Well! It was to be more useful to Scott in 1910 to 1913 than he imagined in 1902. We found the place with its verandah complete, the remains of the two magnetic huts and a rubbish heap. It was wonderful what that rubbish heap yielded up. Bricks to build a blubber stove, a sheet of iron to put over the top of it, a length of stove piping to form a chimney. Somehow somebody made cement, and built the bricks together, and one of the magnetic huts gave up its asbestos sheeting to insulate the chimney from the woodwork of the roofs. An old door made a cook's table, old cases turned upside down made seats. The provisions left by the Discovery were biscuits contained in some forty large packing cases. These we piled up across the middle of our house as a bulkhead and the old Discovery winter awning was dug out of the snow outside and fixed against the wall thus made to keep the warmth in. At night we cleared the floor space and spread our bags.
The two precious survivors of the eight ponies with which we started on our journey were housed in the verandah, which was made wind-proof and snow-proof. The more truculent dogs lay tethered outside, the more docile were allowed their freedom, but even so the dog fights were not infrequent. We had one poor little dog, Makaka by name. When unloading the ship this dog had been overrun by the sledge which he was helping to pull; he suffered again when the team of dogs fell down the crevasse, and was now partially paralysed. He was a wretched object, for the hair refused to grow on his hind quarters, but he was a real sportsman and had no idea of giving in. Meares and I went out one night when it was blowing hard, attracted by the cries of a dog. It was Makaka who had ventured to climb a steep slope and was now afraid to return. When the dogs finally returned to Cape Evans, Makaka was allowed to run by the side of the team; but when Cape Evans was reached he was gone. Search failed to find him and, after some weeks, hope of him was abandoned. But a month afterwards Gran and Debenham went over to Hut Point, and here at the entrance of the hut they found Makaka, pitifully weak but able to bark to them. He must have lived on seal, but how he did so in that condition is a mystery.
The reader may ask how it was that being so near our Winter Quarters at Cape Evans we were unable to reach them immediately. Cape Evans is fifteen miles across the sea from Hut Point, and though both huts are on the same island—Hut Point being at the end of a peninsula and Cape Evans on the remains of a flow of lava which juts out into the sea—the land which joins the two has never yet been crossed by a sledge party owing to the great ice falls which cover the slopes of Erebus. A glance at the map will show that although Hut Point is surrounded with sea, or sea-ice, on every side except that of Arrival Heights, the Barrier abuts upon the Hut Point Peninsula to the south beyond Pram Point. Thus there is always communication with the Barrier by a devious route by which indeed we had just arrived, but farther progress north is cut off until the cold temperature of the autumn and winter causes the open sea to freeze. We arrived at Hut Point on March 5 and Scott expected to be able to cross on the newly-frozen ice by about March 21. However, it was nearly a month after that when the first party could pass to Cape Evans, and then only the Bays were frozen and the Sound was still open water, owing to the winds which swept the ice out to sea almost as soon as it was formed.
On the top of all the anxieties which had oppressed him lately Scott had a great fear that a swell so phenomenal as to break up Glacier Tongue, a landmark which had probably been there for centuries, might have swept away our hut at Cape Evans. He was so alarmed about it that he told Wilson and myself to prepare to form a sledging party with him to penetrate the Erebus icefalls and reach Cape Evans. "Went yesterday to Castle Rock with Wilson to see what chance there might be of getting to Cape Evans. The day was bright and it was quite warm walking in the sun. There is no doubt the route to Cape Evans lies over the worst corner of Erebus. From this distance (some 7 or 8 miles at least) the whole mountain side looks a mass of crevasses, but a route might be found at a level of 3000 or 4000 feet."[123] After some days the project was abandoned as being hopeless.
On March 8 Bowers led a party to bring in the gear and provisions which had been left at Disaster Camp, the material, that is, which had been rescued from the sea-ice. They were away three days and found the pulling very hard. "At the corner of the bay the Barrier was buckled into round ridges which took a couple of hours to cross. We marched for some time alongside an enormous crevasse, which lay like a street near us. I examined it at one point which must have been 15 feet wide, and though it was impossible to see the bottom for snow cornices it was undoubtedly open as I could hear a seal blowing below."[124]
Bowers' letter describes them dragging their heavy load up the slope to Castle Rock: "It took us all the morning to reach Saddle Camp with the loads in two journeys. I found a steady plod up a steep hill without spells is better and less exhausting than a rush and a number of rests. This theory I put into practice with great success. I don't know whether everybody saw eye to eye with me over the idea of getting to the top without a spell. After the second sledge was up Atkinson said: 'I don't mind you as a rule, but there are times when I positively hate you.'"
Defoe could have written another Robinson Crusoe with Hut Point instead of San Juan Fernandez. Our sledging supplies were mostly exhausted and we depended upon the seals we could kill for food, fuel and light. We were smutty as sweeps from the blubber we burned; and a more blackguard-looking crew would have been hard to find. We spent our fine days killing, cutting up and carrying in seal when we could find them, or climbing the various interesting hills and craters which abound here, and our evenings in long discussions which seldom settled anything. Some looked after dogs, and others after ponies; some made geological collections; others sketched the wonderful sunsets; but before and above all we ate and slept. We must have spent a good twelve hours asleep in our bags every day after our six weeks' sledging. And we rested. Perhaps this is not everybody's notion of a very good time, but it was good enough for us.
The Weddell seal which frequents the seas which fringe the Antarctic continent was a standby for most of our wants; for he can at a pinch provide not only meat to eat, fuel for your fire and oil for your lamp, but also leather for your finnesko and an antidote to scurvy. As he lies out on the sea-ice, a great ungainly shape, nothing short of an actual prod will persuade him to take much notice of an Antarctic explorer. Even then he is as likely as not to yawn in your face and go to sleep again. His instincts are all to avoid the water when alarmed, for he knows his enemies the killer whales live there: but if you drive him into the water he is transformed in the twinkling of an eye into a thing of beauty and grace, which can travel and turn with extreme celerity and which can successfully chase the fish on which he feeds.
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 inc
hes 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 weathe
r 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."