thick weather. To-night we are camped and I
+am sorry to say Mr. Evans is in a very bad state. If this is scurvy I am
+sorry for anyone it attacks. We shall do our utmost to get him back
+alive, although he is so ill, he is very cheerful, which is very good and
+tries to do anything to help us along. We are thinking the food, now we
+have got a change, may improve things. I am very pleased to say Crean and
+myself are in the best of health, which we are thankful for.
+
+    _11th February 1912._
+
+To-day we built a cairn and left all our gear we could do without, as it
+is impossible for us to drag the load now, and Mr. Evans we think is
+doing well as long as he can keep on his legs. We have had a very bad
+light all day, and to-night we have a bliz on us, so we had to camp
+early. Our day's run has been 11 miles. We are now about 99 miles from
+our base.
+
+    _12th February 1912._
+
+We did not get away until 10 o'clock on account of bad weather, but after
+we put Mr. Evans on his ski he went on slowly. It is against our wish to
+have to send him on a little in advance, but it is best as we shall have
+to drag him out of this we are certain. He has fainted on two or three
+occasions, but after a drop of brandy he has been able to proceed, but it
+is very awkward, especially as the temperature is so low. We are afraid
+of his getting frost-bitten. Our progress is very slow, the light is very
+bad, and it is seldom we see the land.
+
+    _13th February 1912._
+
+We got away in good time, but progress was slow, and Mr. Evans could not
+go, and we consulted awhile and came to the conclusion it would be best
+to put him on the sledge, otherwise he may not pull through, so we
+stopped and camped, and decided to drop everything we can possibly do
+without, so we have only got our sleeping bags, cooker, and what little
+food and oil we have left. Our load is not much, but Mr. Evans on the
+sledge makes it pretty heavy work for us both, but he says he is
+comfortable now. This morning he wished us to leave him, but this we
+could not think of. We shall stand by him to the end one way or other, so
+we are the masters to-day. He has got to do as we wish and we hope to
+pull him through. This morning when we depôted all our gear I changed my
+socks and got my foot badly frostbitten, and the only way was to fetch it
+round. So although Mr. Evans was so bad he proposed to stuff it on his
+stomach to try and get it right again. I did not like to risk such a
+thing as he is certainly very weak, but we tried it, and it succeeded in
+bringing it round, thanks to his thoughtfulness, and I shall never forget
+the kindness bestowed on me at a critical time in our travels, but I
+think we could go to any length of trouble to assist one another; in such
+time and such a place we must trust in a higher power to pull us through.
+When we pack up now and have to move off we have to get everything ready
+before we attempt to move the tent, as it is impossible for our leader
+now to stand, therefore it is necessary to get him ready before we start.
+We then pull the sledge alongside his bag and lift him on to it and strap
+him on. It is a painful piece of work and he takes it pretty well, but we
+can't help hurting him, as it is very awkward to lift him, the snow being
+soft and the light so bad, but he dont complain. The only thing we hear
+him grind his teeth.
+
+    _14th February 1912._
+
+Another good start after the usual preparation, we have not got much to
+pack, but it takes us some time, to get our invalid ready, the surface is
+very bad and our progress is very slow, but we have proposed to go longer
+hours and try to cover the distance, that is if we can stick it
+ourselves.
+
+    _15th February 1912._
+
+We started in fine weather this morning, but it soon came over thick and
+progress became slow. We had to continually consult the compass, as we
+have had no wind to assist us, but after awhile the sun peeped out and
+the wind sprang up and we were able to set sail, which helped us put in
+a good march.
+
+    _16th February 1912._
+
+To-day it have been a very heavy drag all day, and the light is very bad,
+but we had the pleasure of seeing Castle Rock and Observation Hill. We
+uncovered Mr. Evans to let him have a look and we have reduced our ration
+now to one half as it is impossible for us to reach Hut Point under four
+days, that is if everything goes favourable with us.
+
+    _17th February 1912._
+
+To-day it has been thick, this morning soon after we started we saw what
+we thought was the dog tent [the two dog-teams going out to meet the
+Polar Party], a thing we had been looking for to try and get relief, but
+when we came up to it we found it was only a piece of biscuit box stuck
+on an old camp for a guide. It shows how deceiving the things here are. I
+can tell you our hopes were raised, but on reaching it they dropped again
+considerably. We were able to see the land occasionally, and during one
+of the breaks this afternoon we spotted the motor. Oh, what joy! We again
+uncovered Mr. Evans to let him have a look and after trudging along for
+another three hours we brought up alongside it and camped for the night.
+We are now only a little over 30 miles from Hut Point: if we could only
+see the dogs approaching us, but they, we think, may have passed us while
+the weather have been thick. Mr. Evans is getting worse every day, we are
+almost afraid to sleep at night as he seems very weak. If the temperature
+goes much lower it will be a job to keep him warm. We have found some
+biscuits here at the motor but nothing else, but that will assist greatly
+on our way. The slogging have been heavy all day. We are pretty tired
+to-night. I dont think we have got the go in us we had, but we must try
+and push on.
+
+    _18th February 1912._
+
+I started to move Mr. Evans this morning, but he completely collapsed and
+fainted away. Crean was very upset and almost cried, but I told him it
+was no good to create a scene but put up a bold front and try to assist.
+I really think he thought Mr. Evans had gone, but we managed to pull him
+through. We used the last drop of brandy. After awhile we got him on the
+sledge and proceeded as usual, but finding the surface very bad and we
+were unable to make less than a mile an hour, we stopped and decided to
+camp. We told Mr. Evans of our plans, which were: Crean should proceed,
+it being a splendid day, on foot to Hut Point to obtain relief if
+possible. This we had agreed to between ourselves. I offered to do the
+Journey and Crean remain behind, but Tom said he would much rather I
+stayed with the invalid and look after him, so I thought it best I should
+remain, and these plans were agreed to by all of us, so after we had
+camped the next thing was the food problem. We had about a day's
+provisions with extra biscuit taken from the motor, and a little extra
+oil taken from the same place, so we gave Crean what he thought he could
+manage to accomplish the Journey of 30 miles geographical on, which was a
+little chocolate and biscuits. We put him up a little drink, but he would
+not carry it. What a pity we did not have some ski, but we dumped them to
+save weight. So Crean sailed away in splendid weather for a try to bring
+relief. I was in a bit of a sweat all day and remained up to watch the
+weather till long after midnight. I was afraid of the weather, but it
+kept clear and I thought he might have reached or got within easy
+distance of Hut Point; but there was the possibility of his dropping down
+a crevasse, but that we had to leave to chance, but none the more it was
+anxious moments as if it comes on to drift the weather is very
+treacherous in these parts. After Crean left I left Mr. Evans and
+proceeded to Corner Camp which was about a mile away, to see if there was
+any provisions left there that would be of use to us. I found a little
+butter, a little cheese, and a little treacle that had been brought there
+for the ponies. I also went back to the motor and got a little more oil
+while the weather was fine. I also got a large piece of burbery and tied
+on a long bamboo and stuck up a big flag on our sledge so that anyone
+could not pass our way without seeing us or our flag. I found a note left
+at Corner Camp by Mr. Day saying there was a lot of very bad crevasses
+between there and the sea ice, especially off White Island. This put me
+in a bit of a fix, as I, of course, at once thought of Crean. He being on
+foot was more likely to go down than he would had he been on ski. I did
+not tell Mr. Evans anything about the crevasses, as I certainly thought
+it would be best kept from him. I just told him the note was there and
+all was well.
+
+    _19th February 1912._
+
+To-day Mr. Evans seems a bit better and more cheerful, the rest will do
+him good and assist in getting a little strength. We have been wondering
+when relief will reach us, but we cannot expect it for at least a day or
+two yet at the earliest. It was very thick this morning and also very
+cold. The temperature is dropping rapidly. Our tent was all covered in
+frost rime to-day, a sure sign of colder weather. It was very thick this
+morning but cleared as the day advanced, but we could not see Hut Point.
+I wonder if poor old Tom reached alright. We have very little food now
+except biscuit, but oil is better. We have got ½ gallon and if relief
+dont come for some time we shall be able to have hot water when all other
+things are gone. I have thought out a plan for the future, in case of no
+relief coming, but of course we took all things into consideration in
+case of failure, but we must hope for the best. Of course I know it is no
+use thinking of Mr. Evans being able to move any further as he cant stand
+at all, the only thing is, we may have missed the dogs, if so there is
+still a chance of someone being at Hut Point. I am cold now and cannot
+write more to-night. We lose the sun at midnight now. If all had went
+well we should have been home by now.
+
+    _20th February 1912._
+
+Tuesday not a nice day. A low drift all the morning and increased to a
+blizzard at times. Have had to remain in the tent all day to try and keep
+warm. Have not got much food except biscuits. Mr. Evans is about the same
+but quite cheerful. We have had whole journey over and over: it have
+passed these three days away. We have wondered how they are getting on
+behind us; we have worked it out and they ought to be on the Barrier now,
+with anything of luck. We have been gambling on the condition of the ice
+and the possibility of the open water at Hut Point at any time now, and
+also about what news of home, although home is one of the foremost
+thoughts we hardly ever mention it, only what we are going to have to eat
+when we do arrive there. I think we have got everything that is good down
+on our list. Of course New Zealand have got to be answerable for a good
+deal: plenty of apples we are going to have and some nice home-made cake,
+not too rich, as we think we can eat more. I wonder if the mules will
+have arrived, as I am to look after them till Capt. Oates returns, as
+Anton will be gone home, or at least going soon. We shall have to hurry
+up as the ship is to leave again on the 2nd of March, as it is not safe
+to remain longer in these regions. I am now too cold to write, and I dont
+seem settled at all and the weather is still pretty bad outside, so we
+are not going to look for anything to come along to-night. "Hark!" from
+us both. "Yes, it is the dogs near. Relief at last. Who is there?" I did
+not stay to think more before I was outside the tent. "Yes, sir, it is
+alright." The Doctor and Dimitri. "How did you see us?" "The flag Lash,"
+says Dimitri. The Doctor, "How is Mr. Evans?" "Alright, but low." But
+this had a good effect on him. After the first few minutes we got their
+tent pitched and the food they brought us I was soon on the way preparing
+a meal for us all, but Mr. Evans cannot have pemmican, but the Doctor
+have brought everything that will do him good, some onions to boil and
+several other things. Dimitri brought along a good lump of cake: we are
+in clover. To-night after the Doctor had examined my patient and we got
+through a good deal of talk about everything we could think of,
+especially home news and the return parties and the ship and those in
+her. We were sorry to hear she had not been able to get very near, and
+that the mules had arrived, and I dont know what, we now settled down for
+a good night. It seems to me we are in a new world, a weight is off my
+mind and I can once more see a bright spot in the sky for us all, the
+gloom is now removed. The bliz is bad outside, and Doctor and Dimitri is
+gone and turned in, so will [I] once more, but sleep is out of the
+question.
+
+    _21st February 1912._
+
+The day have been very bad and we are obliged to remain until it clears.
+We are going to move off as soon as it clears, the day have been very
+cold, so we have had to remain in our bags, but things are alright and we
+have got plenty to eat now. We have all retired for the night as the bliz
+is still raging outside.
+
+    _22nd February 1912._
+
+The wind went down about 9 P.M., so we began to move and were ready to
+kick off at 10, and proposed to do the journey in two stages. It was
+fearful heavy going for the poor dogs, we arranged so that Mr. Evans was
+on Dimitri's sledge and Doctor and myself was on the other. We have done
+about half the journey and are now camped for a rest for the dogs and
+ourselves. We had a stiff 16 miles: the Doctor and myself, we took turns
+in riding on the sledge and walking and running to keep up to the dogs.
+Sometimes we sank in up to the knees, but we struggled through it. My
+legs is the most powerful part of me now, but I am tired and shall be
+glad when it is over. I must lie down now, as we are starting again soon
+for Hut Point, but the surface is getting better as we have passed White
+Island and can see so plainly the land. Castle Rock and good old Erebus
+look so stately with the smoke rolling out. It is so clear and calm and
+peaceful. What a change in our surroundings of a few days ago and also
+our prospects. Doctor and Dimitri have done everything they could for us.
+
+    _22nd February 1912._
+
+We started off after a rest for the dogs and reached here at Hut Point at
+1 P.M. where we can rest in peace for a time. Dimitri and Crean are going
+to Cape Evans: the ship is nowhere in sight. Have had to get some seal
+meat and ice and prepare a meal. Mr. Evans is alright and asleep. We are
+looking for a mail now. How funny we should always be looking for
+something else, now we are safe.
+
+[End of Lashly's Diary.]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Crean has told me the story of his walk as follows:
+
+He started at 10 on Sunday morning and "the surface was good, very good
+surface indeed," and he went about sixteen miles before he stopped. Good
+clear weather. He had three biscuits and two sticks of chocolate. He
+stopped about five minutes, sitting on the snow, and ate two biscuits and
+the chocolate, and put one biscuit back in his pocket. He was quite warm
+and not sleepy.
+
+He carried on just the same and passed Safety Camp on his right some five
+hours later, and thinks it was about twelve-thirty on Monday morning that
+he reached the edge of the Barrier, tired, getting cold in the back and
+the weather coming on thick. It was bright behind him but it was coming
+over the Bluff, and White Island was obscured though he could still see
+Cape Armitage and Castle Rock. He slipped a lot on the sea-ice, having
+several falls on to his back and it was getting thicker all the time. At
+the Barrier edge there was a light wind, now it was blowing a strong
+wind, drifting and snowing. He made for the Gap and could not get up at
+first. To avoid taking a lot out of himself he started to go round Cape
+Armitage; but soon felt slush coming through his finnesko (he had no
+crampons) and made back for the Gap. He climbed up to the left of the Gap
+and climbed along the side of Observation Hill to avoid the slippery ice.
+When he got to the top it was still clear enough to see vaguely the
+outline of Hut Point, but he could see no sledges nor dogs. He sat down
+under the lee of Observation Hill, and finished his biscuit with a bit of
+ice: "I was very dry,"--slid down the side of Observation Hill and
+thought at this time there was open water below, for he had no goggles on
+the march and his eyes were strained. But on getting near the ice-foot he
+found it was polished sea-ice and made his way round to the hut under the
+ice-foot. When he got close he saw the dogs and sledges on the sea-ice,
+and it was now blowing very hard with drift. He walked in and found the
+Doctor and Dimitri inside. "He gave me a tot first, and then a feed of
+porridge--but I couldn't keep it down: thats the first time in my life
+that ever it happened, and it was the brandy that did it."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [253] See pp. 382, 383, 410, 412.
+
+   [254] My own diary, December 22, 1911.
+
+   [255] My own diary.
+
+   [256] My own diary.
+
+   [257] See p. 412.
+
+   [258] See p. 335.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+SUSPENSE
+
+      All the past we leave behind;
+    We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world;
+    Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labour and the march,
+      Pioneers! O pioneers!
+
+      We detachments steady throwing,
+    Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,
+    Conquering, holding, daring, venturing, as we go, the unknown ways,
+      Pioneers! O pioneers!
+
+    WALT WHITMAN.
+
+
+Let us come back to Cape Evans after the return of the First Supporting
+Party.
+
+Hitherto our ways had always been happy: for the most part they had been
+pleasant. Scott was going to reach the Pole, probably without great
+difficulty, for when we left him on the edge of the plateau he had only
+to average seven miles a day to go there on full rations. We ourselves
+had averaged 14.2 geographical miles a day on our way home to One Ton
+Depôt, and there seemed no reason to suppose that the other two parties
+would not do likewise, and the food was not only sufficient but abundant
+if such marches were made. Thus we were content as we wandered over the
+cape, or sat upon some rock warmed by the sun and watched the penguins
+bathing in the lake which had formed in the sea-ice between us and
+Inaccessible Island. All round us were the cries of the skua gulls as
+they squabbled among themselves, and we heard the swish of their wings as
+they swooped down upon a man who wandered too near their nests. Out upon
+the sea-ice, which was soggy and dangerous, lay several seal, and the
+bubblings and whistlings and gurglings which came from their throats
+chimed musically in contrast to the hoarse aak, aak, of the Adélie
+penguins: the tide crack was sighing and groaning all the time: it was
+very restful after the Barrier silence.
+
+Meanwhile the Terra Nova had been seen in the distance, but the state of
+the sea-ice prevented her approach. It was not until February 4 that
+communication was opened with her and we got our welcome mails and news
+of the world during the last year. We heard that Campbell's party had
+been picked up at Cape Adare and landed at Evans Coves. We started
+unloading on February 9, and this work was continued until February 14:
+there was about three miles of ice between the ship and the shore and we
+were doing more than twenty miles a day. In the case of men who had been
+sledging much, and who might be wanted to sledge again, this was a
+mistake. Latterly the ice began to break up, and the ship left on the
+15th, to pick up the Geological Party on the western side of McMurdo
+Sound. But she met great obstacles, and her record near the coasts this
+year is one of continual fights against pack-ice, while the winds
+experienced as the season advanced were very strong. On January 13 the
+fast ice at the mouth of McMurdo Sound extended as far as the southern
+end of the Bird Peninsula: ten days later they found fast ice extending
+for thirty miles from the head of Granite Harbour. Later in the season
+the most determined efforts were made again and again to penetrate into
+Evans Coves in order to pick up Campbell and his men, until the ice was
+freezing all round them, and many times the propeller was brought up dead
+against blocks of ice.[259]
+
+The expedition was originally formed for two years from the date of
+leaving England. But before the ship left after landing us at Cape Evans
+in January 1911 the possibility of a third year was considered, and
+certain requests for additional transport and orders for stores were sent
+home. Thus it came about that the ship now landed not only new sledges
+and sledging stores but also fourteen dogs from Kamchatka and seven
+mules, with their food and equipment. The dogs were big and fat, but the
+only ones which proved of much service for sledging were Snowy, a nice
+white dog, and Bullett. It was Oates' idea that mules might prove a
+better form of transport on the Barrier than ponies. Scott therefore
+wrote to Sir Douglas Haig, then C.-in-C. in India, that if he failed to
+reach the Pole in the summer of 1911-12, "it is my intention to make a
+second attempt in the following season provided fresh transport can be
+brought down: the circumstances making it necessary to plan to sacrifice
+the transport animals used in any attempt.
+
+"Before directing more ponies to be sent down I have thoroughly discussed
+the situation with Captain Oates, and he has suggested that mules would
+be better than ponies for our work and that trained Indian Transport
+Mules would be ideal. It is evident already that our ponies have not a
+uniform walking pace and that in other small ways they will be
+troublesome to us although they are handy little beasts."
+
+The Indian Government not only sent seven mules but when they arrived we
+found that they had been most carefully trained and equipped. In India
+they were in the charge of Lieutenant George Pulleyn, and the care and
+thought which had been spent upon them could not have been exceeded: the
+equipment was also extremely good and well adapted to the conditions,
+while most of the improvements made by us as the result of a year's
+experience were already foreseen and provided. The mules themselves, by
+name Lal Khan, Gulab, Begum, Ranee, Abdullah, Pyaree and Khan Sahib, were
+beautiful animals.
+
+Atkinson would soon have to start on his travels again. Before we left
+Scott at the top of the Beardmore he gave him orders to take the two
+dog-teams South in the event of Meares having to return home, as seemed
+likely. This was not meant in any way to be a relief journey. Scott said
+that he was not relying upon the dogs; and that in view of the sledging
+in the following year, the dogs were not to be risked. Although it was
+settled that some members of the expedition would stay, while others
+returned to New Zealand, Scott and several of his companions had left
+undecided until the last moment the question of whether they would
+themselves remain in the South for another year. In the event of Scott
+deciding to return home the dog-teams might make the difference between
+catching or missing the ship. I had discussed this question with Wilson
+more than once, and he was of opinion that the business affairs of the
+expedition demanded Scott's return if possible: Wilson himself inclined
+to the view that he himself would stay if Scott stayed, and return if
+Scott returned. I think that Oates meant to return, and am sure that
+Bowers meant to stay: indeed he welcomed the idea of one more year in a
+way which I do not think was equalled by any other member of the
+expedition. For the most part we felt that we had joined up for two
+years, but that if there was to be a third year we would rather see the
+thing through than return home.
+
+I hope I have made clear that the primary object of this journey with the
+dog-teams was to hurry Scott and his companions home so that they might
+be in time to catch the ship if possible, before she was compelled by the
+close of the season to leave McMurdo Sound. Another thing which made
+Scott anxious to communicate with the ship if possible before the season
+forced her to leave the Sound was his desire to send back news. From many
+remarks which he made, and also from the discussions in the hut during
+the winter, it was obvious that he considered it was of the first
+importance that the news of reaching the Pole, if it should be reached,
+be communicated to the world without the delay of another year. Of course
+he would also wish to send news of the safe return of his party to wives
+and relations as soon as possible. It is necessary to emphasize the fact
+that the dog-teams were intended to hasten the return of the Polar Party,
+but that they were never meant to form a relief journey.
+
+But now Atkinson was left in a rather difficult position. I note in my
+diary, after we had reached the hut, that "Scott was to have sent back
+instructions for the dog party with us, but these have, it would seem,
+been forgotten"; but it may be that Scott considered that he had given
+these instructions in a conversation he had with Atkinson at the top of
+the Beardmore Glacier, when Scott said, "with the depôt [of dog-food]
+which has been laid come as far as you can."
+
+According to the plans for the Polar Journey the food necessary to bring
+the three advance parties of man-haulers back from One Ton Depôt to Hut
+Point was to be taken out to One Ton during the absence of these parties.
+This food consisted of five weekly units of what were known as XS
+rations. It was also arranged that if possible a depôt of dog-biscuit
+should be taken out at the same time: this was the depôt referred to
+above by Scott. In the event of the return of the dog-teams in the first
+half of December, which was the original plan, the five units of food and
+the dog-biscuit would have been run out by them to One Ton. If the
+dog-teams did not return in time to do this a man-hauling party from Cape
+Evans was to take out three of the five units of food.
+
+It has been shown that the dog-teams were taken farther on the Polar
+Journey than was originally intended,[260] indeed they were taken from
+81° 15´, where they were to have turned back, as far as 83° 35´. Nor were
+they able to make the return journey in the fast time which had been
+expected of them, and the dog-drivers were running very short of food and
+were compelled to encroach to some extent upon the supplies left to
+provide for the wants of those who were following in their tracks.[261]
+The dog-teams did not arrive back at Cape Evans until January 4.
+
+Meanwhile a man-hauling party from Cape Evans, consisting of Day, Nelson,
+Clissold and Hooper, had already, according to plan, taken out three of
+the five XS rations for the returning parties. The weights of the
+man-hauling party did not allow for the transport of the remaining two XS
+rations, nor for any of the dog-food. Thus it was that when Atkinson came
+to make his plans to go South with the dogs he found that there was no
+dog-food south of Corner Camp, and that the rations for the return of the
+Polar Party from One Ton Depôt had still to be taken out. That is to say,
+the depôt of dog-food spoken of by Scott did not exist. There was,
+however, enough food already at One Ton to allow the Polar Party to come
+in on reduced rations. This meant that what the dog-teams could do was
+limited, and was much less than it might have been had it been possible
+to take out the depôt of dog-food to One Ton. Also the man-food for the
+Polar Party had to be added to the weights taken by the dogs.
+
+To estimate even approximately at what date a party will reach a given
+point after a journey of this length when the weather conditions are
+always uncertain and the number of travelling days unknown, was a most
+difficult task. The only guide was the average marches per diem made by
+our own return party, and the average of the second return party if it
+should return before the dog party set out. A week one way or the other
+was certainly not a large margin. A couple of blizzards might make this
+much difference.
+
+In the plan of the Southern Journey Scott, working on Shackleton's
+averages, mentions March 27 as a possible date of return to Hut Point,
+allowing seven days in from One Ton. Whilst on the outward journey I
+heard Scott discuss the possibility of returning in April; and the Polar
+Party had enough food to allow them to do this on full rations.
+
+Atkinson and Dimitri with the two dog-teams left Cape Evans for Hut Point
+on February 13 because the sea-ice, which was our only means of
+communication between these places, and so to the Barrier, was beginning
+to break up. Atkinson intended to leave Hut Point for the Barrier in
+about a week's time. At 3.30 A.M. on February 19 Crean arrived with the
+astounding news that Lieutenant Evans, still alive but at his last gasp,
+was lying out near Corner Camp, and that Lashly was nursing him; that the
+Last Supporting Party had consisted of three men only, a possibility
+which had never been considered; and that they had left Scott,
+travelling rapidly and making good averages, only 148 geographical miles
+from the Pole. Scott was so well advanced that it seemed that he would be
+home much earlier than had been anticipated.
+
+A blizzard which had been threatening on the Barrier, and actually
+blowing at Hut Point, during Crean's solitary journey, but which had
+lulled as he arrived, now broke with full force, and nothing could be
+done for Evans until it took off sufficiently for the dog-teams to
+travel. But in the meantime Crean urgently wanted food and rest and
+warmth. As these were supplied to him Atkinson learned bit by bit the
+story of the saving of Evans' life, told so graphically in Lashly's diary
+which is given in the preceding chapter, and pieced together the details
+of Crean's solitary walk of thirty-five statute miles. This effort was
+made, it should be remembered, at the end of a journey of three and a
+half months, and over ground rendered especially perilous by crevasses,
+from which a man travelling alone had no chance of rescue in case of
+accident. Crean was walking for eighteen hours, and it was lucky for him,
+as also for his companions, that the blizzard which broke half an hour
+after his arrival did not come a little sooner, for no power on earth
+could have saved him then, and the news of Evans' plight would not have
+been brought.
+
+The blizzard raged all that day, and the next night and morning, and
+nothing could be done. But during the afternoon of the 20th the
+conditions improved, and at 4.30 P.M. Atkinson and Dimitri started with
+the two dog-teams, though it was still blowing hard and very thick. They
+travelled, with one rest for the dogs, until 4.30 P.M. the next day, but
+had a very hazy idea where they were most of the time, owing to the vile
+weather: once at any rate they seem to have got right in under White
+Island. When they camped the second time they thought they were in the
+neighbourhood of Lashly's tent, and in a temporary clearance they saw the
+flag which Lashly had put up on the sledge. Evans was still alive, and
+Atkinson was able to give him immediately the fresh vegetables, fruit,
+and seal meat which his body wanted. Atkinson has never been able to
+express adequately the admiration he feels for Lashly's care and
+nursing.
+
+All that night and the next day the blizzard continued and made a start
+impossible, and it was not until 3 A.M. on the morning of the 22nd that
+they could start for Hut Point, Evans being carried in his sleeping-bag
+on the sledge. Lashly has told how they got home.
+
+At Cape Evans we knew nothing of these events, which had made
+reorganization inevitable. It was clear that Atkinson, being the only
+doctor available, would have to stay with Evans, who was very seriously
+ill: indeed Atkinson told me that another day, or at the most two, would
+have finished him. In fact he says that when he first saw him he thought
+he must die. It was a considerable surprise then when Dimitri with Crean
+and one dog-team reached Cape Evans about mid-day on February 23 with a
+note from Atkinson, who said that he thought he had better stay with
+Lieutenant Evans and that some one else should take out the dogs. He
+suggested that Wright or myself should take them. This was our first
+intimation that the dogs had not already gone South.
+
+Wright and I started for Hut Point by 2 P.M. the same day and on our
+arrival it was decided by Atkinson that I was to take out the dogs. Owing
+to the early departure of our meteorologist, Simpson, Wright, who had
+special qualifications for this important work, was to remain at Cape
+Evans. Dimitri having rested his dog-team overnight at Cape Evans arrived
+at Hut Point on the morning of the 24th.
+
+Now the daily distance which every 4-man party had to average from Hut
+Point to its turning-point and back to Hut Point, so as to be on full
+rations all the way, was only 8.4 geographical miles. From Hut Point to
+the latitude in which he was last seen, 87° 32´ S., Scott had averaged
+more than ten geographical miles a day.
+
+Taking into consideration the advanced latitude, 87° 32´ S., at which the
+Second Return Party had left Scott, and the extremely good daily averages
+these two parties had marched on the plateau up to this point, namely
+12.3 geographical miles a day; seeing also that the First Return Party
+had averaged 14.2 geographical miles on their return from 85° 3´ S. to
+One Ton Depôt; and the Second Return Party had averaged 11.2 geographical
+miles on their return from 87° 32´ S. to the same place, although one of
+the three men was seriously ill; it was supposed that all the previous
+estimates made for the return of the Polar Party were too late, and that
+the opportunity to reach One Ton Camp before them had been lost.
+Meanwhile the full rations for their return over the 140 miles (statute)
+from One Ton to Hut Point were still at Hut Point.
+
+My orders were given me by Atkinson, and were verbal, as follows:
+
+    1. To take 24 days' food for the two men, and 21
+    days' food for the two dog-teams, together with the food
+    for the Polar Party.
+
+    2. To travel to One Ton Depôt as fast as possible and
+    leave the food there.
+
+    3. If Scott had not arrived at One Ton Depôt before
+    me I was to judge what to do.
+
+    4. That Scott was not in any way dependent on the
+    dogs for his return.
+
+    5. That Scott had given particular instructions that the
+    dogs were not to be risked in view of the sledging plans
+    for next season.
+
+Since it had proved impossible to take the depôt of dog-food, together
+with the full Polar Party rations, to One Ton before this; considering
+the unforeseen circumstances which had arisen; and seeing that this
+journey of the dog-teams was not indispensable, being simply meant to
+bring the last party home more speedily, I do not believe that better
+instructions could have been given than these of Atkinson.
+
+I was eager to start as soon as the team which had come back from Cape
+Evans was rested, but a blizzard prevented this. On the morning of the
+25th it was thick as a hedge, but it cleared enough to pack sledges in
+the afternoon, and when we turned into our bags we could see Observation
+Hill. We started at 2 A.M. that night.
+
+I confess I had my misgivings. I had never driven one dog, let alone a
+team of them; I knew nothing of navigation; and One Ton was a hundred and
+thirty miles away, out in the middle of the Barrier and away from
+landmarks. And so as we pushed our way out through the wind and drift
+that night I felt there was a good deal to be hoped for, rather than to
+be expected. But we got along very well, Dimitri driving his team in
+front, as he did most of this journey, and picking up marks very
+helpfully with his sharp eyes. In the low temperatures we met, the
+glasses which I must wear are almost impossible, because of fogging. We
+took three boxes of dog-biscuit from Safety Camp and another three boxes
+from a point sixteen miles from Hut Point. Here we rested the dogs for a
+few hours, and started again at 6 P.M. All day the light was appalling,
+and the wind strong, but to my great relief we found Corner Camp after
+four hours' more travelling, the flag showing plainly, though the cairn
+itself was invisible when a hundred yards away. This was the last place
+where there was any dog-food on the route, and the dogs got a good feed
+after doing thirty-four miles (statute) for the day's run. This was more
+than we had hoped: the only disquieting fact was that both the
+sledge-meters which we had were working wrong: the better of the two
+seemed however to be marking the total mileage fairly correctly at
+present, though the hands which indicated more detailed information were
+quite at sea. We had no minimum thermometer, but the present temperature
+was -4°.
+
+"_February 27._ Mount Terror has proved our friend to-day, for the slope
+just above the Knoll has remained clear when everything else was covered,
+and we have steered by that--behind us. It seemed, when we started in low
+drift, that we should pick up nothing, but by good luck, or good I don't
+know what, we have got everything: first the motor, then pony walls at 10
+miles, where we stopped and had a cup of tea. I wanted to do 15 miles,
+but we have done 18½ miles on the best running surface I have ever seen.
+After lunch we got a cairn which we could not see twenty yards away after
+we had reached it, but which we could see for a long way on the southern
+horizon, against a thin strip of blue sky. We camped just in time to get
+the tent pitched before a line of drift we saw coming out of the sky hit
+us. It is now blowing a mild blizzard and drifting. Forty-eight miles in
+two days is more than I expected: may our luck continue. Dogs pulling
+very fit and not done up.
+
+"_February 28._ I had my first upset just after starting, the sledge
+capsizing on a great sastrugus like the Ramp. Dimitri was a long way
+ahead and all behind was very thick. I had to unload the sledge for I
+could not right it alone. Just as I righted it the team took charge. I
+missed the driving-stick but got on to the sledge with no hope of
+stopping them, and I was carried a mile to the south, leaving four boxes
+of dog-food, the weekly bag, cooker, and tent poles on the ground. The
+team stopped when they reached Dimitri's team, and by then the gear was
+out of sight. We went back for it, and made good 16¾ miles for the day on
+a splendid surface. The sun went down at 11.15 (10.15 A.T.), miraged
+quite flat on top. After he had gone down a great bonfire seemed to blaze
+out from the horizon. Now -22° and we use a candle for the first time.
+
+"_February 29. Bluff Depôt._ If anybody had told me we could reach Bluff
+Depôt, nearly ninety miles, in four days, I would not have believed it.
+We have had a good clear day with much mirage. Dogs a bit tired."[262]
+
+The next three days' run took us to One Ton. On the day we left Bluff
+Depôt, which had been made a little more than a year ago, when certain of
+the ponies were sent home on the Depôt Journey,[263] but which no longer
+contained any provisions, we travelled 12 miles; there was a good light
+and it was as warm as could be expected in March. The next day (March 2)
+we did 9 miles after a cold and sleepless night, -24° and a mild blizzard
+from N.W. and quite thick. On the night of March 3 we reached One Ton,
+heading into a strongish wind with a temperature of -24°. These were the
+first two days on which we had cold weather, but it was nothing to worry
+about for us, and was certainly not colder than one could ordinarily have
+expected at this time of year.
+
+Arrived at One Ton my first feeling was one of relief that the Polar
+Party had not been to the Depôt and that therefore we had got their
+provisions out in time. The question of what we were to do in the
+immediate future was settled for us; for four days out of the six during
+which we were at One Ton the weather made travelling southwards, that is
+against the wind, either entirely impossible or such that the chance of
+seeing another party at any distance was nil. On the two remaining days I
+could have run a day farther South and back again, with the possibility
+of missing the party on the way. I decided to remain at the Depôt where
+we were certain to meet.
+
+On the day after we arrived at One Ton (March 4) Dimitri came to me and
+said that the dogs ought to be given more food, since they were getting
+done and were losing their coats: they had, of course, done a great deal
+of sledging already this year. Dimitri had long experience of dog-driving
+and I had none. I thought and I still think he was right. I increased the
+dog ration therefore, and this left us with thirteen more days' dog-food,
+including that for March 4.
+
+The weather was bad when we were at One Ton, for when it was blowing the
+temperature often remained comparatively low, and when it was not blowing
+it dropped considerably, and I find readings in my diary of -34° and -37°
+at 8 P.M. Having no minimum thermometer we did not know the night
+temperatures. On the other hand I find an entry: "To-day is the first
+real good one we have had, only about -10° and the sun shining,--and we
+have shifted the tent, dried our bags and gear a lot, and been pottering
+about all day." At this time, however, when we were at One Ton I looked
+upon these conditions as being a temporary cold snap: there was no reason
+then to suppose these were normal March conditions in the middle of the
+Barrier, where no one had ever been at this time of year. I believe now
+they are normal: on the other hand, in our meteorological report Simpson
+argues that they were abnormal for the Barrier at this time of year.[264]
+
+Since there was no depôt of dog-food at One Ton it was not possible to go
+farther South (except for the one day mentioned above) without killing
+dogs. My orders on this point were perfectly explicit; I saw no reason
+for disobeying them, and indeed it appeared that we had been wrong to
+hurry out so soon, before the time that Scott had reckoned that he would
+return, and that the Polar Party would really come in at the time Scott
+had calculated before starting rather than at the time we had reckoned
+from the data brought back by the Last Return Party.
+
+From the particulars already given it will be seen that I had no reason
+to suspect that the Polar Party could be in want of food. The Polar Party
+of five men had according to our rations plenty of food either on their
+sledge or in the depôts. In addition they had a lot of pony meat depôted
+at Middle Glacier Depôt and onwards from there. Though we did not know
+it, the death of Evans at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier provided an
+additional amount of food for the four men who were then left. The full
+amount of oil for this food had been left in the depôts; but we know now
+what we did not know then, that some of it had evaporated. These matters
+are discussed in greater detail in the account of the return of the Polar
+Party and after.[265]
+
+Thus I felt little anxiety for the Polar Party. But I was getting anxious
+about my companion. Soon after arrival at One Ton it was clear that
+Dimitri was feeling the cold. He complained of his head; then his right
+arm and side were affected; and from this time onwards he found that he
+could do less and less with his right side. Still I did not worry much
+about it, and my decision as to our movements was not affected by this
+complication. I decided to allow eight days' food for our return, which
+meant that we must start on March 10.
+
+"_March 10._ Pretty cold night: -33° when we turned out at 8 A.M.
+Getting our gear together, and the dogs more or less into order after
+their six days was cold work, and we started in minus thirties and a head
+wind. The dogs were mad,--stark, staring lunatics. Dimitri's team wrecked
+my sledge-meter, and I left it lying on the ground a mile from One Ton.
+All we could do was to hang on to the sledge and let them go: there
+wasn't a chance to go back, turn them or steer them. Dimitri broke his
+driving-stick: my team fought as they went: once I was dragged with my
+foot pinned under my driving-stick, which was itself jammed in the
+grummet: several times I only managed to catch on anywhere: this went on
+for six or seven miles, and then they got better."[266]
+
+Our remaining sledge-meter was quite unreliable, but following our
+outward tracks (for it became thick and overcast), and judging by our old
+camping sites, we reckoned that we had done an excellent run of 23 to 24
+miles (statute) for the day. The temperature when we camped was only
+-14°. However it became much colder in the night, and when we turned out
+it was so thick that I decided we must wait. At 2 P.M. on March 11 there
+was one small patch of blue sky showing, and we started to steer by this:
+soon it was blowing a mild blizzard, and we stopped after doing what I
+reckoned was eight miles, steering by trying to keep the wind on my ear:
+but I think we were turning circles much of the time. It blew hard and
+was very cold during the night, and we turned out on the morning of March
+12 to a blizzard with a temperature of -33°: this gradually took off, and
+at 10 A.M. Dimitri said he could see the Bluff, and we were right into
+the land, and therefore the pressure. This was startling, but later it
+cleared enough to reassure me, though Dimitri was so certain that during
+the first part of our run that day I steered east a lot. We did 25 to 30
+miles this day in drift and a temperature of -28°.
+
+By now I was becoming really alarmed and anxious about Dimitri, who
+seemed to be getting much worse, and to be able to do less and less.
