The question of what ought to be done for the best during the coming sledging season must have been in the minds of all of us. Which of the two missing parties were we to try and find? A winter journey to relieve Campbell and his five men was out of the question. I doubt the possibility of such a journey to Evans Coves with fit men: to us at any rate it was unthinkable. Also if we could do the double journey up and down, Campbell could certainly do the single journey down. Add to this that there was every sign of open water under the Western Mountains, though this did not influence us much when the decision was made. The problem as it presented itself to us was much as follows:
Campbell's Party might have been picked up by the Terra Nova. Pennell meant to have another try to reach him on his way north, and it was probable that the ship would not be able to communicate again with Cape Evans owing to ice: on the other hand it was likely that the ship had not been able to relieve him. It also seemed that he could not have travelled down the coast at this time, owing to the state of the sea-ice. The danger to him and his men was primarily during the winter: every day after the winter his danger was lessened. If we started in the end of October to relieve Campbell, estimating the probable date of arrival of the ship, we judged that we could reach him only five or six weeks before the ship relieved him. All the same Campbell and his men might be alive, and, having lived through the winter, the arrival of help might make the difference between life and death.
On the other hand we knew that the Polar Party must be dead. They might be anywhere between Hut Point and the Pole, drifted over by snow, or lying at the bottom of a crevasse, which seemed the most likely thing to have happened. From the Upper Glacier Depôt in 85° 5' S. to the Pole, that is the whole distance of the Plateau Journey, we did not know the courses they had steered nor the position of their depôts, for Lieutenant Evans, who brought back the Last Return Party, was invalided home and neither of the seamen who remained of this party knew the courses.
After the experience of both the supporting parties on their way down the Beardmore Glacier, when we all got into frightfully crevassed areas, it was the general opinion that the Polar Party must have fallen down a crevasse; the weight of five men, as compared with the four men and three men of the other return parties, supported this theory. Lashly was inclined to think they had had scurvy. The true solution never once occurred to us, for they had full rations for a very much longer period of time than, according to their averages to 87° 32', they were likely to be out.
The first object of the expedition had been the Pole. If some record was not found, their success or failure would for ever remain uncertain. Was it due not only to the men and their relatives, but also to the expedition, to ascertain their fate if possible?
The chance of finding the remains of the Southern Party did not seem very great. At the same time Scott was strict about leaving notes at depôts, and it seemed likely that he would have left some record at the Upper Glacier Depôt before starting to descend the Beardmore Glacier: it would be interesting to know whether he did so. If we went south we must be prepared to reach this depôt: farther than that, I have explained, we could not track him. On the other hand, if we went south prepared to go to the Upper Glacier Depôt, the number of sledging men necessary, in view of the fact that we had no depôts, would not allow of our sending a second party to relieve Campbell.
It was with all this in our minds that we sat down one evening in the hut to decide what was to be done. The problem was a hard one. On the one hand we might go south, fail entirely to find any trace of the Polar Party, and while we were fruitlessly travelling all the summer Campbell's men might die for want of help. On the other hand we might go north, to find that Campbell's men were safe, and as a consequence the fate of the Polar Party and the result of their efforts might remain for ever unknown. Were we to forsake men who might be alive to look for those whom we knew were dead?
These were the points put by Atkinson to the meeting of the whole party. He expressed his own conviction that we should go south, and then each member was asked what he thought. No one was for going north: one member only did not vote for going south, and he preferred not to give an opinion. Considering the complexity of the question, I was surprised by this unanimity. We prepared for another Southern Journey.
It is impossible to express and almost impossible to imagine how difficult it was to make this decision. Then we knew nothing: now we know all. And nothing is harder than to realize in the light of facts the doubts which others have experienced in the fog of uncertainty.
Our winter routine worked very smoothly. Inside the hut we had a good deal more room than we needed, but this allowed of certain work being done in its shelter which would otherwise have had to be done outside. For instance we cut a hole through the floor of the dark-room, and sledged in some heavy boulders of kenyte lava: these were frozen solidly into the rock upon which the hut was built by the simple method of pouring hot water over them, and the pedestal so formed was used by Wright for his pendulum observations. I was able to skin a number of birds in the hut; which, incidentally, was a very much colder place in consequence of the reduction in our numbers.
The wind was most turbulent during this winter. The mean velocity of the wind, in miles per hour, for the month of May was 24.6 m.p.h.; for June 30.9 m.p.h.; and for July 29.5 m.p.h. The percentage of hours when the wind was blowing over fresh gale strength (42 m.p.h. on the Beaufort scale) for the month of May was 24.5, for June 35, and for July 33 per cent of the whole.
These figures speak for themselves: after May we lived surrounded by an atmosphere of raging winds and blinding drift, and the sea at our door was never allowed to freeze permanently.
