Baron Edward Ratcliffe Garth Russell Evans Mountevans

“ When Taylor and I got first down we were greeted with a weird and wonderful sight: constant drifts of snow had formed a great overhang and the ice cliff was wreathed in a mass of snowy curtains and folds which took all manner of fantastic turns and shapes. A fresh wind was blowing continuously that made it most unpleasant for those above, and it was a relief to us all when the last man was passed down in safety, it was Scott himself. ”

“ Those of his ship-mates who saw him in this gale will never forget his strong, brown face illuminated by a hanging lamp as he stood amongst those suffering little beasts. He was a fine, powerful man, and on occasions he seemed to be actually lifting the poor little ponies to their feet as the ship lurched heavily to leeward and a great sea would wash the legs of his charges from under them. One felt somehow, glancing into the ponies' stalls, which Captain Scott and I frequently visited together, that Oates's very strength itself inspired his animals with confidence. ”

“ To get into one's head what we had to look at on the upper half of the Beardmore, imagine a moderate straight slope: this is the Glacier like a giant road, white except where the sun has melted the snow and bared the blue ice. Looking up the Glacier an overhang of ice-falls and disturbances, with three nunataks or mountains sticking through the ice-sheet like islands—the disturbance is mostly to the left (Eastwards) of these, and the road here looks cruelly steep even where it is not broken up. ”

“ Two tiny, disconsolate figures were silhouetted against the sunlight—my two companions on our great homeward march, one sitting and one standing, probably looking for my reappearance as I vanished and was sighted again from time to time. I felt a tremendous love for those two men that day. They had trusted me so implicitly and believed in my ability to win through. I turned northward again, stepped down into the next hollow and stopped. I was in an enormous depression but not a crevasse to be seen, for the sides of the depression met quite firmly at the bottom in smooth, blue, solid ice. ”

“ We began now to experience the same tingling wind that Shackleton speaks of, and men's noses were frequently frost-bitten. On Christmas Eve we were 8000 feet above the Barrier, and we imagined we were clear of crevasses and pressure ridges. We now felt the cold far more when marching than we had done on the Beardmore.
The wind all the time turned our breath into cakes of ice on our beards. ”

“ I suppose the memory of the pack ice hissing around a wooden ship is one of the little voices that call—and they sometimes call as the memory of "a tall ship and a star to steer her by" calls John Masefield's seamen "down to the sea again." I sometimes feel a mute fool at race meetings, society dinner parties, and dances, the lure of the little voices I know then at its strongest. ”

“ What tried us more than anything else was thick weather and the fearfully bad light on days when no landmarks were visible to guide us to the depot. Our sleeping-bags also were frozen and uncomfortable, thick rime collecting on the insides of our tents which every puff of wind would shake down in a shower of ice. When sitting round on our rolled-up sleeping-bags at meal times we could not help our heads and shoulders brushing off patches of this frost rime, which soon accumulated in the fur of the sleeping-bags and made life at night a clammy misery. ”

“ Wilson did a large amount of sketching on the Beardmore—his sketches, besides being wonderful works of art, helped us very much in our surveys.
Fringing the great glittering river of ice were dark granite and dolerite hills, some were snow-clad and some quite bare, for their steepness resisted the white cloak of this freezing clime. The new hills were surveyed, headlands plotted, and names bestowed where Shackleton had not already done so. Of course we had Shackleton's charts, diaries, and experience to help us. We often discussed Shackleton's journey, and were amazed at his fine performance. ”

“ The sun was just below the horizon at midnight and we had a most glorious sunset, which was first a blazing copper changing to salmon pink and then purple. The pools of water between the floes caught the reflection, the sea was perfectly still and every berg and ice-floe caught something of the delicate colour. Wilson, of course, was up and about till long after midnight sketching and painting. The Antarctic pack ice lends itself to water-colour work far better than to oils. ”

“ To rightly get hold of our wintering place one must imagine a low spit of land jutting out into a fiord running, roughly north and south and bounded on both sides by a steep-to coast line indented with glaciers of vast size. Here and there gigantic snow-slopes were to be seen which more gradually lowered into the sea, and all around ice-covered mountains with black and brown foothills. A few islands rose to heights of 300 or 400 feet in McMurdo Sound, and these had no snow on them worth speaking of even in the winter. ”

“ The watch manned the hand pump, which, although choked, discharged a small stream, and for twenty-four hours this game was kept up, Scott himself working with the best of them and staying with the toughest.
It was a sight that one could never forget: everybody saturated, some waist-deep on the floor of the engine room, oil and coal dust mixing with the water and making every one filthy, some men clinging to the iron ladder way and passing full buckets up long after their muscles had ceased to work naturally, their grit and spirit keeping them going. ”

“ We could stagger on no farther with the dreadfully heavy sledge. The prospect was hopeless and our food was nearly gone. Some rest must be obtained to give us strength for this absolute battle for life. The great strain of the day's efforts had thoroughly exhausted us, and it took me back to the last day of the December blizzard which caused the eventual loss of the Polar Party and the ruin of Captain Scott's so excellently laid plans. I remembered the poor ponies after their fourteen hours' march, their flanks heaving, their black eyes dull, shrivelled and wasted. ”

“ Christmas Day, 1911, found our two tiny green tents pitched on the King Edward VII. Plateau—the only objects that broke the monotony of the great white glittering waste that stretches from the Beardmore Glacier Head to the South Pole. A light wind was blowing from the South, and little whirls of fine snow, as fine as dust, would occasionally sweep round the tents and along the sides of the sledge runners, streaming away almost like smoke to the Northward. Inside the tents breathing heavily were our eight sleeping figures—in these little canvas shelters soon after 4 a.m. ”