+Sitting on a sledge the next day with a head wind and the temperature
+-30° was cold. The land was clear when we turned out and I could see that
+we must be far outside our course, but almost immediately it became
+foggy. We made in towards the land a good deal, and made a good run, but
+owing to the sledge-meter being useless and the bad weather generally
+during the last few days, I had a very hazy idea indeed where we were
+when we camped, having been steering for some time by the faint gleam of
+the sun through the mist. Just after camping Dimitri suddenly pointed to
+a black spot which seemed to wave to and fro: we decided that it was the
+flag of the derelict motor near Corner Camp which up to that time I
+thought was ten to fifteen miles away: this was a great relief, and we
+debated packing up again and going to it, but decided to stay where we
+were.
+
+It was fairly clear on the morning of March 14, which was lucky, for it
+was now obvious that we were miles from Corner Camp and much too near the
+land. The flag we had seen must have been a miraged piece of pressure,
+and it was providential that we had not made for it, and found worse
+trouble than we actually experienced. Try all I could that morning, my
+team, which was leading, insisted on edging westwards. At last I saw what
+I thought was a cairn, but found out just in time that it was a haycock
+or mound of ice formed by pressure: by its side was a large open
+crevasse, of which about fifty yards of snow-bridge had fallen in. For
+several miles we knew that we were crossing big crevasses by the hollow
+sound, and it was with considerable relief that I sighted the motor and
+then Corner Camp some two or three miles to the east of us. "Dimitri had
+left his Alpine rope there, and also I should have liked to have brought
+in Evans' sledge, but it would have meant about five miles extra, and I
+left it. I hope Scott, finding no note, will not think we are lost."[267]
+
+Dimitri seemed to be getting worse, and we pushed on until we camped that
+night only fifteen miles from Hut Point. My main anxiety was whether the
+sea-ice between us and Hut Point was in, because I felt that the job of
+getting the teams up on to the Peninsula and along it and down the other
+side would be almost more than we could do: there was an ominous
+open-water sky ahead.
+
+On March 15 we were held up all day by a strong blizzard. But by 8 A.M.
+the next morning we could see just the outline of White Island. I was
+very anxious, for Dimitri said that he had nearly fainted, and I felt
+that we must get on somehow, and chance the sea-ice being in. He stayed
+inside the tent as long as possible, and my spirits rose as the land
+began to clear all round while I was packing up both sledges. From Safety
+Camp the mirage at the edge of the Barrier was alarming, but as we
+approached the edge to my very great relief I found that the sea-ice was
+still in, and that what we had taken for frost smoke was only drift over
+Cape Armitage.
+
+Pushing into the drift round the corner I found Atkinson on the sea-ice,
+and Keohane in the hut behind. In a few minutes we had the gist of one
+another's news. The ship had made attempt after attempt to reach Campbell
+and his five men, but they had not been taken off from Evans Coves when
+she finally left McMurdo Sound on March 4: she would make another effort
+on her way to New Zealand. Evans was better and was being taken home.
+Meanwhile there were four of us at Hut Point and we could not communicate
+with our companions at Cape Evans until the Sound froze over, for the
+open sea was washing the feet of Vince's Cross.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We were not unduly alarmed about the Polar Party at present, but began to
+make arrangements for further sledging if necessary. It was useless to
+think of taking the dogs again for they were thoroughly done. The mules
+and the new dogs were at Cape Evans. "In four or five days Atkinson
+wishes to start South again to see what we can do man-hauling, if the
+Polar Party is not in. I agree with him that to try and go west to meet
+Campbell is useless just now. If we can go north, they can come south,
+and to put two parties there on the new sea-ice is to double the risk."
+
+"_March 17._ A blizzard day but only about force 5-6. I think they will
+have been able to travel all right on the Barrier. Atkinson thinks of
+starting on the 22nd: my view is that allowing three weeks and four days
+for the Summit, and ten days for being hung up by weather, we can give
+them five weeks after the Last Return Party (i.e. to March 26) to get
+in, having been quite safe and sound all the way. We feel anxious now,
+but I do not think there is need for alarm till then, and they might get
+in well after that, and be all right.
+
+"Now our only real chance of finding them, if we go out, is from here to
+ten miles south of Corner Camp. After that we shall do all we can, but it
+would be no good, because there is no very definite route. Therefore I
+would start out on March 27, when we would travel that part with most
+chance of meeting them there if they have any trouble. I have put this to
+Atkinson and will willingly do what he decides. I am feeling pretty done
+up, and have rested. The prospect of what will be a hard journey, feeling
+as I do, is rather bad. I don't think there is really cause for alarm."
+
+"_March 18 and 19._ We are very anxious, though the Pole Party could not
+be in yet. Also I am very done, and more so than I at first thought: I am
+afraid it is a bit doubtful whether I can get out again yet, but to-day I
+feel better and have been for a short walk. I am taking all the rest I
+can."
+
+"_March 20._ Last night a very strong blizzard blew, wind force 9 and big
+snowfall and drift. This morning the doors and windows are all drifted
+up, and we could hardly get out: a lot of snow had got inside the hut
+also: I was feeling rotten, and thought that to go out and clear the
+window and door would do me good. This I did, but came back in a big
+squall, passing Atkinson as I came in. Then I felt myself going faint,
+and remember pushing the door to get in if possible. I knew no more until
+I came to on the floor just inside the door, having broken some tendons
+in my right hand in falling."[268]
+
+Two days afterwards the dogs sang at breakfast-time: they often did this
+when a party was approaching, even when it was still far away, and they
+had done so when Crean came in on his walk from Corner Camp. We were
+cheered by the noise. But no party arrived, and the singing of the dogs
+was explained later by some seal appearing on the new ice in Arrival Bay.
+Atkinson decided to go out on to the Barrier man-hauling with Keohane on
+the 26th. It was obvious that I could not go with them: he told me
+afterwards that when I came in with the dog-teams he was sure I could not
+go out again.
+
+"_March 25._ The wind came away yesterday evening, first S.W. and then
+S.E. but not bad, though very thick. It was a surprise to find we could
+see the Western Mountains this morning, and I believe it has been a good
+day on the Barrier, though it is still blowing with low drift this
+evening. We are now on the days when I expect the Polar Party in: pray
+God I may be right. Atkinson and I look at one another, and he looks, and
+I feel, quite haggard with anxiety. He says he does not think they have
+scurvy. We both, I think, feel quite comfortable, in comparison, about
+Campbell: he only wants to exercise care, and his great care was almost a
+byword on the ship. They are fresh and they have plenty of seal.[269] He
+discussed with Pennell both the possibility of shipwreck and that of the
+ship being unable to get to him, and for this reason landed an extra
+month's rations as a depôt; also he contemplated the idea of living on
+seal. He knows of the Butter Point Depôt, and knows that a party has been
+sledging in that neighbourhood: though he does not know of the depôts
+they left at Cape Roberts and Cape Bernacchi, they are right out on the
+Points and Taylor says he could not miss them on his way down the
+coast."[270]
+
+This day Atkinson thought he saw Campbell's party coming in, and the next
+day Keohane and Dimitri came in great excitement and said they could see
+them, and we were out on the Point and on the sea-ice in the drift for
+quite a long time. "Last night we had turned in about two hours when five
+or six knocks were hit on the little window over our heads. Atkinson
+shouted 'Hullo!' and cried, 'Cherry, they're in.' Keohane said, 'Who's
+cook?' Some one lit a candle and left it in the far corner of the hut to
+give them light, and we all rushed out. But there was no one there. It
+was the nearest approach to ghost work that I have ever heard, and it
+must have been a dog which sleeps in that window. He must have shaken
+himself, hitting the window with his tail. Atkinson thought he heard
+footsteps!"[271]
+
+On Wednesday, March 27, Atkinson started out on to the Barrier with one
+companion, Keohane. During the whole of this trip the temperatures were
+low, and both men obtained but little sleep, finding of course that a
+tent occupied by two men only is a very cold place. The first two days
+they made nine miles each day, on March 29 they pushed on in thick
+weather for eleven miles, when the weather cleared enough to show them
+that they had got into the White Island pressure. On March 30 they
+reached a point south of Corner Camp, when "taking into consideration the
+weather, and temperatures, and the time of the year, and the hopelessness
+of finding the party except at any definite point like a depôt, I decided
+to return from here. We depôted the major portion of a week's provisions
+to enable them to communicate with Hut Point in case they should reach
+this point. At this date in my own mind I was morally certain that the
+party had perished, and in fact on March 29 Captain Scott, 11 miles south
+of One Ton Depôt, made the last entry in his diary."[272]
+
+"They arrived back on April 1. Yesterday evening at 6.30 P.M. Atkinson
+and Keohane arrived. It was pretty thick here and blowing too, but they
+had had a fair day on the Barrier. They had been out to Corner Camp and
+eight miles farther. Their bags were bad, their clothes very bad after
+six days: they must have had minus forties constantly. It is a moral
+certainty that to go farther south would serve no purpose, and for two
+men would be a useless risk. They did quite right to come back. They are
+much in want of sleep, poor devils, and I do hope Atkinson will allow
+himself to rest: he looks as though he might knock up. Keohane did well,
+and is very fit. They came in over fifteen miles yesterday, and have
+brought in the sledge of the Second Return Party, the one they took out
+being very heavy pulling. They had no day on which they could not travel.
+Here it has been blowing and drifting half the time he has been absent,"
+and a few days later, "We have got to face it now. The Pole Party will
+not in all probability ever get back. And there is no more that we can
+do. The next step must be to get to Cape Evans as soon as it is possible.
+There are fresh men there: at any rate fresh compared to us."[273]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Atkinson was the senior officer left, and unless Campbell and his party
+came in, the command of the Main Party devolved upon him. It was not a
+position which any one could envy even if he had been fresh and fit.
+Amidst all his anxieties and responsibilities he looked after me with the
+greatest patience and care. I was so weak that sometimes I could only
+keep on my legs with difficulty: the glands of my throat were swollen so
+that I could hardly speak or swallow: my heart was strained and I had
+considerable pain. At such a time I was only a nuisance, but nothing
+could have exceeded his kindness and his skill with the few drugs which
+we possessed.
+
+Again and again in these days some one would see one or other of the
+missing parties coming in. It always proved to be mirage, a seal or
+pressure or I do not know what, but never could we quite persuade
+ourselves that these excitements might not have something in them, and
+every time hope sprang up anew. Meanwhile the matter of serious
+importance was the state of the ice in the bays between us and Cape
+Evans: we _must_ get help. All the ice in the middle of the Sound was
+swept out by the winds of March 30 to April 2, and on the following day
+Atkinson climbed Arrival Heights to see how the remaining ice looked. The
+view over the Sound from here is shown in the frontispiece to this book.
+"The ice in the two bays to Cape Evans is quite new--formed this morning,
+I suppose, with the rest that is in the Sound. There are open leads
+between Glacier Tongue and Cape Evans, inside the line joining the ends
+of the two. There is a big berg in between Glacier Tongue and the
+Islands, and also a flat one off Cape Evans."[274]
+
+We had some good freezing days after this, and on April 5 "we tried the
+ice this afternoon. It is naturally slushy and salt, but some hundred
+yards from the old ice it is six inches thick: probably it averages about
+this thickness all over the Sound."[275] Then we had a hard blizzard, on
+the fourth day of which it was possible to get up the Heights again and
+see for some distance. As far as could be judged the ice in the two bays
+had remained firm: these bays are those formed on either side of Glacier
+Tongue, by the Hut Point Peninsula on the south, and by Cape Evans and
+the islands on the north.
+
+On April 10 Atkinson, Keohane and Dimitri started for Cape Evans, meaning
+to travel along the Peninsula to the Hutton Cliffs, and thence to cross
+the sea-ice in these bays, if it proved to be practicable. The amount of
+daylight was now very restricted, and the sun would disappear for the
+winter a week hence. Arrived at the Hutton Cliffs, where it was blowing
+as usual, they lost no time in lowering themselves and their sledge on to
+the sea-ice, and were then pleasantly surprised to find how slippery it
+was. "We set sail before a strong following breeze and, all sitting on
+the sledge, had reached the Glacier Tongue in twenty minutes. We
+clambered over the Tongue, and, our luck and the breeze still holding, we
+reached Cape Evans, completing the last seven miles, all sitting on the
+sledge, in an hour."
+
+[Illustration: CAPE EVANS FROM ARRIVAL HEIGHTS]
+
+[Illustration: CAPE ROYDS FROM CAPE BARNE]
+
+"There I called together all the members and explained the situation,
+telling them what had been done, and what I then proposed to do; also
+asking them for their advice in this trying time. The opinion was almost
+unanimous that all that was possible had been already done. Owing to
+the lateness of the year, and the likelihood of our being unable to make
+our way up the coast to Campbell, one or two members suggested that
+another journey might be made to Corner Camp. Knowing the conditions
+which had lately prevailed on the Barrier, I took it upon myself to
+decide the uselessness of this."[276]
+
+All was well at Cape Evans. Winds and temperatures had both been high,
+the latter being in marked contrast to the low temperatures we had
+experienced at Hut Point, which averaged as much as 15° lower than those
+that were recorded in the previous year. The seven mules were well, but
+three of the new dogs had died: we were always being troubled by that
+mysterious disease.
+
+Before she left for New Zealand the following members of our company
+joined the ship: Simpson, who had to return to his work in India;
+Griffith Taylor, who had been lent to us by the Australian Government for
+only one year; Ponting, whose photographic work was done; Day, whose work
+with the motors was done; Meares, who was recalled by family affairs;
+Forde, whose hand had never recovered the effects of frost-bite during
+the spring; Clissold, who fell off a berg and concussed himself; and
+Anton, whose work with the ponies was done. Lieutenant Evans was
+invalided home.
+
+Archer had been landed to take Clissold's place as cook; another seaman,
+Williamson, was landed to take Forde's place, and of our sledging
+companions he was the only fresh man. Wright was probably the most fit
+after him, and otherwise we had no one who, under ordinary circumstances,
+would have been considered fit to go out sledging again this season,
+especially at a time when the sun was just leaving us for the winter. We
+were sledged out.
+
+The next few days were occupied in making preparations for a further
+sledge journey, and on April 13 a party started to return to Hut Point by
+the Hutton Cliffs. Atkinson, Wright, Keohane and Williamson were to try
+and sledge up the western coast to help Campbell: Gran and Dimitri were
+to stay with me at Hut Point. The surface of the sea-ice was now
+extremely slushy and bad for pulling; the ice had begun to extrude its
+salt. A blizzard started in their faces, and they ran for shelter to the
+lee of Little Razorback Island. The weather clearing they pushed on to
+the Glacier Tongue, and camped there for the night somewhat frost-bitten.
+Some difficulty was experienced the next morning in climbing the
+ice-cliff on to the Peninsula, but Atkinson, using his knife as a
+purchase, and the sledge held at arm's-length by four men as a ladder,
+succeeded eventually in getting a foothold.
+
+Meanwhile I was left alone at Hut Point, where blizzards raged
+periodically with the usual creakings and groanings of the old hut.
+Foolishly I accompanied my companions, when they started for Cape Evans,
+as far as the bottom of Ski Slope. When I left them I found I could not
+keep my feet on the slippery snow and ice patches, and I had several
+nasty falls, in one of which I gave my shoulder a twist. It was this
+shaking combined with the rather desperate conditions which caused a more
+acute state of illness and sickness than I had experienced for some time.
+Some of those days I remained alone at Hut Point I was too weak to do
+more than crawl on my hands and knees about the hut. I had to get blubber
+from the door to feed the fire, and chop up seal-meat to eat, to cook,
+and to tend the dogs, some of whom were loose, while most of them were
+tied in the verandah, or between the hut door and Vince's Cross. The hut
+was bitterly cold with only one man in it: had there not been some
+morphia among the stores brought down from Cape Evans I do not know what
+I should have done.
+
+The dogs realized that they could take liberties which they would not
+have dared to do in different circumstances. They whined and growled, and
+squabbled amongst themselves all the time, day and night. Seven or eight
+times one day I crawled across the floor to try and lay my hands upon one
+dog who was the ringleader. I was sure it was Dyk, but never detected him
+in the act, and though I thrashed him with difficulty as a speculation,
+the result was not encouraging. I would willingly have killed the lot of
+them just then, I am ashamed to say. I lay in my sleeping-bag with the
+floor of the hut falling from me, or its walls disappearing in the
+distance and coming back: and roused myself at intervals to feed blubber
+to the stove. I felt as though I had been delivered out of hell when the
+relief party arrived on the night of April 14. I had been alone four
+days, and I think a few more days would have sent me off my head. Not the
+least welcome of the things they had brought me were my letters, copies
+of the Weekly Times, a pair of felt shoes and a comb!
+
+Atkinson's plan was to start on April 7 over the old sea-ice which lay to
+the south and south-west of us: he was to take with him Wright, Keohane
+and Williamson, and they wanted to reach Butter Point, and thence to
+sledge up the western coast. If the sea-ice was in, and Campbell was
+sledging down upon it, they hoped to meet him and might be of the
+greatest assistance to him. Even if they did not meet him they could mark
+more obviously certain depôts, of which he had no knowledge, left by our
+own geological parties on the route he must follow. As I have already
+mentioned, these were on Cape Roberts, off Granite Harbour, and on Cape
+Bernacchi, north of New Harbour: there was also a depôt at Butter Point,
+but Campbell already knew of this. They could also leave instructions to
+this effect at points where he would be likely to see them. There was no
+question that there was grave risk in this journey. Not only was the
+winter approaching, and the daylight limited, but the sea-ice over which
+they must march was most dangerous. Sea-ice is always forming and being
+blown out to sea, or just floating away on the tide at this time of year.
+The amount of old ice which had remained during the summer was certain to
+be limited: the new ice was thin and might take them out with it at any
+time. However, what could be done had to be done.
+
+Before they left certain signals by means of rockets and Véry lights were
+arranged, to be sent up by us at Hut Point if Campbell arrived: signals
+had also been arranged between Hut Point and Cape Evans in view of
+certain events. We did not have, but I think we ought to have had some
+form of portable heliograph for communications between Hut Point and Cape
+Evans when the sun was up and some kind of lamp signal apparatus to use
+during the winter.
+
+They started at 10.30 A.M. on Wednesday, April 17. The sun was now only
+just peeping over the northern horizon at mid-day, and would disappear
+entirely in six more days, though of course there was a long twilight as
+yet. For fresh men on old sea-ice it would not have been an easy venture:
+for worn-out men on a coast where the ice was probably freezing and
+blowing out at odd times it was very brave.
+
+They had hard pulling their first two days, and the minimum temperature
+for the corresponding nights was -43° and -45°. Consequently they soon
+began to be iced up. On the other hand they found old sea-ice and made
+good some 25 miles, camping on the evening of the 18th about four miles
+from the Eskers. Next morning they had to venture upon newly frozen ice,
+and a blizzard wind was blowing. They crossed the four miles from their
+night camp to the Eskers, glad enough to reach land the other side
+without the ice going to sea with them. They then turned towards the
+Butter Point Depôt, but were compelled to camp owing to the blizzard
+which came on with full force. The rise in temperature to zero caused a
+general thaw of sleeping-bags and clothing which dried but little when
+the sun had no power. On the following morning they reached the Butter
+Point Depôt, which they found with difficulty, for there was no flag
+standing. Even as they struck their camp they saw the ice to the north of
+them breaking up and going out to sea. There was nothing to do but to
+turn back, for neither could they go north to Campbell nor could Campbell
+come south to them. Wright now told Atkinson how much he had been opposed
+to this journey all along: "he had come on this trip fully believing that
+there was every possibility of the party being lost, but had never
+demurred and never offered a contrary opinion, and one cannot be thankful
+enough to such men."[277] They made up the Butter Point Depôt, marked it
+as well as they could in case Campbell should arrive there, and left two
+weeks' provisions for him. They could do no more.
+
+They got back to the Eskers that same day and anxiously awaited the
+twilight of the morning to reveal the state of the new sea-ice which they
+had crossed on their outward journey. To their joy some of it remained
+and they started to do the four miles between them and the old sea-ice.
+For two miles they ran with the sail set: then they had a hard pull, and
+some Emperor penguins whom they could see led them to suppose that there
+was open water ahead. But they got through all right, and did ten miles
+for the day. On Monday 22, "blizzard in morning, so started late, and
+made for end of Pinnacled Ice. We found our little bay of sea-ice all
+gone out. Luckily there was a sort of ice-foot around the Pinnacled Ice
+and we completed seven miles and got through."[278]
+
+_Tuesday, April 23._ "Atkinson and his party got in about 7 P.M. after a
+long pull all day in very bad weather. They are just in the state of a
+party which has been out on a very cold spring journey: clothes and
+sleeping-bags very wet, sweaters, pyjama coats and so forth full of snow.
+Atkinson looks quite done up, his cheeks are fallen in and his throat
+shows thin. Wright is also a good deal done up, and the whole party has
+evidently had little sleep. They have had a difficult and dangerous trip,
+and it is a good thing they are in, and they are fortunate to have had no
+mishaps, for the sea-ice is constantly going out over there, and when
+they were on it they never knew that they might not find themselves cut
+off from the shore. Big leads were constantly opening, even in ice over a
+foot thick and with little wind. But even if the ice had been in I do not
+believe that they could have gone many days."[279]
+
+That same day the sun appeared for the last time for four months.
+
+April 28 seemed to be a quite good day when we woke, and Wright, Keohane
+and Gran started back for Cape Evans before 10 A.M. We could then see the
+outline of Inaccessible Island, and the ice in the Sound looked fairly
+firm. So they determined to go by the way of the sea-ice under Castle
+Rock instead of going along the Peninsula to the Hutton Cliffs. Soon
+after they started it came up thick, and by 11.30 it was blowing a mild
+blizzard with a low temperature. We felt considerable anxiety, especially
+when a full blizzard set in with a temperature down to -31°, and we could
+not see how the ice was standing it. Two days later it cleared, and that
+night a flare was lit at Cape Evans at a pre-arranged time, by which
+signal we knew that they had arrived safely. We heard afterwards that
+when it came up thick they decided to follow the land which was the only
+thing that they could see. They soon found that the ice was not nearly so
+good as was supposed: there were open pools of water, and some of the ice
+was moving up and down with their weight as they crossed it: Gran put his
+foot in. Then Wright went ahead with the Alpine rope, the ice being blue,
+the pulling easy, and the wind force 4-5. As far as Turtleback Island the
+ice was newly frozen, but after that they knew they were on oldish ice.
+They were lost on Cape Evans in the blizzard for some time, but
+eventually found the hut safely. One of the lessons of this expedition is
+that too little care was taken in travelling on sea-ice.
+
+Atkinson, Dimitri and I left for Cape Evans with the two dog-teams on May
+1. Directly we started it was evident that the surface was very bad: even
+the ice near Hut Point, which had been frozen for a long time, was hard
+pulling for the dogs, and when after less than a mile we got on to ice
+which had frozen quite lately the sledges were running on snow which in
+turn lay on salt sleet. It seemed a long time before we got abreast of
+Castle Rock, following close along the land for the weather was very
+thick: when we started we could just see the outline of Inaccessible
+Island, but by now the horizon was lost in the dusk and haze. We decided
+to push on to Turtleback Island and go over Glacier Tongue in order to
+get on to the older ice as soon as possible. The dogs began to get very
+done: Manuki Noogis, who had been harnessed in as leader (for Rabchick
+had deserted in the night), gave in completely, lay down and refused to
+be persuaded to go on: we had to cast him off and hope that he would
+follow. After a time Turtleback Island was visible in the gloom, but it
+was all we could do, pushing and pulling the sledges to help the dogs, to
+get them so far. We were now on the older ice: our way was easier and we
+reached Cape Evans without further incident. We found Rabchick on
+arrival, but no Manuki Noogis, who never reappeared.
+
+As we neared the Cape Atkinson turned to me: "Would you go for Campbell
+or the Polar Party next year?" he said. "Campbell," I answered: just then
+it seemed to me unthinkable that we should leave live men to search for
+those who were dead.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [259] See Introduction, pp. l, lii-lix.
+
+   [260] See pp. 353, 383.
+
+   [261] See pp. 382, 383.
+
+   [262] My own diary.
+
+   [263] See p. 115.
+
+   [264] _British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1913_, "Meteorology," by
+         G. C. Simpson, vol. i. pp. 28-30.
+
+   [265] See pp. 550-556.
+
+   [266] My own diary.
+
+   [267] My own diary.
+
+   [268] My own diary.
+
+   [269] As a matter of fact this was not the case.
+
+   [270] My own diary.
+
+   [271] My own diary.
+
+   [272] Atkinson in _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 309.
+
+   [273] My own diary.
+
+   [274] My own diary.
+
+   [275] Ibid.
+
+   [276] Atkinson in _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 31.
+
+   [277] Atkinson in _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 314.
+
+   [278] Atkinson's diary.
+
+   [279] My own diary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE LAST WINTER
+
+    Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing
+    wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....--H. G. WELLS.
+
+
+    (I) _5 men dead._                   (III) _2 men landed._
+
+SCOTT          OATES                  ARCHER           WILLIAMSON
+WILSON         SEAMAN EVANS
+BOWERS
+                               (IV) _13 men at Cape Evans for third year._
+
+(II) _9 men gone home._               ATKINSON         CREAN
+                                      CHERRY-GARRARD   KEOHANE
+LIEUT. EVANS   DAY                    WRIGHT           DIMITRI
+SIMPSON        FORDE                  DEBENHAM         HOOPER
+MEARES         CLISSOLD               GRAN             WILLIAMSON
+TAYLOR         ANTON                  NELSON           ARCHER
+PONTING                               LASHLY
+
+A quite disproportionately small part of Scott's Last Expedition was
+given to Atkinson's account of the last and worst year any of us
+survivors spent: some one should have compelled him to write, for he will
+not do so if he can help it. The problems which presented themselves were
+unique in the history of Arctic travel, the weather conditions which had
+to be faced during this last winter were such as had never been met in
+McMurdo Sound! The sledging personnel had lately undergone journeys, in
+one case no less than four journeys, of major importance, until they were
+absolutely worn out. The successful issue of the party was a triumph of
+good management and good fellowship. The saving clause was that as
+regards hut, food, heat, clothing and the domestic life generally we were
+splendidly found. To the north of us, some hundreds of miles away,
+Campbell's party of six men must be fighting for their lives against
+these same conditions, or worse--unless indeed they had already perished
+on their way south. We knew they must be in desperate plight, but
+probably they were alive: the point in their favour was that they were
+fresh men. To the south of us, anywhere between us and the Pole, were
+five men. We knew _they_ must be dead.
+
+The immediate problem which presented itself was how best to use the
+resources which were left to us. Our numbers were much reduced. Nine men
+had gone home before any hint of tragedy reached them. Two men had been
+landed from the ship. We were thirteen men for this last year. Of these
+thirteen it was almost certain that Debenham would be unable to go out
+sledging again owing to an injury to his knee: Archer had come to cook
+and not to sledge: and it was also doubtful about myself. As a matter of
+fact our sledging numbers for the last summer totalled eleven, five
+officers and six men.
+
+We were well provided with transport, having the seven mules sent down by
+the Indian Government, which were excellent animals, as well as our
+original two dog-teams: the additional dogs brought down by the ship were
+with two exceptions of no real sledging value. Our dog-teams had,
+however, already travelled some 1500 miles on the Barrier alone, not
+counting the work they had done between Hut Point and Cape Evans; and,
+though we did not realize it at this time, they were sick of it and never
+worked again with that dash which we had come to expect of them.
+
+The first thing which we settled about the winter which lay ahead of us
+was that, so far as possible, everything should go on as usual. The
+scientific work must of course be continued, and there were the dogs and
+mules to be looked after: a night-watch to be kept and the meteorological
+observations and auroral notes to be taken. Owing to our reduced numbers
+we should need the help of the seamen for this purpose. We were also to
+bring out another volume of the South Polar Times on Mid-winter Day. The
+importance of not allowing any sense of depression to become a part of
+the atmosphere of our life was clear to all. This was all the more
+necessary when, as we shall see, the constant blizzards confined us week
+after week to our hut. Even when we did get a fine day we were almost
+entirely confined to the rocky cape for our exercise and walks. When
+there was sea-ice it was most unsafe.
+
+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.
+
+[Illustration: CAPE EVANS IN WINTER--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+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.
+
+"_Saturday, June 8._ The weather changes since the night before last have
+been, luckily for us, uncommon. Thursday evening a strong northerly wind
+started with some drift, and this increased during the night until it
+blew over forty miles an hour, the temperature being -22°. A strong wind
+from the north is rare, and generally is the prelude of a blizzard. This
+northerly wind fell towards morning, and the day was calm and clear, the
+temperature falling until it was -33° at 4 P.M. The barometer had been
+abnormally low during the day, being only 28.24 at noon. Then at 8 P.M.
+with the temperature at -36°, this blizzard broke, and at the same time
+there was a big upward jump of the barometer, which seemed to mark the
+beginning of the blizzard much more than the thermometer, which did not
+rise much. The wind during the night was very high, blowing 72 and 66
+miles an hour, for hours at a time, and has not yet shown any sign of
+diminishing. Now, after lunch, the hut is straining and creaking, while a
+shower of stones rattles at intervals against it: the drift is generally
+very heavy."
+
+"_Sunday, June 9._ The temperature has been higher, about zero, during
+the day, and the blizzard shows no signs of falling yet. The gusts are
+still of a very high velocity. A large quantity of ice to the north seems
+to have gone out: at any rate our narrow strip along the front, which is
+so valuable to us, will probably be permanent now."
+
+"_Monday, June 10._ A most turbulent day. It is very hard to settle down
+to do anything, read or write, with such a turmoil outside, the hut
+shaking until we begin to wonder how long it will stand such winds. Most
+of the time the wind is averaging about sixty miles an hour, but the
+gusts are far greater, and at times it seems that something must go. Just
+before lunch I was racking my brains to write an Editorial for the South
+Polar Times, and had congratulated ourselves on having the sea-ice which
+is still in North Bay. As we were having lunch Nelson came in and said,
+'The thermometers have gone!' All the ice in North Bay has gone. The part
+immediately next to the shore, which has now been in so long, and which
+was over two feet thick, we had considered sure to stay. On it has gone
+out the North Bay thermometer screen with its instruments, which was
+placed 400 yards out, the fish-trap, some shovels and a sledge with a
+crowbar. The gusts were exceptionally strong at lunch, and the ice must
+have gone out very quickly. There was no sign of it afterwards, though it
+was not drifting much and we could see some distance. To lose this ice in
+North Bay is a great disappointment, for it means so much to us here
+whether we have ice or water at our doors. We are now pretty well
+confined to the cape both for our own exercise and that of the mules, and
+in the dark it is very rough walking. But if the ice in South Bay were to
+follow, it would be a calamity, cutting us off entirely from the south
+and all sledging next year. Let us hope we shall be spared this."
+
+This blizzard lasted for eight days, up till then the longest blizzard we
+had experienced: "It died as it had lived, blowing hard to the last,
+averaging 68 miles an hour from the south, and then 56 miles an hour from
+the north, finally back to the south, and so to calm. To sit here with no
+noise of wind whistling in the ventilator, calm and starlight outside,
+and North Bay freezing over once more, is a very great relief."[280]
+
+It is noteworthy that this clearance of the ice, as also that in the
+beginning of May, coincided roughly with the maximum declination of the
+moon, and therefore with a run of spring tides.
+
+It would be tedious to give any detailed account of the winds and drift
+which followed, night and day. There were few days which did not produce
+their blizzard, but in contrast the hours of bright starlight were very
+beautiful. "Walking home over the cape in the darkness this afternoon I
+saw an eruption of Erebus which, compared with anything we have seen here
+before, was very big. It looked as though a great mass of flame shot up
+some thousands of feet into the air, and, as suddenly as it rose, fell
+again, rising again to about half the height, and then disappearing.
+There was then a great column of steam rising from the crater, and
+probably, so Debenham asserts, it was not a flame which appeared, but the
+reflection from a big bubble breaking in the crater. Afterwards the smoke
+cloud stretched away southwards, and we could not see the end of
+it."[281]
+
+Blizzard followed blizzard, and at the beginning of July we had four days
+which were the thickest I have ever seen. Generally when you go out into
+a blizzard the drift is blown from your face and clothes, and though you
+cannot see your stretched-out hand, especially on a dark winter day, the
+wind prevents you being smothered. The wind also prevents the land,
+tents, hut and cases from being covered. But during this blizzard the
+drift drove at you in such blankets of snow, that your person was
+immediately blotted out, your face covered and your eyes plugged up. Gran
+lost himself for some time on the hill when taking the 8 A.M.
+observations, and Wright had difficulty in getting back from the magnetic
+cave. Men had narrow escapes of losing themselves, though they were but a
+few feet from the hut.
+
+When this blizzard cleared the camp was buried, and even on unobstructed
+surfaces the snowdrifts averaged four feet of additional depth. Two
+enormous drifts ran down to the sea from either end of the hut. I do not
+think we ever found some of our stores again, but the larger part we
+carried up to the higher ground behind us where they remained fairly
+clear. About this time I began to notice large sheets of anchor ice off
+the end of Cape Evans, that is to say, ice forming and remaining on the
+bottom of the open sea. Now also the open water was extending round the
+cape into the South Bay behind us: but it was too dark to get any
+reliable idea of the distribution of ice in the Sound. We were afraid
+that we were cut off from Hut Point, but I do not believe that this was
+the case; though the open water must have stretched many miles to the
+south in the middle of the Sound. The days when it was clear enough even
+to potter about outside the hut were exceptional. God was very angry.
+
+"_Sunday, July 14._ A blizzard during the night, and after breakfast it
+was drifting a lot. While we were having service some of the men went
+over the camp to get ice for water. The sea-ice had been blown out of
+North Bay, and the men supposed that the sea was open, and would look
+black, but Crean tells me that they nearly walked over the ice-foot, and,
+when it cleared later, we saw the sea as white as the ice-foot itself. A
+strip of ice which was lying out in the Bay last night must have been
+brought in by the tide, even against a wind of some forty miles an hour.
+This shows what an influence the tides and currents have in comparison
+with the winds, for just at this time we are having very big tides. It
+was blowing and drifting all the morning, and the tide was flowing in,
+pressing the ice in under the ice-foot to such an extent that later it
+remained there, though the tide was ebbing and a strong southerly was
+blowing."[282] Incidentally the bergs which were grounded in our
+neighbourhood were shifted and broken about considerably by these high
+winds: also the meteorological screen placed on the Ramp the year before
+was broken from its upright, which had snapped in the middle, and must
+have been taken up into the air and so out to sea, for there was no trace
+of it to be found: Wright lost two doors placed over the entrance to the
+magnetic cave: when he lifted them they were taken out of his hands by
+the wind, and disappeared into the air and were never seen again.
+
+[Illustration: NORTH BAY AND THE BARNE GLACIER]
+
+So ready was the sea to freeze that there can be little doubt that it
+already contained large numbers of ice crystals, and time and again I
+have stood upon the ice-foot watching the tongues of the winds licking up
+the waters as they roared their way out to sea. Then, with no warning,
+there would come, suddenly and completely, a lull. And there would be a
+film of ice, covering the surface of the sea, come so quickly that all
+you could say was that it was not there before and it was there now. And
+then down would come the wind again and it was gone. Once when the winter
+had gone and daylight had returned I stood upon the end of the cape, the
+air all calm around me, and there, half-a-mile away, a full blizzard was
+blowing: the islands, and even the berg between Inaccessible Island
+and the cape, were totally obscured in the thickest drift: the top of the
+drift, which was very distinct, thinned to show dimly the crest of
+Inaccessible Island: Turk's Head was visible and Erebus quite clear. In
+fact I was just on the edge of a thick blizzard, blowing down the Strait,
+the side showing as a perpendicular wall about 500 feet high and
+travelling, I should say, about 40 miles an hour. A roar came out from it
+of the wind and waves.
+
+The weather conditions were extraordinarily local, as another experience
+will show. Atkinson and Dimitri were off to Hut Point with the dogs,
+carrying biscuit and pemmican for the coming Search Journey: I went with
+them some way, and then left them to place a flag upon the end of Glacier
+Tongue for surveying purposes. It was clear and bright, and it was easy
+to get a sketch of the bearings of the islands from this position, which
+showed how great a portion of the Tongue must have broken off in the
+autumn of 1911. I anticipated a pleasant walk home, but was somewhat
+alarmed when heavy wind and drift came down from the direction of the
+Hutton Cliffs. Wearing spectacles, and being unable to see without them,
+I managed to steer with difficulty by the sun which still showed dimly
+through the drift. It was amazing suddenly to walk out of the wall of
+drift into light airs at Little Razorback Island. One minute it was
+blowing and drifting hard and I could see almost nothing, the next it was
+calm, save for little whirlwinds of snow formed by eddies of air drawn in
+from the north. In another three hundred yards the wind was blowing from
+the north. On this day Atkinson found wind force 8 and temperature -17°
+at Hut Point: at Cape Evans the temperature was zero and men were sitting
+on the rocks and smoking in the sun. Many instances might be given to
+show how local our weather conditions often were.
+
+There was a morning some time in the middle of the winter when we awoke
+to one of our usual tearing blizzards. We had had some days of calm, and
+the ice had frozen sufficiently for the fish-trap to be lowered again.
+But that it would not stand much of this wind was obvious, and after
+breakfast Atkinson stuck out his jaw and said he wasn't going to lose
+another trap for any dash blizzard. He and Keohane sallied forth on to
+the ice, lost to our sight immediately in the darkness and drift. They
+got it, but arrived on the cape in quite a different place, and we were
+glad to see them back. Soon afterwards the ice blew out.
+
+Much credit is due to the mule leaders that they were able to exercise
+their animals without hurt. Cape Evans in the dark, strewn with great
+boulders, with the open sea at your feet, is no easy place to manage a
+very high-spirited and excitable mule, just out of a warm stable,
+especially if this is his first outing for several days and the wind is
+blowing fresh, and you are not sure if your face is frost-bitten, and you
+are quite sure that your hands are. But the exercise was carried out
+without mishap. The mules themselves were most anxious to go out, and
+when Pyaree developed a housemaid's knee and was kept in, she revenged
+herself upon her more fortunate companions by biting each one hard as it
+passed her head on its way to and from the door. Gulab was the biggest
+handful, and Williamson managed him with skill: some of them, especially
+Lal Khan, were very playful, running round and round their leaders and
+stopping to paw the ground: Khan Sahib, on the other hand, was bored,
+yawning continually: it was suggested that he was suffering from polar
+ennui! Altogether they reflected the greatest credit upon Lashly, who
+groomed them every day and took the greatest care of them. They were
+subject to the most violent fits of jealousy, being much disturbed if a
+rival got undue attention. The dog Vaida, however, was good friends with
+them all, going down the line and rubbing noses with them in their
+stalls.
