There is no censure attached to this criticism. Our ration was probably

the best which has been used: but more is known now than was known then.
We are all out to try and get these things right for the future.[354]

Campbell reached Hut Point only five days after we left it with the
dog-teams. A characteristic note left to greet us on our return regretted
they were too late to take part in the Search Journey. If I had lived
through ten months such as those men had just endured, wild horses would
not have dragged me out sledging again. But they were keen to get some
useful work done in the time which remained until the ship arrived.

We had the Polar records: Campbell and his men, unaided, had not only
survived their terrible winter, but had sledged down the coast after it.
We ourselves, faced by a difficult alternative, had fallen on our feet.
We never hoped for more than this: we seldom hoped for so much.

I wanted a series of Adelie penguin embryos from the rookery at Cape
Royds, but had not expected an opportunity of getting them because I was
away sledging during the summer months. Now the chance had come. Atkinson
wanted to work on parasites at the same place, and others to survey. But
the real job was an ascent of Erebus, the active volcano which rose from
our doors to some 13,400 feet in height. A party of Shackleton's men
under Professor David went up it in March, and managed to haul a sledge
up to 5800 feet, from which point they had to portage their gear. A year
before this Debenham, with the help of a telescope, selected a route by
which they could haul a sledge up to 9000 feet. There proved to be no
great difficulty about it; it was just a matter of legs and breath.

They were a cheery company, part-singing in the evenings and working hard
all day. It was an uneventful trip, Debenham said, and very harmonious:
the best trip he had down there. Both Debenham and Dickason suffered from
mountain sickness, however, and they were the two smokers! The clearness
of the air was marked. At 5000 feet they could plainly see Mount
Melbourne and Cape Jones, between two and three hundred miles away, and
several uncharted mountains over to the west, but they were unable to
plot them accurately because they could get direction rays from one point
only. The Sound itself was covered by cloud most of the time, but
Beaufort Island and Franklin Island were clear. Unlike David's party,
they could see no signs whatever of volcanic action on Mount Bird, which
is almost entirely covered with ice on which it was to be expected that
some mark might be left. At 9000 feet Terror looked very imposing, but
Mount Bird and Terra Nova were insignificant and uninteresting. The
valley between the old crater and the slopes of the second crater greatly
impressed them, and they found a fine little crevassed glacier in it.
Both Priestley and Debenham are of opinion that it is possible to get to
Terror by this valley, and that there are no crevassed areas or
impossible slopes on the way. All the same it would probably be more
sensible to go from Cape Crozier.

At a point about 9000 feet up, Priestley, Gran, Abbott and Hooper started
to make the ascent to the active crater on December 10. They packed the
tent, poles, bags, inner cooker and cooking gear, with four days'
provisions, and reached the second crater at about 11,500 feet, to be
hung up by cloud all the next day. At these altitudes the temperature
varied between -10 deg. and -30 deg., though at sea-level simultaneously they
were round about freezing-point. By 1 A.M. on the 12th the conditions
were good--clear, with a southerly wind blowing the steam away from the
summit. The party got away as soon as possible and reached the lip of the
active crater in a few hours. Looking down they were unable to see the
bottom, for it was full of steam: the sides sloped at a steep angle for
some 500 feet, when they became sheer precipices: the opening appeared to
be about 14,000 paces round. The top is mostly pumice, but there is also
a lot of kenyte, much the same as at sea-level: the old crater was mostly
kenyte, proving that this is the oldest rock of the island: felspar
crystals must be continually thrown out, for they were lying about on the
top of the snow; I have one nearly 31/2 inches long.

Two men went back to the camp, for one had a frost-bitten foot. This left
Priestley and Gran, who tried to boil the hypsometer but failed owing to
the wind, which was variable and enveloped them from time to time in
steam and sulphur vapour. They left a record on a cairn and started to
return. But when they had got 500 feet down Priestley found that he had
left a tin of exposed films on the top instead of the record. Gran said
he would go back and change it. He had reached the top when there was a
loud explosion: large blocks of pumice were hurled out with a big smoke
cloud; probably a big bubble had burst. Gran was in the middle of it,
heard it gurgle before it burst, saw "blocks of pumiceous lava, in shape
like the halves of volcanic bombs, and with bunches of long, drawn-out,
hair-like shreds of glass in their interior."[355] This was Pele's hair.
Gran was a bit sick from sulphur dioxide fumes afterwards. They reached
Cape Royds on the 16th, the very successful trip taking fifteen days.

