|
|
[136] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. ii. p. 53.
[137] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 295.
[138] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. pp. 432-433.
[139] Ibid. p. 597.
[140] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 362.
[141] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 396.
[142] _With Scott: The Silver Lining_, Taylor, p. 240.
[143] F. G. Jackson, _A Thousand Days in the Arctic_, vol. ii. pp.
380-381.
[144] See p. 179.
[145] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 4.
[146] See pp. 130-134.
[147] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 352.
[148] Ibid. p. 353.
[149] _Scott's Last Expedition_, vol. i. p. 353.
CHAPTER VII
THE WINTER JOURNEY
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a Heaven for?
R. BROWNING, _Andrea del Sarto._
To me, and to every one who has remained here the result of this
effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination, as one of the
most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander
forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold
and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they
should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity
for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation
which I hope may not be lost in the telling.
Scott's Diary, at Cape Evans.
The following list of the Winter Journey sledge weights (for three men)
is taken from the reckoning made by Bowers before we started:
_Expendible Stores_-- lbs. lbs.
'Antarctic' biscuit 135
3 Cases for same 12
Pemmican 110
Butter 21
Salt 3
Tea 4
Oil 60
Spare parts for primus, and matches 2
Toilet paper 2
Candles 8
Packing 5
Spirit 8 370
_Permanent Weights, etc._
2 9-ft. Sledges, 41 lbs. each 82
1 Cooker complete 13
2 Primus filled with oil 8
1 Double tent complete 35
1 Sledging shovel 3.5
3 Reindeer sleeping-bags, 12 lbs. each 36
3 Eider-down sleeping-bag linings, 4 lbs. each 12
1 Alpine rope 5
1 Bosun's bag, containing repairing materials, and
1 Bonsa outfit, containing repairing tools 5
3 Personal bags, each containing 15 lbs. spare clothing, etc. 45
Lamp box with knives, steel, etc., for seal and penguin 21
Medical and scientific box 40
2 Ice axes, 3 lbs. each 6
3 Man-harnesses 3
3 Portaging harnesses 3
Cloth for making roof and door for stone igloo 24
Instrument box 7
3 Pairs ski and sticks (discarded afterwards) 33
1 Pickaxe 11
3 Crampons, 2 lbs. 3 oz. each 6.5
2 Bamboos for measuring tide if possible, 14 feet each 4
2 Male bamboos 4
1 Plank to form top of door of igloo 2
1 Bag sennegrass 1
6 Small female bamboo ends and
1 Knife for cutting snow block to make igloo 4
Packing 8 420
----
790
====
The 'Lamp box' mentioned above contained the following:
1 Lamp for burning blubber.
1 Lamp for burning spirit.
1 Tent candle lamp.
1 Blubber cooker.
1 Blowpipe.
The party of three men set out with a total weight of 757 lbs. to draw,
the ski and sticks in the above list being left behind at the last
moment.
It was impossible to load the total bulk upon one 12-ft. sledge, and so
two 9-ft. sledges were taken, one toggled on behind the other. While this
made the packing and handling of the gear much easier, it nearly doubled
the friction surface against which the party had to pull.
* * * * *
_June 22. Midwinter Night._
A hard night: clear, with a blue sky so deep that it looks black: the
stars are steel points: the glaciers burnished silver. The snow rings and
thuds to your footfall. The ice is cracking to the falling temperature
and the tide crack groans as the water rises. And over all, wave upon
wave, fold upon fold, there hangs the curtain of the aurora. As you
watch, it fades away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and
rushes to the zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of
flaming gold. Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams
which rise behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus. And again the
spiritual veil is drawn--
Here at the roaring loom of Time I ply
And weave for God the garment thou seest him by.
Inside the hut are orgies. We are very merry--and indeed why not? The sun
turns to come back to us to-night, and such a day comes only once a year.
After dinner we had to make speeches, but instead of making a speech
Bowers brought in a wonderful Christmas tree, made of split bamboos and a
ski stick, with feathers tied to the end of each branch; candles, sweets,
preserved fruits, and the most absurd toys of which Bill was the owner.
Titus got three things which pleased him immensely, a sponge, a whistle,
and a pop-gun which went off when he pressed in the butt. For the rest of
the evening he went round asking whether you were sweating. "No." "Yes,
you are," he said, and wiped your face with the sponge. "If you want to
please me very much you will fall down when I shoot you," he said to me,
and then he went round shooting everybody. At intervals he blew the
whistle.
He danced the Lancers with Anton, and Anton, whose dancing puts that of
the Russian Ballet into the shade, continually apologized for not being
able to do it well enough. Ponting gave a great lecture with slides which
he had made since we arrived, many of which Meares had coloured. When one
of these came up one of us would shout, "Who coloured that," and another
would cry, "Meares,"--then uproar. It was impossible for Ponting to
speak. We had a milk punch, when Scott proposed the Eastern Party, and
Clissold, the cook, proposed Good Old True Milk. Titus blew away the
ball of his gun. "I blew it into the cerulean--how doth Homer have
it?--cerulean azure--hence Erebus." As we turned in he said, "Cherry, are
you responsible for your actions?" and when I said Yes, he blew loudly on
his whistle, and the last thing I remembered was that he woke up Meares
to ask him whether he was fancy free.
It was a magnificent bust.
* * * * *
Five days later and three men, one of whom at any rate is feeling a
little frightened, stand panting and sweating out in McMurdo Sound. They
have two sledges, one tied behind the other, and these sledges are piled
high with sleeping-bags and camping equipment, six weeks' provisions, and
a venesta case full of scientific gear for pickling and preserving. In
addition there is a pickaxe, ice-axes, an Alpine rope, a large piece of
green Willesden canvas and a bit of board. Scott's amazed remark when he
saw our sledges two hours ago, "Bill, why are you taking all this oil?"
pointing to the six cans lashed to the tray on the second sledge, had a
bite in it. Our weights for such travelling are enormous--253 lbs. a man.
It is mid-day but it is pitchy dark, and it is not warm.
As we rested my mind went back to a dusty, dingy office in Victoria
Street some fifteen months ago. "I want you to come," said Wilson to me,
and then, "I want to go to Cape Crozier in the winter and work out the
embryology of the Emperor penguins, but I'm not saying much about it--it
might never come off." Well! this was better than Victoria Street, where
the doctors had nearly refused to let me go because I could only see the
people across the road as vague blobs walking. Then Bill went and had a
talk with Scott about it, and they said I might come if I was prepared to
take the additional risk. At that time I would have taken anything.
After the Depot 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 deg.
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 deg.. 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 deg. 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 deg., and it was
-55 deg. 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 deg.. 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 31/4 miles, and travelled 10 miles to do it. The
temperature was -66 deg. 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 deg.; and as taken on the sledge was -75 deg.. 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 deg., 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 21/4 miles, and it
took 8 hours.
It blew force 3 that night with a temperature of -65.2 deg., 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 deg., 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 21/2 miles with the usual relaying, and camped at 8 P.M.
with the temperature -65 deg.. 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 deg., and during July 3 it ranged between -52 deg.
and -58 deg.. We got forward only 21/2 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 deg. 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 deg., but in the
morning we wakened (we really did wake that morning) to great relief. The
temperature was only -27 deg. 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 deg.:
during the following night to -54 deg..
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 11/2 miles. The temperature ranged between
-55 deg. and -61 deg., 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 deg.; at breakfast -70 deg.; at noon
nearly -77 deg.. 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 deg., which is 1091/2 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 deg.,[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 deg., and I will not pretend that it did
not convince me that Dante was right when he placed the circles of ice
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