+
+The food of the mules was based upon that given by Oates to the ponies
+the year before, and the results were successful.
+
+The accommodation given to the dogs in the Terra Nova on the way south is
+open to criticism. As the reader may remember, they were chained on the
+top of the deck cargo on the main deck, and of course had a horrible
+time during the gale, and any subsequent bad weather, which did not
+however last very long. But it was quite impossible to put them anywhere
+else, for every square inch between decks was so packed that even our
+personal belongings for more than two years were reduced to one small
+uniform case. Any seaman will easily understand that to build houses or
+shelters on deck over and above what we had already was out of the
+question. As a matter of fact I doubt whether the dogs had a worse time
+than we during that gale. In good weather at sea, and at all times in the
+pack, they were comfortable enough. But future explorers might consider
+whether they can give their dogs more shelter during the winter than we
+were able to do. Amundsen, whose Winter Quarters were on the Barrier
+itself, and who experienced lower temperatures and very much less wind
+than was our lot at Cape Evans, had his dogs in tents, and let them run
+loose in the camp during the day. Tents would have gone in the winds we
+experienced, and I have explained that we had no snow in which we could
+make houses, as was done by Amundsen in the Barrier.
+
+Our more peaceable dogs were allowed to run loose, especially during this
+last winter, at the beginning of which we also built a dog hospital. We
+should have liked to loose them all, but if we did so they immediately
+flew at one another's throats. We might perhaps have let them loose if we
+had first taken the precaution Amundsen took, and muzzled all of them
+before doing so. The sport of fighting, so his dogs discovered, lost all
+its charm when they found they could not taste blood, and they gave it
+up, and ran about unmuzzled and happy. But the slaughter among the seals
+and penguins would have been horrible with us, and many dogs might have
+been carried away on the breaking sea-ice. The tied-up ones lay under the
+lee of a line of cases, each in his own hole. They curled up quite snugly
+buried in the snowdrift when blizzards were blowing, and lay exactly in
+the same way when sledging on the Barrier, the first duty of the
+dog-driver after pitching his own tent being to dig holes for each of his
+dogs. It may be that these conditions are more natural to them than any
+other, and that they are warmer when covered by the drifted snow than
+they would be in any unwarmed shelter: but this I doubt. At any rate they
+throve exceedingly under these rigorous conditions, soon becoming fat and
+healthy after the hardest sledge journeys, and their sledging record is a
+very fine one. We could not have built them a hut; as it was, we left our
+magnetic hut, a far smaller affair, in New Zealand, for there was no room
+to stow it on the ship. I would not advise housing dogs in a hut built
+with a lean-to roof as an annexe to the main living-hut, but this would
+be one way of doing it if you are prepared to stand the noise and smell.
+
+The dog-biscuits, provided by Spratt, weighed 8 oz. each, and their
+sledging ration was 1½ lbs. a day, given to them after they reached the
+night camp. We made seal pemmican for them and tried this when sledging,
+as an occasional variation on biscuit, but they did not thrive on this
+diet. The oil in the biscuits caused purgation, as also did the pemmican:
+the fat was partly undigested and the excreta were eaten. The ponies also
+ate their excreta at times. Certain dogs were confirmed leather eaters,
+and we carried chains for them: on camping, these dogs were taken out of
+their canvas and raw-hide harnesses, and attached to the sledge by the
+chains, care being taken that they could not get at the food on the
+sledge. When sledging, Amundsen gave his dogs pemmican but I do not know
+what else: he also fed dog to dog: I do not know whether we could have
+fed dog to dog, for ours were Siberian dogs which, I am told, will not
+eat one another. At Amundsen's winter quarters he gave them seal's flesh
+and blubber one day, and dried fish the next.[283] On the long voyage
+south in the Fram, he fed his dogs on dried fish, and three times a week
+gave them a porridge of dried fish, tallow, and maize meal boiled
+together.[284] At Cape Evans or at Hut Point our dogs were given plenty
+of biscuit some evenings, and plenty of fresh frozen seal at other times.
+
+Our worst trouble with the dogs came from far away--probably from Asia.
+There are references in Scott's diary to four dogs as attacked by a
+mysterious disease during our first year in the South: one of these dogs
+died within two minutes. We lost many more dogs the last year, and
+Atkinson has given me the following memorandum upon the parasite, a
+nematode worm, which was discovered later to be the cause of the trouble:
+
+"_Filaria immitis._--A certain proportion of the dogs became infected
+with this nematode, and it was the cause of their death, mainly in the
+second year. It was present at the time the expedition started (1910) all
+down the Pacific side of Asia and Papua, and there was an examination
+microscopically of all dogs imported at this time into New Zealand. The
+secondary host is the mosquito Culex.
+
+"The symptoms varied. The onset was usually with intense pain, during
+which the animal yelled and groaned: this was cardiac in origin and
+referable to the presence of the mature form in the beast. There was
+marked haematuria, and the animals were anaemic from actual loss of
+haemoglobins. In nearly all cases there was paralysis affecting the
+hindquarters during the later stages, which tended to spread upwards and
+finally ended in death.
+
+"The probable place of infection was Vladivostok before the dogs were put
+on board ship and deported to New Zealand. The only method of coping with
+the disease is prevention of infection in infected areas. It is probable
+that the mosquitoes would not bite after the dog's coat had been rubbed
+with paraffin: or mosquito netting might be placed over the kennels,
+especially at night time. The larval forms were found microscopically in
+the blood, and one mature form in the heart."
+
+We were too careful about killing animals. I have explained how
+Campbell's party was landed at Evans Coves. Some of the party wanted to
+kill some seals on the off chance of the ship not turning up to relieve
+them. This was before they were in any way alarmed. But it was decided
+that life might be taken unnecessarily if they did this--and that winter
+this party nearly died of starvation. And yet this country has allowed
+penguins to be killed by the million every year for Commerce and a
+farthing's worth of blubber.
+
+We never killed unless it was necessary, and what we had to kill was used
+to the utmost both for food and for the scientific work in hand. The
+first Emperor penguin we ever saw at Cape Evans was captured after an
+exciting chase outside the hut in the middle of a blizzard. He kept us
+busy for days: the zoologist got a museum skin, showing some variation
+from the usual coloration, a skeleton, and some useful observation on the
+digestive glands: the parasitologist got a new tape-worm: we all had a
+change of diet. Many a pheasant has died for less.
+
+There were plenty of Weddell seal round us this winter, but they kept out
+of the wind and in the water for the most part. The sea is the warm place
+of the Antarctic, for the temperature never falls below about 29° Fahr.,
+and a seal which has been lying out on the ice in a minus thirty
+temperature, and perhaps some wind, must feel, as he slips into the sea,
+much the same sensations as occur to us when we walk out of a cold
+English winter day into a heated conservatory. On the other hand, a
+seaman went out into North Bay to bathe from a boat, in the full sun of a
+mid-summer day, and he was out almost as soon as he was in. One of the
+most beautiful sights of this winter was to see the seals, outlined in
+phosphorescent light, swimming and hunting in the dark water.
+
+We had lectures, but not as many as during the previous winter when they
+became rather excessive: and we included outside subjects. We read in
+many a polar book of the depressions and trials of the long polar night;
+but thanks to gramophones, pianolas, variety of food, and some study of
+the needs both of mind and body, we suffered very little from the first
+year's months of darkness. There is quite a store of novelty in living in
+the dark: most of us I think thoroughly enjoyed it. But a second winter,
+with some of your best friends dead, and others in great difficulties,
+perhaps dying, when all is unknown and every one is sledged to a
+standstill, and blizzards blow all day and all night, is a ghastly
+experience. This year there was not one of our company who did not
+welcome the return of the sun with thankfulness: all the more so since he
+came back to a land of blizzards and made many of our difficulties more
+easy to tackle. Those who got little outside exercise were more affected
+by the darkness than others. This last year, of course, the difficulties
+of getting sufficient outdoor exercise were much increased. Variety is
+important to the man who travels in polar regions: at all events those
+who went away on sledging expeditions stood the life more successfully
+than those whose duties tied them to the neighbourhood of the hut.
+
+Other things being equal, the men with the greatest store of nervous
+energy came best through this expedition. Having more imagination, they
+have a worse time than their more phlegmatic companions; but they get
+things done. And when the worst came to the worst, their strength of mind
+triumphed over their weakness of body. If you want a good polar traveller
+get a man without too much muscle, with good physical tone, and let his
+mind be on wires--of steel. And if you can't get both, sacrifice physique
+and bank on will.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NOTE
+
+A lecture given at this time by Wright on Barrier Surfaces is especially
+interesting with relation to the Winter Journey and the tragedy of the
+Polar Party. The general tend of friction set up by a sledge-runner upon
+snow of ordinary temperature may be called true _sliding_ friction: it is
+probable that the runners melt to an infinitesimal degree the millions of
+crystal points over which they glide: the sledge is running upon water.
+Crystals in such temperatures are larger and softer than those
+encountered in low temperatures. It is now that halos may be seen in the
+snow, almost reaching to your feet as you pull, and moving forward with
+you: we steered sometimes by keeping these halos at a certain angle to
+us. My experience is that the best pulling surface is at an air
+temperature of about +17° Fahr.: Wright's experience is that below +5°
+during summer temperatures on the Barrier the surface is fairly good,
+that between +5° and +15° less good, and between +15° and +25° best. The
+worst is from +25° upwards, the worst of all being round about freezing
+point.
+
+As the temperature became high the amount of ice melted by this sliding
+friction was excessive. It was then that we found ice forming upon the
+runners, often in almost microscopic amounts, but nevertheless causing
+the sledges to drag seriously. Thus on the Beardmore we took enormous
+care to keep our runners free from ice, by scraping them at every halt
+with the back of our knives. This ice is perhaps formed when the runners
+sink into the snow to an unusual depth, at which the temperature of the
+snow is sufficiently low to freeze the water previously formed by
+friction or radiation from the sun on to a dark runner.
+
+In very low temperatures the snow crystals become very small and very
+hard, so hard that they will scratch the runners. The friction set up by
+runners in such temperatures may be known as _rolling_ friction, and the
+effect, as experienced by us during the Winter Journey and elsewhere, is
+much like pulling a sledge over sand. This rolling friction is that of
+snow crystal against snow crystal.
+
+If the barometer is rising you get flat crystals on the ice, if it is
+falling you get mirage and a blizzard. When you get mirage the air is
+actually coming out of the Barrier. Thus far Wright's lecture.
+
+Since we returned I have had a talk with Nansen about the sledge-runners
+which he recommends to the future explorer. The ideal sledge-runner
+combines lightness and strength. He tells me that he would always have
+metal runners in high temperatures in which they will run better than
+wood. In cold temperatures wood is necessary. Metal is stronger than wood
+with same weight. He has never used, but he suggests the possible use of,
+aluminium or magnesium for the metal. And he would also have wooden
+runners with metal runners attached, to be used alternately, if needed.
+
+The Discovery Expedition used German silver, and it failed: Nansen
+suggests that the failure was due to the fact that these runners were
+fitted at home. The effect of this is that the wood shrinks and the
+German silver is not quite flat: the fitting should be done on the spot.
+Nansen did this himself on the Fram, and the result was excellent. [I
+believe that these Discovery runners were not a continuous strip of metal
+but were built up in strips, which tore at the points of junction.]
+Before it is fitted, German silver should be heated red hot and allowed
+to cool. This makes it more ductile, like lead, and therefore less
+springy: the metal should be as thin as possible.
+
+As runners melt the crystals and so run on water, metal is unsuitable for
+cold snow. For low temperatures, therefore, Nansen would have wooden
+runners under the metal, the metal being taken off when cold conditions
+obtained. He would choose such wood as is the best conductor of heat. He
+tried birch wood in the first crossing of Greenland, but would not
+recommend it as being too easily broken. In the use of oak, ash, maple,
+and doubtless also hickory, for runners, the rings of growth of the tree
+should be as far apart as possible: that is to say, they should be fast
+growing. Ash with narrow rings breaks. There is ash and ash: American ash
+is no good for this purpose; some Norwegian ash is useful, and some not.
+Our own sledges with ash runners varied enormously. The runners of a
+sledge should curve slightly, the centre being nearest to the snow. The
+runners of ski should curve also slightly, in this case upwards in the
+centre, i.e. from the snow. This is done by the way the wood is cut.
+Wood always dries with the curve from the heart towards the outside of
+the tree.
+
+During our last year we had six new Norwegian sledges twelve feet long,
+brought down by the ship, with tapered runners of hickory which were 3¾
+inches broad in the fore part and 2¼ inches only at the stern. I believe
+that this was an idea of Scott, who considered that the broad runner in
+front would press down a path for the tapered part which followed, the
+total area of friction being much less. We took one of them into South
+Bay one morning and tried it against an ordinary sledge, putting 490 lbs.
+on each of them. The surface included fairly soft as well as harder and
+more rubbly going. There was no difference of opinion that the sledge
+with the tapered runners pulled easier, and later we used these sledges
+on the Barrier with great success.
+
+If some instrument could be devised to test sledges in this way it would
+be of very great service. No team of men can make an exact estimate of
+the run of their own sledge, let alone the sledge which your pony or your
+dogs are pulling. Yet sledges vary enormously, and it would be an
+excellent thing for a leader to be able to test his sledges before buying
+them, and also to be able to pick out the best for his more important
+sledge journeys. I believe it can be done by attaching some kind of
+balance between the sledge and the men pulling it.
+
+Other points mentioned by Nansen are as follows:
+
+Tarred ski are good: the snow does not stick so much. [This probably
+refers to the Norwegian compound known as Fahrt.] But he does not
+recommend tarred runners for sledges. Having had experience of a tent of
+Chinese silk which would go into his pocket but was very cold, he
+recommends a double tent, the inner lining being detached so that ice
+could be shaken from both coverings. He suggests the possibility of a
+woollen lining being warmer than cotton or silk or linen. I am, however,
+of opinion that wool would collect more moisture from the cooker, and it
+certainly would be far more difficult to shake off the ice. For four men
+he would have two two-men sleeping-bags and a central pole coming down
+between them, and the floor-cloth made in one piece with the tent. For
+three men a three-man sleeping-bag: e.g. for such a journey as our
+Winter Journey. He would not brush rime, formed upon the tent by the
+steam from the cooker and breath, from the inside of tent before striking
+camp. The more of it the warmer. He considers that two- or three-men
+sleeping-bags are infinitely warmer than single bags: objections of
+discomfort are overcome, for you are so tired you go to sleep anyway. I
+would, however, recommend the explorer to read Scott's remarks upon the
+same subject before making up his mind.[285]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [280] My own diary.
+
+   [281] My own diary.
+
+   [282] My own diary.
+
+   [283] See Amundsen, _The South Pole_, vol. i. p. 264.
+
+   [284] Ibid. vol. i. p. 119.
+
+   [285] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. pp. 480-487.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+ANOTHER SPRING
+
+    O to dream, O to awake and wander
+    There, and with delight to take and render,
+    Through the trance of silence,
+    Quiet breath;
+    Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses,
+    Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
+    Only winds and rivers,
+    Life and death.
+
+
+The flowers were of snow, the rivers of ice, and if Stevenson had been to
+the Antarctic he would have made them so.
+
+God sent His daylight to scatter the nightmares of the darkness. I can
+remember now the joy of an August day when the sun looked over the rim of
+the Barne Glacier, and my shadow lay clear-cut upon the snow. It was
+wonderful what a friendly thing that ice-slope became. We put the first
+trace upon the sunshine recorder; there was talk of expeditions to Cape
+Royds and Hut Point, and survey parties; and we ate our luncheon by the
+daylight which shone through the newly cleared window.
+
+The coming Search Journey was organized to reach the Upper Glacier Depôt,
+and the plans were modelled upon the Polar Journey of the year before.
+But now we had no extensive depôts on the Barrier. It was intended that
+the dogs should run two trips out to Corner Camp during this spring. It
+was hoped that two parties of four men each might be able to ascend the
+Beardmore, one of them remaining about half-way up and doing geological
+and other scientific work while the other went up to the top.
+
+In our inmost thoughts we were full of doubts and fears. "I had a long
+talk with Lashly, who asked me what I candidly thought had happened to
+the Southern Party. I told him a crevasse. He says he does not think so:
+he thinks it is scurvy. Talking about crevasses he says that, on the
+return of the Second Return Party, they came right over the ice-falls
+south of Mount Darwin,--descending about 2000 feet into a great valley,
+down which they travelled towards the west, and so to the Upper Glacier
+Depôt. I believe Scott told Evans (Lieut.) that he meant to come back
+this same way."
+
+"Then the stuff they got into above the Cloudmaker must have been
+horrible. 'Why, there are places there you could put St. Paul's into, and
+that's no exaggeration, neither,' and they spent two nights in it. All
+the way down to the Gateway he says there were crevasses, great big
+fellows thirty feet across, which we of the First Return Party had
+crossed both going and coming back and which we never saw. But then much
+of the snow had gone and they were visible. Lieut. Evans was very badly
+snowblind most of this time. Then outside the Gateway, on the Barrier,
+they crossed many crevasses, and some had fallen in where we had passed
+over them."
+
+"This makes one think. Is the state of affairs in which we found the
+glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being a special phenomenon due to
+that great blizzard and snowfall? Are we going to find blue ice this year
+where we found thick soft snow last? Well! I have got a regular bad
+needle again, just as I have had before. But somehow the needle has
+always worked off when we get right into it. What a blessing it is that
+things are seldom as bad in the reality as you expect they are going to
+be in your imagination: though I must say the Winter Journey was worse
+even than I had imagined. I remember that this time last year the thought
+of the Beardmore was very terrible: but the reality was never very bad."
+
+"Lashly thinks it would be practically impossible for five men to
+disappear down a crevasse. Where three men got through (and he said it
+would be impossible to get worse stuff than they came through), five men
+would be still better off. This is not my view, however. I think that the
+extra weight of one man might make all the difference in crossing a big
+crevasse: and if several men fell through one of those great bridges when
+sledge and men were all on it, I do not think the bridge would hold the
+sledge."[286]
+
+Several trips were made to Cape Royds over the Barne Glacier, and then by
+portaging over the rocks to Shackleton's old hut. The sea was open here,
+except for small niches of ice, and the hut and the cape were
+comparatively free from drifts; probably the open water had swallowed the
+drifting snow. Not so Hut Point, which was surrounded by huge drifts: the
+verandah which we had built up as a stable was filled from floor to roof:
+there was no ice-foot to be seen, only a long snow-slope from the door to
+the sea-level. The hut itself, when we had dug our way into it, was
+clear. We took down stores for the Search Journey, and brought back with
+us the only surviving sledge-meter.
+
+These instruments, which indicate by a clockwork arrangement the distance
+travelled in miles and yards, are actuated by a wheel which runs behind
+the sledge. They are of the greatest possible use, especially when
+sledging out of sight of land on the Barrier or Plateau, and we bitterly
+regretted that we had no more. They do not have an easy time on a
+glacier, and we lost the mechanism of one of our three Polar Journey
+meters when on the Beardmore. Dog-driving is hard on them; and
+pony-driving when the ponies are like Christopher plays the very deuce.
+Anyway we found we had only one left for this year, and this was more or
+less a dud. It was mended so far as possible but was never really
+reliable, and latterly was useless. A lot of trouble was taken by Lashly
+to make another with a bicycle wheel from one of our experimental trucks,
+the revolutions of which were marked on a counter which was almost
+exactly similar to one of our anemometer registers. A bicycle wheel of
+course stood much higher than our proper sledge-meters, and a difficulty
+rose in fixing it to the sledge so as to prevent its wobbling and at the
+same time allow it the necessary amount of play.
+
+Meanwhile the mules were being brought on in condition. With daylight and
+improved weather they were exercised with loaded sledges on the sea-ice
+which still remained in South Bay. They went like lambs, and were
+evidently used to the work. Gulab was a troublesome little animal: he had
+no objection to pulling a sledge, but was just ultra-timid. Again and
+again he was got into position for having his traces hitched on, and each
+time some little thing, the flapping of a mitt, the touch of the trace,
+or the feel of the bow of the sledge, frightened him and he was off, and
+the same performance had to be repeated. Once harnessed he was very good.
+The breast harness sent down for them by the Indian Government was used:
+it was excellent; though Oates, I believe, had an idea that collars were
+better. However, we had not got the collars. The mules themselves looked
+very fit and strong: our only doubt was whether their small hoofs would
+sink into soft snow even farther than the ponies had done.
+
+No record of this expedition would be complete without some mention of
+the cases of fire which occurred. The first was in the lazarette of the
+ship on the voyage to Cape Town: it was caused by an overturned lamp and
+easily extinguished. The second was during our first winter in the
+Antarctic, when there was a fire in the motor shed, which was formed by
+full petrol cases built up round the motors, and roofed with a tarpaulin.
+This threatened to be more serious, but was also put out without much
+difficulty. The third and fourth cases were during the winter which had
+just passed, and were both inside Winter Quarters.
+
+Wright wanted a lamp to heat a shed which he was building out of cases
+and tarpaulins for certain of his work. He brought a lamp (not a primus)
+into the hut, and tried to make it work. He spent some time in the
+morning on this, and after lunch Nelson joined him. The lamp was fitted
+with an indicator to show the pressure obtained by pumping. Nelson was
+pumping, kneeling at the end of the table next the bulkhead which divided
+the officers' and men's quarters: his head was level with the lamp, and
+the indicator was not showing a high pressure. Wright was standing close
+by. Suddenly the lamp burst, a rent three inches long appearing in the
+join where the bottom of the oil reservoir is fitted to the rest of the
+bowl. Twenty places were alight immediately, clothing, bedding, papers
+and patches of burning oil were all over the table and floor. Luckily
+everybody was in the hut, for it was blowing a blizzard and minus twenty
+outside. They were very quick, and every outbreak was stopped.
+
+On September 5 it was blowing as if it would rip your wind-clothes off
+you. We were bagging pemmican in the hut when some one said, "Can you
+smell burning?" At first we could not see anything wrong, and Gran said
+it must be some brown paper he had burnt; but after three or four
+minutes, looking upwards, we saw that the top of the chimney piping was
+red hot where it went out through the roof, as was also a large
+ventilator trap which entered the flue at this point. We put salt down
+from outside, and the fire seemed to die down, but shortly afterwards the
+ventilator trap fell on to the table, leaving a cake of burning soot
+exposed. This luckily did not fall, and we raked it down into buckets.
+About a quarter of an hour afterwards all the chimney started blazing
+again, the flames shooting up into the blizzard outside. We got this out
+by pushing snow in at the top, and holding baths and buckets below to
+catch the débris. We then did what we ought to have done at the beginning
+of the winter--took the piping down and cleaned it all out.
+
+Our last fire was a little business. Debenham and I were at Hut Point. I
+noticed that the place was full of smoke, which was quite usual with a
+blubber fire, but afterwards we found that the old hut was alight between
+the two roofs. The inner roof was too shaky to allow one to walk on it,
+and so, at Debenham's suggestion, we bent a tube which was lying about
+and syphoned some water up with complete success. Our more usual fire
+extinguishers were Minimax, and they left nothing to be desired: indeed,
+all they left were the acid stains on the material touched.
+
+From such grim considerations it is a pleasure to turn to the out-of-door
+life we now led. Emperor penguins began to visit us in companies up to
+forty in number: probably they were birds whose maternal or paternal
+instincts had been thwarted at Cape Crozier and had now taken to a
+vagrant life. They suffered, I am afraid, from the loose dogs, and on one
+occasion Debenham was out on the sea-ice with a team of those dogs of
+ours which were useless for serious sledging. He had taken them in hand
+and formed a team which was very creditable to him, if not to themselves.
+On this occasion he had managed with great difficulty to restrain them
+from joining a company of Emperors. The dogs were frantic, the Emperors
+undisturbed. Unable to go himself, one dog called Little Ginger
+unselfishly bit through the harness which restrained two of his
+companions, and Debenham, helplessly holding the straining sledge, could
+only witness the slaughter, which followed.
+
+The first skua gull arrived on October 24, and we knew they would soon
+breed on any level gravel or rock free from snow; and we should see the
+Antarctic petrels again, and perhaps a rare snowy petrel; and the first
+whales would be finding their way into McMurdo Sound. Also the Weddells,
+the common coastal seals of the Antarctic, were now, in the beginning of
+October, leaving the open water and lying out on the ice. They were
+nearly all females, and getting ready to give birth to their young.
+
+The Weddell seal is black on top, and splashed with silver in other
+places. He measures up to 10 feet from nose to tail, eats fish, is
+corpulent and hulking. He sometimes carries four inches of blubber. On
+the ice he is one of the most sluggish of God's creatures, he sleeps
+continually, digests huge meals, and grunts, gurgles, pipes, trills and
+whistles in the most engaging way. In the sea he is transformed into one
+of the most elastic and lithe of beasts, catching his fish and swallowing
+them whole. As you stand over his blow-hole his head appears, and he
+snorts at you with surprise but no fear, opening and shutting his
+nostrils the while as he takes in a supply of fresh air. It is clear that
+they travel for many miles beneath the ice, and I expect they find their
+way from air-hole to air-hole by listening to the noise made by other
+seals. Some of the air-holes are exit and entrance holes as well, and I
+found at least one seal which appeared to have died owing to its opening
+freezing up. They may be heard at times grinding these holes open with
+their teeth (Ponting took some patient cinematographs showing the process
+of sawing the openings to these wells) and their teeth are naturally much
+worn by the time they become old. Wilson states that they are liable to
+kidney trouble: their skin is often irritable, which may be due to the
+drying salt from the sea; and I have seen one seal which was covered with
+a suppurating rash. Their spleens are sometimes enormously enlarged when
+they first come out of the sea on to the ice, which is interesting
+because no one seems to know much about spleens. Speculation was caused
+amongst us by the fact that some of these air-holes had as it were a
+trap-door above them. One day I was on the ice-foot at Cape Evans at a
+time when North Bay was frozen over with about an inch or more of ice. A
+seal suddenly poked his nose up through this ice to get air, and when he
+disappeared a slab which had been raised by his head fell back into this
+trap position. Clearly this was the origin of the door.
+
+Weddell seals and the Hut Point life are inextricably mixed up in my
+recollections of October. Atkinson, Debenham, Dimitri and I went down to
+Hut Point on the 12th, with the two dog-teams. We were to run two depôts
+out on to the Barrier, and Debenham, whose leg prevented his further
+sledging, was to do geological work and a plane table survey. Those of us
+who had borne the brunt of the travelling of the two previous sledge
+seasons were sick of sledging. For my own part I confess I viewed the
+whole proceedings with distaste, and I have no doubt the others did too;
+but the job had to be done if possible, and there was no good in saying
+we were sick of it. From beginning to end of this year men not only
+laboured willingly, but put their hearts and souls into the work. To have
+to do another three months' journey seemed bad enough, and to leave our
+comfortable Winter Quarters three weeks before we started on that journey
+was an additional irritation. We ran down in surface drift: it was thick
+to the south, the wind bit our faces and hands; we could see nothing by
+the time we got in, and the snow was falling heavily. The stable was full
+of beastly snow, the hut was cold and cheerless, and there was no blubber
+for the stove. And if we had only taken the ship and gone home when the
+period for which we had joined was passed, we might have been in London
+for the last six months!
+
+But then the snow stopped, the wind went down, and the mountain tops
+appeared in all their glorious beauty. We were in the middle of a perfect
+summer afternoon, with a warm sun beating on the rocks as we walked round
+to Pram Point. There were many seals here already, and it was clear that
+the place would form a jolly nursery this year, for there must have been
+a lot of movement on the Barrier and the sea-ice was seamed with pressure
+ridges up to twenty feet in height. The hollows were buckled until the
+sea water came up and formed frozen ponds which would thaw later into
+lovely baths. Sheltered from the wind the children could chase their
+ridiculous tails to their hearts' content: their mothers would lie and
+sleep, awakening every now and then to scratch themselves with their long
+finger-nails. Not quite yet, but they were not far away: Lappy, one of
+our dogs who always looked more like a spaniel than anything else, heard
+one under the ice and started to burrow down to him!
+
+Nearly three weeks later I paid several more visits to this delightful
+place. It was thick with seals, big seals and little seals, hairy seals
+and woolly seals: every day added appreciably to the number of babies,
+and to the baaings and bleatings which made the place sound like a great
+sheepfold. In every case where I approached, the mothers opened their
+mouths and bellowed at me to keep away, but they did not come for me
+though I actually stroked one baby. Often when the mother bellowed the
+little one would also open his mouth, producing just the ghost of a
+bellow: not because he seemed afraid of us, but rather because he
+thought it was the right thing to do: as indeed it probably was. One old
+cow was marked with hoops all round her body, like an advertisement of
+Michelin tyres: only the hoops were but an inch apart from one another,
+and seemed to be formed by darker and longer bands of hair: probably
+something to do with the summer moult. Two cows, which scrambled out of
+the same hole one after the other, were fighting, the hinder one biting
+the other savagely as she made an ungainly entrance. The first was not in
+calf, the aggressor, however, was: this may have had something to do with
+it. They were both much cut about and bleeding.
+
+A seal is never so pretty as when he is a baby. With his grey woolly
+coat, which he keeps for a fortnight, his comparatively long flippers and
+tail, and his big dark eyes, he looks very clean and pussy-like. I
+watched one running round and round after his tail, putting his flipper
+under his head as a pillow, and scratching himself, seemingly as happy as
+possible: yet it was pretty cold with some wind.
+
+Little is known of the lighter side of a Weddell's life. It seems
+probable that their courtship is a ponderous affair. About October 26
+Atkinson found an embryo of about a fortnight old, which is an
+interesting stage, and this was preserved with many others we found, but
+all of them were too old to be of any real value. I think there is a good
+deal of variation in the size of the calves at birth. There is certainly
+much difference between the care of individual mothers, some of which are
+most concerned when you approach, while others take little notice or lop
+away from you, leaving their calf to look after itself, or to find
+another mother. Sometimes they are none too careful not to roll or lie on
+their calves.
+
+One afternoon I drove a bull seal towards a cow with a calf. The cow went
+for him bald-headed, with open mouth, bellowing and most disturbed. The
+bull defended himself as best he might but absolutely refused to take the
+offensive. The calf imitated his mother as best he could.
+
+Meanwhile Atkinson and Dimitri took some mule-fodder and dog-biscuit to a
+point twelve miles south of Corner Camp. They started on October 14 with
+the two dog-teams and found a most terrible surface on the Barrier, the
+sledges sometimes sinking as far as the 'fore-and-afters'; the minimum
+temperatures the first two nights were -39° and -25°; strong blizzard at
+Corner Camp; a lie-up for a day and a half, before they could push on in
+wind and drift and lay the depôt. The dogs ran back from Corner Camp to
+Hut Point on October 19, a distance of thirty miles. Three miles from
+Corner Camp three dogs of Atkinson's team fell into a crevasse, one of
+them falling right down to the length of his harness. The rest of the
+team, however, pulled on, and dragged the three dogs out as they went.
+Atkinson lost his driving-stick, which was left standing in the snow and
+served to mark a place to be avoided. Altogether a rather lucky escape:
+two men out alone with two dog-teams are somewhat helpless in case of
+emergency.
+
+On October 25 Dimitri and I started to take a further depôt out to Corner
+Camp with the two dog-teams, pulling about 600 lbs. each. We found a much
+better surface than that experienced by Atkinson; in places really smooth
+and hard. "It is good to be out again in such weather, and it has been a
+very pleasant day." The minimum was only -24° that night, and we reached
+Corner Camp on the afternoon of the next day, following the old tracks
+where possible, and halting occasionally to hunt when we lost them. "Here
+we made the depôt and the dogs had a rest of 3½ hours, and two biscuits.
+It was quaint to see them waiting for more food, for they knew they had
+not had their full whack."[287]
+
+There was plenty of evidence that the Barrier had moved a long way during
+the last year. It had buckled up the sea-ice at Pram Point; there were at
+least three new and well-marked undulations before reaching Corner Camp;
+and the camp itself had moved visibly, judged by the bearings and
+sketches we possessed. I believe the annual movement had not been less
+than half a mile.
+
+Corner Camp is a well-known trap for blizzards on the line of their exit
+at Cape Crozier, and it was clouding up, the barometer falling, and the
+temperature rising rapidly. "So we decided to come back some way, and
+have in the end come right back to the Biscuit Depôt, since it looked
+very threatening to the east. Here the temperature is lower (-15°) and it
+is clearing. Ross Island has been largely obscured, but the clouds are
+opening on Terror. We had a very good run and the dogs pulled splendidly,
+making light work of it: 29 miles for the day, half of it with loaded
+sledges! Lappy's feet are bleeding a good bit, owing to the snow balling
+in between his toes where the hair is unusually long. Bullet, who is fat
+and did not pull, celebrated his arrival in camp by going for Bielchik
+who had pulled splendidly all day! There is much mirage, and Observation
+Hill and Castle Rock are reversed."[288] We reached Hut Point the next
+day. Lappy's feet were still bad, and Dimitri wrapped him in his
+windproof blouse and strapped him on to the sledge. All went well until
+we got on to the sea-ice, when Lappy escaped and arrived an easy first.
+
+Dog-driving is the devil! Before I started, my language would not have
+shamed a Sunday School, and now--if it were not Sunday I would tell you
+more about it. It takes all kinds to make a world and a dog-team. We had
+aristocrats like Osman, and Bolsheviks like Krisravitza, and lunatics
+like Hol-hol. The present-day employer of labour might stand amazed when
+he saw a crowd of prospective workmen go mad with joy at the sight of
+their driver approaching them with a harness in his hands. The most
+ardent trade unionist might boil with rage at the sight of eleven or
+thirteen huskies dragging a heavy load, including their idle master, over
+the floe with every appearance of intense joy. But truth to tell there
+were signs that they were getting rather sick of it, and within a few
+days we were to learn that dogs can chuck their paws in as well as many
+another. They had their king, of course: Osman was that. They combined
+readily and with immense effect against any companion who did not pull
+his weight, or against one who pulled too much. Dyk was unpopular among
+them, for when the team of which he was a member was halted he
+constantly whined and tugged at his harness in his eagerness to go on:
+this did not allow the rest of the team to rest, and they were
+justifiably resentful. Sometimes a team got a down upon a dog without our
+being able to discover their doggy reason. In any case we had to watch
+carefully to prevent them carrying out their intentions, their method of
+punishment always being the same and ending, if unchecked, in what they
+probably called justice, and we called murder.
+
+I have referred to the crusts on the Barrier, where the snow lies in
+layers with an air-space, perhaps a quarter of an inch, or more, between
+them. These will subside as you pass over them, giving the inexperienced
+polar traveller some nasty moments until he learns that they are not
+crevasses. But the dogs thought they were rabbits, and pounced, time
+after time. There was a little dog called Mukaka, who got dragged under
+the sledge in one of the mad penguin rushes the dog-teams made when we
+were landing stores from the Terra Nova: his back was hurt and afterwards
+he died. "He is paired with a fat, lazy and very greedy black dog, Noogis
+by name, and in every march this sprightly little Mukaka will once or
+twice notice that Noogis is not pulling and will jump over the trace,
+bite Noogis like a snap, and be back again in his own place before the
+fat dog knows what has happened."[289]
+
+Then there was Stareek (which is the Russian for old man, starouka being
+old woman). "He is quite a ridiculous 'old man,' and quite the nicest,
+quietest, cleverest old dog I have ever come across. He looks in face as
+though he knew all the wickedness of all the world and all its cares, and
+as if he were bored to death by them."[290] He was the leader of Wilson's
+team on the Depôt Journey, but decided that he was not going out again.
+Thereafter when he thought there was no one looking he walked naturally;
+but if he saw you looking at him he immediately had a frost-bitten paw,
+limped painfully over the snow, and looked so pitiful that only brutes
+like us could think of putting him to pull a sledge. We tried but he
+refused to work, and his final victory was complete.
+
+One more story: Dimitri is telling us how a "funny old Stareek" at Sydney
+came and objected to his treatment of the dogs (which were more than half
+wolves and would eat you without provocation). "He says to me, 'You not
+whip'--I say, 'What ho!' He go and fetch Mr. Meares--he try put me in
+choky. Then he go to Anton--give Anton cigarette and match--he say--'How
+old that horse?' pointing to Hackenschmidt--Anton say, very young--he not
+believe--he go try see Hackenschmidt's teeth--and old Starouka too--and
+Hackenschmidt he draw back and he rush forward and bite old Stareek
+twice, and he fall backwards over case--and ole woman pick him up. He
+very white beard which went so--I not see him again."
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [286] My own diary.
+
+   [287] My own diary.
+
+   [288] My own diary.
+
+   [289] Wilson's Journal, _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 616.
+
+   [290] Ibid.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE SEARCH JOURNEY
+
+From my own diary
+
+    Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
+    Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please.
+                           SPENSER, _The Faerie Queen._
+
+
+_October 28. Hut Point._ A beautiful day. We finished digging out the
+stable for the mules this morning and brought in some blubber this
+afternoon. The Bluff has its cap on, but otherwise the sky is nearly
+clear: there is a little cumulus between White Island and the Bluff, the
+first I have seen this year on the Barrier. It is most noticeable how
+much snow has disappeared off the rocks and shingle here.
+
+_October 29. Hut Point._ The mule party, under Wright, consisting of
+Gran, Nelson, Crean, Hooper, Williamson, Keohane and Lashly, left Cape
+Evans at 10.30 and arrived here at 5 P.M. after a good march in perfect
+weather. They leave Debenham and Archer at the hut, and I am afraid it
+will be dull work for them the next three months. Archer turned out early
+and made some cakes which they have brought with them. They camped for
+lunch seven miles from Cape Evans.
+
+[Illustration: THE MULE PARTY LEAVES CAPE EVANS--October 29, 1912]
+
+This is the start of the Search Journey. Everything which forethought can
+do has been done, and to a point twelve miles south of Corner Camp the
+mules will be travelling light owing to the depôts which have been laid.
+The barometer has been falling the last few days and is now low, while
+the Bluff is overcast. Yet it does not look like blizzard to come. Two
+Adélie penguins, the first, came to Cape Evans yesterday, and a skua was
+seen there on the 24th: so summer is really here.
+
+_October 30. Hut Point._ It is now 8 P.M., and the mules are just off,
+looking very fit, keeping well together, and giving no trouble at the
+start. Their leaders turned in this afternoon, and to-night begins the
+new routine of night marching, just the same as last year. It did look
+thick on the Barrier this afternoon, and it was quite a question whether
+it was advisable for them to start. But it is rolling away now, being
+apparently only fog, which is now disappearing before some wind, or
+perhaps because the sun is losing its power. I think they will have a
+good march.
