Terra Incognita (23 page)

‘They chose the site in complete darkness,' I said, instinctively springing to their defence.

They had built a kind of igloo out of stones, about seven feet in diameter. Most of it had been carried off by the wind, but a ring of stones about ten inches high had survived. ‘This is the House that Cherry Built,' an anonymous contributor had written in the
South Polar Times
, their expedition newspaper. It went on,

The interior of the shelter was covered with snow, and through it poked a small wooden crate and a pair of frozen socks. People told me these items had belonged to Cherry, Bowers and Wilson, but I was sceptical about that. It was blowing so hard that in order to walk forward we had to mould ourselves into the wind. I found the small entrance in the crumbling wall of the shelter, lay down and closed my eyes.

Cherry had prepared to die as he lay there. He did not rue the past; he said only that he wanted those years over again. The comradeship between the three men never faltered, even at the worst moments. Cherry exults in the dignity with which they emerged from their ordeal. ‘We did not forget the please and the thank you,' he wrote. ‘I'll swear there was still a grace about us when we staggered in. And we kept our tempers, even with God.' People have said that this is an easy thing to write, after the event, especially when no one is alive to gainsay it. This may be so – but Cherry's prose sings with conviction. Lying in the remains of his shelter, I felt something approaching awe, as he had taught me so much. From him I had seen that it was possible to do anything two ways, whether a five-week dance with death or an hour-long business meeting. You could do it with dignity and loving kindness, keeping your temper with God, or with ambition, self-interest and greed, allowing the world to sweep you away like an Antarctic wind. It was a simple choice. As he said, there were no promises attached – the effort brought its own rewards. I had made myself believe I could get to Cape Crozier, as he had done, but what mattered was ‘the response of the spirit'. It is surely the same whatever your personal Crozier – summiting without oxygen, building a garden shed, telling someone you love them.

The crewman and pilot leapt over the low wall and landed on top of me.

‘Bit cramped in here, with three,' the crewman shouted over the wind. Indeed. Cherry's party had bulky reindeer sleeping bags to contend with, too, and the stove. One night a glob of boiling blubber had sizzled from the stove and landed in Wilson's eye. He was temporarily blinded, and in excruciating pain. Needless to say, they were dangerously underfed. ‘Night after night', Cherry wrote, ‘I bought big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield station.'

‘Let's go,' said the pilot, jumping up. ‘We've got a sustained twenty-five knots here and it's slicing through this gear like a knife.'

The manhauling winter journey to Crozier has been repeated once, though only one way. What Mike Stroud, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood accomplished when they pulled sledges to Crozier during the private Footsteps of Scott expedition in 1985 was a remarkable achievement. Mear, however, who went on to make an aborted attempt at a solo crossing of the continent a decade later, acknowledged in his book that the trip had been dominated by tensions and hostility. ‘We came out of it anxious and hurt,' he wrote. So Cherry had been right. For him, what counted was ‘the response of the spirit', but we are living in an age which doesn't give a fig about the spirit, an age fatally compromised by ambition and worldly success. Cherry knew, somehow, that the men who walked in his footsteps wouldn't be interested in ‘gold, pure, shining, unalloyed' companionship. It seemed unbearably sad.

When Mear and his companions returned to their Cape Evans hut, a twelve-pound tin of strawberries exploded and could easily have killed them. Imagine doing all that and being killed by a strawberry.

∗

Bill Wilson, who went south with Scott on both the
Discovery
and the
Terra Nova
expeditions, was the leader of the Crozier trek. He was a deeply religious man, even a mystic. That he was called by God, he had no doubt. This is an extract from one of his poems.

Wilson was a doctor, a naturalist and an accomplished artist; a renaissance man. He admired Ruskin, and had a volume of Tennyson's poems in his pocket on the last sledging journey. He had Scott's ear, so he was a natural confidant for the men. As the great southern journey grew nearer, an increasing number of them came to him with their grievances, whether against Scott, other colleagues or the world in general. ‘My goodness!' he wrote, ‘I had hours of it yesterday; as though I was a bucket and it was poured into me.' Yet back at home he found normal social intercourse so difficult that he confided to his diary that he took sedatives before going to parties, and one of his biographers wrote that it required far more courage for him to face an audience than to cross a crevasse.

Everything served a grand purpose for Wilson and was a component of an embracing and harmonious philosophy. Art functioned to help science, which in turn enhanced faith. He was an ascetic. Between expeditions he wrote to his wife from somewhere in England that he had begun to enjoy hotel dinners and to prefer hot water to cold, and that it was a bad sign.

Many people are mystified by Wilson. After their first meeting, Mawson noted in his diary, ‘I did not like Dr Wilson.' While I was having lunch with Roland Huntford in Cambridge, he put down his knife and fork on the long table in the dining hall smelling of boiled cauliflower and said, ‘I can't
stand
Wilson.' Mike Stroud, one of the three who repeated the Winter Journey in 1985, once told me, ‘Wilson's books are so strange. He was a very odd bloke. I don't know what to make of him.' Robert Graves said he had wanted to put Wilson into his autobiography
Goodbye to All That
, but couldn't find space. The two met in 1909 and Graves was much tickled by the story of a penguin who tried to mate with Wilson, though in fact all the bird did was drop a stone at his feet, which is quite a long way from mating, though perhaps not to a penguin.

