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.