Thus February came and went. Already we had slipped into this new life as if it had always been. Day by day the outside world faded farther from our thoughts. It was indeed hard to imagine we had ever been puppets tied to the routine of cities. Even thoughts of home came as memories of a remote past. We lived in a world of our own, a primitive world, in which the only standards were efficiency and utility, and in which, in an all-satisfying way, we made our own news, devised our own pleasures, and were busy with our own work.
Charles Laseron, South with Mawson
Misfortunes rarely come singly.
Robert Falcon Scott, Scott’s Last Expedition
21 February 1912, Cape Denison, Mawson settles in
Ah, but in terms of isolation, Mawson and his men run Wild and the Western Party close. A month since being left here, and three weeks after settling into their hut, they are now preparing to do what is necessary to get their many scientific projects under way. And there is much to do. From the first, Mawson has noted the likely antediluvian history of this place – just near the hut, there is evidence that the whole area was once covered by an ice sheet that has now receded slightly, leaving behind the telltale grooves and highly polished rock surfaces as traces of what once has been, just as he saw in the Flinders Ranges – but now he and his fellow scientists want to find out everything they can about current conditions.
21 February 1912, Great Ice Barrier, Scott’s Southern Party suffer another terrible day
Apart from the death of Taffy, it has been their worst day since turning back from the South Pole – a brutal, debilitating, devastating day of slow, agonising, exhausting progress.
Though they hoped for less freezing temperatures after leaving the high altitude of the Polar Plateau, things have in fact only got worse. And again, it is not just the discomfort of those temperatures that hurts them, nor even that because of such freezing conditions they need to burn through more fuel to do such things as melt snow for water. Fluctuating temperatures ranging between minus two and minus 17 degrees (at times as much as ten and 20 degrees below average for that time of year) continue to make the surface ever less conducive for their skis and the runners.
After the midday sun melts the top layer of snow, the surface refreezes and sandy, granular snow (known as sugar snow) is created. Scott likens it to ‘pulling over desert sand, not the least glide in the world’.1 It means the sledge does not gliiiiiiide so much as grip and grind.
Rather than fly across the surface, thus, the runners of their sledges tend to plough down, often to the point where the crossbars themselves hit the snow. Worse, as underfed and overworked as they are under these snow conditions, the men’s rate of deterioration is increasing, making the sledges even more exhausting to pull. On this particular night, Scott writes in his diary, ‘We never won a march of 8.5 miles2 with greater difficulty, but we can’t go on like this.’3
21 February 1912 and the day thereafter, Southern Ocean, Davis struggles to escape Antarctica’s icy clutches
Just after 11 pm on this night, on the bridge of Aurora, Davis is suddenly as frantic and as fearful as he has ever been in his life, as his ship tries to break free of the pack of the massive and menacing ice-soldiers that has now suddenly surrounded the trembling ship. At first, in the face of it, he tries having the ship lie doggo, bringing it to a dead halt so he can hopefully see a way forward, but it is soon apparent that the bergs are moving, actually closing in on them! The obvious danger is that they will soon be hemmed in, frozen in place and unable to move for the winter, so the only alternative is to go at the bergs and try to make a break for it.
Now, Davis is a man who is serious by nature, a man truly at home on the high seas – bellowing orders when required, singing from the bridge when things are travelling well. Tonight, though, there is certainly no singing.
For the cries from the lookout are coming thick and fast: ‘Ice to port!’, ‘Ice to starboard!’, or ‘Ice ahead!’. And Davis responds in kind, in an endless staccato: ‘Port!’, ‘Starboard!’, ‘Steady!’, ‘Hard-a-port!’, ‘Full steam ahead!’ and so on, as the ship tries to dodge her attackers. Still, the ice-soldiers cede nothing and keep coming. Just before midnight, the Gods of Freeze even send in their biggest soldier of all. Davis has just given the order to steer away from a berg that looms large on their starboard bow when, as he records it:
a veritable wall of ice seemed suddenly to rise up, like some enormous and menacing ghost, out of the haze before us, right across our course. There was no room to turn and not a moment to be lost. We were embayed. ‘Full speed astern’ was the only thing left.4
Full speed astern it is, and once more they just manage to avoid crashing into a massive iceberg.
And so it goes until the restless dawn arrives, giving enough light that Davis can at last see clearer water to the north. Reluctantly, the waters of Antarctica release their icy grip upon Aurora and, for the moment, the little ship is free to go.
But Davis knows only too well that had it not been for a merciful absence of wind, their fate would have been different indeed.
Last week of February 1912, Cape Denison, Mawson’s men turn to science
It is time to begin their constructions for the purposes of science beyond the hut. Though they have been taking regular meteorological observations since 1 February – and the barometer and barograph can remain inside the hut – Mertz and Ninnis build two ‘Stevenson screens’, box-like structures with four louvred sides to hold the other key instruments. The boxes have one side on a hinge to allow access to the instruments, while all sides allow the free circulation of air without the instruments being blasted by the wind or affected by the sunlight. One box, right next to the hut on the eastern side, contains the thermometer, thermograph and hygrograph, while close by is the nephoscope, which measures the motion of the clouds.
Because the hut is situated in a small gully, the Campbell-Stokes solarimeter (recording hours of sunlight every day) and the anemometer and anemograph (respectively recording wind speed and direction) are located at the top of a small hill 450 feet to the east and 94 feet above sea level, on Anemometer Hill. The anemograph is located in the second Stevenson screen.
All of the instruments are attached to needles with ink buds, connected to slowly revolving drums upon which reams of graph paper are folded so that the changing conditions can be clearly graphed. Every day – rain, hail, shine, snow, gale, blizzard, summer, spring, winter, autumn, with no exceptions – the drums have to have the springs that power them rewound, the daily charts with their valuable recordings collected and new paper put in. The nibs of the pens must be kept full of special non-freezing ink.
Down by the water, a spot is found to drill through the ice, so that a float attached to a vertical wire can be lowered upon the water. As the float rises and falls with the tides, a geared pen above the ice rises and falls with it, drawing a line on a piece of paper wrapped around the slowly revolving drum that is the tide gauge.
All is set up so that, for the next year, the party will be able to record with extraordinary precision the ever-changing conditions they are enduring, and the men set to keeping records with a will, always determined that there will be no mishaps on their watch.
Despite being busy himself with myriad other matters, including getting ready for a forthcoming sledging journey to find out more about the region in which they have landed, Mawson has, of course, been right in the thick of each installation, just as he is quick to ensure that all data is accurate and precisely recorded.
In faraway Australia, at least in less academic circles, a man with his name might be known as Doug or Dougie. But not here. These intellectual and academic young men start calling him Dux Ipse, Latin for ‘the leader himself’, a sobriquet that seems to nicely sum up the intellectual, slightly aloof nature of the man.