After the blizzard in the beginning of May which I have already described, the ice round the point of Cape Evans and that in North Bay formed to a considerable thickness. We put a thermometer screen out upon it, and Atkinson started a fish-trap through a hole in it. There was a good deal of competition over this trap: the seamen started a rival one, which was to have been a very large affair, though it narrowed down to a less ambitious business before it was finished. There was a sound of cheering one morning, and Crean came in triumph from his fish-trap with a catch of 25. Atkinson's last catch had numbered one, but the seals had found his fishing-holes: a new hole caught fish until a seal found it. One of these fish, a Tremasome, had a parasitic growth over the dorsal sheath. External parasites are not common in the Antarctic, and this was an interesting find.
On June 1 Dimitri and Hooper went with a team of nine dogs to and from Hut Point, to see if they could find Noogis, the dog which had left us on our return on May 1. There was plenty of food for him to pick up there. No trace of him could be found. The party reported a bad running surface, no pressure in the ice, as was the case the former year, but a large open working crack running from Great Razorback to Tent Island. There were big snowdrifts at Hut Point, as indeed was already the case at Cape Evans. During the first days of June we got down into the minus thirties, and our spirits rose as the thermometer dropped: we wanted permanent sea-ice.
"Saturday, June 8. The weather changes since the night before last have been, luckily for us, uncommon. Thursday evening a strong northerly wind started with some drift, and this increased during the night until it blew over forty miles an hour, the temperature being -22°. A strong wind from the north is rare, and generally is the prelude of a blizzard. This northerly wind fell towards morning, and the day was calm and clear, the temperature falling until it was -33° at 4 P.M. The barometer had been abnormally low during the day, being only 28.24 at noon. Then at 8 P.M. with the temperature at -36°, this blizzard broke, and at the same time there was a big upward jump of the barometer, which seemed to mark the beginning of the blizzard much more than the thermometer, which did not rise much. The wind during the night was very high, blowing 72 and 66 miles an hour, for hours at a time, and has not yet shown any sign of diminishing. Now, after lunch, the hut is straining and creaking, while a
shower of stones rattles at intervals against it: the drift is generally very heavy."
"Sunday, June 9. The temperature has been higher, about zero, during the day, and the blizzard shows no signs of falling yet. The gusts are still of a very high velocity. A large quantity of ice to the north seems to have gone out: at any rate our narrow strip along the front, which is so valuable to us, will probably be permanent now."
"Monday, June 10. A most turbulent day. It is very hard to settle down to do anything, read or write, with such a turmoil outside, the hut shaking until we begin to wonder how long it will stand such winds. Most of the time the wind is averaging about sixty miles an hour, but the gusts are far greater, and at times it seems that something must go. Just before lunch I was racking my brains to write an Editorial for the South Polar Times, and had congratulated ourselves on having the sea-ice which is still in North Bay. As we were having lunch Nelson came in and said, 'The thermometers have gone!' All the ice in North Bay has gone. The part immediately next to the shore, which has now been in so long, and which was over two feet thick, we had considered sure to stay. On it has gone out the North Bay thermometer screen with its instruments, which was placed 400 yards out, the fish-trap, some shovels and a sledge with a crowbar. The gusts were exceptionally strong at lunch, and the ice must have gone out very quickly. There was no sign of it afterwards, though it was not drifting much and we could see some distance. To lose this ice in North Bay is a great disappointment, for it means so much to us here whether we have ice or water at our doors. We are now pretty well confined to the cape both for our own exercise and that of the mules, and in the dark it is very rough walking. But if the ice in South Bay were to follow, it would be a calamity, cutting us off entirely from the south and all sledging next year. Let us hope we shall be spared this."
This blizzard lasted for eight days, up till then the longest blizzard we had experienced: "It died as it had lived, blowing hard to the last, averaging 68 miles an hour from the south, and then 56 miles an hour from the north, finally back to the south, and so to calm. To sit here with no noise of wind whistling in the ventilator, calm and starlight outside, and North Bay freezing over once more, is a very great relief."[263]
It is noteworthy that this clearance of the ice, as also that in the beginning of May, coincided roughly with the maximum declination of the moon, and therefore with a run of spring tides.