Meanwhile Shackleton's old hut was very pleasant at this time of year: in
winter it was a bit too draughty. With bright sunlight, a lop on the sea
which splashed and gurgled under the ice-foot, the beautiful mountains
all round us, and the penguins nesting at our door, this was better than
the Beardmore Glacier, where we had expected to be at this date. What
then must it have been to the six men who were just returned from the
very Gate of Hell? And the food: "Truly Shackleton's men must have fed
like turkey-cocks from all the delicacies here: boiled chicken, kidneys,
mushrooms, ginger, Garibaldi biscuits, soups of all kinds: it is a
splendid change. Best of all are the fresh-buttered skua's eggs which we
make for breakfast. In fact, life is bearable with all that has been
unknown so long at last cleared up, and our anxieties for Campbell's
party laid at rest."[356]

For three weeks I worked among the Adelie penguins at Cape Royds, and
obtained a complete series of their embryos. It was always Wilson's idea
that embryology was the next job of a vertebral zoologist down south. I
have already explained that the penguin is an interesting link in the
evolutionary chain, and the object of getting this embryo is to find out
where the penguins come in.[357] Whether or no they are more primitive
than other nonflying birds, such as the apteryx, the ostrich, the rhea
and the moa, which last is only just extinct, is an open question. But
wingless birds are still hanging on to the promontories of the southern
continents, where there is less rivalry than in the highly populated
land areas of the north. It may be that penguins are descended from
ancestors who lived in the northern hemisphere in a winged condition
(even now you may sometimes see them try to fly), and that they have been
driven towards the south.

If penguins are primitive, it is rational to infer that the most
primitive penguin is farthest south. These are the two Antarcticists, the
Emperor and the Adelie. The latter appears to be the more numerous and
successful of the two, and for this reason we are inclined to search
among the Emperors as being among the most primitive penguins, if not the
most primitive of birds now living: hence the Winter Journey. I was glad
to get, in addition, this series of Adelie penguins' embryos, feeling
somewhat like a giant who had wandered on to the wrong planet, and who
was distinctly in the way of its true inhabitants.

We returned too late to see the eggs laid, and therefore it was
impossible to tell how old the embryos were. My hopes rose, however, when
I saw some eggless nests with penguins sitting upon them, but later I
found that these were used as bachelor quarters by birds whose wives were
sitting near. I tried taking eggs from nests and was delighted to find
that new eggs appeared: these I carefully marked, and it was not until I
opened one two days later to find inside an embryo at least two weeks
old, that I realized that penguins added baby-snatching to their other
immoralities. Some of those from whom I took eggs sat upon stones of a
similar size and shape with every appearance of content: one sat upon the
half of the red tin of a Dutch cheese. They are not very intelligent.

All the world loves a penguin: I think it is because in many respects
they are like ourselves, and in some respects what we should like to be.
Had we but half their physical courage none could stand against us. Had
we a hundredth part of their maternal instinct we should have to kill our
children by the thousand. Their little bodies are so full of curiosity
that they have no room for fear. They like mountaineering, and joy-riding
on ice-floes: they even like to drill.

One day there had been a blizzard, and lying open to the view of all was
a deserted nest, a pile of coveted stones. All the surrounding rookery
made their way to and fro, each husband acquiring merit, for, after each
journey, he gave his wife a stone. This was the plebeian way of doing
things; but my friend who stood, ever so unconcerned, upon a rock knew a
trick worth two of that: he and his wife who sat so cosily upon the other
side.

The victim was a third penguin. He was without a mate, but this was an
opportunity to get one. With all the speed his little legs could compass
he ran to and fro, taking stones from the deserted nest, laying them
beneath a rock, and hurrying back for more. On that same rock was my
friend. When the victim came up with his stone he had his back turned.
But as soon as the stone was laid and the other gone for more, he jumped
down, seized it with his beak, ran round, gave it to his wife and was
back on the rock (with his back turned) before you could say Killer
Whale. Every now and then he looked over his shoulder, to see where the
next stone might be.

I watched this for twenty minutes. All that time, and I do not know for
how long before, that wretched bird was bringing stone after stone. And
there were no stones there. Once he looked puzzled, looked up and swore
at the back of my friend on his rock, but immediately he came back, and
he never seemed to think he had better stop. It was getting cold and I
went away: he was coming for another.

The life of an Adelie penguin is one of the most unchristian and
successful in the world. The penguin which went in for being a true
believer would never stand the ghost of a chance. Watch them go to bathe.
Some fifty or sixty agitated birds are gathered upon the ice-foot,
peering over the edge, telling one another how nice it will be, and what
a good dinner they are going to have. But this is all swank: they are
really worried by a horrid suspicion that a sea-leopard is waiting to eat
the first to dive. The really noble bird, according to our theories,
would say, "I will go first and if I am killed I shall at any rate have
died unselfishly, sacrificing my life for my companions"; and in time
all the most noble birds would be dead. What they really do is to try and
persuade a companion of weaker mind to plunge: failing this, they hastily
pass a conscription act and push him over. And then--bang,
helter-skelter, in go all the rest.