Mawson’s patrician nature notwithstanding, Frank Hurley would later claim that they ‘looked up to him not only as a leader but loved him as a comrade and a man’.5 This may not be the universal view, with Laseron noting that he is ‘sometimes as stern as billy oh!’. Yet from behind an exterior that eschews familiarity, Mawson also proves to be, according to Laseron, ‘Far more of a comrade than any of us thought he would be … he is such a worker, for from the start he has done more than any two of us.’6
Part of his work is spending enormous amounts of time, often while the others are resting, getting things organised. This includes, particularly in these early weeks in the hut, preparing a multitude of notices setting out all manner of procedures from cleaning duties to just who is on the roster to take the magnetic and meteorological readings. Meticulous in his approach, Mawson provides written instructions, so that everything is set out clearly and all can know their role. Cooking, for example. Do you need to know just what it entails, when it must be done and what must be served? Well, here it is, posted by Mawson on the wall of the tiny but efficient kitchen, which lies at the northern end of the hut, right next to Frank Hurley’s darkroom:
The COOK is responsible for the culinary matters and will be assisted by the messmen.
Duties commence at 7 am and continue until the washing and cleaning up are completed in the evening.
Meals will be served respectively at 8 am, 1 pm, and 6.30 pm.
The ‘piece de resistance’ of dinner shall be as follows:
Monday – Penguin
Tuesday – Seal
Wednesday – Canned meats
Thursday – Penguin
Friday – Seal
Saturday – Variable
Sunday – Mutton.
… The COOK is in charge of the main hut stove unit and shall continue to keep the mean hut-temperature above freezing point and not exceeding 45F.7
24 February 1912, South (Lower) Barrier Depot, in Scott’s Southern Party, Christopher has the last neigh
It is the way of the world … or at least this part of the world. Whereas they had begun this journey 116 days earlier confidently striding out, before shortening their step somewhat as the journey across the Barrier began to sap their strength, and then staggering up the Beardmore Glacier, where their steps turned into a limp, now … now they are reduced to a bare shuffle. For on this day, they at last make it to Southern Barrier Depot, where, 12 weeks before, they left the remains of the highly troublesome pony Christopher. Little do they know …
For even in death the wretched pony causes them desperate grief. All this way, they have been looking forward to eating the brute’s flesh, only to find – they can barely believe it, and certainly not stomach it – that his flesh is rotten. Just one bite makes them gag, and there is nothing to do but throw it away. It seems likely that one of the returning parties has dug up Christopher and not sufficiently buried him and … a few bursts of bright sun have done the rest. Or perhaps, after all, Christopher was indeed bad to the bone.
All they can do is tighten their belts another notch and keep going.
28 February 1912, Germany, with Paquita
No sooner has Paquita’s ship arrived in the German port of Bremen after her long voyage from Australia than she posts a letter to Douglas. True, there is no way he will be able to actually read her letter until nearly a year later, when Aurora would return to pick up the expedition, but the two have agreed to write anyway, to put down their news as it happens, as a way of staying spiritually close to each other. She reports that she has had a wonderful trip to Europe, where she intends to catch up with many of her relatives in Holland. She played deck quoits with a charming young Frenchman she met, loved visiting the city of ‘Colombo with its exquisite colouring, dirty old Port Said … and now Messina with its pitiful ruins’.8
Mostly, though, she has missed him. It has been hard for her seeing other couples wandering hand in hand on the deck, cuddling, dancing, talking, dining together when she is not only all alone but also with her fiancé in something close to the most remote spot on the planet.
‘Here I have been longing and longing for you and now I must write. You said truly when you said that a sea voyage was redolent of love and longing. It is. I lean over the side and in the water see you – oh I think I love you now even much more than when we parted. How simply glorious it will be when we are on our trip together.’9
Sometimes, all but unconsciously, she would see a man with a silhouette like Douglas’s and her heart would leap, and then she would remember, no, she was still by herself. She couldn’t think straight for missing him, couldn’t even read to take her mind off him. She writes:
Oh darling, we are far apart, aren’t we?. Does it ever come to you with a rush … If only nothing is happening to you but I think I should feel it … It is no use wishing you success because when you get this you will be coming back and it will be nearly over. But I know you have had success.10
29 February 1912 and the day thereafter, Cape Denison, Mawson steps out for the first time
Not yet, he hasn’t, but he is working very hard towards it. And yes, he is missing Paquita greatly, though there is some chaff in the hut on this day that, given it is 29 February, it is a very good thing that they are all safe in Antarctica and can’t be besieged by women asking them to marry them.
Still, just after 5 pm, Mawson, together with the astronomer, Lieutenant Robert Bage, and the meteorologist, Cecil Madigan, make their expedition’s first significant foray away from the relative warmth and safety of the hut, to get a feel for the area they are in, understand the lie of the land and discover something of the conditions they would find. The first step is getting the sledge up the steep, long slope of the rise of the polar ice sheet to the immediate south of their hut and then trekking some five miles inland, at which point they find themselves in ‘a great, wan, icy wilderness’,11 before the distant white skyline of a far higher hill that rises to a good 2000 feet in altitude. And beyond that? That is what they are intent on finding out, though they decide to do it by man-hauling, rather than using the dogs, as the animals are clearly not yet in good shape for such an arduous journey.
But it is not easy for the men, either. As it turns out, the wind is so strong, blowing the snow on the ground at them like a river, that they cannot proceed. After securing the sledge up the hill at a distance from the hut of one mile and 264 yards – according to the precious sledge-meter wheel – they beat a hasty retreat, before trying it again at noon the next day, when it goes better.12
Retrieving their sledge, they continue south, and as they proceed they are careful to plant flags every mile or so in the frozen terrain so they can be certain to find their way back. They get as far as five and a half miles before the weather closes in, and they camp for the night, a little anxious to be so far removed from the warmth and stability of the hut but getting used to it little by little. However, the following morning the gale becomes so strong it is overwhelming, and Mawson decides to again anchor the sledge and return to the hut, following the flags they have planted. They make it, just, and are much wiser for the experience.
They have penetrated the hinterland enough to get an impression of the inland ice as ‘an unbroken plateau with no natural landmarks’.13 And they have good reason to believe that such a passable surface may go a whole lot further, to the far horizons and beyond. From that hinterland, ‘a vast solid stream of ice flowed, with heavily crevassed downfalls near the coast’,14 and yet, as difficult as it was in the wind, they managed to traverse it. In warmer weather, it should be much easier. All they need do now is continue their preparations and get ready for the coming spring, when the sledging parties can hopefully head out in earnest in both directions along the coast and at angles slightly inland.