+
+_November 2_, 5 A.M. _Biscuit Depôt._ Atkinson, Dimitri and I, with two
+dog-teams, left Hut Point last night at 8.30. We have had a coldish
+night's run, -21° when we left after lunch, -17° now. The surface was
+very heavy for the dogs, there being a soft coating of snow over
+everything since we last came this way, due no doubt to the foggy days we
+have been having lately. The sledge-meter makes it nearly 16 miles.
+
+The mule party has two days' start on us, and their programme is to do
+twelve miles a day to One Ton Depôt. Their tracks are fairly clear, but
+there has been some drift from the east since they passed. We picked up
+our cairns well. We are pretty wet, having been running nearly all the
+way.
+
+_November 3._ Early morning. 14½ miles. We are here at Corner Camp, but
+not without a struggle. We left the Biscuit Depôt at 6.30 P.M. yesterday,
+and it is now 4 A.M. The last six miles took us four hours, which is very
+bad going for dogs, and we have all been running most of the way. The
+surface was very bad, crusty and also soft: it was blowing with some low
+drift, and overcast and snowing. We followed the drifted-up mule tracks
+with difficulty and are lucky to have got so far. The temperature has
+been a constant zero.
+
+There is a note here from Wright about the mules, which left here last
+night. They only saw two small crevasses on the way, but Khan Sahib got
+into the tide-crack at the edge of the Barrier, and had to be hauled out
+with a rope. The mules are going fast over the first part of the day, but
+show a tendency to stop towards the end: they keep well together except
+Khan Sahib, who is a slower mule than the others. It is now blowing with
+some drift, but nothing bad, and beyond the Bluff it seems to be clear.
+We are all pretty tired.
+
+_November 4. Early morning._ Well! this has been a disappointing day, but
+we must hope that all will turn out well. We turned out at 2 A.M.
+yesterday and then it was clearing all round, a mild blizzard having been
+blowing since we camped. We started at five in some wind and low drift.
+It was good travelling weather, and except for the first three miles the
+surface has been fair to good, and the last part very good. Yet the dogs
+could not manage their load, which according to programme should go up a
+further 150 lbs. each team here at Dimitri Depôt. One of our dogs, Kusoi,
+gave out, but we managed to get him along tied to the stern of the
+sledge, because the team behind tried to get at him and he realized he
+had better mend his ways. We camped for lunch when Tresor also was pretty
+well done. We were then on a very good surface, but were often pushing
+the sledge to get it along. The mule party were gone when we started
+again, and probably did not see us. We came on to the depôt, but we
+cannot hope to get along far on bad surfaces if we cannot get along on
+good ones. The note left by Wright states that their sledge-meter has
+proved useless, and this leaves all three parties of us with only one,
+which is not very reliable now.
+
+So it has been decided that the dogs must return from 80° 30´, or 81° at
+the farthest, and instead of four mules, as was intended, going on from
+there, five must go on instead. The dogs can therefore now leave behind
+much of their own weights and take on the mules' weights instead. And
+this is the part where the mules' weights are so heavy. Perhaps the new
+scheme is the best, but it puts everything on the mules from 80° 30´: if
+they will do it all is well: if they won't we have nothing to fall back
+on.
+
+_Midnight, November 4-5._ It has been blowing and drifting all day. We
+turned out again at mid-day on the 4th, and re-made the depôt with what
+we were to leave owing to the new programme. This is all rather sad, but
+it can't be helped. It was then blowing a summer blizzard, and we were
+getting frost-bitten when we started, following the mule tracks. There
+were plenty of cairns for us to pick up, and with the lighter loads and a
+very good surface we came along much better. Lunching at eight miles we
+arrived just as the mule party had finished their hoosh preparatory to
+starting, and it has been decided that the mules are not to go on
+to-night, but we will all start marching together to-morrow.
+
+The news from this party is on the whole good, not the least good being
+that the sledge-meter is working again, though not very reliably. They
+are marching well, and at a great pace, except for Khan Sahib. Gulab,
+however, is terribly chafed both by his collar and by his breast harness,
+both of which have been tried. He has a great raw place where this fits
+on one side, and is chafed, but not so badly, on the other side. Lal Khan
+is pulling well, but is eating very little. Pyaree is doing very well,
+but has some difficulty in lifting her leg when in soft snow. Abdullah
+seems to be considered the best mule at present. On the whole good
+hearing.
+
+Wright's sleeping-bag is bad, letting in light through cracks in a good
+many places. But he makes very little of it and does not seem to be
+cold--saying it is good ventilation. The mule cloths, which have a rough
+lining to their outside canvas, are collecting a lot of snow, and all the
+mules are matted with cakes of snow. They are terrible rope-eaters,
+cloth-eaters, anything to eat, though they are not hungry. And they have
+even learnt to pull their picketing buckles undone, and go walking about
+the camp. Indeed Nelson says that the only time when Khan Sahib does not
+cast himself adrift is when he is ready to start on the march.
+
+_November 6. Early morning._ We had a really good lie-in yesterday, and
+after the hard slogging with the dogs during the last few days I for one
+was very glad of it. We came on behind, and in sight of the mules this
+last march, and the change in the dogs was wonderful. Where it had been a
+job to urge them on over quite as good a surface yesterday, to-day for
+some time we could not get off the sledge except for short runs: although
+we had taken 312 lbs. weight off the mules and loaded it on to the dogs.
+
+We had a most glorious night for marching, and it is now bright sunlight,
+and the animals' fur is quite warm where the sun strikes it. We have just
+had a bit of a fight over the dog-food, Vaida going for Dyk, and now the
+others are somewhat excited, and there are constant growlings and
+murmurings.
+
+The camp makes more of a mark than last year, for the mules are dark
+while the ponies were white or grey, and the cloths are brown instead of
+light green. The consequence is that the camp shows up from a long
+distance off. We are building cairns at regular distances, and there
+should be no difficulty in keeping on the course in fair weather at any
+rate. Now in the land of big sastrugi: Erebus is beginning to look small,
+but we could see an unusually big smoke from the crater all day.
+
+_November 7. Early morning._ Not an easy day. It was -9° and overcast
+when we turned out, and the wind was then dying down, but it had been
+blowing up to force 5, with surface drift during the day. We started in a
+bad light and the surface, which was the usual hard surface common here,
+with big sastrugi, was covered by a thin layer of crystals which were
+then falling. This naturally made it very much harder pulling: we with
+the dogs have been running nearly all the twelve miles, and I for one am
+tired. At lunch Atkinson thought he saw a tent away to our right,--the
+very thought of it came as a shock,--but it proved to be a false alarm.
+We have been keeping a sharp look-out for the gear which was left about
+this part by the Last Return Party, but have seen no sign of it.
+
+It is now -14°, but the sun is shining brightly in a clear sky, and it
+feels beautifully warm. It seems a very regular thing for the sky to
+cloud over as the sun gets low towards nightfall--and directly the sun
+begins to rise again the clouds disappear in a most wonderful way.
+
+_November 8. Early morning._ Last night's twelve miles was quite cold for
+the time of year, being -23° at lunch and now -18°. But it is calm, with
+bright sun, and this temperature feels warm. However, there are some
+frost-bites as a result, both Nelson and Hooper having swollen faces. The
+same powder and crystals have been on the surface, but we have carried
+the good Bluff surface so far, being now four miles beyond Bluff Depôt.
+This is fortunate, and to the best of my recollection we were already
+getting on to a soft surface at this point last summer. If so there must
+have been more wind here this year than last, which, according to the
+winter we have had, seems probable.
+
+We made up the Bluff Depôt after lunch, putting up a new flag and
+building up the cairn, leaving two cases of dog-biscuit for the returning
+dog-teams. It is curious that the drift to leeward of the cairn, that is
+N.N.E., was quite soft, the snow all round and the drifts on either side
+being hard--exceptionally hard in fact. Why this drift should remain soft
+when a drift in the same place is usually hard is difficult to explain.
+All is happy in the mule camp. They have given Lal a drink of water and
+he has started to eat, which is good news. Some of the mules seem
+snow-blind, and they are now all wearing their blinkers. I have just
+heard that Gran swung the thermometer at four this morning and found it
+-29°. Nelson's face is a sight--his nose a mere swollen lump,
+frost-bitten cheeks, and his goggles have frosted him where the rims
+touched his face. Poor Marie!
+
+_November 9. Early morning._ Twelve more miles to the good, and we must
+consider ourselves fortunate in still carrying on the same good surface,
+which is almost if not quite as good as that of yesterday. This is the
+only time I have ever seen a hard surface here, not more than fifteen
+miles from One Ton, and it looks as if there had been much higher winds.
+The sastrugi, which have been facing S.W., are now beginning to run a
+little more westerly. I believe this to be quite a different wind
+circulation from Ross Island, which as a whole gets its wind from the
+Bluff. The Bluff is, I believe, the dividing line, though big general
+blizzards sweep over the whole, irrespective of local areas of
+circulation. This was amply corroborated by our journey out here last
+autumn. Well, this is better than then--just round here we had a full
+blizzard and -33°.
+
+_November 10. Early morning._ A perfect night for marching, but about
+-20° and chilly for waiting about. The mules are going well, but Lal Khan
+is thinning down a lot: Abdullah and Khan Sahib are also off their feed.
+Their original allowance of 11 lbs. oats and oilcake has been reduced to
+9 lbs., and they are not eating this. The dogs took another 300 lbs. off
+them to-day, and pulled it very well. The surface has been splendidly
+hard, which is most surprising. Wright does not think that there has been
+an abnormal deposition of snow the last winter; he says it is about 1½
+feet, which is much the same as last year. The mules are generally not
+sinking in more than two inches, but in places, especially latterly, they
+have been in five, or six. This is the first we have had this year of
+crusts, and some of them to-day have been exceptionally big: two at lunch
+must have lasted several seconds. The dogs seem to think the devil is
+after them when one of these goes off, and put on a terrific spurt. It is
+interesting to watch them snuffing in the hoof-marks of the mules, where
+there is evidently some scent left. In these temperatures they are always
+kicking their legs about at the halts. As the sun gained power this
+morning a thick fog came up very suddenly. I believe this is a sign of
+good weather.
+
+[Illustration: THE DOG PARTY LEAVES HUT POINT--November 1, 1912]
+
+_November 11. Early morning. One Ton Depôt._ Wright got a latitude sight
+yesterday putting us six miles from One Ton, and our sledge-meter shows
+5¾, and here we are. More frost-bite this morning, and it was pretty cold
+starting in a fair wind and -7° temperature. We have continued this
+really splendid surface, and now the sastrugi are pointing a little more
+to the south of S.W. While there are not such big mounds, the surface
+does not yet show any signs of getting bad. There were the most beautiful
+cloud-effects as we came along--a deep black to the west, shading into
+long lines of grey and lemon yellow round the sun, with a vertical shaft
+through them, and a bright orange horizon. Now there is a brilliant
+parhelion. Given sun, two days here are never alike. Whatever the
+monotony of the Barrier may be, there is endless variety in the sky, and
+I do not believe that anywhere in the world such beautiful colours are to
+be seen.
+
+I had a fair panic as we came up to the depôt. I did not see that one
+body of the ponies had gone ahead of the others and camped, but ahead of
+the travelling ponies was the depôt, looking very black, and I thought
+that there was a tent. It would be too terrible to find that, though one
+knew that we had done all that we could, if we had done something
+different we could have saved them.
+
+And then we find that the provisions we left here for them in the tank
+are soaked with paraffin. How this has happened is a mystery, but I think
+that the oil in the XS tin, which was very full, must have forced its way
+out in a sudden rise of temperature in a winter blizzard, and though the
+tin was not touching the tank, it has found its way in.
+
+Altogether things seemed rather dismal, but a visit to the mules is
+cheering, for they seem very fit as a whole and their leaders are
+cheerful. There are three sacks of oats here--had we known it would have
+saved a lot of weight--but we didn't, and we have plenty with what we
+have brought, so they will be of little use to us. There is no compressed
+fodder, which would have been very useful, for the animals which are
+refusing the oats would probably eat it.
+
+Gulab has a very bad chafe, but he is otherwise fit--and it does not seem
+possible in this life to kill a mule because of chafing. It is a great
+deal to know that he does not seem to be hurt by it, and pulls away
+gallantly. Crean says he had to run a mile this morning with Rani. Marie
+says he is inventing some new ways of walking, one step forward and one
+hop back, in order to keep warm when leading Khan Sahib. Up to date we
+cannot say that the Fates have been unkind to us.
+
+_November 12. Early morning. Lunch_ 2.30 A.M. I am afraid our
+sledge-meters do not agree over this morning's march. The programme is to
+do thirteen miles a day if possible from here: that is 7½ before lunch
+and 5½ afterwards. We could see two cairns of last year on our right as
+we came along. We have got on to a softer surface now and there is bad
+news of Lal Khan, and it will depend on this after-lunch march whether he
+must be shot this evening or not. It was intended to shoot a mule two
+marches from One Ton, but till just lately it had not been thought that
+it must be Lal Khan. He is getting very slow, and came into camp with
+Khan Sahib: the trouble of course is that he will not eat: he has hardly
+eaten, they say, a day's ration since he left Hut Point, and he can't
+work on nothing. It is now -16°, with a slight southerly wind.
+
+_Nearly mid-day. 11-12 miles south of One Ton._ We have found them--to
+say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it--it is too bad for words.
+The tent was there, about half-a-mile to the west of our course, and
+close to a drifted-up cairn of last year. It was covered with snow and
+looked just like a cairn, only an extra gathering of snow showing where
+the ventilator was, and so we found the door.
+
+It was drifted up some 2-3 feet to windward. Just by the side two pairs
+of ski sticks, or the topmost half of them, appeared over the snow, and a
+bamboo which proved to be the mast of the sledge.
+
+Their story I am not going to try and put down. They got to this point on
+March 21, and on the 29th all was over.
+
+Nor will I try and put down what there was in that tent. Scott lay in the
+centre, Bill on his left, with his head towards the door, and Birdie on
+his right, lying with his feet towards the door.
+
+Bill especially had died very quietly with his hands folded over his
+chest. Birdie also quietly.
+
+Oates' death was a very fine one. We go on to-morrow to try and find his
+body. He was glad that his regiment would be proud of him.
+
+They reached the Pole a month after Amundsen.
+
+We have everything--records, diaries, etc. They have among other things
+several rolls of photographs, a meteorological log kept up to March 13,
+and, considering all things, a great many geological specimens. _And they
+have stuck to everything._ It is magnificent that men in such case should
+go on pulling everything that they have died to gain. I think they
+realized their coming end a long time before. By Scott's head was
+tobacco: there is also a bag of tea.
+
+Atkinson gathered every one together and read to them the account of
+Oates' death given in Scott's Diary: Scott expressly states that he
+wished it known. His (Scott's) last words are:
+
+"For God's sake take care of our people."
+
+Then Atkinson read the lesson from the Burial Service from Corinthians.
+Perhaps it has never been read in a more magnificent cathedral and under
+more impressive circumstances--for it is a grave which kings must envy.
+Then some prayers from the Burial Service: and there with the floor-cloth
+under them and the tent above we buried them in their sleeping-bags--and
+surely their work has not been in vain.[291]
+
+That scene can never leave my memory. We with the dogs had seen Wright
+turn away from the course by himself and the mule party swerve
+right-handed ahead of us. He had seen what he thought was a cairn, and
+then something looking black by its side. A vague kind of wonder
+gradually gave way to a real alarm. We came up to them all halted. Wright
+came across to us. 'It is the tent.' I do not know how he knew. Just a
+waste of snow: to our right the remains of one of last year's cairns, a
+mere mound: and then three feet of bamboo sticking quite alone out of the
+snow: and then another mound, of snow, perhaps a trifle more pointed. We
+walked up to it. I do not think we quite realized--not for very long--but
+some one reached up to a projection of snow, and brushed it away. The
+green flap of the ventilator of the tent appeared, and we knew that the
+door was below.
+
+Two of us entered, through the funnel of the outer tent, and through the
+bamboos on which was stretched the lining of the inner tent. There was
+some snow--not much--between the two linings. But inside we could see
+nothing--the snow had drifted out the light. There was nothing to do but
+to dig the tent out. Soon we could see the outlines. There were three men
+here.
+
+Bowers and Wilson were sleeping in their bags. Scott had thrown back the
+flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand was stretched over Wilson, his
+lifelong friend. Beneath the head of his bag, between the bag and the
+floor-cloth, was the green wallet in which he carried his diary. The
+brown books of diary were inside: and on the floor-cloth were some
+letters.
+
+Everything was tidy. The tent had been pitched as well as ever, with the
+door facing down the sastrugi, the bamboos with a good spread, the tent
+itself taut and shipshape. There was no snow inside the inner lining.
+There were some loose pannikins from the cooker, the ordinary tent gear,
+the personal belongings and a few more letters and records--personal and
+scientific. Near Scott was a lamp formed from a tin and some lamp wick
+off a finnesko. It had been used to burn the little methylated spirit
+which remained. I think that Scott had used it to help him to write up to
+the end. I feel sure that he had died last--and once I had thought that
+he would not go so far as some of the others. We never realized how
+strong that man was, mentally and physically, until now.
+
+We sorted out the gear, records, papers, diaries, spare clothing,
+letters, chronometers, finnesko, socks, a flag. There was even a book
+which I had lent Bill for the journey--and he had brought it back.
+Somehow we learnt that Amundsen had been to the Pole, and that they too
+had been to the Pole, and both items of news seemed to be of no
+importance whatever. There was a letter there from Amundsen to King
+Haakon. There were the personal chatty little notes we had left for them
+on the Beardmore--how much more important to us than all the royal
+letters in the world.
+
+We dug down the bamboo which had brought us to this place. It led to the
+sledge, many feet down, and had been rigged there as a mast. And on the
+sledge were some more odds and ends--a piece of paper from the biscuit
+box: Bowers' meteorological log: and the geological specimens, thirty
+pounds of them, all of the first importance. Drifted over also were the
+harnesses, ski and ski-sticks.
+
+Hour after hour, so it seemed to me, Atkinson sat in our tent and read.
+The finder was to read the diary and then it was to be brought
+home--these were Scott's instructions written on the cover. But Atkinson
+said he was only going to read sufficient to know what had happened--and
+after that they were brought home unopened and unread. When he had the
+outline we all gathered together and he read to us the Message to the
+Public, and the account of Oates' death, which Scott had expressly wished
+to be known.
+
+We never moved them. We took the bamboos of the tent away, and the tent
+itself covered them. And over them we built the cairn.
+
+I do not know how long we were there, but when all was finished, and the
+chapter of Corinthians had been read, it was midnight of some day. The
+sun was dipping low above the Pole, the Barrier was almost in shadow. And
+the sky was blazing--sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds. The cairn
+and Cross stood dark against a glory of burnished gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Copy of Note left at the Cairn, over the Bodies_
+
+    _November 12th, 1912._
+            Lat. 79° 50´ S.
+
+    This Cross and Cairn are erected over the bodies of Capt. Scott,
+    C.V.O., R.N.; Dr. E. A. Wilson, M.B., B.A. Cantab.; Lt. H. R.
+    Bowers, Royal Indian Marines. A slight token to perpetuate their
+    gallant and successful attempt to reach the Pole. This they did
+    on the 17th January 1912 after the Norwegian expedition had
+    already done so. Inclement weather and lack of fuel was the cause
+    of their death.
+
+    Also to commemorate their two gallant comrades, Capt. L. E. G.
+    Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons, who walked to his death in a
+    blizzard to save his comrades, about 18 miles south of this
+    position; also of Seaman Edgar Evans, who died at the foot of the
+    Beardmore Glacier.
+
+    The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of
+    the Lord.
+
+                 Relief Expedition.
+    (Signed by all members of the party.)
+
+My diary goes on:
+
+_Midnight, November 12-13._ I cannot think that anything which could be
+done to give these three great men--for great they were--a fitting grave
+has been left undone.
+
+A great cairn has been built over them, a mark which must last for many
+years. That we can make anything that will be permanent on this Barrier
+is impossible, but as far as a lasting mark can be made it has been done.
+On this a cross has been fixed, made out of ski. On either side are the
+two sledges, fixed upright and dug in.
+
+The whole is very simple and most impressive.
+
+On a bamboo standing by itself is left the record which I have copied
+into this book, and which has been signed by us all.
+
+We shall leave some provisions here, and go on lightly laden to see if we
+can find Titus Oates' body: and so give it what burial we can.
+
+We start in about an hour, and I for one shall be glad to leave this
+place.
+
+I am very very sorry that this question of the shortage of oil has
+arisen. We in the First Return Party were most careful with our
+measurement--having a ruler of Wright's and a piece of bamboo with which
+we did it: measuring the total height of oil in each case, and then
+dividing up the stick accordingly with the ruler: and we were _always_
+careful to take _a little less than we were entitled to_, which was
+stated to me, and stated by Birdie in his depôt notes, to be one-third of
+everything in the depôt.
+
+How the shortage arose is a mystery. And they eleven miles from One Ton
+and plenty!
+
+Titus did not show his foot till about three days before he died. The
+foot was then a great size, and almost every night it would be
+frost-bitten again. Then the last day at lunch he said he could go on no
+more--but they said he must: he wanted them to leave him behind in his
+bag. That night he turned in, hoping never to wake: but he woke, and then
+he asked their advice: they said they must all go on together. A thick
+blizzard was blowing, and he said, after a bit, "Well, I am just going
+outside, and I may be some time." They searched for him but could not
+find him.
+
+They had a terrible time from 80° 30´ on to their last camp. There Bill
+was very bad, and Birdie and the Owner had to do the camping.
+
+And then, eleven miles from plenty, they had _nine days of blizzard, and
+that was the end._
+
+They had a good spread on their tent, and their ski-sticks were standing,
+but their ski were drifted up on the ground.
+
+The tent was in excellent condition--only down some of the poles there
+were some chafes.
+
+They had been trying a spirit lamp when all the oil was gone.
+
+At 88° or so they were getting temperatures from -20° to -30°. At 82°,
+10,000 feet lower, it was regularly down to -47° in the night-time, and
+-30° during the day: for no explainable reason.
+
+Bill's and Birdie's feet got bad--the Owner's feet got bad last.
+
+It is all too horrible--I am almost afraid to go to sleep now.
+
+_November 13. Early morning._ We came on just under seven miles with a
+very cold moist wind hurting our faces all the way. We have left most of
+the provisions to pick up again. We purpose going on thirteen miles
+to-morrow and search for Oates' body, and then turn back and get the
+provisions back to Hut Point and see what can be done over in the west to
+get up that coast.
+
+We hope to get two mules back to Hut Point. If possible, we want to
+communicate with Cape Evans.
+
+Atkinson has been quite splendid in this very trying time.
+
+_November 14. Early morning._ It has been a miserable march. We had to
+wait some time after hoosh to let the mules get ahead. Then we went on in
+a cold raw fog and some head wind, with constant frost-bites. The surface
+has been very bad all day for the thirteen miles: if we had been walking
+in arrowroot it would have been much like this was. At lunch the
+temperature was -14.7°.
+
+Then on when it was drifting with the wind in our faces and in a bad
+light. What we took to be the mule party ahead proved to be the old pony
+walls 26 miles from One Ton. There was here a bit of sacking on the
+cairn, and Oates' bag. Inside the bag was the theodolite, and his
+finnesko and socks. One of the finnesko was slit down the front as far as
+the leather beckets, evidently to get his bad foot into it. This was
+fifteen miles from the last camp, and I suppose they had brought on his
+bag for three or four miles in case they might find him still alive.
+Half-a-mile from our last camp there was a very large and quite
+unmistakable undulation, one-quarter to one-third of a mile from crest to
+crest: the pony walls behind us disappeared almost as soon as we started
+to go down, and reappeared again on the other side. There were, I feel
+sure, other rolls, but this was the largest. We have seen no sign of
+Oates' body.
+
+About half an hour ago it started to blow a blizzard, and it is now
+thick, but the wind is not strong. The mules, which came along well
+considering the surface, are off their feed, and this may be the reason.
+
+Dimitri saw the Cairn with the Cross more than eight miles away this
+morning, and in a good light it would be seen from much farther off.
+
+_November 15. Early morning._ We built a cairn to mark the spot near
+which Oates walked out to his death, and we placed a cross on it. Lashed
+to the cross is a record, as follows:
+
+    Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman, Captain L. E. G. Oates
+    of the Inniskilling Dragoons. In March 1912, returning from the
+    Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard to try and
+    save his comrades, beset by hardship. This note is left by the
+    Relief Expedition. 1912.
+
+This was signed by Atkinson and myself.
+
+We saw the cairn for a long way in a bad light as we came back to-day.
+
+The original plan with which we started from Cape Evans was, if the Party
+was found where we could still bear out sufficiently to the eastward to
+have a good chance of missing the pressure caused by the Beardmore, to go
+on and do what we could to survey the land south of the Beardmore: for
+this was the original plan of Captain Scott for this year's sledging. But
+as things are I do not think there can be much doubt that we are doing
+right in losing no time in going over to the west of McMurdo Sound to see
+whether we can go up to Evans Coves, and help Campbell and his party.
+
+We brought on Oates' bag. The theodolite was inside.
+
+A thickish blizzard blew all day yesterday, but it was clear and there
+was only surface drift when we turned out for the night march. Then again
+as we came along, the sky became overcast--all except over the land,
+which remains clear these nights when everything else is obscured. We
+noticed the same thing last year. Now the wind, which had largely
+dropped, has started again and it is drifting. We have had wind and drift
+on four out of the last five days.
+
+_November 16. Early morning._ When we were ready to start with the dogs
+it was blowing a thick blizzard, but the mules had already started some
+time, when it was not thick. We had to wait until nearly 4 A.M. before we
+could start, and came along following tracks. It is very warm and the
+surface is covered with loose snow, but the slide in it seems good. We
+found the mules here at the Cairn and Cross, having been able to find
+their way partly by the old tracks.
+
+I have been trying to draw the grave. Of all the fine monuments in the
+world none seems to me more fitting; and it is also most impressive.
+
+_November 17. Early morning._ I think we are all going crazy together--at
+any rate things are pretty difficult. The latest scheme is to try and
+find a way over the plateau to Evans Coves, trying to strike the top of a
+glacier and go down it. There can be no good in it: if ever men did it,
+they would arrive about the time the ship arrived there too, and their
+labour would be in vain. If they got there and the ship did not arrive,
+there is another party stranded. They would have to wait till February 15
+or 20 to see if the ship was coming, and then there would be no
+travelling back over the plateau: even if we could do it those men there
+could not.
+
+It was almost oppressively hot yesterday--but I'll never grumble about
+heat again. It has now cleared a lot and we came along on the cairns
+easily--but on a very soft downy surface, and the travelling has not been
+fast. We bring with us the Southern Party's gear. The sledge, which was
+the 10-foot which they brought on from the bottom of the glacier, has
+been left.
+
+_November 18. Early morning._ I am thankful to say that the plateau
+journey idea has been given up.
+
+Once more we have come along in thick, snowy weather. If we had not men
+on ski to steer we could never keep much of a course, but Wright is
+steering us very straight, keeping a check on the course by watching the
+man behind, and so far we have been picking up all the cairns. This
+morning we passed the pony walls made on November 10. And yet they were
+nearly level with the ground; so they are not much of a mark. Yank has
+just had a disagreement with Kusoi--for Kusoi objected to his trying to
+get at the meat on the sledge. The mules have been sinking in a long way,
+and are marching very slowly. Pyaree eats the tea-leaves after meals:
+Rani and Abdullah divide a rope between them at the halts; and they have
+eaten the best part of a trace since our last camp. These animals eat
+anything but their proper food, and this some of them will hardly touch.
+
+It cleared a bit for our second march, and we have done our 13 miles, but
+it was very slow travelling. Now it is drifting as much as ever. Yank,
+that redoubtable puller, has just eaten himself loose for the third time
+since hoosh. This time I had to go down to the pony walls to get him.
+
+We have had onions for the first time to-night in our hoosh--they are
+most excellent. Also we have been having some Nestlé's condensed milk
+from One Ton Depôt--which I do not want to see again, the depôt I mean.
+Peary must know what he is about, taking milk as a ration: the sweetness
+is a great thing, but it would be heavy: we have been having it with
+temperature down to -14°, when it was quite manageable, but I don't know
+what it would be like in colder temperatures.
+
+_November 19. Early morning._ We have done our 13 miles to-day and have
+got on to a much better surface. By what we and others have seen before,
+it seems that last winter must have generally been an exceptional one.
+There have been many parties out here: we have never before seen this
+wind-swept surface, on which it is often too slippery to walk
+comfortably. I do not know what temperatures the Discovery had in April,
+but it was much colder last April than it was the year before. And then
+nothing had been experienced down here to compare with the winds last
+winter.
+
+There was a high wind and a lot of drift yesterday during the day, and
+now it is blowing and drifting as usual. During the last nine days there
+has only been one, the day we found the tent, when it has not been
+drifting during all or part of the day. It is all right for travelling
+north, but we should be having very uncomfortable marches if we were
+marching the other way.
+
+_November 20. Early morning._ To-day we have seemed to be walking in
+circles through space. Wright, by dint of having a man behind to give him
+a fixed point to steer upon, has steered us quite straight, and we have
+picked up every cairn. The pony party camped for lunch by two cairns, but
+they never knew the two cairns were there until a piece of paper blew
+away and had to be fetched: and it was caught against one of the cairns.
+They left a flag there to guide us, and though we saw and brought along
+the flag, we never saw the cairns. The temperature is -22.5°, and it is
+now blowing a full blizzard. All this snow has hitherto been lying on the
+ground and making a very soft surface, for though the wind has always
+been blowing it has never been very strong. This snow and wind, which
+have now persisted for nine out of the last ten days, make most
+dispiriting marches; for there is nothing to see, and finding tracks or
+steering is a constant strain. We are certainly lucky to have been able
+to march as we have.
+
+_Note on Mules._--The most ardent admirer of mules could not say that
+they were a success. The question is whether they might be made so. There
+was really only one thing against them but that is a very important
+one--they would not eat on the Barrier. From the time they went away to
+the day they returned (those that did return, poor things) they starved
+themselves, and yet they pulled biggish loads for 30 days.
+
+If they would have eaten they would have been a huge success. They
+travelled faster than the ponies and, with one exception, kept together
+better than the ponies. If both were eating their ration it is
+questionable whether a good mule or a good pony is to be preferred. Our
+mules were of the best, and they were beautifully trained and equipped by
+the Indian Government: yet on November 13, a fortnight from the start,
+Wright records, "mules are a poor substitute for ponies. Not many will
+see Hut Point again, I think. Doubt if any would have got much farther
+than this if surfaces had been as bad this year as last."[292]
+
+Though they would not eat oats, compressed fodder and oil-cake, they were
+quite willing to eat all kinds of other things. If we could have arrived
+at the mule equivalent to a vegetarian diet they might have pulled to the
+Beardmore without stopping. The nearest to this diet at which we could
+arrive was saennegrass, tea-leaves, tobacco ash and rope--all of which
+were eaten with gusto. But supplies were very limited. They ate
+dog-biscuit as long as they thought we were not looking--but as soon as
+they realized they were meant to eat it they went on hunger-strike again.
+But during halts at cairns Rani and Pyaree would stand solemnly chewing
+the same piece of rope from different ends. Abdullah always led the line,
+and followed Wright's ski tracks faithfully, so that if another man was
+ahead and Wright turned aside Abdullah always turned too. It was quite a
+manoeuvre for Wright to read the sledge-meter at the back of the
+sledge. As for Begum: "Got Begum out of a soft patch by rolling her
+over."[293]
+
+On the whole the mules failed to adapt themselves to this life, and as
+such must at present be considered to be a failure for Antarctic work.
+Certainly those of our ponies which had the best chance to adapt
+themselves went farthest, such as Nobby and Jimmy Pigg, both of whom had
+experience of Barrier sledging before they started on the Polar Journey.
+
+_November 21. Early morning._ It has cleared at last, the disturbance
+rolling away to the east during our first march. The surface was very bad
+and the mules were not going well. At this time last year many of the
+ponies were still quite difficult to make stand just before starting. But
+these mules start off now most dolefully. I am afraid they will not all
+get back to Hut Point.
+
+Two and a half miles after lunch, i.e. just over forty miles from the
+depôt, we turned out to the eastward and found the gear left by the
+Second Return Party, when Evans was so ill. The theodolite, which
+belonged to Evans, is I believe there, but though we dug all round we
+were unable to find it. The ski were all upright, drifted to within six
+inches of the shoes. Most of the gear was clothing, which we have left,
+with the skis, in the tank. We brought on a roll of Birdie's photographs,
+taken on the plateau, and three geological specimens: deep-seated rocks I
+think. This was all of importance that there was there.
+
+The N Ration, which we have now come to, consists of about 40 oz. of
+food. At present, doing the work we are doing, and with these high
+temperatures, -23° when we started, for instance, and -17° now, the men
+do not want it. For what it was intended for, hard man-hauling, it would
+probably be an excellent ration, and very satisfying.
+
+_November 22. Early morning._ We could not have had a more perfect night
+to march. Yesterday at 4 P.M., holding the thermometer in the sun, the
+spirit rose to 30°: it was almost too warm in the tent. The cairns show
+very plainly--in such weather navigation of this kind would be dead easy.
+But they are already being eaten away and toppling. The pony walls are
+drifted level--huge drifts, quite hard, running up to windward and down
+to lee.
+
+The dogs are getting more hungry, and want to get at the mules, which
+makes them go better. They went very well to-day, but too fast once, for
+we had a general mix-up: Bieliglass under the sledge and the rest all
+tangled up and ready for a fight at the first chance. How one of the
+front pair of dogs got under the sledge is a mystery.
+
+Among the Polar Party's gear is a letter to the King of Norway. It was
+left by the Norwegians for Scott to take back. It is wrapped in a piece
+of thin windcloth with one dark check line in it. Coarser and rougher
+and, I should say, heavier than our Mandelbergs.
+
+_November 23. Early morning._ We were to make Dimitri Depôt this morning,
+but we came on in a fog, and the mule party camped after running down the
+distance. Wright came back and said, "If we have passed it, it's over
+there"--and as he pointed the depôt showed--not more than 200 yards away.
+So that is all right. We, the dog party, go on in advance to-morrow, so
+that no time may be lost, and if the ice is still good, Atkinson will get
+over to Cape Evans.
+
+[Illustration: 'ATCH']
+
+[Illustration: TITUS OATES]
+
+_November 24. Early morning._ A glut of foot-walloping in soft snow and
+breaking crusts. We have done between 17 and 18 miles to-day. We saw no
+crevasses, and have marked the course well, building up the cairns and
+leaving two flags--so the mule party should be all right. The dogs were
+going well behind the ponies, but directly we went ahead they seemed to
+lose heart. I think they are tired of the Barrier: a cairn now awakens
+little interest: they know it is only a mark and it does not mean a
+camp: they are all well fed, and fairly fat and in good condition. With a
+large number of dogs I suppose one team can go ahead when it is going
+well--changing places with another--each keeping the others going. But I
+do not think that these dogs now will do much more; but they have already
+done as much as any dogs of which we have any record.
+
+The land is clearing gradually. I have never seen such contrasts of black
+rock and white snow, and White Island was capped with great ranges of
+black cumulus, over which rose the pure white peaks of the Royal Society
+Range in a blue sky. The Barrier itself was quite a deep grey, making a
+beautiful picture. And now Observation Hill and Castle Rock are in front.
+I don't suppose I shall ever see this view again: but it is associated
+with many memories of returning to home and plenty after some long and
+hard journeys: in some ways I feel sorry--but I have seen it often
+enough.
+
+_November 25. Early morning._ We came in 24 miles with our loads, to find
+the best possible news--Campbell's Party, all well, are at Cape Evans.
+They arrived here on November 6, starting from Evans Coves on September
+30. What a relief it is, and how different things seem now! It is the
+first real bit of good news since February last--it seems an age. We mean
+to get over the sea-ice, if possible, as soon as we can, and then we
+shall hear their story.
+
+_November 26. Early morning._ Starting from Hut Point about 6.45 P.M.
+last evening, we came through by about 9 P.M., and sat up talking and
+hearing all the splendid news till past 2 A.M. this morning.
+
+All the Northern Party look very fat and fit, and they are most cheerful
+about the time they have had, and make light of all the anxious days they
+must have spent and their hard times.
+
+I cannot write all their story. When the ship was battling with the pack
+to try and get in to them they had open water in Terra Nova Bay to the
+horizon, as seen from 200 feet high. They prepared for the winter,
+digging their hut into a big snowdrift a mile from where they were
+landed. They thought that the ship had been wrecked--or that every one
+had been taken off from here, and that then the ship had been blown north
+by a succession of furious gales which they had and could not get back.
+They never considered seriously the possibility of sledging down the
+coast before the winter. They got settled in and were very warm--so warm
+that in August they did away with one door, of which they had three, of
+biscuit boxes and sacking.
+
+Their stove was the bottom of an oil tin, and they cooked by dripping
+blubber on to seal bones, which became soaked with the blubber, and
+Campbell tells me they cooked almost as quickly as a primus. Of course
+they were filthy. Their main difficulty was dysentery and ptomaine
+poisoning.
+
+Their stories of the winter are most amusing--of "Placing the Plug, or
+Sports in the Antarctic"; of lectures; of how dirty they were; of their
+books, of which they had four, including David Copperfield. They had a
+spare tent, which was lucky, for the bamboos of one of theirs were blown
+in during a big wind, and the men inside it crept along the piedmont on
+hands and knees to the igloo and slept two in a bag. How the seal seemed
+as if they would give out, and they were on half rations and very hungry:
+and they were thinking they would have to come down in the winter, when
+they got two seals: of the fish they got from the stomach of a seal--"the
+best feed they had"--the blubber they have eaten.
+
+But they were buried deep in the snow and quite warm. Big winds all the
+time from the W.S.W., cold winds off the plateau--in the igloo they could
+hear almost nothing outside--how they just had a biscuit a day at times,
+sugar on Sundays, etc.
+
+And so all is well in this direction, and we have done right in going
+south, and we have at least succeeded in getting all records. I suppose
+any news is better than no news.
+
+_Evening._ The Pole Party photos of themselves at the Pole and at the
+Norwegian cairn (a Norwegian tent, post and two flags) are very good
+indeed--one film is unused, one used on these two subjects: taken with
+Birdie's camera. All the party look fit and well, and their clothes are
+not iced up. It was calm at the time: the surface looks rather soft.
