some hundreds of yards away. The little light was going fast: we were
much more excited about the approach of complete darkness and the look of
wind in the south than we were about our triumph. After indescribable
effort and hardship we were witnessing a marvel of the natural world, and
we were the first and only men who had ever done so; we had within our
grasp material which might prove of the utmost importance to science; we
were turning theories into facts with every observation we made,--and we
had but a moment to give.
[Illustration: EMPERORS, BARRIER AND SEA ICE--E. A. Wilson, del.]
The disturbed Emperors made a tremendous row, trumpeting with their
curious metallic voices. There was no doubt they had eggs, for they tried
to shuffle along the ground without losing them off their feet. But when
they were hustled a good many eggs were dropped and left lying on the
ice, and some of these were quickly picked up by eggless Emperors who had
probably been waiting a long time for the opportunity. In these poor
birds the maternal side seems to have necessarily swamped the other
functions of life. Such is the struggle for existence that they can only
live by a glut of maternity, and it would be interesting to know whether
such a life leads to happiness or satisfaction.
I have told[156] how the men of the Discovery found this rookery where we
now stood. How they made journeys in the early spring but never arrived
early enough to get eggs and only found parents and chicks. They
concluded that the Emperor was an impossible kind of bird who, for some
reason or other, nests in the middle of the Antarctic winter with the
temperature anywhere below seventy degrees of frost, and the blizzards
blowing, always blowing, against his devoted back. And they found him
holding his precious chick balanced upon his big feet, and pressing it
maternally, or paternally (for both sexes squabble for the privilege)
against a bald patch in his breast. And when at last he simply must go
and eat something in the open leads near by, he just puts the child down
on the ice, and twenty chickless Emperors rush to pick it up. And they
fight over it, and so tear it that sometimes it will die. And, if it can,
it will crawl into any ice-crack to escape from so much kindness, and
there it will freeze. Likewise many broken and addled eggs were found,
and it is clear that the mortality is very great. But some survive, and
summer comes; and when a big blizzard is going to blow (they know all
about the weather), the parents take the children out for miles across
the sea-ice, until they reach the threshold of the open sea. And there
they sit until the wind comes, and the swell rises, and breaks that
ice-floe off; and away they go in the blinding drift to join the main
pack-ice, with a private yacht all to themselves.
You must agree that a bird like this is an interesting beast, and when,
seven months ago, we rowed a boat under those great black cliffs,[157]
and found a disconsolate Emperor chick still in the down, we knew
definitely why the Emperor has to nest in mid-winter. For if a June egg
was still without feathers in the beginning of January, the same egg
laid in the summer would leave its produce without practical covering for
the following winter. Thus the Emperor penguin is compelled to undertake
all kinds of hardships because his children insist on developing so
slowly, very much as we are tied in our human relationships for the same
reason. It is of interest that such a primitive bird should have so long
a childhood.
But interesting as the life history of these birds must be, we had not
travelled for three weeks to see them sitting on their eggs. We wanted
the embryos, and we wanted them as young as possible, and fresh and
unfrozen that specialists at home might cut them into microscopic
sections and learn from them the previous history of birds throughout the
evolutionary ages. And so Bill and Birdie rapidly collected five eggs,
which we hoped to carry safely in our fur mitts to our igloo upon Mount
Terror, where we could pickle them in the alcohol we had brought for the
purpose. We also wanted oil for our blubber stove, and they killed and
skinned three birds--an Emperor weighs up to 6½ stones.
The Ross Sea was frozen over, and there were no seal in sight. There were
only 100 Emperors as compared with 2000 in 1902 and 1903. Bill reckoned
that every fourth or fifth bird had an egg, but this was only a rough
estimate, for we did not want to disturb them unnecessarily. It is a
mystery why there should have been so few birds, but it certainly looked
as though the ice had not formed very long. Were these the first
arrivals? Had a previous rookery been blown out to sea and was this the
beginning of a second attempt? Is this bay of sea-ice becoming unsafe?
Those who previously discovered the Emperors with their chicks saw the
penguins nursing dead and frozen chicks if they were unable to obtain a
live one. They also found decomposed eggs which they must have incubated
after they had been frozen. Now we found that these birds were so anxious
to sit on something that some of those which had no eggs were sitting on
ice! Several times Bill and Birdie picked up eggs to find them lumps of
ice, rounded and about the right size, dirty and hard. Once a bird
dropped an ice nest egg as they watched, and again a bird returned and
tucked another into itself, immediately forsaking it for a real one,
however, when one was offered.
Meanwhile a whole procession of Emperors came round under the cliff on
which I stood. The light was already very bad and it was well that my
companions were quick in returning: we had to do everything in a great
hurry. I hauled up the eggs in their mitts (which we fastened together
round our necks with lampwick lanyards) and then the skins, but failed to
help Bill at all. "Pull," he cried, from the bottom: "I am pulling," I
said. "But the line's quite slack down here," he shouted. And when he had
reached the top by climbing up on Bowers' shoulders, and we were both
pulling all we knew Birdie's end of the rope was still slack in his
hands. Directly we put on a strain the rope cut into the ice edge and
jammed--a very common difficulty when working among crevasses. We tried
to run the rope over an ice-axe without success, and things began to look
serious when Birdie, who had been running about prospecting and had
meanwhile put one leg through a crack into the sea, found a place where
the cliff did not overhang. He cut steps for himself, we hauled, and at
last we were all together on the top--his foot being by now surrounded by
a solid mass of ice.
We legged it back as hard as we could go: five eggs in our fur mitts,
Birdie with two skins tied to him and trailing behind, and myself with
one. We were roped up, and climbing the ridges and getting through the
holes was very difficult. In one place where there was a steep rubble and
snow slope down I left the ice-axe half way up; in another it was too
dark to see our former ice-axe footsteps, and I could see nothing, and so
just let myself go and trusted to luck. With infinite patience Bill said:
"Cherry, you _must_ learn how to use an ice-axe." For the rest of the
trip my wind-clothes were in rags.
We found the sledge, and none too soon, and now had three eggs left,
more or less whole. Both mine had burst in my mitts: the first I emptied
out, the second I left in my mitt to put into the cooker; it never got
there, but on the return journey I had my mitts far more easily thawed
out than Birdie's (Bill had none) and I believe the grease in the egg did
them good. When we got into the hollows under the ridge where we had to
cross, it was too dark to do anything but feel our way. We did so over
many crevasses, found the ridge and crept over it. Higher up we could see
more, but to follow our tracks soon became impossible, and we plugged
straight ahead and luckily found the slope down which we had come. All
day it had been blowing a nasty cold wind with a temperature between -20°
and 30°, which we felt a good deal. Now it began to get worse. The
weather was getting thick and things did not look very nice when we
started up to find our tent. Soon it was blowing force 4, and soon we
missed our way entirely. We got right up above the patch of rocks which
marked our igloo and only found it after a good deal of search.
I have heard tell of an English officer at the Dardanelles who was left,
blinded, in No Man's Land between the English and Turkish trenches.
Moving only at night, and having no sense to tell him which were his own
trenches, he was fired at by Turk and English alike as he groped his
ghastly way to and from them. Thus he spent days and nights until, one
night, he crawled towards the English trenches, to be fired at as usual.
"Oh God! what can I do!" some one heard him say, and he was brought in.
Such extremity of suffering cannot be measured: madness or death may give
relief. But this I know: we on this journey were already beginning to
think of death as a friend. As we groped our way back that night,
sleepless, icy, and dog-tired in the dark and the wind and the drift, a
crevasse seemed almost a friendly gift.
"Things must improve," said Bill next day, "I think we reached bed-rock
last night." We hadn't, by a long way.
It was like this.
