Of
all the stories of Polar exploration, that of Apsley Cherry-Garrard is one of
the most extraordinary. Cherry was at a cousin’s house in Scotland in September
1907, where he heard Captain Scott and Edward Wilson were planning a return
expedition to Antarctica. Young Cherry (aged twenty-four) volunteered for the
expedition but was turned down, as he suffered from poor eyesight and did not
have the relevant scientific experience. He applied again and promised to
donate £1,000 to the cash-strapped expedition, but was again turned down. When
he sent the money anyway, Scott was so impressed by the gesture he offered
Cherry a place.
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| Apsley Cherry-Garrard |
Dr Edward ‘Bill’ Wilson was the Chief of the Scientific Staff
on the expedition, second in command to Scott, and he took the young Cherry
under his wing. Contemporary evolutionary thought favoured recapitulation
theory, a belief that an embryo passes through the evolutionary stages of the
its species, and the Emperor Penguin was considered to be the most primitive of
birds; one of the aims of the expedition was to collect eggs for
experimentation, to see if the embryo passed through a ‘reptile’ stage, thus
giving a link to bi-pedal dinosaurs. The Terra Nova left Cardiff on June
15th 1910, and landed at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica in January 1911.
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| McMurdo Sound by Edward Wilson |
In the austral winter of that year, plans were made for ‘The Winter Journey’,
with Wilson, Cherry and Henry Robertson ‘Birdie’ Bowers selected to travel to
the rookeries of the Emperor Penguin and bring back some unhatched eggs. They
packed supplies weighing 790 pounds onto two nine-foot sledges, one toggled
behind the other, and on June 27th 1911, the three men left McMurdo
Sound for Cape Crozier, then the only known Emperor Penguin rookery. Wilson had
made a detailed study of the penguins and knew they hatched their eggs in
September, so he calculated they would be laying in July. In the pitch dark at
noon, they began to drag the sledges across the ice, and on the first day
Cherry accidentally grasped a rope with ungloved hands, frost-biting all ten
fingers. It was –47o F but fell to minus seventy at night.
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| The Hut at Cape Evans |
The worst
part, said Cherry, was the darkness, making it impossible to see, to navigate,
to find their kit on the sledges. Their clothes froze and it took two men to
bend them enough to get them on. Their sweat froze between their skin and their
clothes, their balaclavas froze to their faces. On June 30th they
could not pull both sledges and were forced to drag one, return back for the
other and then drag that one. They moved three and a half miles forwards, but
walked ten and a half miles to do so. That night the temperature under the
sledge was –69o F and –75o F on top of it, that is one
hundred and seven degrees of frost. The next day they continued the relay with
the sledges, retracing their footsteps by candlelight. The fluid in the
blisters on Cherry’s frost-bitten fingers froze. Fresh snow slowed their
progress even more, down to a mile and a half a day, still relaying the sledges
by candlelight in frozen fog and with the temperature in the minus seventies.
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| Bowers, Wilson and Cherry-Garrard |
As they approached Cape Crozier and Mount Terror, the ice began to crack and
they were in danger of falling into crevasses; the Barrier, a vast ice cliff
over four hundred miles long and two hundred feet high, where the ice meets the
land, lay before them. And then a blizzard struck, forcing them to stay in
their tiny tent for three days on end, followed by more of the same slow
trudge, edging their way to Mount Terror.
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| From New Zealand to the South Pole |
On July 15th, they arrived
at the Knoll, a great hill attached to Mount Terror, which runs down to
precipitous sea cliffs, and at 800 feet they pitched camp there. They had
arrived and set about building an igloo, with rock walls and one of the sledges
as a roof beam, all covered by a tarpaulin sheet. When this was built, they
went off with the empty sledge, two ice axes, alpine rope and skinning tools,
to look for the Emperors. They worked their way through the pressure ridges of
ice and deep crevasses, down toward the sea ice, hemmed in by ice cliffs and
the great bulk of Cape Crozier, until, finally, they heard the penguins, their
cries echoing off the ice but at least a quarter of a mile away. They tried
again the next day, crawling through ice caves and scrambling down crevasses,
until they came to the rookery.
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| Emperors, Barrier and Sea-Ice by Edward Wilson |
The birds huddled together on the ice, with
their eggs balanced on their feet to keep them from freezing, and so strong was
the brooding instinct, that some birds without eggs were trying to hatch
egg-shaped blocks of ice. There were only about one hundred Emperors, Cherry
thought that these may have been the first arrivals, and the party took five
eggs, hanging them in mittens around their necks, and killed three adult birds,
as they needed the fat to burn in their stove.
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| The Emperor Rookery by Edward Wilson |
They started back to the igloo
but became lost, and Cherry fell, breaking the two eggs he was carrying. They
fumbled and groped for what seemed like an eternity in the darkness until, more
by luck than anything, they found their tracks and followed them back to the
igloo; icy, sleepless and dog-tired, they crawled in.
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| Work in a Blizzard by Edward Wilson |
A wind began to batter
the canvas, and with difficulty they lashed it to the rocks, as the gale around
them grew and grew. Inside, they tried to get the blubber stove lit, but a blob
of the boiling fat spat into Wilson’s eye and blinded him. In agony, he groaned
throughout the night, and the blizzard outside got worse. A great gust of wind thundered into the tent
and carried it away, scattering gear across the snow, and in a howling gale,
they tried to salvage what little they could. The igloo itself was hammered by
the hurricane, the roof threatened to collapse, the snow blew in through cracks
and was soon eight inches deep.
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| The Winter Journey |
The solder on the blubber stove melted and it
collapsed, rendering it useless. They used some of the last of their fuel oil
to cook a final hot meal on the primus when, at last, the Willesden canvas
tarpaulin was ripped apart, the thunderous wind tore it into tatters and it was
gone. They dived into their sleeping bags and lay face down as the walls of the
igloo collapsed in on them. When they could, they inched fingerfuls of snow
into their mouths and waited for it to melt, so they could drink. They had
already spent a month on the ice, in temperatures far below zero, with only
biscuit and pemmican to eat, and now with no tent, a broken stove and battered
bodies, 900 feet up a mountainside in the face of a polar blizzard, they faced
what seemed like certain death.
Continued tomorrow
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