+
+Atkinson and Campbell have gone to Hut Point with one dog-team, and we
+are all to forgather here. The ice still seems good from here to Hut
+Point: all else open water as far as can be seen.
+
+A steady southerly wind has been blowing here for three days now. The
+mules should get into Hut Point to-day.
+
+It is the happiest day for nearly a year--almost the only happy one.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [291] My own diary.
+
+   [292] Wright's diary.
+
+   [293] Wright's diary.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY
+
+    DON JUAN. This creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a
+    coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He
+    may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He
+    can only be enslaved while he is spiritually weak enough to
+    listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a
+    piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will
+    later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely
+    reckless of the consequences to himself personally....
+
+    DON JUAN. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic
+    idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than
+    the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will
+    arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the
+    filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.
+
+    THE STATUE. Bosh!
+
+    DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for.
+    Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for
+    human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty
+    gladly.
+
+    BERNARD SHAW, _Man and Superman._
+
+
+V. THE POLE AND AFTER
+
+
+_The Polar Party._               _Depôts._
+
+SCOTT                             One Ton [79° 29´].
+WILSON                            Upper Barrier or Mount Hooper [80° 32´].
+BOWERS                            Middle Barrier [81° 35´].
+OATES                             Lower Barrier [82° 47´].
+Seaman EVANS                      Shambles Camp [N. of Gateway].
+                                  Lower Glacier [S. of Gateway].
+                                  Middle Glacier [Cloudmaker].
+                                  Upper Glacier [Mt. Darwin].
+                                  Three Degree [86° 56´].
+                                  1½ Degree [88° 29´].
+                                  Last Depôt [89° 32´].
+
+Scott returned from the Discovery Expedition impressed by the value of
+youth in polar work; but the five who went forward from 87° 32´ were all
+grown men, chosen from a body which was largely recruited on a basis of
+youth. Four of them were men who were accustomed to take responsibility
+and to lead others. Four of them had wide sledging experience and were
+accustomed to cold temperatures. They were none of them likely to get
+flurried in emergency, to panic under any circumstances, or to wear
+themselves out by loss of nervous control. Scott and Wilson were the most
+highly strung of the party: I believe that the anxiety which Scott
+suffered served as a stimulus against mental monotony rather than as a
+drain upon his energy. Scott was 43, Wilson 39, Evans 37, Oates 32, and
+Bowers 28 years old. Bowers was exceptionally old for his age.
+
+In the event of one man crocking a five-man party may be better able to
+cope with the situation, but with this doubtful exception Scott had
+nothing to gain and a good deal to lose by taking an extra man to the
+Pole. That he did so means, I think, that he considered his position a
+very good one at this time. He was anxious to take as many men with him
+as possible. I have an impression that he wanted the army represented as
+well as the navy. Be that as it may, he took five men: he decided to take
+the extra man at the last moment, and in doing so he added one more link
+to a chain. But he was content; and four days after the Last Return Party
+left them, as he lay out a blizzard, quite warm in his sleeping-bag
+though the mid-day temperature was -20°, he wrote a long diary praising
+his companions very highly indeed "so our five people are perhaps as
+happily selected as it is possible to imagine."[294] He speaks of Seaman
+Evans as being a giant worker with a really remarkable headpiece. There
+is no mention of the party feeling the cold, though they were now at the
+greatest height of their journey; the food satisfied them thoroughly.
+There is no shadow of trouble here: only Evans has got a nasty cut on his
+hand!
+
+There were more disadvantages in this five-man party than you might
+think. There was 5½ weeks' food for four men: five men would eat this in
+about four weeks. In addition to the extra risk of breakdown, there was
+a certain amount of discomfort involved, for everything was arranged for
+four men as I have already explained; the tent was a four-man tent, and
+an inner lining had been lashed to the bamboos making it smaller still:
+when stretched out for the night the sleeping-bags of the two outside men
+must have been partly off the floor-cloth, and probably on the snow:
+their bags must have been touching the inner tent and collecting the rime
+which was formed there: cooking for five took about half an hour longer
+in the day than cooking for four--half an hour off your sleep, or half an
+hour off your march? I do not believe that five men on the lid of a
+crevasse are as safe as four. Wilson writes that the stow of the sledge
+with five sleeping-bags was pretty high: this makes it top-heavy and
+liable to capsize in rough country.
+
+But what would have paralysed anybody except Bowers was the fact that
+they had only four pairs of ski between the five of them. To slog along
+on foot, in soft snow, in the middle of four men pulling rhythmically on
+ski, must have been tiring and even painful; and Birdie's legs were very
+short. No steady swing for him, and little chance of getting his mind off
+the job in hand. Scott could never have meant to take on five men when he
+told his supporting team to leave their ski behind, only four days before
+he reorganized.
+
+"May I be there!" wrote Wilson of the men chosen to travel the ice-cap to
+the Pole. "About this time next year may I be there or thereabouts! With
+so many young bloods in the heyday of youth and strength beyond my own I
+feel there will be a most difficult task in making choice towards the
+end." "I should like to have Bill to hold my hand when we get to the
+Pole," said Scott.
+
+Wilson _was_ there and his diary is that of an artist, watching the
+clouds and mountains, of a scientist observing ice and rock and snow, of
+a doctor, and above all of a man with good judgment. You will understand
+that the thing which really interested him in this journey was the
+acquisition of knowledge. It is a restrained, and for the most part a
+simple, record of facts. There is seldom any comment, and when there is
+you feel that, for this very reason, it carries more weight. Just about
+this time: "December 24. Very promising, thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon
+march": "Christmas Day, and a real good and happy one with a very long
+march": "January 1, 1912. We had only 6 hours' sleep last night by a
+mistake, but I had mine solid in one piece, actually waking in exactly
+the same position as I fell asleep in 6 hours before--never moved":
+"January 2. We were surprised to-day by seeing a Skua gull flying over
+us--evidently hungry but not weak. Its droppings, however, were clear
+mucus, nothing in them at all. It appeared in the afternoon and
+disappeared again about ½ hour after." And then on January 3: "Last night
+Scott told us what the plans were for the South Pole. Scott, Oates,
+Bowers, Petty Officer Evans and I are to go to the Pole. Teddie Evans is
+to return from here to-morrow with Crean and Lashly. Scott finished his
+week's cooking to-night and I begin mine to-morrow." Just that.
+
+The next day Bowers wrote: "I had my farewell breakfast in the tent with
+Teddy Evans, Crean and Lashly. After so little sleep the previous night I
+rather dreaded the march. We gave our various notes, messages and letters
+to the returning party and started off. They accompanied us for about a
+mile before returning, to see that all was going well. Our party were on
+ski with the exception of myself: I first made fast to the central span,
+but afterwards connected up to the toggle of the sledge, pulling in the
+centre between the inner ends of Captain Scott's and Dr. Wilson's traces.
+This was found to be the best place, as I had to go my own step.
+
+"Teddy and party gave us three cheers, and Crean was half in tears. They
+have a feather-weight sledge to go back with of course, and ought to run
+down their distance easily.[295] We found we could manage our load
+easily, and did 6.3 miles before lunch, completing 12.5 by 7.15 P.M. Our
+marching hours are nine per day. It is a long slog with a well-loaded
+sledge, and more tiring for me than the others, as I have no ski.
+However, as long as I can do my share all day and keep fit it does not
+matter much one way or the other.
+
+"We had our first northerly wind on the plateau to-day, and a deposit of
+snow crystals made the surface like sand latterly on the march. The
+sledge dragged like lead. In the evening it fell calm, and although the
+temperature was -16° it was positively pleasant to stand about outside
+the tent and bask in the sun's rays. It was our first calm since we
+reached the summit too. Our socks and other damp articles which we hang
+out to dry at night become immediately covered with long feathery
+crystals exactly like plumes. Socks, mitts and finnesko dry splendidly up
+here during the night. We have little trouble with them compared with
+spring and winter journeys. I generally spread my bag out in the sun
+during the 1½ hours of lunch time, which gives the reindeer hair a chance
+to get rid of the damage done by the deposit of breath and any
+perspiration during the night."[296]
+
+Plenty of sun, heavy surfaces, iridescent clouds ... the worst windcut
+sastrugi I have seen, covered with bunches of crystals like gorse ... ice
+blink all round ... hairy faces and mouths dreadfully iced up on the
+march ... hot and sweaty days' work, but sometimes cold hands in the
+loops of the ski sticks ... windy streaky cirrus in every direction, all
+thin and filmy and scrappy ... horizon clouds all being wafted about....
+These are some of the impressions here and there in Wilson's diary during
+the first ten days of the party's solitary march. On the whole he is
+enjoying himself, I think.
+
+You should read Scott's diary yourself and form your own opinions, but I
+think that after the Last Return Party left him there is a load off his
+mind. The thing had worked so far, it was up to _them_ now: that great
+mass of figures and weights and averages, those years of preparation,
+those months of anxiety--no one of them had been in vain. They were up
+to date in distance, and there was a very good amount of food, probably
+more than was necessary to see them to the Pole and off the plateau on
+full rations. Best thought of all, perhaps, the motors with their
+uncertainties, the ponies with their suffering, the glacier with its
+possibilities of disaster, all were behind: and the two main supporting
+parties were safely on their way home. Here with him was a fine party,
+tested and strong, and only 148 miles from the Pole.
+
+I can see them, working with a business-like air, with no fuss and no
+unnecessary talk, each man knowing his job and doing it: pitching the
+tent: finishing the camp work and sitting round on their sleeping-bags
+while their meal was cooked: warming their hands on their mugs: saving a
+biscuit to eat when they woke in the night: packing the sledge with a
+good neat stow: marching with a solid swing--we have seen them do it so
+often, and they did it jolly well.
+
+And the conditions did not seem so bad. "To-night it is flat calm; the
+sun so warm that in spite of the temperature we can stand about outside
+in the greatest comfort. It is amusing to stand thus and remember the
+constant horrors of our situation as they were painted for us: the sun is
+melting the snow on the ski, etc. The plateau is now very flat, but we
+are still ascending slowly. The sastrugi are getting more confused,
+predominant from the S.E. I wonder what is in store for us. At present
+everything seems to be going with extraordinary smoothness.... We feel
+the cold very little, the great comfort of our situation is the excellent
+drying effect of the sun.... Our food continues to amply satisfy. What
+luck to have hit on such an excellent ration. We really are an
+excellently found party ... we lie so very comfortably, warmly clothed in
+our comfortable bags, within our double-walled tent."[297]
+
+Then something happened.
+
+While Scott was writing the sentences you have just read, he reached the
+summit of the plateau and started, ever so slightly, to go downhill. The
+list of corrected altitudes given by Simpson in his meteorological
+report are of great interest: Cape Evans 0, Shambles Camp 170, Upper
+Glacier Depôt 7151, Three Degree Depôt 9392, One and a Half Degree Depôt
+9862, South Pole 9072 feet above sea-level.[298]
+
+What happened is not quite clear, but there is no doubt that the surface
+became very bad, that the party began to feel the cold, and that before
+long Evans especially began to crock. The immediate trouble was bad
+surfaces. I will try and show why these surfaces should have been met in
+what was, you must remember, now a land which no man had travelled
+before.
+
+Scott laid his One and a Half Degree Depôt (i.e. 1½° or 90 miles from
+the Pole) on January 10. That day they started to go down, but for
+several days before that the plateau had been pretty flat. Time after
+time in the diaries you find crystals--crystals--crystals: crystals
+falling through the air, crystals bearding the sastrugi, crystals lying
+loose upon the snow. Sandy crystals, upon which the sun shines and which
+made pulling a terrible effort: when the sky clouds over they get along
+much better. The clouds form and disperse without visible reason. And
+generally the wind is in their faces.
+
+Wright tells me that there is certain evidence in the records which may
+explain these crystals. Halos are caused by crystals and nearly all those
+logged from the bottom of the Beardmore to the Pole and back were on this
+stretch of country, where the land was falling. Bowers mentions that the
+crystals did not appear in all directions, which goes to show that the
+air was not always rising, but sometimes was falling and therefore not
+depositing its moisture. There is no doubt that the surfaces met were
+very variable, and it may be that the snow lay in waves. Bowers mentions
+big undulations for thirty miles before the Pole, and other inequalities
+may have been there which were not visible. There is sometimes evidence
+that these crystals were formed on the windward side of these waves, and
+carried over by a strong wind and deposited on the lee side.
+
+It is common knowledge that as you rise in the atmosphere so the pressure
+decreases: in fact, it is usual to measure your height by reading the
+barometer. Now the air on this last stretch to the Pole was rising, for
+the wind was from the south, and, as we have seen, the plateau here was
+sloping down towards the Pole. The air, driven uphill by this southerly
+wind, was forced to rise. As it rose it expanded, because the pressure
+was less. Air which has expanded without any heat being given to it from
+outside, that is in a heat-proof vessel, is said to expand by adiabatic
+expansion. Such air tends first to become saturated, and then to
+precipitate its moisture. These conditions were approximately fulfilled
+on the plateau, where the air expanded as it rose, but could get little
+or no heat from outside. The air therefore precipitated its moisture in
+the form of crystals.
+
+Owing to the rapid changes in surfaces (on one occasion they depôted
+their ski because they were in a sea of sastrugi, and had to walk back
+for them because the snow became level and soft again) Scott guessed that
+the coastal mountains could not be far away, and we now know that the
+actual distance was only 130 miles. About the same time Scott mentions
+that he had been afraid that they were weakening in their pulling, but he
+was reassured by getting a patch of good surface and finding the sledge
+coming as easily as of old. On the night of January 12, eight days after
+leaving the Last Return Party, he writes: "At camping to-night every one
+was chilled and we guessed a cold snap, but to our surprise the actual
+temperature was higher than last night, when we could dawdle in the sun.
+It is most unaccountable why we should suddenly feel the cold in this
+manner: partly the exhaustion of the march, but partly some damp quality
+in the air, I think. Little Bowers is wonderful; in spite of my protest
+he _would_ take sights after we had camped to-night, after marching in
+the soft snow all day when we have been comparatively restful on
+ski."[299] On January 14, Wilson wrote: "A very cold grey thick day with
+a persistent breeze from the S.S.E. which we all felt considerably, but
+temperature was only -18° at lunch and -15° in the evening. Now just over
+40 miles from the Pole." Scott wrote the same day: "Again we noticed the
+cold; at lunch to-day all our feet were cold but this was mainly due to
+the bald state of our finnesko. I put some grease under the bare skin and
+found it make all the difference. Oates seems to be feeling the cold and
+fatigue more than the rest of us, but we are all very fit." And on
+January 15, lunch: "We were all pretty done at camping."[300] And Wilson:
+"We made a depôt [The Last Depôt] of provisions at lunch time and went on
+for our last lap with nine days' provision. We went much more easily in
+the afternoon, and on till 7.30 P.M. The surface was a funny mixture of
+smooth snow and sudden patches of sastrugi, and we occasionally appear to
+be on a very gradual down gradient and on a slope down from the west to
+east." In the light of what happened afterwards I believe that the party
+was not as fit at this time as might have been expected ten days before,
+and that this was partly the reason why they felt the cold and found the
+pulling so hard. The immediate test was the bad surface, and this was the
+result of the crystals which covered the ground.
+
+Simpson has worked out[301] that there is an almost constant pressure
+gradient driving the air on the plateau northwards parallel to the 146°
+E. meridian, and parallel also to the probable edge of the plateau. The
+mean velocity for the months of this December and January was about 11
+miles an hour. During this plateau journey Scott logged wind force 5 and
+over on 23 occasions, and this wind was in their faces from the Beardmore
+to the Pole, and at their backs as they returned. A low temperature when
+it is calm is paradise compared to a higher temperature with a wind, and
+it is this constant pitiless wind, combined with the altitude and low
+temperatures, which has made travelling on the Antarctic plateau so
+difficult.
+
+While the mean velocity of wind during the two midsummer months seems to
+be fairly constant, there is a very rapid fall of temperature in
+January. The mean actual temperature found on the plateau this year in
+December was -8.6°, the minimum observed being -19.3°. Simpson remarks
+that "it must be accounted as one of the wonders of the Antarctic that it
+contains a vast area of the earth's surface where the mean temperature
+during the warmest month is more than 8° below the Fahrenheit zero, and
+when throughout the month the highest temperature was only +5.5° F."[302]
+But the mean temperature on the plateau dropped 10° in January to -18.7°,
+the minimum observed being -29.7°. These temperatures have to be combined
+with the wind force described above to imagine the conditions of the
+march. In the light of Scott's previous plateau journey[303] and
+Shackleton's Polar Journey[304] this wind was always expected by our
+advance parties. But there can be no doubt that the temperature falls as
+solar radiation decreases more rapidly than was generally supposed. Scott
+probably expected neither such a rapid fall of temperature, nor the very
+bad surfaces, though he knew that the plateau would mean a trying time,
+and indeed it was supposed that it would be much the hardest part of the
+journey.
+
+On the night of January 15, Scott wrote "it ought to be a certain thing
+now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the Norwegian flag
+forestalling ours."[305] They were 27 miles from the Pole.
+
+The story of the next three days is taken from Wilson's diary:
+
+"_January 16._ We got away at 8 A.M. and made 7.5 miles by 1.15, lunched,
+and then in 5.3 miles came on a black flag and the Norwegians' sledge,
+ski, and dog tracks running about N.E. and S.W. both ways. The flag was
+of black bunting tied with string to a fore-and-after which had evidently
+been taken off a finished-up sledge. The age of the tracks was hard to
+guess but probably a couple of weeks--or three or more. The flag was
+fairly well frayed at the edges. We camped here and examined the tracks
+and discussed things. The surface was fairly good in the forenoon -23°
+temperature, and all the afternoon we were coming downhill with again a
+rise to the W., and a fall and a scoop to the east where the Norwegians
+came up, evidently by another glacier."
+
+[Illustration: AMUNDSEN'S POLHEIM--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+"_January 17._ We camped on the Pole itself at 6.30 P.M. this evening. In
+the morning we were up at 5 A.M. and got away on Amundsen's tracks going
+S.S.W. for three hours, passing two small snow cairns, and then, finding
+the tracks too much snowed up to follow, we made our own bee-line for the
+Pole: camped for lunch at 12.30 and off again from 3 to 6.30 P.M. It blew
+from force 4 to 6 all day in our teeth with temperature -22°, the coldest
+march I ever remember. It was difficult to keep one's hands from freezing
+in double woollen and fur mitts. Oates, Evans, and Bowers all have pretty
+severe frost-bitten noses and cheeks, and we had to camp early for lunch
+on account of Evans' hands. It was a very bitter day. Sun was out now and
+again, and observations taken at lunch, and before and after supper, and
+at night, at 7 P.M. and at 2 A.M. by our time. The weather was not clear,
+the air was full of crystals driving towards us as we came south, and
+making the horizon grey and thick and hazy. We could see no sign of cairn
+or flag, and from Amundsen's direction of tracks this morning he has
+probably hit a point about 3 miles off. We hope for clear weather
+to-morrow, but in any case are all agreed that he can claim prior right
+to the Pole itself. He has beaten us in so far as he made a race of it.
+We have done what we came for all the same and as our programme was made
+out. From his tracks we think there were only 2 men, on ski, with plenty
+of dogs on rather low diet. They seem to have had an oval tent. We sleep
+one night at the Pole and have had a double hoosh with some last bits of
+chocolate, and X's cigarettes have been much appreciated by Scott and
+Oates and Evans. A tiring day: now turning into a somewhat starchy frozen
+bag. To-morrow we start for home and shall do our utmost to get back in
+time to send the news to the ship."
+
+"_January 18._ Sights were taken in the night, and at about 5 A.M. we
+turned out and marched from this night camp about 3¾ miles back in a
+S.E.ly direction to a spot which we judged from last night's sights to be
+the Pole. Here we lunched camp: built a cairn: took photos: flew the
+Queen Mother's Union Jack and all our own flags. We call this the Pole,
+though as a matter of fact we went ½ mile farther on in a S. easterly
+direction after taking further sights to the actual final spot, and here
+we left the Union Jack flying. During the forenoon we passed the
+Norwegians' last southerly camp: they called it Polheim and left here a
+small tent with Norwegian and Fram flags flying, and a considerable
+amount of gear in the tent: half reindeer sleeping-bags, sleeping-socks,
+reinskin trousers 2 pair, a sextant, and artif[icial] horizon, a
+hypsometer with all the thermoms broken, etc. I took away the spirit-lamp
+of it, which I have wanted for sterilizing and making disinfectant
+lotions of snow. There were also letters there: one from Amundsen to King
+Haakon, with a request that Scott should send it to him. There was also a
+list of the five men who made up their party, but no news as to what they
+had done. I made some sketches here, but it was blowing very cold, -22°.
+Birdie took some photos. We found no sledge there though they said there
+was one: it may have been buried in drift. The tent was a funny little
+thing for 2 men, pegged out with white line and tent-pegs of yellow wood.
+I took some strips of blue-grey silk off the tent seams: it was perished.
+The Norskies had got to the Pole on December 16, and were here from 15th
+to 17th. At our lunch South Pole Camp we saw a sledge-runner with a black
+flag about ½ mile away blowing from it. Scott sent me on ski to fetch it,
+and I found a note tied to it showing that this was the Norskies' actual
+final Pole position. I was given the flag and the note with Amundsen's
+signature, and I got a piece of the sledge-runner as well. The small
+chart of our wanderings shows best how all these things lie. After lunch
+we made 6.2 miles from the Pole Camp to the north again, and here we are
+camped for the night."[306]
+
+The following remarks on the South Pole area were written by Bowers in
+the Meteorological Log, apparently on January 17 and 18: "Within 120
+miles of the South Pole the sastrugi crossed seem to indicate belts of
+certain prevalent winds. These were definitely S.E.ly. up to about Lat.
+78° 30´ S., where the summit was passed and we started to go definitely
+downhill toward the Pole. An indefinite area was then crossed S.E.ly,
+S.ly and S.W.ly sastrugi. Later, in about 79° 30´ S., those from the
+S.S.W. predominated. At this point also the surface of the ice-cap became
+affected by undulations running more or less at right angles to our
+course. These resolved themselves into immense waves some miles in
+extent,[307] with a uniform surface both in hollow and crust. The whole
+surface was carpeted with a deposit of ice-crystals which, while we were
+there, fell sometimes in the form of minute spicules and sometimes in
+plates. These caused an almost continuous display of parhelia.
+
+"The flags left a month previously by the Norwegian expedition were
+practically undamaged and so could not have been exposed to very heavy
+wind during that time. Their sledging and ski tracks, where marked, were
+raised slightly, also the dogs' footprints. In the neighbourhood of their
+South Pole Camp the drifts were S.W.ly, but there was one S.S.E. drift to
+leeward of tent. They had pitched their tent to allow for S.W.ly wind.
+For walking on foot the ground was all pretty soft, and on digging down
+the crystalline structure of the snow was found to alter very little, and
+there were no layers of crust such as are found on the Barrier. The snow
+seems so lightly put together as not to cohere, and makes very little
+water for its bulk when melted. The constant and varied motion of cirrus,
+and the forming and motion of radiant points, shows that in the upper
+atmosphere at this time of the year there is little or no
+tranquillity."[308]
+
+That is the bare bones of what was without any possible doubt a great
+shock. Consider! These men had been out 2½ months and were 800 miles
+from home. The glacier had been a heavy grind: the plateau certainly not
+worse, probably better, than was expected, as far as that place where the
+Last Return Party left them. But then, in addition to a high altitude, a
+head wind, and a temperature which averaged -18.7°, came this shower of
+ice-crystals, turning the surface to sand, especially when the sun was
+out. They were living in cirrus clouds, and the extraordinary state seems
+to have obtained that the surface of the snow was colder when the sun was
+shining than when clouds checked the radiation from it. They began to
+descend. Things began to go not quite right: they felt the cold,
+especially Oates and Evans: Evans' hands also were wrong--ever since the
+seamen made that new sledge. The making of that sledge must have been
+fiercely cold work: one of the hardest jobs they did. I am not sure that
+enough notice has been taken of that.
+
+And then: "The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole.
+It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal
+companions. Many thoughts come and much discussion have we had. To-morrow
+we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we
+can compass. All the day-dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return."
+"The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those
+expected ... companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.... Evans
+had such cold hands we camped for lunch ... the wind is blowing hard, T.
+-21°, and there is that curious damp, cold feeling in the air which
+chills one to the bone in no time.... Great God! this is an awful
+place...."[309]
+
+This is not a cry of despair. It is an ejaculation provoked by the
+ghastly facts. Even now in January the temperature near the South Pole is
+about 24° lower than it is during the corresponding month of the year
+(July) near the North Pole,[310] and if it is like this in mid-summer,
+what is it like in mid-winter? At the same time it was, with the
+exception of the sandy surfaces, what they had looked for, and every
+detail of organization was working out as well as if not better than had
+been expected.
+
+Bowers was so busy with the meteorological log and sights which were
+taken in terribly difficult circumstances that he kept no diary until
+they started back. Then he wrote on seven consecutive days, as follows:
+
+"_January 19._ A splendid clear morning with a fine S.W. wind blowing.
+During breakfast time I sewed a flap attachment on to the hood of my
+green hat so as to prevent the wind from blowing down my neck on the
+march. We got up the mast and sail on the sledge and headed north,
+picking up Amundsen's cairn and our outgoing tracks shortly afterwards.
+Along these we travelled till we struck the other cairn and finally the
+black flag where we had made our 58th outward camp. We then with much
+relief left all traces of the Norwegians behind us, and headed on our own
+track till lunch camp, when we had covered eight miles.
+
+"In the afternoon we passed No. 2 cairn of the British route, and fairly
+slithered along before a fresh breeze. It was heavy travelling for me,
+not being on ski, but one does not mind being tired if a good march is
+made. We did sixteen [miles] altogether for the day, and so should pick
+up our Last Depôt to-morrow afternoon. The weather became fairly thick
+soon after noon, and at the end of the afternoon there was considerable
+drift, with a mist caused by ice-crystals, and parhelion."
+
+"_January 20._ Good sailing breeze again this morning. It is a great
+pleasure to have one's back to the wind instead of having to face it. It
+came on thicker later, but we sighted the Last Depôt soon after 1 P.M.
+and reached it at 1.45 P.M. The red flag on the bamboo pole was blowing
+out merrily to welcome us back from the Pole, with its supply of
+necessaries of life below. We are absolutely dependent upon our depôts to
+get off the plateau alive, and so welcome the lonely little cairns
+gladly. At this one, called the Last Depôt, we picked up four days' food,
+a can of oil, some methylated spirit (for lighting purposes) and some
+personal gear we had left there. The bamboo was bent on to the
+floor-cloth as a yard for our sail instead of a broken sledge-runner of
+Amundsen's which we had found at the Pole and made a temporary yard of.
+
+"As we had marched extra long in the forenoon in order to reach the
+depôt, our afternoon march was shorter than usual. The wind increased to
+a moderate gale with heavy gusts and considerable drift. We should have
+had a bad time had we been facing it. After an hour I had to shift my
+harness aft so as to control the motions of the sledge. Unfortunately the
+surface got very sandy latterly, but we finished up with 16.1 miles to
+our credit and camped in a stiff breeze, which resolved itself into a
+blizzard a few hours later. I was glad we had our depôt safe."
+
+"_January 21._ Wind increased to force 8 during night with heavy drift.
+In the morning it was blizzing like blazes and marching was out of the
+question. The wind would have been of great assistance to us, but the
+drift was so thick that steering a course would have been next to
+impossible. We decided to await developments and get under weigh as soon
+as it showed any signs of clearing. Fortunately it was shortlived, and
+instead of lasting the regulation two days it eased up in the afternoon,
+and 3.45 found us off with our sail full. It was good running on ski but
+soft plodding for me on foot. I shall be jolly glad to pick up my dear
+old ski. They are nearly 200 miles away yet, however. The breeze fell
+altogether latterly and I shifted up into my old place as middle number
+of the five. Our distance completed was 5.5 miles, when camp was made
+again. Our old cairns are of great assistance to us, also the tracks,
+which are obliterated in places by heavy drift and hard sastrugi, but can
+be followed easily."
+
+"_January 22._ We came across Evans' sheepskin boots this morning. They
+were almost covered up after their long spell since they fell off the
+sledge [on January 11]. The breeze was fair from the S.S.W. but got
+lighter and lighter. At lunch camp we had completed 8.2 miles. In the
+afternoon the breeze fell altogether, and the surface, acted on by the
+sun, became perfect sawdust. The light sledge pulled by five men came
+along like a drag without a particle of slide or give. We were all glad
+to camp soon after 7 P.M. I think we were all pretty tired out. We did
+altogether 19.5 miles for the day. We are only thirty miles from the 1½
+Degree Depôt, and should reach it in two marches with any luck." [The
+minimum temperature this night was -30° (uncorrected).]
+
+"_January 23._ Started off with a bit of a breeze which helped us a
+little [temperature -28°]. After the first two hours it increased to
+force 4, S.S.W., and filling the sail we sped along merrily, doing 8¾
+miles before lunch. In the afternoon it was even stronger, and I had to
+go back on the sledge and act as guide and brakesman. We had to lower the
+sail a bit, but even then she ran like a bird.
+
+"We are picking up our old cairns famously. Evans got his nose
+frost-bitten, not an unusual thing with him, but as we were all getting
+pretty cold latterly we stopped at a quarter to seven, having done 16½
+miles. We camped with considerable difficulty owing to the force of the
+wind."[311]
+
+The same night Scott wrote: "We came along at a great pace, and should
+have got within an easy march of our [One and a Half Degree] Depôt had
+not Wilson suddenly discovered that Evans' nose was frost-bitten--it was
+white and hard. We thought it best to camp at 6.45. Got the tent up with
+some difficulty, and now pretty cosy after good hoosh.
+
+"There is no doubt Evans is a good deal run down--his fingers are badly
+blistered and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent
+frost-bites. He is very much annoyed with himself, which is not a good
+sign. I think Wilson, Bowers and I are as fit as possible under the
+circumstances. Oates gets cold feet. One way and another I shall be glad
+to get off the summit!... The weather seems to be breaking up."[312]
+
+Bowers resumes the tale:
+
+"_January 24._ Evans has got his fingers all blistered with frost-bites,
+otherwise we are all well, but thinning, and in spite of our good rations
+get hungrier daily. I sometimes spend much thought on the march with
+plans for making a pig of myself on the first opportunity. As that will
+be after a further march of 700 miles they are a bit premature.
+
+"It was blowing a gale when we started and it increased in force. Finally
+with the sail half down, one man detached tracking ahead and Titus and I
+breaking back, we could not always keep the sledge from overrunning. The
+blizzard got worse and worse till, having done only seven miles, we had
+to camp soon after twelve o'clock. We had a most difficult job camping,
+and it has been blowing like blazes all the afternoon. I think it is
+moderating now, 9 P.M. We are only seven miles from our depôt and this
+delay is exasperating."[313]
+
+[Scott wrote: "This is the second full gale since we left the Pole. I
+don't like the look of it. Is the weather breaking up? If so, God help
+us, with the tremendous summit journey and scant food. Wilson and Bowers
+are my stand-by. I don't like the easy way in which Oates and Evans get
+frost-bitten."[314]]
+
+"_January 25._ It was no use turning out at our usual time (5.45 A.M.),
+as the blizzard was as furious as ever; we therefore decided on a late
+breakfast and no lunch unless able to march. We have only three days'
+food with us and shall be in Queer Street if we miss the depôt. Our bags
+are getting steadily wetter, so are our clothes. It shows a tendency to
+clear off now (breakfast time) so, D.V., we may march after all. I am in
+tribulation as regards meals now as we have run out of salt, one of my
+favourite commodities. It is owing to Atkinson's party taking back an
+extra tin by mistake from the Upper Glacier Depôt. Fortunately we have
+some depôted there, so I will only have to endure another two weeks
+without it.
+
+"10 P.M.--We have got in a march after all, thank the Lord. Assisted by
+the wind we made an excellent rundown to our One and a Half Degree Depôt,
+where the big red flag was blowing out like fury with the breeze, in
+clouds of driving drift. Here we picked up 1¼ cans of oil and one week's
+food for five men, together with some personal gear depôted. We left the
+bamboo and flag on the cairn. I was much relieved to pick up the depôt:
+now we only have one other source of anxiety on this endless snow summit,
+viz. the Three Degree Depôt in latitude 86° 56´ S.
+
+"In the afternoon we did 5.2 miles. It was a miserable march, blizzard
+all the time and our sledge either sticking in sastrugi or overrunning
+the traces. We had to lower the sail half down, and Titus and I hung on
+to her. It was most strenuous work, as well as much colder than pulling
+ahead. Most of the time we had to brake back with all our strength to
+keep the sledge from overrunning. Bill got a bad go of snow glare from
+following the track without goggles on.
+
+"This day last year we started the Depôt Journey. I did not think so
+short a time would turn me into an old hand at polar travelling, neither
+did I imagine at the time that I would be returning from the Pole
+itself."[315]
+
+Wilson was very subject to these attacks of snow blindness, and also to
+headaches before blizzards. I have an idea that his anxiety to sketch
+whenever opportunity offered, and his willingness to take off his goggles
+to search for tracks and cairns, had something to do with it. This attack
+was very typical. "I wrote this at lunch and in the evening had a bad
+attack of snow blindness." ... "Blizzard in afternoon. We only got in a
+forenoon march. Couldn't see enough of the tracks to follow at all. My
+eyes didn't begin to trouble me till to-morrow [yesterday], though it was
+the strain of tracking and the very cold drift which we had to-day that
+gave me this attack of snow glare." ... "Marched on foot in the afternoon
+as my eyes were too bad to go on ski. We had a lot of drift and wind and
+very cold. Had ZuSO_4 and cocaine in my eyes at night and didn't get to
+sleep at all for the pain--dozed about an hour in the morning only." ...
+"Marched on foot again all day as I couldn't see my way on ski at all,
+Birdie used my ski. Eyes still very painful and watering. Tired out by
+the evening, had a splendid night's sleep, and though very painful across
+forehead to-night they are much better."[316]
+
+The surface was awful: in his diary of the day after they left the Pole
+(January 19) Wilson wrote an account of it. "We had a splendid wind right
+behind us most of the afternoon and went well until about 6 P.M. when the
+sun came out and we had an awful grind until 7.30 when we camped. The sun
+comes out on sandy drifts, all on the move in the wind, and temp. -20°,
+and gives us an absolutely awful surface with no glide at all for ski or
+sledge, and just like fine sand. The weather all day has been more or
+less overcast with white broken alto-stratus, and for 3 degrees above the
+horizon there is a grey belt looking like a blizzard of drift, but this
+in reality is caused by a constant fall of minute snow crystals, very
+minute. Sometimes instead of crystal plates the fall is of minute
+agglomerate spicules like tiny sea-urchins. The plates glitter in the sun
+as though of some size, but you can only just see them as pin-points on
+your burberry. So the spicule collections are only just visible. Our
+hands are never warm enough in camp to do any neat work now. The weather
+is always uncomfortably cold and windy, about -23°, but after lunch
+to-day I got a bit of drawing done."[317]
+
+All the joy had gone from their sledging. They were hungry, they were
+cold, the pulling was heavy, and two of them were not fit. As long ago as
+January 14 Scott wrote that Oates was feeling the cold and fatigue more
+than the others[318] and again he refers to the matter on January
+20.[319] On January 19 Wilson wrote: "We get our hairy faces and mouths
+dreadfully iced up on the march, and often one's hands very cold indeed
+holding ski-sticks. Evans, who cut his knuckle some days ago at the last
+depôt, has a lot of pus in it to-night." January 20: "Evans has got 4 or
+5 of his finger-tips badly blistered by the cold. Titus also his nose and
+cheeks--al[so] Evans and Bowers." January 28: "Evans has a number of
+badly blistered finger-ends which he got at the Pole. Titus' big toe is
+turning blue-black." January 31: "Evans' finger-nails all coming off,
+very raw and sore." February 4: "Evans is feeling the cold a lot, always
+getting frost-bitten. Titus' toes are blackening, and his nose and cheeks
+are dead yellow. Dressing Evans' fingers every other day with boric
+vaseline: they are quite sweet still." February 5: "Evans' fingers
+suppurating. Nose very bad [hard] and rotten-looking."[320]
+
+Scott was getting alarmed about Evans, who "has dislodged two
+finger-nails to-night; his hands are really bad, and, to my surprise, he
+shows signs of losing heart over it. He hasn't been cheerful since the
+accident."[321] "The party is not improving in condition, especially
+Evans, who is becoming rather dull and incapable." "Evans' nose is almost
+as bad as his fingers. He is a good deal crocked up."[322]
+
+Bowers' diary, quoted above, finished on January 25, on which day they
+picked up their One and a Half Degree Depôt. "I shall sleep much better
+with our provision bag full again," wrote Scott that night. "Bowers got
+another rating sight to-night--it was wonderful how he managed to observe
+in such a horribly cold wind." They marched 16 miles the next day, but
+got off the outward track, which was crooked. On January 27 they did 14
+miles on a "very bad surface of deep-cut sastrugi all day, until late in
+the afternoon when we began to get out of them."[323] "By Jove, this is
+tremendous labour," said Scott.
+
+They were getting into the better surfaces again: 15.7 miles for January
+28, "a fine day and a good march on very decent surface."[324] On January
+29 Bowers wrote his last full day's diary: "Our record march to-day.
+With a good breeze and improving surface we were soon in among the double
+tracks where the supporting party left us. Then we picked up the
+memorable camp where I transferred to the advance party. How glad I was
+to change over. The camp was much drifted up and immense sastrugi were
+everywhere, S.S.E. in direction and S.E. We did 10.4 miles before lunch.
+I was breaking back on sledge and controlling; it was beastly cold and my
+hands were perished. In the afternoon I put on my dogskin mitts and was
+far more comfortable. A stiff breeze with drift continues: temperature
+-25°. Thank God our days of having to face it are over. We completed 19.5
+miles [22 statute] this evening, and so are only 29 miles from our
+precious [Three Degree] Depôt. It will be bad luck indeed if we do not
+get there in a march and a half anyhow."[325]
+
+Nineteen miles again on January 30, but during the previous day's march
+Wilson had strained a tendon in his leg. "I got a nasty bruise on the
+Tib[ialis] ant[icus] which gave me great pain all the afternoon." "My
+left leg exceedingly painful all day, so I gave Birdie my ski and hobbled
+alongside the sledge on foot. The whole of the Tibialis anticus is
+swollen and tight, and full of teno synovitis, and the skin red and
+oedematous over the shin. But we made a very fine march with the help of
+a brisk breeze." January 31: "Again walking by the sledge with swollen
+leg but not nearly so painful. We had 5.8 miles to go to reach our Three
+Degree Depôt. Picked this up with a week's provision and a line from
+Evans, and then for lunch an extra biscuit each, making 4 for lunch and
+1/10 whack of butter extra as well. Afternoon we passed cairn where
+Birdie's ski had been left. These we picked up and came on till 7.30 P.M.