They take turns in sitting on their eggs, and after many days the fathers
may be seen waddling down towards the sea with their shirt-fronts
muddied, their long trick done. It may be a fortnight before they return,
well-fed, clean, pleased with life, and with a grim determination to
relieve their wives, to do their job. Sometimes they are met by others
going to bathe. They stop and pass the time of day. Well! Perhaps it
would be more pleasant, and what does a day or two matter anyhow. They
turn; clean and dirty alike are off to the seaside again. This is when
they say, "The women are splendid."

Life is too strenuous for them to have any use for the virtues of
brotherly love, good works, charity and benevolence. When they mate the
best thief wins: when they nest the best pair of thieves hatch out their
eggs. In a long unbroken stream, which stretches down below the sea-ice
horizon, they march in from the open sea. Some are walking on their human
feet: others tobogganing upon their shiny white breasts. After their long
walk they must have a sleep, and then the gentlemen make their way into
the already crowded rookery to find them wives. But first a suitor must
find, or steal, a pebble, for such are the penguin jewels: they are of
lava, black, russet or grey, with almond-shaped crystals bedded in them.
They are rare and of all sizes, but that which is most valued is the size
of a pigeon's egg. Armed with one of these he courts his maid, laying it
at her feet. If accepted he steals still more stones: she guards them
jealously, taking in the meantime any safe opportunity to pick others
from under her nearest neighbours. Any penguin which is unable to fight
and steal successfully fails to make a good high nest, or loses it when
made. Then comes a blizzard, and after that a thaw: for it thaws
sometimes right down by the sea-shore where the Adelies have their
nurseries. The eggs of the strong and wicked hatch out, but those of the
weak are addled. You must have a jolly good pile of stones to hatch eggs
after a blizzard like that in December 1911, when the rookeries were
completely snow-covered: nests, eggs, parents and all.

Once hatched the chicks grow quickly from pretty grey atoms of down to
black lumps of stomach topped by a small and quite inadequate head. They
are two or more weeks old, and they leave their parents, or their parents
leave them, I do not know which. If socialism be the nationalization of
the means of production and distribution, then they are socialists. They
divide into parents and children. The adult community comes up from the
open sea, bringing food inside them: they are full of half-digested
shrimps. But not for their own children: these, if not already dead, are
lost in a crowd of hungry tottering infants which besiege each
food-provider as he arrives. But not all of them can get food, though all
of them are hungry. Some have already been behindhand too long: they have
not managed to secure food for days, and they are weak and cold and very
weary.

"As we stood there and watched this race for food we were gradually
possessed with the idea that the chicks looked upon each adult coming up
full-bellied from the shore as not a parent only, but a food-supply. The
parents were labouring under a totally different idea, and intended
either to find their own infants and feed them, or else to assimilate
their already partially digested catch themselves. The more robust of the
young thus worried an adult until, because of his importunity, he was
fed. But with the less robust a much more pathetic ending was the rule. A
chick that had fallen behind in this literal race for life, starving and
weak, and getting daily weaker because it could not run fast enough to
insist on being fed, again and again ran off pursuing with the rest.
Again and again it stumbled and fell, persistently whining out its hunger
in a shrill and melancholy pipe, till at last the race was given up.
Forced thus by sheer exhaustion to stop and rest, it had no chance of
getting food. Each hurrying parent with its little following of hungry
chicks, intent on one thing only, rushed quickly by, and the starveling
dropped behind to gather strength for one more effort. Again it fails, a
robuster bird has forced the pace, and again success is wanting to the
runt. Sleepily it stands there, with half-shut eyes, in a torpor
resulting from exhaustion, cold, and hunger, wondering perhaps what all
the bustle round it means, a little dirty, dishevelled dot, in the race
for life a failure, deserted by its parents, who have hunted vainly for
their own offspring round the nest in which they hatched it, but from
which it may by now have wandered half a mile. And so it stands, lost to
everything around, till a skua in its beat drops down beside it, and with
a few strong, vicious pecks puts an end to the failing life."[358]

There is a great deal to be said for this kind of treatment. The Adelie
penguin has a hard life: the Emperor penguin a horrible one. Why not kill
off the unfit right away, before they have had time to breed, almost
before they have had time to eat? Life is a stern business in any case:
why pretend that it is anything else? Or that any but the best can
survive at all? And in consequence, I challenge you to find a more jolly,
happy, healthy lot of old gentlemen in the world. We _must_ admire them:
if only because they are so much nicer than ourselves! But it is grim:
Nature is an uncompromising nurse.

