A First Rate Tragedy (34 page)

The next day heralded tragedy. Scott’s diary for 16 February records: ‘A rather trying position. Evans has nearly broken down in brain, we think. He is absolutely changed from his normal self-reliant self. This morning and this afternoon he stopped the march on some trivial excuse.’ If this sounds unsympathetic it must be remembered that Scott was under great mental and physical strain. He probably also felt responsible for the poor state of his comrade and hence guilty. Oates’s verdict sounds equally callous: ‘It is an extraordinary thing about Evans, he has lost his guts and behaves like an old woman or worse,’ and yet Oates was the most popular officer among the men of the lower deck. Wilson’s verdict was that: ‘Evans’s 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.’

The next day they pressed on, hoping to make the depot, but it was ‘anxious work with the sick man’.
⁹
The crisis was about to break and it was, in Scott’s words, ‘a very terrible day’. Evans had slept well and prepared for the march, gamely declaring, as he always did, that he was fit and well. He took his place in the traces but within half an hour had to drop out because his ski shoes had
loosened. The others plodded on with the groaning sledge over a thick treacly surface. Evans slowly caught them up again and once more took his place. However, after half an hour he again dropped out and asked Bowers to lend him some string. Scott told Evans to catch up when he could and the seaman apparently answered him cheerfully.

Again the others continued to haul, anxious to reach the depot and sweating heavily. At lunchtime they sat and waited, expecting the lonely shambling figure of Evans to come into view. When he failed to appear they went to look for him and caught sight of him still some way behind. It was obvious something was wrong. Scott was the first to reach Evans and was shocked at his appearance: ‘He was on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten, and a wild look in his eyes.’ Asked what had happened he replied that he did not know but thought that he must have fainted. He could no longer walk and was showing signs of complete collapse. Oates remained with him while the others hurried to fetch the sledge. By the time they managed to get him into the tent he was comatose and died quietly that night without regaining consciousness. He had been out from Cape Evans for three and a half months and had marched over 1,200 miles. In his final letter to his wife he had written: ‘I am always thinking of you on this great ice platform ten thousand feet above the sea level.’
¹⁰

His shocked companions debated the cause of his death. They concluded that he had begun to weaken before reaching the Pole and that his downward spiral had been hastened by the discovery of his frostbitten fingers, his falls on the glacier and his loss of confidence. Wilson believed he must have injured his brain during a fall. Whatever the cause of their companion’s death it was a chilling moment for the four survivors, emphasizing their own vulnerability, with so many miles still to go. Yet at the same time
it was the solution to a horrible dilemma. As Scott commented, ‘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 . . . what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands at such a distance from home.’

Later on, when Scott knew that he himself was probably going to die, he wrote that Evans’s death had spared them a terrible decision since ‘the safety of the remainder seemed to demand his abandonment’. He also noted gratefully that Evans had died a natural death – meaning he had not had to resort to suicide or even that his comrades had not been required to give him a merciful release with the opium they carried. They would never have left him while he lived, yet it would have been impossible to pull him on the sledge. As it was, both Scott and Wilson could record their pride that their record ‘was clear’.

Scott and his companions kept vigil for two hours after Edgar Evans died – the first victim of a journey that would prove too far for them all. What they did with his body is not recorded.

16

‘Had We Lived . . .’

The next day, as the surviving quartet marched grimly on their way, Kathleen wrote in her diary: ‘I was very taken up with you all evening. I wonder if anything special is happening to you. Something odd happened to the clocks between 9 and 10 p.m.’ She felt uncharacteristically depressed and had to shake off a sense of foreboding. There is a story that around this time Peter asked to be lifted down from his rocking horse and ran to the door holding out his hands and calling: ‘Hello Daddy’, but Kathleen did not believe in the supernatural.
¹
She was, however, brooding over Scott’s perennial bad luck and told Sir Compton Mackenzie, who was sitting for her at the time, that she feared it would prevent him from reaching the Pole. Kathleen was not to know that her husband had reached the Pole, only to be disappointed, and was now struggling against the odds to return.