We moved into the igloo for the first time, for we had to save oil by
using our blubber stove if we were to have any left to travel home with,
and we did not wish to cover our tent with the oily black filth which the
use of blubber necessitates. The blizzard blew all night, and we were
covered with drift which came in through hundreds of leaks: in this
wind-swept place we had found no soft snow with which we could pack our
hard snow blocks. As we flensed some blubber from one of our penguin
skins the powdery drift covered everything we had.
Though uncomfortable this was nothing to worry about overmuch. Some of
the drift which the blizzard was bringing would collect to leeward of our
hut and the rocks below which it was built, and they could be used to
make our hut more weather-proof. Then with great difficulty we got the
blubber stove to start, and it spouted a blob of boiling oil into Bill's
eye. For the rest of the night he lay, quite unable to stifle his groans,
obviously in very great pain: he told us afterwards that he thought his
eye was gone. We managed to cook a meal somehow, and Birdie got the stove
going afterwards, but it was quite useless to try and warm the place. I
got out and cut the green canvas outside the door, so as to get the roof
cloth in under the stones, and then packed it down as well as I could
with snow, and so blocked most of the drift coming in.
It is extraordinary how often angels and fools do the same thing in this
life, and I have never been able to settle which we were on this journey.
I never heard an angry word: once only (when this same day I could not
pull Bill up the cliff out of the penguin rookery) I heard an impatient
one: and these groans were the nearest approach to complaint. Most men
would have howled. "I think we reached bed-rock last night," was strong
language for Bill. "I was incapacitated for a short time," he says in his
report to Scott.[158] Endurance was tested on this journey under unique
circumstances, and always these two men with all the burden of
responsibility which did not fall upon myself, displayed that quality
which is perhaps the only one which may be said with certainty to make
for success, self-control.
We spent the next day--it was July 21--in collecting every scrap of soft
snow we could find and packing it into the crevasses between our hard
snow blocks. It was a pitifully small amount but we could see no cracks
when we had finished. To counteract the lifting tendency the wind had on
our roof we cut some great flat hard snow blocks and laid them on the
canvas top to steady it against the sledge which formed the ridge
support. We also pitched our tent outside the igloo door. Both tent and
igloo were therefore eight or nine hundred feet up Terror: both were
below an outcrop of rocks from which the mountain fell steeply to the
Barrier behind us, and from this direction came the blizzards. In front
of us the slope fell for a mile or more down to the ice-cliffs, so
wind-swept that we had to wear crampons to walk upon it. Most of the tent
was in the lee of the igloo, but the cap of it came over the igloo roof,
while a segment of the tent itself jutted out beyond the igloo wall.
That night we took much of our gear into the tent and lighted the blubber
stove. I always mistrusted that stove, and every moment I expected it to
flare up and burn the tent. But the heat it gave, as it burned furiously,
with the double lining of the tent to contain it, was considerable.
It did not matter, except for a routine which we never managed to keep,
whether we started to thaw our way into our frozen sleeping-bags at 4 in
the morning or 4 in the afternoon. I think we must have turned in during
the afternoon of that Friday, leaving the cooker, our finnesko, a deal of
our foot-gear, Bowers' bag of personal gear, and many other things in the
tent. I expect we left the blubber stove there too, for it was quite
useless at present to try and warm the igloo. The tent floor-cloth was
under our sleeping-bags in the igloo.
"Things must improve," said Bill. After all there was much for which to
be thankful. I don't think anybody could have made a better igloo with
the hard snow blocks and rocks which were all we had: we would get it
air-tight by degrees. The blubber stove was working, and we had fuel for
it: we had also found a way down to the penguins and had three complete,
though frozen eggs: the two which had been in my mitts smashed when I
fell about because I could not wear spectacles. Also the twilight given
by the sun below the horizon at noon was getting longer.
But already we had been out twice as long in winter as the longest
previous journeys in spring. The men who made those journeys had daylight
where we had darkness, they had never had such low temperatures,
generally nothing approaching them, and they had seldom worked in such
difficult country. The nearest approach to healthy sleep we had had for
nearly a month was when during blizzards the temperature allowed the
warmth of our bodies to thaw some of the ice in our clothing and
sleeping-bags into water. The wear and tear on our minds was very great.
We were certainly weaker. We had a little more than a tin of oil to get
back on, and we knew the conditions we had to face on that journey across
the Barrier: even with fresh men and fresh gear it had been almost
unendurable.
And so we spent half an hour or more getting into our bags. Cirrus cloud
was moving across the face of the stars from the north, it looked rather
hazy and thick to the south, but it is always difficult to judge weather
in the dark. There was little wind and the temperature was in the minus
twenties. We felt no particular uneasiness. Our tent was well dug in, and
was also held down by rocks and the heavy tank off the sledge which were
placed on the skirting as additional security. We felt that no power on
earth could move the thick walls of our igloo, nor drag the canvas roof
from the middle of the embankment into which it was packed and lashed.
"Things must improve," said Bill.
I do not know what time it was when I woke up. It was calm, with that
absolute silence which can be so soothing or so terrible as circumstances
dictate. Then there came a sob of wind, and all was still again. Ten
minutes and it was blowing as though the world was having a fit of
hysterics. The earth was torn in pieces: the indescribable fury and roar
of it all cannot be imagined.
"Bill, Bill, the tent has gone," was the next I remember--from Bowers
shouting at us again and again through the door. It is always these early
morning shocks which hit one hardest: our slow minds suggested that this
might mean a peculiarly lingering form of death. Journey after journey
Birdie and I fought our way across the few yards which had separated the
tent from the igloo door. I have never understood why so much of our gear
which was in the tent remained, even in the lee of the igloo. The place
where the tent had been was littered with gear, and when we came to
reckon up afterwards we had everything except the bottom piece of the
cooker, and the top of the outer cooker. We never saw these again. The
most wonderful thing of all was that our finnesko were lying where they
were left, which happened to be on the ground in the part of the tent
which was under the lee of the igloo. Also Birdie's bag of personal gear
was there, and a tin of sweets.
Birdie brought two tins of sweets away with him. One we had to celebrate
our arrival at the Knoll: this was the second, of which we knew nothing,
and which was for Bill's birthday, the next day. We started eating them
on Saturday, however, and the tin came in useful to Bill afterwards.
To get that gear in we fought against solid walls of black snow which
flowed past us and tried to hurl us down the slope. Once started nothing
could have stopped us. I saw Birdie knocked over once, but he clawed his
way back just in time. Having passed everything we could find in to Bill,
we got back into the igloo, and started to collect things together,
including our very dishevelled minds.
There was no doubt that we were in the devil of a mess, and it was not
altogether our fault. We had had to put our igloo more or less where we
could get rocks with which to build it. Very naturally we had given both
our tent and igloo all the shelter we could from the full force of the
wind, and now it seemed we were in danger not because they were in the
wind, but because they were not sufficiently in it. The main force of the
hurricane, deflected by the ridge behind, fled over our heads and
appeared to form by suction a vacuum below. Our tent had either been
sucked upwards into this, or had been blown away because some of it was
in the wind while some of it was not. The roof of our igloo was being
wrenched upwards and then dropped back with great crashes: the drift was
spouting in, not it seemed because it was blown in from outside, but
because it was sucked in from within: the lee, not the weather, wall was
the worst. Already everything was six or eight inches under snow.
Very soon we began to be alarmed about the igloo. For some time the heavy
snow blocks we had heaved up on to the canvas roof kept it weighted down.
But it seemed that they were being gradually moved off by the hurricane.
The tension became well-nigh unendurable: the waiting in all that welter
of noise was maddening. Minute after minute, hour after hour--those snow
blocks were off now anyway, and the roof was smashed up and down--no
canvas ever made could stand it indefinitely.