Nature was going to give us a bad time too if we were not relieved, and
on January 17, as there were still no signs of the ship, it was decided
to prepare for another winter. We were to go on rations; to cook with
oil, for nearly all the coal was gone; to kill and store up seal. On
January 18 we started our preparations, digging a cave to store more
meat, and so forth. I went off seal hunting after breakfast, and having
killed and cut up two, came back across the Cape at mid-day. All the men
were out working in the camp. There was nothing to be seen in the Sound,
and then, quite suddenly, the bows of the ship came out from behind the
end of the Barne Glacier, two or three miles away. We watched her
cautious approach with immense relief.

"Are you all well," through a megaphone from the bridge.

"The Polar Party died on their return from the Pole: we have their
records." A pause and then a boat.

Evans, who had been to England and made a good recovery from scurvy, was
in command: with him were Pennell, Rennick, Bruce, Lillie and Drake. They
reported having had a very big gale indeed on their way home last year.

We got some apples off the ship, "beauties, I want nothing better....
Pennell is first-class, as always...." "One notices among the ship's men
a rather unnatural way of talking: not so much in special instances, but
as a whole, contact with civilization gives it an affected sound: I
notice it in both officers and men."[359]

"_January 19. On board the Terra Nova._ After 28 hours' loading we left
the old hut for good and all at 4 P.M. this afternoon. It has been a bit
of a rush and little sleep last night. It is quite wonderful now to be
travelling a day's journey in an hour: we went to Cape Royds in about
that time and took off geological and zoological specimens. I should like
to sit up and sketch all these views, which would have meant long
travelling without the ship, but I feel very tired. The mail is almost
too good for words. Now, with the latest waltz on the gramophone, beer
for dinner and apples and fresh vegetables to eat, life is more bearable
than it has been for many a long weary week and month. I leave Cape Evans
with no regret: I never want to see the place again. The pleasant
memories are all swallowed up in the bad ones."[360]

Before the ship arrived it was decided among us to urge the erection of a
cross on Observation Hill to the memory of the Polar Party. On the
arrival of the ship the carpenter immediately set to work to make a great
cross of jarrah wood. There was some discussion as to the inscription, it
being urged that there should be some quotation from the Bible because
"the women think a lot of these things." But I was glad to see the
concluding line of Tennyson's "Ulysses" adopted: "To strive, to seek, to
find, and not to yield."

The open water stretched about a mile and a half south of Tent Island,
and here we left the ship to sledge the cross to Hut Point at 8 A.M. on
January 20. The party consisted of Atkinson, Wright, Lashly, Crean,
Debenham, Keohane and Davies, the ship's carpenter and myself.

"_Evening. Hut Point._ We had a most unpleasant experience coming in. We
struck wind and drift just about a mile from Hut Point: then we saw there
was a small thaw pool off the Point, and came out to give it a wide
berth. Atkinson put his feet down into water: we turned sharp out, and
then Crean went right in up to his arms, and we realized that the ice was
not more than three or four inches of slush. I managed to give him a hand
out without the ice giving, and we went on floundering about. Then Crean
went right in again, and the sledge nearly went too: we pulled the
sledge, and the sledge pulled him out. Except for some more soft patches
that was all, but it was quite enough. I think we got out of it most
fortunately."

"Crean got some dry clothes here, and the cross has had a coat of white
paint and is drying. We went up Observation Hill and have found a good
spot right on the top, and have already dug a hole which will, with the
rock alongside, give us three feet. From there we can see that this
year's old ice is in a terrible state, open water and open water slush
all over near the land--I have never seen anything like it here. Off Cape
Armitage and at the Pram Point pressure it is extra bad. I only hope we
can find a safe way back."

"You would not think Crean had had such a pair of duckings to hear him
talking so merrily to-night...."

"I really do think the cross is going to look fine."[361]

Observation Hill was clearly the place for it, it knew them all so well.
Three of them were Discovery men who lived three years under its shadow:
they had seen it time after time as they came back from hard journeys on
the Barrier: Observation Hill and Castle Rock were the two which always
welcomed them in. It commanded McMurdo Sound on one side, where they had
lived: and the Barrier on the other, where they had died. No more fitting
pedestal, a pedestal which in itself is nearly 1000 feet high, could have
been found.

"_Tuesday, January 22._ Rousing out at 6 A.M. we got the large piece of
the cross up Observation Hill by 11 A.M. It was a heavy job, and the ice
was looking very bad all round, and I for one was glad when we had got it
up by 5 o'clock or so. It is really magnificent, and will be a permanent
memorial which could be seen from the ship nine miles off with a naked
eye. It stands nine feet out of the rocks, and many feet into the ground,
and I do not believe it will ever move. When it was up, facing out over
the Barrier, we gave three cheers and one more."

