Surely Chance must be the damnedest conspirator against human happiness,
or my darling could never have been allowed to suffer so much from the
report that my ship was lost.
What actually happened is easily told.
Two days after we left Akaroa, N.Z., which was the last we saw of the
world before we set our faces towards the Unknown, we ran into a heavy
lumpy sea and made bad weather of it for forty-eight hours.
Going at good speed, however, we proceeded south on meridian 179 degrees
E., latitude 68, when (just as we were sighting the Admiralty Mountains,
our first glimpse of the regions of the Pole) we encountered a
south-westerly gale, which, with our cumbersome deck cargo, made the
handling of the ship difficult.
Nevertheless the _Scotia_ rode bravely for several hours over the
mountainous seas, though sometimes she rolled fifty degrees from side to
side.
Towards nightfall we shipped a good deal of water; the sea smashed in
part of our starboard bulwarks, destroyed the upper deck, washed out the
galley, carried off two of our life boats and sent other large fragments
of the vessel floating away to leeward.
At last the pumps became choked, and the water found its way to the
engine-room. So to prevent further disaster we put out the fires, and
then started, all hands, to bale out with buckets.
It was a sight to see every man-jack at work on that job (scientific
staff included), and you would not have thought our spirits were much
damped, whatever our bodies may have been, if you had been there when I
cried, "Are we downhearted, shipmates?" and heard the shout that came up
from fifty men (some of them waist deep in the water):
"No!"
We had a stiff tussle until after midnight, but we stuck hard, and
before we turned into our bunks, we had fought the sea and beaten it.
Next morning broke fine and clear, with that fresh crisp air of the
Antarctic which is the same to the explorer as the sniff of battle to
the warhorse, and no sign of the storm except the sight of some
lead-white icebergs which had been torn from the islands south-west of
us.
Everybody was in high spirits at breakfast, and when one of the company
started "Sweethearts and Wives" all hands joined in the chorus, and
(voice or no voice) I had a bit of a go at it myself.
It is not the most solemn music ever slung together, but perhaps no
anthem sung in a cathedral has ascended to heaven with a heartier spirit
of thanksgiving.
When I went up on deck again, though, I saw that enough of our "wooden
walls" had gone overboard to give "scarey people" the impression (if
things were ever picked up, as I knew they would be, for the set of the
current was to the north-east) that we had foundered, and that made me
think of my dear one.
We had no wireless aboard, and the ship would not be going back to New
Zealand until March, so I was helpless to correct the error; but I
determined that the very first message from the very first station I set
up on the Antarctic continent should be sent to her to say that I was
safe and everything going splendid.
What happened on Christmas day is a longer story.
On the eighteenth of December, having landed some of my deck cargo and
provisions, and sent up my ship to winter quarters, I was on my way,
with ponies, dogs, and sledges and a large company of men, all in A1
condition, to the lower summit of Mount Erebus, for I intended to set up
my first electric-power-wave station there--that being high enough, we
thought, to permit of a message reaching the plateau of the Polar zone
and low enough (allowing for the curvature of the earth) to cover the
maximum distance in a northerly direction.
It was a long reach, but we chose the rocky ridges and moraines, trying
to avoid the crevassed glaciers, and all went well until the twentieth,
when just as we were reaching the steeper gradients a strong wind sprang
up, blowing straight down the course before us.
All day long we toiled against it, but the weather grew worse, with
gusts of sleet and snow, until the wind reached the force of a hurricane
and the temperature fell to 28 degrees below zero.
There was nothing to do but to wait for the blizzard to blow itself out,
so we plugged down our tents in the shelter of the rocky side of a
ravine that had an immense snow-field behind it.
The first night was bad enough, for the canvas of one tent flew into
ribbons, and the poor chaps in it had to lie uncovered in their
half-frozen sleeping-bags until morning.
