XVII. THE POLAR JOURNEY…

XVII. THE POLAR JOURNEY

DON JUAN. This creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved while he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally....

DON JUAN. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

THE STATUE. Bosh!

DON JUAN. What you call bosh is the only thing men dare die for. Later on, Liberty will not be Catholic enough: men will die for human perfection, to which they will sacrifice all their liberty gladly.

BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman.

V. THE POLE AND AFTER

The Polar Party. Depôts.

SCOTT One Ton [79° 29´]. WILSON Upper Barrier or Mount Hooper [80° 32´]. BOWERS Middle Barrier [81° 35´]. OATES Lower Barrier [82° 47´]. Seaman EVANS Shambles Camp [N. of Gateway]. Lower Glacier [S. of Gateway]. Middle Glacier [Cloudmaker]. Upper Glacier [Mt. Darwin]. Three Degree [86° 56´]. 1½ Degree [88° 29´]. Last Depôt [89° 32´].

Scott returned from the Discovery Expedition impressed by the value of youth in polar work; but the five who went forward from 87° 32´ were all grown men, chosen from a body which was largely recruited on a basis of youth. Four of them were men who were accustomed to take responsibility and to lead others. Four of them had wide sledging experience and were accustomed to cold temperatures. They were none of them likely to get flurried in emergency, to panic under any circumstances, or to wear themselves out by loss of nervous control. Scott and Wilson were the most highly strung of the party: I believe that the anxiety which Scott suffered served as a stimulus against mental monotony rather than as a drain upon his energy. Scott was 43, Wilson 39, Evans 37, Oates 32, and Bowers 28 years old. Bowers was exceptionally old for his age.

In the event of one man crocking a five-man party may be better able to cope with the situation, but with this doubtful exception Scott had nothing to gain and a good deal to lose by taking an extra man to the Pole. That he did so means, I think, that he considered his position a very good one at this time. He was anxious to take as many men with him as possible. I have an impression that he wanted the army represented as well as the navy. Be that as it may, he took five men: he decided to take the extra man at the last moment, and in doing so he added one more link to a chain. But he was content; and four days after the Last Return Party left them, as he lay out a blizzard, quite warm in his sleeping-bag though the mid-day temperature was -20°, he wrote a long diary praising his companions very highly indeed "so our five people are perhaps as happily selected as it is possible to imagine."[294] He speaks of Seaman Evans as being a giant worker with a really remarkable headpiece. There is no mention of the party feeling the cold, though they were now at the greatest height of their journey; the food satisfied them thoroughly. There is no shadow of trouble here: only Evans has got a nasty cut on his hand!

There were more disadvantages in this five-man party than you might think. There was 5½ weeks' food for four men: five men would eat this in about four weeks. In addition to the extra risk of breakdown, there was a certain amount of discomfort involved, for everything was arranged for four men as I have already explained; the tent was a four-man tent, and an inner lining had been lashed to the bamboos making it smaller still: when stretched out for the night the sleeping-bags of the two outside men must have been partly off the floor-cloth, and probably on the snow: their bags must have been touching the inner tent and collecting the rime which was formed there: cooking for five took about half an hour longer in the day than cooking for four--half an hour off your sleep, or half an hour off your march? I do not believe that five men on the lid of a crevasse are as safe as four. Wilson writes that the stow of the sledge with five sleeping-bags was pretty high: this makes it top-heavy and liable to capsize in rough country.

But what would have paralysed anybody except Bowers was the fact that they had only four pairs of ski between the five of them. To slog along on foot, in soft snow, in the middle of four men pulling rhythmically on ski, must have been tiring and even painful; and Birdie's legs were very short. No steady swing for him, and little chance of getting his mind off the job in hand. Scott could never have meant to take on five men when he told his supporting team to leave their ski behind, only four days before he reorganized.

"May I be there!" wrote Wilson of the men chosen to travel the ice-cap to the Pole. "About this time next year may I be there or thereabouts! With so many young bloods in the heyday of youth and strength beyond my own I feel there will be a most difficult task in making choice towards the end." "I should like to have Bill to hold my hand when we get to the Pole," said Scott.

Wilson was there and his diary is that of an artist, watching the clouds and mountains, of a scientist observing ice and rock and snow, of a doctor, and above all of a man with good judgment. You will understand that the thing which really interested him in this journey was the acquisition of knowledge. It is a restrained, and for the most part a simple, record of facts. There is seldom any comment, and when there is you feel that, for this very reason, it carries more weight. Just about this time: "December 24. Very promising, thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon march": "Christmas Day, and a real good and happy one with a very long march": "January 1, 1912. We had only 6 hours' sleep last night by a mistake, but I had mine solid in one piece, actually waking in exactly the same position as I fell asleep in 6 hours before--never moved": "January 2. We were surprised to-day by seeing a Skua gull flying over us--evidently hungry but not weak. Its droppings, however, were clear mucus, nothing in them at all. It appeared in the afternoon and disappeared again about ½ hour after." And then on January 3: "Last night Scott told us what the plans were for the South Pole. Scott, Oates, Bowers, Petty Officer Evans and I are to go to the Pole. Teddie Evans is to return from here to-morrow with Crean and Lashly. Scott finished his week's cooking to-night and I begin mine to-morrow." Just that.

The next day Bowers wrote: "I had my farewell breakfast in the tent with Teddy Evans, Crean and Lashly. After so little sleep the previous night I rather dreaded the march. We gave our various notes, messages and letters to the returning party and started off. They accompanied us for about a mile before returning, to see that all was going well. Our party were on ski with the exception of myself: I first made fast to the central span, but afterwards connected up to the toggle of the sledge, pulling in the centre between the inner ends of Captain Scott's and Dr. Wilson's traces. This was found to be the best place, as I had to go my own step.

"Teddy and party gave us three cheers, and Crean was half in tears. They have a feather-weight sledge to go back with of course, and ought to run down their distance easily.[295] We found we could manage our load easily, and did 6.3 miles before lunch, completing 12.5 by 7.15 P.M. Our marching hours are nine per day. It is a long slog with a well-loaded sledge, and more tiring for me than the others, as I have no ski. However, as long as I can do my share all day and keep fit it does not matter much one way or the other.

"We had our first northerly wind on the plateau to-day, and a deposit of snow crystals made the surface like sand latterly on the march. The sledge dragged like lead. In the evening it fell calm, and although the temperature was -16° it was positively pleasant to stand about outside the tent and bask in the sun's rays. It was our first calm since we reached the summit too. Our socks and other damp articles which we hang out to dry at night become immediately covered with long feathery crystals exactly like plumes. Socks, mitts and finnesko dry splendidly up here during the night. We have little trouble with them compared with spring and winter journeys. I generally spread my bag out in the sun during the 1½ hours of lunch time, which gives the reindeer hair a chance to get rid of the damage done by the deposit of breath and any perspiration during the night."[296]

Plenty of sun, heavy surfaces, iridescent clouds ... the worst windcut sastrugi I have seen, covered with bunches of crystals like gorse ... ice blink all round ... hairy faces and mouths dreadfully iced up on the march ... hot and sweaty days' work, but sometimes cold hands in the loops of the ski sticks ... windy streaky cirrus in every direction, all thin and filmy and scrappy ... horizon clouds all being wafted about.... These are some of the impressions here and there in Wilson's diary during the first ten days of the party's solitary march. On the whole he is enjoying himself, I think.

You should read Scott's diary yourself and form your own opinions, but I think that after the Last Return Party left him there is a load off his mind. The thing had worked so far, it was up to them now: that great mass of figures and weights and averages, those years of preparation, those months of anxiety--no one of them had been in vain. They were up to date in distance, and there was a very good amount of food, probably more than was necessary to see them to the Pole and off the plateau on full rations. Best thought of all, perhaps, the motors with their uncertainties, the ponies with their suffering, the glacier with its possibilities of disaster, all were behind: and the two main supporting parties were safely on their way home. Here with him was a fine party, tested and strong, and only 148 miles from the Pole.

I can see them, working with a business-like air, with no fuss and no unnecessary talk, each man knowing his job and doing it: pitching the tent: finishing the camp work and sitting round on their sleeping-bags while their meal was cooked: warming their hands on their mugs: saving a biscuit to eat when they woke in the night: packing the sledge with a good neat stow: marching with a solid swing--we have seen them do it so often, and they did it jolly well.

And the conditions did not seem so bad. "To-night it is flat calm; the sun so warm that in spite of the temperature we can stand about outside in the greatest comfort. It is amusing to stand thus and remember the constant horrors of our situation as they were painted for us: the sun is melting the snow on the ski, etc. The plateau is now very flat, but we are still ascending slowly. The sastrugi are getting more confused, predominant from the S.E. I wonder what is in store for us. At present everything seems to be going with extraordinary smoothness.... We feel the cold very little, the great comfort of our situation is the excellent drying effect of the sun.... Our food continues to amply satisfy. What luck to have hit on such an excellent ration. We really are an excellently found party ... we lie so very comfortably, warmly clothed in our comfortable bags, within our double-walled tent."[297]

Then something happened.

While Scott was writing the sentences you have just read, he reached the summit of the plateau and started, ever so slightly, to go downhill. The list of corrected altitudes given by Simpson in his meteorological report are of great interest: Cape Evans 0, Shambles Camp 170, Upper Glacier Depôt 7151, Three Degree Depôt 9392, One and a Half Degree Depôt 9862, South Pole 9072 feet above sea-level.[298]

What happened is not quite clear, but there is no doubt that the surface became very bad, that the party began to feel the cold, and that before long Evans especially began to crock. The immediate trouble was bad surfaces. I will try and show why these surfaces should have been met in what was, you must remember, now a land which no man had travelled before.

Scott laid his One and a Half Degree Depôt (i.e. 1½° or 90 miles from the Pole) on January 10. That day they started to go down, but for several days before that the plateau had been pretty flat. Time after time in the diaries you find crystals--crystals--crystals: crystals falling through the air, crystals bearding the sastrugi, crystals lying loose upon the snow. Sandy crystals, upon which the sun shines and which made pulling a terrible effort: when the sky clouds over they get along much better. The clouds form and disperse without visible reason. And generally the wind is in their faces.

Wright tells me that there is certain evidence in the records which may explain these crystals. Halos are caused by crystals and nearly all those logged from the bottom of the Beardmore to the Pole and back were on this stretch of country, where the land was falling. Bowers mentions that the crystals did not appear in all directions, which goes to show that the air was not always rising, but sometimes was falling and therefore not depositing its moisture. There is no doubt that the surfaces met were very variable, and it may be that the snow lay in waves. Bowers mentions big undulations for thirty miles before the Pole, and other inequalities may have been there which were not visible. There is sometimes evidence that these crystals were formed on the windward side of these waves, and carried over by a strong wind and deposited on the lee side.

It is common knowledge that as you rise in the atmosphere so the pressure decreases: in fact, it is usual to measure your height by reading the barometer. Now the air on this last stretch to the Pole was rising, for the wind was from the south, and, as we have seen, the plateau here was sloping down towards the Pole. The air, driven uphill by this southerly wind, was forced to rise. As it rose it expanded, because the pressure was less. Air which has expanded without any heat being given to it from outside, that is in a heat-proof vessel, is said to expand by adiabatic expansion. Such air tends first to become saturated, and then to precipitate its moisture. These conditions were approximately fulfilled on the plateau, where the air expanded as it rose, but could get little or no heat from outside. The air therefore precipitated its moisture in the form of crystals.

Owing to the rapid changes in surfaces (on one occasion they depôted their ski because they were in a sea of sastrugi, and had to walk back for them because the snow became level and soft again) Scott guessed that the coastal mountains could not be far away, and we now know that the actual distance was only 130 miles. About the same time Scott mentions that he had been afraid that they were weakening in their pulling, but he was reassured by getting a patch of good surface and finding the sledge coming as easily as of old. On the night of January 12, eight days after leaving the Last Return Party, he writes: "At camping to-night every one was chilled and we guessed a cold snap, but to our surprise the actual temperature was higher than last night, when we could dawdle in the sun. It is most unaccountable why we should suddenly feel the cold in this manner: partly the exhaustion of the march, but partly some damp quality in the air, I think. Little Bowers is wonderful; in spite of my protest he would take sights after we had camped to-night, after marching in the soft snow all day when we have been comparatively restful on ski."[299] On January 14, Wilson wrote: "A very cold grey thick day with a persistent breeze from the S.S.E. which we all felt considerably, but temperature was only -18° at lunch and -15° in the evening. Now just over 40 miles from the Pole." Scott wrote the same day: "Again we noticed the cold; at lunch to-day all our feet were cold but this was mainly due to the bald state of our finnesko. I put some grease under the bare skin and found it make all the difference. Oates seems to be feeling the cold and fatigue more than the rest of us, but we are all very fit." And on January 15, lunch: "We were all pretty done at camping."[300] And Wilson: "We made a depôt [The Last Depôt] of provisions at lunch time and went on for our last lap with nine days' provision. We went much more easily in the afternoon, and on till 7.30 P.M. The surface was a funny mixture of smooth snow and sudden patches of sastrugi, and we occasionally appear to be on a very gradual down gradient and on a slope down from the west to east." In the light of what happened afterwards I believe that the party was not as fit at this time as might have been expected ten days before, and that this was partly the reason why they felt the cold and found the pulling so hard. The immediate test was the bad surface, and this was the result of the crystals which covered the ground.

Simpson has worked out[301] that there is an almost constant pressure gradient driving the air on the plateau northwards parallel to the 146° E. meridian, and parallel also to the probable edge of the plateau. The mean velocity for the months of this December and January was about 11 miles an hour. During this plateau journey Scott logged wind force 5 and over on 23 occasions, and this wind was in their faces from the Beardmore to the Pole, and at their backs as they returned. A low temperature when it is calm is paradise compared to a higher temperature with a wind, and it is this constant pitiless wind, combined with the altitude and low temperatures, which has made travelling on the Antarctic plateau so difficult.

While the mean velocity of wind during the two midsummer months seems to be fairly constant, there is a very rapid fall of temperature in January. The mean actual temperature found on the plateau this year in December was -8.6°, the minimum observed being -19.3°. Simpson remarks that "it must be accounted as one of the wonders of the Antarctic that it contains a vast area of the earth's surface where the mean temperature during the warmest month is more than 8° below the Fahrenheit zero, and when throughout the month the highest temperature was only +5.5° F."[302] But the mean temperature on the plateau dropped 10° in January to -18.7°, the minimum observed being -29.7°. These temperatures have to be combined with the wind force described above to imagine the conditions of the march. In the light of Scott's previous plateau journey[303] and Shackleton's Polar Journey[304] this wind was always expected by our advance parties. But there can be no doubt that the temperature falls as solar radiation decreases more rapidly than was generally supposed. Scott probably expected neither such a rapid fall of temperature, nor the very bad surfaces, though he knew that the plateau would mean a trying time, and indeed it was supposed that it would be much the hardest part of the journey.