We got back to the ship all right and coasted up the Western Mountains to
Granite Harbour; a wonderfully interesting trip to those of us who had
only seen these mountains from a distance. Gran went off to pick up a
depot of geological specimens. Lillie did a trawl.

This was an absorbing business, though it was only one of a long and
important series made during the voyages of the Terra Nova. Here were all
kinds of sponges, siliceous, glass rope, tubular, and they were generally
covered with mucus. Some fed on diatoms so minute that they can only be
collected by centrifuge: some have gastric juices to dissolve the
siliceous skeletons of the diatoms on which they feed: they anchor
themselves in the mud and pass water in and out of their bodies:
sometimes the current is stimulated by cilia. There were colonies of
Gorgonacea, which share their food unselfishly; and corals and marine
degenerate worms, which started to live in little cells like coral, but
have gone down in the world. And there were starfishes, sea-urchins,
brittle-stars, feather-stars and sea-cucumbers. The sea-urchins are
formed of hexagonal plates, the centre of each of which is a ball, upon
which a spine works on a ball and socket joint. These spines are used for
protection, and when large they can be used for locomotion. But the real
means of locomotion are five double rows of water-tube feet, working by
suction, by which they withdraw the water inside a receptacle in the
shell, thereby forming a vacuum; starfishes do the same. We found a
species of sea-urchin which had such large spines that they practically
formed bars; the spines were twice as long as the sea-urchin and shaped
just like oars, being even fluted. A lobster grows by discarding his
suit, hiding and getting another, growing meanwhile. A snail or an oyster
retains his original shell, and adds to it in layers all the way down,
increasing one edge. But our sea-urchin grows by an increment of
calcareous matter all round the outside of each plate. As the animal
grows the plates get bigger.

There was a sea-cucumber which nurses its young, having a brood cavity
which is really formed out of the mouth: this is a peculiarity of a new
Antarctic genus found first on the Discovery. It has the most complex
water-tubes, which it uses as legs, and a few limy rods in its soft skin
instead of the bony calcareous plates of sea-urchins and starfish. After
them came the feather-stars, a relic of the old crinoids which used to
flourish in the carboniferous period, examples of which can be found in
the Derbyshire limestone; and there were thousands of brittle-stars, like
beautiful wheels of which the hubs and spokes remained, but not the
circumference. These spokes or legs are muscular, sensory and locomotive;
they differ from the starfishes in that they have no digestive glands in
their legs, and from the feather-stars in that they do not use their legs
to waft food into their mouths. Once upon a time they had a stalk and
were anchored to a rock, and there are still very rare old stalked
echinoderms living in the sea. This apparently geological thing was found
by Wyville Thomson in 1868 still living in the seas to the north of
Scotland, and this find started the Challenger Expedition for deep-sea
soundings in 1872. But the Challenger brought back little in this line.
Most of the species we found were peculiar to the Antarctic.

There were Polychaete worms by the hundred, showing the protrusable
mouth, which is shoved into the mud and then brought back into the body,
and the bristles on the highly developed projections which act as legs,
by which they get about the mud. These beasts have apparently given rise
to the Arthropods. In a modified and later form they had taken to living
in a tube, both for protection and because they found that they could not
go through the mud, which had become too viscous for them. So they stand
up in a tube and collect the sediment which is falling by means of
tentacles. They spread from one locality to another by going through a
plankton embryonic stage in their youth. They may be compared to the
mason worms, which also build tubes.

But as Lillie squatted on the poop surrounded by an inner ring of jars
and tangled masses of the catch, and an outer ring of curious scientists,
pseudo-scientists and seamen, no find pleased him so much as the frequent
discovery of pieces of Cephalodiscus rarus, of which even now there are
but some four jars full in the world. It is as interesting as it is
uncommon, for its ancestor was a link between the vertebrates and
invertebrates, though no one knows what it was like. It has been a
vertebrate and gone back, and now has the signs of a notochord in early
life, and it also has gills. First found on the Graham's Land side of the
Antarctic continent, it has only recently been discovered in the Ross
Sea, and occurs nowhere else in the world so far as is known.