We got a meal that Saturday morning, our last for a very long time as it
happened. Oil being of such importance to us we tried to use the blubber
stove, but after several preliminary spasms it came to pieces in our
hands, some solder having melted; and a very good thing too, I thought,
for it was more dangerous than useful. We finished cooking our meal on
the primus. Two bits of the cooker having been blown away we had to
balance it on the primus as best we could. We then settled that in view
of the shortage of oil we would not have another meal for as long as
possible. As a matter of fact God settled that for us.
We did all we could to stop up the places where the drift was coming in,
plugging the holes with our socks, mitts and other clothing. But it was
no real good. Our igloo was a vacuum which was filling itself up as soon
as possible: and when snow was not coming in a fine black moraine dust
took its place, covering us and everything. For twenty-four hours we
waited for the roof to go: things were so bad now that we dare not unlash
the door.
Many hours ago Bill had told us that if the roof went he considered that
our best chance would be to roll over in our sleeping-bags until we were
lying on the openings, and get frozen and drifted in.
Gradually the situation got more desperate. The distance between the
taut-sucked canvas and the sledge on which it should have been resting
became greater, and this must have been due to the stretching of the
canvas itself and the loss of the snow blocks on the top: it was not
drawing out of the walls. The crashes as it dropped and banged out again
were louder. There was more snow coming through the walls, though all our
loose mitts, socks and smaller clothing were stuffed into the worst
places: our pyjama jackets were stuffed between the roof and the rocks
over the door. The rocks were lifting and shaking here till we thought
they would fall.
We talked by shouting, and long before this one of us proposed to try and
get the Alpine rope lashed down over the roof from outside. But Bowers
said it was an absolute impossibility in that wind. "You could never ask
men at sea to try such a thing," he said. He was up and out of his bag
continually, stopping up holes, pressing against bits of roof to try and
prevent the flapping and so forth. He was magnificent.
And then it went.
Birdie was over by the door, where the canvas which was bent over the
lintel board was working worse than anywhere else. Bill was practically
out of his bag pressing against some part with a long stick of some kind.
I don't know what I was doing but I was half out of and half in my bag.
The top of the door opened in little slits and that green Willesden
canvas flapped into hundreds of little fragments in fewer seconds than it
takes to read this. The uproar of it all was indescribable. Even above
the savage thunder of that great wind on the mountain came the lash of
the canvas as it was whipped to little tiny strips. The highest rocks
which we had built into our walls fell upon us, and a sheet of drift came
in.
Birdie dived for his sleeping-bag and eventually got in, together with a
terrible lot of drift. Bill also--but he was better off: I was already
half into mine and all right, so I turned to help Bill. "Get into your
own," he shouted, and when I continued to try and help him, he leaned
over until his mouth was against my ear. "_Please_, Cherry," he said, and
his voice was terribly anxious. I know he felt responsible: feared it was
he who had brought us to this ghastly end.
The next I knew was Bowers' head across Bill's body. "We're all right,"
he yelled, and we answered in the affirmative. Despite the fact that we
knew we only said so because we knew we were all wrong, this statement
was helpful. Then we turned our bags over as far as possible, so that the
bottom of the bag was uppermost and the flaps were more or less beneath
us. And we lay and thought, and sometimes we sang.
I suppose, wrote Wilson, we were all revolving plans to get back without
a tent: and the one thing we had left was the floor-cloth upon which we
were actually lying. Of course we could not speak at present, but later
after the blizzard had stopped we discussed the possibility of digging a
hole in the snow each night and covering it over with the floor-cloth. I
do not think we had any idea that we could really get back in those
temperatures in our present state of ice by such means, but no one ever
hinted at such a thing. Birdie and Bill sang quite a lot of songs and
hymns, snatches of which reached me every now and then, and I chimed in,
somewhat feebly I suspect. Of course we were getting pretty badly drifted
up. "I was resolved to keep warm," wrote Bowers, "and beneath my debris
covering I paddled my feet and sang all the songs and hymns I knew to
pass the time. I could occasionally thump Bill, and as he still moved I
knew he was alive all right--what a birthday for him!" Birdie was more
drifted up than we, but at times we all had to hummock ourselves up to
heave the snow off our bags. By opening the flaps of our bags we could
get small pinches of soft drift which we pressed together and put into
our mouths to melt. When our hands warmed up again we got some more; so
we did not get very thirsty. A few ribbons of canvas still remained in
the wall over our heads, and these produced volleys of cracks like pistol
shots hour after hour. The canvas never drew out from the walls, not an
inch. The wind made just the same noise as an express train running fast
through a tunnel if you have both the windows down.
I can well believe that neither of my companions gave up hope for an
instant. They must have been frightened but they were never disturbed. As
for me I never had any hope at all; and when the roof went I felt that
this was the end. What else could I think? We had spent days in reaching
this place through the darkness in cold such as had never been
experienced by human beings. We had been out for four weeks under
conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few
days, if that. During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer
physical exhaustion, as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we
had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence, and
always in the dark. We had kept ourselves going by enormous care of our
feet and hands and bodies, by burning oil, and by having plenty of hot
fatty food. Now we had no tent, one tin of oil left out of six, and only
part of our cooker. When we were lucky and not too cold we could almost
wring water from our clothes, and directly we got out of our
sleeping-bags we were frozen into solid sheets of armoured ice. In cold
temperatures with all the advantages of a tent over our heads we were
already taking more than an hour of fierce struggling and cramp to get
into our sleeping-bags--so frozen were they and so long did it take us to
thaw our way in. No! Without the tent we were dead men.
[Illustration: MT. EREBUS]
[Illustration: ICE PRESSURE AT A]
And there seemed not one chance in a million that we should ever see our
tent again. We were 900 feet up on the mountain side, and the wind blew
about as hard as a wind can blow straight out to sea. First there was a
steep slope, so hard that a pick made little impression upon it, so
slippery that if you started down in finnesko you never could stop: this
ended in a great ice-cliff some hundreds of feet high, and then came
miles of pressure ridges, crevassed and tumbled, in which you might as
well look for a daisy as a tent: and after that the open sea. The
chances, however, were that the tent had just been taken up into the air
and dropped somewhere in this sea well on the way to New Zealand.
Obviously the tent was gone.
Face to face with real death one does not think of the things that
torment the bad people in the tracts, and fill the good people with
bliss. I might have speculated on my chances of going to Heaven; but
candidly I did not care. I could not have wept if I had tried. I had no
wish to review the evils of my past. But the past did seem to have been a
bit wasted. The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions: the road
to Heaven is paved with lost opportunities.
I wanted those years over again. What fun I would have with them: what
glorious fun! It was a pity. Well has the Persian said that when we come
to die we, remembering that God is merciful, will gnaw our elbows with
remorse for thinking of the things we have not done for fear of the Day
of Judgment.
And I wanted peaches and syrup--badly. We had them at the hut, sweeter
and more luscious than you can imagine. And we had been without sugar for
a month. Yes--especially the syrup.
Thus impiously I set out to die, making up my mind that I was not going
to try and keep warm, that it might not take too long, and thinking I
would try and get some morphia from the medical case if it got very bad.
Not a bit heroic, and entirely true! Yes! comfortable, warm reader. Men
do not fear death, they fear the pain of dying.
And then quite naturally and no doubt disappointingly to those who would
like to read of my last agonies (for who would not give pleasure by his
death?) I fell asleep. I expect the temperature was pretty high during
this great blizzard, and anything near zero was very high to us. That
and the snow which drifted over us made a pleasant wet kind of snipe
marsh inside our sleeping-bags, and I am sure we all dozed a good bit.