On the night of January 15, Scott wrote "it ought to be a certain thing now, and the only appalling possibility the sight of the Norwegian flag forestalling ours."[305] They were 27 miles from the Pole.

The story of the next three days is taken from Wilson's diary:

"January 16. We got away at 8 A.M. and made 7.5 miles by 1.15, lunched, and then in 5.3 miles came on a black flag and the Norwegians' sledge, ski, and dog tracks running about N.E. and S.W. both ways. The flag was of black bunting tied with string to a fore-and-after which had evidently been taken off a finished-up sledge. The age of the tracks was hard to guess but probably a couple of weeks--or three or more. The flag was fairly well frayed at the edges. We camped here and examined the tracks and discussed things. The surface was fairly good in the forenoon -23° temperature, and all the afternoon we were coming downhill with again a rise to the W., and a fall and a scoop to the east where the Norwegians came up, evidently by another glacier."

"January 17. We camped on the Pole itself at 6.30 P.M. this evening. In the morning we were up at 5 A.M. and got away on Amundsen's tracks going S.S.W. for three hours, passing two small snow cairns, and then, finding the tracks too much snowed up to follow, we made our own bee-line for the Pole: camped for lunch at 12.30 and off again from 3 to 6.30 P.M. It blew from force 4 to 6 all day in our teeth with temperature -22°, the coldest march I ever remember. It was difficult to keep one's hands from freezing in double woollen and fur mitts. Oates, Evans, and Bowers all have pretty severe frost-bitten noses and cheeks, and we had to camp early for lunch on account of Evans' hands. It was a very bitter day. Sun was out now and again, and observations taken at lunch, and before and after supper, and at night, at 7 P.M. and at 2 A.M. by our time. The weather was not clear, the air was full of crystals driving towards us as we came south, and making the horizon grey and thick and hazy. We could see no sign of cairn or flag, and from Amundsen's direction of tracks this morning he has probably hit a point about 3 miles off. We hope for clear weather to-morrow, but in any case are all agreed that he can claim prior right to the Pole itself. He has beaten us in so far as he made a race of it. We have done what we came for all the same and as our programme was made out. From his tracks we think there were only 2 men, on ski, with plenty of dogs on rather low diet. They seem to have had an oval tent. We sleep one night at the Pole and have had a double hoosh with some last bits of chocolate, and X's cigarettes have been much appreciated by Scott and Oates and Evans. A tiring day: now turning into a somewhat starchy frozen bag. To-morrow we start for home and shall do our utmost to get back in time to send the news to the ship."

"January 18. Sights were taken in the night, and at about 5 A.M. we turned out and marched from this night camp about 3¾ miles back in a S.E.ly direction to a spot which we judged from last night's sights to be the Pole. Here we lunched camp: built a cairn: took photos: flew the Queen Mother's Union Jack and all our own flags. We call this the Pole, though as a matter of fact we went ½ mile farther on in a S. easterly direction after taking further sights to the actual final spot, and here we left the Union Jack flying. During the forenoon we passed the Norwegians' last southerly camp: they called it Polheim and left here a small tent with Norwegian and Fram flags flying, and a considerable amount of gear in the tent: half reindeer sleeping-bags, sleeping-socks, reinskin trousers 2 pair, a sextant, and artif[icial] horizon, a hypsometer with all the thermoms broken, etc. I took away the spirit-lamp of it, which I have wanted for sterilizing and making disinfectant lotions of snow. There were also letters there: one from Amundsen to King Haakon, with a request that Scott should send it to him. There was also a list of the five men who made up their party, but no news as to what they had done. I made some sketches here, but it was blowing very cold, -22°. Birdie took some photos. We found no sledge there though they said there was one: it may have been buried in drift. The tent was a funny little thing for 2 men, pegged out with white line and tent-pegs of yellow wood. I took some strips of blue-grey silk off the tent seams: it was perished. The Norskies had got to the Pole on December 16, and were here from 15th to 17th. At our lunch South Pole Camp we saw a sledge-runner with a black flag about ½ mile away blowing from it. Scott sent me on ski to fetch it, and I found a note tied to it showing that this was the Norskies' actual final Pole position. I was given the flag and the note with Amundsen's signature, and I got a piece of the sledge-runner as well. The small chart of our wanderings shows best how all these things lie. After lunch we made 6.2 miles from the Pole Camp to the north again, and here we are camped for the night."[306]

The following remarks on the South Pole area were written by Bowers in the Meteorological Log, apparently on January 17 and 18: "Within 120 miles of the South Pole the sastrugi crossed seem to indicate belts of certain prevalent winds. These were definitely S.E.ly. up to about Lat. 78° 30´ S., where the summit was passed and we started to go definitely downhill toward the Pole. An indefinite area was then crossed S.E.ly, S.ly and S.W.ly sastrugi. Later, in about 79° 30´ S., those from the S.S.W. predominated. At this point also the surface of the ice-cap became affected by undulations running more or less at right angles to our course. These resolved themselves into immense waves some miles in extent,[307] with a uniform surface both in hollow and crust. The whole surface was carpeted with a deposit of ice-crystals which, while we were there, fell sometimes in the form of minute spicules and sometimes in plates. These caused an almost continuous display of parhelia.

"The flags left a month previously by the Norwegian expedition were practically undamaged and so could not have been exposed to very heavy wind during that time. Their sledging and ski tracks, where marked, were raised slightly, also the dogs' footprints. In the neighbourhood of their South Pole Camp the drifts were S.W.ly, but there was one S.S.E. drift to leeward of tent. They had pitched their tent to allow for S.W.ly wind. For walking on foot the ground was all pretty soft, and on digging down the crystalline structure of the snow was found to alter very little, and there were no layers of crust such as are found on the Barrier. The snow seems so lightly put together as not to cohere, and makes very little water for its bulk when melted. The constant and varied motion of cirrus, and the forming and motion of radiant points, shows that in the upper atmosphere at this time of the year there is little or no tranquillity."[308]

That is the bare bones of what was without any possible doubt a great shock. Consider! These men had been out 2½ months and were 800 miles from home. The glacier had been a heavy grind: the plateau certainly not worse, probably better, than was expected, as far as that place where the Last Return Party left them. But then, in addition to a high altitude, a head wind, and a temperature which averaged -18.7°, came this shower of ice-crystals, turning the surface to sand, especially when the sun was out. They were living in cirrus clouds, and the extraordinary state seems to have obtained that the surface of the snow was colder when the sun was shining than when clouds checked the radiation from it. They began to descend. Things began to go not quite right: they felt the cold, especially Oates and Evans: Evans' hands also were wrong--ever since the seamen made that new sledge. The making of that sledge must have been fiercely cold work: one of the hardest jobs they did. I am not sure that enough notice has been taken of that.

And then: "The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole. It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Many thoughts come and much discussion have we had. To-morrow we must march on to the Pole and then hasten home with all the speed we can compass. All the day-dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return." "The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected ... companions labouring on with cold feet and hands.... Evans had such cold hands we camped for lunch ... the wind is blowing hard, T. -21°, and there is that curious damp, cold feeling in the air which chills one to the bone in no time.... Great God! this is an awful place...."[309]

This is not a cry of despair. It is an ejaculation provoked by the ghastly facts. Even now in January the temperature near the South Pole is about 24° lower than it is during the corresponding month of the year (July) near the North Pole,[310] and if it is like this in mid-summer, what is it like in mid-winter? At the same time it was, with the exception of the sandy surfaces, what they had looked for, and every detail of organization was working out as well as if not better than had been expected.

Bowers was so busy with the meteorological log and sights which were taken in terribly difficult circumstances that he kept no diary until they started back. Then he wrote on seven consecutive days, as follows:

"January 19. A splendid clear morning with a fine S.W. wind blowing. During breakfast time I sewed a flap attachment on to the hood of my green hat so as to prevent the wind from blowing down my neck on the march. We got up the mast and sail on the sledge and headed north, picking up Amundsen's cairn and our outgoing tracks shortly afterwards. Along these we travelled till we struck the other cairn and finally the black flag where we had made our 58th outward camp. We then with much relief left all traces of the Norwegians behind us, and headed on our own track till lunch camp, when we had covered eight miles.

"In the afternoon we passed No. 2 cairn of the British route, and fairly slithered along before a fresh breeze. It was heavy travelling for me, not being on ski, but one does not mind being tired if a good march is made. We did sixteen [miles] altogether for the day, and so should pick up our Last Depôt to-morrow afternoon. The weather became fairly thick soon after noon, and at the end of the afternoon there was considerable drift, with a mist caused by ice-crystals, and parhelion."

"January 20. Good sailing breeze again this morning. It is a great pleasure to have one's back to the wind instead of having to face it. It came on thicker later, but we sighted the Last Depôt soon after 1 P.M. and reached it at 1.45 P.M. The red flag on the bamboo pole was blowing out merrily to welcome us back from the Pole, with its supply of necessaries of life below. We are absolutely dependent upon our depôts to get off the plateau alive, and so welcome the lonely little cairns gladly. At this one, called the Last Depôt, we picked up four days' food, a can of oil, some methylated spirit (for lighting purposes) and some personal gear we had left there. The bamboo was bent on to the floor-cloth as a yard for our sail instead of a broken sledge-runner of Amundsen's which we had found at the Pole and made a temporary yard of.

"As we had marched extra long in the forenoon in order to reach the depôt, our afternoon march was shorter than usual. The wind increased to a moderate gale with heavy gusts and considerable drift. We should have had a bad time had we been facing it. After an hour I had to shift my harness aft so as to control the motions of the sledge. Unfortunately the surface got very sandy latterly, but we finished up with 16.1 miles to our credit and camped in a stiff breeze, which resolved itself into a blizzard a few hours later. I was glad we had our depôt safe."

"January 21. Wind increased to force 8 during night with heavy drift. In the morning it was blizzing like blazes and marching was out of the question. The wind would have been of great assistance to us, but the drift was so thick that steering a course would have been next to impossible. We decided to await developments and get under weigh as soon as it showed any signs of clearing. Fortunately it was shortlived, and instead of lasting the regulation two days it eased up in the afternoon, and 3.45 found us off with our sail full. It was good running on ski but soft plodding for me on foot. I shall be jolly glad to pick up my dear old ski. They are nearly 200 miles away yet, however. The breeze fell altogether latterly and I shifted up into my old place as middle number of the five. Our distance completed was 5.5 miles, when camp was made again. Our old cairns are of great assistance to us, also the tracks, which are obliterated in places by heavy drift and hard sastrugi, but can be followed easily."

"January 22. We came across Evans' sheepskin boots this morning. They were almost covered up after their long spell since they fell off the sledge [on January 11]. The breeze was fair from the S.S.W. but got lighter and lighter. At lunch camp we had completed 8.2 miles. In the afternoon the breeze fell altogether, and the surface, acted on by the sun, became perfect sawdust. The light sledge pulled by five men came along like a drag without a particle of slide or give. We were all glad to camp soon after 7 P.M. I think we were all pretty tired out. We did altogether 19.5 miles for the day. We are only thirty miles from the 1½ Degree Depôt, and should reach it in two marches with any luck." [The minimum temperature this night was -30° (uncorrected).]

"January 23. Started off with a bit of a breeze which helped us a little [temperature -28°]. After the first two hours it increased to force 4, S.S.W., and filling the sail we sped along merrily, doing 8¾ miles before lunch. In the afternoon it was even stronger, and I had to go back on the sledge and act as guide and brakesman. We had to lower the sail a bit, but even then she ran like a bird.

"We are picking up our old cairns famously. Evans got his nose frost-bitten, not an unusual thing with him, but as we were all getting pretty cold latterly we stopped at a quarter to seven, having done 16½ miles. We camped with considerable difficulty owing to the force of the wind."[311]

The same night Scott wrote: "We came along at a great pace, and should have got within an easy march of our [One and a Half Degree] Depôt had not Wilson suddenly discovered that Evans' nose was frost-bitten--it was white and hard. We thought it best to camp at 6.45. Got the tent up with some difficulty, and now pretty cosy after good hoosh.

"There is no doubt Evans is a good deal run down--his fingers are badly blistered and his nose is rather seriously congested with frequent frost-bites. He is very much annoyed with himself, which is not a good sign. I think Wilson, Bowers and I are as fit as possible under the circumstances. Oates gets cold feet. One way and another I shall be glad to get off the summit!... The weather seems to be breaking up."[312]

Bowers resumes the tale:

"January 24. Evans has got his fingers all blistered with frost-bites, otherwise we are all well, but thinning, and in spite of our good rations get hungrier daily. I sometimes spend much thought on the march with plans for making a pig of myself on the first opportunity. As that will be after a further march of 700 miles they are a bit premature.

"It was blowing a gale when we started and it increased in force. Finally with the sail half down, one man detached tracking ahead and Titus and I breaking back, we could not always keep the sledge from overrunning. The blizzard got worse and worse till, having done only seven miles, we had to camp soon after twelve o'clock. We had a most difficult job camping, and it has been blowing like blazes all the afternoon. I think it is moderating now, 9 P.M. We are only seven miles from our depôt and this delay is exasperating."[313]

[Scott wrote: "This is the second full gale since we left the Pole. I don't like the look of it. Is the weather breaking up? If so, God help us, with the tremendous summit journey and scant food. Wilson and Bowers are my stand-by. I don't like the easy way in which Oates and Evans get frost-bitten."[314]]

"January 25. It was no use turning out at our usual time (5.45 A.M.), as the blizzard was as furious as ever; we therefore decided on a late breakfast and no lunch unless able to march. We have only three days' food with us and shall be in Queer Street if we miss the depôt. Our bags are getting steadily wetter, so are our clothes. It shows a tendency to clear off now (breakfast time) so, D.V., we may march after all. I am in tribulation as regards meals now as we have run out of salt, one of my favourite commodities. It is owing to Atkinson's party taking back an extra tin by mistake from the Upper Glacier Depôt. Fortunately we have some depôted there, so I will only have to endure another two weeks without it.