+when the wind which had been very light all day dropped, and with temp.
+-20° it felt delightfully warm and sunny and clear. We have 1/10 extra
+pemmican in the hoosh now also. My leg pretty swollen again
+to-night."[326] They travelled 13.5 miles that day, and 15.7 on the next.
+"My leg much more comfortable, gave me no pain, and I was able to pull
+all day, holding on to the sledge. Still some oedema. We came down a
+hundred feet or so to-day on a fairly steep gradient."[327]
+
+They were now approaching the crevassed surfaces and the ice-falls which
+mark the entrance to the Beardmore Glacier, and February 2 was marked by
+another accident, this time to Scott. "On a very slippery surface I came
+an awful 'purler' on my shoulder. It is horribly sore to-night and
+another sick person added to our tent--three out of five injured, and the
+most troublesome surfaces to come. We shall be lucky if we get through
+without serious injury. Wilson's leg is better, but might easily get bad
+again, and Evans' fingers.... We have managed to get off 17 miles. The
+extra food is certainly helping us, but we are getting pretty hungry. The
+weather is already a trifle warmer, the altitude lower and only 80 miles
+or so to Mount Darwin. It is time we were off the summit.--Pray God
+another four days will see us pretty well clear of it. Our bags are
+getting very wet and we ought to have more sleep."[328]
+
+They had been spending some time in finding the old tracks. But they had
+a good landfall for the depôt at the top of the glacier and on February 3
+they decided to push on due north, and to worry no more for the present
+about tracks and cairns. They did 16 miles that day. Wilson's diary runs:
+"Sunny and breezy again. Came down a series of slopes, and finished the
+day by going up one. Enormous deep-cut sastrugi and drifts and shiny
+egg-shell surface. Wind all S.S.E.ly. To-day at about 11 P.M. we got our
+first sight again of mountain peaks on our eastern horizon.... We crossed
+the outmost line of crevassed ridge top to-day, the first on our return.
+
+[Illustration: BUCKLEY ISLAND--Where The Fossils Were Found.]
+
+"_February 4._ 18 miles. Clear cloudless blue sky, surface drift. During
+forenoon we came down gradual descent including 2 or 3 irregular terrace
+slopes, on crest of one of which were a good many crevasses. Southernmost
+were just big enough for Scott and Evans to fall in to their waists, and
+very deceptively covered up. They ran east and west. Those nearer the
+crest were the ordinary broad street-like crevasses, well lidded. In the
+afternoon we again came to a crest, before descending, with street
+crevasses, and one we crossed had a huge hole where the lid had fallen
+in, big enough for a horse and cart to go down. We have a great number of
+mountain tops on our right and south of our beam as we go due north now.
+We are now camped just below a great crevassed mound, on a mountain top
+evidently."
+
+"_February 5._ 18.2 miles. We had a difficult day, getting in amongst a
+frightful chaos of broad chasm-like crevasses. We kept too far east and
+had to wind in and out amongst them and cross multitudes of bridges.
+We then bore west a bit and got on better all the afternoon and got round
+a good deal of the upper disturbances of the falls here."
+
+[Scott wrote: "We are camped in a very disturbed region, but the wind has
+fallen very light here, and our camp is comfortable for the first time
+for many weeks."[329]]
+
+"_February 6._ 15 miles. We again had a forenoon of trying to cut
+corners. Got in amongst great chasms running E. and W. and had to come
+out again. We then again kept west and downhill over tremendous sastrugi,
+with a slight breeze, very cold. In afternoon continued bearing more and
+more towards Mount Darwin: we got round one of the main lines of ice-fall
+and looked back up to it.... Very cold march: many crevasses: I walking
+by the sledge on foot found a good many: the others all on ski."
+
+"_February 7._ 15.5 miles. Clear day again and we made a tedious march in
+the forenoon along a flat or two, and down a long slope: and then in the
+afternoon we had a very fresh breeze, and very fast run down long slopes
+covered with big sastrugi. It was a strenuous job steering and checking
+behind by the sledge. We reached the Upper Glacier Depôt by 7.30 P.M. and
+found everything right."[330]
+
+This was the end of the plateau: the beginning of the glacier. Their hard
+time should be over so far as the weather was concerned. Wilson notes how
+fine the land looked as they approached it: "The colour of the Dominion
+Range rock is in the main all brown madder or dark reddish chocolate, but
+there are numerous bands of yellow rock scattered amongst it. I think it
+is composed of dolerite and sandstone as on the W. side."[331]
+
+The condition of the party was of course giving anxiety: how much it is
+impossible to say. A good deal was to be hoped from the warm weather
+ahead. Scott and Bowers were probably the fittest men. Scott's shoulder
+soon mended and "Bowers is splendid, full of energy and bustle all the
+time."[332] Wilson was feeling the cold more than either of them now. His
+leg was not yet well enough to wear ski. Oates had suffered from a cold
+foot for some time. Evans, however, was the only man whom Scott seems to
+have been worried about. "His cuts and wounds suppurate, his nose looks
+very bad, and altogether he shows considerable signs of being played
+out." ... "Well, we have come through our seven weeks' ice-cap journey
+and most of us are fit, but I think another week might have had a very
+bad effect on P.O. Evans, who is going steadily downhill."[333] They had
+all been having extra food which had helped them much, though they
+complained of hunger and want of sleep. Directly they got into the warmer
+weather on the glacier their food satisfied them, "but we must march to
+keep on the full ration, and we want rest, yet we shall pull through all
+right, D.V. We are by no means worn out."[334]
+
+There are no germs in the Antarctic, save for a few isolated specimens
+which almost certainly come down from civilization in the upper air
+currents. You can sleep all night in a wet bag and clothing, and sledge
+all day in a mail of ice, and you will not catch a cold nor get any
+aches. You can get deficiency diseases, like scurvy, for inland this is a
+deficiency country, without vitamines. You can also get poisoned if you
+allow your food to remain thawed out too long, and if you do not cover
+the provisions in a depôt with enough snow the sun will get at them, even
+though the air temperature is far below freezing. But it is not easy to
+become diseased.
+
+On the other hand, once something does go wrong it is the deuce and all
+to get it right: especially cuts. And the isolation of the polar
+traveller may place him in most difficult circumstances. There are no
+ambulances and hospitals, and a man on a sledge is a very serious weight.
+Practically any man who undertakes big polar journeys must face the
+possibility of having to commit suicide to save his companions, and the
+difficulty of this must not be overrated, for it is in some ways more
+desirable to die than to live if things are bad enough: we got to that
+stage on the Winter Journey. I remember discussing this question with
+Bowers, who had a scheme of doing himself in with a pick-axe if necessity
+arose, though how he could have accomplished it I don't know: or, as he
+said, there might be a crevasse and at any rate there was the medical
+case. I was horrified at the time: I had never faced the thing out with
+myself like that.
+
+They left the Upper Glacier Depôt under Mount Darwin on February 8. This
+day they collected the most important of those geological specimens to
+which, at Wilson's special request, they clung to the end, and which were
+mostly collected by him. Mount Darwin and Buckley Island, which are
+really the tops of high mountains, stick out of the ice at the top of the
+glacier, and the course ran near to both of them, but not actually up
+against them. Shackleton found coal on Buckley Island, and it was clear
+that the place was of great geological importance, for it was one of the
+only places in the Antarctic where fossils could be found, so far as we
+knew. The ice-falls stretched away as far as you could see towards the
+mountains which bound the glacier on either side, and as you looked
+upwards towards Buckley Island they were like a long breaking wave. One
+of the great difficulties about the Beardmore was that you saw the
+ice-falls as you went up, and avoided them, but coming down you knew
+nothing of their whereabouts until you fell into the middle of pressure
+and crevasses, and then it was almost impossible to say whether you
+should go right or left to get out.
+
+Evans was unable to pull this day, and was detached from the sledge, but
+this was not necessarily a very serious sign: Shackleton on his return
+journey was not able to pull at this place. Wilson wrote as follows:
+
+"_February 8, Mt. Buckley Cliffs._ A very busy day. We had a very cold
+forenoon march, blowing like blazes from the S. Birdie detached and went
+on ski to Mt. Darwin and collected some dolerite, the only rock he could
+see on the Nunatak, which was nearest. We got into a sort of crusted
+surface where the snow broke through nearly to our knees and the
+sledge-runner also. I thought at first we were all on a thinly bridged
+crevasse. We then came on east a bit, and gradually got worse and worse
+going over an ice-fall, having great trouble to prevent sledge taking
+charge, but eventually got down and then made N.W. or N. into the land,
+and camped right by the moraine under the great sandstone cliffs of Mt.
+Buckley, out of the wind and quite warm again: it was a wonderful change.
+After lunch we all geologized on till supper, and I was very late turning
+in, examining the moraine after supper. Socks, all strewn over the rocks,
+dried splendidly. Magnificent Beacon sandstone cliffs. Masses of
+limestone in the moraine, and dolerite crags in various places. Coal
+seams at all heights in the sandstone cliffs, and lumps of weathered coal
+with fossil vegetable. Had a regular field-day and got some splendid
+things in the short time."
+
+"_February 9, Moraine visit._ We made our way along down the moraine, and
+at the end of Mt. Buckley [I] unhitched and had half an hour over the
+rocks and again got some good things written up in sketch-book. We then
+left the moraine and made a very good march on rough blue ice all day
+with very small and scarce scraps of névé, on one of which we camped for
+the night with a rather overcast foggy sky, which cleared to bright sun
+in the night. We are all thoroughly enjoying temps. of +10° or
+thereabouts now, with no wind instead of the summit winds which are
+incessant with temp. -20°."
+
+"_February 10._ ?16 m. We made a very good forenoon march from 10 to 2.45
+towards the Cloudmaker. Weather overcast gradually obscured everything in
+snowfall fog, starting with crystals of large size.... We had to camp
+after 2½ hours' afternoon march as it got too thick to see anything and
+we were going downhill on blue ice...."[335]
+
+[Illustration: BUCKLEY ISLAND--E. A. Wilson, del. Emery Walker Limited,
+Collotypers.]
+
+The next day in bad lights and on a bad surface they fell into the same
+pressure which both the other returning parties experienced. Like them
+they were in the middle of it before they realized. "Then came the fatal
+decision to steer east. We went on for 6 hours, hoping to do a good
+distance, which I suppose we did, but for the last hour or two we
+pressed on into a regular trap. Getting on to a good surface we did not
+reduce our lunch meal, and thought all going well, but half an hour after
+lunch we got into the worst ice mess I have ever been in. For three hours
+we plunged on on ski, first thinking we were too much to the right, then
+too much to the left; meanwhile the disturbance got worse and my spirits
+received a very rude shock. There were times when it seemed almost
+impossible to find a way out of the awful turmoil in which we found
+ourselves.... The turmoil changed in character, irregular crevassed
+surface giving way to huge chasms, closely packed and most difficult to
+cross. It was very heavy work, but we had grown desperate. We won through
+at 10 P.M., and I write after 12 hours on the march...."[336]
+
+Wilson continues the story:
+
+"_February 12._ We had a good night just outside the ice-falls and
+disturbances, and a small breakfast of tea, thin hoosh and biscuit, and
+began the forenoon by a decent bit of travelling on rubbly blue ice in
+crampons: then plunged into an ice-fall and wandered about in it for
+hours and hours."
+
+"_February 13._ We had one biscuit and some tea after a night's sleep on
+very hard and irregular blue ice amongst the ice-fall crevasses. No snow
+on the tent, only ski, etc. Got away at 10 A.M. and by 2 P.M. found the
+depôt, having had a good march over very hard rough blue ice. Only ½ hour
+in the disturbance of yesterday. The weather was very thick, snowing and
+overcast, could only just see the points of bearing for depôt. However,
+we got there, tired and hungry, and camped and had hoosh and tea and 3
+biscuits each. Then away again with our three and a half days' food from
+this red flag depôt and off down by the Cloudmaker moraine. We travelled
+about 4 hours on hard blue ice, and I was allowed to geologize the last
+hour down the two outer lines of boulders. The outer one all dolerite and
+quartz rocks, the inner all dolerite and sandstone.... We camped on the
+inner line of boulders, weather clearing all the afternoon."[337]
+
+Meanwhile both Wilson and Bowers had been badly snow-blind, though Wilson
+does not mention it in his diary; and this night Scott says Evans had no
+power to assist with camping work. A good march followed on February 14,
+but "there is no getting away from the fact that we are not pulling
+strong. Probably none of us: Wilson's leg still troubles him and he
+doesn't like to trust himself on ski; but the worst case is Evans, who is
+giving us serious anxiety. This morning he suddenly disclosed a huge
+blister on his foot. It delayed us on the march, when he had to have his
+crampon readjusted. Sometimes I feel he is going from bad to worse, but I
+trust he will pick up again when we come to steady work on ski like this
+afternoon. He is hungry and so is Wilson. We can't risk opening out our
+food again, and as cook at present I am serving something under full
+allowance. We are inclined to get slack and slow with our camping
+arrangement, and small delays increase. I have talked of the matter
+to-night and hope for improvement. We cannot do distance without the
+hours."[338]
+
+There was something wrong with this party: more wrong, I mean, than was
+justified by the tremendous journey they had already experienced. Except
+for the blizzard at the bottom of the Beardmore and the surfaces near the
+Pole it had been little worse than they expected. Evans, however, who was
+considered by Scott to be the strongest man of the party, had already
+collapsed, and it is admitted that the rest of the party was becoming far
+from strong. There seems to be an unknown factor here somewhere.
+
+[Illustration: MT. KYFFIN--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+Wilson's diary continues: "_February 15. 13¾ m. geog._ I got on ski again
+first time since damaging my leg and was on them all day for 9 hours. It
+was a bit painful and swelled by the evening, and every night I put on
+snow poultice. We are not yet abreast of Mt. Kyffin, and much discussion
+how far we are from the Lower Glacier Depôt, probably 18 to 20 m.: and we
+have to reduce food again, only one biscuit to-night with a thin hoosh of
+pemmican. To-morrow we have to make one day's food which remains last
+over the two. The weather became heavily overcast during the afternoon
+and then began to snow, and though we got in our 4 hours' march it was
+with difficulty, and we only made a bit over 5 miles. However, we are
+nearer the depôt to-night."
+
+"_February 16. 12½ m. geog._ Got a good start in fair weather after one
+biscuit and a thin breakfast, and made 7½ m. in the forenoon. Again the
+weather became overcast and we lunched almost at our old bearing on
+Kyffin of lunch Dec. 15. All the afternoon the weather became thick and
+thicker and after 3¼ hours Evans collapsed, sick and giddy, and unable to
+walk even by the sledge on ski, so we camped. Can see no land at all
+anywhere, but we must be getting pretty near the Pillar Rock. Evans'
+collapse has much to do with the fact that he has never been sick in his
+life and is now helpless with his hands frost-bitten. We had thin meals
+for lunch and supper."
+
+"_February 17._ The weather cleared and we got away for a clear run to
+the depôt and had gone a good part of the way when Evans found his ski
+shoes coming off. He was allowed to readjust and continue to pull, but it
+happened again, and then again, so he was told to unhitch, get them
+right, and follow on and catch us up. He lagged far behind till lunch,
+and when we camped we had lunch, and then went back for him as he had not
+come up. He had fallen and had his hands frost-bitten, and we then
+returned for the sledge, and brought it, and fetched him in on it as he
+was rapidly losing the use of his legs. He was comatose when we got him
+into the tent, and he died without recovering consciousness that night
+about 10 P.M. We had a short rest for an hour or two in our bags that
+night, then had a meal and came on through the pressure ridges about 4
+miles farther down and reached our Lower Glacier Depôt. Here we camped at
+last, had a good meal and slept a good night's rest which we badly
+needed. Our depôt was all right."[339] "A very terrible day.... On
+discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we
+reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by
+the shock of his frost-bitten fingers, and later by falls during rough
+travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in
+himself. Wilson thinks it certain he must have injured his brain by a
+fall. It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm
+reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the
+terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch
+yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on
+our hands at such a distance from home."[340]
+
+[Illustration: WHERE EVANS DIED--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [294] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 536.
+
+   [295] It is to be noticed that every return party, including the
+         Polar Party, was supposed by their companions to be going to
+         have a very much easier time than, as a matter of fact, they
+         had.--A. C.-G.
+
+   [296] Bowers.
+
+   [297] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 530-534.
+
+   [298] Simpson, _B.A.E., 1910-1913_, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 291.
+
+   [299] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 540.
+
+   [300] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 541-542.
+
+   [301] Simpson, _B.A.E., 1910-1913_, "Meteorology," vol. i. pp.
+         144-146.
+
+   [302] Simpson, _B.A.E., 1910-1913_, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 41.
+
+   [303] See pp. xxxviii-xxxix.
+
+   [304] See p. xivii.
+
+   [305] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 543.
+
+   [306] Wilson.
+
+   [307] Evidently meaning some miles from crest to crest.
+
+   [308] Bowers, _Polar Meteorological Log._
+
+   [309] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 543-544.
+
+   [310] Simpson, _B.A.E., 1910-1913_, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 40.
+
+   [311] Bowers.
+
+   [312] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 550-551.
+
+   [313] Bowers.
+
+   [314] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 552.
+
+   [315] Bowers.
+
+   [316] Wilson.
+
+   [317] Wilson.
+
+   [318] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 541.
+
+   [319] Ibid. p. 549.
+
+   [320] Wilson.
+
+   [321] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 557.
+
+   [322] Ibid. pp. 560, 561.
+
+   [323] Wilson.
+
+   [324] Ibid.
+
+   [325] Bowers.
+
+   [326] Wilson.
+
+   [327] Ibid.
+
+   [328] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 559.
+
+   [329] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 561.
+
+   [330] Wilson.
+
+   [331] Ibid.
+
+   [332] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 561.
+
+   [333] Ibid. pp. 562, 563.
+
+   [334] Ibid. p. 566.
+
+   [335] Wilson.
+
+   [336] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 567.
+
+   [337] Wilson.
+
+   [338] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 570-571.
+
+   [339] Wilson.
+
+   [340] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 573.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE POLAR JOURNEY (_continued_)
+
+    This happy breed of men, this little world,
+    This precious stone set in the silver sea,
+    Which serves it in the office of a wall, ...
+    This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
+    This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, ...
+    This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land.
+                                                    SHAKESPEARE.
+
+VI. FARTHEST SOUTH
+
+
+Stevenson has written of a traveller whose wife slumbered by his side
+what time his spirit re-adventured forth in memory of days gone by. He
+was quite happy about it, and I suppose his travels had been peaceful,
+for days and nights such as these men spent coming down the Beardmore
+will give you nightmare after nightmare, and wake you shrieking--years
+after.
+
+Of course they were shaken and weakened. But the conditions they had
+faced, and the time they had been out, do not in my opinion account
+entirely for their weakness nor for Evans' collapse, which may have had
+something to do with the fact that he was the biggest, heaviest and most
+muscular man in the party. I do not believe that this is a life for such
+men, who are expected to pull their weight and to support and drive a
+larger machine than their companions, and at the same time to eat no
+extra food. If, as seems likely, the ration these men were eating was not
+enough to support the work they were doing, then it is clear that the
+heaviest man will feel the deficiency sooner and more severely than
+others who are smaller than he. Evans must have had a most terrible time:
+I think it is clear from the diaries that he had suffered very greatly
+without complaint. At home he would have been nursed in bed: here he must
+march (he was pulling the day he died) until he was crawling on his
+frost-bitten hands and knees in the snow--horrible: most horrible perhaps
+for those who found him so, and sat in the tent and watched him die. I am
+told that simple concussion does not kill as suddenly as this: probably
+some clot had moved in his brain.
+
+For one reason and another they took very nearly as long to come down the
+glacier with a featherweight sledge as we had taken to go up it with full
+loads. Seven days' food were allowed from the Upper to the Lower Glacier
+Depôt. Bowers told me that he thought this was running it fine. But the
+two supporting parties got through all right, though they both tumbled
+into the horrible pressure above the Cloudmaker. The Last Return Party
+took 7½ days: the Polar Party 10 days: the latter had been 25½ days
+longer on the plateau than the former. Owing to their slow progress down
+the glacier the Polar Party went on short rations for the first and last
+time until they camped on March 19: with the exception of these days they
+had either their full, or more than their full ration until that date.
+
+Until they reached the Barrier on their return journey the weather can be
+described neither as abnormal nor as unexpected. There were 300 statute
+miles (260 geo.) to be covered to One Ton Depôt, and 150 statute miles
+(130 geo.) more from One Ton to Hut Point. They had just picked up one
+week's food for five men: between the Beardmore and One Ton were three
+more depôts each with one week's food for five men. They were four men:
+their way was across the main body of the Barrier out of sight of land,
+and away from any immediate influence of the comparatively warm sea ahead
+of them. Nothing was known of the weather conditions in the middle of the
+Barrier at this time of year, and no one suspected that March conditions
+there were very cold. Shackleton turned homeward on January 10: reached
+his Bluff Depôt on February 23, and Hut Point on February 28.
+
+Wilson's diary continues:
+
+"_February 18._ We had only five hours' sleep. We had butter and biscuit
+and tea when we woke at 2 P.M., then came over the Gap entrance to the
+pony-slaughter camp, visiting a rock moraine of Mt. Hope on the way."
+
+"_February 19._ Late in getting away after making up new 10-foot sledge
+and digging out pony meat. We made 5½ m. on a very heavy surface
+indeed."[341]
+
+This bad surface is the feature of their first homeward marches on the
+Barrier. From now onwards they complain always of the terrible surfaces,
+but a certain amount of the heavy pulling must be ascribed to their own
+weakness. In the low temperatures which occurred later bad surfaces were
+to be expected: but now the temperatures were not really low, about zero
+to -17°: fine clear days for the most part and, a thing to be noticed,
+little wind. They wanted wind, which would probably be behind them from
+the south. "Oh! for a little wind," Scott writes. "E. Evans evidently had
+plenty." He was already very anxious. "If this goes on we shall have a
+bad time, but I sincerely trust it is only the result of this windless
+area close to the coast and that, as we are making steadily outwards, we
+shall shortly escape it. It is perhaps premature [Feb. 19] to be anxious
+about covering distance. In all other respects things are improving. We
+have our sleeping-bags spread on the sledge and they are drying, but,
+above all, we have our full measure of food again. To-night we had a sort
+of stew fry of pemmican and horseflesh, and voted it the best hoosh we
+had ever had on a sledge journey. The absence of poor Evans is a help to
+the commissariat, but if he had been here in a fit state we might have
+got along faster. I wonder what is in store for us, with some little
+alarm at the lateness of the season." And on February 20, when they made
+7 miles, "At present our sledge and ski leave deeply ploughed tracks
+which can be seen winding for miles behind. It is distressing, but as
+usual trials are forgotten when we camp, and good food is our lot. Pray
+God we get better travelling as we are not so fit as we were, and the
+season is advancing apace." And on February 21, "We never won a march of
+8½ miles with greater difficulty, but we can't go on like this."[342]
+
+A breeze suddenly came away from S.S.E., force 4 to 6 at 11 A.M. on
+February 22, and they hoisted the sail on the sledge they had just picked
+up. They immediately lost the tracks they were following, and failed to
+find the cairns and camp remains which they should have picked up if they
+had been on the right course, which was difficult here owing to the thick
+weather we had on the outward march. Bowers was sure they were too near
+the land and they steered out, but still failed to pick up the line on
+which their depôts and their lives depended. Scott was convinced they
+were outside, not inside the line. The next morning Bowers took a round
+of angles, and they came to the conclusion, on slender evidence, that
+they were still too near the land. They had an unhappy march still off
+the tracks, "but just as we decided to lunch, Bowers' wonderful sharp
+eyes detected an old double lunch cairn, the theodolite telescope
+confirmed it, and our spirits rose accordingly."[343] Then Wilson had
+another "bad attack of snow-glare: could hardly keep a chink of eye open
+in goggles to see the course. Fat pony hoosh."[344] This day they reached
+the Lower Barrier Depôt.
+
+[Illustration: SLEDGING IN A HIGH WIND--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+They were in evil case, but they would have been all right, these men, if
+the cold had not come down upon them, a bolt quite literally from the
+blue of a clear sky: unexpected, unforetold and fatal. The cold itself
+was not so tremendous until you realize that they had been out four
+months, that they had fought their way up the biggest glacier in the
+world in feet of soft snow, that they had spent seven weeks under plateau
+conditions of rarefied air, big winds and low temperatures, and they had
+watched one of their companions die--not in a bed, in a hospital or
+ambulance, nor suddenly, but slowly, night by night and day by day, with
+his hands frost-bitten and his brain going, until they must have
+wondered, each man in his heart, whether in such case a human being could
+be left to die, that four men might live. He died a natural death and
+they went out on to the Barrier.
+
+Given such conditions as were expected, and the conditions for which
+preparation had been made, they would have come home alive and well. Some
+men say the weather was abnormal: there is some evidence that it was. The
+fact remains that the temperature dropped into the minus thirties by day
+and the minus forties by night. The fact also remains that there was a
+great lack of southerly winds, and in consequence the air near the
+surface was not being mixed: excessive radiation took place, and a layer
+of cold air formed near the ground. Crystals also formed on the surface
+of the snow and the wind was not enough to sweep them away. As the
+temperature dropped so the surface for the runners of the sledges became
+worse, as I explained elsewhere.[345] They were pulling as it were
+through sand.
+
+In the face of the difficulties which beset them their marches were
+magnificent: 11½ miles on February 25 and again on the following day:
+12.2 miles on February 27, and 11½ miles again on February 28 and 29. If
+they could have kept this up they would have come through without a
+doubt. But I think it was about now that they suspected, and then were
+sure, that they could not pull through. Scott's diary, written at lunch,
+March 2, is as follows:
+
+"Misfortunes rarely come singly. We marched to the [Middle Barrier] depôt
+fairly easily yesterday afternoon, and since that have suffered three
+distinct blows which have placed us in a bad position. First, we found a
+shortage of oil; with most rigid economy it can scarce carry us to the
+next depôt on this surface [71 miles away]. Second, Titus Oates disclosed
+his feet, the toes showing very bad indeed, evidently bitten by the late
+temperatures. The third blow came in the night, when the wind, which we
+had hailed with some joy, brought dark overcast weather. It fell below
+-40° in the night, and this morning it took 1½ hours to get our foot-gear
+on, but we got away before eight. We lost cairn and tracks together and
+made as steady as we could N. by W., but have seen nothing. Worse was to
+come--the surface is simply awful. In spite of strong wind and full sail
+we have only done 5½ miles. We are in a _very_ queer street, since there
+is no doubt we cannot do the extra marches and feel the cold
+horribly."[346]
+
+They did nearly ten miles that day, but on March 3 they had a terrible
+time. "God help us," wrote Scott, "we can't keep up this pulling, that is
+certain. Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man
+feels in his heart I can only guess. Putting on foot-gear in the morning
+is getting slower and slower, therefore every day more dangerous."
+
+The following extracts are taken from Scott's diary.
+
+"_March 4. Lunch._ We are in a very tight place indeed, but none of us
+despondent _yet_, or at least we preserve every semblance of good cheer,
+but one's heart sinks as the sledge stops dead at some sastrugi behind
+which the surface sand lies thickly heaped. For the moment the
+temperature is in the -20°--an improvement which makes us much more
+comfortable, but a colder snap is bound to come again soon. I fear that
+Oates at least will weather such an event very poorly. Providence to our
+aid! We can expect little from man now except the possibility of extra
+food at the next depôt. It will be real bad if we get there and find the
+same shortage of oil. Shall we get there? Such a short distance it would
+have appeared to us on the summit! I don't know what I should do if
+Wilson and Bowers weren't so determinedly cheerful over things."
+
+[Illustration: MOUNT LONGSTAFF--E. A. Wilson, del. Emery Walker Limited,
+Collotypers.]
+
+"_Monday, March 5. Lunch._ Regret to say going from bad to worse. We got
+a slant of wind yesterday afternoon, and going on 5 hours we converted
+our wretched morning run of 3½ miles into something over 9. We went to
+bed on a cup of cocoa and pemmican solid with the chill off.... The
+result is telling on all, but mainly on Oates, whose feet are in a
+wretched condition. One swelled up tremendously last night and he is very
+lame this morning. We started march on tea and pemmican as last night--we
+pretend to prefer the pemmican this way. Marched for 5 hours this
+morning over a slightly better surface covered with high moundy sastrugi.
+Sledge capsized twice; we pulled on foot, covering about 5½ miles. We are
+two pony marches and 4 miles about from our depôt. Our fuel dreadfully
+low and the poor Soldier nearly done. It is pathetic enough because we
+can do nothing for him; more hot food might do a little, but only a
+little, I fear. We none of us expected these terribly low temperatures,
+and of the rest of us, Wilson is feeling them most; mainly, I fear, from
+his self-sacrificing devotion in doctoring Oates' feet. We cannot help
+each other, each has enough to do to take care of himself. We get cold on
+the march when the trudging is heavy, and the wind pierces our worn
+garments. The others, all of them, are unendingly cheerful when in the
+tent. We mean to see the game through with a proper spirit, but it's
+tough work to be pulling harder than we ever pulled in our lives for long
+hours, and to feel that the progress is so slow. One can only say 'God
+help us!' and plod on our weary way, cold and very miserable, though
+outwardly cheerful. We talk of all sorts of subjects in the tent, not
+much of food now, since we decided to take the risk of running a full
+ration. We simply couldn't go hungry at this time."
+
+"_Tuesday, March 6. Lunch._ We did a little better with help of wind
+yesterday afternoon, finishing 9½ miles for the day, and 27 miles from
+depôt. But this morning things have been awful. It was warm in the night
+and for the first time during the journey I overslept myself by more than
+an hour; then we were slow with foot-gear; then, pulling with all our
+might (for our lives) we could scarcely advance at rate of a mile an
+hour; then it grew thick and three times we had to get out of harness to
+search for tracks. The result is something less than 3½ miles for the
+forenoon. The sun is shining now and the wind gone. Poor Oates is unable
+to pull, sits on the sledge when we are track-searching--he is
+wonderfully plucky, as his feet must be giving him great pain. He makes
+no complaint, but his spirits only come up in spurts now, and he grows
+more silent in the tent. We are making a spirit lamp to try and replace
+the primus when our oil is exhausted..."
+
+"_Wednesday, March 7._ A little worse, I fear. One of Oates' feet _very_
+bad this morning; he is wonderfully brave. We still talk of what we will
+do together at home.
+
+"We only made 6½ miles yesterday. This morning in 4½ hours we did just
+over 4 miles. We are 16 from our depôt. If we only find the correct
+proportion of food there and this surface continues, we may get to the
+next depôt [Mt. Hooper, 72 miles farther] but not to One Ton Camp. We
+hope against hope that the dogs have been to Mt. Hooper; then we might
+pull through. If there is a shortage of oil again we can have little
+hope. One feels that for poor Oates the crisis is near, but none of us
+are improving, though we are wonderfully fit considering the really
+excessive work we are doing. We are only kept going by good food. No wind
+this morning till a chill northerly air came ahead. Sun bright and cairns
+showing up well. I should like to keep the track to the end."
+
+"_Thursday, March 8. Lunch._ Worse and worse in morning; poor Oates' left
+foot can never last out, and time over foot-gear something awful. Have to
+wait in night foot-gear for nearly an hour before I start changing, and
+then am generally first to be ready. Wilson's feet giving trouble now,
+but this mainly because he gives so much help to others. We did 4½ miles
+this morning and are now 8½ miles from the depôt--a ridiculously small
+distance to feel in difficulties, yet on this surface we know we cannot
+equal half our old marches, and that for that effort we expend nearly
+double the energy. The great question is: What shall we find at the
+depôt? If the dogs have visited it we may get along a good distance, but
+if there is another short allowance of fuel, God help us indeed. We are
+in a very bad way, I fear, in any case."
+
+"_Saturday, March 10._ Things steadily downhill. Oates' foot worse. He
+has rare pluck and must know that he can never get through. He asked
+Wilson if he had a chance this morning, and of course Bill had to say he
+didn't know. In point of fact he has none. Apart from him, if he went
+under now, I doubt whether we could get through. With great care we might
+have a dog's chance, but no more. The weather conditions are awful, and
+our gear gets steadily more icy and difficult to manage....
+
+"Yesterday we marched up the depôt, Mt. Hooper. Cold comfort. Shortage on
+our allowance all round. I don't know that any one is to blame. The dogs
+which would have been our salvation have evidently failed. Meares had a
+bad trip home I suppose.
+
+"This morning it was calm when we breakfasted, but the wind came from the
+W.N.W. as we broke camp. It rapidly grew in strength. After travelling
+for half an hour I saw that none of us could go on facing such
+conditions. We were forced to camp and are spending the rest of the day
+in a comfortless blizzard camp, wind quite foul."
+
+"_Sunday, March 11._ Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What we
+or he will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast;
+he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but he
+practically asked for advice. Nothing could be said but to urge him to
+march as long as he could. One satisfactory result to the discussion: I
+practically ordered Wilson to hand over the means of ending our troubles
+to us, so that any one of us may know how to do so. Wilson had no choice
+between doing so and our ransacking the medicine case. We have 30 opium
+tabloids apiece and he is left with a tube of morphine. So far the
+tragical side of our story.
+
+"The sky completely overcast when we started this morning. We could see
+nothing, lost the tracks, and doubtless have been swaying a good deal
+since--3.1 miles for the forenoon--terribly heavy dragging--expected it.
+Know that 6 miles is about the limit of our endurance now, if we get no
+help from wind or surfaces. We have 7 days' food and should be about 55
+miles from One Ton Camp to-night, 6x7 = 42, leaving us 13 miles short of
+our distance, even if things get no worse. Meanwhile the season rapidly
+advances."
+
+"_Monday, March 12._ We did 6.9 miles yesterday, under our necessary
+average. Things are left much the same, Oates not pulling much, and now
+with hands as well as feet pretty well useless. We did 4 miles this
+morning in 4 hours 20 min.--we may hope for 3 this afternoon 7 x 6 = 42.
+We shall be 47 miles from the depôt. I doubt if we can possibly do it.
+The surface remains awful, the cold intense, and our physical condition
+running down. God help us! Not a breath of favourable wind for more than
+a week, and apparently liable to head winds at any moment."
+
+"_Wednesday, March 14._ No doubt about the going downhill, but everything
+going wrong for us. Yesterday we woke to a strong northerly wind with
+temp. -37°. Couldn't face it, so remained in camp till 2, then did 5¼
+miles. Wanted to march later, but party feeling the cold badly as the
+breeze (N.) never took off entirely, and as the sun sank the temp. fell.
+Long time getting supper in dark.
+
+"This morning started with southerly breeze, set sail and passed another
+cairn at good speed; half-way, however, the wind shifted to W. by S. or
+W.S.W., blew through our wind-clothes and into our mitts. Poor Wilson
+horribly cold, could [not] get off ski for some time. Bowers and I
+practically made camp, and when we got into the tent at last we were all
+deadly cold. Then temp. now mid-day down -43° and the wind strong. We
+_must_ go on, but now the making of every camp must be more difficult and
+dangerous. It must be near the end, but a pretty merciful end. Poor Oates
+got it again in the foot. I shudder to think what it will be like
+to-morrow. It is only with greatest pains rest of us keep off
+frost-bites. No idea there could be temperatures like this at this time
+of year with such winds. Truly awful outside the tent. Must fight it out
+to the last biscuit, but can't reduce rations."
+
+[Illustration: A BLIZZARD CAMP--E. A. Wilson, del.]
+
+"_Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17._ Lost track of dates, but think the
+last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch, the day before
+yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should
+leave him in his sleeping-bag. That we could not do, and we induced him
+to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him
+he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we
+knew the end had come.
+
+"Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates' last thoughts
+were of his mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that
+his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his
+death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for
+weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to
+discuss outside subjects. He did not--would not--give up hope till the
+very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the
+night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the
+morning--yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, 'I am just going
+outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have
+not seen him since.
+
+"I take this opportunity of saying that we have stuck to our sick
+companions to the last. In case of Edgar Evans, when absolutely out of
+food and he lay insensible, the safety of the remainder seemed to demand
+his abandonment, but Providence mercifully removed him at this critical
+moment. He died a natural death, and we did not leave him till two hours
+after his death. We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but
+though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man
+and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar
+spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.
+
+"I can only write at lunch and then only occasionally. The cold is
+intense, -40° at mid-day. My companions are unendingly cheerful, but we
+are all on the verge of serious frost-bites, and though we constantly
+talk of fetching through I don't think any one of us believes it in his
+heart.
+
+"We are cold on the march now, and at all times except meals. Yesterday
+we had to lay up for a blizzard and to-day we move dreadfully slowly. We
+are at No. 14 Pony Camp, only two pony marches from One Ton Depôt. We
+leave here our theodolite, a camera, and Oates' sleeping-bags. Diaries,
+etc., and geological specimens carried at Wilson's special request, will
+be found with us or on our sledge."
+
+"_Sunday, March 18._ To-day, lunch, we are 21 miles from the depôt. Ill
+fortune presses, but better may come. We have had more wind and drift
+from ahead yesterday; had to stop marching; wind N.W., force 4, temp.
+-35°. No human being could face it, and we are worn out _nearly_.
+
+"My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes--two days ago I was proud
+possessor of best feet.... Bowers takes first place in condition, but
+there is not much to choose after all. The others are still confident of
+getting through--or pretend to be--I don't know! We have the last _half_
+fill of oil in our primus and a very small quantity of spirit--this alone
+between us and thirst. The wind is fair for the moment, and that is
+perhaps a fact to help. The mileage would have seemed ridiculously small
+on our outward journey."
+
+"_Monday, March 19. Lunch._ We camped with difficulty last night and were
+dreadfully cold till after our supper of cold pemmican and biscuit and a
+half pannikin of cocoa cooked over the spirit. Then, contrary to
+expectation, we got warm and all slept well. To-day we started in the
+usual dragging manner. Sledge dreadfully heavy. We are 15½ miles from the
+depôt and ought to get there in three days. What progress! We have two
+days' food but barely a day's fuel. All our feet are getting
+bad--Wilson's best, my right foot worse, left all right. There is no
+chance to nurse one's feet till we can get hot food into us. Amputation
+is the least I can hope for now, but will the trouble spread? That is the
+serious question. The weather doesn't give us a chance--the wind from N.