There was so much to worry about that there was not the least use in
worrying; and we were so _very_ tired. We were hungry, for the last meal
we had had was in the morning of the day before, but hunger was not very
pressing.
And so we lay, wet and quite fairly warm, hour after hour while the wind
roared round us, blowing storm force continually and rising in the gusts
to something indescribable. Storm force is force 11, and force 12 is the
biggest wind which can be logged: Bowers logged it force 11, but he was
always so afraid of overestimating that he was inclined to underrate. I
think it was blowing a full hurricane. Sometimes awake, sometimes dozing,
we had not a very uncomfortable time so far as I can remember. I knew
that parties which had come to Cape Crozier in the spring had experienced
blizzards which lasted eight or ten days. But this did not worry us as
much as I think it did Bill: I was numb. I vaguely called to mind that
Peary had survived a blizzard in the open: but wasn't that in the summer?
It was in the early morning of Saturday (July 22) that we discovered the
loss of the tent. Some time during that morning we had had our last meal.
The roof went about noon on Sunday and we had had no meal in the interval
because our supply of oil was so low; nor could we move out of our bags
except as a last necessity. By Sunday night we had been without a meal
for some thirty-six hours.
The rocks which fell upon us when the roof went did no damage, and though
we could not get out of our bags to move them, we could fit ourselves
into them without difficulty. More serious was the drift which began to
pile up all round and over us. It helped to keep us warm of course, but
at the same time in these comparatively high temperatures it saturated
our bags even worse than they were before. If we did not find the tent
(and its recovery would be a miracle) these bags and the floor-cloth of
the tent on which we were lying were all we had in that fight back
across the Barrier which could, I suppose, have only had one end.
Meanwhile we had to wait. It was nearly 70 miles home and it had taken us
the best part of three weeks to come. In our less miserable moments we
tried to think out ways of getting back, but I do not remember very much
about that time. Sunday morning faded into Sunday afternoon,--into Sunday
night,--into Monday morning. Till then the blizzard had raged with
monstrous fury; the winds of the world were there, and they had all gone
mad. We had bad winds at Cape Evans this year, and we had far worse the
next winter when the open water was at our doors. But I have never heard
or felt or seen a wind like this. I wondered why it did not carry away
the earth.
In the early hours of Monday there was an occasional hint of a lull.
Ordinarily in a big winter blizzard, when you have lived for several days
and nights with that turmoil in your ears, the lulls are more trying than
the noise: "the feel of not to feel it."[159] I do not remember noticing
that now. Seven or eight more hours passed, and though it was still
blowing we could make ourselves heard to one another without great
difficulty. It was two days and two nights since we had had a meal.
We decided to get out of our bags and make a search for the tent. We did
so, bitterly cold and utterly miserable, though I do not think any of us
showed it. In the darkness we could see very little, and no trace
whatever of the tent. We returned against the wind, nursing our faces and
hands, and settled that we must try and cook a meal somehow. We managed
about the weirdest meal eaten north or south. We got the floor-cloth
wedged under our bags, then got into our bags and drew the floor-cloth
over our heads. Between us we got the primus alight somehow, and by hand
we balanced the cooker on top of it, minus the two members which had been
blown away. The flame flickered in the draughts. Very slowly the snow in
the cooker melted, we threw in a plentiful supply of pemmican, and the
smell of it was better than anything on earth. In time we got both tea
and pemmican, which was full of hairs from our bags, penguin feathers,
dirt and debris, but delicious. The blubber left in the cooker got burnt
and gave the tea a burnt taste. None of us ever forgot that meal: I
enjoyed it as much as such a meal could be enjoyed, and that burnt taste
will always bring back the memory.
It was still dark and we lay down in our bags again, but soon a little
glow of light began to come up, and we turned out to have a further
search for the tent. Birdie went off before Bill and me. Clumsily I
dragged my eider-down out of my bag on my feet, all sopping wet: it was
impossible to get it back and I let it freeze: it was soon just like a
rock. The sky to the south was as black and sinister as it could possibly
be. It looked as though the blizzard would be on us again at any moment.
I followed Bill down the slope. We could find nothing. But, as we
searched, we heard a shout somewhere below and to the right. We got on a
slope, slipped, and went sliding down quite unable to stop ourselves, and
came upon Birdie with the tent, the outer lining still on the bamboos.
Our lives had been taken away and given back to us.
We were so thankful we said nothing.
The tent must have been gripped up into the air, shutting as it rose. The
bamboos, with the inner lining lashed to them, had entangled the outer
cover, and the whole went up together like a shut umbrella. This was our
salvation. If it had opened in the air nothing could have prevented its
destruction. As it was, with all the accumulated ice upon it, it must
have weighed the best part of 100 lbs. It had been dropped about half a
mile away, at the bottom of a steep slope: and it fell in a hollow, still
shut up. The main force of the wind had passed over it, and there it was,
with the bamboos and fastenings wrenched and strained, and the ends of
two of the poles broken, but the silk untorn.
If that tent went again we were going with it. We made our way back up
the slope with it, carrying it solemnly and reverently, precious as
though it were something not quite of the earth. And we dug it in as
tent was never dug in before; not by the igloo, but in the old place
farther down where we had first arrived. And while Bill was doing this
Birdie and I went back to the igloo and dug and scratched and shook away
the drift inside until we had found nearly all our gear. It is wonderful
how little we lost when the roof went. Most of our gear was hung on the
sledge, which was part of the roof, or was packed into the holes of the
hut to try and make it drift-proof, and the things must have been blown
inwards into the bottom of the hut by the wind from the south and the
back draught from the north. Then they were all drifted up. Of course a
certain number of mitts and socks were blown away and lost, but the only
important things were Bill's fur mitts, which were stuffed into a hole in
the rocks of the hut. We loaded up the sledge and pushed it down the
slope. I don't know how Birdie was feeling, but I felt so weak that it
was the greatest labour. The blizzard looked right on top of us.
We had another meal, and we wanted it: and as the good hoosh ran down
into our feet and hands, and up into our cheeks and ears and brains, we
discussed what we would do next. Birdie was all for another go at the
Emperor penguins. Dear Birdie, he never would admit that he was beaten--I
don't know that he ever really was! "I think he (Wilson) thought he had
landed us in a bad corner and was determined to go straight home, though
I was for one other tap at the Rookery. However, I had placed myself
under his orders for this trip voluntarily, and so we started the next
day for home."[160] There could really be no common-sense doubt: we had
to go back, and we were already very doubtful whether we should ever
manage to get into our sleeping-bags in very low temperature, so ghastly
had they become.
I don't know when it was, but I remember walking down that slope--I don't
know why, perhaps to try and find the bottom of the cooker--and thinking
that there was nothing on earth that a man under such circumstances
would not give for a good warm sleep. He would give everything he
possessed: he would give--how many--years of his life. One or two at any
rate--perhaps five? Yes--I would give five. I remember the sastrugi, the
view of the Knoll, the dim hazy black smudge of the sea far away below:
the tiny bits of green canvas that twittered in the wind on the surface
of the snow: the cold misery of it all, and the weakness which was biting
into my heart.
For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining--his
beautiful dry bag of the finest down--which he had never slipped into his
own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it.
We packed the tank ready for a start back in the morning and turned in,
utterly worn out. It was only -12° that night, but my left big toe was
frost-bitten in my bag which I was trying to use without an eider-down
lining, and my bag was always too big for me. It must have taken several
hours to get it back, by beating one foot against the other. When we got
up, as soon as we could, as we did every night, for our bags were nearly
impossible, it was blowing fairly hard and looked like blizzing. We had a
lot to do, two or three hours' work, packing sledges and making a depôt
of what we did not want, in a corner of the igloo. We left the second
sledge, and a note tied to the handle of the pickaxe.