The hut they have returned to, however, is not quite the oasis it was. For by now the wind is so strong, so relentless, that it is finding its way through every tiny chink in the Winter Quarters’ armour – much of the timber, which had become sodden on the deck of Aurora, has twisted a little in the freezing conditions – meaning a great deal of energy, time and resources must be spent sealing those chinks. When they are outside, however, they just have to learn to live with those winds … and, for the most part, so they do, because they have no choice.
In their first days after Aurora sailed away, when the wind blew at hurricane force, the men fell over and were swept away with ever greater velocity until they were hard up against the sastrugi some 30 yards or more away. This obliged them to stay mainly indoors. Over time, however, as the wind blows with ever more ferocity and frequency, this becomes problematic. To stay indoors when the wind is howling would mean staying indoors almost all the time. So they adapt.
Bit by bit, they learn how, by wearing Swiss crampons – specially designed shoes with sharp studs on the bottom to dig into the ice – it is possible to ‘hurricane-walk’. That is, by keeping your body rigid and thrusting your torso forward on the wind, it is possible to gain a bizarre point of equilibrium at an angle closer to zero than 45 degrees. Then, by digging your crampons into the ground and bracing your feet against every tiny projection of rock or ice, you can, step by step, go about your business. Those unequipped or less game are reduced to crawling along on hands and knees like infants. But for those who have crampons and who practise, it is found to be possible to move fairly comfortably in a 70-mph wind and stay standing in 80 mph.
At such velocity, the rushing wind is a living, killing thing, slapping your face, pulling your hair, tearing at your entire body, billowing into your clothes, into every tiny nook and cranny where it can get a purchase, even as the breath is sucked from your lungs and your ears are filled with the roar of a thousand banshees screaming your death song. And then it gets stronger and faster still.
In 90- and 100-mph winds, not even the best of the men can hurricane-walk: there is no last man left standing, and all are brought back to the same level, wriggling about on the ground like snakes, giving the wind as little surface as possible on which to get a grip. It is best to have your ice-axe with you, in case you are bowled over and find yourself sliding straight towards the Southern Ocean.
Certainly, it is extraordinarily difficult to experience such conditions, but as scientists it is also fascinating to experience ‘katabatic’ winds first-hand.
For they know that what is happening is that the freezing air on the Polar Plateau is denser and heavier than the far warmer air above the water by the coast where they are situated. The warmer air rises, to be replaced by the dense frigid air pulled down by gravity from the plateau, where the temperature is usually 15 to 20 degrees colder than the coast. And the spot where they have made their home, beneath a glacial slope pointing down towards the sea, increases these katabatic wind speeds even more. They are in one of the few places in all of Antarctica where ‘an open sea throughout the year lies in direct contact with a steep shore’,15 and the result is they are in fact living in the windiest place on earth at sea level, frequently suffering the onslaught of a veritable avalanche of air. While the average wind speed in Melbourne is 8 mph year on year, here it is 44 mph.
As scientists, though, they note not merely its extraordinary speed but also its particularities. By observation, they establish that no matter its strength, its direction is always coming from within a point of south-south-east, while high above them they note by the drift of the clouds that the wind there is coming from nearly the exact opposite direction.
1 March 1912 and the day thereafter, Mid-Barrier Depot, death begins to stalk Scott’s party close
Disaster. Sheer disaster. Though hugely relieved to arrive at the depot that they left almost 14 weeks earlier, in an identical situation to that at the South Barrier Depot they find that the thing they most need apart from food – paraffin oil, to heat their food, melt their ice to water and heat their tent – is in devastatingly short supply. Fuel tins that were expected to be full to the brim only have a little sloshing around at the bottom. How has this happened?
A large part of it seems to have been their positioning: the red tins have been left at the top of the cairns both for accessibility and visibility. Alas, just as the warmth of the sun may have rotted the flesh of Christopher, it appears to have also vaporised the fuel, and a significant quantity has escaped – either through a flaw in the leather container seals or possibly through the tins’ seams, on occasion contaminating the food supplies beneath.16 And though it is a devastating error on the part of individuals unknown, as with everything else, Scott must bear the ultimate responsibility.
Men in the Antarctic without fuel are almost inevitably destined to be frozen men, and as on this day the temperature drops as far as minus 40 degrees, that freezing will not take long if they run out. Yes, they still have a little fuel left from their last depot, but that cannot last long. To add to their many woes, the temperature has plummeted still further, and day by day they must face temperatures ten to 20 degrees below average, and 40 to 50 degrees lower than Teddy Evans and his men experienced just a month before.
The most pressing problem, though, is the fuel and the fact that they simply don’t have enough of it. Again using the calculus of catastrophe, a desperate Scott records their perilous position in his diary on the following day after lunch: ‘With most rigid economy it can scarce carry us to the next depot … 71 miles17 away.’18
All of their thoughts now focus fiercely on the salvation in the form of paraffin and biscuits that should await them at the Mt Hooper Depot – the spot that Teddy Evans’s abandoned motor-sledge party established three and a half months earlier – if they can just get there.
After all, prior to departure 19 weeks previously, on 20 October 1911, Scott formally instructed Meares to bring the dogs out to meet the Southern Party:
about March 1 in latitude 82 or 82.30. If you are then in a position to advance a few short marches or ‘mark time’ for five or six days on food brought, or ponies killed, you should have a good chance of effecting your object.19
True, those orders to Meares had been complicated by the fact that the dog-handler and his dogs stayed with them two weeks longer than planned, meaning he had been four weeks late back to Cape Evans, but hopefully something would have been sorted out.
They press on the best they can. But it is hideously difficult. In terms of pulling, the men soon realise they have lost a quarter of their power after the now seriously struggling Oates reveals his frostbitten, gangrenous feet, all the toes turned black as … death.
‘Misfortunes rarely come singly,’ records Scott.20
And sometimes they really do announce themselves with a darkening sky, a further sharp drop in the temperature and an ill wind growing in strength. For just when they are most in need of benign weather, the cloudy columns of snowdrift they can see advancing from the south soon hit them, and this wretched wind blowing in dark and stormy weather makes it seem as if the full-blown winter coming from the Pole they have left has finally overtaken them. The following morning, it takes them an hour and a half to get into their foot gear.
May God help them, indeed, because it is starting to look like Providence will not.
Early March 1911, Cape Denison’s Winter Quarters, Mawson’s men build up
And now the focus of Mawson’s party switches to mounting the rest of their scientific program. One of Mawson’s principal aims in this field is to continue his research on the magnetic fields, which he first began during his expedition with Shackleton four years earlier, particularly focusing on how the position of the South Magnetic Pole changes over time.
