The Worst Journey in the World (40 page)

"It was shortly after midnight when I [Scott] was told that the animal
seemed a little easier. At 2.30 I was again in the stable and found the
improvement had been maintained; the horse still lay on its side with
outstretched head, but the spasms had ceased, its eye looked less
distressed, and its ears pricked to occasional noises. As I stood looking
it suddenly raised its head and rose without effort to its legs; then in
a moment, as though some bad dream had passed, it began to nose at some
hay and at its neighbour. Within three minutes it had drunk a bucket of
water and had started to feed."
^[142]

The immediate cause of the trouble was indicated by "a small ball of
semi-fermented hay covered with mucus and containing tape-worms; so far
not very serious, but unfortunately attached to this mass was a strip of
the lining of the intestine."
^[143]

The recovery of Bones was uninterrupted. Two day later another pony went
off his feed and lay down, but was soon well again.

Considerable speculation as to the original cause of this illness never
found a satisfactory answer. Some traced it to a want of ventilation, and
it is necessary to say that both the ponies who were ill stood next to
the blubber stove; at any rate a big ventilator was fitted and more fresh
air let in. Others traced it to the want of water, supposing that the
animals would not eat as much snow as they would have drunk water; the
easy remedy for this was to give them water instead of snow. We also gave
them more salt than they had had before. Whatever the cause may have been
we had no more of this colic, and the improvement in their condition
until we started sledging was uninterrupted.

All the ponies were treated for worms; it was also found that they had
lice, which were eradicated after some time and difficulty by a wash of
tobacco and water. I know that Oates wished that he had clipped the
ponies at the beginning of the winter, believing that they would have
grown far better coats if this had been done. He also would have wished
for a loose box for each pony.

No account of the ponies would be complete without mention of our Russian
pony boy, Anton. He was small in height, but he was exceedingly strong
and had a chest measurement of 40 inches.

I believe both Anton and Dimitri, the Russian dog driver, were brought
originally to look after the ponies and dogs on their way from Siberia to
New Zealand. But they proved such good fellows and so useful that we were
very glad to take them on the strength of the landing party. I fear that
Anton, at any rate, did not realize what he was in for. When we arrived
at Cape Crozier in the ship on our voyage south, and he saw the two great
peaks of Ross Island in front and the Barrier Cliff disappearing in an
unbroken wall below the eastern horizon, he imagined that he reached
the South Pole, and was suitably elated. When the darkness of the winter
closed down upon us, this apparently unnatural order of things so preyed
upon his superstitious mind that he became seriously alarmed. Where the
sea-ice joined the land in front of the hut was of course a working
crack, caused by the rise and fall of the tide. Sometimes the sea-water
found its way up, and Anton was convinced that the weird phosphorescent
lights which danced up out of the sea were devils. In propitiation we
found that he had sacrificed to them his most cherished luxury, his
scanty allowance of cigarettes, which he had literally cast upon the
waters in the darkness. It was natural that his thoughts should turn to
the comforts of his Siberian home, and the one-legged wife whom he was
going to marry there, and when it became clear that a another year would
be spent in the South his mind was troubled. And so he went to Oates and
asked him, "If I go away at the end of this year, will Captain Scott
disinherit me?" In order to try and express his idea, for he knew little
English, he had some days before been asking "what we called it when a
father died and left his son nothing." Poor Anton!

He looked long and anxiously for the ship, and with his kit-bag on his
shoulder was amongst the first to trek across the ice to meet her. Having
asked for and obtained a job of work there was no happier man on board:
he never left her until she reached New Zealand. Nevertheless he was
always cheerful, always working, and a most useful addition to our small
community.

It is still usual to talk of people living in complete married happiness
when we really mean, so Mr. Bernard Shaw tells me, that they confine
their quarrels to Thursday nights. If then I say that we lived this life
for nearly three years, from the day when we left England until the day
we returned to New Zealand, without any friction of any kind, I shall be
supposed to be making a formal statement of somewhat limited truth. May I
say that there is really no formality about it, and nothing but the
truth. To be absolutely accurate I must admit to having seen a man in a
very 'prickly' state on one occasion. That was all. It didn't last and
may have been well justified for aught I know: I have forgotten what it
was all about. Why we should have been more fortunate than polar
travellers in general it is hard to say, but undoubtedly a very powerful
reason was that we had no idle hours: there was no time to quarrel.

Before we went South people were always saying, "You will get fed up with
one another. What will you do all the dark winter?" As a matter of fact
the difficulty was to get through with the work. Often after working all
through a long night-watch officers carried on as a matter of course
through the following day in order to clear off arrears. There was little
reading or general relaxation during the day: certainly not before
supper, if at all. And while no fixed hours for work were laid down, the
custom was general that all hours between breakfast and supper should be
so used.

Our small company was desperately keen to obtain results. The youngest
and most cynical pessimist must have had cause for wonder to see a body
of healthy and not unintellectual men striving thus single-mindedly to
add their small quota of scientific and geographical knowledge to the sum
total of the world—with no immediate prospect of its practical utility.
Laymen and scientists alike were determined to attain the objects to gain
which they had set forth.

And I believe that in a vague intangible way there was an ideal in front
of and behind this work. It is really not desirable for men who do not
believe that knowledge is of value for its own sake to take up this kind
of life. The question constantly put to us in civilization was and still
is: "What is the use? Is there gold? or Is there coal?" The commercial
spirit of the present day can see no good in pure science: the English
manufacturer is not interested in research which will not give him a
financial return within one year: the city man sees in it only so much
energy wasted on unproductive work: truly they are bound to the wheel of
conventional life.