"10 P.M.--We have got in a march after all, thank the Lord. Assisted by the wind we made an excellent rundown to our One and a Half Degree Depôt, where the big red flag was blowing out like fury with the breeze, in clouds of driving drift. Here we picked up 1¼ cans of oil and one week's food for five men, together with some personal gear depôted. We left the bamboo and flag on the cairn. I was much relieved to pick up the depôt: now we only have one other source of anxiety on this endless snow summit, viz. the Three Degree Depôt in latitude 86° 56´ S.

"In the afternoon we did 5.2 miles. It was a miserable march, blizzard all the time and our sledge either sticking in sastrugi or overrunning the traces. We had to lower the sail half down, and Titus and I hung on to her. It was most strenuous work, as well as much colder than pulling ahead. Most of the time we had to brake back with all our strength to keep the sledge from overrunning. Bill got a bad go of snow glare from following the track without goggles on.

"This day last year we started the Depôt Journey. I did not think so short a time would turn me into an old hand at polar travelling, neither did I imagine at the time that I would be returning from the Pole itself."[315]

Wilson was very subject to these attacks of snow blindness, and also to headaches before blizzards. I have an idea that his anxiety to sketch whenever opportunity offered, and his willingness to take off his goggles to search for tracks and cairns, had something to do with it. This attack was very typical. "I wrote this at lunch and in the evening had a bad attack of snow blindness." ... "Blizzard in afternoon. We only got in a forenoon march. Couldn't see enough of the tracks to follow at all. My eyes didn't begin to trouble me till to-morrow [yesterday], though it was the strain of tracking and the very cold drift which we had to-day that gave me this attack of snow glare." ... "Marched on foot in the afternoon as my eyes were too bad to go on ski. We had a lot of drift and wind and very cold. Had ZuSO_4 and cocaine in my eyes at night and didn't get to sleep at all for the pain--dozed about an hour in the morning only." ... "Marched on foot again all day as I couldn't see my way on ski at all, Birdie used my ski. Eyes still very painful and watering. Tired out by the evening, had a splendid night's sleep, and though very painful across forehead to-night they are much better."[316]

The surface was awful: in his diary of the day after they left the Pole (January 19) Wilson wrote an account of it. "We had a splendid wind right behind us most of the afternoon and went well until about 6 P.M. when the sun came out and we had an awful grind until 7.30 when we camped. The sun comes out on sandy drifts, all on the move in the wind, and temp. -20°, and gives us an absolutely awful surface with no glide at all for ski or sledge, and just like fine sand. The weather all day has been more or less overcast with white broken alto-stratus, and for 3 degrees above the horizon there is a grey belt looking like a blizzard of drift, but this in reality is caused by a constant fall of minute snow crystals, very minute. Sometimes instead of crystal plates the fall is of minute agglomerate spicules like tiny sea-urchins. The plates glitter in the sun as though of some size, but you can only just see them as pin-points on your burberry. So the spicule collections are only just visible. Our hands are never warm enough in camp to do any neat work now. The weather is always uncomfortably cold and windy, about -23°, but after lunch to-day I got a bit of drawing done."[317]

All the joy had gone from their sledging. They were hungry, they were cold, the pulling was heavy, and two of them were not fit. As long ago as January 14 Scott wrote that Oates was feeling the cold and fatigue more than the others[318] and again he refers to the matter on January 20.[319] On January 19 Wilson wrote: "We get our hairy faces and mouths dreadfully iced up on the march, and often one's hands very cold indeed holding ski-sticks. Evans, who cut his knuckle some days ago at the last depôt, has a lot of pus in it to-night." January 20: "Evans has got 4 or 5 of his finger-tips badly blistered by the cold. Titus also his nose and cheeks--al[so] Evans and Bowers." January 28: "Evans has a number of badly blistered finger-ends which he got at the Pole. Titus' big toe is turning blue-black." January 31: "Evans' finger-nails all coming off, very raw and sore." February 4: "Evans is feeling the cold a lot, always getting frost-bitten. Titus' toes are blackening, and his nose and cheeks are dead yellow. Dressing Evans' fingers every other day with boric vaseline: they are quite sweet still." February 5: "Evans' fingers suppurating. Nose very bad [hard] and rotten-looking."[320]

Scott was getting alarmed about Evans, who "has dislodged two finger-nails to-night; his hands are really bad, and, to my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it. He hasn't been cheerful since the accident."[321] "The party is not improving in condition, especially Evans, who is becoming rather dull and incapable." "Evans' nose is almost as bad as his fingers. He is a good deal crocked up."[322]

Bowers' diary, quoted above, finished on January 25, on which day they picked up their One and a Half Degree Depôt. "I shall sleep much better with our provision bag full again," wrote Scott that night. "Bowers got another rating sight to-night--it was wonderful how he managed to observe in such a horribly cold wind." They marched 16 miles the next day, but got off the outward track, which was crooked. On January 27 they did 14 miles on a "very bad surface of deep-cut sastrugi all day, until late in the afternoon when we began to get out of them."[323] "By Jove, this is tremendous labour," said Scott.

They were getting into the better surfaces again: 15.7 miles for January 28, "a fine day and a good march on very decent surface."[324] On January 29 Bowers wrote his last full day's diary: "Our record march to-day. With a good breeze and improving surface we were soon in among the double tracks where the supporting party left us. Then we picked up the memorable camp where I transferred to the advance party. How glad I was to change over. The camp was much drifted up and immense sastrugi were everywhere, S.S.E. in direction and S.E. We did 10.4 miles before lunch. I was breaking back on sledge and controlling; it was beastly cold and my hands were perished. In the afternoon I put on my dogskin mitts and was far more comfortable. A stiff breeze with drift continues: temperature -25°. Thank God our days of having to face it are over. We completed 19.5 miles [22 statute] this evening, and so are only 29 miles from our precious [Three Degree] Depôt. It will be bad luck indeed if we do not get there in a march and a half anyhow."[325]

Nineteen miles again on January 30, but during the previous day's march Wilson had strained a tendon in his leg. "I got a nasty bruise on the Tib[ialis] ant[icus] which gave me great pain all the afternoon." "My left leg exceedingly painful all day, so I gave Birdie my ski and hobbled alongside the sledge on foot. The whole of the Tibialis anticus is swollen and tight, and full of teno synovitis, and the skin red and oedematous over the shin. But we made a very fine march with the help of a brisk breeze." January 31: "Again walking by the sledge with swollen leg but not nearly so painful. We had 5.8 miles to go to reach our Three Degree Depôt. Picked this up with a week's provision and a line from Evans, and then for lunch an extra biscuit each, making 4 for lunch and 1/10 whack of butter extra as well. Afternoon we passed cairn where Birdie's ski had been left. These we picked up and came on till 7.30 P.M. when the wind which had been very light all day dropped, and with temp. -20° it felt delightfully warm and sunny and clear. We have 1/10 extra pemmican in the hoosh now also. My leg pretty swollen again to-night."[326] They travelled 13.5 miles that day, and 15.7 on the next. "My leg much more comfortable, gave me no pain, and I was able to pull all day, holding on to the sledge. Still some oedema. We came down a hundred feet or so to-day on a fairly steep gradient."[327]

They were now approaching the crevassed surfaces and the ice-falls which mark the entrance to the Beardmore Glacier, and February 2 was marked by another accident, this time to Scott. "On a very slippery surface I came an awful 'purler' on my shoulder. It is horribly sore to-night and another sick person added to our tent--three out of five injured, and the most troublesome surfaces to come. We shall be lucky if we get through without serious injury. Wilson's leg is better, but might easily get bad again, and Evans' fingers.... We have managed to get off 17 miles. The extra food is certainly helping us, but we are getting pretty hungry. The weather is already a trifle warmer, the altitude lower and only 80 miles or so to Mount Darwin. It is time we were off the summit.--Pray God another four days will see us pretty well clear of it. Our bags are getting very wet and we ought to have more sleep."[328]

They had been spending some time in finding the old tracks. But they had a good landfall for the depôt at the top of the glacier and on February 3 they decided to push on due north, and to worry no more for the present about tracks and cairns. They did 16 miles that day. Wilson's diary runs: "Sunny and breezy again. Came down a series of slopes, and finished the day by going up one. Enormous deep-cut sastrugi and drifts and shiny egg-shell surface. Wind all S.S.E.ly. To-day at about 11 P.M. we got our first sight again of mountain peaks on our eastern horizon.... We crossed the outmost line of crevassed ridge top to-day, the first on our return.

"February 4. 18 miles. Clear cloudless blue sky, surface drift. During forenoon we came down gradual descent including 2 or 3 irregular terrace slopes, on crest of one of which were a good many crevasses. Southernmost were just big enough for Scott and Evans to fall in to their waists, and very deceptively covered up. They ran east and west. Those nearer the crest were the ordinary broad street-like crevasses, well lidded. In the afternoon we again came to a crest, before descending, with street crevasses, and one we crossed had a huge hole where the lid had fallen in, big enough for a horse and cart to go down. We have a great number of mountain tops on our right and south of our beam as we go due north now. We are now camped just below a great crevassed mound, on a mountain top evidently."

"February 5. 18.2 miles. We had a difficult day, getting in amongst a frightful chaos of broad chasm-like crevasses. We kept too far east and had to wind in and out amongst them and cross multitudes of bridges. We then bore west a bit and got on better all the afternoon and got round a good deal of the upper disturbances of the falls here."

[Scott wrote: "We are camped in a very disturbed region, but the wind has fallen very light here, and our camp is comfortable for the first time for many weeks."[329]]

"February 6. 15 miles. We again had a forenoon of trying to cut corners. Got in amongst great chasms running E. and W. and had to come out again. We then again kept west and downhill over tremendous sastrugi, with a slight breeze, very cold. In afternoon continued bearing more and more towards Mount Darwin: we got round one of the main lines of ice-fall and looked back up to it.... Very cold march: many crevasses: I walking by the sledge on foot found a good many: the others all on ski."

"February 7. 15.5 miles. Clear day again and we made a tedious march in the forenoon along a flat or two, and down a long slope: and then in the afternoon we had a very fresh breeze, and very fast run down long slopes covered with big sastrugi. It was a strenuous job steering and checking behind by the sledge. We reached the Upper Glacier Depôt by 7.30 P.M. and found everything right."[330]

This was the end of the plateau: the beginning of the glacier. Their hard time should be over so far as the weather was concerned. Wilson notes how fine the land looked as they approached it: "The colour of the Dominion Range rock is in the main all brown madder or dark reddish chocolate, but there are numerous bands of yellow rock scattered amongst it. I think it is composed of dolerite and sandstone as on the W. side."[331]

The condition of the party was of course giving anxiety: how much it is impossible to say. A good deal was to be hoped from the warm weather ahead. Scott and Bowers were probably the fittest men. Scott's shoulder soon mended and "Bowers is splendid, full of energy and bustle all the time."[332] Wilson was feeling the cold more than either of them now. His leg was not yet well enough to wear ski. Oates had suffered from a cold foot for some time. Evans, however, was the only man whom Scott seems to have been worried about. "His cuts and wounds suppurate, his nose looks very bad, and altogether he shows considerable signs of being played out." ... "Well, we have come through our seven weeks' ice-cap journey and most of us are fit, but I think another week might have had a very bad effect on P.O. Evans, who is going steadily downhill."[333] They had all been having extra food which had helped them much, though they complained of hunger and want of sleep. Directly they got into the warmer weather on the glacier their food satisfied them, "but we must march to keep on the full ration, and we want rest, yet we shall pull through all right, D.V. We are by no means worn out."[334]

There are no germs in the Antarctic, save for a few isolated specimens which almost certainly come down from civilization in the upper air currents. You can sleep all night in a wet bag and clothing, and sledge all day in a mail of ice, and you will not catch a cold nor get any aches. You can get deficiency diseases, like scurvy, for inland this is a deficiency country, without vitamines. You can also get poisoned if you allow your food to remain thawed out too long, and if you do not cover the provisions in a depôt with enough snow the sun will get at them, even though the air temperature is far below freezing. But it is not easy to become diseased.

On the other hand, once something does go wrong it is the deuce and all to get it right: especially cuts. And the isolation of the polar traveller may place him in most difficult circumstances. There are no ambulances and hospitals, and a man on a sledge is a very serious weight. Practically any man who undertakes big polar journeys must face the possibility of having to commit suicide to save his companions, and the difficulty of this must not be overrated, for it is in some ways more desirable to die than to live if things are bad enough: we got to that stage on the Winter Journey. I remember discussing this question with Bowers, who had a scheme of doing himself in with a pick-axe if necessity arose, though how he could have accomplished it I don't know: or, as he said, there might be a crevasse and at any rate there was the medical case. I was horrified at the time: I had never faced the thing out with myself like that.

They left the Upper Glacier Depôt under Mount Darwin on February 8. This day they collected the most important of those geological specimens to which, at Wilson's special request, they clung to the end, and which were mostly collected by him. Mount Darwin and Buckley Island, which are really the tops of high mountains, stick out of the ice at the top of the glacier, and the course ran near to both of them, but not actually up against them. Shackleton found coal on Buckley Island, and it was clear that the place was of great geological importance, for it was one of the only places in the Antarctic where fossils could be found, so far as we knew. The ice-falls stretched away as far as you could see towards the mountains which bound the glacier on either side, and as you looked upwards towards Buckley Island they were like a long breaking wave. One of the great difficulties about the Beardmore was that you saw the ice-falls as you went up, and avoided them, but coming down you knew nothing of their whereabouts until you fell into the middle of pressure and crevasses, and then it was almost impossible to say whether you should go right or left to get out.

Evans was unable to pull this day, and was detached from the sledge, but this was not necessarily a very serious sign: Shackleton on his return journey was not able to pull at this place. Wilson wrote as follows:

"February 8, Mt. Buckley Cliffs. A very busy day. We had a very cold forenoon march, blowing like blazes from the S. Birdie detached and went on ski to Mt. Darwin and collected some dolerite, the only rock he could see on the Nunatak, which was nearest. We got into a sort of crusted surface where the snow broke through nearly to our knees and the sledge-runner also. I thought at first we were all on a thinly bridged crevasse. We then came on east a bit, and gradually got worse and worse going over an ice-fall, having great trouble to prevent sledge taking charge, but eventually got down and then made N.W. or N. into the land, and camped right by the moraine under the great sandstone cliffs of Mt. Buckley, out of the wind and quite warm again: it was a wonderful change. After lunch we all geologized on till supper, and I was very late turning in, examining the moraine after supper. Socks, all strewn over the rocks, dried splendidly. Magnificent Beacon sandstone cliffs. Masses of limestone in the moraine, and dolerite crags in various places. Coal seams at all heights in the sandstone cliffs, and lumps of weathered coal with fossil vegetable. Had a regular field-day and got some splendid things in the short time."