To do this properly – and that is the only way that Dux Ipse accepts anything being done – the men now busy themselves finishing off another two small structures, known as the Magnetograph House and the Absolute Magnetic Hut. They are 50 yards apart around 400 yards north-east of the main hut, far enough that there will be no magnetic influence on the sensitive recording equipment that those huts will contain. It is for the same reason that the huts are constructed with copper, rather than iron, nails.21
Once the Magnetograph House is finished, the chief magnetician, Azi Webb, will oversee the efficient installation of the instruments, including the magnetograph. All up, the equipment will precisely record the variations in horizontal and vertical components, as well as the absolute value, of the total magnetic force, minute by minute, hour by hour, around the clock and allow them to monitor sudden large, irregular variations referred to as ‘magnetic storms’.22
Ensuring they are not carrying anything magnetic – such as knives, belt buckles and even boot fittings – Webb and his assistant magneticians will take turns manning the nearby Absolute Magnetic Hut to calculate standard values as a check against the automatically recorded information.
Because Mawson’s party is soon due to take part in synchronised magnetic readings with the German Antarctic expedition led by Lieutenant Wilhelm Filchner and other observatories at low latitudes, the erection of these huts is a priority.
4 March 1912 and six days thereafter, One Ton Depot, Cherry-Garrard’s Dog Party look for Scott and his men
The checklist is sobering:
– The dog expert Meares is in fact going home, ‘recalled by family affairs’.23
– The still seriously scurvy-stricken Teddy Evans is shortly to be sent back to England on Terra Nova.
– Dr Atkinson is busy nursing Teddy.
That leaves … the young and enthusiastic Oxford graduate Apsley Cherry-Garrard, along with Demetri and two teams of dogs, to head out into the wilderness to One Ton Depot, 140 miles south of Hut Point, and possibly further, to meet up with Scott’s returning party and help them get home. No matter that in his whole life Cherry-Garrard has ‘never driven one dog, let alone a team of them’24 and is no expert on navigation. It has to be him as, effectively, he is the last man left standing.
Just where this meeting point with Scott may lie is nigh on impossible to predict, dependent as it is on the Southern Party’s rate of progress, unknown since the return of Evans’s final support party. Matters have been further confused by Scott’s lack of clear instructions to the respective returning parties regarding where he is expecting the Dog Party to get to. He has not even been totally clear as to just whose responsibility it is to get a new supply of dog food to One Ton Depot, so that this Dog Party, when it gets there, can easily keep going further south to the Mt Hooper Depot and even beyond. All is confused.
Still, it is hoped that Scott and his men will be somewhere in the area around One Ton Depot, and before leaving Cape Evans Atkinson told Cherry-Garrard, ‘If Scott [has] not arrived at One Ton Depot before you, you must judge what to do.’25
So be it. Making his calculations based on the final support party’s rate of return, Cherry-Garrard has been straining his eyes the whole way on the reckoning that Scott and his men may already be north of One Ton Depot, and his fervent hope is to either see their ethereal figures emerge from the snowy sleet or, on a clear day, spot them as tiny specks in the distance.
Scanning … scanning … scanning. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
After eight days’ sledging in deteriorating conditions, Cherry-Garrard, Demetri and the dogs do indeed reach One Ton Depot on this day – in full-blown blizzard conditions – to find not only that Scott is not there but also that he and his men have not yet been there. That can only mean they remain somewhere to their south, between here and the South Pole.
What to do? The situation is now delicate. Cherry-Garrard and Demetri have hauled a maximum sledging load for that time of the year: food for the men themselves for 21 days; food for the dogs for 24 days; and a further two weeks of supplies for the Scott party, including fuel and requested delicacies. It is this amount of dog food, though, that is the most telling factor in the decision Cherry-Garrard must make, as, amid all of Scott’s confused instructions, the bottom line is that One Ton Depot holds not one crumb of a dog biscuit.
The mathematics of it get even more grim as the blizzard closes in for four of the next six days, as they deplete the supplies they do have. It is still possible to keep going a bit further south for a day or so, even if, in the conditions, it would be difficult and they would risk missing the Southern Party coming the other way. Still, unaware of Scott’s abominable situation some 65 miles south of Mt Hooper Depot at this very time, it certainly does not appear to be a matter of extreme urgency that he do so. In fact, Cherry-Garrard recalls Scott mentioning on the outward journey that his party held sufficient supplies to be able to return to Hut Point on full rations as late as 27 March or even early April. And didn’t Scott also say – reiterated in Atkinson’s instructions before they left – that the purpose of the Dog Party is only to speed the Southern Party home, rather than ‘succour’ them?
Following Scott’s instructions to protect the worn-out dogs for the following season, Cherry-Garrard even increases their daily rations as a way of combatting the unseasonal and extreme cold that sees the temperature plummet to minus 40 degrees. He still has nine days of dog food in hand, and so Cherry-Garrard must finally give an answer to the question to which Atkinson has instructed him to apply his judgement: go on or hold on one more day at One Ton Depot and return on the remaining eight days of food?26 Kill one of the dogs for food, to give them the capacity to go even further south? After wrestling with the dilemma for some time, Cherry-Garrard finally takes decisive action …
6 March 1912, 65 miles south of Mt Hooper Depot, Scott’s Southern Party struggle on
‘God help us, we can’t keep up this pulling, that is certain,’ Scott has written in his journal. ‘Amongst ourselves we are unendingly cheerful, but what each man feels in his heart I can only guess. Pulling on foot gear in the morning is getter slower and slower, therefore every day more dangerous.’27
Now, three days later, Scott recognises that their situation has moved beyond desperate – it is critical. Even as they manage to struggle just over six miles forward, the witches’ tempest shrieks with no sign of abatement.
No one is more affected than Lawrence Oates, who by now has such a swollen, frostbitten and blackened left foot that he has to slit his finnesko up the front to allow it on. Oates’s greatest hero, of course, is Napoleon Bonaparte, and just as the French emperor had so famously lost all but 40,000 of the 450,000 soldiers who invaded Russia in the summer of 1812 only to still be caught there in that cruel winter, Oates is now experiencing what so many of those soldiers experienced: trying to get back to safety, clumping forward through a frozen wasteland, undernourished, over-frozen and forever teetering on total collapse.
And though there is little Uncle Bill can do for him, the good doctor doesn’t stop trying, so much so that Scott grows concerned over dear Bill’s self-sacrifice. Oates’s parlous condition means he is now unable to pull the sledge, yet the Soldier marches on, only stopping to sit on the sledge while the others search for the track. His condition is coming to resemble that of the tragic Taffy shortly before he died, and they all know it.
Scott writes, ‘If we were all fit I should have hopes of getting through, but the poor Soldier has become a terrible hindrance, though he does his utmost and suffers much I fear.’28
Scott realises that, truly, their only hope is that the dogs have been to Mt Hooper to replenish supplies there, most particularly oil, because without that they are extremely unlikely to pull through.
