The Worst Journey In The World: Antarctic, 1910-1913 - free ebook by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD

With Panoramas, Maps, And Illustrations By The Late Doctor Edward A. Wilson And Other Members Of The Expedition...

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IN TWO VOLUMES

This volume is a narrative of Scott's Last Expedition from its departure from England in 1910 to its return to New Zealand in 1913. It does not, however, include the story of subsidiary parties except where their adventures touch the history of the Main Party. It is hoped later to publish an appendix volume with an account of the two Geological Journeys, and such other information concerning the equipment of, and lessons learned by, this Expedition as may be of use to the future explorer. Apsley

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MAPS

Frontispiece...

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APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD

With Panoramas, Maps, And Illustrations By The Late Doctor Edward A. Wilson And Other Members Of The Expedition This volume is a narrative of Scott's Last Expedition from its departure from England in 1910 to its return to New Zealand in 1913. It does not, however, include the story of subsidiary parties except where their adventures touch the history of the Main Party. It is hoped later to publish an appendix volume with an account of the two Geological Journeys, and such other information conc

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PREFACE

This post-war business is inartistic, for it is seldom that any one does anything well for the sake of doing it well; and it is un-Christian, if you value Christianity, for men are out to hurt and not to help—can you wonder, when the Ten Commandments were hurled straight from the pulpit through good stained glass. It is all very interesting and uncomfortable, and it has been a great relief to wander back in one's thoughts and correspondence and personal dealings to an age in geological time, so

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INTRODUCTION

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised. It is the only form of adventure in which you put on your clothes at Michaelmas and keep them on until Christmas, and, save for a layer of the natural grease of the body, find them as clean as though they were new. It is more lonely than London, more secluded than any monastery, and the post comes but once a year. As men will compare the hardships of France, Palestine, or Mesopotamia, so

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CHAPTER I

Scott used to say that the worst part of an expedition was over when the preparation was finished. So no doubt it was with a sigh of relief that he saw the Terra Nova out from Cardiff into the Atlantic on June 15, 1910. Cardiff had given the expedition a most generous and enthusiastic send-off, and Scott announced that it should be his first port on returning to England. Just three years more and the Terra Nova, worked back from New Zealand by Pennell, reached Cardiff again on June 14, 1913, and

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CHAPTER II

"Ten minutes to four, sir!" It is an oilskinned and dripping seaman, and the officer of the watch, or his so-called snotty, as the case may be, wakes sufficiently to ask: "What's it like?" "Two hoops, sir!" answers the seaman, and makes his way out. The sleepy man who has been wakened wedges himself more securely into his six foot by two—which is all his private room on the ship—and collects his thoughts, amid the general hubbub of engines, screw and the roll of articles which have worked loose,

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CHAPTER III

George Herbert. Telegrams from all parts of the world, special trains, all ships dressed, crowds and waving hands, steamers out to the Heads and a general hullabaloo—these were the incidents of Saturday, November 26, 1910, when we slipped from the wharf at Lyttelton at 3 p.m. We were to call at Dunedin before leaving civilization, and arrived there on Sunday night. Here we took on the remainder of our coal. On Monday night we danced, in fantastic clothing for we had left our grand clothes behind

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CHAPTER IV

Milton , Paradise Lost , II. "They say it's going to blow like hell. Go and look at the glass." Thus Titus Oates quietly to me a few hours before we left the pack. I went and looked at the barograph and it made me feel sea-sick. Within a few hours I was sick, very sick; but we newcomers to the Antarctic had yet to learn that we knew nothing about its barometer. Nothing very terrible happened after all. When I got up to the bridge for the morning watch we were in open water and it was blowing fre

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CHAPTER V

Robert Browning. Imaginative friends of the thirteen men who started from Cape Evans on January 24, 1911, may have thought of them as athletes, trained for some weeks or months to endure the strains which they were to face, sleeping a good nine hours a night, eating carefully regulated meals and doing an allotted task each day under scientific control. They would be far from the mark. For weeks we had turned in at midnight too tired to take off our clothes, and had been lucky if we were allowed

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CHAPTER VI

The highest object that human beings can set before themselves is not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the unknown; it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its boundaries a little further from our little sphere of action.— Huxley. And so we came back to our comfortable hut. Whatever merit there may be in going to the Antarctic, once there you must not credit yourself for being there. To spend a year in the hut at Cape Evans because you explore is no more laudable tha

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CHAPTER VII

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 n

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APPENDIX

"It was a great disappointment to Dr. Wilson that no Emperor Penguin embryos were obtained during the cruise of the Discovery. But though embryos were conspicuous by their absence in the Emperor eggs brought home by the National Antarctic Expedition, it is well to bear in mind that the naturalists on board the Discovery learned much about the breeding habits of the largest living member of the ancient penguin family. Amongst other things it was ascertained (1) that in the case of the Emperor, as

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APSLEY CHERRY-GARRARD

With Panoramas, Maps, And Illustrations By The Late Doctor Edward A. Wilson And Other Members Of The Expedition...