We left Granite Harbour in the early morning of January 23, and started
to make our way out. Our next job was to pick up the geological specimens
at Evans Coves, where Campbell and his men had wintered in the igloo, and
also to leave a depot there for future explorers. We met very heavy pack,
having to return at least twelve miles and try another way. "The sea has
been freezing out here, which seems an extraordinary thing at this time
of year. There was a thin layer of ice over the water between the floes
this morning, and I feel sure that most of these big level floes, of
which we have seen several, are the remains of ice which has frozen
comparatively recently."[362] The propeller had a bad time, constantly
catching up on ice. At length we were some thirty miles north of Cape
Bird making roughly towards Franklin Island. That night we made good
progress in fairly open water, and we passed Franklin Island during the
day. But the outlook was so bad in the evening (January 24) that we
stopped and banked fires. "We lay just where we stopped until at 5 A.M.
on January 25, when the ice eased up sufficiently for us to get along,
and we started to make the same slow progress--slow ahead, stop (to the
engine-room)--bump and grind for a bit--then slow astern, stop--slow
ahead again, and so on, until at 7 P.M., after one real big bump which
brought the dinner some inches off the table, Cheetham brought us out
into open water."[363]

Mount Nansen rose sheer and massive ahead of us with a table top, and at
3 A.M. on January 26 we were passing the dark brown granite headland of
the northern foothills. We were soon made fast to a stretch of some 500
yards of thick sea-ice, upon which the wind had not left a particle of
snow, and before us the foothills formed that opening which Campbell had
well named Hell's Gate.

I wish I had seen that igloo: with its black and blubber and beastliness.
Those who saw it came back with faces of amazement and admiration. We
left a depot at the head of the bay, marked with a bamboo and a flag, and
then we turned homewards, counting the weeks, and days, and then the
hours. In the early hours of January 27 we left the pack. On January 29
we were off Cape Adare, "head sea, and wind, and fog, very ticklish work
groping along hardly seeing the ship's length. Then it lifts and there is
a fair horizon. Everybody pretty sea-sick, including most of the seamen
from Cape Evans. All of us feeling rotten."[364] Very thick that night,
and difficult going. At mid-day (lat. 69 deg. 50' S.) a partial clearance
showed a berg right ahead. By night it was blowing a full gale, and it
was not too easy to keep in our bunks. Our object was now to make east in
order to allow for the westerlies later on. We passed a very large number
of bergs, varied every now and then by growlers. On February 1, latitude
64 deg. 15' S. and longitude 159 deg. 15' E., we coasted along one side of a
berg which was twenty-one geographical miles long: the only other side of
which we got a good view stretched away until lost below the horizon. In
latitude 62 deg. 10' S. and longitude 158 deg. 15' E. we had "a real bad day:
head wind from early morning, and simply crowds of bergs all round. At 8
A.M. we had to wedge in between a berg and a long line of pack before we
could find a way through. Then thick fog came down. At 9.45 A.M. I went
out of the ward-room door, and almost knocked my head against a great
berg which was just not touching the ship on the starboard side. There
was a heavy cross-swell, and the sea sounded cold as it dashed against
the ice. After crossing the deck it was just possible to see in the fog
that there was a great Barrier berg just away on the port side." We
groped round the starboard berg to find others beyond. Our friend on the
opposite side was continuous and apparently without end. It was soon
clear that we were in a narrow alley-way--between one very large berg and
a number of others. It took an hour and a quarter of groping to leave the
big berg behind. At 4 P.M., six hours later, we were still just feeling
our way along. And we had hopes of being out of the ice in this latitude!

The Terra Nova is a wood barque, built in 1884 by A. Stephen & Sons,
Dundee; tonnage 764 gross and 400 net; measuring 187' x 31' x 19';
compound engines with two cylinders of 140 nominal horse-power;
registered at St. Johns, Newfoundland. She is therefore not by any means
small as polar ships go, but Pennell and his men worked her short-handed,
with bergs and growlers all round them, generally with a big sea running
and often in darkness or fog. On this occasion we were spared many of the
most ordinary dangers. It was summer. Our voyage was an easy one. There
was twilight most of the night: there were plenty of men on board, and
heaps of coal. Imagine then what kind of time Pennell and his ship's
company had in late autumn, after remaining in the south until only a
bare ration of coal was left for steaming, until the sea was freezing
round them and the propeller brought up dead as they tried to force
their way through it. Pennell was a very sober person in his statements,
yet he described the gale through which the Terra Nova passed on her way
to New Zealand in March 1912 as seeming to blow the ship from the top of
one wave to the top of the next; and the nights were dark, and the bergs
were all round them. They never tried to lay a meal in those days, they
just ate what they could hold in their hands. He confessed to me that one
hour he did begin to wonder what was going to happen next: others told me
that he seemed to enjoy every minute of it all.

Owing to press contracts and the necessity of preventing leakage of news
the Terra Nova had to remain at sea for twenty-four hours after a cable
had been sent to England. Also it was of the first importance that the
relatives should be informed of the facts before the newspapers published
them.