After snatching five hours’ sleep at the Lower Glacier Depot Scott and his three companions reached Shambles Camp, the desolate spot where the last of the ponies had been slaughtered, but a ‘fine supper’ of pony meat revived them a little. As Scott wrote: ‘New life seems to come with greater food almost
immediately.’ They could take comfort that the plateau and the treacherous glacier lay behind them, but they now faced a slog of nearly 400 miles across the Barrier where the only certainty would be the mind-numbing monotony of a featureless landscape. They prepared as best they could, swapping their sledge for a new one which had been left at the depot and loading it with pony meat. However, they soon discovered that the surface was coated with soft, slushy snow. Scott described miserably how it was ‘like pulling over desert sand, not the least glide in the world’. He knew they must maintain a reasonable momentum to reach the depots containing the vital supplies, strung out across the Barrier, before their food and fuel ran out. There are echoes here of Shackleton’s return from his great southern journey when he wrote the morbid line: ‘Our food lies ahead and death stalks us from behind.’
²

Scott pinned his hopes on a change in the weather. A brisk southerly wind would enable them to hoist their sail and be blown across the ice. Even a moderate blizzard would have helped by sweeping away the loose ice crystals that clogged the sledge. Yet no kindly wind came to their aid. As he hauled, Scott pondered whether the loss of the tragic fifth man was a help or a hindrance. He concluded that: ‘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.’ On 20 February they staggered into Desolation Camp where the blizzard had imprisoned them for a disastrous four days on their outward journey. They searched hopefully for more pony meat but found none.

Scott was lost in gloom. Trudging on, the only ‘rays of comfort’ were finding the tracks and cairns of the outward journey. This was not easy and they sometimes found themselves veering off-course. Scott was on tenterhooks, straining for the sight of each new cairn, anxiously assessing the weather, the surface of the Barrier and
wondering what the weather held in store. On 24 February Scott set down the challenge: ‘It is a race between the season and hard conditions and our fitness and good food.’ He might have added that it was also a race to cover the distance before their fuel ran out. That very day while collecting supplies from the Southern Barrier Depot they had found a worrying shortage of oil. The fuel allowance had been carefully calculated – two one-gallon tins had been left at each depot for the returning parties. However, the oil had been exposed to extremes of heat and cold. In particular, the tins were often left in an accessible place on the top of the cairns and in the sun’s warmth the oil vaporized and escaped through the stoppers. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the leather washers around the stoppers were prone to perish in the cold and that the tins had been disturbed by being opened by the other returning parties. Scott noted that they would have to be ‘
very
saving’ and from now on his diaries are peppered with worried references to the fuel situation and the need to cover greater distances. Scott’s anxiety expressed itself in various ways. The next day he nagged Bowers about his ability to pull on skis, writing that he ‘hasn’t quite the trick and is a little hurt at my criticisms, but I never doubted his heart’.

As the month drew to a close the temperature dropped steadily. By 27 February Scott was describing it as ‘desperately cold’. The surface of the ice was deteriorating. It was now ‘coated with a thin layer of woolly crystals . . . These are too firmly fixed to be removed by the wind and cause impossible friction on the runners’. Scott knew their position was critical. Everything now depended on reaching each depot in time. He made endless calculations – how many days would it take to reach the next depot? How many days’ supply of food and fuel was left? Apart from everything else the Barrier itself depressed him – there was
nothing to see, no warmth, no comfort on this great shelf of ice. ‘There is no doubt the middle of the Barrier is a pretty awful locality,’ he wrote in the knowledge that there were nearly 300 miles to go. Wilson’s diary ceased from this time. Living up to his ideal of being ‘entirely careless of your own soul or body in looking after the welfare of others’ left him neither time nor energy to write.
³
Oates had abandoned his diary on 24 February, the day the poor meat-loving soldier had dug up Christopher’s head, only to find that it had gone rotten. From now on Scott became the only one to record the unfolding tragedy day by day.