“ They contrasted strangely in their blackness with the low crystal ice cliffs of the Barrier itself. In one place we were splashed by the spray from quite a large waterfall, and one realised that the summer sun, beating down on those black foothills, must be melting enormous quantities of ice and snow. A curious ozone smell, which must have been the stench of the guano from the penguin rookeries, was noticed, but land smells of any sort were pleasant enough now for it brought home to us the fact that we should shortly embark on yet another stage of the Expedition. ”

“ In the camp we could only sleep and eat, the tent space became more and more congested, and those lying closest to the walls of the tents were cramped by the weight of snow which bore down on the canvas. The blizzard on the second day pursued its course with unabated violence, the temperature increased, however, and we experienced driving sleet. The tent floor cloths had pools of water on them, and water dripped on our faces as we lay in our sleeping-bags. Outside the scene was miserable enough, the poor ponies cowering behind their snow walls the picture of misery. ”

“ Yes, Amundsen was over 150 miles farther South, and his sledge runners were slithering over the snow, casting its powdered particles aside in beautiful little clouds while I was rapidly overhauling the motors with their labouring, sorely taxed custodians, Day, Lashly, and Hooper. It seems very cruel to say this, but there's no good in shutting one's eyes to Truth, however unpleasantly clad she may be. ”

“ We made some little way homeward, Keohane, James Pigg and myself pulling the sledge with our gear on it, and Forde lifting, carrying, and pushing Blossom along. I felt I ought to kill this animal but I knew how angry and disappointed Scott would be at the loss, so kept him going although he showed so much distress. It was surprising what spirit the little brute had: if we started to march away Blossom staggered along after us, looking like a spectre against the white background of snow. ”

“ The two parts of the Alpine rope working round the pole cut deeply into the over-hanging snow and brought a shower of ice crystals pouring over the heads and shoulders of whoever was sitting in the bowline. It was a good piece of work getting everything down safely, and I admired Scott's decision to go over; a more nervous man would have fought shy because, once down on the sea ice there was little chance of our getting back and we had got to fight our way forward to Cape Evans somehow. ”

“ Although our work physically was of the hardest we lived in luxury for a while. Nelson provided cocoa for Captain Scott and myself at midnight just before we slept. He used to make it after supper and keep it for us in a great thermos flask. We only washed once a week and we were soon black with sun and dirt but in splendid training. In the first three weeks my shore gang, which included the lusty Canadian physicist, Wright, carried many hundreds of cases, walked miles daily, dug ice, picked, shovelled, handed ponies, cooked and danced. ”

“ On they came, seemingly at a great pace, and one heard a crunching noise as the hoofs of the ponies trod down the snow crust, but one could not hear the footfalls of the men. One exchanged a "Hallo" with the leading man and passed on until a much bigger white shape loomed up in the obscurity of the noon-twilight, the going underfoot changed and skis fetched up against a great lump of ice which was scarcely discernible in the confusing darkness, and one realised that what little light there was to the northward had been blotted out by one of the big grounded icebergs. ”

“ We packed our ski on the sledge, attached spiked crampons to our finnesko, and guided the sledge through the maze of hummocks and crevasses.
The travelling surface was wind-swept and consequently too easy, for the sledge would charge down a slippery slope of blue ice and capsize time after time. In places the way became so steep that our united efforts were needed to avoid the yawning chasms which beset our path. ”

“ Our sojourn at Hut Point had given us plenty of chance to learn the easier snow roads and the least dangerous, and Scott chose the way close eastward of Castle Rock to a position four miles beyond it, which his first expedition had named Hutton Cliffs. From Castle Rock onward the way took us to the westward of two conical hills which were well-known landmarks—a hitherto untrodden route—but the going was by no means bad. Bitingly cold for faces and finger-tips, still, no weights to impede us. ”

“ A floating farm-yard best describes the appearance of the upper deck, with the white pony heads peeping out of their stables, dogs chained to stanchions, rails, and ring-bolts, pet rabbits lolloping around the ready supply of compressed hay, and forage here, there, and everywhere. If the "Terra Nova" was deeply laden from Cardiff, imagine what she looked like leaving New Zealand. We had piled coal in sacks wherever it could be wedged in between the deck cargo of petrol. ”

“ Alas, more wear for the runners of the sledge, which meant more labour to the eight of us, so keen to succeed in our enterprise—soon we are in the thick of it; first one slips and is thrown violently down, then a sledge runs over the slope of a great ice wave.
The man trying to hold it back is relentlessly thrown, and the bow of the sledge crashes on to the heel of the hindermost of those hauling ahead with a thud that means "pain." ”

“ Our marching hours are nine per day. It is a long slog with a well-loaded sledge, and more tiring for me than the others as I have no ski. However, as long as I can do my share all day and keep fit, it does not matter much one way or the other.
"We had our first north wind on the Plateau to-day, and a deposit of snow crystals made the surface like sand latterly on the march. The sledge dragged like lead. In the evening it fell calm, and although the temperature was 16 degrees it was positively pleasant to stand about outside the tent and bask in the sun's rays. ”

“ The newcomers to these regions were clustered in little groups on the forecastle and poop sketching and painting, hanging over the bows and gleefully watching this lighter stuff being brushed aside by our strong stem.
We were passing through pack all day, but the ice hereabouts was not close enough nor heavy enough to stop us appreciably. The ship was usually conned by Pennell and myself from the crow's-nest, and I took the ship very near one berg for Ponting to cinematograph it. We now began to see snow petrels with black beaks and pure white bodies, rather resembling doves. ”

“ The ponies like drowned rats, their manes and tails dank and dripping, a saturated blotting-paper look about their green horse cloths, eyes half closed, mouths flabby and wet, each animal half buried in this Antarctic morass, the old snow walls like sand dunes after a storm. ”