The Worst Journey in the World (31 page)

We were lucky now in that a small bay of sea-ice, about an acre in
extent, still remained within two miles of us at a corner where Barrier,
sea, and land meet, called Pram Point by Scott in the Discovery days.

Now Pram Point during the summer months is one of the most populous seal
nurseries in McMurdo Sound. In this neighbourhood the Barrier, moving
slowly towards the Peninsula, buckles the sea-ice into pressure ridges.
As the trough of each ridge is forced downwards, so in summer pools of
sea water are formed in which the seal make their holes and among these
ridges they lie and bask in the sun: the males fight their battles, the
females bring forth their young: the children play and chase their tails
just like kittens. Now that the sea-ice had broken up, many seal were to
be found in this sheltered corner under the green and blue ice-cliffs of
Crater Hill.

If you go seal killing you want a big stick, a bayonet, a flensing knife
and a steel. Any big stick will do, so long as it will hit the seal a
heavy blow on the nose: this stuns him and afterwards mercifully he feels
no more. The bayonet knife (which should be fitted into a handle with a
cross-piece to prevent the slipping of the hand down on to the blade)
should be at least 14 inches long without the handle; this is used to
reach the seal's heart. Our flensing knives were one foot long including
the handle, the blades were seven inches long by 1¼ inches broad: some
were pointed and others round and I do not know which was best. The
handles should be of wood as being warmer to hold.

Killing and cutting up seals is a gruesome but very necessary business,
and the provision of suitable implements is humane as well as economic in
time and labour. The skin is first cut off with the blubber attached: the
meat is then cut from the skeleton, the entrails cleaned out, the liver
carefully excised. The whole is then left to freeze in pieces on the
snow, which are afterwards collected as rock-like lumps. The carcass can
be cut up with an axe when needed and fed to the dogs. Nothing except
entrails was wasted.

Lighting was literally a burning question. I do not know that any lamp
was better than a tin matchbox fed with blubber, with strands of lamp
wick sticking up in it, but all kinds of patterns big and small were made
by proud inventors; they generally gave some light, though not a
brilliant one. There were more ambitious attempts than blubber. The worst
of these perhaps was produced by Oates. Somebody found some carbide and
Oates immediately schemed to light the hut with acetylene. I think he was
the only person who did not view the preparation with ill-concealed
nervousness. However, Wilson took the situation into his tactful hands.
For several days Oates and Wilson were deep in the acetylene plant scheme
and then, apparently without reason, it was found that it could not be
done. It was a successful piece of strategy which no woman could have
bettered.

Bowers, Wilson, Atkinson and I were on Crater Hill one morning when we
espied a sledge party approaching from the direction of Castle Rock. As
we expected, this was the Geological party, consisting of Griffith
Taylor, Wright, Debenham and Seaman Evans, home from the Western
Mountains. They entirely failed to recognize in our black faces the men
whom they had last seen from the ship at Glacier Tongue. I hope their
story will be told by Debenham. For days their doings were the topic of
conversation. Both numerically and intellectually they were an addition
to our party, which now numbered sixteen. Taylor especially is seldom at
a loss for conversation and his remarks are generally original, if
sometimes crude. Most of us were glad to listen when the discussions in
which he was a leading figure raged round the blubber stove. Scott and
Wilson were always in the thick of it, and the others chimed in as their
interest, knowledge and experience led. Rash statements on questions of
fact were always dangerous, for our small community contained so many
specialists that errors were soon exposed. At the same time there were
few parts of the world that one or other of us had not visited at least
once. Later, when we came to our own limited quarters, books of reference
were constantly in demand to settle disputes. Such books as the Times
Atlas, a good encyclopaedia and even a Latin Dictionary are invaluable to
such expeditions for this purpose. To them I would add Who's Who.

From odd corners we unearthed some Contemporary Reviews, the Girls' Own
Paper and the Family Herald, all of ten years ago! We also found encased
in ice an incomplete copy of Stanley Weyman's My Lady Rotha; it was
carefully thawed out and read by everybody, and the excitement was
increased by the fact that the end of the book was missing.