"We started down the slope in a wind which was rising all the time and
-15°. My job was to balance the sledge behind: I was so utterly done I
don't believe I could have pulled effectively. Birdie was much the
strongest of us. The strain and want of sleep was getting me in the neck,
and Bill looked very bad. At the bottom we turned our faces to the
Barrier, our backs to the penguins, but after doing about a mile it
looked so threatening in the south that we camped in a big wind, our
hands going one after the other. We had nothing but the hardest
wind-swept sastrugi, and it was a long business: there was only the
smallest amount of drift, and we were afraid the icy snow blocks would
chafe the tent. Birdie lashed the full biscuit tin to the door to
prevent its flapping, and also got what he called the tent downhaul round
the cap and then tied it about himself outside his bag: if the tent went
he was going too.
"I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It
was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a
brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which
my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do
less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I
was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept
most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without
going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of
these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep
awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it
fall: and sometimes he had the primus.
"Bill's bag was getting hopeless: it was really too small for an
eider-down and was splitting all over the place: great long holes. He
never consciously slept for nights: he did sleep a bit, for we heard him.
Except for this night, and the next when Birdie's eider-down was still
fairly dry, I never consciously slept; except that I used to wake for
five or six nights running with the same nightmare--that we were drifted
up, and that Bill and Birdie were passing the gear into my bag, cutting
it open to do so, or some other variation,--I did not know that I had
been asleep at all."[161]
"We had hardly reached the pit," wrote Bowers, "when a furious wind came
on again and we had to camp. All that night the tent flapped like the
noise of musketry, owing to two poles having been broken at the ends and
the fit spoilt. I thought it would end matters by going altogether and
lashed it down as much as I could, attaching the apex to a line round my
own bag. The wind abated after 1½ days and we set out, doing five or six
miles before we found ourselves among crevasses."[162]
We had plugged ahead all that day (July 26) in a terrible light,
blundering in among pressure and up on to the slopes of Terror. The
temperature dropped from -21° to -45°. "Several times [we] stepped into
rotten-lidded crevasses in smooth wind-swept ice. We continued, however,
feeling our way along by keeping always off hard ice-slopes and on the
crustier deeper snow which characterizes the hollows of the pressure
ridges, which I believed we had once more fouled in the dark. We had no
light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct
silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance
and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were
approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror,
miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of
the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much
of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the
dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction."[163]
And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely
lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure."
But there were pressure pops all night, as though some one was whacking
an empty tub.
It was Birdie's picture hat which made the trouble next day. "What do you
think of _that_ for a hat, sir?" I heard him say to Scott a few days
before we started, holding it out much as Lucille displays her latest
Paris model. Scott looked at it quietly for a time: "I'll tell you when
you come back, Birdie," he said. It was a complicated affair with all
kinds of nose-guards and buttons and lanyards: he thought he was going to
set it to suit the wind much as he would set the sails of a ship. We
spent a long time with our housewifes before this and other trips, for
everybody has their own ideas as to how to alter their clothing for the
best. When finished some looked neat, like Bill: others baggy, like Scott
or Seaman Evans: others rough and ready, like Oates and Bowers: a few
perhaps more rough than ready, and I will not mention names. Anyway
Birdie's hat became improper immediately it was well iced up.
"When we got a little light in the morning we found we were a little
north of the two patches of moraine on Terror. Though we did not know it,
we were on the point where the pressure runs up against Terror, and we
could dimly see that we were right up against something. We started to
try and clear it, but soon had an enormous ridge, blotting out the
moraine and half Terror, rising like a great hill on our right. Bill said
the only thing was to go right on and hope it would lower; all the time,
however, there was a bad feeling that we might be putting any number of
ridges between us and the mountain. After a while we tried to cross this
one, but had to turn back for crevasses, both Bill and I putting a leg
down. We went on for about twenty minutes and found a lower place, and
turned to rise up it diagonally, and reached the top. Just over the top
Birdie went right down a crevasse, which was about wide enough to take
him. He was out of sight and out of reach from the surface, hanging in
his harness. Bill went for his harness, I went for the bow of the sledge:
Bill told me to get the Alpine rope and Birdie directed from below what
we could do. We could not possibly haul him up as he was, for the sides
of the crevasse were soft and he could not help himself."[164]
"My helmet was so frozen up," wrote Bowers, "that my head was encased in
a solid block of ice, and I could not look down without inclining my
whole body. As a result Bill stumbled one foot into a crevasse and I
landed in it with both mine [even as I shouted a warning[165] ], the
bridge gave way and down I went. Fortunately our sledge harness is made
with a view to resisting this sort of thing, and there I hung with the
bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that
to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it.
Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline
for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got
me out."[166] Meanwhile on the surface I lay over the crevasse and gave
Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot,
giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his
foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the
harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again.
We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the
temperature was -46°. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people
out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that
it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen
man hanging in one himself.
"In front of us we could see another ridge, and we did not know how many
lay beyond that. Things looked pretty bad. Bill took a long lead on the
Alpine rope and we got down our present difficulty all right. This method
of the leader being on a long trace in front we all agreed to be very
useful. From this moment our luck changed and everything went for us to
the end. When we went out on the sea-ice the whole experience was over in
a few days, Hut Point was always in sight, and there was daylight. I
always had the feeling that the whole series of events had been brought
about by an extraordinary run of accidents, and that after a certain
stage it was quite beyond our power to guide the course of them. When on
the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show
us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without
any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such
a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great
balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were
lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with
a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. I cannot
write how helpless I believed we were to help ourselves, and how we were
brought out of a very terrible series of experiences. When we started
back I had a feeling that things were going to change for the better, and
this day I had a distinct idea that we were to have one more bad
experience and that after that we could hope for better things.
[Illustration: DOWN A CREVASSE]
"By running along the hollow we cleared the pressure ridges, and
continued all day up and down, but met no crevasses. Indeed, we met no
more crevasses and no more pressure. I think it was upon this day that a
wonderful glow stretched over the Barrier edge from Cape Crozier: at the
base it was the most vivid crimson it is possible to imagine, shading
upwards through every shade of red to light green, and so into a deep
blue sky. It is the most vivid red I have ever seen in the sky."[167]
It was -49° in the night and we were away early in -47°. By mid-day we
were rising Terror Point, opening Erebus rapidly, and got the first
really light day, though the sun would not appear over the horizon for
another month. I cannot describe what a relief the light was to us. We
crossed the point outside our former track, and saw inside us the ridges
where we had been blizzed for three days on our outward journey.
The minimum was -66° the next night and we were now back in the windless
bight of Barrier with its soft snow, low temperatures, fogs and mists,
and lingering settlements of the inside crusts. Saturday and Sunday, the
29th and 30th, we plugged on across this waste, iced up as usual but
always with Castle Rock getting bigger. Sometimes it looked like fog or
wind, but it always cleared away. We were getting weak, how weak we can
only realize now, but we got in good marches, though slow--days when we
did 4½, 7¼ 6¾, 6½, 7½ miles. On our outward journey we had been relaying
and getting forward about 4½ miles a day at this point. The surface which
we had dreaded so much was not so sandy or soft as when we had come out,
and the settlements were more marked. These are caused by a crust falling
under your feet. Generally the area involved is some twenty yards or so
round you, and the surface falls through an air space for two or three
inches with a soft 'crush' which may at first make you think there are
crevasses about. In the region where we now travelled they were much more
pronounced than elsewhere, and one day, when Bill was inside the tent
lighting the primus, I put my foot into a hole that I had dug. This
started a big settlement; sledge, tent and all of us dropped about a
foot, and the noise of it ran away for miles and miles: we listened to it
until we began to get too cold. It must have lasted a full three minutes.
