When the Crozier party turned their frostbitten faces back to Cape Evans on 25 July 1911, they had endured some of the worst conditions man has ever had to face – at least while armed with the necessary scientific equipment to quantify them. Record cold, hurricane-force winds, a three-day blizzard with no greater shelter than their sopping wet reindeer skin sleeping bags; all this in the dark of polar midwinter. The one small but significant mercy was that they had not lost their tent. They knew that, leaving the moderating influence of the sea at Cape Crozier, they would be plunging again into the brutal cold of Windless Bight, but that was the way home, and home they had to go.
Cherry describes cooking as being the third worst job. Some parts of the cooker set had been lost in the hurricane, and though they improvised one with the lid of a biscuit tin, the cooker still had to be balanced on top of the Primus stove by whoever was on duty. The matches in their dreadful metal tins had only got more frosted since the outward journey. The strings on the ration bags were like steel wires. It took more than an hour to get their pemmican hoosh made.
The worst job was thawing oneself into one's sleeping bag at the end of the day. The sleeping bags had absorbed so much moisture by now that they were more or less solid ice. The men had figured out early on that if one's sleeping kit were plugged into the mouth of the bag in the morning, one got a small headstart thawing in. It still took over an hour of melting the bag open inch by inch with their own body heat to open it fully, and begin the second worst job of the night, which was lying in the freezing wet bag for six hours. Wilson had made them lie for eight on the outward journey, whether they slept or not – mostly not, by Cherry's recollection – solely for the sake of giving their bodies a rest, but this was agreed to be so unpleasant that they lowered it to six on the return.
Cherry only got two good sleeps, and these were a gift from Bowers: Each of them had an eiderdown lining for their bags, and Cherry's had reached unendurable saturation at Cape Crozier. For days Birdie had been urging me to use his eider-down lining – his beautiful dry bag of the finest down – which he had never slipped into his own fur bag. I had refused: I felt that I should be a beast to take it. [286] Cherry finally relented when he felt as if I should crack … I felt a brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which my [too] big bag would not allow. [287] After two nights Birdie's eiderdown was too wet to be much help, but that sleep did make a difference.
Dangerously sleep-deprived and nearing the limits of physical resilience, they found themselves nodding off as they marched to make up for the sleep not slept in their bags. Instead of marching in a close cluster, Wilson extended his lead so as to walk well ahead, and thereby spot any crevasses: if he were to fall in, he would be anchored by those safely on solid ground, and they could pull him out. And then, of course, they would know there was a crevasse.
They escaped the worst of the outward temperatures, but -66°F was bad enough. Wilson's bag was too small, and with the extra pressure of the his eiderdown inside it, had begun to split. Most of Cherry's teeth shattered in the cold. But, as Cherry said, now they were callous, and with only one sledge to haul, they were making much better time than they had on the outward journey.
Our departure from Cape Crozier was far less dramatic. We had all scrambled back to the helicopter without mishap or loss, and our pilot took off into the rising wind, in which everything to the south was an indistinct haze. There was no question of taking the Winter Journey route back to McMurdo as visibility was far worse than when we'd been denied that way on the outward flight, so it was back around the island the long way again.
Luckily this meant that we, unlike the egg hunters, got a second go at the penguins. They are under a strict protection order, so a helicopter can't get too close lest it disturb them in any way, but in our swoop around to get the best view of their situation, we did get close enough to see them.
See that sprinkling of black dots down in the finger bay, like the dust on a table where a pepper grinder sits? Those are the Emperors! Here's a closer look:
Then it was time to round the corner and fly back along the north coast to our own version of home. You can see how the cloud cover erases nearly all detail on the snowy slopes of Ross Island and why we couldn't have flown back the cloudy way. As it was, we flew mostly over the sea ice, which was mottled enough to be visible even in the diffuse light.
We only had to get through this patch of cloud and then, as you can see in the distance above, we would reach sunnier skies and safer flying. Retracing more or less the same route we had followed, but this time with the impression of a blizzard sweeping over the island, the strong wind was evident both in the drift blowing off the ice cliffs and how the sea ice, which had been solid around the coast on our outward journey, was now being blown off.
Beaufort Island, where the Emperors move when they've had a bad year at Cape Crozier.
Over the saddle between Mt Erebus and Cape Bird, our low altitude and the clouds hugging the slopes meant we flew through the landscape rather than over it. It was a completely magical experience and felt like our own personal IMAX movie.
I've always thought the depiction of Heaven as an eternal cloudscape is the most boring and unappealing way to present the idea of paradise. The unfolding vistas on this flight, concocted purely from the interaction of water and light, made me wonder if maybe they were on to something.
Our return journey certainly couldn't have been more different from the Crozier party's.
The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not. We had been through a great deal since then. ... I know that when it was only -40° when we camped for the night we considered quite seriously that we were going to have a warm one, and that when we got up in the morning if the temperature was in the minus sixties we did not inquire what it was. The day's march was bliss compared to the night's rest, and both were awful. We were about as bad as men can be and do good travelling: but I never heard a word of complaint, nor, I believe, an oath, and I saw self-sacrifice standing every test. [295-6]
In civilization men are taken at their own valuation because there are so many ways of concealment, and there is so little time, perhaps even so little understanding. Not so down South. These two men went through the Winter Journey and lived: later they went through the Polar Journey and died. They were gold, pure, shining, unalloyed. Words cannot express how good their companionship was.