Whatever happens, though, ‘I should like to keep the track to the end.’29
6 March 1912, London, Kathleen Scott hears the news …
Wonderful! Kathleen Scott can barely believe it is true, but an unending series of phone calls from reporters are the cause of her joy. A rumour has started circulating that Captain Scott has become the first man to conquer the South Pole and has arrived back at base safely! Does Mrs Scott know anything? No, she does not, but surely such a rumour must be based on something, mustn’t it? Surely confirmation will arrive shortly? When no confirmation does come, she decides to rein in her joy until such times as it does. But still nothing.
The day passes and the phone calls slow … 30
7 March 1912, Cape Evans, Terra Nova gets ready to leave without Scott and his men
It is time to go. The acting commander in Scott’s absence, the still seriously scurvy-stricken Teddy Evans, is brought aboard Terra Nova. In the exact path of Shackleton before him back in 1903, Evans is to be invalided home. In his absence, Atch Atkinson – who has closely attended Teddy since his dire return from the south – officially assumes command.
With the pack ice starting to close in, Terra Nova reluctantly turns north for Lyttelton without Scott’s polar party, while also abandoning Campbell’s Northern Party to their fate at Evans Cove, north of the Drygalski Ice Tongue. (Twice over the last month, Terra Nova tried to break through the pack ice and twice she failed. The crew simply have to hope that the Wicked Mate and his men will be able to get through the winter on their own and perhaps make their own way back to Cape Evans in the next spring.31)
It is a pity that Terra Nova is not able to take either party back, but on the other hand there is, really, concern only for the Wicked Mate’s party and not for Scott’s. For while the Wicked Mate and his men are going to have adapt to the unforeseen circumstance of not being relieved, as far as anyone knows Scott’s party is still on track and on time.
7 March 1912, Hobart, Amundsen arrives aboard Fram
Early this morning, a little the worse for wear, an unidentified barquentine enters the Derwent River under power. In due course, she responds to the Mt Nelson signal station: she be Fram, come back from deep within the Antarctic Circle, from out of the Bay of Whales in the Ross Sea. News out, the crowd gathering by the docks are soon disappointed, as Fram drops anchor in splendid isolation some distance off Battery Point.
Once Amundsen arrives on shore by launch, the members of the press gang, who gather like baby chicks around a mother hen, are also let down. In the manner of so many explorers who have a contract for exclusive rights with a major newspaper – in this case, it is with London’s Daily Chronicle for £2000 – Amundsen refuses to answer any questions regarding his farthest south and whether or not his party have claimed the coveted crown.
‘Please do not bring in the Pole, but say rather when I got so near to the Antarctic regions, which I had already visited, I felt I must make another voyage there before turning to the northwards,’ dictates the ‘dour Norse sea king’, appearing to believe his own press.32
Faithful to his contract he may be, ‘but the “Silence is Golden” puts a very sordid aspect upon the heroism of exploration,’ writes a nonplussed Hobart Mercury reporter.33
What Amundsen does say is that he is keenly interested in Mawson’s expedition and that, from what he has heard, the Australian would make a ‘clever leader and that the expedition should have valuable and interesting results’.34
Like Shackleton, Amundsen has also sworn his crew to silence, and soon the Chief is whisked away to the Norwegian consul’s residence, from where he sends the scoop, in a typically coded, brief cable to his brother Leon at home in Norway. Feverishly decoded by Leon, it proves to read: ‘Ja! – Pole attained fourteenth–seventeenth December 1911. All well.’35
As Leon knows, the most important thing now is to first inform the King, before letting the press and the rest of the world know.
Alas, alas, initially in London there is confusion, and the first of the newspaper banners shrieks, ‘SCOTT AT SOUTH POLE – BRILLIANT VICTORY’.36 Then come the first of the garbled corrections, the cables saying: Amundsen arrived South Pole, states Scott has reached the pole. In her home, Kathleen Scott is besieged by newspaper reporters, all with their own versions of those cables, but this time she refuses to let herself go. Such cables are worthless, she says, as they are unsigned, and they would only make themselves and their papers ridiculous by publishing them.
‘But they heeded me not and published far and wide,’ she confides to the detailed diary she has been keeping so her husband, when he returns, can know all of her and young Peter’s life without him.37 The day becomes a pandemonium of telegrams, phone calls, visitors and insistent reporters trying to get a comment out of her. Wary, and worried, she refuses to respond, simply sending a short note to The Times and The Morning Post, saying she has no reason to believe such reports. The best she can, she tries to concentrate on completing a bust of her friend, Aubrey Waterfield.
And then, the denouement. A worldwide exclusive, simultaneously shared by The Daily Chronicle in London and The New York Times, flashes the true news of Amundsen’s historic success:
AMUNDSEN REACHES THE SOUTH POLE; STAYS FOUR DAYS, DEC. 14 TO 17, PARTY ALL WELL HE TELLS THE NEW YORK TIMES.38
‘Captain Amundsen has attained the geographical South Pole, the long sought for spot, and that finishes record breaking as far as the ends of the earth are concerned,’ writes Shackleton in an exclusive article for the same paper.
‘The whole world has been discovered,’ enthuses the paper itself.
The news is like a flaming comet, and as one the planet gravitates towards it with eyes ablaze. Nowhere in the heavens nor on earth is the news more passionately celebrated than in Norway, where one paper joyously proclaims, ‘NORWAY’S FLAG AT THE SOUTH POLE. Today, town and country put out all flags. We are all Roald Amundsen’s fellow countrymen,’ and the rhyme in an Oslo variety theatre runs:
With regard to Scott, the English-language press’s initial stoical optimism – maybe he has actually beaten Amundsen to the Pole or arrived simultaneously? – soon gives way to the realisation that the glorious crown of being the first to reach the Pole (either north or south, for that matter) will never be worn by an Englishman. At least they could focus on the considerable contribution Scott’s party will have made to the advancement of science.
‘England will wait most anxiously for news of the Scott expedition,’ opines the Chicago Daily Tribune.40
When news of Amundsen’s success reaches Kathleen Scott’s ears, the explorer’s wife is immediately thrown into a state of shock and despair. Mrs Scott has long harboured a distinct dislike of Amundsen, and Shackleton’s public recognition of the Norwegian’s success provokes her to privately exclaim of the disloyal Anglo-Irishman that she would ‘willingly assist at that man’s annihilation’.41
Where, oh where, is her husband now?
9 March 1912, Mt Hooper Depot, Scott’s Southern Party discover the wrong kind of broken seal
After the most bitter pulling of their lives, pushing their exhausted and starving bodies far beyond the limits they were previously aware of, Scott, Bowers, Wilson and Oates make it to the Mt Hooper Depot. Their most earnest hope is to see a support party waiting for them with dogs, or even that the depot has been resupplied, but … there is … nothing.