In the pauses of our marching we halted in our harnesses the ropes of
which lay slack in the powdery snow. We stood panting with our backs
against the mountainous mass of frozen gear which was our load. There was
no wind, at any rate no more than light airs: our breath crackled as it
froze. There was no unnecessary conversation: I don't know why our
tongues never got frozen, but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been
killed, split to pieces. We had been going perhaps three hours since
lunch.
"How are your feet, Cherry?" from Bill.
"Very cold."
"That's all right; so are mine." We didn't worry to ask Birdie: he never
had a frost-bitten foot from start to finish.
Half an hour later, as we marched, Bill would ask the same question. I
tell him that all feeling has gone: Bill still has some feeling in one of
his but the other is lost. He settled we had better camp: another ghastly
night ahead. We started to get out of our harnesses, while Bill, before
doing anything else, would take the fur mitts from his hands, carefully
shape any soft parts as they froze (generally, however, our mitts did not
thaw on our hands), and lay them on the snow in front of him--two dark
dots. His proper fur mitts were lost when the igloo roof went: these were
the delicate dog-skin linings we had in addition, beautiful things to
look at and to feel when new, excellent when dry to turn the screws of a
theodolite, but too dainty for straps and lanyards. Just now I don't know
what he could have done without them.
Working with our woollen half-mitts and mitts on our hands all the time,
and our fur mitts over them when possible, we gradually got the buckles
undone, and spread the green canvas floor-cloth on the snow. This was
also fitted to be used as a sail, but we never could have rigged a sail
on this journey. The shovel and the bamboos, with a lining, itself lined
with ice, lashed to them, were packed on the top of the load and were now
put on the snow until wanted. Our next job was to lift our three
sleeping-bags one by one on to the floor-cloth: they covered it, bulging
over the sides--those obstinate coffins which were all our life to us....
One of us is off by now to nurse his fingers back. The cooker was
unlashed from the top of the instrument box; some parts of it were put on
the bags with the primus, methylated spirit can, matches and so forth;
others left to be filled with snow later. Taking a pole in each hand we
three spread the bamboos over the whole. "All right? Down!" from Bill;
and we lowered them gently on to the soft snow, that they might not sink
too far. The ice on the inner lining of the tent was formed mostly from
the steam of the cooker. This we had been unable to beat or chip off in
the past, and we were now, truth to tell, past worrying about it. The
little ventilator in the top, made to let out this steam, had been tied
up in order to keep in all possible heat. Then over with the outer cover,
and for one of us the third worst job of the day was to begin. The worst
job was to get into our bags: the second or equal worst was to lie in
them for six hours (we had brought it down to six): this third worst was,
to get the primus lighted and a meal on the way.
As cook of the day you took the broken metal framework, all that remained
of our candlestick, and got yourself with difficulty into the funnel
which formed the door. The enclosed space of the tent seemed much colder
than the outside air: you tried three or four match-boxes and no match
would strike: almost desperate, you asked for a new box to be given you
from the sledge and got a light from this because it had not yet been in
the warmth, so called, of the tent. The candle hung by a wire from the
cap of the tent. It would be tedious to tell of the times we had getting
the primus alight, and the lanyards of the weekly food bag unlashed.
Probably by now the other two men have dug in the tent; squared up
outside; filled and passed in the cooker; set the thermometer under the
sledge and so forth. There were always one or two odd jobs which wanted
doing as well: but you may be sure they came in as soon as possible when
they heard the primus hissing, and saw the glow of light inside. Birdie
made a bottom for the cooker out of an empty biscuit tin to take the
place of the part which was blown away. On the whole this was a success,
but we had to hold it steady--on Bill's sleeping-bag, for the flat frozen
bags spread all over the floor space. Cooking was a longer business now.
Some one whacked out the biscuit, and the cook put the ration of pemmican
into the inner cooker which was by now half full of water. As opportunity
offered we got out of our day, and into our night foot-gear--fleecy
camel-hair stockings and fur boots. In the dim light we examined our feet
for frost-bite.
I do not think it took us less than an hour to get a hot meal to our
lips: pemmican followed by hot water in which we soaked our biscuits. For
lunch we had tea and biscuits: for breakfast, pemmican, biscuits and tea.
We could not have managed more food bags--three were bad enough, and the
lashings of everything were like wire. The lashing of the tent door,
however, was the worst, and it _had_ to be tied tightly, especially if it
was blowing. In the early days we took great pains to brush rime from the
tent before packing it up, but we were long past that now.
The hoosh got down into our feet: we nursed back frost-bites: and we were
all the warmer for having got our dry foot-gear on before supper. Then we
started to get into our bags.
[Illustration: PANORAMA AND MAP OF THE WINTER JOURNEY--Copied at Hut
Point by Apsley Cherry-Garrard from a drawing by E. A. Wilson]
Birdie's bag fitted him beautifully, though perhaps it would have been a
little small with an eider-down inside. He must have had a greater heat
supply than other men; for he never had serious trouble with his feet,
while ours were constantly frost-bitten: he slept, I should be afraid to
say how much, longer than we did, even in these last days: it was a
pleasure, lying awake practically all night, to hear his snores. He
turned his bag inside out from fur to skin, and skin to fur, many times
during the journey, and thus got rid of a lot of moisture which came
out as snow or actual knobs of ice. When we did turn our bags the only
way was to do so directly we turned out, and even then you had to be
quick before the bag froze. Getting out of the tent at night it was quite
a race to get back to your bag before it hardened. Of course this was in
the lowest temperatures.
We could not burn our bags and we tried putting the lighted primus into
them to thaw them out, but this was not very successful. Before this
time, when it was very cold, we lighted the primus in the morning while
we were still in our bags: and in the evening we kept it going until we
were just getting or had got the mouths of our bags levered open. But
returning we had no oil for such luxuries, until the last day or two.
I do not believe that any man, however sick he is, has a much worse time
than we had in those bags, shaking with cold until our backs would almost
break. One of the added troubles which came to us on our return was the
sodden condition of our hands in our bags at night. We had to wear our
mitts and half-mitts, and they were as wet as they could be: when we got
up in the morning we had washer-women's hands--white, crinkled, sodden.
That was an unhealthy way to start the day's work. We really wanted some
bags of saennegrass for hands as well as feet; one of the blessings of
that kind of bag being that you can shake the moisture from it: but we
only had enough for our wretched feet.
The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know
they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of
us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the
penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not. We had
been through a great deal since then. I know that we slept on the march;
for I woke up when I bumped against Birdie, and Birdie woke when he
bumped against me. I think Bill steering out in front managed to keep
awake. I know we fell asleep if we waited in the comparatively warm tent
when the primus was alight--with our pannikins or the primus in our
hands. I know that our sleeping-bags were so full of ice that we did not
worry if we spilt water or hoosh over them as they lay on the
floor-cloth, when we cooked on them with our maimed cooker. They were so
bad that we never rolled them up in the usual way when we got out of them
in the morning: we opened their mouths as much as possible before they
froze, and hoisted them more or less flat on to the sledge. All three of
us helped to raise each bag, which looked rather like a squashed coffin
and was probably a good deal harder. I know that if it was only -40° when
we camped for the night we considered quite seriously that we were going
to have a warm one, and that when we got up in the morning if the
temperature was in the minus sixties we did not enquire what it was. The
day's march was bliss compared to the night's rest, and both were awful.
We were about as bad as men can be and do good travelling: but I never
heard a word of complaint, nor, I believe, an oath, and I saw
self-sacrifice standing every test.