Through all these days ... the worst I suppose in their severity that men have ever come through alive, no single hasty or angry word passed their lips. When ... we were sure, so far as we can be sure of anything, that we must die, they were cheerful, and so far as I can judge their songs and cheery words were quite unforced. Nor were they ever flurried, though always quick as conditions would allow in moments of emergency. It is hard that often such men go first when others far less worthy remain. [246]
... [W]ith quiet perseverance, in perfect friendship, almost with gentleness those two men led on. I just did what I was told. [249]
Their spirits rose as they came within sight of the familiar landforms of the Hut Point Peninsula. How good the memories of those days are. With jokes about Birdie's picture hat: with songs we remembered off the gramophone: with ready words of sympathy for frost-bitten feet: with generous smiles for poor jests: with suggestions of happy beds to come. We did not forget the Please and Thank you, which mean much in such circumstances, and all the little links with decent civilization which we could still keep going. I'll swear there was still a grace about us when we staggered in. And we kept our tempers – even with God. [296-7]
The temperature rose as they hauled their sledge down off the ice shelf onto the sea ice, and yet more as they rounded Cape Armitage. The Discovery Hut gave them their first solid shelter in over a month, and no longer having to eke out their last can of oil, they pitched a clean dry tent inside the hut and lit two Primus stoves inside it for maximum warmth, and drank cocoa without sugar so thick that next morning we were gorged with it. [297]
The next day they did their final march in to Cape Evans, into what felt like blazing light as the mountains had hidden the growing midday light on the horizon for the last week or more. As we began to gather our gear together to pack up for the last time, Bill said quietly, "I want to thank you two for what you have done. I couldn't have found two better companions – and what is more I never shall." I am proud of that. [298]
Our own final stretch was in the opposite direction, and the first of the 'home' sights was Cape Royds, above, site of another Adélie colony, and the Nimrod hut where Terra Nova men would go for a mini-break from Cape Evans during the first winter, when they weren't hieing off to Cape Crozier. Then, as we left the lee of Ross Island and headed back into the cloud as it poured around this side, a more familiar cape came into view:
The Cape Evans hut is the vaguely trapezoidal shape at left, surrounded by snowbanks; the camp on the ice is an Antarctica New Zealand experiment studying effects of different amounts and colours of light on sub-sea-ice diatoms.
Back over Great Razorback, with Turk's Head nearly lost in fog . . .
Back over Glacier Tongue, with seals sleeping where the last lunch of the Winter Journey was had ...
Back over the uncommon luxury of the Discovery hut …
And back to McMurdo, safe and sound.
We trudged on for several more hours and it grew very dark. There was a discussion as to where Cape Evans lay. We rounded it at last : it must have been ten or eleven o'clock, and it was possible that some one might see us as we pulled towards the hut. "Spread out well," said Bill, "and they will be able to see that there are three men." But we pulled along the cape, over the tide-crack, up the bank to the very door of the hut without a sound. No noise from the stable, nor the bark of a dog from the snow drifts above us. We halted and stood there trying to get ourselves and one another out of our frozen harnesses – the usual long job. The door opened – " Good God! here is the Crozier Party," said a voice, and disappeared.
Thus ended the worst journey in the world. [298-9]
Inside was pandemonium. Most men had gone to bed, and I have a blurred memory of men in pyjamas and dressing-gowns getting hold of me and trying to get the chunks of armour which were my clothes to leave my body. Finally they cut them off and threw them into an angular heap at the foot of my bunk. Next morning they were a sodden mass weighing 24 lbs. Bread and jam, and cocoa; showers of questions; "You know this is the hardest journey ever made," from Scott; a broken record of George Robey on the gramophone which started us laughing until in our weak state we found it difficult to stop. ... Then into my warm blanket bag, and I managed to keep awake just long enough to think that Paradise must be something like this.
We slept ten thousand years ... [301]
When my coordinator had phoned me with the details of our flight that afternoon, she apologised that, due to the weather, we couldn't take the Winter Journey route, and would have to go the longer northerly way instead. I replied that it was no problem, and "If Cherry knew I was going to fly to Cape Crozier in 35 minutes, his ghost would skua-dive me," referring to the local species of gull which is notorious for divebombing anyone with the temerity to carry a tasty snack outdoors. She had been on the receiving end of this once or twice in the past, and had told me shortly after my arrival that it feels like being hit on the back of the head with a roasting chicken.
When we were heading north on our way out, and our pilot was briefing us on the route and the flight time, again apologising for the change of plan, my coordinator told him about our conversation, except that instead of the skua-diving ghost she said "Cherry would turn over in his grave."
Our return to McMurdo passed without comment – we had only been gone a couple of hours, and after all, helicopters come and go all the time; there was no reason ours should be more remarkable than any other. It was near enough to dinner time that, once I thanked our pilot profusely and gave my flight gear back to Helo Ops, then swapped my accursed bunny boots for lighter shoes back in my office, there wasn't anything else to do but head to the galley to see what there was to eat.
Well.
