The Worst Journey in the World Part 59

"_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 depot 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, gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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-cuc.u.mbers. 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 sh.e.l.l, 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 sh.e.l.l, 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-cuc.u.mber 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 circ.u.mference. 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 anch.o.r.ed 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 p.o.o.p surrounded by an inner ring of jars and tangled ma.s.ses 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 depot 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 pa.s.sed 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)--b.u.mp and grind for a bit--then slow astern, stop--slow ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big b.u.mp which brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out into open water."[363]

Mount Nansen rose sheer and ma.s.sive ahead of us with a table top, and at 3 A.M. on January 26 we were pa.s.sing 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 h.e.l.l'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 depot 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 pa.s.sed a very large number of bergs, varied every now and then by growlers. On February 1, lat.i.tude 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 lat.i.tude 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 lat.i.tude!

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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.sy 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 ash.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e-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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sage 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 Depot 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 s.e.xually 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 subst.i.tute? 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Pa.s.sion.

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 Depot (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.