Now unless a man believes that such a view is wrong he has no business to
be 'down South.' Our magnetic and meteorological work may, I suppose,
have a fairly immediate bearing upon commerce and shipping: otherwise I
cannot imagine any branch of our labours which will do more at present
than swell the central pool of unapplied knowledge. The members of this
expedition believed that it was worth while to discover new land and new
life, to reach the Southern Pole of the earth, to make elaborate
meteorological and magnetic observations and extended geological surveys
with all the other branches of research for which we were equipped. They
were prepared to suffer great hardship; and some of them died for their
beliefs. Without such ideals the spirit which certainly existed in our
small community would have been impossible.

But if the reasons for this happy state of our domestic life were due
largely to the adaptability and keenness of the members of our small
community, I doubt whether the frictions which have caused other
expeditions to be less comfortable than they might have been, would have
been avoided in our case, had it not been for the qualities in some of
our men which set a fashion of hard work without any thought of personal
gain.

With all its troubles it is a good life. We came back from the Barrier,
telling one another we loathed the place and nothing on earth should make
us return. But now the Barrier comes back to us, with its clean, open
life, and the smell of the cooker, and its soft sound sleep. So much of
the trouble of this world is caused by memories, for we only remember
half.

We have forgotten—or nearly forgotten—how the loss of a biscuit crumb
left a sense of injury which lasted for a week; how the greatest friends
were so much on one another's nerves that they did not speak for days for
fear of quarrelling; how angry we felt when the cook ran short on the
weekly bag; how sick we were after the first meals when we could eat as
much as we liked; how anxious we were when a man fell ill many hundreds
of miles from home, and we had a fortnight of thick weather and had to
find our depôts or starve. We remember the cry of
Camp Ho!
which
preceded the cup of tea which gave us five more miles that evening; the
good fellowship which completed our supper after safely crossing a bad
patch of crevasses; the square inch of plum pudding which celebrated our
Christmas Day; the chanties we sang all over the Barrier as we marched
our ponies along.

We travelled for Science. Those three small embryos from Cape Crozier,
that weight of fossils from Buckley Island, and that mass of material,
less spectacular, but gathered just as carefully hour by hour in wind and
drift, darkness and cold, were striven for in order that the world may
have a little more knowledge, that it may build on what it knows instead
of on what it thinks.

Some of our men were ambitious: some wanted money, others a name; some a
help up the scientific ladder, others an F.R.S. Why not? But we had men
who did not care a rap for money or fame. I do not believe it mattered to
Wilson when he found that Amundsen had reached the Pole a few days before
him—not much. Pennell would have been very bored if you had given him a
knighthood. Lillie, Bowers, Priestley, Debenham, Atkinson and many others
were much the same.

But there is no love lost between the class of men who go out and do such
work and the authorities at home who deal with their collections. I
remember a conversation in the hut during the last bad winter. Men were
arguing fiercely that professionally they lost a lot by being down South,
that they fell behindhand in current work, got out of the running and so
forth. There is a lot in that. And then the talk went on to the
publication of results, and the way in which they would wish them done. A
said he wasn't going to hand over his work to be mucked up by such and
such a body at home; B said he wasn't going to have his buried in museum
book-shelves never to be seen again; C said he would jolly well publish
his own results in the scientific journals. And the ears of the armchair
scientists who might deal with our hard-won specimens and observations
should have been warm that night.

At the time I felt a little indignant. It seemed to me that these men
ought to think themselves lucky to be down South at all: there were
thousands who would have like to take their place. But now I understand
quite a lot more than I did then. Science is a big thing if you can
travel a Winter Journey in her cause and not regret it. I am not sure she
is not bigger still if you can have dealings with scientists and continue
to follow in her path.

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a Heaven for?
R. BROWNING,
Andrea del Sarto.

To me, and to every one who has remained here the result of this
effort is the appeal it makes to our imagination, as one of the
most gallant stories in Polar History. That men should wander
forth in the depth of a Polar night to face the most dismal cold
and the fiercest gales in darkness is something new; that they
should have persisted in this effort in spite of every adversity
for five full weeks is heroic. It makes a tale for our generation
which I hope may not be lost in the telling.

Scott's Diary, at Cape Evans.

The following list of the Winter Journey sledge weights (for three men)
is taken from the reckoning made by Bowers before we started:

Expendible Stores
— lbs.
'Antarctic' biscuit 135
3 Cases for same 12
Pemmican 110
Butter 21
Salt 3
Tea 4
Oil 60
Spare parts for primus, and matches 2
Toilet paper 2
Candles 8
Packing 5
Spirit 8
—370 lbs.

Permanent Weights, etc.
2 9-ft. Sledges, 41 lbs. each 82
1 Cooker complete 13
2 Primus filled with oil 8
1 Double tent complete 35
1 Sledging shovel 3.5
3 Reindeer sleeping-bags, 12 lbs. each 36
3 Eider-down sleeping-bag linings, 4 lbs. each 12
1 Alpine rope 5
1 Bosun's bag, containing repairing materials, and
1 Bonsa outfit, containing repairing tools 5
3 Personal bags, each containing 15 lbs. spare clothing, etc. 45
Lamp box with knives, steel, etc., for seal and penguin 21
Medical and scientific box 40
2 Ice axes, 3 lbs. each 6
3 Man-harnesses 3
3 Portaging harnesses 3
Cloth for making roof and door for stone igloo 24
Instrument box 7
3 Pairs ski and sticks (discarded afterwards) 33
1 Pickaxe 11
3 Crampons, 2 lbs. 3 oz. each 6.5
2 Bamboos for measuring tide if possible, 14 feet each 4
2 Male bamboos 4
1 Plank to form top of door of igloo 2
1 Bag sennegrass 1
6 Small female bamboo ends and
1 Knife for cutting snow block to make igloo 4
Packing 8
—420 lbs.