On 1 March they reached the Middle Barrier Depot to discover a trio of misfortunes. First, there was a further serious shortage of oil – there was barely enough to carry them on to the next depot over sixty miles away. Second, Oates, no longer able to conceal the appalling state of his feet, disclosed his frostbitten gangrenous toes on which the bitter temperatures on the Barrier had taken their toll. Third, that night the temperature fell to below -40°F, leaving them so chilled that it took them an hour and a half to struggle into their foot gear the next morning. Scott was not mincing his words when he wrote: ‘We are in a
very
queer street.’

Indeed, from now on Scott’s account descends into thinly veiled despair as they battled along, barely managing a mile an hour, although he acknowledged the bravery of his companions: ‘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 getting slower and slower, therefore every day more dangerous.’ It was also taking longer and longer to push painful and sensitive frostbitten limbs into sleeping bags which were becoming ever heavier and more rigid with frozen sweat and exhaled breath. Scott derived his strength and comfort from Wilson and Bowers, knowing he would not be able to cope if they
‘weren’t so determinedly cheerful over things’. He was painfully aware of Oates’s condition, knowing that a colder snap would spell disaster for the soldier. On 5 March he was writing: ‘Our fuel dreadfully low and the poor Soldier nearly done. It is pathetic enough because we can do nothing for him . . .’ None of them had expected such dreadfully low temperatures on the Barrier and the one suffering most, after Oates, was Wilson, ‘mainly, I fear, from his self-sacrificing devotion in doctoring Oates’s feet’.

By 6 March poor Oates could no longer pull. He never complained and, indeed, was growing daily ever more silent. There seems little doubt that he knew what lay ahead and was coming to terms with the fact that he would never again see Gestingthorpe, nor ride to hounds nor see his mother. He knew he was now a drag on the others. So did Scott, writing: ‘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 . . .’ The obvious solution stared Oates in the face. He must have remembered his discussions with Ponting at Cape Evans when he had asserted that suicide was the only honourable course for a sledger who was imperilling his companions.

The days that followed were harrowing – three men struggling to pull what had become an impossible load, the fourth wondering how much longer he should continue to be a burden. On 7 March Scott wrote that the soldier’s crisis was near, but implying that it was fast approaching for them all. He himself was determined to keep going: ‘I should like to keep the track to the end,’ he wrote defiantly. Much would depend on what they found at the next depot. Had the dogs been out there with fresh supplies? Would there be enough fuel? Arriving at the depot at Mount Hooper on 9 March they found everything in short supply and only ‘cold comfort’ – ‘the dogs which would have been our salvation have
evidently failed,’ Scott recorded grimly. The dogs had actually been awaiting the Polar party at One Ton Depot since 3 March, but a week later after depoting some supplies their drivers Cherry-Garrard and Dimitri had turned northwards again.

Meanwhile, in early March London was abuzz with rumours that Scott had been first to the Pole. Kathleen, however, confided in her diary that: ‘I was certain there was something wrong.’ On 7 March, with Amundsen’s arrival in Tasmania, came proof positive that the Norwegian had in fact been the victor. The reaction in Britain was predictably muted and praise of Amundsen was tempered by the suggestion that he had not really played the game.
The Times
declared that his sudden decision to go south rather than north and the secrecy which surrounded it ‘were felt to be not quite in accordance with the spirit of fair and open competition which had hitherto marked Antarctic exploration’. Kathleen reacted with characteristic dignity and generosity to the Norwegian’s triumph but wrote: ‘I worked badly and my head rocked. I’m not going to recount what I have been feeling.’ Perhaps her little son was trying to cheer her up when he said: ‘Amundsen and Daddy both got to the Pole. Daddy has stopped working now.’