Apsley Cherry-Garrard

“ So great is the wish of the sea to freeze, and so cold is the air, that the wind has only to lull for one instant and the surface is covered with a thin film of ice, as though by magic. But the next blizzard tears it out by force or a spring tide coaxes it out by stealth, whether it be a foot thick or only a fraction of an inch. Such an example we had at our very doors during our last winter, and the untamed winds which blew as a result were atrocious.
Thus it is that floes from a few inches to twenty feet thick go voyaging out to join the belt of ice which is known as the pack. ”

“ A White Day is so rare that I have recollections of going out from the hut or the tent and being impressed by the fact that the snow really looked white. When to the beautiful tints in the sky and the delicate shading on the snow are added perhaps the deep colours of the open sea, with reflections from the ice foot and ice-cliffs in it, all brilliant blues and emerald greens, then indeed a man may realize how beautiful this world can be, and how clean. ”

“ It takes all kinds to make a world and a dog-team. We had aristocrats like Osman, and Bolsheviks like Krisravitza, and lunatics like Hol-hol. The present-day employer of labour might stand amazed when he saw a crowd of prospective workmen go mad with joy at the sight of their driver approaching them with a harness in his hands. The most ardent trade unionist might boil with rage at the sight of eleven or thirteen huskies dragging a heavy load, including their idle master, over the floe with every appearance of intense joy. ”

“ Such men may be at a discount in conventional life; but give me a snowy ice-floe waving about on the top of a black swell, a ship thrown aback, a sledge-party almost shattered, or one that has just upset their supper on to the floorcloth of the tent (which is much the same thing) , and I will lie down and cry for Bowers to come and lead me to food and safety.
Those whom the gods love, die young. The gods loved him, if indeed it be benevolent to show your favourites a clear, straight, shining path of life, with plenty of discomfort and not a little pain, but with few doubts and no fears. ”

“ There is no doubt that Scott knows where to aim for in a glacier, as it was just here that Shackleton had two or three of his worst days' work, in such a maze of crevasses that he said that often a slip meant death for the whole party. He avoids the sides of the glacier and goes nowhere near the snow: he often heads straight for apparent chaos and somehow, when we appear to have reached a cul-de-sac, we find it an open road. ”

“ The snow rings and thuds to your footfall. The ice is cracking to the falling temperature and the tide crack groans as the water rises. And over all, wave upon wave, fold upon fold, there hangs the curtain of the aurora. As you watch, it fades away, and then quite suddenly a great beam flashes up and rushes to the zenith, an arch of palest green and orange, a tail of flaming gold. Again it falls, fading away into great searchlight beams which rise behind the smoking crater of Mount Erebus. ”

“ The whole makes a tricky place on which to walk in the dark, for the surface is strewn with boulders of all sizes and furrowed and channelled by drifts of hard and icy snow, and quite suddenly you may find yourself prostrate upon a surface of slippery blue ice. It may be easily imagined that it is no seemly place to exercise skittish ponies or mules in a cold wind, but there is no other place when the sea-ice is unsafe. ”

“ When on the way to Cape Crozier the moon suddenly came out of the cloud to show us a great crevasse which would have taken us all with our sledge without any difficulty, I felt that we were not to go under this trip after such a deliverance. When we had lost our tent, and there was a very great balance of probability that we should never find it again, and we were lying out the blizzard in our bags, I saw that we were face to face with a long fight against cold which we could not have survived. ”

“ Cape Evans in the dark, strewn with great boulders, with the open sea at your feet, is no easy place to manage a very high-spirited and excitable mule, just out of a warm stable, especially if this is his first outing for several days and the wind is blowing fresh, and you are not sure if your face is frost-bitten, and you are quite sure that your hands are. ”

“ One can feel the averages running through his brain: so many miles to-day: so many more to-morrow. When shall we come to an end of this pressure? Can we go straight or must we go more west? And then the great undulating waves with troughs eight miles wide, and the buried mountains, causing whirlpools in the ice—how immense, and how annoying. The monotonous march: the necessity to keep the mind concentrated to steer amongst disturbances: the relief of a steady plod when the disturbances cease for a time: then more pressure and more crevasses. ”

“ Camp 30. Noon. Miserable, utterly miserable. We have camped in the 'Slough of Despond.' The tempest rages with unabated violence. The temperature has gone to +33°; everything in the tent is soaking. People returning from the outside look exactly as though they had been in a heavy shower of rain. They drip pools on the floor-cloth. The snow is steadily climbing higher about walls, ponies, tents and sledges. The ponies look utterly desolate. Oh! But this is too crushing, and we are only 12 miles from the glacier. A hopeless feeling descends on one and is hard to fight off. ”

“ From our hut, four hundred yards away, it looks like a great embankment behind which rises the majestic volcano Erebus, with its plume of steam and smoke.
The cape itself does not rise on the average more than thirty feet, and somewhat resembles the back of a hog with several backbones. The hollows between the ridges are for the most part filled with snow and ice, while in one or two places where the accumulation of snow is great enough there are little glacierets which do not travel far before they ignominiously peter out. ”