Always we were getting nearer home: and we were doing good marches. We
were going to pull through; it was only a matter of sticking this for a
few more days; six, five, four ... three perhaps now, if we were not
blizzed. Our main hut was behind that ridge where the mist was always
forming and blowing away, and there was Castle Rock: we might even see
Observation Hill to-morrow, and the Discovery Hut furnished and trim was
behind it, and they would have sent some dry sleeping-bags from Cape
Evans to greet us there. We reckoned our troubles over at the Barrier
edge, and assuredly it was not far away. "You've got it in the neck,
stick it, you've got it in the neck"--it was always running in my head.
And we _did_ stick it. How good the memories of those days are. With
jokes about Birdie's picture hat: with songs we remembered off the
gramophone: with ready words of sympathy for frost-bitten feet: with
generous smiles for poor jests: with suggestions of happy beds to come.
We did not forget the Please and Thank you, which mean much in such
circumstances, and all the little links with decent civilization which
we could still keep going. I'll swear there was still a grace about us
when we staggered in. And we kept our tempers--even with God.
We _might_ reach Hut Point to-night: we were burning more oil now, that
one-gallon tin had lasted us well: and burning more candle too; at one
time we feared they would give out. A hell of a morning we had: -57° in
our present state. But it was calm, and the Barrier edge could not be
much farther now. The surface was getting harder: there were a few
wind-blown furrows, the crust was coming up to us. The sledge was
dragging easier: we always suspected the Barrier sloped downwards
hereabouts. Now the hard snow was on the surface, peeping out like great
inverted basins on which we slipped, and our feet became warmer for not
sinking into soft snow. Suddenly we saw a gleam of light in a line of
darkness running across our course. It was the Barrier edge: we were all
right now.
We ran the sledge off a snow-drift on to the sea-ice, with the same cold
stream of air flowing down it which wrecked my hands five weeks ago:
pushed out of this, camped and had a meal: the temperature had already
risen to -43°. We could almost feel it getting warmer as we went round
Cape Armitage on the last three miles. We managed to haul our sledge up
the ice foot, and dug the drift away from the door. The old hut struck us
as fairly warm.
Bill was convinced that we ought not to go into the warm hut at Cape
Evans when we arrived there--to-morrow night! We ought to get back to
warmth gradually, live in a tent outside, or in the annexe for a day or
two. But I'm sure we never meant to do it. Just now Hut Point did not
prejudice us in favour of such abstinence. It was just as we had left it:
there was nothing sent down for us there--no sleeping-bags, nor sugar:
but there was plenty of oil. Inside the hut we pitched a dry tent left
there since Depôt Journey days, set two primuses going in it; sat dozing
on our bags; and drank cocoa without sugar so thick that next morning we
were gorged with it. We were very happy, falling asleep between each
mouthful, and after several hours discussed schemes of not getting into
our bags at all. But some one would have to keep the primus going to
prevent frost-bite, and we could not trust ourselves to keep awake. Bill
and I tried to sing a part-song. Finally we sopped our way into our bags.
We only stuck _them_ three hours, and thankfully turned out at 3 A.M.,
and were ready to pack up when we heard the wind come away. It was no
good, so we sat in our tent and dozed again. The wind dropped at 9.30: we
were off at 11. We walked out into what seemed to us a blaze of light. It
was not until the following year that I understood that a great part of
such twilight as there is in the latter part of the winter was cut off
from us by the mountains under which we travelled. Now, with nothing
between us and the northern horizon below which lay the sun, we saw as we
had not seen for months, and the iridescent clouds that day were
beautiful.
We just pulled for all we were worth and did nearly two miles an hour:
for two miles a baddish salt surface, then big undulating hard sastrugi
and good going. We slept as we walked. We had done eight miles by 4 P.M.
and were past Glacier Tongue. We lunched there.
As we began to gather our gear together to pack up for the last time,
Bill said quietly, "I want to thank you two for what you have done. I
couldn't have found two better companions--and what is more I never
shall."
I am proud of that.
Antarctic exploration is seldom as bad as you imagine, seldom as bad as
it sounds. But this journey had beggared our language: no words could
express its horror.
We trudged on for several more hours and it grew very dark. There was a
discussion as to where Cape Evans lay. We rounded it at last: it must
have been ten or eleven o'clock, and it was possible that some one might
see us as we pulled towards the hut. "Spread out well," said Bill, "and
they will be able to see that there are three men." But we pulled along
the cape, over the tide-crack, up the bank to the very door of the hut
without a sound. No noise from the stable, nor the bark of a dog from the
snowdrifts above us. We halted and stood there trying to get ourselves
and one another out of our frozen harnesses--the usual long job. The door
opened--"Good God! here is the Crozier Party," said a voice, and
disappeared.
Thus ended the worst journey in the world.
And now the reader will ask what became of the three penguins' eggs for
which three human lives had been risked three hundred times a day, and
three human frames strained to the utmost extremity of human endurance.
Let us leave the Antarctic for a moment and conceive ourselves in the
year 1913 in the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I had
written to say that I would bring the eggs at this time. Present, myself,
C.-G., the sole survivor of the three, with First or Doorstep Custodian
of the Sacred Eggs. I did not take a verbatim report of his welcome; but
the spirit of it may be dramatized as follows:
FIRST CUSTODIAN. Who are you? What do you want? This ain't an egg-shop.
What call have you to come meddling with our eggs? Do you want me to put
the police on to you? Is it the crocodile's egg you're after? I don't
know nothing about 'no eggs. You'd best speak to Mr. Brown: it's him that
varnishes the eggs.
I resort to Mr. Brown, who ushers me into the presence of the Chief
Custodian, a man of scientific aspect, with two manners: one, affably
courteous, for a Person of Importance (I guess a Naturalist Rothschild at
least) with whom he is conversing, and the other, extraordinarily
offensive even for an official man of science, for myself.
I announce myself with becoming modesty as the bearer of the penguins'
eggs, and proffer them. The Chief Custodian takes them into custody
without a word of thanks, and turns to the Person of Importance to
discuss them. I wait. The temperature of my blood rises. The conversation
proceeds for what seems to me a considerable period. Suddenly the Chief
Custodian notices my presence and seems to resent it.
CHIEF CUSTODIAN. You needn't wait.
HEROIC EXPLORER. I should like to have a receipt for the eggs, if you
please.
CHIEF CUSTODIAN. It is not necessary: it is all right. You needn't wait.
HEROIC EXPLORER. I should like to have a receipt.
But by this time the Chief Custodian's attention is again devoted wholly
to the Person of Importance. Feeling that to persist in overhearing their
conversation would be an indelicacy, the Heroic Explorer politely leaves
the room, and establishes himself on a chair in a gloomy passage outside,
where he wiles away the time by rehearsing in his imagination how he will
tell off the Chief Custodian when the Person of Importance retires. But
this the Person of Importance shows no sign of doing, and the Explorer's
thoughts and intentions become darker and darker. As the day wears on,
minor officials, passing to and from the Presence, look at him doubtfully
and ask his business. The reply is always the same, "I am waiting for a
receipt for some penguins' eggs." At last it becomes clear from the
Explorer's expression that what he is really waiting for is not to take a
receipt but to commit murder. Presumably this is reported to the destined
victim: at all events the receipt finally comes; and the Explorer goes
his way with it, feeling that he has behaved like a perfect gentleman,
but so very dissatisfied with that vapid consolation that for hours he
continues his imaginary rehearsals of what he would have liked to have
done to that Custodian (mostly with his boots) by way of teaching him
manners.