And so at 2.30 A.M. on February 10 we crept like a phantom ship into the
little harbour of Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand. With what
mixed feelings we smelt the old familiar woods and grassy slopes, and saw
the shadowy outlines of human homes. With untiring persistence the little
lighthouse blinked out the message, "What ship's that?" "What ship's
that?" They were obviously puzzled and disturbed at getting no answer. A
boat was lowered and Pennell and Atkinson were rowed ashore and landed.
The seamen had strict orders to answer no questions. After a little the
boat returned, and Crean announced: "We was chased, sorr, but they got
nothing out of us."

We put out to sea.

When morning broke we could see the land in the distance--greenness,
trees, every now and then a cottage. We began to feel impatient. We
unpacked the shore-going clothes with their creases three years old which
had been sent out from home, tried them on--and they felt unpleasantly
tight. We put on our boots, and they were positively agony. We shaved off
our beards! There was a hiatus. There was nothing to do but sail up and
down the coast and, if possible, avoid coastwise craft.

In the evening the little ship which runs daily from Akaroa to Lyttelton
put out to sea on her way and ranged close alongside. "Are all well?"
"Where's Captain Scott?" "Did you reach the Pole?" Rather unsatisfactory
answers and away they went. Our first glimpse, however, of civilized
life.

At dawn the next morning, with white ensign at half-mast, we crept
through Lyttelton Heads. Always we looked for trees, people and houses.
How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as
though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe
we were not dreaming still.

The Harbour-master came out in the tug and with him Atkinson and Pennell.
"Come down here a minute," said Atkinson to me, and "It's made a
tremendous impression, I had no idea it would make so much," he said. And
indeed we had been too long away, and the whole thing was so personal to
us, and our perceptions had been blunted: we never realized. We landed to
find the Empire--almost the civilized world--in mourning. It was as
though they had lost great friends.

To a sensitive pre-war world the knowledge of these men's deaths came as
a great shock: and now, although the world has almost lost the sense of
tragedy, it appeals to their pity and their pride. The disaster may well
be the first thing which Scott's name recalls to your mind (as though an
event occurred in the life of Columbus which caused you to forget that he
discovered America); but Scott's reputation is not founded upon the
conquest of the South Pole. He came to a new continent, found out how to
travel there, and gave knowledge of it to the world: he discovered the
Antarctic, and founded a school. He is the last of the great geographical
explorers: it is useless to try and light a fire when everything has been
burned; and he is probably the last old-fashioned polar explorer, for, as
I believe, the future of such exploration is in the air, but not yet. And
he was strong: we never realized until we found him lying there dead how
strong, mentally and physically, that man was.

In both his polar expeditions he was helped, to an extent which will
never be appreciated, by Wilson: in the last expedition by Bowers. I
believe that there has never been a finer sledge party than these three
men, who combined in themselves initiative, endurance and high ideals to
an extraordinary degree. And they could organize: they did organize the
Polar Journey and their organization seemed to have failed. Did it fail?
Scott said No. "The causes of this disaster are not due to faulty
organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken."
Nine times out of ten, says the meteorologist, he would have come
through: but he struck the tenth. "We took risks, we knew we took them;
things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for
complaint." No better epitaph has been written.

He decided to use the only route towards the Pole of which the world had
any knowledge, that is to go up the Beardmore Glacier, then the only
discovered way up through the mountains which divide the polar plateau
from the Great Ice Barrier: probably it is the only possible passage for
those who travel from McMurdo Sound. The alternative was to winter on the
Barrier, as Amundsen did, so many hundred miles away from the coast-line
that, in travelling south, the chaos caused in the ice plain by the
Beardmore in its outward flow would be avoided. To do so meant the
abandonment of a great part of the scientific programme, and Scott was
not a man to go south just to reach the Pole. Amundsen knew that Scott
was going to McMurdo Sound when he decided to winter in the Bay of
Whales: otherwise he might have gone to McMurdo Sound. Probably no man
would have refused the knowledge which had already been gained.

I have said that there are those who say that Scott should have relied on
ski and dogs. If you read Shackleton's account of his discovery and
passage of the Beardmore Glacier you will not be prejudiced in favour of
dogs: and as a matter of fact, though we found a much better way up than
Shackleton, I do not believe it possible to take dogs up and down, and
over the ice disturbances at the junction with the plateau, unless there
is ample time to survey a route, if then. "Dogs could certainly have
come up as far as this," I heard Scott say somewhere under the
Cloudmaker, approximately half-way up the glacier, but the best thing you
could do with dogs in pressure such as we all experienced on our way down
would be to drop them into the nearest chasm. If you can avoid such
messes well and good: if not, you must not rely on dogs, and the people
who talk of these things have no knowledge.