+to N.W. and -40° temp, to-day."
+
+"_Wednesday, March 21._ Got within 11 miles of depôt Monday night; had to
+lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. To-day forlorn hope, Wilson and
+Bowers going to depôt for fuel."
+
+"_22 and 23._ Blizzard bad as ever--Wilson and Bowers unable to
+start--to-morrow last chance--no fuel and only one or two of food
+left--must be near the end. Have decided it shall be natural--we shall
+march for the depôt with or without our effects and die in our tracks."
+
+"_Thursday, March 29._ Since the 21st we have had a continuous gale from
+W.S.W. and S.W. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food
+for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our
+depôt _11 miles_ away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a
+scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things
+now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of
+course, and the end cannot be far.
+
+"It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
+
+    R. SCOTT."
+
+_Last entry._ "For God's sake, look after our people."
+
+
+The following extracts are from letters written by Scott:
+
+
+_To Mrs. E. A. Wilson_
+
+MY DEAR MRS. WILSON. If this letter reaches you, Bill and I will have
+gone out together. We are very near it now and I should like you to know
+how splendid he was at the end--everlastingly cheerful and ready to
+sacrifice himself for others, never a word of blame to me for leading him
+into this mess. He is not suffering, luckily, at least only minor
+discomforts.
+
+His eyes have a comfortable blue look of hope and his mind is peaceful
+with the satisfaction of his faith in regarding himself as part of the
+great scheme of the Almighty. I can do no more to comfort you than to
+tell you that he died as he lived, a brave, true man--the best of
+comrades and staunchest of friends.
+
+My whole heart goes out to you in pity. Yours,
+
+    R. SCOTT.
+
+
+_To Mrs. Bowers_
+
+MY DEAR MRS. BOWERS. I am afraid this will reach you after one of the
+heaviest blows of your life.
+
+I write when we are very near the end of our journey, and I am finishing
+it in company with two gallant, noble gentlemen. One of these is your
+son. He had come to be one of my closest and soundest friends, and I
+appreciate his wonderful upright nature, his ability and energy. As the
+troubles have thickened his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he
+has remained cheerful, hopeful and indomitable to the end....
+
+
+_To Sir J. M. Barrie_
+
+MY DEAR BARRIE. We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot. Hoping
+this letter may be found and sent to you, I write a word of farewell ...
+Good-bye. I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a
+humble pleasure which I had planned for the future on our long marches. I
+may not have proved a great explorer, but we have done the greatest march
+ever made and come very near to great success. Good-bye, my dear friend.
+Yours ever,
+
+    R. SCOTT.
+
+We are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way
+from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our
+songs and the cheery conversation as to what we will do when we get to
+Hut Point.
+
+_Later._ We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our
+good cheer. We have four days of storm in our tent and nowhere's food or
+fuel. We did intend to finish ourselves when things proved like this, but
+we have decided to die naturally in the track.[347]
+
+The following extracts are from letters written to other friends:
+
+" ... I want to tell you that I was _not_ too old for this job. It was
+the younger men that went under first.... After all we are setting a good
+example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by
+facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we
+neglected the sick."
+
+"Wilson, the best fellow that ever stepped, has sacrificed himself again
+and again to the sick men of the party...."
+
+" ... Our journey has been the biggest on record, and nothing but the
+most exceptional hard luck at the end would have caused us to fail to
+return."
+
+"What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has
+it been than lounging in too great comfort at home."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC
+
+The causes of the disaster are not due to faulty organization, but to
+misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken.
+
+1. The loss of pony transport in March 1911 obliged me to start later
+than I had intended, and obliged the limits of stuff transported to be
+narrowed.
+
+2. The weather throughout the outward journey, and especially the long
+gale in 83° S., stopped us.
+
+3. The soft snow in lower reaches of glacier again reduced pace.
+
+We fought these untoward events with a will and conquered, but it cut
+into our provision reserve.
+
+Every detail of our food supplies, clothing and depôts made on the
+interior ice-sheet and over that long stretch of 700 miles to the Pole
+and back, worked out to perfection. The advance party would have returned
+to the glacier in fine form and with surplus of food, but for the
+astonishing failure of the man whom we had least expected to fail. Edgar
+Evans was thought the strongest man of the party.
+
+The Beardmore Glacier is not difficult in fine weather, but on our return
+we did not get a single completely fine day; this with a sick companion
+enormously increased our anxieties.
+
+As I have said elsewhere, we got into frightfully rough ice and Edgar
+Evans received a concussion of the brain--he died a natural death, but
+left us a shaken party with the season unduly advanced.
+
+But all the facts above enumerated were as nothing to the surprise which
+awaited us on the Barrier. I maintain that our arrangements for returning
+were quite adequate, and that no one in the world would have expected the
+temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year.
+On the summit in lat. 85°-86° we had -20°, -30°. On the Barrier in lat.
+82°, 10,000 feet lower, we had -30° in the day, -47° at night pretty
+regularly, with continuous head-wind during our day marches. It is clear
+that these circumstances come on very suddenly, and our wreck is
+certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not
+seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever
+came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got
+through in spite of the weather but for the sickening of a second
+companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depôts for which
+I cannot account, and finally, but for the storm which has fallen on us
+within 11 miles of the depôt at which we hoped to secure our final
+supplies. Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow.
+We arrived within 11 miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one last
+meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave
+the tent--the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult,
+but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that
+Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as
+great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took
+them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for
+complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our
+best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this
+enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our
+countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.
+
+Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood,
+endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the
+heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must
+tell the tale, but surely, surely a great rich country like ours will see
+that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.--R.
+SCOTT.[348]
+
+[Illustration: THE POLAR JOURNEY--Apsley Cherry-Garrard, del. Emery
+Walker Ltd., Collotypers.]
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [341] Wilson.
+
+   [342] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 575-576.
+
+   [343] Ibid. p. 577.
+
+   [344] Wilson.
+
+   [345] See note at end of Chapter XIV.
+
+   [346] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 582, 583.
+
+   [347] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 584-599.
+
+   [348] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 605-607.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+NEVER AGAIN
+
+        And now in age I bud again,
+    After so many deaths I live and write;
+        I once more smell the dew and rain,
+    And relish versing. O my onely light,
+            It cannot be
+            That I am he
+    On whom thy tempests fell all night.
+                                         HERBERT.
+
+
+I shall inevitably be asked for a word of mature judgment of the
+expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all close up to it,
+and when I was a subaltern of 24, not incapable of judging my elders, but
+too young to have found out whether my judgment was worth anything. I now
+see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will
+never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our
+business. In the broad perspective opened up by ten years' distance, I
+see not one journey to the Pole, but two, in startling contrast one to
+another. On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there
+first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having
+put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day's
+work of polar exploration. Nothing more business-like could be imagined.
+On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing
+prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown,
+commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet
+reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and
+leaving our best men dead on the ice. To ignore such a contrast would be
+ridiculous: to write a book without accounting for it a waste of time.
+
+First let me do full justice to Amundsen. I have not attempted to
+disguise how we felt towards him when, after leading us to believe that
+he had equipped the Fram for an Arctic journey, and sailed for the north,
+he suddenly made his dash for the south. Nothing makes a more unpleasant
+impression than a feint. But when Scott reached the Pole only to find
+that Amundsen had been there a month before him, his distress was not
+that of a schoolboy who has lost a race. I have described what it had
+cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had
+still to suffer in returning until death stopped them. Much of that risk
+and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world
+is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where
+a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his
+face, however he turns, is always to the North. The moment Scott saw the
+Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already
+known. His achievement was a mere precaution against Amundsen perishing
+on his way back; and that risk was no greater than his own. The Polar
+Journey was literally laid waste: that was the shock that staggered them.
+Well might Bowers be glad to see the last of Norskies' tracks as their
+homeward paths diverged.
+
+All this heartsickness has passed away now; and the future explorer will
+not concern himself with it. He will ask, what was the secret of
+Amundsen's slick success? What is the moral of our troubles and losses? I
+will take Amundsen's success first. Undoubtedly the very remarkable
+qualities of the man himself had a good deal to do with it. There is a
+sort of sagacity that constitutes the specific genius of the explorer;
+and Amundsen proved his possession of this by his guess that there was
+terra firma in the Bay of Whales as solid as on Ross Island. Then there
+is the quality of big leadership which is shown by daring to take a big
+chance. Amundsen took a very big one indeed when he turned from the route
+to the Pole explored and ascertained by Scott and Shackleton and
+determined to find a second pass over the mountains from the Barrier to
+the plateau. As it happened, he succeeded, and established his route as
+the best way to the Pole until a better is discovered. But he might
+easily have failed and perished in the attempt; and the combination of
+reasoning and daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated.
+All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative whaling captain
+might have refused to make Scott's experiment with motor transport,
+ponies and man-hauling, and stuck to the dogs; and to the use of ski in
+running those dogs; and it was this quite commonplace choice that sent
+Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or
+dogs, and no great hardship either. He never pulled a mile from start to
+finish.
+
+The very ease of the exploit makes it impossible to infer from it that
+Amundsen's expedition was more highly endowed in personal qualities than
+ours. We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have
+suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition,
+with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more
+important than any other acre of the plateau. We followed in the steps of
+a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its
+forerunners: Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most
+efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We
+were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took
+on the work of two or three expeditions.
+
+It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a division of energy.
+Scott wanted to reach the Pole: a dangerous and laborious exploit, but a
+practicable one. Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin:
+a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which is none the less
+impracticable because the three men who achieved it survived by a
+miracle. These two feats had to be piled one on top of the other. What
+with the Depôt Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were
+sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and our worst year
+was still to come. We, the survivors, went in search of the dead when
+there was a possibly living party waiting in the ice somewhere for us to
+succour them. That turned out all right, because when we got back, we
+found Campbell's party self-extricated and waiting for us, alive and
+well. But suppose they also had perished, what would have been said of
+us?
+
+The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things
+were done. He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how
+they could have been got up and down the Beardmore. He is scandalized
+because 30 lbs. of geological specimens were deliberately added to the
+weight of the sledge that was dragging the life out of the men who had to
+haul it; but he does not realize that it is the friction surfaces of the
+snow on the runners which mattered and not the dead weight, which in this
+case was almost negligible. Nor does he know that these same specimens
+dated a continent and may elucidate the whole history of plant life. He
+will admit that we were all very wonderful, very heroic, very beautiful
+and devoted: that our exploits gave a glamour to our expedition that
+Amundsen's cannot claim; but he has no patience with us, and declares
+that Amundsen was perfectly right in refusing to allow science to use up
+the forces of his men, or to interfere for a moment with his single
+business of getting to the Pole and back again. No doubt he was; but we
+were not out for a single business: we were out for everything we could
+add to the world's store of knowledge about the Antarctic.
+
+Of course the whole business simply bristles with "ifs": If Scott had
+taken dogs and succeeded in getting them up the Beardmore: if we had not
+lost those ponies on the Depôt Journey: if the dogs had not been taken so
+far and the One Ton Depôt had been laid: if a pony and some extra oil had
+been depôted on the Barrier: if a four-man party had been taken to the
+Pole: if I had disobeyed my instructions and gone on from One Ton,
+killing dogs as necessary: or even if I had just gone on a few miles and
+left some food and fuel under a flag upon a cairn: if they had been first
+at the Pole: if it had been any other season but that.... But always the
+bare fact remains that Scott could not have travelled from McMurdo Sound
+to the Pole faster than he did except with dogs; all the king's horses
+and all the king's men could not have done it. Why, then, says the
+practical man, did we go to McMurdo Sound instead of to the Bay of
+Whales? Because we gained that continuity of scientific observation which
+is so important in this work: and because the Sound was the
+starting-point for continuing the exploration of the only ascertained
+route to the Pole, via the Beardmore Glacier.
+
+I am afraid it was all inevitable: we were as wise as any one can be
+before the event. I admit that we, scrupulously economical of our
+pemmican, were terribly prodigal of our man-power. But we had to be: the
+draft, whatever it may have been on the whole, was not excessive at any
+given point; and anyhow we just had to use every man to take every
+opportunity. There is so much to do, and the opportunities for doing it
+are so rare. Generally speaking, I don't see how we could have done
+differently, but I don't want to see it done again; I don't want it to be
+necessary to do it again. I want to see this country tackle the job, and
+send enough men to do one thing at a time. They do it in Canada: why not
+in England too?
+
+But we wasted our man-power in one way which could have been avoided. I
+have described how every emergency was met by calling for volunteers, and
+how the volunteers were always forthcoming. Unfortunately volunteering
+was relied on not only for emergencies, but for a good deal of everyday
+work that should have been organised as routine; and the inevitable
+result was that the willing horses were overworked. It was a point of
+honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told
+afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They
+should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never
+insisted on a regular routine.
+
+Money was scarce: probably Scott could not have obtained the funds for
+the expedition if its objective had not been the Pole. There was no lack
+of the things which could be bought across the counter from big business
+houses--all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment was
+first-class--but one of the first and most important items, the ship,
+would have sent Columbus on strike, and nearly sent us to the bottom of
+the sea.
+
+People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west
+from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of
+magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively
+to the resources of that time, much better than the one old tramp in
+which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and morning are
+the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers
+can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration _ad hoc_.
+Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra
+Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for
+the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar
+expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific
+work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act
+making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply
+between London Bridge and Ramsgate.
+
+And then the begging that is necessary to obtain even this equipment.
+Shackleton hanging round the doors of rich men! Scott writing begging
+letters for months together! Is the country not ashamed?
+
+Modern civilized States should make up their minds to the endowment of
+research, which includes exploration; and as all States benefit alike by
+the scientific side of it there is plenty of scope for international
+arrangement, especially in a region where the mere grabbing of territory
+is meaningless, and no Foreign Office can trace the frontier between King
+Edward's Plateau and King Haakon's. The Antarctic continent is still
+mostly unexplored; but enough is known of it to put any settlement by
+ordinary pioneer emigration, pilgrim fathers and the like, out of the
+question. Ross Island is not a place for a settlement: it is a place for
+an elaborately equipped scientific station, with a staff in residence
+for a year at a time. Our stay of three years was far too much: another
+year would have driven the best of us mad. Of the five main journeys
+which fell to my lot, one, the Winter Journey, should not have been
+undertaken at all with our equipment; and two others, the Dog Journey and
+the Search Journey, had better have been done by fresh men. It is no use
+repeating that Englishmen will respond to every call and stick it to the
+death: they will (some of them); but they have to pay the price all the
+same; and the price in my case was an overdraft on my vital capital which
+I shall never quite pay off, and in the case of five bigger, stronger,
+more seasoned men, death. The establishment of such stations and of such
+a service cannot be done by individual heroes and enthusiasts cadging for
+cheques from rich men and grants from private scientific societies: it is
+a business, like the Nares Arctic expedition, for public organization.
+
+I do not suppose that in these days of aviation the next visit to the
+Pole will be made by men on foot dragging sledges, or by men on sledges
+dragged by dogs, mules or ponies; nor will depôts be laid in that way.
+The pack will not, I hope, be broken through by any old coal-burning ship
+that can be picked up in the second-hand market. Specially built ships,
+and enough of them; specially engined tractors and aeroplanes; specially
+trained men and plenty of them, will all be needed if the work is to be
+done in any sort of humane and civilized fashion; and Cabinet ministers
+and voters alike must learn to value knowledge that is not baited by
+suffering and death. My own bolt is shot; I do not suppose I shall ever
+go south again before I go west; but if I do it will be under proper and
+reasonable conditions. I may not come back a hero; but I shall come back
+none the worse; for I repeat, the Antarctic, in moderation as to length
+of stay, and with such accommodation as is now easily within the means of
+modern civilized Powers, is not half as bad a place for public service as
+the worst military stations on the equator. I hope that by the time Scott
+comes home--for he is coming home: the Barrier is moving, and not a trace
+of our funeral cairn was found by Shackleton's men in 1916--the
+hardships that wasted his life will be only a horror of the past, and his
+_via dolorosa_ a highway as practicable as Piccadilly.
+
+And now let me come down to tin tacks. No matter how well the thing is
+done in future, its organizers will want to know at first all we can tell
+them about oil, about cold, and about food. First, as to oil.
+
+Scott complains of a shortage of oil at several of his last depôts. There
+is no doubt that this shortage was due to the perishing of the leather
+washers of the tins which contained the paraffin oil. All these tins had
+been subjected to the warmth of the sun in summer and the autumn
+temperatures, which were unexpectedly cold. In his Voyage of the
+Discovery Scott wrote as follows of the tins in which they drew their oil
+when sledging: "Each tin had a small cork bung, which was a decided
+weakness; paraffin _creeps_ in the most annoying manner, and a good deal
+of oil was wasted in this way, especially when the sledges were
+travelling over rough ground and were shaken or, as frequently happened,
+capsized. It was impossible to make these bungs quite tight, however
+closely they were jammed down, so that in spite of a trifling extra
+weight a much better fitting would have been a metallic screwed bung. To
+find on opening a fresh tin of oil that it was only three-parts full was
+very distressing, and of course meant that the cooker had to be used with
+still greater care."[349] Amundsen wrote of his paraffin: "We kept it in
+the usual cans but they proved too weak; not that we lost any paraffin,
+but Bjaaland had to be constantly soldering to keep them tight."[350]
+
+Our own tins were furnished with the metallic screwed stoppers which
+Scott recommended. There was no trouble reported[351] until we came up to
+One Ton Camp when on the Search Journey. Here was the depôt of food and
+oil which I had laid in the previous autumn for the Polar Party, stowed
+in a canvas 'tank' which was buried beneath seven feet of snow; the oil
+was placed on the top of the snow, in order that the red tins might prove
+an additional mark for the depôt. When we dug out the tank the food
+inside was almost uneatable owing to the quantity of paraffin which had
+found its way down through seven feet of snow during the winter and
+spring.
+
+We then found the Polar Party and learned of the shortage of oil. After
+our return to Cape Evans some one was digging about the camp and came
+across a wooden case containing eight one-gallon tins of paraffin. These
+had been placed there in September 1911, to be landed at Cape Crozier by
+the Terra Nova when she came down. The ship could not take them: they
+were snowed up during the winter, lost and forgotten, until dug up
+fifteen months afterwards. Three tins were full, three empty, one a third
+full and one two-thirds full.
+
+There can be no doubt that the oil, which was specially volatile, tended
+to vaporize and escape through the stoppers, and that this process was
+accelerated by the perishing, and I suggest also the hardening and
+shrinking, of the leather washers. Another expedition will have to be
+very careful on this point: they might reduce the risk by burying the
+oil.
+
+The second point about which something must be said is the unexpected
+cold met by Scott on the Barrier, which was the immediate cause of the
+disaster. "No one in the world would have expected the temperatures and
+surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year.... It is clear
+that these circumstances come on very suddenly, and our wreck is
+certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not
+seem to have any satisfactory cause."[352]
+
+They came down the glacier in plus temperatures: nor was there anything
+abnormal for more than a week after they got on to the Barrier. Then
+there came a big drop to a -37° minimum on the night of February 26. It
+is significant that the sun began to dip below the southern horizon at
+midnight about this time. "There is no doubt the middle of the Barrier is
+a pretty awful locality," wrote Scott.
+
+Simpson, in his meteorological report, has little doubt that the
+temperatures met by the Polar Party were abnormal. The records "clearly
+bring to light the possibility of great cold at an extremely early period
+in the year within a comparatively few miles of an open sea where the
+temperatures were over 40 degrees higher." "It is quite impossible to
+believe that normally there is a difference of nearly 40 degrees in March
+between McMurdo Sound and the South of the Barrier." The temperatures
+recorded by other sledge parties in March 1912 and those recorded at Cape
+Evans form additional evidence, in Simpson's opinion, that the
+temperatures experienced by Scott were not such as might be expected
+during normal autumn weather.
+
+Simpson's explanation is based upon the observations made in McMurdo
+Sound by sending up balloons with self-recording instruments attached.
+These showed that very rapid radiation takes place from the snow surface
+in winter, which cools the air in the immediate neighbourhood: a cold
+layer of air is thus formed near the ground, which may be many degrees
+colder than the air above it. It becomes, as it were, colder than it
+ought to be. This, however, can only happen during an absence of wind:
+when a wind blows the cold layer is swept away, the air is mixed and the
+temperature rises.
+
+The absence of wind from the south noted by Scott was, in Simpson's
+opinion, the cause of the low temperatures met by Scott: the temperature
+was reduced ten degrees below normal at Cape Evans, and perhaps twenty
+degrees where Scott was.[353]
+
+The third question is that of food. It is this point which is most
+important to future explorers. It is a fact that the Polar Party failed
+to make their distance because they became weak, and that they became
+weak although they were eating their full ration or more than their full
+ration of food, save for a few days when they went short on the way down
+the Beardmore Glacier. The first man to weaken was the biggest and
+heaviest man in the expedition: "the man whom we had least expected to
+fail."
+
+The rations were of two kinds. The Barrier (B) ration was that which was
+used on the Barrier during the outward journey towards the Pole. The
+Summit (S) ration was the result of our experiments on the Winter
+Journey. I expect it is the best ration which has been used to date, and
+consisted of biscuits 16, pemmican 12, butter 2, cocoa 0.57, sugar 3 and
+tea 0.86 ounces; total 34.43 ounces daily per man.
+
+The twelve men who went forward started this S ration at the foot of the
+Beardmore, and it was this ration which was left in all depôts to see
+them home. It was much more satisfying than the Barrier ration, and men
+could not have eaten so much when leading ponies or driving dogs in the
+early stages of summer Barrier sledging: but man-hauling is a different
+business altogether from leading ponies or driving dogs.
+
+It is calculated that the body requires certain proportions of fat,
+carbohydrates and proteins to do certain work under certain conditions:
+but just what the absolute quantities are is not ascertained. The work of
+the Polar Party was laborious: the temperatures (the most important of
+the conditions) varied from comparative warmth up and down the glacier to
+an average of about -20° in the rarefied air of the plateau. The
+temperatures met by them on their return over the Barrier were not really
+low for more than a week, and then there came quite commonly minus
+thirties during the day with a further drop to minus forties at night,
+when for a time the sun was below the horizon. These temperatures, which
+are not very terrible to men who are fresh and whose clothing is new,
+were ghastly to these men who had striven night and day almost
+ceaselessly for four months on, as I maintain, insufficient food. Did
+these temperatures kill them?
+
+Undoubtedly the low temperatures caused their death, inasmuch as they
+would have lived had the temperatures remained high. But Evans would not
+have lived: he died before the low temperatures occurred. What killed
+Evans? And why did the other men weaken as they did, though they were
+eating full rations and more? Weaken so much that in the end they starved
+to death?
+
+I have always had a doubt whether the weather conditions were sufficient
+to cause the tragedy. These men on full rations were supposed to be
+eating food of sufficient value to enable them to do the work they were
+doing, under the conditions which they actually met until the end of
+February, without loss of strength. They had more than their full
+rations, but the conditions in March were much worse than they imagined
+to be possible: when three survivors out of the five pitched their Last
+Camp they were in a terrible state. After the war I found that Atkinson
+had come to wonder much as I, but he had gone farther, for he had the
+values of our rations worked out by a chemical expert according to the
+latest knowledge and standards. I may add that, being in command after
+Scott's death, he increased the ration for the next year's sledging, so I
+suppose he had already come to the conclusion that the previous ration
+was not sufficient. The following are some of the data for which I am
+indebted to him: the whole subject will be investigated by him and the
+results published in a more detailed form.
+
+According to the most modern standards the food requirements for
+laborious work at a temperature of zero Fahr. (which is a fair Barrier
+average temperature to take) are 7714 calories to produce 10,069
+foot-tons of work. The actual Barrier ration which we used would generate
+4003 calories, equivalent to 5331 foot-tons of work. Similar requirements
+for laborious work at -10° Fahr. (which is a high average plateau
+temperature) are 8500 calories to produce 11,094 foot-tons of work. The
+actual Summit ration would generate 4889 calories, equivalent to 6608
+foot-tons of work. These requirements are calculated for total absorption
+of all food-stuffs: but in practice, by visual proof, this does not take
+place: this is especially noticeable in the case of fats, a quantity of
+which were digested neither by men, ponies, nor dogs.
+
+Several things go to prove that our ration was not enough. In the first
+case we were probably not as fit as we seemed after long sledge journeys.
+There is no doubt that when sledging men developed an automaticity of
+certain muscles at the expense of other muscles: for instance, a sledge
+could be hauled all day at the expense of the arms, and we had little
+power to lift weights at the end of several months of sledging. In
+relation to this I would add that, when the relief ship arrived in
+February 1912, four of us were at Cape Evans, but just arrived from three
+months of the Polar Journey. The land party, we four among them, were
+turned on to sledge stores ashore. This in practice meant twenty miles
+every day dragging a sledge; a good deal of 'humping' heavy cases, from
+five o'clock in the morning to very late at night; with uncertain meals
+and no rests. I can remember now how hard that work was to myself and, I
+expect, to those others who had been away sledging. The ship's party
+sledged only every other day "because they were not used to it." This was
+extremely bad organization, and in view of the possibility that some of
+the men might be required for further sledging in the autumn, just silly.
+
+Again, there is the experience of the man-hauling parties of the Polar
+Journey. There was, you may remember, a man-hauling party on the way to
+the Beardmore Glacier. They travelled with a light sledge but they lost
+weight on the Barrier ration. It is significant that they picked up
+condition when they started the Summit ration, especially Lashly.
+
+The Polar Party and the two returning parties, who were on the Summit
+ration from the foot of the Beardmore until the end of their journeys,
+weakened, in Atkinson's opinion, more than they should have done had
+their ration been sufficient. The First Return Party covered
+approximately 1100 statute miles. At the end of their journey their
+pulling muscles were all right, but Atkinson, who led the party,
+considers that they were at least 70 per cent weaker in other muscles.
+They all lost a great deal of weight, though they had the best conditions
+of the three returning parties, and the temperatures met by them averaged
+well over zero.
+
+The Second Return Party faced much worse conditions. They were only three
+men, and one of the three was so sick that for 120 miles he could not
+pull and for 90 miles he had to be dragged on the sledge. The average
+temperature approximated zero. They were extremely exhausted.
+
+Scott makes constant reference to the increasing hunger of the Polar
+Party: it is clear that the food did not compensate for the conditions
+which were met in increasing severity. Yet they were eating rather more
+than their full ration a considerable part of the time. It has to be
+considered that the temperatures met by them averaged far below -10°:
+that they did not absorb all their food: that increased heat was wanted
+not only for energy to do extra work caused by bad surfaces and contrary
+winds, but also to heat their bodies, and to thaw out their clothing and
+sleeping-bags.
+
+I believe it to be clear that the rations used by us must not only be
+increased by future expeditions, but co-ordinated in different
+proportions of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Taking into
+consideration the fact that our bodies were not digesting the amount of
+fats we had provided, Atkinson suggests that it is useless to increase
+the fats at the expense of the protein and carbohydrates. He recommends
+that fats should total about 5 ounces daily. The digestion of
+carbohydrates is easy and complete, and though that of protein is more
+complicated there are plenty of the necessary digestive ferments. The
+ration should be increased by equal amounts of protein and carbohydrates;
+both should be provided in as dry and pure a form as possible.
+
+There is no censure attached to this criticism. Our ration was probably
+the best which has been used: but more is known now than was known then.
+We are all out to try and get these things right for the future.[354]
+
+Campbell reached Hut Point only five days after we left it with the
+dog-teams. A characteristic note left to greet us on our return regretted
+they were too late to take part in the Search Journey. If I had lived
+through ten months such as those men had just endured, wild horses would
+not have dragged me out sledging again. But they were keen to get some
+useful work done in the time which remained until the ship arrived.
+
+We had the Polar records: Campbell and his men, unaided, had not only
+survived their terrible winter, but had sledged down the coast after it.
+We ourselves, faced by a difficult alternative, had fallen on our feet.
+We never hoped for more than this: we seldom hoped for so much.
+
+I wanted a series of Adélie penguin embryos from the rookery at Cape
+Royds, but had not expected an opportunity of getting them because I was
+away sledging during the summer months. Now the chance had come. Atkinson
+wanted to work on parasites at the same place, and others to survey. But
+the real job was an ascent of Erebus, the active volcano which rose from
+our doors to some 13,400 feet in height. A party of Shackleton's men
+under Professor David went up it in March, and managed to haul a sledge
+up to 5800 feet, from which point they had to portage their gear. A year
+before this Debenham, with the help of a telescope, selected a route by
+which they could haul a sledge up to 9000 feet. There proved to be no
+great difficulty about it; it was just a matter of legs and breath.
+
+They were a cheery company, part-singing in the evenings and working hard
+all day. It was an uneventful trip, Debenham said, and very harmonious:
+the best trip he had down there. Both Debenham and Dickason suffered from
+mountain sickness, however, and they were the two smokers! The clearness
+of the air was marked. At 5000 feet they could plainly see Mount
+Melbourne and Cape Jones, between two and three hundred miles away, and
+several uncharted mountains over to the west, but they were unable to
+plot them accurately because they could get direction rays from one point
+only. The Sound itself was covered by cloud most of the time, but
+Beaufort Island and Franklin Island were clear. Unlike David's party,
+they could see no signs whatever of volcanic action on Mount Bird, which
+is almost entirely covered with ice on which it was to be expected that
+some mark might be left. At 9000 feet Terror looked very imposing, but
+Mount Bird and Terra Nova were insignificant and uninteresting. The
+valley between the old crater and the slopes of the second crater greatly
+impressed them, and they found a fine little crevassed glacier in it.
+Both Priestley and Debenham are of opinion that it is possible to get to
+Terror by this valley, and that there are no crevassed areas or
+impossible slopes on the way. All the same it would probably be more
+sensible to go from Cape Crozier.
+
+At a point about 9000 feet up, Priestley, Gran, Abbott and Hooper started
+to make the ascent to the active crater on December 10. They packed the
+tent, poles, bags, inner cooker and cooking gear, with four days'
+provisions, and reached the second crater at about 11,500 feet, to be
+hung up by cloud all the next day. At these altitudes the temperature
+varied between -10° and -30°, though at sea-level simultaneously they
+were round about freezing-point. By 1 A.M. on the 12th the conditions
+were good--clear, with a southerly wind blowing the steam away from the
+summit. The party got away as soon as possible and reached the lip of the
+active crater in a few hours. Looking down they were unable to see the
+bottom, for it was full of steam: the sides sloped at a steep angle for
+some 500 feet, when they became sheer precipices: the opening appeared to
+be about 14,000 paces round. The top is mostly pumice, but there is also
+a lot of kenyte, much the same as at sea-level: the old crater was mostly
+kenyte, proving that this is the oldest rock of the island: felspar
+crystals must be continually thrown out, for they were lying about on the
+top of the snow; I have one nearly 3½ inches long.
+
+Two men went back to the camp, for one had a frost-bitten foot. This left
+Priestley and Gran, who tried to boil the hypsometer but failed owing to
+the wind, which was variable and enveloped them from time to time in
+steam and sulphur vapour. They left a record on a cairn and started to
+return. But when they had got 500 feet down Priestley found that he had
+left a tin of exposed films on the top instead of the record. Gran said
+he would go back and change it. He had reached the top when there was a
+loud explosion: large blocks of pumice were hurled out with a big smoke
+cloud; probably a big bubble had burst. Gran was in the middle of it,
+heard it gurgle before it burst, saw "blocks of pumiceous lava, in shape
+like the halves of volcanic bombs, and with bunches of long, drawn-out,
+hair-like shreds of glass in their interior."[355] This was Pélé's hair.
+Gran was a bit sick from sulphur dioxide fumes afterwards. They reached
+Cape Royds on the 16th, the very successful trip taking fifteen days.
+
+Meanwhile Shackleton's old hut was very pleasant at this time of year: in
+winter it was a bit too draughty. With bright sunlight, a lop on the sea
+which splashed and gurgled under the ice-foot, the beautiful mountains
+all round us, and the penguins nesting at our door, this was better than
+the Beardmore Glacier, where we had expected to be at this date. What
+then must it have been to the six men who were just returned from the
+very Gate of Hell? And the food: "Truly Shackleton's men must have fed
+like turkey-cocks from all the delicacies here: boiled chicken, kidneys,
+mushrooms, ginger, Garibaldi biscuits, soups of all kinds: it is a
+splendid change. Best of all are the fresh-buttered skua's eggs which we
+make for breakfast. In fact, life is bearable with all that has been
+unknown so long at last cleared up, and our anxieties for Campbell's
+party laid at rest."[356]
+
+For three weeks I worked among the Adélie penguins at Cape Royds, and
+obtained a complete series of their embryos. It was always Wilson's idea
+that embryology was the next job of a vertebral zoologist down south. I
+have already explained that the penguin is an interesting link in the
+evolutionary chain, and the object of getting this embryo is to find out
+where the penguins come in.[357] Whether or no they are more primitive
+than other nonflying birds, such as the apteryx, the ostrich, the rhea
+and the moa, which last is only just extinct, is an open question. But
+wingless birds are still hanging on to the promontories of the southern
+continents, where there is less rivalry than in the highly populated
+land areas of the north. It may be that penguins are descended from
+ancestors who lived in the northern hemisphere in a winged condition
+(even now you may sometimes see them try to fly), and that they have been
+driven towards the south.
+
+If penguins are primitive, it is rational to infer that the most
+primitive penguin is farthest south. These are the two Antarcticists, the
+Emperor and the Adélie. The latter appears to be the more numerous and
+successful of the two, and for this reason we are inclined to search
+among the Emperors as being among the most primitive penguins, if not the
+most primitive of birds now living: hence the Winter Journey. I was glad
+to get, in addition, this series of Adélie penguins' embryos, feeling
+somewhat like a giant who had wandered on to the wrong planet, and who
+was distinctly in the way of its true inhabitants.
+
+We returned too late to see the eggs laid, and therefore it was
+impossible to tell how old the embryos were. My hopes rose, however, when
+I saw some eggless nests with penguins sitting upon them, but later I
+found that these were used as bachelor quarters by birds whose wives were
+sitting near. I tried taking eggs from nests and was delighted to find
+that new eggs appeared: these I carefully marked, and it was not until I
+opened one two days later to find inside an embryo at least two weeks
+old, that I realized that penguins added baby-snatching to their other
+immoralities. Some of those from whom I took eggs sat upon stones of a
+similar size and shape with every appearance of content: one sat upon the
+half of the red tin of a Dutch cheese. They are not very intelligent.
+
+All the world loves a penguin: I think it is because in many respects
+they are like ourselves, and in some respects what we should like to be.
+Had we but half their physical courage none could stand against us. Had
+we a hundredth part of their maternal instinct we should have to kill our
+children by the thousand. Their little bodies are so full of curiosity
+that they have no room for fear. They like mountaineering, and joy-riding
+on ice-floes: they even like to drill.
+
+One day there had been a blizzard, and lying open to the view of all was
+a deserted nest, a pile of coveted stones. All the surrounding rookery
+made their way to and fro, each husband acquiring merit, for, after each
+journey, he gave his wife a stone. This was the plebeian way of doing
+things; but my friend who stood, ever so unconcerned, upon a rock knew a
+trick worth two of that: he and his wife who sat so cosily upon the other
+side.
+
+The victim was a third penguin. He was without a mate, but this was an
+opportunity to get one. With all the speed his little legs could compass
+he ran to and fro, taking stones from the deserted nest, laying them
+beneath a rock, and hurrying back for more. On that same rock was my
+friend. When the victim came up with his stone he had his back turned.
+But as soon as the stone was laid and the other gone for more, he jumped
+down, seized it with his beak, ran round, gave it to his wife and was
+back on the rock (with his back turned) before you could say Killer
+Whale. Every now and then he looked over his shoulder, to see where the
+next stone might be.
+
+I watched this for twenty minutes. All that time, and I do not know for
+how long before, that wretched bird was bringing stone after stone. And
+there were no stones there. Once he looked puzzled, looked up and swore
+at the back of my friend on his rock, but immediately he came back, and
+he never seemed to think he had better stop. It was getting cold and I
+went away: he was coming for another.
+
+The life of an Adélie penguin is one of the most unchristian and
+successful in the world. The penguin which went in for being a true
+believer would never stand the ghost of a chance. Watch them go to bathe.
+Some fifty or sixty agitated birds are gathered upon the ice-foot,
+peering over the edge, telling one another how nice it will be, and what
+a good dinner they are going to have. But this is all swank: they are
+really worried by a horrid suspicion that a sea-leopard is waiting to eat
+the first to dive. The really noble bird, according to our theories,
+would say, "I will go first and if I am killed I shall at any rate have
+died unselfishly, sacrificing my life for my companions"; and in time
+all the most noble birds would be dead. What they really do is to try and
+persuade a companion of weaker mind to plunge: failing this, they hastily
+pass a conscription act and push him over. And then--bang,
+helter-skelter, in go all the rest.
+
+They take turns in sitting on their eggs, and after many days the fathers
+may be seen waddling down towards the sea with their shirt-fronts
+muddied, their long trick done. It may be a fortnight before they return,
+well-fed, clean, pleased with life, and with a grim determination to
+relieve their wives, to do their job. Sometimes they are met by others
+going to bathe. They stop and pass the time of day. Well! Perhaps it
+would be more pleasant, and what does a day or two matter anyhow. They
+turn; clean and dirty alike are off to the seaside again. This is when
+they say, "The women are splendid."
+
+Life is too strenuous for them to have any use for the virtues of
+brotherly love, good works, charity and benevolence. When they mate the
+best thief wins: when they nest the best pair of thieves hatch out their
+eggs. In a long unbroken stream, which stretches down below the sea-ice
+horizon, they march in from the open sea. Some are walking on their human
+feet: others tobogganing upon their shiny white breasts. After their long
+walk they must have a sleep, and then the gentlemen make their way into
+the already crowded rookery to find them wives. But first a suitor must
+find, or steal, a pebble, for such are the penguin jewels: they are of
+lava, black, russet or grey, with almond-shaped crystals bedded in them.
+They are rare and of all sizes, but that which is most valued is the size
+of a pigeon's egg. Armed with one of these he courts his maid, laying it
+at her feet. If accepted he steals still more stones: she guards them
+jealously, taking in the meantime any safe opportunity to pick others
+from under her nearest neighbours. Any penguin which is unable to fight
+and steal successfully fails to make a good high nest, or loses it when
+made. Then comes a blizzard, and after that a thaw: for it thaws
+sometimes right down by the sea-shore where the Adélies have their
+nurseries. The eggs of the strong and wicked hatch out, but those of the
+weak are addled. You must have a jolly good pile of stones to hatch eggs
+after a blizzard like that in December 1911, when the rookeries were
+completely snow-covered: nests, eggs, parents and all.