"February 9, Moraine visit. We made our way along down the moraine, and at the end of Mt. Buckley [I] unhitched and had half an hour over the rocks and again got some good things written up in sketch-book. We then left the moraine and made a very good march on rough blue ice all day with very small and scarce scraps of névé, on one of which we camped for the night with a rather overcast foggy sky, which cleared to bright sun in the night. We are all thoroughly enjoying temps. of +10° or thereabouts now, with no wind instead of the summit winds which are incessant with temp. -20°."

"February 10. ?16 m. We made a very good forenoon march from 10 to 2.45 towards the Cloudmaker. Weather overcast gradually obscured everything in snowfall fog, starting with crystals of large size.... We had to camp after 2½ hours' afternoon march as it got too thick to see anything and we were going downhill on blue ice...."[335]

The next day in bad lights and on a bad surface they fell into the same pressure which both the other returning parties experienced. Like them they were in the middle of it before they realized. "Then came the fatal decision to steer east. We went on for 6 hours, hoping to do a good distance, which I suppose we did, but for the last hour or two we pressed on into a regular trap. Getting on to a good surface we did not reduce our lunch meal, and thought all going well, but half an hour after lunch we got into the worst ice mess I have ever been in. For three hours we plunged on on ski, first thinking we were too much to the right, then too much to the left; meanwhile the disturbance got worse and my spirits received a very rude shock. There were times when it seemed almost impossible to find a way out of the awful turmoil in which we found ourselves.... The turmoil changed in character, irregular crevassed surface giving way to huge chasms, closely packed and most difficult to cross. It was very heavy work, but we had grown desperate. We won through at 10 P.M., and I write after 12 hours on the march...."[336]

Wilson continues the story:

"February 12. We had a good night just outside the ice-falls and disturbances, and a small breakfast of tea, thin hoosh and biscuit, and began the forenoon by a decent bit of travelling on rubbly blue ice in crampons: then plunged into an ice-fall and wandered about in it for hours and hours."

"February 13. We had one biscuit and some tea after a night's sleep on very hard and irregular blue ice amongst the ice-fall crevasses. No snow on the tent, only ski, etc. Got away at 10 A.M. and by 2 P.M. found the depôt, having had a good march over very hard rough blue ice. Only ½ hour in the disturbance of yesterday. The weather was very thick, snowing and overcast, could only just see the points of bearing for depôt. However, we got there, tired and hungry, and camped and had hoosh and tea and 3 biscuits each. Then away again with our three and a half days' food from this red flag depôt and off down by the Cloudmaker moraine. We travelled about 4 hours on hard blue ice, and I was allowed to geologize the last hour down the two outer lines of boulders. The outer one all dolerite and quartz rocks, the inner all dolerite and sandstone.... We camped on the inner line of boulders, weather clearing all the afternoon."[337]

Meanwhile both Wilson and Bowers had been badly snow-blind, though Wilson does not mention it in his diary; and this night Scott says Evans had no power to assist with camping work. A good march followed on February 14, but "there is no getting away from the fact that we are not pulling strong. Probably none of us: Wilson's leg still troubles him and he doesn't like to trust himself on ski; but the worst case is Evans, who is giving us serious anxiety. This morning he suddenly disclosed a huge blister on his foot. It delayed us on the march, when he had to have his crampon readjusted. Sometimes I feel he is going from bad to worse, but I trust he will pick up again when we come to steady work on ski like this afternoon. He is hungry and so is Wilson. We can't risk opening out our food again, and as cook at present I am serving something under full allowance. We are inclined to get slack and slow with our camping arrangement, and small delays increase. I have talked of the matter to-night and hope for improvement. We cannot do distance without the hours."[338]

There was something wrong with this party: more wrong, I mean, than was justified by the tremendous journey they had already experienced. Except for the blizzard at the bottom of the Beardmore and the surfaces near the Pole it had been little worse than they expected. Evans, however, who was considered by Scott to be the strongest man of the party, had already collapsed, and it is admitted that the rest of the party was becoming far from strong. There seems to be an unknown factor here somewhere.

Wilson's diary continues: "February 15. 13¾ m. geog. I got on ski again first time since damaging my leg and was on them all day for 9 hours. It was a bit painful and swelled by the evening, and every night I put on snow poultice. We are not yet abreast of Mt. Kyffin, and much discussion how far we are from the Lower Glacier Depôt, probably 18 to 20 m.: and we have to reduce food again, only one biscuit to-night with a thin hoosh of pemmican. To-morrow we have to make one day's food which remains last over the two. The weather became heavily overcast during the afternoon and then began to snow, and though we got in our 4 hours' march it was with difficulty, and we only made a bit over 5 miles. However, we are nearer the depôt to-night."

"February 16. 12½ m. geog. Got a good start in fair weather after one biscuit and a thin breakfast, and made 7½ m. in the forenoon. Again the weather became overcast and we lunched almost at our old bearing on Kyffin of lunch Dec. 15. All the afternoon the weather became thick and thicker and after 3¼ hours Evans collapsed, sick and giddy, and unable to walk even by the sledge on ski, so we camped. Can see no land at all anywhere, but we must be getting pretty near the Pillar Rock. Evans' collapse has much to do with the fact that he has never been sick in his life and is now helpless with his hands frost-bitten. We had thin meals for lunch and supper."

"February 17. The weather cleared and we got away for a clear run to the depôt and had gone a good part of the way when Evans found his ski shoes coming off. He was allowed to readjust and continue to pull, but it happened again, and then again, so he was told to unhitch, get them right, and follow on and catch us up. He lagged far behind till lunch, and when we camped we had lunch, and then went back for him as he had not come up. He had fallen and had his hands frost-bitten, and we then returned for the sledge, and brought it, and fetched him in on it as he was rapidly losing the use of his legs. He was comatose when we got him into the tent, and he died without recovering consciousness that night about 10 P.M. We had a short rest for an hour or two in our bags that night, then had a meal and came on through the pressure ridges about 4 miles farther down and reached our Lower Glacier Depôt. Here we camped at last, had a good meal and slept a good night's rest which we badly needed. Our depôt was all right."[339] "A very terrible day.... On discussing the symptoms we think he began to get weaker just before we reached the Pole, and that his downward path was accelerated first by the shock of his frost-bitten fingers, and later by falls during rough travelling on the glacier, further by his loss of all confidence in himself. Wilson thinks it certain he must have injured his brain by a fall. It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands at such a distance from home."[340]

FOOTNOTES:

[294] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 536.Return to passage

[295] It is to be noticed that every return party, including the Polar Party, was supposed by their companions to be going to have a very much easier time than, as a matter of fact, they had.--A. C.-G.Return to passage

[296] Bowers.Return to passage

[297] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 530-534.Return to passage

[298] Simpson, B.A.E., 1910-1913, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 291.Return to passage

[299] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 540.Return to passage

[300] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 541-542.Return to passage

[301] Simpson, B.A.E., 1910-1913, "Meteorology," vol. i. pp. 144-146.Return to passage

[302] Simpson, B.A.E., 1910-1913, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 41.Return to passage

[303] See pp. xxxviii-xxxix.Return to passage

[304] See p. xivii.Return to passage

[305] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 543.Return to passage

[306] Wilson.Return to passage

[307] Evidently meaning some miles from crest to crest.Return to passage

[308] Bowers, Polar Meteorological Log.Return to passage

[309] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 543-544.Return to passage

[310] Simpson, B.A.E., 1910-1913, "Meteorology," vol. i. p. 40.Return to passage

[311] Bowers.Return to passage

[312] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 550-551.Return to passage

[313] Bowers.Return to passage

[314] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 552.Return to passage

[315] Bowers.Return to passage

[316] Wilson.Return to passage

[317] Wilson.Return to passage

[318] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 541.Return to passage

[319] Ibid. p. 549.Return to passage

[320] Wilson.Return to passage

[321] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 557.Return to passage

[322] Ibid. pp. 560, 561.Return to passage

[323] Wilson.Return to passage

[324] Ibid.Return to passage

[325] Bowers.Return to passage

[326] Wilson.Return to passage

[327] Ibid.Return to passage

[328] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 559.Return to passage

[329] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 561.Return to passage

[330] Wilson.Return to passage

[331] Ibid.Return to passage

[332] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 561.Return to passage

[333] Ibid. pp. 562, 563.Return to passage

[334] Ibid. p. 566.Return to passage

[335] Wilson.Return to passage

[336] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 567.Return to passage

[337] Wilson.Return to passage

[338] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 570-571.Return to passage

[339] Wilson.Return to passage

[340] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. p. 573.Return to passage

XVIII. THE POLAR JOURNEY (continued)

This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, ... This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, ... This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land. SHAKESPEARE.

VI. FARTHEST SOUTH

Stevenson has written of a traveller whose wife slumbered by his side what time his spirit re-adventured forth in memory of days gone by. He was quite happy about it, and I suppose his travels had been peaceful, for days and nights such as these men spent coming down the Beardmore will give you nightmare after nightmare, and wake you shrieking--years after.

Of course they were shaken and weakened. But the conditions they had faced, and the time they had been out, do not in my opinion account entirely for their weakness nor for Evans' collapse, which may have had something to do with the fact that he was the biggest, heaviest and most muscular man in the party. I do not believe that this is a life for such men, who are expected to pull their weight and to support and drive a larger machine than their companions, and at the same time to eat no extra food. If, as seems likely, the ration these men were eating was not enough to support the work they were doing, then it is clear that the heaviest man will feel the deficiency sooner and more severely than others who are smaller than he. Evans must have had a most terrible time: I think it is clear from the diaries that he had suffered very greatly without complaint. At home he would have been nursed in bed: here he must march (he was pulling the day he died) until he was crawling on his frost-bitten hands and knees in the snow--horrible: most horrible perhaps for those who found him so, and sat in the tent and watched him die. I am told that simple concussion does not kill as suddenly as this: probably some clot had moved in his brain.

For one reason and another they took very nearly as long to come down the glacier with a featherweight sledge as we had taken to go up it with full loads. Seven days' food were allowed from the Upper to the Lower Glacier Depôt. Bowers told me that he thought this was running it fine. But the two supporting parties got through all right, though they both tumbled into the horrible pressure above the Cloudmaker. The Last Return Party took 7½ days: the Polar Party 10 days: the latter had been 25½ days longer on the plateau than the former. Owing to their slow progress down the glacier the Polar Party went on short rations for the first and last time until they camped on March 19: with the exception of these days they had either their full, or more than their full ration until that date.

Until they reached the Barrier on their return journey the weather can be described neither as abnormal nor as unexpected. There were 300 statute miles (260 geo.) to be covered to One Ton Depôt, and 150 statute miles (130 geo.) more from One Ton to Hut Point. They had just picked up one week's food for five men: between the Beardmore and One Ton were three more depôts each with one week's food for five men. They were four men: their way was across the main body of the Barrier out of sight of land, and away from any immediate influence of the comparatively warm sea ahead of them. Nothing was known of the weather conditions in the middle of the Barrier at this time of year, and no one suspected that March conditions there were very cold. Shackleton turned homeward on January 10: reached his Bluff Depôt on February 23, and Hut Point on February 28.

Wilson's diary continues:

"February 18. We had only five hours' sleep. We had butter and biscuit and tea when we woke at 2 P.M., then came over the Gap entrance to the pony-slaughter camp, visiting a rock moraine of Mt. Hope on the way."

"February 19. Late in getting away after making up new 10-foot sledge and digging out pony meat. We made 5½ m. on a very heavy surface indeed."[341]

This bad surface is the feature of their first homeward marches on the Barrier. From now onwards they complain always of the terrible surfaces, but a certain amount of the heavy pulling must be ascribed to their own weakness. In the low temperatures which occurred later bad surfaces were to be expected: but now the temperatures were not really low, about zero to -17°: fine clear days for the most part and, a thing to be noticed, little wind. They wanted wind, which would probably be behind them from the south. "Oh! for a little wind," Scott writes. "E. Evans evidently had plenty." He was already very anxious. "If this goes on we shall have a bad time, but I sincerely trust it is only the result of this windless area close to the coast and that, as we are making steadily outwards, we shall shortly escape it. It is perhaps premature [Feb. 19] to be anxious about covering distance. In all other respects things are improving. We have our sleeping-bags spread on the sledge and they are drying, but, above all, we have our full measure of food again. To-night we had a sort of stew fry of pemmican and horseflesh, and voted it the best hoosh we had ever had on a sledge journey. The absence of poor Evans is a help to the commissariat, but if he had been here in a fit state we might have got along faster. I wonder what is in store for us, with some little alarm at the lateness of the season." And on February 20, when they made 7 miles, "At present our sledge and ski leave deeply ploughed tracks which can be seen winding for miles behind. It is distressing, but as usual trials are forgotten when we camp, and good food is our lot. Pray God we get better travelling as we are not so fit as we were, and the season is advancing apace." And on February 21, "We never won a march of 8½ miles with greater difficulty, but we can't go on like this."[342]

A breeze suddenly came away from S.S.E., force 4 to 6 at 11 A.M. on February 22, and they hoisted the sail on the sledge they had just picked up. They immediately lost the tracks they were following, and failed to find the cairns and camp remains which they should have picked up if they had been on the right course, which was difficult here owing to the thick weather we had on the outward march. Bowers was sure they were too near the land and they steered out, but still failed to pick up the line on which their depôts and their lives depended. Scott was convinced they were outside, not inside the line. The next morning Bowers took a round of angles, and they came to the conclusion, on slender evidence, that they were still too near the land. They had an unhappy march still off the tracks, "but just as we decided to lunch, Bowers' wonderful sharp eyes detected an old double lunch cairn, the theodolite telescope confirmed it, and our spirits rose accordingly."[343] Then Wilson had another "bad attack of snow-glare: could hardly keep a chink of eye open in goggles to see the course. Fat pony hoosh."[344] This day they reached the Lower Barrier Depôt.

They were in evil case, but they would have been all right, these men, if the cold had not come down upon them, a bolt quite literally from the blue of a clear sky: unexpected, unforetold and fatal. The cold itself was not so tremendous until you realize that they had been out four months, that they had fought their way up the biggest glacier in the world in feet of soft snow, that they had spent seven weeks under plateau conditions of rarefied air, big winds and low temperatures, and they had watched one of their companions die--not in a bed, in a hospital or ambulance, nor suddenly, but slowly, night by night and day by day, with his hands frost-bitten and his brain going, until they must have wondered, each man in his heart, whether in such case a human being could be left to die, that four men might live. He died a natural death and they went out on to the Barrier.