The depot is there, just as they left it in mid-November, but that is all. That is all! The only thing leavening their grievous desperation at finding their dreams dashed is that it is at least something to have made it to this repository of food and fuel, and eagerly they scrabble the snow away to find that … much of the fuel has evaporated. Again, the problem is possibly some kind of inadequate lid seal or defect in the tin seams. It is now more unlikely than ever that they can make it to One Ton Depot, 77 miles away, and if Scott is not mistaken, this is a death warrant, perhaps for them all, but certainly for Oates.
He writes in his journal that evening, ‘Things steadily downhill, Oates’s foot worse. He has rare pluck and must know that he can never get through.’42
That, Titus does – almost.
The Soldier nevertheless has just enough of the spark of life left in him to ask Bill Wilson on this night in the gasping, whispery wisp of a voice of one who is likely not long for this world whether Uncle Bill thinks he has any chance of living.
Wilson looks at him, considers it and decides to lie.
‘I do not know,’ he says simply, but with great compassion.43
But Scott does, for he has overheard the conversation and now writes in his journal, baldly:
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. At the same time of course poor Titus is the greatest handicap. He keeps us waiting in the morning until we have partly lost the warming effect of our good breakfast, when the only wise policy is to be up and away at once … Poor chap! It is too pathetic to watch him; one cannot but try to cheer him up.44
They now, really, have only two chances left of survival. The first is that they make it to One Ton Depot. This is an unlikely prospect, such terrible condition are they in, but one they must try for. And the second is that a relief party is on its way to them, with dogs and food and fuel …
11 March 1912 and several weeks thereafter, Cape Denison, Mawson and his men send signals
In terms of major infrastructure to install at Cape Denison, what remains are the two tall wireless masts at a far enough distance away from the huts that if they are blown over they will not come crashing down upon it.
It requires some serious grunt and engineering. Each mast has four segments, and each of those segments needs to be secured with ten stout ‘strops’ of rope anchored into hard rock to hold it against a wind that always wants to flatten it, like everything else above ice level. The problem is that the work to raise those segments can only be done in comparatively calm weather, which is rare, and …
And what is that?
What is what?
That … silence. Every now and then, there is a lull in the all-but-ceaseless roar of the wind, and it always stuns the men. Charles Laseron records:
Our ear-drums commence to throb as with a great noise. Somebody speaks and his voice cracks like a whip on the stillness. For the wind has stopped, and, accustomed as we are to its howl, the silence can literally be felt. For a while we speak almost in whispers, our heads are ringing and we feel very uncomfortable.45
But hasten!
For with every rare lull in the roar, there is a mad dash in the hut as everyone rushes to put on their Burberrys, gloves, balaclavas and beanies, and shortly thereafter the hut disgorges through the veranda exit ‘a crowd of muffled figures … dragging ropes, blocks, picks, and shovels’.46 Within minutes, all hands are employed, ‘collecting rocks as weights, boring holes in the hard rock, or digging foundations for the masts themselves’.47
In a radius of 80 yards around where the two masts will stand, ice holes are dug. Cairns of heavy boulders are gathered as the men use dynamite to blast deep holes to hold each lowest section of mast – a ten-inch-square, 30-foot-long piece of Oregon timber.48 The three higher sections than this are also 30 feet long, though progressively thinner, and if all goes well the masts will get to 120 feet high – but there remains a lot of work to do, and freezing work it is, frequently causing the nip of frostbite.
Always, the men return to the hut with great relief. It is unimaginable, horrifying to even think of, what it would be like to be caught out in such temperatures without a warm shelter to retreat to.
11 March 1912, Great Ice Barrier, Scott’s Southern Party face the toughest choice
Finally, Scott wheedles out of Wilson the easiest way to solve all their problems. It turns out that in his old friend’s medical kit there are sufficient opium tablets to put them all to sleep, painlessly, forever.
At Scott’s insistence, the extremely reluctant and deeply religious Wilson – for whom taking one’s own life is a sin – gives Scott, Bowers and Oates 30 tablets each.
Should they find themselves near the point of death, unable to stand it any more, with no further point in suffering needlessly, then these tablets will make it easy for them. For himself, Wilson keeps a vial of morphine handy. This will not kill him, but at least it will ease the pain.
If the blizzard stops, and if the party can quickly get going again, they still have an outside chance of getting to One Ton Depot, which Scott calculates as now being 63 miles away. At best, he estimates, they can make seven miles a day … but they have food and fuel for only seven days – bringing them up 14 miles short. They need a miracle. They really do need to see men with dogs coming their way, bearing supplies and help.
12 March 1912, Hobart, Captain Davis has a homecoming of sorts
Shortly after noon, Aurora, under the tight control of Davis, steams up the Derwent River, passing Fram still lying at her anchorage in Sandy Bay. Having been informed by the pilot of Amundsen’s success, as Aurora passes Fram, 16 years her junior, the ship from the Mawson expedition dips her flags in a show of respect, as a proud mother might honour the success of her child. Still not content, Davis and his crew crowd the deck and offer three mighty cheers for Fram, Amundsen and his brave crew, who have won the honour of being first to the Pole.
Aurora makes fast to the pier (with only nine tons of coal left in her hold – the equivalent of the smell of an oily rag for the ship’s engine) and, once ashore, Captain Davis continues to honour Amundsen’s victory. He tells the Mercury:
I was surprised to hear that the Fram was in Hobart but was very pleased to hear that Captain Amundsen had returned safely, having reached the South Pole. Those who have followed his previous work will probably not have been at all surprised at his success. We are anxiously waiting news of Captain Scott, and we hope that he also will return with a full measure of success.49
Meanwhile, cables have continued to pour in from all parts of the globe congratulating Amundsen and his men on their achievement, including ones from the Royal Geographical Society and the former president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt. Now, for the first time in the history of Hobart, two mighty and pugnacious polar vessels belonging to separate Antarctic expeditions are in the port. Time to celebrate!
13 March 1912, Western Base, Frank Wild and his men break the ice
Since having been dropped off by Aurora three weeks earlier, Wild and his men have devoted all their energy to getting themselves established, and that is precisely what they are doing on this early morning. After having breakfast at 6 am, they get to work putting up the masts to hold their antenna and by 8.30 am are just getting them into position when …
When before their eyes another huge chunk of the ice shelf on which they have made their home, on which their entire existence depends, calves off, and, with a resounding roar, many thousands of tons of it fall into the ocean. ‘The tremendous waves raised by the fall of this mass smash into fragments all the floe left in the bay’50 and take away the snow hill they have been using to get up and down the cliffs from their hut to the shore and back, meaning they will have no further chance to hunt seals and penguins. All that remains between them and the water is ‘a perpendicular cliff, sixty to one hundred feet above the water’,51 and their old landing place has been completely obliterated. It is, notes Wild in his diary, ‘a rather serious matter’.52 Quite.