+
+Once hatched the chicks grow quickly from pretty grey atoms of down to
+black lumps of stomach topped by a small and quite inadequate head. They
+are two or more weeks old, and they leave their parents, or their parents
+leave them, I do not know which. If socialism be the nationalization of
+the means of production and distribution, then they are socialists. They
+divide into parents and children. The adult community comes up from the
+open sea, bringing food inside them: they are full of half-digested
+shrimps. But not for their own children: these, if not already dead, are
+lost in a crowd of hungry tottering infants which besiege each
+food-provider as he arrives. But not all of them can get food, though all
+of them are hungry. Some have already been behindhand too long: they have
+not managed to secure food for days, and they are weak and cold and very
+weary.
+
+"As we stood there and watched this race for food we were gradually
+possessed with the idea that the chicks looked upon each adult coming up
+full-bellied from the shore as not a parent only, but a food-supply. The
+parents were labouring under a totally different idea, and intended
+either to find their own infants and feed them, or else to assimilate
+their already partially digested catch themselves. The more robust of the
+young thus worried an adult until, because of his importunity, he was
+fed. But with the less robust a much more pathetic ending was the rule. A
+chick that had fallen behind in this literal race for life, starving and
+weak, and getting daily weaker because it could not run fast enough to
+insist on being fed, again and again ran off pursuing with the rest.
+Again and again it stumbled and fell, persistently whining out its hunger
+in a shrill and melancholy pipe, till at last the race was given up.
+Forced thus by sheer exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance of
+getting food. Each hurrying parent with its little following of hungry
+chicks, intent on one thing only, rushed quickly by, and the starveling
+dropped behind to gather strength for one more effort. Again it fails, a
+robuster bird has forced the pace, and again success is wanting to the
+runt. Sleepily it stands there, with half-shut eyes, in a torpor
+resulting from exhaustion, cold, and hunger, wondering perhaps what all
+the bustle round it means, a little dirty, dishevelled dot, in the race
+for life a failure, deserted by its parents, who have hunted vainly for
+their own offspring round the nest in which they hatched it, but from
+which it may by now have wandered half a mile. And so it stands, lost to
+everything around, till a skua in its beat drops down beside it, and with
+a few strong, vicious pecks puts an end to the failing life."[358]
+
+There is a great deal to be said for this kind of treatment. The Adélie
+penguin has a hard life: the Emperor penguin a horrible one. Why not kill
+off the unfit right away, before they have had time to breed, almost
+before they have had time to eat? Life is a stern business in any case:
+why pretend that it is anything else? Or that any but the best can
+survive at all? And in consequence, I challenge you to find a more jolly,
+happy, healthy lot of old gentlemen in the world. We _must_ admire them:
+if only because they are so much nicer than ourselves! But it is grim:
+Nature is an uncompromising nurse.
+
+Nature was going to give us a bad time too if we were not relieved, and
+on January 17, as there were still no signs of the ship, it was decided
+to prepare for another winter. We were to go on rations; to cook with
+oil, for nearly all the coal was gone; to kill and store up seal. On
+January 18 we started our preparations, digging a cave to store more
+meat, and so forth. I went off seal hunting after breakfast, and having
+killed and cut up two, came back across the Cape at mid-day. All the men
+were out working in the camp. There was nothing to be seen in the Sound,
+and then, quite suddenly, the bows of the ship came out from behind the
+end of the Barne Glacier, two or three miles away. We watched her
+cautious approach with immense relief.
+
+"Are you all well," through a megaphone from the bridge.
+
+"The Polar Party died on their return from the Pole: we have their
+records." A pause and then a boat.
+
+Evans, who had been to England and made a good recovery from scurvy, was
+in command: with him were Pennell, Rennick, Bruce, Lillie and Drake. They
+reported having had a very big gale indeed on their way home last year.
+
+We got some apples off the ship, "beauties, I want nothing better....
+Pennell is first-class, as always...." "One notices among the ship's men
+a rather unnatural way of talking: not so much in special instances, but
+as a whole, contact with civilization gives it an affected sound: I
+notice it in both officers and men."[359]
+
+"_January 19. On board the Terra Nova._ After 28 hours' loading we left
+the old hut for good and all at 4 P.M. this afternoon. It has been a bit
+of a rush and little sleep last night. It is quite wonderful now to be
+travelling a day's journey in an hour: we went to Cape Royds in about
+that time and took off geological and zoological specimens. I should like
+to sit up and sketch all these views, which would have meant long
+travelling without the ship, but I feel very tired. The mail is almost
+too good for words. Now, with the latest waltz on the gramophone, beer
+for dinner and apples and fresh vegetables to eat, life is more bearable
+than it has been for many a long weary week and month. I leave Cape Evans
+with no regret: I never want to see the place again. The pleasant
+memories are all swallowed up in the bad ones."[360]
+
+Before the ship arrived it was decided among us to urge the erection of a
+cross on Observation Hill to the memory of the Polar Party. On the
+arrival of the ship the carpenter immediately set to work to make a great
+cross of jarrah wood. There was some discussion as to the inscription, it
+being urged that there should be some quotation from the Bible because
+"the women think a lot of these things." But I was glad to see the
+concluding line of Tennyson's "Ulysses" adopted: "To strive, to seek, to
+find, and not to yield."
+
+The open water stretched about a mile and a half south of Tent Island,
+and here we left the ship to sledge the cross to Hut Point at 8 A.M. on
+January 20. The party consisted of Atkinson, Wright, Lashly, Crean,
+Debenham, Keohane and Davies, the ship's carpenter and myself.
+
+"_Evening. Hut Point._ We had a most unpleasant experience coming in. We
+struck wind and drift just about a mile from Hut Point: then we saw there
+was a small thaw pool off the Point, and came out to give it a wide
+berth. Atkinson put his feet down into water: we turned sharp out, and
+then Crean went right in up to his arms, and we realized that the ice was
+not more than three or four inches of slush. I managed to give him a hand
+out without the ice giving, and we went on floundering about. Then Crean
+went right in again, and the sledge nearly went too: we pulled the
+sledge, and the sledge pulled him out. Except for some more soft patches
+that was all, but it was quite enough. I think we got out of it most
+fortunately."
+
+"Crean got some dry clothes here, and the cross has had a coat of white
+paint and is drying. We went up Observation Hill and have found a good
+spot right on the top, and have already dug a hole which will, with the
+rock alongside, give us three feet. From there we can see that this
+year's old ice is in a terrible state, open water and open water slush
+all over near the land--I have never seen anything like it here. Off Cape
+Armitage and at the Pram Point pressure it is extra bad. I only hope we
+can find a safe way back."
+
+"You would not think Crean had had such a pair of duckings to hear him
+talking so merrily to-night...."
+
+"I really do think the cross is going to look fine."[361]
+
+Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well.
+Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow:
+they had seen it time after time as they came back from hard journeys on
+the Barrier: Observation Hill and Castle Rock were the two which always
+welcomed them in. It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had
+lived: and the Barrier on the other, where they had died. No more fitting
+pedestal, a pedestal which in itself is nearly 1000 feet high, could have
+been found.
+
+"_Tuesday, January 22._ Rousing out at 6 A.M. we got the large piece of
+the cross up Observation Hill by 11 A.M. It was a heavy job, and the ice
+was looking very bad all round, and I for one was glad when we had got it
+up by 5 o'clock or so. It is really magnificent, and will be a permanent
+memorial which could be seen from the ship nine miles off with a naked
+eye. It stands nine feet out of the rocks, and many feet into the ground,
+and I do not believe it will ever move. When it was up, facing out over
+the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more."
+
+We got back to the ship all right and coasted up the Western Mountains to
+Granite Harbour; a wonderfully interesting trip to those of us who had
+only seen these mountains from a distance. Gran went off to pick up a
+depôt of geological specimens. Lillie did a trawl.
+
+This was an absorbing business, though it was only one of a long and
+important series made during the voyages of the Terra Nova. Here were all
+kinds of sponges, siliceous, glass rope, tubular, and they were generally
+covered with mucus. Some fed on diatoms so minute that they can only be
+collected by centrifuge: some have gastric juices to dissolve the
+siliceous skeletons of the diatoms on which they feed: they anchor
+themselves in the mud and pass water in and out of their bodies:
+sometimes the current is stimulated by cilia. There were colonies of
+Gorgonacea, which share their food unselfishly; and corals and marine
+degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but
+have gone down in the world. And there were starfishes, sea-urchins,
+brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers. The sea-urchins are
+formed of hexagonal plates, the centre of each of which is a ball, upon
+which a spine works on a ball and socket joint. These spines are used for
+protection, and when large they can be used for locomotion. But the real
+means of locomotion are five double rows of water-tube feet, working by
+suction, by which they withdraw the water inside a receptacle in the
+shell, thereby forming a vacuum; starfishes do the same. We found a
+species of sea-urchin which had such large spines that they practically
+formed bars; the spines were twice as long as the sea-urchin and shaped
+just like oars, being even fluted. A lobster grows by discarding his
+suit, hiding and getting another, growing meanwhile. A snail or an oyster
+retains his original shell, and adds to it in layers all the way down,
+increasing one edge. But our sea-urchin grows by an increment of
+calcareous matter all round the outside of each plate. As the animal
+grows the plates get bigger.
+
+There was a sea-cucumber which nurses its young, having a brood cavity
+which is really formed out of the mouth: this is a peculiarity of a new
+Antarctic genus found first on the Discovery. It has the most complex
+water-tubes, which it uses as legs, and a few limy rods in its soft skin
+instead of the bony calcareous plates of sea-urchins and starfish. After
+them came the feather-stars, a relic of the old crinoids which used to
+flourish in the carboniferous period, examples of which can be found in
+the Derbyshire limestone; and there were thousands of brittle-stars, like
+beautiful wheels of which the hubs and spokes remained, but not the
+circumference. These spokes or legs are muscular, sensory and locomotive;
+they differ from the starfishes in that they have no digestive glands in
+their legs, and from the feather-stars in that they do not use their legs
+to waft food into their mouths. Once upon a time they had a stalk and
+were anchored to a rock, and there are still very rare old stalked
+echinoderms living in the sea. This apparently geological thing was found
+by Wyville Thomson in 1868 still living in the seas to the north of
+Scotland, and this find started the Challenger Expedition for deep-sea
+soundings in 1872. But the Challenger brought back little in this line.
+Most of the species we found were peculiar to the Antarctic.
+
+There were Polychaete worms by the hundred, showing the protrusable
+mouth, which is shoved into the mud and then brought back into the body,
+and the bristles on the highly developed projections which act as legs,
+by which they get about the mud. These beasts have apparently given rise
+to the Arthropods. In a modified and later form they had taken to living
+in a tube, both for protection and because they found that they could not
+go through the mud, which had become too viscous for them. So they stand
+up in a tube and collect the sediment which is falling by means of
+tentacles. They spread from one locality to another by going through a
+plankton embryonic stage in their youth. They may be compared to the
+mason worms, which also build tubes.
+
+But as Lillie squatted on the poop surrounded by an inner ring of jars
+and tangled masses of the catch, and an outer ring of curious scientists,
+pseudo-scientists and seamen, no find pleased him so much as the frequent
+discovery of pieces of Cephalodiscus rarus, of which even now there are
+but some four jars full in the world. It is as interesting as it is
+uncommon, for its ancestor was a link between the vertebrates and
+invertebrates, though no one knows what it was like. It has been a
+vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early
+life, and it also has gills. First found on the Graham's Land side of the
+Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross
+Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.
+
+We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started
+to make our way out. Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens
+at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and
+also to leave a depôt there for future explorers. We met very heavy pack,
+having to return at least twelve miles and try another way. "The sea has
+been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time
+of year. There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes
+this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of
+which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen
+comparatively recently."[362] The propeller had a bad time, constantly
+catching up on ice. At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape
+Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island. That night we made good
+progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the
+day. But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we
+stopped and banked fires. "We lay just where we stopped until at 5 A.M.
+on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along,
+and we started to make the same slow progress--slow ahead, stop (to the
+engine-room)--bump and grind for a bit--then slow astern, stop--slow
+ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big bump which
+brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out
+into open water."[363]
+
+Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at
+3 A.M. on January 26 we were passing the dark brown granite headland of
+the northern foothills. We were soon made fast to a stretch of some 500
+yards of thick sea-ice, upon which the wind had not left a particle of
+snow, and before us the foothills formed that opening which Campbell had
+well named Hell's Gate.
+
+I wish I had seen that igloo: with its black and blubber and beastliness.
+Those who saw it came back with faces of amazement and admiration. We
+left a depôt at the head of the bay, marked with a bamboo and a flag, and
+then we turned homewards, counting the weeks, and days, and then the
+hours. In the early hours of January 27 we left the pack. On January 29
+we were off Cape Adare, "head sea, and wind, and fog, very ticklish work
+groping along hardly seeing the ship's length. Then it lifts and there is
+a fair horizon. Everybody pretty sea-sick, including most of the seamen
+from Cape Evans. All of us feeling rotten."[364] Very thick that night,
+and difficult going. At mid-day (lat. 69° 50´ S.) a partial clearance
+showed a berg right ahead. By night it was blowing a full gale, and it
+was not too easy to keep in our bunks. Our object was now to make east in
+order to allow for the westerlies later on. We passed a very large number
+of bergs, varied every now and then by growlers. On February 1, latitude
+64° 15´ S. and longitude 159° 15´ E., we coasted along one side of a
+berg which was twenty-one geographical miles long: the only other side of
+which we got a good view stretched away until lost below the horizon. In
+latitude 62° 10´ S. and longitude 158° 15´ E. we had "a real bad day:
+head wind from early morning, and simply crowds of bergs all round. At 8
+A.M. we had to wedge in between a berg and a long line of pack before we
+could find a way through. Then thick fog came down. At 9.45 A.M. I went
+out of the ward-room door, and almost knocked my head against a great
+berg which was just not touching the ship on the starboard side. There
+was a heavy cross-swell, and the sea sounded cold as it dashed against
+the ice. After crossing the deck it was just possible to see in the fog
+that there was a great Barrier berg just away on the port side." We
+groped round the starboard berg to find others beyond. Our friend on the
+opposite side was continuous and apparently without end. It was soon
+clear that we were in a narrow alley-way--between one very large berg and
+a number of others. It took an hour and a quarter of groping to leave the
+big berg behind. At 4 P.M., six hours later, we were still just feeling
+our way along. And we had hopes of being out of the ice in this latitude!
+
+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.
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+   [349] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 449.
+
+   [350] Amundsen, _The South Pole_, vol. ii. p. 19.
+
+   [351] Lashly's diary records that the Second Return Party found a
+         shortage of oil at the Middle Barrier Depôt (see p. 395).
+
+   [352] Scott, "Message to the Public."
+
+   [353] A full discussion of these and other Antarctic temperatures
+         is to be found in the scientific reports of the British
+         Antarctic Expedition, 1910-13, "Meteorology," vol. i. chap.
+         ii., by G. C. Simpson.
+
+   [354] Modern research suggests that the presence or absence of
+         certain vitamines makes a difference, and it may be a very
+         great difference, in the ability of any individual to profit
+         by the food supplied to him. If this be so this factor must
+         have had great influence upon the fate of the Polar Party,
+         whose diet was seriously deficient in, if not absolutely
+         free from, vitamines. The importance of this deficiency to
+         the future explorer can hardly be exaggerated, and I suggest
+         that no future Antarctic sledge party can ever set out to
+         travel inland again without food which contains these
+         vitamines. It is to be noticed that, although the Medical
+         Research Council's authoritative publication on the true
+         value of these accessory substances was not available when
+         we went South in 1910, yet Atkinson insisted that fresh
+         onions, which had been brought down by the ship, be added to
+         our ration for the Search Journey. Compare recent work of
+         Professor Leonard Hill on the value of ultra-violet rays in
+         compensating for lack of vitamines.--A. C.-G.
+
+   [355] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 356.
+
+   [356] My own diary.
+
+   [357] See p. 234.
+
+   [358] Wilson, _Nat. Ant. Exp., 1901-1904_, "Zoology," Part ii. pp.
+         44-45.
+
+   [359] My own diary.
+
+   [360] Ibid.
+
+   [361] My own diary.
+
+   [362] My own diary.
+
+   [363] My own diary.
+
+   [364] Ibid.
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+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.
+
+BRASH. Small ice fragments from a floe which is breaking up.
+
+CLOUD. The commonest form of cloud, and also that typical of blizzard
+conditions, was a uniform pall stretching all over the sky without
+distinction. This was logged by us as _stratus_. _Cumulus_ clouds are the
+woolly billows, flat below and rounded on top, which are formed by local
+ascending currents of air. They were rare in the south and only formed
+over open water or mountains. _Cirrus_ are the "mare's tails" and similar
+wispy clouds which float high in the atmosphere. These and their allied
+forms were common. Generally speaking, the clouds were due to
+stratification of the air into layers rather than to ascending currents.
+
+CRUSTS. Layers of snow in a snow-field with air space between them.
+
+FINNESKO. Boots made entirely of fur, soles and all.
+
+FROST SMOKE. Condensed water vapour which forms a mist over open sea in
+cold weather.
+
+ICE-FOOT. Fringes of ice which skirt many parts of the Antarctic shores:
+many of them have been formed by sea-spray.
+
+NUNATAK. An island of land in a snow-field. Buckley Island is the top of
+a mountain sticking out of the top of the Beardmore Glacier.
+
+PIEDMONT. Stretches of ancient ice which remain along the Antarctic
+coasts.
+
+PRAM. A Norwegian skiff, with a spoon bow.
+
+SAENNEGRASS. A kind of Norwegian hay used as packing in finnesko.
+
+SASTRUGI are the furrows or irregularities formed on a snow plain by the
+wind. They may be a foot or more deep and as hard and as slippery as
+ice: they may be quite soft: they may appear as great inverted pudding
+bowls: they may be hard knots covered with soft powdery snow.
+
+SLEDGING DISTANCES. All miles are geographical miles unless otherwise
+stated, 1 statute or English mile = 0.87 geographical mile: 1
+geographical mile = 1.15 statute miles.
+
+TANK. A canvas "hold-all" strapped to the sledge to contain food bags.
+
+TIDE CRACK. A working crack between the land ice and the sea ice which
+rises and falls with the tide.
+
+WIND. Wind forces are logged according to the Beaufort scale, which is as
+follows:
+
+                             Mean velocity
+No.     Description.        in miles per hour.
+ 0.     Calm                        0
+ 1.     Light air                   1
+ 2.     Light breeze                4
+ 3.     Gentle breeze               9
+ 4.     Moderate breeze            14
+ 5.     Fresh breeze               20
+ 6.     Strong breeze              26
+ 7.     Moderate gale              33
+ 8.     Fresh gale                 42
+ 9.     Strong gale                51
+10.     Whole gale                 62
+11.     Storm                      75
+12.     Hurricane                  92
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+    Abbott, George P., lv, lvii, 558
+    Adam Mountains, 361
+    Adare, Cape, xxiii, xxix, xxxiv, 409, 570
+    Adélie Land, xxii
+    Adélie penguins. _See_ Penguins, Adélie
+    Adventure, the, xviii
+    Albatross, capture of, 39
+    Alexander Land, xxi
+    Alexandra, Queen, 507
+    Amundsen, Roald,
+        telegram to Scott, 41
+        arrives in Bay of Whales, 128
+        character, 134
+        letter to King of Norway, 482
+        forestalls Scott at Pole, 506
+        reason of success, 544
+    'Antarctic Adventures' (Priestley), lxi
+    Antarctic Continent, theories of, xxi
+    'Antarctic Penguins' (Levick), lxi
+    Antarctic regions,
+        early explorations, xviii
+        Ross's expedition, xxv
+        importance of Scott's work, lxii
+        marine life, 568
+    Anton (pony boy), 224, 429
+    Aptenodytes forsteri. _See_ Penguin, Emperor
+    Archer, W. W., 429, 438, 472
+    Arctic regions, exploration in, xxix-xxxiii
+    Arethusa. _See_ Portuguese man-of-war
+    Armitage, Cape, 108, 566
+    Arrival Bay, xlvi
+    Arrival Heights, 98, 185
+    Atkinson, Edward L.,
+        his responsibilities, 1
+        on the Terra Nova, 3
+        character, 4
+        on South Trinidad, 19
+        accident to foot, 111
+        lecture on scurvy, 215
+        lost in blizzard, 303
+        Barrier Journey, 324
+        in command of First Return Party, 381
+        meets Lashly and Evans, 404
+        difficulties during Scott's absence, 411
+        attempts to find Scott, 426
+        in command of Main Party, 427
+        journey to Hutton Cliffs, 428
+        sledge journey, 429
+        fish-trap, 444
+        spring journey, 467
+        reads Burial Service over Scott, 481
+        lands in New Zealand, 572
+    Atmosphere, observations on, 35
+    Aurora borealis, 244
+
+    Balloon Bight, xxxiv, 130
+    Barne Glacier, 184, 307, 459
+    Barrie, Sir J. M., Scott's letter to, 540
+    Barrier, the,
+        Ross's journey, xxiii
+        Scott's survey, 1902, xxxiv
+        first arrival at, 81
+        Scott's paper on, 214
+        snow surface, 239
+        Wright's lecture, 455
+        movement, 468
+    Beardmore Glacier, journey across, 350-367
+    Beaufort Island, 557
+    Bellingshausen, xxi
+    Bernacchi, Cape, 425
+    Biology, marine,
+        importance of Ross's expedition, xxvii
+        Terra Nova observations, 7, 567
+    Bird, Cape, xxiv
+    Bird, Mt., 558
+    Bird Peninsula, 409
+    Biscuit Depôt, 473
+    Black Island, xxv
+    Blacksand Beach, 100
+    Blizzards, 112, 447
+    Blubber, uses of, lvi
+    Bluff Depôt, 114, 119, 418
+    Borchgrevink, xxviii
+    Bowers, Lieut. H. R.,
+        on Terra Nova, 3
+        character and personality, 4, 208
+        at South Trinidad, 16
+        on Depôt Journey, 105
+        on Winter Journey, 234
+        trip to Western Mountains, 306
+        commencement of Polar Journey, 325
+        passage of the Beardmore Glacier, 351
+        _seq._ Plateau Journey, 368 _seq._
+        body discovered, 480
+        journey to Pole, 496
+        _seq._ return from Pole, 511 _seq._
+    Bowers, Mrs., Scott's letter to, 539
+    Browning, Frank V., lv, lvi, lvii, lviii
+    Brown Island, xxv
+    Bruce, Wilfred M., 565
+    Buckley Island, 362
+    Butter Point, 425
+
+    Campbell, Victor,
+        at Inexpressible Island, lii _seq._
+        on Terra Nova, 2
+        character, 4
+        Terra Nova attempts to relieve, 409
+    possibility of rescuing, 441
+        rescued, 493
+    Cardiff, Wales, 1
+    Castle Rock, xxxv, 152, 185, 434
+    Cephalodiscus rarus, 569
+    Challenger Expedition, xxviii, 568
+    Cherry-Garrard, Apsley,
+        functions, 2
+        on Winter Journey, 233 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 _seq._
+        journey with dogs, 416 _seq._
+        illness, 427
+        work on penguins, 559
+    Christmas Day celebration, 1911, 373
+    Clissold, Thomas, 309, 383, 429
+    Cloudmaker, 356, 359, 382
+    Colbeck, Cape, 129
+    Cook, Captain James, Antarctic explorations, xviii, xix, xx, xxi
+    Corner Camp, 112, 122, 135, 166, 306, 468, 473
+    Crater Heights, 98, 162
+    Crean, Thomas,
+        Depôt Journey, 104 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 _seq._
+        Plateau Journey, 368 _seq._
+        snow-blindness, 385
+        journey for help, 406
+        duties, 438
+        on search journey, 472
+    Crozier, Capt., xxix
+    Crozier, Cape, discovery, xxiii, xl, 252, 558
+
+    Darwin, Mt., 366, 388
+    David, Professor, xlvii
+    Davies, Francis, 92
+    Day, Bernard C., 310, 383, 429
+    Debenham, Frank, 217, 309, 437, 438, 465, 472, 557
+    Dellbridge Islands, 169
+    De Long, G. W., xxix
+    Derrick Point, 98
+    Dickason, Harry, liv, lviii, 557
+    Diet,
+        Cook's precautions, xviii
+        experiments on Winter Journey, 256
+        importance of good cooking, 330
+        effects of unsuitability, 552
+    Dimitri (dog boy), 104, 310, 323, 404, 419, 420, 428, 467
+    Disaster Camp, 160
+    Discovery, Mt., 151, 186
+    Discovery Expedition, 1901-1904, xxxiii _seq._, 456
+    Discovery hut, 97, 185
+    Dogs,
+        on Scott's first expedition, xxxvi
+        on board ship, 49
+        effect of blizzards, 113
+        ponies as food for, 339
+        successful use, 353
+        rate of return, 383
+        new batch, 410
+        hospital, 437
+        behaviour in camp, 440
+        accommodation, 450
+        diet, 452
+        disease among, 453
+        behaviour while driving, 469
+    Dolphins, observations on, 37
+    Dominion Range, 362, 370
+    Drake, Frank, 3, 97, 565
+    Drygalski Ice Tongue, lviii
+    Dunedin, N.Z., 48
+    Dunlop Island, 307
+    D'Urville, Dumont, xxii
+
+    Emperor Penguin. _See_ Penguin, Emperor
+    Enderby, Messrs., xxi
+    Equator, crossing of, 10
+    Erebus, Mt.,
+        discovery, xxiii
+        first glimpse of, 81
+        activity, 184
+        ascent of, 557
+    Erebus, the, xxii, xxix
+    Eskers, the, 432
+    Evans, Lieut. Edward,
+        functions, 2
+        character, 4
+        on Depôt Journey, 104 _seq._
+        lectures, 217
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 _seq._
+        Plateau Journey, 368 _seq._
+        snow-blindness, 391
+        symptoms of scurvy, 393
+        illness, 399
+        sent home, 423
+        returns on Terra Nova, 565
+    Evans, Seaman Edgar,
+        on Discovery Expedition, xxxix
+        as Neptune, 10
+        trip to Western Mountains, 306 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 _seq._
+        Plateau Journey, 368 _seq._
+        accident to hand, 378
+        journey to Pole, 496 _seq._
+        return from Pole, 511 _seq._
+        death, 528
+    Evans, Cape, xlviii, 86, 96, 181, 317, 434, 444, 447, 493, 502
+    Evans Coves, l, liii, 409, 569
+
+    Fahrt, 458
+    Ferrar Glacier, xxxviii
+    Fire, outbreaks of, 462
+    Fodder Depôt, 109
+    Forde, Robert, 104, 306, 429
+    Forster, Mr., xx
+    Fram, the, xxix _seq._, xlviii, 46, 133
+    Franklin, Sir John, xxix
+    Franklin Island, 557, 570
+    Franz Josef Land, xxxii
+    Funchal, Madeira, 3.
+
+    Gap, the, 98
+    Gateway, the, 339, 351
+    Geelmuyden, Professor, xxxi
+    Glacier Tongue, 152, 185, 430, 449
+    Gran, Tryggve, 4, 104 _seq._, 429, 434, 438, 447, 472, 558, 567
+    Granite Harbour, lviii, 409, 567
+    Granite Pillars, 393
+    Great Razorback Island, 169, 186
+    Greely, A. W., xxix, xxx
+
+    Haig, Sir Douglas, Scott's letter to, 410
+    Halley, Edmund, 11
+    Hare, xxxv
+    Hell's Gate, 570
+    Helminthology, 17
+    High Peak, 183
+    Hobart, Tasmania, xxii
+    Hooker, Sir Joseph D., xxv
+    Hooker, Mt., 186
+    Hooper, F. J., 15, 28, 310, 383, 438, 472, 477, 558
+    Hooper, Mt. _See_ Upper Barrier Depôt
+    Hope, Mt., 343, 393
+    Hope Island, xlvii
+    Horses. _See_ Ponies, Manchurian
+    Horseshoe Bay, 98
+    Hut Point, lix, 97, 157, 461, 566
+    Hut Point Peninsula, xxiv, xxxiv, 185
+    Hutton Cliffs, 169, 185, 428
+    Hyperoodon rostrata. _See_ Whale, bottle-nosed
+
+    Ice,
+        Cook's observations, xx
+        the Fram, xxx
+        formation of pack, 59
+        movement, 440
+    Ice cap, Antarctic, xxxviii
+    Icebergs, 61, 570
+    "Igloo back," lvii
+    Inaccessible Island, 186, 434
+    Inexpressible Island, conditions on, liii
+    Island Lake, 182
+
+    Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, xxxii, 216
+    Jeannette, the, xxix
+    Johansen, Lieut., xxx, 132
+    Jones, Cape, 557
+
+    Kayaks, Nansen's use of, xxxi
+    Keltie Glacier, 358
+    Keohane, Patrick, 104 _seq._, 353, 382, 426, 428, 434, 438, 473
+    Killer whale. _See_ Whale, killer
+    King Edward VII.'s Land, xxxiv, xlviii
+    Kinsey, Mr. J. J., 48
+    Knight, E. F., 12, 18
+    Knoll, the, xl, 252, 260
+    Kyffin, Mt., 352
+
+    Land crabs, at South Trinidad, 14, 18
+    Lashly, W.,
+        on Discovery Expedition, xxxviii
+        diary, 311 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 _seq._
+        nurses Lieut. Evans, 393 _seq._
+        duties, 438
+        on Search Journey, 472
+    Levick, G. Murray, liii, 3
+    Lillie, Denis G., 4, 565, 569
+    Lister, Mt., 186
+    Little Razorback Island, 171, 186, 449
+    Lower Glacier Depôt, 352
+    Lyttelton, N.Z., 2, 44, 573
+
+    M'Clintock, Sir F. L., xxix
+    McMurdo Sound, xxiv, xxxiv, 409
+    Magnetic Pole, South, xxii, xxv
+    Markham, Sir Clements, xxix
+    Markham, Mt., 337
+    Marshall Mountains, 362
+    Meares, Cecil H., 97, 104, 213, 310, 323, 347, 353, 382, 429
+    Melbourne, Mt., l, 557
+    Middle Barrier Depôt, 338
+    Mill Glacier, 362
+    Milne, A. A., on Scott's character, lx
+    Minna Bluff, xxiv, 186
+    Mirage, 118, 386, 423
+    Morning, Mt., 186
+    Morning, the, xxxvii
+    Mules, use of, 410, 450, 462, 473, 475, 478, 490
+
+    Nansen, Fridtjof,
+        Arctic explorations, xxix _seq._
+        on scurvy, 216
+        on equipment, 456
+    Nansen, Mt., 570
+    Nares, Sir G. S., xxix
+    Neale, W. H., 28
+    Nelson, Edward W., 4, 215, 383, 438, 445, 472, 477
+    North Bay, 172, 438, 444, 445
+
+    Oamaru, N.Z., 572
+    Oates, Capt. L. E. G.,
+        on Terra Nova, 2, 4
+        Depôt Journey, 104 _seq._
+        care of ponies, 179, 318
+        lecture on horses, 217
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351
+        Plateau Journey, 369
+        suggests use of mules, 410
+        death, 485
+        commemorative inscription, 487
+        journey to Pole, 497
+    Observation Hill, 98, 565
+    Oestrelata arminjoniana. _See_ Petrel, black-breasted
+    Oestrelata trinitatis. _See_ Petrel, white-breasted
+    Oil, shortage of, 550
+    Oil fuel, its advantages, 46
+    One and a Half Degree Depôt, 502
+    One Ton Depôt, 116, 314, 326, 383, 398, 413, 418
+    Orca gladiator. _See_ Whale, killer
+
+    Pagoda Cairn, 117
+    Parry, Sir W. E., xxix
+    Peary, R. E., xlviii
+    Penguin, Adélie,
+        appearance, xxxix
+        Levick's book, lxi
+        habits, 63, 561
+        rookery discovered, 83
+        curiosity, 86
+        embryos obtained, 559
+        breeding, 562
+        feeding of young, 563
+    Penguin, Emperor,
+        eggs, xxii, 299
+        habits and breeding, xxxix _seq._, 82
+        embryology, 234
+        discovery of rookery, 252, 268
+        care of young, 269
+        eagerness to sit, 270
+    Pennell, Harry L. L., liii, 3, 4, 8, 565, 572
+    Petrel, Antarctic, 63
+    Petrel, black-breasted, 13
+    Petrel, giant, 50
+    Petrel, snowy, xix, 50
+    Petrel, white-breasted, 13
+    Plankton, 6, 69
+    Pole, South,
+        Scott's final arrangements, 379
+        altitude, 502
+        Amundsen's arrival, 506
+        Scott's arrival, 506
+        characteristics of area, 508
+    Polheim (camp), 507
+    Polychaete worms, 568
+    Ponies, Manchurian,
+        on board ship, 49
+        their uses, 88
+        effect of blizzards on, 113
+        Scott's care of, 114
+        behaviour on ice, 141
+        fodder, 179
+        exercising, 190
+        treatment and diseases, 218
+        Scott's decision, 327
+        weights lightened, 331
+        difficulties on march, 342
+        destroyed, 349
+    Ponting, Herbert G., 90, 173, 213, 320, 429
+    Portuguese man-of-war, 7
+    Pram, 17, 19
+    Pram Point, 98, 162, 466, 566
+    Priestley, Raymond E., liii, 130, 558
+    Ptomaine poisoning, lvii
+    Pulleyn, Lieut. George, 410
+
+    Ramp, the, 168
+    Rennick, H. E. de P., 3, 565
+    Resolution, the, xviii
+    Roberts, Cape, lviii, 425
+    Ross, Sir James C., xxii, 11, 12
+    Ross Island, xxiii
+    Ross Sea, xxiii, xxviii, xlii
+    Royal Society Range, 493
+    Royds, Cape, xlv, xlvii, 98, 183, 461, 559
+
+    Sabine, Mt., xxiii, 80
+    Safety Camp, 110, 122, 136, 306
+    St. Paul, island, 33
+    Scott, Capt. R. F.,
+        on early explorations, xx
+        on Ross, xxvii
+        first expedition, 1901-1904, xxxiii
+        excellence of equipment, lxii
+        commencement of second expedition, 1
+        visits South Trinidad, 1901, 12
+        joins Terra Nova, 31
+        Depôt Journey, 104
+        character and achievements, 200, 573
+        paper on Barrier, 214
+        trip to Western Mountains, 306
+        Barrier stage of Polar Journey, 319 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 350 _seq._
+        Plateau Journey, 368
+        strength of team, 377
+        alteration in units, 379
+        tries new sledge runners, 457
+        body discovered, 480
+        burial, 483
+        his account of journey to Pole, 496 _seq._
+        return from Pole, 511 _seq._
+        message to the public, 541
+        drawbacks of his plan, 545
+    'Scott's Last Expedition,' lix
+    Scurvy, lvii, 215, 393
+    Sea, freezing of, 448
+    Sea-cucumber, 568
+    Sea-leopard, 65, 66
+    Sea-urchins, 567
+    Seal, 66, 67, 162
+    Seal, crab-eating, 67, 68
+    Seal, Ross, 66
+    Seal, Weddell, 66, 67, 161, 464, 466
+    Shackleton, Sir Ernest, xxxvii, xlvii
+    Shambles Camp, 349, 502
+    Simon's Bay, 31
+    Simpson, G. C., 4, 215, 306 _seq._, 429, 502, 504
+    Ski, use of, 355, 458, 498
+    Ski Slope, 152
+    Skua gulls, 464, 499
+    Skua Lake, 95, 182
+    Sledge meters, 385, 417, 461
+    Sledge runners, Nansen on, 456, 457
+    Sledges,
+        Nansen's innovation, xxx
+        motor, 88, 92, 321
+    Smoking, limitations on, 195
+    Snow-blindness, 353
+    South Bay, 447
+    'South Polar Times,' 437, 445
+    South Trinidad,
+        landing, 13
+        bird life, 13, 14
+        land crabs, 14
+        difficulty of leaving, 15, 18
+    Southern Barrier Depôt, 338
+    Sverdrup, O. N., xxx
+
+    Taylor, Griffith, lxi, 215, 307, 308, 317, 429
+    Temperature,
+        of polar plateau, 505
+        effect on Polar party, 553
+    Tent Island, 186, 439, 566
+    Terra Australis, belief in existence of, xviii
+    Terra Nova Bay, 493
+    Terra Nova, the,
+        on Scott's first expedition, xlv
+        commencement of voyage, 1910, 1
+        crew, 2
+        arrangement of cabins, 3
+        defects in pumps, 5, 28
+        plankton nets, 6
+        fire on board, 6
+        biological observations, 7
+        lack of fresh water, 8
+        refits at Lyttelton, 44
+        overloading, 50
+        suitability for ice work, 73
+        anchorage, 101
+        arrival with mails, 409
+        defects, 548
+        expedition finally relieved, 564
+        trawling, 567
+    Terror, Mt., xxiii, xxiv, xli, 252, 558
+    Terror, the, xxii, xxix
+    Terror Point, 253
+    Tersio peronii, 37
+    Three Degree Depôt, 502
+    Tremasome, parasitic growth on, 444
+    Turk's Head, 185
+    Turtleback Island, 434
+
+    Upper Barrier Depôt, 333
+    Upper Glacier Depôt, 369, 502
+
+    Victoria Land, xxxiv
+    Vince's Cross, xxxv
+
+    Waves, height of, 58
+    Weddell, James, xxv
+    Western Mountains, 151, 306, 567
+    Whale, 37
+    Whale, blue, 70, 71
+    Whale, bottle-nosed, 156
+    Whale, killer, 69, 90, 142, 154
+    Whale, piked, 70
+    Whales, Bay of, xlviii, 128, 130
+    White Island, xxiv, 111, 493
+    Wild, Frank, xxxv
+    Wild Mountains, 362
+    Wilkes, Charles, xxii
+    Williamson, Thomas S., 429, 438, 472
+    Wilson, Dr. E. A.,
+        on Emperor penguins, xli
+        functions, 2
+        character and personality, 4, 203
+        Depôt Journey, 104
+        Winter Journey, 233 _seq._
+        Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351
+        Plateau Journey, 368
+        body discovered, 480
+        journey to Pole, 496 _seq._
+        return from Pole, 512 _seq._
+    Wilson, Mrs., Scott's letter to, 539
+    Wind Vane Hill, 95, 182
+    Wright, Charles S., 4, 215, 319, 351, 381, 382, 429, 434, 438, 447,
+        455, 472, 481, 489
+
+    X Cairn, 120
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
+
+
+
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