Given such conditions as were expected, and the conditions for which preparation had been made, they would have come home alive and well. Some men say the weather was abnormal: there is some evidence that it was. The fact remains that the temperature dropped into the minus thirties by day and the minus forties by night. The fact also remains that there was a great lack of southerly winds, and in consequence the air near the surface was not being mixed: excessive radiation took place, and a layer of cold air formed near the ground. Crystals also formed on the surface of the snow and the wind was not enough to sweep them away. As the temperature dropped so the surface for the runners of the sledges became worse, as I explained elsewhere.[345] They were pulling as it were through sand.

In the face of the difficulties which beset them their marches were magnificent: 11½ miles on February 25 and again on the following day: 12.2 miles on February 27, and 11½ miles again on February 28 and 29. If they could have kept this up they would have come through without a doubt. But I think it was about now that they suspected, and then were sure, that they could not pull through. Scott's diary, written at lunch, March 2, is as follows:

"Misfortunes rarely come singly. We marched to the [Middle Barrier] depôt fairly easily yesterday afternoon, and since that have suffered three distinct blows which have placed us in a bad position. First, we found a shortage of oil; with most rigid economy it can scarce carry us to the next depôt on this surface [71 miles away]. Second, Titus Oates disclosed his feet, the toes showing very bad indeed, evidently bitten by the late temperatures. The third blow came in the night, when the wind, which we had hailed with some joy, brought dark overcast weather. It fell below -40° in the night, and this morning it took 1½ hours to get our foot-gear on, but we got away before eight. We lost cairn and tracks together and made as steady as we could N. by W., but have seen nothing. Worse was to come--the surface is simply awful. In spite of strong wind and full sail we have only done 5½ miles. We are in a very queer street, since there is no doubt we cannot do the extra marches and feel the cold horribly."[346]

They did nearly ten miles that day, but on March 3 they had a terrible time. "God help us," wrote Scott, "we can't keep up this pulling, that is certain. Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess. Putting on foot-gear in the morning is getting slower and slower, therefore every day more dangerous."

The following extracts are taken from Scott's diary.

"March 4. Lunch. We are in a very tight place indeed, but none of us despondent yet, or at least we preserve every semblance of good cheer, but one's heart sinks as the sledge stops dead at some sastrugi behind which the surface sand lies thickly heaped. For the moment the temperature is in the -20°--an improvement which makes us much more comfortable, but a colder snap is bound to come again soon. I fear that Oates at least will weather such an event very poorly. Providence to our aid! We can expect little from man now except the possibility of extra food at the next depôt. It will be real bad if we get there and find the same shortage of oil. Shall we get there? Such a short distance it would have appeared to us on the summit! I don't know what I should do if Wilson and Bowers weren't so determinedly cheerful over things."

"Monday, March 5. Lunch. Regret to say going from bad to worse. We got a slant of wind yesterday afternoon, and going on 5 hours we converted our wretched morning run of 3½ miles into something over 9. We went to bed on a cup of cocoa and pemmican solid with the chill off.... The result is telling on all, but mainly on Oates, whose feet are in a wretched condition. One swelled up tremendously last night and he is very lame this morning. We started march on tea and pemmican as last night--we pretend to prefer the pemmican this way. Marched for 5 hours this morning over a slightly better surface covered with high moundy sastrugi. Sledge capsized twice; we pulled on foot, covering about 5½ miles. We are two pony marches and 4 miles about from our depôt. Our fuel dreadfully low and the poor Soldier nearly done. It is pathetic enough because we can do nothing for him; more hot food might do a little, but only a little, I fear. We none of us expected these terribly low temperatures, and of the rest of us, Wilson is feeling them most; mainly, I fear, from his self-sacrificing devotion in doctoring Oates' feet. We cannot help each other, each has enough to do to take care of himself. We get cold on the march when the trudging is heavy, and the wind pierces our worn garments. The others, all of them, are unendingly cheerful when in the tent. We mean to see the game through with a proper spirit, but it's tough work to be pulling harder than we ever pulled in our lives for long hours, and to feel that the progress is so slow. One can only say 'God help us!' and plod on our weary way, cold and very miserable, though outwardly cheerful. We talk of all sorts of subjects in the tent, not much of food now, since we decided to take the risk of running a full ration. We simply couldn't go hungry at this time."

"Tuesday, March 6. Lunch. We did a little better with help of wind yesterday afternoon, finishing 9½ miles for the day, and 27 miles from depôt. But this morning things have been awful. It was warm in the night and for the first time during the journey I overslept myself by more than an hour; then we were slow with foot-gear; then, pulling with all our might (for our lives) we could scarcely advance at rate of a mile an hour; then it grew thick and three times we had to get out of harness to search for tracks. The result is something less than 3½ miles for the forenoon. The sun is shining now and the wind gone. Poor Oates is unable to pull, sits on the sledge when we are track-searching--he is wonderfully plucky, as his feet must be giving him great pain. He makes no complaint, but his spirits only come up in spurts now, and he grows more silent in the tent. We are making a spirit lamp to try and replace the primus when our oil is exhausted..."

"Wednesday, March 7. A little worse, I fear. One of Oates' feet very bad this morning; he is wonderfully brave. We still talk of what we will do together at home.

"We only made 6½ miles yesterday. This morning in 4½ hours we did just over 4 miles. We are 16 from our depôt. If we only find the correct proportion of food there and this surface continues, we may get to the next depôt [Mt. Hooper, 72 miles farther] but not to One Ton Camp. We hope against hope that the dogs have been to Mt. Hooper; then we might pull through. If there is a shortage of oil again we can have little hope. One feels that for poor Oates the crisis is near, but none of us are improving, though we are wonderfully fit considering the really excessive work we are doing. We are only kept going by good food. No wind this morning till a chill northerly air came ahead. Sun bright and cairns showing up well. I should like to keep the track to the end."

"Thursday, March 8. Lunch. Worse and worse in morning; poor Oates' left foot can never last out, and time over foot-gear something awful. Have to wait in night foot-gear for nearly an hour before I start changing, and then am generally first to be ready. Wilson's feet giving trouble now, but this mainly because he gives so much help to others. We did 4½ miles this morning and are now 8½ miles from the depôt--a ridiculously small distance to feel in difficulties, yet on this surface we know we cannot equal half our old marches, and that for that effort we expend nearly double the energy. The great question is: What shall we find at the depôt? If the dogs have visited it we may get along a good distance, but if there is another short allowance of fuel, God help us indeed. We are in a very bad way, I fear, in any case."

"Saturday, March 10. Things steadily downhill. Oates' foot worse. He has rare pluck and must know that he can never get through. He asked Wilson if he had a chance this morning, and of course Bill had to say he didn't know. In point of fact he has none. Apart from him, if he went under now, I doubt whether we could get through. With great care we might have a dog's chance, but no more. The weather conditions are awful, and our gear gets steadily more icy and difficult to manage....

"Yesterday we marched up the depôt, Mt. Hooper. Cold comfort. Shortage on our allowance all round. I don't know that any one is to blame. The dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed. Meares had a bad trip home I suppose.

"This morning it was calm when we breakfasted, but the wind came from the W.N.W. as we broke camp. It rapidly grew in strength. After travelling for half an hour I saw that none of us could go on facing such conditions. We were forced to camp and are spending the rest of the day in a comfortless blizzard camp, wind quite foul."

"Sunday, March 11. Titus Oates is very near the end, one feels. What we or he will do, God only knows. We discussed the matter after breakfast; he is a brave fine fellow and understands the situation, but he practically asked for advice. Nothing could be said but to urge him to march as long as he could. One satisfactory result to the discussion: I practically ordered Wilson to hand over the means of ending our troubles to us, so that any one of us may know how to do so. Wilson had no choice between doing so and our ransacking the medicine case. We have 30 opium tabloids apiece and he is left with a tube of morphine. So far the tragical side of our story.

"The sky completely overcast when we started this morning. We could see nothing, lost the tracks, and doubtless have been swaying a good deal since--3.1 miles for the forenoon--terribly heavy dragging--expected it. Know that 6 miles is about the limit of our endurance now, if we get no help from wind or surfaces. We have 7 days' food and should be about 55 miles from One Ton Camp to-night, 6x7 = 42, leaving us 13 miles short of our distance, even if things get no worse. Meanwhile the season rapidly advances."

"Monday, March 12. We did 6.9 miles yesterday, under our necessary average. Things are left much the same, Oates not pulling much, and now with hands as well as feet pretty well useless. We did 4 miles this morning in 4 hours 20 min.--we may hope for 3 this afternoon 7 x 6 = 42. We shall be 47 miles from the depôt. I doubt if we can possibly do it. The surface remains awful, the cold intense, and our physical condition running down. God help us! Not a breath of favourable wind for more than a week, and apparently liable to head winds at any moment."

"Wednesday, March 14. No doubt about the going downhill, but everything going wrong for us. Yesterday we woke to a strong northerly wind with temp. -37°. Couldn't face it, so remained in camp till 2, then did 5¼ miles. Wanted to march later, but party feeling the cold badly as the breeze (N.) never took off entirely, and as the sun sank the temp. fell. Long time getting supper in dark.

"This morning started with southerly breeze, set sail and passed another cairn at good speed; half-way, however, the wind shifted to W. by S. or W.S.W., blew through our wind-clothes and into our mitts. Poor Wilson horribly cold, could [not] get off ski for some time. Bowers and I practically made camp, and when we got into the tent at last we were all deadly cold. Then temp. now mid-day down -43° and the wind strong. We must go on, but now the making of every camp must be more difficult and dangerous. It must be near the end, but a pretty merciful end. Poor Oates got it again in the foot. I shudder to think what it will be like to-morrow. It is only with greatest pains rest of us keep off frost-bites. No idea there could be temperatures like this at this time of year with such winds. Truly awful outside the tent. Must fight it out to the last biscuit, but can't reduce rations."

"Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping-bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

"Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates' last thoughts were of his mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not--would not--give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning--yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

"I take this opportunity of saying that we have stuck to our sick companions to the last. In case of Edgar Evans, when absolutely out of food and he lay insensible, the safety of the remainder seemed to demand his abandonment, but Providence mercifully removed him at this critical moment. He died a natural death, and we did not leave him till two hours after his death. We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.

"I can only write at lunch and then only occasionally. The cold is intense, -40° at mid-day. My companions are unendingly cheerful, but we are all on the verge of serious frost-bites, and though we constantly talk of fetching through I don't think any one of us believes it in his heart.

"We are cold on the march now, and at all times except meals. Yesterday we had to lay up for a blizzard and to-day we move dreadfully slowly. We are at No. 14 Pony Camp, only two pony marches from One Ton Depôt. We leave here our theodolite, a camera, and Oates' sleeping-bags. Diaries, etc., and geological specimens carried at Wilson's special request, will be found with us or on our sledge."

"Sunday, March 18. To-day, lunch, we are 21 miles from the depôt. Ill fortune presses, but better may come. We have had more wind and drift from ahead yesterday; had to stop marching; wind N.W., force 4, temp. -35°. No human being could face it, and we are worn out nearly.

"My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes--two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet.... Bowers takes first place in condition, but there is not much to choose after all. The others are still confident of getting through--or pretend to be--I don't know! We have the last half fill of oil in our primus and a very small quantity of spirit--this alone between us and thirst. The wind is fair for the moment, and that is perhaps a fact to help. The mileage would have seemed ridiculously small on our outward journey."

"Monday, March 19. Lunch. We camped with difficulty last night and were dreadfully cold till after our supper of cold pemmican and biscuit and a half pannikin of cocoa cooked over the spirit. Then, contrary to expectation, we got warm and all slept well. To-day we started in the usual dragging manner. Sledge dreadfully heavy. We are 15½ miles from the depôt and ought to get there in three days. What progress! We have two days' food but barely a day's fuel. All our feet are getting bad--Wilson's best, my right foot worse, left all right. There is no chance to nurse one's feet till we can get hot food into us. Amputation is the least I can hope for now, but will the trouble spread? That is the serious question. The weather doesn't give us a chance--the wind from N. to N.W. and -40° temp, to-day."

"Wednesday, March 21. Got within 11 miles of depôt Monday night; had to lay up all yesterday in severe blizzard. To-day forlorn hope, Wilson and Bowers going to depôt for fuel."

"22 and 23. Blizzard bad as ever--Wilson and Bowers unable to start--to-morrow last chance--no fuel and only one or two of food left--must be near the end. Have decided it shall be natural--we shall march for the depôt with or without our effects and die in our tracks."

"Thursday, March 29. Since the 21st we have had a continuous gale from W.S.W. and S.W. We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depôt 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

"It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

R. SCOTT."

Last entry. "For God's sake, look after our people."

The following extracts are from letters written by Scott:

To Mrs. E. A. Wilson

MY DEAR MRS. WILSON. If this letter reaches you, Bill and I will have gone out together. We are very near it now and I should like you to know how splendid he was at the end--everlastingly cheerful and ready to sacrifice himself for others, never a word of blame to me for leading him into this mess. He is not suffering, luckily, at least only minor discomforts.

His eyes have a comfortable blue look of hope and his mind is peaceful with the satisfaction of his faith in regarding himself as part of the great scheme of the Almighty. I can do no more to comfort you than to tell you that he died as he lived, a brave, true man--the best of comrades and staunchest of friends.

My whole heart goes out to you in pity. Yours,

R. SCOTT.

To Mrs. Bowers

MY DEAR MRS. BOWERS. I am afraid this will reach you after one of the heaviest blows of your life.

I write when we are very near the end of our journey, and I am finishing it in company with two gallant, noble gentlemen. One of these is your son. He had come to be one of my closest and soundest friends, and I appreciate his wonderful upright nature, his ability and energy. As the troubles have thickened his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter and he has remained cheerful, hopeful and indomitable to the end....

To Sir J. M. Barrie

MY DEAR BARRIE. We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot. Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write a word of farewell ... Good-bye. I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a humble pleasure which I had planned for the future on our long marches. I may not have proved a great explorer, but we have done the greatest march ever made and come very near to great success. Good-bye, my dear friend. Yours ever,

R. SCOTT.

We are in a desperate state, feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and the cheery conversation as to what we will do when we get to Hut Point.