If Scott was going up the Beardmore he was probably right not to take
dogs: actually he relied on ponies to the foot of the glacier and
man-haulage on from that point. Because he relied on ponies he was not
able to start before November: the experience of the Depot Journey showed
that ponies could not stand the weather conditions before that date. But
he could have started earlier if he had taken dogs, in place of ponies,
to the foot of the glacier. This would have gained him a few days in his
race against the autumn conditions when returning.

Such tragedies inevitably raise the question, "Is it worth it?" What is
worth what? Is life worth risking for a feat, or losing for your country?
To face a thing because it was a feat, and only a feat, was not very
attractive to Scott: it had to contain an additional object--knowledge. A
feat had even less attraction for Wilson, and it is a most noteworthy
thing in the diaries which are contained in this book, that he made no
comment when he found that the Norwegians were first at the Pole: it is
as though he felt that it did not really matter, as indeed it probably
did not.

It is most desirable that some one should tackle these and kindred
questions about polar life. There is a wealth of matter in polar
psychology: there are unique factors here, especially the complete
isolation, and four months' darkness every year. Even in Mesopotamia a
long-suffering nation insisted at last that adequate arrangements must be
made to nurse and evacuate the sick and wounded. But at the Poles a man
must make up his mind that he may be rotting of scurvy (as Evans was) or
living for ten months on half-rations of seal and full rations of
ptomaine poisoning (as Campbell and his men were) but no help can reach
him from the outside world for a year, if then. There is no chance of a
'cushy' wound: if you break your leg on the Beardmore you must consider
the most expedient way of committing suicide, both for your own sake and
that of your companions.

Both sexually and socially the polar explorer must make up his mind to be
starved. To what extent can hard work, or what may be called dramatic
imagination, provide a substitute? Compare our thoughts on the march; our
food dreams at night; the primitive way in which the loss of a crumb of
biscuit may give a lasting sense of grievance. Night after night I bought
big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield
station, but always woke before I got a mouthful to my lips; some
companions who were not so highly strung were more fortunate, and ate
their phantom meals.

And the darkness, accompanied it may be almost continually by howling
blizzards which prevent you seeing your hand before your face. Life in
such surroundings is both mentally and physically cramped; open-air
exercise is restricted and in blizzards quite impossible, and you realize
how much you lose by your inability to see the world about you when you
are out-of-doors. I am told that when confronted by a lunatic or one who
under the influence of some great grief or shock contemplates suicide,
you should take that man out-of-doors and walk him about: Nature will do
the rest. To normal people like ourselves living under abnormal
circumstances Nature could do much to lift our thoughts out of the rut of
everyday affairs, but she loses much of her healing power when she cannot
be seen, but only felt, and when that feeling is intensely uncomfortable.

Somehow in judging polar life you must discount compulsory endurance; and
find out what a man can shirk, remembering always that it is a sledging
life which is the hardest test. It is because it is so much easier to
shirk in civilization that it is difficult to get a standard of what your
average man can do. It does not really matter much whether your man
whose work lies in or round the hut shirks a bit or not, just as it does
not matter much in civilization: it is just rather a waste of
opportunity. But there's precious little shirking in Barrier sledging: a
week finds most of us out.

There are many questions which ought to be studied. The effect upon men
of going from heat to cold, such as Bowers coming to us from the Persian
Gulf: or vice versa of Simpson returning from the Antarctic to India;
differences of dry and damp cold; what is a comfortable temperature in
the Antarctic and what is it compared to a comfortable temperature in
England, the question of women in these temperatures...? The man with the
nerves goes farthest. What is the ratio between nervous and physical
energy? What is vitality? Why do some things terrify you at one time and
not at others? What is this early morning courage? What is the influence
of imagination? How far can a man draw on his capital? Whence came
Bowers' great heat supply? And my own white beard? and X's blue eyes: for
he started from England with brown ones and his mother refused to own him
when he came back? Growth and colour change in hair and skin?

There are many reasons which send men to the Poles, and the Intellectual
Force uses them all. But the desire for knowledge for its own sake is the
one which really counts and there is no field for the collection of
knowledge which at the present time can be compared to the Antarctic.

Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion.

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to
give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man
you will do nothing: if you are fearful you may do much, for none but
cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are
mad, and nearly all will say, "What is the use?" For we are a nation of
shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not
promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge
nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers:
that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will
have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

FOOTNOTES:

[349] Scott, _Voyage of the Discovery_, vol. i. p. 449.

[350] Amundsen, _The South Pole_, vol. ii. p. 19.

[351] Lashly's diary records that the Second Return Party found a