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CHAPTER VIII

Inside was pandemonium. Most men had gone to bed, and I have a blurred memory of men in pyjamas and dressing-gowns getting hold of me and trying to get the chunks of armour which were my clothes to leave my body. Finally they cut them off and threw them into an angular heap at the foot of my bunk. Next morning they were a sodden mass weighing 24 lbs. Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on th

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CHAPTER IX

Tennyson , Ulysses. Take it all in all it is wonderful that the South Pole was reached so soon after the North Pole had been conquered. From Cape Columbia to the North Pole, straight going, is 413 geographical miles, and Peary who took on his expedition 246 dogs, covered this distance in 37 days. From Hut Point to the South Pole and back is 1532 geographical or 1766 statute miles, the distance to the top of the Beardmore Glacier alone being more than 100 miles farther than Peary had to cover to

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CHAPTER X

The Southern Journey involves the most important object of the Expedition.... One cannot affect to be blind to the situation: the scientific public, as well as the more general public, will gauge the result of the scientific work of the Expedition largely in accordance with the success or failure of the main object. With success all roads will be made easy, all work will receive its proper consideration. With failure even the most brilliant work may be neglected and forgotten, at least for a tim

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CHAPTER XI

People, perhaps, still exist who believe that it is of no importance to explore the unknown polar regions. This, of course, shows ignorance. It is hardly necessary to mention here of what scientific importance it is that these regions should be thoroughly explored. The history of the human race is a continual struggle from darkness towards light. It is, therefore, to no purpose to discuss the use of knowledge; man wants to know, and when he ceases to do so, he is no longer man.— Nansen. For the

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CHAPTER XII

The Devil . And these are the creatures in whom you discover what you call a Life Force! Don Juan . Yes; for now comes the most surprising part of the whole business. The Statue . What's that? Don Juan . Why, that you can make any of these cowards brave by simply putting an idea into his head. The Statue . Stuff! As an old soldier I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as sea sickness, and matters just as little. But that about putting an idea into a man's head is stuff and nonsense. In a batt

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CHAPTER XIII

Walt Whitman. Let us come back to Cape Evans after the return of the First Supporting Party. Hitherto our ways had always been happy: for the most part they had been pleasant. Scott was going to reach the Pole, probably without great difficulty, for when we left him on the edge of the plateau he had only to average seven miles a day to go there on full rations. We ourselves had averaged 14.2 geographical miles a day on our way home to One Ton Depôt, and there seemed no reason to suppose that the

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CHAPTER XIV

Ordinary people snuggle up to God as a lost leveret in a freezing wilderness might snuggle up to a Siberian tiger....— H. G. Wells. A quite disproportionately small part of Scott's Last Expedition was given to Atkinson's account of the last and worst year any of us survivors spent: some one should have compelled him to write, for he will not do so if he can help it. The problems which presented themselves were unique in the history of Arctic travel, the weather conditions which had to be faced d

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CHAPTER XV

The flowers were of snow, the rivers of ice, and if Stevenson had been to the Antarctic he would have made them so. God sent His daylight to scatter the nightmares of the darkness. I can remember now the joy of an August day when the sun looked over the rim of the Barne Glacier, and my shadow lay clear-cut upon the snow. It was wonderful what a friendly thing that ice-slope became. We put the first trace upon the sunshine recorder; there was talk of expeditions to Cape Royds and Hut Point, and s

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CHAPTER XVI

From my own diary Spenser , The Faerie Queen. October 28. Hut Point. A beautiful day. We finished digging out the stable for the mules this morning and brought in some blubber this afternoon. The Bluff has its cap on, but otherwise the sky is nearly clear: there is a little cumulus between White Island and the Bluff, the first I have seen this year on the Barrier. It is most noticeable how much snow has disappeared off the rocks and shingle here. October 29. Hut Point. The mule party, under Wrig

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CHAPTER XVII

Don Juan . This creature Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved while he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason. I tell you, gentlemen, if you can show a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later on call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.... Don J

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CHAPTER XVIII

Shakespeare. Stevenson has written of a traveller whose wife slumbered by his side what time his spirit re-adventured forth in memory of days gone by. He was quite happy about it, and I suppose his travels had been peaceful, for days and nights such as these men spent coming down the Beardmore will give you nightmare after nightmare, and wake you shrieking—years after. Of course they were shaken and weakened. But the conditions they had faced, and the time they had been out, do not in my opinion

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CHAPTER XIX

Herbert. I shall inevitably be asked for a word of mature judgment of the expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all close up to it, and when I was a subaltern of 24, not incapable of judging my elders, but too young to have found out whether my judgment was worth anything. I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business. In the broad perspective opened up by ten years' d

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GLOSSARY

Blizzard . An Antarctic blizzard is a high southerly wind generally accompanied by clouds of drifting snow, partly falling from above, partly picked up from the surface. In the daylight of summer a tent cannot be seen a few yards off: in the darkness of winter it is easy to be lost within a few feet of a hut. There is no doubt that a blizzard has a bewildering and numbing effect upon the brain of any one exposed to it. Brash . Small ice fragments from a floe which is breaking up. Cloud . The com

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