"Who's going to cook?" was one of the last queries each night, and two
men would volunteer. It is not great fun lighting an ordinary coal fire
on a cold winter's morning, but lighting the blubber fire at Hut Point
when the metal frosted your fingers and the frozen blubber had to be
induced to drip was a far more arduous task. The water was converted from
its icy state and, by that time, the stove was getting hot, in inverse
proportion to your temper. Seal liver fry and cocoa with unlimited
Discovery Cabin biscuits were the standard dish for breakfast, and when
it was ready a sustained cry of 'hoosh' brought the sleepers from their
bags, wiping reindeer hairs from their eyes. I think I was responsible
for the greatest breakfast failure when I fried some biscuits and
sardines (we only had one tin). Leaving the biscuits in the frying pan,
the lid of a cooker, after taking it from the fire, they went on cooking
and became as charcoal. This meal was known as 'the burnt-offering.' On
April 1 Bowers prepared to make a fool of two of us by putting chaff in
our pannikins and covering the top only with seal meat. The plan turned
back upon the maker, for he had not enough left to make up the
deficiency, and, as I found out many weeks afterwards, surreptitiously
gave up his own hoosh to the April fools and went without himself. Of
such are the small incidents which afforded real amusement and even live
in the memory as outstanding features of our existence.

Breakfast done, there was a general clean-up. One seized the apology for
a broom which existed: day foot-gear, finnesko, hair socks, ordinary
socks and puttees, took the place of fleecy sleeping-socks and fur-lined
sleeping-boots: lunch cooks began to make their preparations: ice was
fetched for water: a frozen chunk of red seal meat or liver was levered
and chopped with an ice axe from the general store of seal meat: fids of
sealskin, with the blubber attached, a good three inches of it perhaps,
were brought in and placed by the stove, much as we bring in a scuttle of
coal. Gradually the community scattered as duty or inclination led,
leaving some members to dig away the snow-drifts which had accumulated
round the door and windows during the night.

By lunch time every one had some new item of interest. Wright had found a
new form of ice crystal: Scott had tested the ice off the Point and found
it five inches thick: Wilson had found new seal holes off Cape Armitage,
and we had hopes of finding our food and fuel nearer home: Atkinson had
killed an Emperor penguin which weighed over ninety pounds, a record: and
the assistant zoologist felt he would have to skin it, and did not want
to do so: Meares had found an excellent place to roll stones down Arrival
Heights into the sea: Debenham had a new theory to account for the Great
Boulder, as a mammoth block different in structure from the surrounding
geological features was called: Bowers had a scheme for returning from
the Pole by the Plateau instead of the Barrier: Oates might be heard
saying that he thought he could do with another chupattie. A favourite
pastime was the making of knots. Could you make a clove hitch with one
hand?

The afternoon was like the morning, save that the sun was now sinking
behind the Western Mountains. These autumn effects were among the most
beautiful sights of the world, and it was now that Wilson made the
sketches for many of the water-colours which he afterwards painted at
Winter Quarters. The majority were taken from the summit of Observation
Hill, crouching under the lee of the rocks into which, nearly two years
after, we built the Cross which now stands to commemorate his death and
that of his companions. He sketched quickly with bare fingers and
mittened hands, jotting down the outlines of hills and clouds, and
pencilling in the colours by name. After a minute, more or less, the
fingers become too cold for such work, and they must be put back into the
wool and fur mitts until they are again warm enough to continue. Pencil
and sketch book, a Winsor and Newton, were carried in a little
blubber-stained wallet on his belt. Scott carried his sledge diaries in
similar books in a similar wallet made of green Willesden canvas and
fastened with a lanyard.