The only good thing? The ice on which they have built their home is still there. But it is a worry all right.
Somewhere, surely, Captain Davis is stirring restlessly, his worst nightmare barely averted, this time …
13 March 1912, Hobart, Captain Grumpy meets a happy man
The following day, Captain Davis boards Fram to pay his personal respects to Amundsen and is mightily impressed. ‘After seeing the Fram, and her equipment,’ he shortly afterwards tells the Examiner, ‘it was easy to understand why Captain Amundsen returned successful. Every little detail had been thought out with the greatest care.’53
Returning the honour, Amundsen goes to lunch aboard Aurora, where Captain Davis, following the flavour of the day, toasts Amundsen’s victory. Amundsen responds by saying that he has a keen interest in the success of Mawson’s expedition and is glad that things have got off to a good start.
He has nothing but high praise for Davis’s ‘splendid’ seamanship in successfully completing all he has had to do and for Aurora’s seaworthiness in accomplishing this.
To back up his words, responding to Mawson’s request, Amundsen arranges to transfer 21 of his fine-looking Greenland dogs, including one that accompanied Amundsen to the Pole, to the quarantine station to be picked up by Aurora on her relief journey to Antarctica.
15 March 1912, Great Ice Barrier, Cherry-Garrard and Demetri … head back to base
For Cherry-Garrard, five days earlier it had begun with a simple cry of ‘Hut, hut’, a sharp flick of the whip and a nod to Demetri. And with that they had started their trip … back to Cape Evans.
After long consideration, Cherry-Garrard has decided to return to Winter Quarters and trust that Scott’s party – which includes his leader, Scott, his mentor, Bill Wilson, and good friend Birdie Bowers – will be all right.
It had been a particularly brutal last few days. The dogs, as wild as the weather, had started fighting among each other, the weather turned blank with blizzard and night temperatures continued to languish at around minus 30 degrees. Demetri’s health further deteriorated, and they lost their way in the thick fog and began to ‘turn circles’.
Still they had kept going, however, and – after recovering from the fright of being lost – now that Cherry-Garrard is just approaching those Winter Quarters he is relieved. He hoped to be returning with the Scott party, of course, but he is not worried over the decision he has made not to go in further search of them.
There was no particular reason to have concerns about Captain Scott’s Southern Party, and his primary duty has been to ensure the safety of Demetri and himself. Had the two gone on further to the south in search of the others, they would have cut into their precious few supplies, in any case, and it was Cherry-Garrard’s view that it would be better to leave the entire two weeks of provisions, including treats, at One Ton Depot for Scott and his men, and head back to the sanctuary of Hut Point.
Now, with one final drive, they force the spent dogs through the white wall towards the refuge, and once inside the safety of Winter Quarters at last they recount their journey and go to bed. None of the other men in the hut is concerned about the Scott party either.
15 March 1912 and the day thereafter, 32 miles south of One Ton Depot, beware the ides of March
For two weeks now, Oates has been bravely marching on feet in such terrible condition that every step causes crippling pain. His time of pulling the sledges is long gone. With one foot badly swollen, black and gangrenous, he limps and staggers rather than marches and is all but done in, trailing behind like a broken-down Frankenstein’s monster, a spectre of their worst nightmare at their heels. For he is what they fear they will become.
And though the rest of them are in a much better condition than Oates, all intuitively understand that if he can no longer walk, it is out of the question for them to put him on the sledge and drag him, for even if he were the lightest of the party – and not the heaviest, as he is – they are simply not strong enough. Yes, he is at the end of his tether, but to have him at the end of their tether would be a certain death warrant for them all.
What then?
When asked while at Cape Evans before setting out what should a man do if he has become a burden to his mates, Oates unequivocally replied that the party should carry a pistol for just such an occasion, and ‘if anyone breaks down he should have the privilege of using it’.54
But, of course, now Oates has no pistol, and at lunch on 15 March, after they have marched all morning into an unrelenting northerly wind at a temperature of minus 37 degrees, Oates tells Scott he can go no further and that he wishes to be left behind in his sleeping bag.
Scott is, surely, sorely tempted to accede to the request. Without Oates, they will not have anyone holding them back, and all of their own food intake can increase by a third. As it is, however, Scott, Bowers and Wilson unanimously urge Oates to soldier on the best he can.
That night in the tent, at much the same spot on the Barrier where Oates so strongly argued with Scott that One Ton Depot should be situated, at 80 degrees south, the Soldier withdraws into himself, barely able to utter a word. Nevertheless, he does briefly rouse himself to give Wilson his diary, asking him to take it to his mother and to tell her that she is the only woman he has ever loved.
And also tell her that he is sorry he couldn’t write her a last note, but his frostbitten fingers prevent it. Oates furthermore speaks briefly but fondly of his regiment, hoping that they will remember him well.
Scott knows that this brave soul has not got long:
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.55
That night, his condition so deteriorates that Oates hopes he will expire in his sleep. Alas, the brave Soldier awakens the next morning to the same tragedy, the same entirely hopeless situation.
In the tent, it is minus 40 degrees. Outside, in the howling blizzard, it is surely another 20 degrees colder. No one speaks, as that would require energy they do not have, and, besides that, there is nothing really to say. The others do note, however, some feeble movement from the direction of Oates’s sleeping bag, as the Soldier struggles first to extract himself and then to get himself into a crawling position, without bothering to put his boots on over his grotesquely swollen sock-clad feet.
Clambering over their outstretched legs, he painfully moves towards the tent flap, manages to wobble to his feet and then looks back to the others before speaking his first words of the morning: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’56
…
With that, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates lets himself out from the tent57 and goes forth … and within minutes he is no more. This brave soldier is just one day shy of both his 32nd birthday and the second anniversary of the day he received the cable from Scott telling him he has been successful in his application to join the expedition.58
The men who remain behind are overwhelmed with a mixture of emotions.
Scott honours him with warm words:
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.59
For his part, Wilson would subsequently take the time to write a heartfelt letter to Oates’s beloved mother, Caroline:
Dear Mrs Oates,
This is a sad ending to our undertaking. Your son died a very noble death, God Knows. I have never seen or heard of such courage as he showed from first to last with his feet both badly frostbitten – never a word or sign of complaint or of the pain. He was a great example.
… if ever a man died like a noble soul and in a Christian spirit your son did – Our whole journey’s record is clean and though disastrous – has no shadow over it. He died like a man and a soldier without a word of regret or complaint except that he hadn’t written to you at the last, but the cold has been intense and I fear we have all of us left writing alone until it is almost too late to attempt anything but the most scrappy notes.