Later. We are very near the end, but have not and will not lose our good cheer. We have four days of storm in our tent and nowhere's food or fuel. We did intend to finish ourselves when things proved like this, but we have decided to die naturally in the track.[347]

The following extracts are from letters written to other friends:

" ... I want to tell you that I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first.... After all we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there. We could have come through had we neglected the sick."

"Wilson, the best fellow that ever stepped, has sacrificed himself again and again to the sick men of the party...."

" ... Our journey has been the biggest on record, and nothing but the most exceptional hard luck at the end would have caused us to fail to return."

"What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home."

* * * * *

MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC

The causes of the disaster are not due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken.

1. The loss of pony transport in March 1911 obliged me to start later than I had intended, and obliged the limits of stuff transported to be narrowed.

2. The weather throughout the outward journey, and especially the long gale in 83° S., stopped us.

3. The soft snow in lower reaches of glacier again reduced pace.

We fought these untoward events with a will and conquered, but it cut into our provision reserve.

Every detail of our food supplies, clothing and depôts made on the interior ice-sheet and over that long stretch of 700 miles to the Pole and back, worked out to perfection. The advance party would have returned to the glacier in fine form and with surplus of food, but for the astonishing failure of the man whom we had least expected to fail. Edgar Evans was thought the strongest man of the party.

The Beardmore Glacier is not difficult in fine weather, but on our return we did not get a single completely fine day; this with a sick companion enormously increased our anxieties.

As I have said elsewhere, we got into frightfully rough ice and Edgar Evans received a concussion of the brain--he died a natural death, but left us a shaken party with the season unduly advanced.

But all the facts above enumerated were as nothing to the surprise which awaited us on the Barrier. I maintain that our arrangements for returning were quite adequate, and that no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year. On the summit in lat. 85°-86° we had -20°, -30°. On the Barrier in lat. 82°, 10,000 feet lower, we had -30° in the day, -47° at night pretty regularly, with continuous head-wind during our day marches. It is clear that these circumstances come on very suddenly, and our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause. I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through, and we should have got through in spite of the weather but for the sickening of a second companion, Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depôts for which I cannot account, and finally, but for the storm which has fallen on us within 11 miles of the depôt at which we hoped to secure our final supplies. Surely misfortune could scarcely have exceeded this last blow. We arrived within 11 miles of our old One Ton Camp with fuel for one last meal and food for two days. For four days we have been unable to leave the tent--the gale howling about us. We are weak, writing is difficult, but for my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for.

Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly provided for.--R. SCOTT.[348]

FOOTNOTES:

[341] Wilson.Return to passage

[342] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 575-576.Return to passage

[343] Ibid. p. 577.Return to passage

[344] Wilson.Return to passage

[345] See note at end of Chapter XIV.Return to passage

[346] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 582, 583.Return to passage

[347] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 584-599.Return to passage

[348] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 605-607.Return to passage

XIX. NEVER AGAIN

And now in age I bud again, After so many deaths I live and write; I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing. O my onely light, It cannot be That I am he On whom thy tempests fell all night. HERBERT.

I shall inevitably be asked for a word of mature judgment of the expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all close up to it, and when I was a subaltern of 24, not incapable of judging my elders, but too young to have found out whether my judgment was worth anything. I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business. In the broad perspective opened up by ten years' distance, I see not one journey to the Pole, but two, in startling contrast one to another. On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day's work of polar exploration. Nothing more business-like could be imagined. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice. To ignore such a contrast would be ridiculous: to write a book without accounting for it a waste of time.

First let me do full justice to Amundsen. I have not attempted to disguise how we felt towards him when, after leading us to believe that he had equipped the Fram for an Arctic journey, and sailed for the north, he suddenly made his dash for the south. Nothing makes a more unpleasant impression than a feint. But when Scott reached the Pole only to find that Amundsen had been there a month before him, his distress was not that of a schoolboy who has lost a race. I have described what it had cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had still to suffer in returning until death stopped them. Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North. The moment Scott saw the Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already known. His achievement was a mere precaution against Amundsen perishing on his way back; and that risk was no greater than his own. The Polar Journey was literally laid waste: that was the shock that staggered them. Well might Bowers be glad to see the last of Norskies' tracks as their homeward paths diverged.

All this heartsickness has passed away now; and the future explorer will not concern himself with it. He will ask, what was the secret of Amundsen's slick success? What is the moral of our troubles and losses? I will take Amundsen's success first. Undoubtedly the very remarkable qualities of the man himself had a good deal to do with it. There is a sort of sagacity that constitutes the specific genius of the explorer; and Amundsen proved his possession of this by his guess that there was terra firma in the Bay of Whales as solid as on Ross Island. Then there is the quality of big leadership which is shown by daring to take a big chance. Amundsen took a very big one indeed when he turned from the route to the Pole explored and ascertained by Scott and Shackleton and determined to find a second pass over the mountains from the Barrier to the plateau. As it happened, he succeeded, and established his route as the best way to the Pole until a better is discovered. But he might easily have failed and perished in the attempt; and the combination of reasoning and daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated. All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative whaling captain might have refused to make Scott's experiment with motor transport, ponies and man-hauling, and stuck to the dogs; and to the use of ski in running those dogs; and it was this quite commonplace choice that sent Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or dogs, and no great hardship either. He never pulled a mile from start to finish.

The very ease of the exploit makes it impossible to infer from it that Amundsen's expedition was more highly endowed in personal qualities than ours. We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition, with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more important than any other acre of the plateau. We followed in the steps of a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its forerunners: Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took on the work of two or three expeditions.

It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a division of energy. Scott wanted to reach the Pole: a dangerous and laborious exploit, but a practicable one. Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin: a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which is none the less impracticable because the three men who achieved it survived by a miracle. These two feats had to be piled one on top of the other. What with the Depôt Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and our worst year was still to come. We, the survivors, went in search of the dead when there was a possibly living party waiting in the ice somewhere for us to succour them. That turned out all right, because when we got back, we found Campbell's party self-extricated and waiting for us, alive and well. But suppose they also had perished, what would have been said of us?

The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things were done. He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how they could have been got up and down the Beardmore. He is scandalized because 30 lbs. of geological specimens were deliberately added to the weight of the sledge that was dragging the life out of the men who had to haul it; but he does not realize that it is the friction surfaces of the snow on the runners which mattered and not the dead weight, which in this case was almost negligible. Nor does he know that these same specimens dated a continent and may elucidate the whole history of plant life. He will admit that we were all very wonderful, very heroic, very beautiful and devoted: that our exploits gave a glamour to our expedition that Amundsen's cannot claim; but he has no patience with us, and declares that Amundsen was perfectly right in refusing to allow science to use up the forces of his men, or to interfere for a moment with his single business of getting to the Pole and back again. No doubt he was; but we were not out for a single business: we were out for everything we could add to the world's store of knowledge about the Antarctic.

Of course the whole business simply bristles with "ifs": If Scott had taken dogs and succeeded in getting them up the Beardmore: if we had not lost those ponies on the Depôt Journey: if the dogs had not been taken so far and the One Ton Depôt had been laid: if a pony and some extra oil had been depôted on the Barrier: if a four-man party had been taken to the Pole: if I had disobeyed my instructions and gone on from One Ton, killing dogs as necessary: or even if I had just gone on a few miles and left some food and fuel under a flag upon a cairn: if they had been first at the Pole: if it had been any other season but that.... But always the bare fact remains that Scott could not have travelled from McMurdo Sound to the Pole faster than he did except with dogs; all the king's horses and all the king's men could not have done it. Why, then, says the practical man, did we go to McMurdo Sound instead of to the Bay of Whales? Because we gained that continuity of scientific observation which is so important in this work: and because the Sound was the starting-point for continuing the exploration of the only ascertained route to the Pole, via the Beardmore Glacier.

I am afraid it was all inevitable: we were as wise as any one can be before the event. I admit that we, scrupulously economical of our pemmican, were terribly prodigal of our man-power. But we had to be: the draft, whatever it may have been on the whole, was not excessive at any given point; and anyhow we just had to use every man to take every opportunity. There is so much to do, and the opportunities for doing it are so rare. Generally speaking, I don't see how we could have done differently, but I don't want to see it done again; I don't want it to be necessary to do it again. I want to see this country tackle the job, and send enough men to do one thing at a time. They do it in Canada: why not in England too?

But we wasted our man-power in one way which could have been avoided. I have described how every emergency was met by calling for volunteers, and how the volunteers were always forthcoming. Unfortunately volunteering was relied on not only for emergencies, but for a good deal of everyday work that should have been organised as routine; and the inevitable result was that the willing horses were overworked. It was a point of honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never insisted on a regular routine.

Money was scarce: probably Scott could not have obtained the funds for the expedition if its objective had not been the Pole. There was no lack of the things which could be bought across the counter from big business houses--all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment was first-class--but one of the first and most important items, the ship, would have sent Columbus on strike, and nearly sent us to the bottom of the sea.

People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively to the resources of that time, much better than the one old tramp in which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and morning are the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration ad hoc. Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and Ramsgate.

And then the begging that is necessary to obtain even this equipment. Shackleton hanging round the doors of rich men! Scott writing begging letters for months together! Is the country not ashamed?

Modern civilized States should make up their minds to the endowment of research, which includes exploration; and as all States benefit alike by the scientific side of it there is plenty of scope for international arrangement, especially in a region where the mere grabbing of territory is meaningless, and no Foreign Office can trace the frontier between King Edward's Plateau and King Haakon's. The Antarctic continent is still mostly unexplored; but enough is known of it to put any settlement by ordinary pioneer emigration, pilgrim fathers and the like, out of the question. Ross Island is not a place for a settlement: it is a place for an elaborately equipped scientific station, with a staff in residence for a year at a time. Our stay of three years was far too much: another year would have driven the best of us mad. Of the five main journeys which fell to my lot, one, the Winter Journey, should not have been undertaken at all with our equipment; and two others, the Dog Journey and the Search Journey, had better have been done by fresh men. It is no use repeating that Englishmen will respond to every call and stick it to the death: they will (some of them); but they have to pay the price all the same; and the price in my case was an overdraft on my vital capital which I shall never quite pay off, and in the case of five bigger, stronger, more seasoned men, death. The establishment of such stations and of such a service cannot be done by individual heroes and enthusiasts cadging for cheques from rich men and grants from private scientific societies: it is a business, like the Nares Arctic expedition, for public organization.

I do not suppose that in these days of aviation the next visit to the Pole will be made by men on foot dragging sledges, or by men on sledges dragged by dogs, mules or ponies; nor will depôts be laid in that way. The pack will not, I hope, be broken through by any old coal-burning ship that can be picked up in the second-hand market. Specially built ships, and enough of them; specially engined tractors and aeroplanes; specially trained men and plenty of them, will all be needed if the work is to be done in any sort of humane and civilized fashion; and Cabinet ministers and voters alike must learn to value knowledge that is not baited by suffering and death. My own bolt is shot; I do not suppose I shall ever go south again before I go west; but if I do it will be under proper and reasonable conditions. I may not come back a hero; but I shall come back none the worse; for I repeat, the Antarctic, in moderation as to length of stay, and with such accommodation as is now easily within the means of modern civilized Powers, is not half as bad a place for public service as the worst military stations on the equator. I hope that by the time Scott comes home--for he is coming home: the Barrier is moving, and not a trace of our funeral cairn was found by Shackleton's men in 1916--the hardships that wasted his life will be only a horror of the past, and his via dolorosa a highway as practicable as Piccadilly.

And now let me come down to tin tacks. No matter how well the thing is done in future, its organizers will want to know at first all we can tell them about oil, about cold, and about food. First, as to oil.

Scott complains of a shortage of oil at several of his last depôts. There is no doubt that this shortage was due to the perishing of the leather washers of the tins which contained the paraffin oil. All these tins had been subjected to the warmth of the sun in summer and the autumn temperatures, which were unexpectedly cold. In his Voyage of the Discovery Scott wrote as follows of the tins in which they drew their oil when sledging: "Each tin had a small cork bung, which was a decided weakness; paraffin creeps in the most annoying manner, and a good deal of oil was wasted in this way, especially when the sledges were travelling over rough ground and were shaken or, as frequently happened, capsized. It was impossible to make these bungs quite tight, however closely they were jammed down, so that in spite of a trifling extra weight a much better fitting would have been a metallic screwed bung. To find on opening a fresh tin of oil that it was only three-parts full was very distressing, and of course meant that the cooker had to be used with still greater care."[349] Amundsen wrote of his paraffin: "We kept it in the usual cans but they proved too weak; not that we lost any paraffin, but Bjaaland had to be constantly soldering to keep them tight."[350]

Our own tins were furnished with the metallic screwed stoppers which Scott recommended. There was no trouble reported[351] until we came up to One Ton Camp when on the Search Journey. Here was the depôt of food and oil which I had laid in the previous autumn for the Polar Party, stowed in a canvas 'tank' which was buried beneath seven feet of snow; the oil was placed on the top of the snow, in order that the red tins might prove an additional mark for the depôt. When we dug out the tank the food inside was almost uneatable owing to the quantity of paraffin which had found its way down through seven feet of snow during the winter and spring.

We then found the Polar Party and learned of the shortage of oil. After our return to Cape Evans some one was digging about the camp and came across a wooden case containing eight one-gallon tins of paraffin. These had been placed there in September 1911, to be landed at Cape Crozier by the Terra Nova when she came down. The ship could not take them: they were snowed up during the winter, lost and forgotten, until dug up fifteen months afterwards. Three tins were full, three empty, one a third full and one two-thirds full.

There can be no doubt that the oil, which was specially volatile, tended to vaporize and escape through the stoppers, and that this process was accelerated by the perishing, and I suggest also the hardening and shrinking, of the leather washers. Another expedition will have to be very careful on this point: they might reduce the risk by burying the oil.

The second point about which something must be said is the unexpected cold met by Scott on the Barrier, which was the immediate cause of the disaster. "No one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of the year.... It is clear that these circumstances come on very suddenly, and our wreck is certainly due to this sudden advent of severe weather, which does not seem to have any satisfactory cause."[352]

They came down the glacier in plus temperatures: nor was there anything abnormal for more than a week after they got on to the Barrier. Then there came a big drop to a -37° minimum on the night of February 26. It is significant that the sun began to dip below the southern horizon at midnight about this time. "There is no doubt the middle of the Barrier is a pretty awful locality," wrote Scott.