In the south Wilson experienced the peace which passes all understanding. He spent the happiest times in the crow's nest, communing with his God together (as he felt) with his beloved wife Ory. Towards the end he appears already to have worked himself beyond the earthly plane. ‘This is the most fascinating ideal I think I ever imagined,' he wrote on the plateau, ‘to become entirely careless of your own soul or body in looking after the welfare of others.' If this is true – and I have no reason to suppose that it is not – Wilson must have overcome the most powerful of instincts: survival. In that case, it is not so surprising that he didn't survive.

Bowers, the third member of the team, was called Birdie because he had a beak nose. He was a peerless worker, indomitably cheerful, never felt the cold and shared, though to a lesser degree, Wilson's spirituality. That he had bought the fatal British prejudice concerning the moral virtues of dogless travel is revealed in a letter he wrote to Kathleen Scott. ‘After all, it will be a fine thing to do that plateau with man-haulage in these days of the supposed decadence of the British race.' He gave his horse, Victor, a last biscuit from his own ration before shooting him.

He was devoted to his mother, and wrote this in a letter to her from the south.

We arrived early to pick up the biologists, and sat down to eat our sandwiches. The skuas complained bitterly about this flagrant trespass. The sandwiches were peanut butter and jelly, a particularly American combination and very nasty indeed. The whole of the Cape Crozier area was characterised by the dull background roar of the Adélie colony – some 170,000 breeding pairs. The chicks were sixteen days old, about ten inches tall and very lively. From a distance they looked like grey puffballs.

The Kiwi beakers, who were monitoring the Adélie diet, came trudging up the hill carrying their buckets like children coming home from the beach.

‘Know what's in those buckets?' asked the crewman.

‘No,' I said.

‘Penguin vomit!' he announced triumphantly.

‘Krill
¹
dip, anyone?' shouted Bruce, the younger Kiwi. The pair of them had climbed into the helicopter when we first picked them up and begun chatting over the headsets as if they had known us all their lives. In fact, none of us had ever seen them before. They had a straightforward and pragmatic approach to whatever the day threw at them, and viewed the world with a healthy perspective that I had observed in many New Zealanders.

‘What exactly do you do to the penguins?' I asked dubiously over the headset after we had taken off.

‘Put catheters down their throats, introduce a little ambient temperature salt water and apply pressure to their abdomens,' said Jack cheerfully. He was the project leader. ‘They throw up pretty quickly.'

Hardly surprising, I thought. The crew made gagging noises.

‘What do you do with the vomit?' I continued in spite of myself.

‘Bottle it,' said Jack. ‘And take it back to New Zealand to have a closer look. Or sell it as chutney.'

When we landed at Cape Bird, everyone agreed that we should shut down and climb out for a turn on the cape.

The wind had carved the band of twisted ice fastened to the shore into a series of apocalyptic shapes, and the Adélies waddled among them like spectators at an art exhibition.

‘There's between thirty and forty thousand breeding pairs here,' said Bruce, ‘and see how well they blend in with the environment.' It was true – they melted into the snow-streaked black volcanic rock. Penguins were everywhere. Antarctica was the antithesis of the jungle or the rainforest, where everything burgeoned and mutated and thousands of species and tens of thousands of subspecies co-existed. (I remembered fungus forming on my rucksack in the Amazon Basin as quickly as ice did in the south.) As the biologist David Campbell wrote in
The Crystal Desert
, ‘A paucity of species but an abundance of individuals is a recurring evolutionary motif in polar areas.'

Everything was so simple in Antarctica. Even the food chain was simple. Phytoplankton, the primary producers, took light and made matter. Phytoplankton were eaten by krill, and krill were eaten by everything else.

Bruce, a man of Pickwickian geniality and an alarming orange beard, was showing off his new electronic weighbridge over which a sub-colony of Adélies were obliged to strut on their passage to the sea. The parents took it in turns to swim out, swallow a meal and return to regurgitate it to their offspring. There was a good deal of argument over it all. When a leopard seal began his late afternoon patrol hundreds of penguins porpoising through the water shot out vertically as if propelled by a tightly coiled spring. After landing, they shook themselves off as if they hadn't expected to land quite so soon. The water, reflecting the pearly silver blues of the sky, was thick with drifting pack, and suddenly the dark arched backs of a large pod of killer whales appeared, proceeding with rhythmic perfection in front of the cape. It was an identical scene to that of Herbert Ponting's finest hour, when, not far from this spot, he was apprehended on a floe by eight killer whales – but not until he had got the shots he wanted. He makes much of this episode in his book.

Ponting was the official photographer on the
Terra Nova
expedition, though he pressurised Scott to let him be called Camera Artist. Besides the famous stills of Scott writing purposefully at his desk in the Cape Evans hut and the ship perfectly framed by an ice cave, images now engraved on the national consciousness, Ponting shot a ‘kinematograph', or moving-picture film, and twenty years later reissued it with a commentary and soundtrack, calling it
Ninety Degrees South
. Teddy Evans appears at the beginning in front of a creased black curtain in full evening dress and, hands in pockets, plays with his balls for some minutes while introducing ‘Ponto', who slides into view resembling a large stuffed animal. What follows is a brilliant piece of film.

Ponting was a cold fish. He abandoned his wife, daughter and son to become a photographer, and never saw any of them again. Scott deplored his commercialism, and Ponting was always moaning that Scott had got the publicity wrong. In the south he irritated the others by asking them to pose all the time, like many photographers after him, and in later years never attended reunions. His prose is stiff and pompous, yet often revealing. ‘We felt like boys again,' he wrote, ‘and acted, too, like boys.'