“ Had we but half their physical courage none could stand against us. Had we a hundredth part of their maternal instinct we should have to kill our children by the thousand. Their little bodies are so full of curiosity that they have no room for fear. They like mountaineering, and joy-riding on ice-floes: they even like to drill.
One day there had been a blizzard, and lying open to the view of all was a deserted nest, a pile of coveted stones. All the surrounding rookery made their way to and fro, each husband acquiring merit, for, after each journey, he gave his wife a stone. ”

“ Straight ahead of you there is nothing to be seen but black open sea, with a high light over the horizon, which you know betokens pack; this is ice blink. But as you watch there appears and disappears a little dark smudge. This puzzles you for some time, and then you realize that this is the mirage of some far mountain or of Beaufort Island, which guards the mouth of McMurdo Sound against such traffic as ever comes that way, by piling up the ice floes across the entrance. ”

“ I wish I could take you on to the great Ice Barrier some calm evening when the sun is just dipping in the middle of the night and show you the autumn tints on Ross Island. A last look round before turning in, a good day's march behind, enough fine fat pemmican inside you to make you happy, the homely smell of tobacco from the tent, a pleasant sense of soft fur and the deep sleep to come. And all the softest colours God has made are in the snow; on Erebus to the west, where the wind can scarcely move his cloud of smoke ”

“ The big swell which so often prevails in these latitudes is a most inspiring sight, and must be seen from a comparatively small ship like the Terra Nova for its magnitude to be truly appreciated. As the ship rose on the crest of one great hill of water the next big ridge was nearly a mile away, with a sloping valley between. At times these seas are rounded in giant slopes as smooth as glass; at others they curl over, leaving a milk-white foam, and their slopes are marbled with a beautiful spumy tracery. ”

“ There were many seals here already, and it was clear that the place would form a jolly nursery this year, for there must have been a lot of movement on the Barrier and the sea-ice was seamed with pressure ridges up to twenty feet in height. The hollows were buckled until the sea water came up and formed frozen ponds which would thaw later into lovely baths. Sheltered from the wind the children could chase their ridiculous tails to their hearts' content: their mothers would lie and sleep, awakening every now and then to scratch themselves with their long finger-nails. ”

“ But now your ear catches the metallic scratch of ski sticks on hard ice; there is some one else ski-ing over there, it may be many miles away, for sound travels in an amazing way. Every now and then there comes a sharp crack like a pistol shot; it is the ice contracting in the glaciers of Erebus, and you know that it is getting colder. Your breath smokes, forming white rime over your face, and ice in your beard; if it is very cold you may actually hear it crackle as it freezes in mid air! ”

“ Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration ad hoc. Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and Ramsgate. ”

“ 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. ”

“ North and south of us are deep bays, beyond which great glaciers come rippling over the lower slopes to thrust high blue-walled snouts into the sea. The sea is blue before us, dotted with shining bergs or ice floes, whilst far over the Sound, yet so bold and magnificent as to appear near, stand the beautiful Western Mountains with their numerous lofty peaks, their deep glacial valley and clear cut scarps, a vision of mountain scenery that can have few rivals." [107] ”

“ Take it all in all, I do not believe anybody on earth has a worse time than an Emperor penguin.
Even now the Antarctic is to the rest of the earth as the Abode of the Gods was to the ancient Chaldees, a precipitous and mammoth land lying far beyond the seas which encircled man's habitation, and nothing is more striking about the exploration of the Southern Polar regions than its absence, for when King Alfred reigned in England the Vikings were navigating the ice-fields of the North; yet when Wellington fought the battle of Waterloo there was still an undiscovered continent in the South. ”

“ And it continues to move. As you stand in the still cold air you may sometimes hear the silence broken by the sharp reports as the cold contracts it or its own weight splits it. Nature is tearing up that ice as human beings tear paper.
The sea-cliff is not so high here, and is more broken up by crevasses and caves, and more covered with snow. Some five miles along the coast the white line is broken by a bluff and black outcrop of rock; this is Turk's Head, and beyond it is the low white line of Glacier Tongue, jutting out for miles into the sea. ”

“ I dream sometimes now of bad days we had on the Beardmore and elsewhere, when men were dropping through to be caught up and hang at the full length of the harnesses and toggles many times in an hour. On the same sledge as myself on the Beardmore one man went down once head first, and another eight times to the length of his harness in 25 minutes. And always you wondered whether your harness was going to hold when the jerk came. But those days were a Sunday School treat compared to our days of blind-man's buff with the Emperor penguins among the crevasses of Cape Crozier. ”

“ It is blowing a full gale: the air is full of falling snow, and the wind drives this along and adds to it the loose snow which is lying on the surface of the Barrier. Fight your way a few steps away from the tent, and it will be gone. Lose your sense of direction and there is nothing to guide you back. Expose your face and hands to the wind, and they will very soon be frost-bitten. And this at midsummer. Imagine the added cold of spring and autumn: the cold and darkness of winter. ”