Simpson, in his meteorological report, has little doubt that the temperatures met by the Polar Party were abnormal. The records "clearly bring to light the possibility of great cold at an extremely early period in the year within a comparatively few miles of an open sea where the temperatures were over 40 degrees higher." "It is quite impossible to believe that normally there is a difference of nearly 40 degrees in March between McMurdo Sound and the South of the Barrier." The temperatures recorded by other sledge parties in March 1912 and those recorded at Cape Evans form additional evidence, in Simpson's opinion, that the temperatures experienced by Scott were not such as might be expected during normal autumn weather.

Simpson's explanation is based upon the observations made in McMurdo Sound by sending up balloons with self-recording instruments attached. These showed that very rapid radiation takes place from the snow surface in winter, which cools the air in the immediate neighbourhood: a cold layer of air is thus formed near the ground, which may be many degrees colder than the air above it. It becomes, as it were, colder than it ought to be. This, however, can only happen during an absence of wind: when a wind blows the cold layer is swept away, the air is mixed and the temperature rises.

The absence of wind from the south noted by Scott was, in Simpson's opinion, the cause of the low temperatures met by Scott: the temperature was reduced ten degrees below normal at Cape Evans, and perhaps twenty degrees where Scott was.[353]

The third question is that of food. It is this point which is most important to future explorers. It is a fact that the Polar Party failed to make their distance because they became weak, and that they became weak although they were eating their full ration or more than their full ration of food, save for a few days when they went short on the way down the Beardmore Glacier. The first man to weaken was the biggest and heaviest man in the expedition: "the man whom we had least expected to fail."

The rations were of two kinds. The Barrier (B) ration was that which was used on the Barrier during the outward journey towards the Pole. The Summit (S) ration was the result of our experiments on the Winter Journey. I expect it is the best ration which has been used to date, and consisted of biscuits 16, pemmican 12, butter 2, cocoa 0.57, sugar 3 and tea 0.86 ounces; total 34.43 ounces daily per man.

The twelve men who went forward started this S ration at the foot of the Beardmore, and it was this ration which was left in all depôts to see them home. It was much more satisfying than the Barrier ration, and men could not have eaten so much when leading ponies or driving dogs in the early stages of summer Barrier sledging: but man-hauling is a different business altogether from leading ponies or driving dogs.

It is calculated that the body requires certain proportions of fat, carbohydrates and proteins to do certain work under certain conditions: but just what the absolute quantities are is not ascertained. The work of the Polar Party was laborious: the temperatures (the most important of the conditions) varied from comparative warmth up and down the glacier to an average of about -20° in the rarefied air of the plateau. The temperatures met by them on their return over the Barrier were not really low for more than a week, and then there came quite commonly minus thirties during the day with a further drop to minus forties at night, when for a time the sun was below the horizon. These temperatures, which are not very terrible to men who are fresh and whose clothing is new, were ghastly to these men who had striven night and day almost ceaselessly for four months on, as I maintain, insufficient food. Did these temperatures kill them?

Undoubtedly the low temperatures caused their death, inasmuch as they would have lived had the temperatures remained high. But Evans would not have lived: he died before the low temperatures occurred. What killed Evans? And why did the other men weaken as they did, though they were eating full rations and more? Weaken so much that in the end they starved to death?

I have always had a doubt whether the weather conditions were sufficient to cause the tragedy. These men on full rations were supposed to be eating food of sufficient value to enable them to do the work they were doing, under the conditions which they actually met until the end of February, without loss of strength. They had more than their full rations, but the conditions in March were much worse than they imagined to be possible: when three survivors out of the five pitched their Last Camp they were in a terrible state. After the war I found that Atkinson had come to wonder much as I, but he had gone farther, for he had the values of our rations worked out by a chemical expert according to the latest knowledge and standards. I may add that, being in command after Scott's death, he increased the ration for the next year's sledging, so I suppose he had already come to the conclusion that the previous ration was not sufficient. The following are some of the data for which I am indebted to him: the whole subject will be investigated by him and the results published in a more detailed form.

According to the most modern standards the food requirements for laborious work at a temperature of zero Fahr. (which is a fair Barrier average temperature to take) are 7714 calories to produce 10,069 foot-tons of work. The actual Barrier ration which we used would generate 4003 calories, equivalent to 5331 foot-tons of work. Similar requirements for laborious work at -10° Fahr. (which is a high average plateau temperature) are 8500 calories to produce 11,094 foot-tons of work. The actual Summit ration would generate 4889 calories, equivalent to 6608 foot-tons of work. These requirements are calculated for total absorption of all food-stuffs: but in practice, by visual proof, this does not take place: this is especially noticeable in the case of fats, a quantity of which were digested neither by men, ponies, nor dogs.

Several things go to prove that our ration was not enough. In the first case we were probably not as fit as we seemed after long sledge journeys. There is no doubt that when sledging men developed an automaticity of certain muscles at the expense of other muscles: for instance, a sledge could be hauled all day at the expense of the arms, and we had little power to lift weights at the end of several months of sledging. In relation to this I would add that, when the relief ship arrived in February 1912, four of us were at Cape Evans, but just arrived from three months of the Polar Journey. The land party, we four among them, were turned on to sledge stores ashore. This in practice meant twenty miles every day dragging a sledge; a good deal of 'humping' heavy cases, from five o'clock in the morning to very late at night; with uncertain meals and no rests. I can remember now how hard that work was to myself and, I expect, to those others who had been away sledging. The ship's party sledged only every other day "because they were not used to it." This was extremely bad organization, and in view of the possibility that some of the men might be required for further sledging in the autumn, just silly.

Again, there is the experience of the man-hauling parties of the Polar Journey. There was, you may remember, a man-hauling party on the way to the Beardmore Glacier. They travelled with a light sledge but they lost weight on the Barrier ration. It is significant that they picked up condition when they started the Summit ration, especially Lashly.

The Polar Party and the two returning parties, who were on the Summit ration from the foot of the Beardmore until the end of their journeys, weakened, in Atkinson's opinion, more than they should have done had their ration been sufficient. The First Return Party covered approximately 1100 statute miles. At the end of their journey their pulling muscles were all right, but Atkinson, who led the party, considers that they were at least 70 per cent weaker in other muscles. They all lost a great deal of weight, though they had the best conditions of the three returning parties, and the temperatures met by them averaged well over zero.

The Second Return Party faced much worse conditions. They were only three men, and one of the three was so sick that for 120 miles he could not pull and for 90 miles he had to be dragged on the sledge. The average temperature approximated zero. They were extremely exhausted.

Scott makes constant reference to the increasing hunger of the Polar Party: it is clear that the food did not compensate for the conditions which were met in increasing severity. Yet they were eating rather more than their full ration a considerable part of the time. It has to be considered that the temperatures met by them averaged far below -10°: that they did not absorb all their food: that increased heat was wanted not only for energy to do extra work caused by bad surfaces and contrary winds, but also to heat their bodies, and to thaw out their clothing and sleeping-bags.

I believe it to be clear that the rations used by us must not only be increased by future expeditions, but co-ordinated in different proportions of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. Taking into consideration the fact that our bodies were not digesting the amount of fats we had provided, Atkinson suggests that it is useless to increase the fats at the expense of the protein and carbohydrates. He recommends that fats should total about 5 ounces daily. The digestion of carbohydrates is easy and complete, and though that of protein is more complicated there are plenty of the necessary digestive ferments. The ration should be increased by equal amounts of protein and carbohydrates; both should be provided in as dry and pure a form as possible.

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 Adélie 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° and -30°, 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 3½ 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 Pélé'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 Adélie 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 Adélie. 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 Adélie 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 Adélie 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 Adélies 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 Adélie 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 depôt 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 depôt 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 depôt 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° 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° 15´ S. and longitude 159° 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° 10´ S. and longitude 158° 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 Depôt 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.Return to passage

[350] Amundsen, The South Pole, vol. ii. p. 19.Return to passage

[351] Lashly's diary records that the Second Return Party found a shortage of oil at the Middle Barrier Depôt (see p. 395).Return to passage

[352] Scott, "Message to the Public."Return to passage

[353] A full discussion of these and other Antarctic temperatures is to be found in the scientific reports of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-13, "Meteorology," vol. i. chap. ii., by G. C. Simpson.Return to passage

[354] Modern research suggests that the presence or absence of certain vitamines makes a difference, and it may be a very great difference, in the ability of any individual to profit by the food supplied to him. If this be so this factor must have had great influence upon the fate of the Polar Party, whose diet was seriously deficient in, if not absolutely free from, vitamines. The importance of this deficiency to the future explorer can hardly be exaggerated, and I suggest that no future Antarctic sledge party can ever set out to travel inland again without food which contains these vitamines. It is to be noticed that, although the Medical Research Council's authoritative publication on the true value of these accessory substances was not available when we went South in 1910, yet Atkinson insisted that fresh onions, which had been brought down by the ship, be added to our ration for the Search Journey. Compare recent work of Professor Leonard Hill on the value of ultra-violet rays in compensating for lack of vitamines.--A. C.-G.Return to passage

[355] Scott's Last Expedition, vol. ii. p. 356.Return to passage

[356] My own diary.Return to passage

[357] See p. 234.Return to passage

[358] Wilson, Nat. Ant. Exp., 1901-1904, "Zoology," Part ii. pp. 44-45.Return to passage

[359] My own diary.Return to passage

[360] Ibid.Return to passage

[361] My own diary.Return to passage

[362] My own diary.Return to passage

[363] My own diary.Return to passage

[364] Ibid.Return to passage

GLOSSARY

BLIZZARD. An Antarctic blizzard is a high southerly wind generally accompanied by clouds of drifting snow, partly falling from above, partly picked up from the surface. In the daylight of summer a tent cannot be seen a few yards off: in the darkness of winter it is easy to be lost within a few feet of a hut. There is no doubt that a blizzard has a bewildering and numbing effect upon the brain of any one exposed to it.

BRASH. Small ice fragments from a floe which is breaking up.

CLOUD. The commonest form of cloud, and also that typical of blizzard conditions, was a uniform pall stretching all over the sky without distinction. This was logged by us as stratus. Cumulus clouds are the woolly billows, flat below and rounded on top, which are formed by local ascending currents of air. They were rare in the south and only formed over open water or mountains. Cirrus are the "mare's tails" and similar wispy clouds which float high in the atmosphere. These and their allied forms were common. Generally speaking, the clouds were due to stratification of the air into layers rather than to ascending currents.

CRUSTS. Layers of snow in a snow-field with air space between them.

FINNESKO. Boots made entirely of fur, soles and all.

FROST SMOKE. Condensed water vapour which forms a mist over open sea in cold weather.

ICE-FOOT. Fringes of ice which skirt many parts of the Antarctic shores: many of them have been formed by sea-spray.

NUNATAK. An island of land in a snow-field. Buckley Island is the top of a mountain sticking out of the top of the Beardmore Glacier.

PIEDMONT. Stretches of ancient ice which remain along the Antarctic coasts.

PRAM. A Norwegian skiff, with a spoon bow.

SAENNEGRASS. A kind of Norwegian hay used as packing in finnesko.

SASTRUGI are the furrows or irregularities formed on a snow plain by the wind. They may be a foot or more deep and as hard and as slippery as ice: they may be quite soft: they may appear as great inverted pudding bowls: they may be hard knots covered with soft powdery snow.

SLEDGING DISTANCES. All miles are geographical miles unless otherwise stated, 1 statute or English mile = 0.87 geographical mile: 1 geographical mile = 1.15 statute miles.

TANK. A canvas "hold-all" strapped to the sledge to contain food bags.

TIDE CRACK. A working crack between the land ice and the sea ice which rises and falls with the tide.

WIND. Wind forces are logged according to the Beaufort scale, which is as follows:

Mean velocity No. Description. in miles per hour. 0. Calm 0 1. Light air 1 2. Light breeze 4 3. Gentle breeze 9 4. Moderate breeze 14 5. Fresh breeze 20 6. Strong breeze 26 7. Moderate gale 33 8. Fresh gale 42 9. Strong gale 51 10. Whole gale 62 11. Storm 75 12. Hurricane 92

INDEX

Abbott, George P., lv, lvii, 558 Adam Mountains, 361 Adare, Cape, xxiii, xxix, xxxiv, 409, 570 Adélie Land, xxii Adélie penguins. See Penguins, Adélie Adventure, the, xviii Albatross, capture of, 39 Alexander Land, xxi Alexandra, Queen, 507 Amundsen, Roald, telegram to Scott, 41 arrives in Bay of Whales, 128 character, 134 letter to King of Norway, 482 forestalls Scott at Pole, 506 reason of success, 544 'Antarctic Adventures' (Priestley), lxi Antarctic Continent, theories of, xxi 'Antarctic Penguins' (Levick), lxi Antarctic regions, early explorations, xviii Ross's expedition, xxv importance of Scott's work, lxii marine life, 568 Anton (pony boy), 224, 429 Aptenodytes forsteri. See Penguin, Emperor Archer, W. W., 429, 438, 472 Arctic regions, exploration in, xxix-xxxiii Arethusa. See Portuguese man-of-war Armitage, Cape, 108, 566 Arrival Bay, xlvi Arrival Heights, 98, 185 Atkinson, Edward L., his responsibilities, 1 on the Terra Nova, 3 character, 4 on South Trinidad, 19 accident to foot, 111 lecture on scurvy, 215 lost in blizzard, 303 Barrier Journey, 324 in command of First Return Party, 381 meets Lashly and Evans, 404 difficulties during Scott's absence, 411 attempts to find Scott, 426 in command of Main Party, 427 journey to Hutton Cliffs, 428 sledge journey, 429 fish-trap, 444 spring journey, 467 reads Burial Service over Scott, 481 lands in New Zealand, 572 Atmosphere, observations on, 35 Aurora borealis, 244