It would be tedious to give any detailed account of the winds and drift which followed, night and day. There were few days which did not produce their blizzard, but in contrast the hours of bright starlight were very beautiful. "Walking home over the cape in the darkness this afternoon I saw an eruption of Erebus which, compared with anything we have seen here before, was very big. It looked as though a great mass of flame shot up some thousands of feet into the air, and, as suddenly as it rose, fell again, rising again to about half the height, and then disappearing. There was then a great column of steam rising from the crater, and probably, so Debenham asserts, it was not a flame which appeared, but the reflection from a big bubble breaking in the crater. Afterwards the smoke cloud stretched away southwards, and we could not see the end of it."[264]
Blizzard followed blizzard, and at the beginning of July we had four days which were the thickest I have ever seen. Generally when you go out into a blizzard the drift is blown from your face and clothes, and though you cannot see your stretched-out hand, especially on a dark winter day, the wind prevents you being smothered. The wind also prevents the land, tents, hut and cases from being covered. But during this blizzard the drift drove at you in such blankets of snow, that your person was immediately blotted out, your face covered and your eyes plugged up. Gran lost himself for some time on the hill when taking the 8 A.M. observations, and Wright had difficulty in getting back from the magnetic cave. Men had narrow escapes of losing themselves, though they were but a few feet from the hut.
When this blizzard cleared the camp was buried, and even on unobstructed surfaces the snowdrifts averaged four feet of additional depth. Two enormous drifts ran down to the sea from either end of the hut. I do not think we ever found some of our stores again, but the larger part we carried up to the higher ground behind us where they remained fairly clear. About this time I began to notice large sheets of anchor ice off the end of Cape Evans, that is to say, ice forming and remaining on the bottom of the open sea. Now also the open water was extending round the cape into the South Bay behind us: but it was too dark to get any reliable idea of the distribution of ice in the Sound. We were afraid that we were cut off from Hut Point, but I do not believe that this was the case; though the open water must have stretched many miles to the south in the middle of the Sound. The days when it was clear enough even to potter about outside the hut were exceptional. God was very angry.
"Sunday, July 14. A blizzard during the night, and after breakfast it was drifting a lot. While we were having service some of the men went over the camp to get ice for water. The sea-ice had been blown out of North Bay, and the men supposed that the sea was open, and would look black, but Crean tells me that they nearly walked over the ice-foot, and, when it cleared later, we saw the sea as white as the ice-foot itself. A strip of ice which was lying out in the Bay last night must have been brought in by the tide, even against a wind of some forty miles an hour. This shows what an influence the tides and currents have in comparison with the winds, for just at this time we are having very big tides. It was blowing and drifting all the morning, and the tide was flowing in, pressing the ice in under the ice-foot to such an extent that later it remained there, though the tide was ebbing and a strong southerly was blowing."[265] Incidentally the bergs which were grounded in our neighbourhood were shifted and broken about considerably by these high winds: also the meteorological screen placed on the Ramp the year before was broken from its upright, which had snapped in the middle, and must have been taken up into the air and so out to sea, for there was no trace of it to be found: Wright lost two doors placed over the entrance to the magnetic cave: when he lifted them they were taken out of his hands by the wind, and disappeared into the air and were never seen again.
So ready was the sea to freeze that there can be little doubt that it already contained large numbers of ice crystals, and time and again I have stood upon the ice-foot watching the tongues of the winds licking up the waters as they roared their way out to sea. Then, with no warning, there would come, suddenly and completely, a lull. And there would be a film of ice, covering the surface of the sea, come so quickly that all you could say was that it was not there before and it was there now. And then down would come the wind again and it was gone. Once when the winter had gone and daylight had returned I stood upon the end of the cape, the air all calm around me, and there, half-a-mile away, a full blizzard was blowing: the islands, and even the berg between Inaccessible Island and the cape, were totally obscured in the thickest drift: the top of the drift, which was very distinct, thinned to show dimly the crest of Inaccessible Island: Turk's Head was visible and Erebus quite clear. In fact I was just on the edge of a thick blizzard, blowing down the Strait, the side showing as a perpendicular wall about 500 feet high and travelling, I should say, about 40 miles an hour. A roar came out from it of the wind and waves.
The weather conditions were extraordinarily local, as another experience will show. Atkinson and Dimitri were off to Hut Point with the dogs, carrying biscuit and pemmican for the coming Search Journey: I went with them some way, and then left them to place a flag upon the end of Glacier Tongue for surveying purposes. It was clear and bright, and it was easy to get a sketch of the bearings of the islands from this position, which showed how great a portion of the Tongue must have broken off in the autumn of 1911. I anticipated a pleasant walk home, but was somewhat alarmed when heavy wind and drift came down from the direction of the Hutton Cliffs. Wearing spectacles, and being unable to see without them, I managed to steer with difficulty by the sun which still showed dimly through the drift. It was
amazing suddenly to walk out of the wall of drift into light airs at Little Razorback Island. One minute it was blowing and drifting hard and I could see almost nothing, the next it was calm, save for little whirlwinds of snow formed by eddies of air drawn in from the north. In another three hundred yards the wind was blowing from the north. On this day Atkinson found wind force 8 and temperature -17° at Hut Point: at Cape Evans the temperature was zero and men were sitting on the rocks and smoking in the sun. Many instances might be given to show how local our weather conditions often were.