“ Four hundred miles of moving ice behind it had just tossed and twisted those giant ridges until Job himself would have lacked words to reproach their Maker. We scrambled over and under, hanging on with our axes, and cutting steps where we could not find a foothold with our crampons. And always we got towards the Emperor penguins, and it really began to look as if we were going to do it this time, when we came up against a wall of ice which a single glance told us we could never cross. One of the largest pressure ridges had been thrown, end on, against the cliff. ”

“ That sledging, at any rate in summer and autumn, was a much less terrible ordeal than my imagination had painted it, and that those Hut Point days would prove some of the happiest in my life. Just enough to eat and keep us warm, no more—no frills nor trimmings: there is many a worse and more elaborate life. The necessaries of civilization were luxuries to us: and as Priestley found under circumstances compared to which our life at Hut Point was a Sunday School treat, the luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create. ”

“ But the primus lamps could not be lighted, and as they sat in leather boots and inadequate clothing being continually frost-bitten they decided to leave the tent and make their way to the ship—sheer madness as we now know. As they groped their way in the howling snow-drift the majority of the party either slipped or rolled down a steep slippery snow slope some thousand feet high ending in a precipitous ice-cliff, below which lay the open sea. It is a nasty place on a calm summer day: in a blizzard it must be ghastly. ”

“ Some of us have slept in a hurricane of wind and a hell of drifting snow and darkness, with no roof above our heads, with no tent to help us home, with no conceivable chance that we should ever see our friends again, with no food that we could eat, and only the snow which drifted into our sleeping-bags which we could drink day after day and night after night. ”

“ Is the state of affairs in which we found the glacier an extraordinary one, the snow being a special phenomenon due to that great blizzard and snowfall? Are we going to find blue ice this year where we found thick soft snow last? Well! I have got a regular bad needle again, just as I have had before. But somehow the needle has always worked off when we get right into it. What a blessing it is that things are seldom as bad in the reality as you expect they are going to be in your imagination: though I must say the Winter Journey was worse even than I had imagined. ”

“ 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. ”

“ On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day's work of polar exploration. Nothing more business-like could be imagined. On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One had forgotten that a tent could be warm and a sleeping-bag dry: so deep were the contrary impressions that only actual experience was convincing. "It is a sweltering day, the air breathless, the glare intense—one loses sight of the fact that the temperature is low [-22°] , one's mind seeks comparison in hot sunlit streets and scorching pavements, yet six hours ago my thumb was frost-bitten. All the inconveniences of frozen footwear and damp clothes and sleeping-bags have vanished entirely." ”

“ On the top of the pianola, close to the head of the table, lived the gramophone; and under the one looking-glass we possessed, which hung on the bulkhead of Scott's cubicle, was a home-made box with shelves on which lay our records. It was usual to start the gramophone after dinner, and its value may be imagined. It is necessary to be cut off from civilization and all that it means to enable you to realize fully the power music has to recall the past, or the depths of meaning in it to soothe the present and give hope for the future. ”

“ That is the kind of sleep the Antarctic offers you at her worst, or nearly at her worst. And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than as a gruesome foe. ”

“ We had just charged the first big floe, and we were in the pack.
"The sky has been wonderful, with every form of cloud in every condition of light and shade; the sun has continually appeared through breaks in the cloudy heavens from time to time, brilliantly illuminating some field of pack, some steep-walled berg, or some patch of bluest sea. So sunlight and shadow have chased each other across our scene. To-night there is little or no swell—the ship is on an even keel, steady, save for the occasional shocks on striking ice. ”

“ The warm glow of the sun with the keen invigorating cold of the air forms a combination which is inexpressibly health-giving and satisfying to me, whilst the golden light on this wonderful scene of mountain and ice satisfies every claim of scenic magnificence. ”

“ It is amazing to one who looks back upon these first efforts of the Discovery Expedition that the results were not more disastrous than was actually the case. When one reads of dog-teams which refused to start, of pemmican which was considered to be too rich to eat, of two officers discussing the ascent of Erebus and back in one day, and of sledging parties which knew neither how to use their cookers or lamp, nor how to put up their tents, nor even how to put on their clothes, then one begins to wonder that the process of education was gained at so small a price. ”

“ Six hours earlier we could have walked to the hut on sound sea-ice. A few hours later we should have seen open water on arrival at the Barrier edge. The blizzard that knocked out the beasts, the death of Weary, the misunderstanding of the dogs, everything, fitted in to place us on the sea-ice during the only two hours of the whole year that we could possibly have been in such a position. Let those who believe in coincidence carry on believing. Nobody will ever convince me that there was not something more. ”

“ With so many young bloods in the heyday of youth and strength beyond my own I feel there will be a most difficult task in making choice towards the end." "I should like to have Bill to hold my hand when we get to the Pole," said Scott.
Wilson was there and his diary is that of an artist, watching the clouds and mountains, of a scientist observing ice and rock and snow, of a doctor, and above all of a man with good judgment. You will understand that the thing which really interested him in this journey was the acquisition of knowledge. ”