There was a good fug in the hut by dinner time: this was a mixed
blessing. It was good for our gear: sleeping-bags, finnesko, mitts, socks
were all hung up and dried, most necessary after sledging, and most
important for the preservation of the skins; but it also started the most
infernal drip-drip from the roof. I have spoken of the double roof of the
old Discovery hut. This was still full of solid ice; indeed some time
afterwards a large portion of it fell, but luckily the inhabitants were
outside. The immediate problem was to prevent the leaks falling on
ourselves, our food or our clothing and bags. And so every tin was
brought into use and hung from leaky spots, while water chutes came into
their own. As the stove cooled so did the drip cease, and in no
prehistoric cavern did more stalactites and stalagmites grow apace.

On March 16 the last sledge party to the Barrier that season started for
Corner Camp with provisions to increase the existing depôt there. The
party was in charge of Lieutenant Evans, and consisted of Bowers, Oates,
Atkinson, Wright, and myself, with two seamen, Crean and Forde. The
journey out and back took eight days and was uneventful as sledge
journeys go. Thick weather prevailed for several days, and after running
down our distance to Corner Camp we waited for it to clear. We found
ourselves six miles from the depôt and among crevasses, which goes to
show how easy it is to steer off the course under such conditions, and
how creditable the navigation is when a course is kept correctly,
sometimes more by instinct than by skill.

But we got our first experience of cold weather sledging which was
useful. The minus thirties and forties are not very cold as we were to
understand cold afterwards, but quite cold enough to start with; cold
enough to teach you how to look after your footgear, handle metal and
not to waste time. However, the sun was still well up during the day, and
this makes all the difference, since any sun does more drying of clothes
and gear than none at all. At the same time we began to realize the
difficulties which attend upon spring journeys, though we could only
imagine what might be the trials on a journey in mid-winter, such as we
intended to essay.

It is easy to be wise after the event, but, in looking back upon the
expedition as a whole, and the tragedy which was to come, mainly from the
unforeseen cold of the autumn on the Barrier (such as minus forties in
February) it seems that we might have grasped that these temperatures
were lower than might have been expected in the middle of March quite
near the open sea. Even if this had occurred to any one, and I do not
think that it did, I doubt whether the next step of reasoning would have
followed, namely, the possibility that the interior of the Barrier would,
as actually happened, prove to be much colder than was expected at this
date. On the contrary I several times heard Scott mention the possibility
of the Polar Party not returning until April. At the same time it must be
realized that pony transport to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier made a
late start inevitable, for the blizzards our ponies had already suffered
proved that spring weather on the Barrier would be intolerable to them.
As a matter of fact, Scott says in his Message to the Public, "no one in
the world would have expected the temperature and surfaces which we
encountered at this time of the year."

We returned to find everything at Hut Point, including the hut, covered
with frozen spray. This was the result of a blizzard of which we only
felt the tail end on the Barrier. Scott wrote: "The sea was breaking
constantly and heavily on the ice foot. The spray carried right over the
Point—covering all things and raining on the roof of the hut. Poor
Vince's cross, some 30 feet above the water, was enveloped in it. Of
course the dogs had a very poor time, and we went and released two or
three, getting covered in spray during the operation—our wind clothes
very wet. This is the third gale from the South since our arrival here
(i.e. in 2½ weeks). Any one of these would have rendered the Bay
impossible for a ship, and, therefore, it is extraordinary that we should
have entirely escaped such a blow when the Discovery was in it in
1902."
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It is difficult to see long distances across open water at this time of
year because the comparatively warm water throws up into the air a fog,
known as frost-smoke. If there is a wind this smoke is carried over the
surface of the sea, but if calm the smoke rises and forms a dense
curtain. Standing on Arrival Heights, which form the nail of the
finger-like Peninsula on which we now lived, we could see the four
islands which lie near Cape Evans, and a black smudge in the face of the
glaciers which descend from Erebus, which we knew to be the face of the
steep slope above Cape Evans, afterwards named The Ramp. But, for the
present, our comfortable hut might have been thousands of miles away for
all the good it was to us. As soon as the wind fell calm the sea was
covered by a thin layer of ice, in twenty-four hours it might be four or
five inches thick, but as yet it never proved strong enough to resist the
next blizzard. In March the ice to the south was safe; there was
appearance of ice in the two bays at the foot of Erebus' slopes in the
beginning of April.