God comfort you in your loss.
Yours sincerely,
E A Wilson60
Once the blizzard lifts later that day, though the wind blows at force four and the temperature remains at minus 35 degrees, it is time for them to move on once more. When they emerge from the tent, of course they look for some sign of Oates – he cannot have got far – but there is no clue. No doubt his body will have been covered by snowdrift. In any case, finding him is beside the point. He is dead, and they must try to live. They must move as quickly as they can.
Carefully, they offload Oates’s sleeping bag, a camera and their theodolite, so as to reduce weight. At Wilson’s special request, they are sure, however, not to leave behind the 35 pounds of rock specimens containing the fossilised remains, as he judges them to be of great scientific significance.
18 March 1912, Cape Denison, with Mawson and his men, as the heavens play opening night
While the coming winter brings terrible travails, some compensation is provided by the fact that it also brings scenes of unimagined beauty. Even during blizzards and fierce winds, for the most part the sky remains clear, and many is the night they are able to see, in all its glory, aurora australis, the stunning light-show in the northern skies.
‘These were the nights,’ Mawson records, ‘when “curtains” hung festooned in the heavens, alive, rippling, dancing to the lilt of lightning music.’61
As wonderful as these spectacles are, however, the gasps of awe coming from onlookers in polar climes is not their only effect on earth. When the show is at its height, such disparate things as the edges of helmets, the corners of boxes and the ends of mitts begin to glow with a pale blue light, which sometimes works itself all the way up into a small electric shock.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more marked than down in the Magnetograph Hut, where at the height of the aurora event the nightwatchman finds the edges and wire stays of the screen outlined in a fashion reminiscent of a pyrotechnic display. The exact cause of it all is not obvious, only that it is connected to the aurora, and that when that phenomenon is occurring, there are ‘magnetic storms’ here on earth.
In normal circumstances, the dip on the vertical compass attached to the magnetograph points down at an angle of about 87 degrees, though that varies day by day and even minute by minute by as much as a degree – all of it recorded on the revolving drum. And yet, as the veils of the aurora rise and fall to the horizons, so too does the magnetograph suddenly flicker wildly, like the metronome on a piano keeping time to this visual melody from the heavens.
19 March 1912 and a week thereafter, Great Ice Barrier, the final days of Scott’s Southern Party
Despite extreme exhaustion and the woeful weather, over the two days since losing Oates, Scott’s party make one last-ditch effort and travel a little over 20 miles until they arrive at a point where they simply cannot go on, as a blizzard closes in and they must stop or die in their tracks. Now, they are just 11 geographical miles62 away from the supplies stored at One Ton Depot the previous February and replenished several times since. But when they wake the following morning, the blizzard has not abated even a jot. If anything, it has become fiercer. Scott’s attitude at this point is a curious mixture of refusal to give in and fatalism as to the inevitable result. ‘We have decided to die naturally in the track,’ writes Scott.63
Scott’s feet, his pride just two days ago, are gone – with his right foot so horrifying that, even if he does make it back, it will have to be amputated. By this day, 20 March, they have just two days of food left, and the day after just enough fuel to make two cups of tea apiece. In short, lying in their tiny tent in the middle of the white desert, as the very heavens rage at their existence, it is becoming ever more obvious: they have shot their bolt. On 22 and 23 March, the blizzard is as bad as ever, the fuel is gone and the food might as well be.
Around this time, Bill Wilson writes to the woman whose memory has warmed his soul for months – if not his freezing body now – his beloved wife, Oriana: ‘Birdie and I are going to try and reach the Depot 11 miles north of us and return to this tent where Captain Scott is lying with a frozen foot.’ Wilson continues, saying that if he does not make it:
I shall simply fall and go to sleep in the snow, and I have your little books with me in my breast pocket … Don’t be unhappy – all is for the best. We are playing a good part in the great scheme arranged by God Himself, and all is well … I am only sorry I couldn’t have seen your loving letters, and Mother’s and Dad’s and the Smiths’, and all the happy news I had hoped to see – but all these things are easily seen later, I expect … God be with you – my love is as living for you as ever … We will all meet after death, and death has no terrors … We have done what we thought was best. My own dear wife, good-bye for the present … I do not cease to pray for you – to the very last …64
Still the blizzard rages, though, and Wilson finally does write to his parents:
Dear old Dad and Mother,
The end has come and with it an earnest looking forward to the day when we shall all meet together in the hereafter. Death has no terrors for me. I am only sorry for my beloved Ory and for all of you dear people, but it is God’s will and all is for the best. Our record is clear and we have struggled against very heavy odds to the bitter end – two of the 5 of us are already dead and we three are nearly done up. Scott’s foot is badly frostbitten so that he can scarcely walk. Dear old home folks how I love you all and how I have loved to think of you all – bless you. I have had a very happy life and I look forward to a very happy life hereafter when we shall all be together again. God knows I have no fear in meeting Him – for He will be merciful to all of us. My poor Ory may or may not have long to wait – I am so sorry for her. However we have done all for the best believing in His guidance and we have both believed that whatever is, is His will, and in that faith I am prepared to meet Him and leave all you loved ones in His care till His own time is fulfilled.
Now God be with you all,
Your own loving Ted.65
Despite Wilson’s ongoing hope that the blizzard will abate long enough to allow them to make a push on One Ton, such are the conditions, and so overwhelming is their weakness that another attempt to sally forth is simply not possible. The good man, Wilson, thus summons his last ounces of strength to write a final note to his beloved Oriana:
I leave this life in absolute faith and happy belief that if God wishes you to wait long without me it will be to some good purpose. All is for the best to those that love God and oh, my Ory, we have both loved Him all our lives. All is well … All the things I had hoped to do with you after the expedition are as nothing now, but there are greater things for us to do in the world to come … One of my notes will surely reach you.
All is well.66
26 March 1912 and four days thereafter, Corner Camp, Atch nearly gets it right
In the continued absence of the Scott party, it is decided that a search party needs to be sent. Taking 18 days’ worth of provisions on their man-hauling sledge, Atch Atkinson and Patrick Keohane set off, into a howling gale and temperatures of minus 40 degrees. By the time they reach Corner Camp, both men are stunned by how difficult the going is. The terrible weather, bitter cold and approaching winter make further progress south impossible. Besides which, there is no point.
Though he doesn’t say anything to Keohane, in his own mind Atkinson is ‘morally certain that the [Scott] party had perished’.67
29 March 1912, 12.5 miles from One Ton Depot, Scott writes in his diary for the final time …
In that tiny tent, in that raging blizzard, the last flicker of life is at last … finally and forevermore … extinguished.
Scott’s last diary entry, 29 March 1912, ends with these words:
Every day we have been ready to start for our depot, 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.
For God’s sake look after our people.68