All through the twenty-first, twenty-second, and twenty-third the storm
continued, sweeping with terrific force down the ravine, and whirling
the snow in dense masses from the snow-field overhead.
Christmas Eve was worse, with the temperature down to 38 degrees below
zero and the wind up to eighty miles an hour in gusts, and during the
greater part of Christmas Day we were all confined to our sleeping-bags
and half buried in the snow that had drifted in on us.
As a consequence we had no religious service, and if anybody said a De
Profundis it was between his crackling lips under his frozen beard. We
had no Christmas dinner either, except a few Plasmon biscuits and a nip
of brandy and water, which were served out by good old O'Sullivan who
had come with me as doctor to the expedition.
On St. Stephen's Day I made a round of the camp and found the ponies
suffering terribly and the dogs badly hit. The storm was telling on the
men too, for some of them were down with dysentery, and the toes of one
poor chap were black from frostbite.
I was fit enough myself, thank God, but suffering from want of sleep or
rather from a restless feeling which broken sleep brought with it.
The real truth is that never since I sailed had I been able to shake off
the backward thought that I ought not to have left my dear one behind
me. In active work, like the gale, I could dismiss the idea of her
danger; but now that I had nothing to do but to lie like a log in a
sleeping-bag, I suffered terribly from my recollection of her
self-sacrifice and my fear of the consequences that might come of it.
This was not so bad in the daytime, for even in the midst of the
whirling snow and roaring wind I had only to close my eyes, and I could
see her as she came up the road in the sunshine that Sunday morning when
she was returning from church in her drooping hat and fluttering veil,
or as she looked at me with her great "seeing eyes" at the last moment
of all when she compelled me to come away.
But the night was the devil. No sooner did I drop off to sleep than I
awoke with a start at the sound of her voice calling me by my name.
"Martin! Martin!"
It was always a voice of distress, and though I am no dreamer and I
think no crank, I could not get away from the idea that she was crying
to me to come back.
That was about the one thing in the world that was impossible to me now,
and yet I knew that getting assurance from somewhere that my dear one
was being cared for was the only way to set my mind at rest for the job
that was before me.
It may seem ridiculous that I should have thought of that, but everybody
who has ever been with Nature in her mighty solitudes, aloof from the
tides of life, knows that the soul of man is susceptible down there to
signs which would seem childish amid the noise and bustle of the world.
It was like that with me.
I shared my tent with O'Sullivan, the chief of our scientific staff, and
Treacle, who thought it his duty to take care of me, though the work was
generally the other way about.
The old salt had been badly battered, and I had not liked the way he had
been mumbling about "mother," which is not a good sign in a stalwart
chap when his strength is getting low.
So while buttoning up the tent on the night after Christmas Day I was a
bit touched up to see old Treacle, who had lived the life of a rip,
fumbling at his breast and hauling something out with an effort.
It was a wooden image of the Virgin (about the length of my hand) daubed
over with gilt and blue paint, and when he stuck it up in front of his
face as he lay in his sleeping-bag, I knew that he expected to go out
before morning, and wished _that_ to be the last thing his old eyes
should rest on.
I am not much of a man for saints myself (having found that we get out
of tight places middling well without them), but perhaps what Treacle
did got down into some secret place of my soul, for I felt calmer as I
fell asleep, and when I awoke it was not from the sound of my darling's
voice, but from a sort of deafening silence.
The roaring of the wind had ceased; the blizzard was over; the lamp that
hung from the staff of the tent had gone out; and there was a sheet of
light coming in from an aperture in the canvas.
It was the midnight sun of the Antarctic, and when I raised my head I
saw that it fell full on the little gilded image of the Virgin. Anybody
who has never been where I was then may laugh if he likes and welcome,
but that was enough for me. It was all right! Somebody was looking after
my dear one!
I shouted to my shipmates to get up and make ready, and at dawn, when we
started afresh on our journey, there may have been dark clouds over our
heads but the sun was shining inside of us.