Balloon Bight, xxxiv, 130 Barne Glacier, 184, 307, 459 Barrie, Sir J. M., Scott's letter to, 540 Barrier, the, Ross's journey, xxiii Scott's survey, 1902, xxxiv first arrival at, 81 Scott's paper on, 214 snow surface, 239 Wright's lecture, 455 movement, 468 Beardmore Glacier, journey across, 350-367 Beaufort Island, 557 Bellingshausen, xxi Bernacchi, Cape, 425 Biology, marine, importance of Ross's expedition, xxvii Terra Nova observations, 7, 567 Bird, Cape, xxiv Bird, Mt., 558 Bird Peninsula, 409 Biscuit Depôt, 473 Black Island, xxv Blacksand Beach, 100 Blizzards, 112, 447 Blubber, uses of, lvi Bluff Depôt, 114, 119, 418 Borchgrevink, xxviii Bowers, Lieut. H. R., on Terra Nova, 3 character and personality, 4, 208 at South Trinidad, 16 on Depôt Journey, 105 on Winter Journey, 234 trip to Western Mountains, 306 commencement of Polar Journey, 325 passage of the Beardmore Glacier, 351 seq. Plateau Journey, 368 seq. body discovered, 480 journey to Pole, 496 seq. return from Pole, 511 seq. Bowers, Mrs., Scott's letter to, 539 Browning, Frank V., lv, lvi, lvii, lviii Brown Island, xxv Bruce, Wilfred M., 565 Buckley Island, 362 Butter Point, 425

Campbell, Victor, at Inexpressible Island, lii seq. on Terra Nova, 2 character, 4 Terra Nova attempts to relieve, 409 possibility of rescuing, 441 rescued, 493 Cardiff, Wales, 1 Castle Rock, xxxv, 152, 185, 434 Cephalodiscus rarus, 569 Challenger Expedition, xxviii, 568 Cherry-Garrard, Apsley, functions, 2 on Winter Journey, 233 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 seq. journey with dogs, 416 seq. illness, 427 work on penguins, 559 Christmas Day celebration, 1911, 373 Clissold, Thomas, 309, 383, 429 Cloudmaker, 356, 359, 382 Colbeck, Cape, 129 Cook, Captain James, Antarctic explorations, xviii, xix, xx, xxi Corner Camp, 112, 122, 135, 166, 306, 468, 473 Crater Heights, 98, 162 Crean, Thomas, Depôt Journey, 104 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 seq. Plateau Journey, 368 seq. snow-blindness, 385 journey for help, 406 duties, 438 on search journey, 472 Crozier, Capt., xxix Crozier, Cape, discovery, xxiii, xl, 252, 558

Darwin, Mt., 366, 388 David, Professor, xlvii Davies, Francis, 92 Day, Bernard C., 310, 383, 429 Debenham, Frank, 217, 309, 437, 438, 465, 472, 557 Dellbridge Islands, 169 De Long, G. W., xxix Derrick Point, 98 Dickason, Harry, liv, lviii, 557 Diet, Cook's precautions, xviii experiments on Winter Journey, 256 importance of good cooking, 330 effects of unsuitability, 552 Dimitri (dog boy), 104, 310, 323, 404, 419, 420, 428, 467 Disaster Camp, 160 Discovery, Mt., 151, 186 Discovery Expedition, 1901-1904, xxxiii seq., 456 Discovery hut, 97, 185 Dogs, on Scott's first expedition, xxxvi on board ship, 49 effect of blizzards, 113 ponies as food for, 339 successful use, 353 rate of return, 383 new batch, 410 hospital, 437 behaviour in camp, 440 accommodation, 450 diet, 452 disease among, 453 behaviour while driving, 469 Dolphins, observations on, 37 Dominion Range, 362, 370 Drake, Frank, 3, 97, 565 Drygalski Ice Tongue, lviii Dunedin, N.Z., 48 Dunlop Island, 307 D'Urville, Dumont, xxii

Emperor Penguin. See Penguin, Emperor Enderby, Messrs., xxi Equator, crossing of, 10 Erebus, Mt., discovery, xxiii first glimpse of, 81 activity, 184 ascent of, 557 Erebus, the, xxii, xxix Eskers, the, 432 Evans, Lieut. Edward, functions, 2 character, 4 on Depôt Journey, 104 seq. lectures, 217 Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 seq. Plateau Journey, 368 seq. snow-blindness, 391 symptoms of scurvy, 393 illness, 399 sent home, 423 returns on Terra Nova, 565 Evans, Seaman Edgar, on Discovery Expedition, xxxix as Neptune, 10 trip to Western Mountains, 306 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 seq. Plateau Journey, 368 seq. accident to hand, 378 journey to Pole, 496 seq. return from Pole, 511 seq. death, 528 Evans, Cape, xlviii, 86, 96, 181, 317, 434, 444, 447, 493, 502 Evans Coves, l, liii, 409, 569

Fahrt, 458 Ferrar Glacier, xxxviii Fire, outbreaks of, 462 Fodder Depôt, 109 Forde, Robert, 104, 306, 429 Forster, Mr., xx Fram, the, xxix seq., xlviii, 46, 133 Franklin, Sir John, xxix Franklin Island, 557, 570 Franz Josef Land, xxxii Funchal, Madeira, 3.

Gap, the, 98 Gateway, the, 339, 351 Geelmuyden, Professor, xxxi Glacier Tongue, 152, 185, 430, 449 Gran, Tryggve, 4, 104 seq., 429, 434, 438, 447, 472, 558, 567 Granite Harbour, lviii, 409, 567 Granite Pillars, 393 Great Razorback Island, 169, 186 Greely, A. W., xxix, xxx

Haig, Sir Douglas, Scott's letter to, 410 Halley, Edmund, 11 Hare, xxxv Hell's Gate, 570 Helminthology, 17 High Peak, 183 Hobart, Tasmania, xxii Hooker, Sir Joseph D., xxv Hooker, Mt., 186 Hooper, F. J., 15, 28, 310, 383, 438, 472, 477, 558 Hooper, Mt. See Upper Barrier Depôt Hope, Mt., 343, 393 Hope Island, xlvii Horses. See Ponies, Manchurian Horseshoe Bay, 98 Hut Point, lix, 97, 157, 461, 566 Hut Point Peninsula, xxiv, xxxiv, 185 Hutton Cliffs, 169, 185, 428 Hyperoodon rostrata. See Whale, bottle-nosed

Ice, Cook's observations, xx the Fram, xxx formation of pack, 59 movement, 440 Ice cap, Antarctic, xxxviii Icebergs, 61, 570 "Igloo back," lvii Inaccessible Island, 186, 434 Inexpressible Island, conditions on, liii Island Lake, 182

Jackson-Harmsworth Expedition, xxxii, 216 Jeannette, the, xxix Johansen, Lieut., xxx, 132 Jones, Cape, 557

Kayaks, Nansen's use of, xxxi Keltie Glacier, 358 Keohane, Patrick, 104 seq., 353, 382, 426, 428, 434, 438, 473 Killer whale. See Whale, killer King Edward VII.'s Land, xxxiv, xlviii Kinsey, Mr. J. J., 48 Knight, E. F., 12, 18 Knoll, the, xl, 252, 260 Kyffin, Mt., 352

Land crabs, at South Trinidad, 14, 18 Lashly, W., on Discovery Expedition, xxxviii diary, 311 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 seq. nurses Lieut. Evans, 393 seq. duties, 438 on Search Journey, 472 Levick, G. Murray, liii, 3 Lillie, Denis G., 4, 565, 569 Lister, Mt., 186 Little Razorback Island, 171, 186, 449 Lower Glacier Depôt, 352 Lyttelton, N.Z., 2, 44, 573

M'Clintock, Sir F. L., xxix McMurdo Sound, xxiv, xxxiv, 409 Magnetic Pole, South, xxii, xxv Markham, Sir Clements, xxix Markham, Mt., 337 Marshall Mountains, 362 Meares, Cecil H., 97, 104, 213, 310, 323, 347, 353, 382, 429 Melbourne, Mt., l, 557 Middle Barrier Depôt, 338 Mill Glacier, 362 Milne, A. A., on Scott's character, lx Minna Bluff, xxiv, 186 Mirage, 118, 386, 423 Morning, Mt., 186 Morning, the, xxxvii Mules, use of, 410, 450, 462, 473, 475, 478, 490

Nansen, Fridtjof, Arctic explorations, xxix seq. on scurvy, 216 on equipment, 456 Nansen, Mt., 570 Nares, Sir G. S., xxix Neale, W. H., 28 Nelson, Edward W., 4, 215, 383, 438, 445, 472, 477 North Bay, 172, 438, 444, 445

Oamaru, N.Z., 572 Oates, Capt. L. E. G., on Terra Nova, 2, 4 Depôt Journey, 104 seq. care of ponies, 179, 318 lecture on horses, 217 Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 Plateau Journey, 369 suggests use of mules, 410 death, 485 commemorative inscription, 487 journey to Pole, 497 Observation Hill, 98, 565 Oestrelata arminjoniana. See Petrel, black-breasted Oestrelata trinitatis. See Petrel, white-breasted Oil, shortage of, 550 Oil fuel, its advantages, 46 One and a Half Degree Depôt, 502 One Ton Depôt, 116, 314, 326, 383, 398, 413, 418 Orca gladiator. See Whale, killer

Pagoda Cairn, 117 Parry, Sir W. E., xxix Peary, R. E., xlviii Penguin, Adélie, appearance, xxxix Levick's book, lxi habits, 63, 561 rookery discovered, 83 curiosity, 86 embryos obtained, 559 breeding, 562 feeding of young, 563 Penguin, Emperor, eggs, xxii, 299 habits and breeding, xxxix seq., 82 embryology, 234 discovery of rookery, 252, 268 care of young, 269 eagerness to sit, 270 Pennell, Harry L. L., liii, 3, 4, 8, 565, 572 Petrel, Antarctic, 63 Petrel, black-breasted, 13 Petrel, giant, 50 Petrel, snowy, xix, 50 Petrel, white-breasted, 13 Plankton, 6, 69 Pole, South, Scott's final arrangements, 379 altitude, 502 Amundsen's arrival, 506 Scott's arrival, 506 characteristics of area, 508 Polheim (camp), 507 Polychaete worms, 568 Ponies, Manchurian, on board ship, 49 their uses, 88 effect of blizzards on, 113 Scott's care of, 114 behaviour on ice, 141 fodder, 179 exercising, 190 treatment and diseases, 218 Scott's decision, 327 weights lightened, 331 difficulties on march, 342 destroyed, 349 Ponting, Herbert G., 90, 173, 213, 320, 429 Portuguese man-of-war, 7 Pram, 17, 19 Pram Point, 98, 162, 466, 566 Priestley, Raymond E., liii, 130, 558 Ptomaine poisoning, lvii Pulleyn, Lieut. George, 410

Ramp, the, 168 Rennick, H. E. de P., 3, 565 Resolution, the, xviii Roberts, Cape, lviii, 425 Ross, Sir James C., xxii, 11, 12 Ross Island, xxiii Ross Sea, xxiii, xxviii, xlii Royal Society Range, 493 Royds, Cape, xlv, xlvii, 98, 183, 461, 559

Sabine, Mt., xxiii, 80 Safety Camp, 110, 122, 136, 306 St. Paul, island, 33 Scott, Capt. R. F., on early explorations, xx on Ross, xxvii first expedition, 1901-1904, xxxiii excellence of equipment, lxii commencement of second expedition, 1 visits South Trinidad, 1901, 12 joins Terra Nova, 31 Depôt Journey, 104 character and achievements, 200, 573 paper on Barrier, 214 trip to Western Mountains, 306 Barrier stage of Polar Journey, 319 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 350 seq. Plateau Journey, 368 strength of team, 377 alteration in units, 379 tries new sledge runners, 457 body discovered, 480 burial, 483 his account of journey to Pole, 496 seq. return from Pole, 511 seq. message to the public, 541 drawbacks of his plan, 545 'Scott's Last Expedition,' lix Scurvy, lvii, 215, 393 Sea, freezing of, 448 Sea-cucumber, 568 Sea-leopard, 65, 66 Sea-urchins, 567 Seal, 66, 67, 162 Seal, crab-eating, 67, 68 Seal, Ross, 66 Seal, Weddell, 66, 67, 161, 464, 466 Shackleton, Sir Ernest, xxxvii, xlvii Shambles Camp, 349, 502 Simon's Bay, 31 Simpson, G. C., 4, 215, 306 seq., 429, 502, 504 Ski, use of, 355, 458, 498 Ski Slope, 152 Skua gulls, 464, 499 Skua Lake, 95, 182 Sledge meters, 385, 417, 461 Sledge runners, Nansen on, 456, 457 Sledges, Nansen's innovation, xxx motor, 88, 92, 321 Smoking, limitations on, 195 Snow-blindness, 353 South Bay, 447 'South Polar Times,' 437, 445 South Trinidad, landing, 13 bird life, 13, 14 land crabs, 14 difficulty of leaving, 15, 18 Southern Barrier Depôt, 338 Sverdrup, O. N., xxx

Taylor, Griffith, lxi, 215, 307, 308, 317, 429 Temperature, of polar plateau, 505 effect on Polar party, 553 Tent Island, 186, 439, 566 Terra Australis, belief in existence of, xviii Terra Nova Bay, 493 Terra Nova, the, on Scott's first expedition, xlv commencement of voyage, 1910, 1 crew, 2 arrangement of cabins, 3 defects in pumps, 5, 28 plankton nets, 6 fire on board, 6 biological observations, 7 lack of fresh water, 8 refits at Lyttelton, 44 overloading, 50 suitability for ice work, 73 anchorage, 101 arrival with mails, 409 defects, 548 expedition finally relieved, 564 trawling, 567 Terror, Mt., xxiii, xxiv, xli, 252, 558 Terror, the, xxii, xxix Terror Point, 253 Tersio peronii, 37 Three Degree Depôt, 502 Tremasome, parasitic growth on, 444 Turk's Head, 185 Turtleback Island, 434

Upper Barrier Depôt, 333 Upper Glacier Depôt, 369, 502

Victoria Land, xxxiv Vince's Cross, xxxv

Waves, height of, 58 Weddell, James, xxv Western Mountains, 151, 306, 567 Whale, 37 Whale, blue, 70, 71 Whale, bottle-nosed, 156 Whale, killer, 69, 90, 142, 154 Whale, piked, 70 Whales, Bay of, xlviii, 128, 130 White Island, xxiv, 111, 493 Wild, Frank, xxxv Wild Mountains, 362 Wilkes, Charles, xxii Williamson, Thomas S., 429, 438, 472 Wilson, Dr. E. A., on Emperor penguins, xli functions, 2 character and personality, 4, 203 Depôt Journey, 104 Winter Journey, 233 seq. Beardmore Glacier Journey, 351 Plateau Journey, 368 body discovered, 480 journey to Pole, 496 seq. return from Pole, 512 seq. Wilson, Mrs., Scott's letter to, 539 Wind Vane Hill, 95, 182 Wright, Charles S., 4, 215, 319, 351, 381, 382, 429, 434, 438, 447, 455, 472, 481, 489

X Cairn, 120

THE END

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