Some time after this I visited the Natural History Museum with Captain
Scott's sister. After a slight preliminary skirmish in which we convinced
a minor custodian that the specimens brought by the expedition from the
Antarctic did not include the moths we found preying on some of them,
Miss Scott expressed a wish to see the penguins' eggs. Thereupon the
minor custodians flatly denied that any such eggs were in existence or in
their possession. Now Miss Scott was her brother's sister; and she showed
so little disposition to take this lying down that I was glad to get her
away with no worse consequences than a profanely emphasized threat on my
part that if we did not receive ample satisfaction in writing within
twenty-four hours as to the safety of the eggs England would reverberate
with the tale.
The ultimatum was effectual; and due satisfaction was forthcoming in
time; but I was relieved when I learnt later on that they had been
entrusted to Professor Assheton for the necessary microscopic
examination. But he died before he could approach the task; and the eggs
passed into the hands of Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University.
His report is as follows:
FOOTNOTES:
[150] See pp. xxxix-xlv.
[151] A thermometer which registered -77° at the Winter Quarters
of H.M.S. Alert on March 4, 1876, is preserved by the Royal
Geographical Society. I do not know whether it was screened.
[152] My own diary.
[153] My own diary.
[154] My own diary.
[155] Ibid.
[156] See Introduction, pp. xxxix-xlv.
[157] See p. 82.
[158] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 42.
[159] Keats.
[160] Bowers.
[161] My own diary.
[162] Bowers.
[163] Wilson in _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. ii. p. 58.
[164] My own diary.
[165] Wilson.
[166] Bowers.
[167] My own diary.
APPENDIX
PROFESSOR COSSAR EWART'S REPORT
"It was a great disappointment to Dr. Wilson that no Emperor Penguin
embryos were obtained during the cruise of the Discovery. But though
embryos were conspicuous by their absence in the Emperor eggs brought
home by the National Antarctic Expedition, it is well to bear in mind
that the naturalists on board the Discovery learned much about the
breeding habits of the largest living member of the ancient penguin
family. Amongst other things it was ascertained (1) that in the case of
the Emperor, as in the King Penguin, the egg during the period of
incubation rests on the upper surface of the feet protected and kept in
position by a fold of skin from the lower breast; and (2) that in the
case of the Emperor the whole process of incubation is carried out on sea
ice during the coldest and darkest months of the antarctic winter.
"After devoting much time to the study of penguins Dr. Wilson came to the
conclusion that Emperor embryos would throw new light on the origin and
history of birds, and decided that if he again found his way to the
Antarctic he would make a supreme effort to visit an Emperor rookery
during the breeding season. When, and under what conditions, the Cape
Crozier rookery was eventually visited and Emperor eggs secured is
graphically told in The Winter Journey. The question now arises, Has 'the
weirdest bird's-nesting expedition that has ever been made' added
appreciably to our knowledge of birds?
"It is admitted that birds are descended from bipedal reptiles which
flourished some millions of years ago--reptiles in build not unlike the
kangaroo. From Archaeopteryx of Jurassic times we know primeval birds had
teeth, three fingers with claws on each hand, and a long lizard-like tail
provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true feathers. But
unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, nor yet the fossil birds
found in America, throw any light on the origin of feathers.
Ornithologists and others who have devoted much time to the study of
birds have as a rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that
the scales along the margin of the hand and forearm and along each side
of the tail were elongated, frayed and otherwise modified to form the
wing and tail quills, and that later other scales were altered to provide
a coat capable of preventing loss of heat. But as it happens, a study of
the development of feathers affords no evidence that they were made out
of scales. There are neither rudiments of scales nor feathers in very
young bird embryos. In the youngest of the three Emperor embryos there
are, however, feather rudiments in the tail region,--the embryo was
probably seven or eight days old--but in the two older embryos there are
a countless number of feather rudiments, i.e. of minute pimples known
as papillae.
"In penguins as in many other birds there are two distinct crops of
feather papillae, viz.: a crop of relatively large papillae which develop
into prepennae, the forerunners of true feathers (pennae), and a crop of
small papillae which develop into preplumulae, the forerunners of true
down feathers (plumulae).
"In considering the origin of feathers we are not concerned with the true
feathers (pennae), but with the nestling feathers (prepennae), and more
especially with the papillae from which the prepennae are developed. What
we want to know is, Do the papillae which in birds develop into the
first generation of feathers correspond to the papillae which in lizards
develop into scales?
"The late Professor Assheton, who undertook the examination of some of
the material brought home by the Terra Nova, made a special study of the
feather papillae of the Emperor Penguin embryos from Cape Crozier.
Drawings were made to indicate the number, size and time of appearance of
the feather papillae, but unfortunately in the notes left by the
distinguished embryologist there is no indication whether the feather
papillae were regarded as modified scale papillae or new creations
resulting from the appearance of special feather-forming factors in the
germ-plasm.
"When eventually the three Emperor Penguin embryos reached me that their
feather rudiments might be compared with the feather rudiments of other
birds, I noticed that in Emperor embryos the feather papillae appeared
before the scale papillae. Evidence of this was especially afforded by
the largest embryo, which had reached about the same stage in its
development as a 16-days goose embryo.
"In the largest Emperor embryo feather papillae occur all over the
hind-quarters and on the legs to within a short distance of the tarsal
joint. Beyond the tarsal joint even in the largest embryo no attempt had
been made to produce the papillae which in older penguin embryos
represent, and ultimately develop into, the scaly covering of the foot.
The absence of papillae on the foot implied either that the scale
papillae were fundamentally different from feather papillae or that for
some reason or other the development of the papillae destined to give
rise to the foot scales had been retarded. There is no evidence as far as
I can ascertain that in modern lizards the scale papillae above the
tarsal joint appear before the scale papillae beyond this joint.
"The absence of papillae below the tarsal joint in Emperor embryos,
together with the fact that in many birds each large feather papilla is
accompanied by two or more very small feather papillae, led me to study
the papillae of the limbs of other birds. The most striking results were
obtained from the embryos of Chinese geese in which the legs are
relatively longer than in penguins. In a 13-days goose embryo the whole
of the skin below and for some distance above the tarsal joint is quite
smooth, whereas the skin of the rest of the leg is studded with feather
papillae. On the other hand, in an 18-days goose embryo in which the
feather papillae of the legs have developed into filaments, each
containing a fairly well-formed feather, scale papillae occur not only on
the foot below and for some distance above the tarsal joint but also
between the roots of the feather filaments between the tarsal and the
knee joints. More important still, in a 20-days goose embryo a number of
the papillae situated between the feather filaments of the leg were
actually developing into scales each of which overlapped the root
(calamus) of a feather just as scales overlap the foot feathers in grouse
and other feather-footed birds.
"As in bird embryos there is no evidence that feather papillae ever
develop into scales or that scale papillae ever develop into feathers it
may be assumed that feather papillae are fundamentally different from
scale papillae, the difference presumably being due to the presence of
special factors in the germ-plasm. Just as in armadillos hairs are found
emerging from under the scales, in ancient birds as in the feet of some
modern birds the coat probably consisted of both feathers and scales. But
in course of time, owing perhaps to the growth of the scales being
arrested, the coat of the birds, instead of consisting throughout of
well-developed scales and small inconspicuous feathers, was almost
entirely made up of a countless number of downy feathers, well-developed
scales only persisting below the tarsal joint.
"If the conclusions arrived at with the help of the Emperor Penguin
embryos about the origin of feathers are justified, the worst journey in
the world in the interest of science was not made in vain."
* * * * *
END OF VOLUME ONE
_Printed in Great Britain by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh._
[Illustration: A HALO ROUND THE MOON--E. A. Wilson, del.]
THE WORST JOURNEY
IN THE WORLD
ANTARCTIC
1910-1913
BY
APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD
WITH PANORAMAS, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE LATE
DOCTOR EDWARD A. WILSON AND OTHER MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOLUME TWO
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY SYDNEY
_First published 1922_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
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