MFDJ 03/06/19: Bitter Defeat in a Frozen Wasteland

Today’s Bitterly Cold Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

For Lawrence Oates, the race to the South Pole had a portentous start. Just two days after the Terra Nova Expedition left New Zealand in November 1910, a violent storm killed two of the 19 ponies in Oates’s care and nearly sank the ship. His journey ended almost two years later, when he stepped out of a tent and into the teeth of an Antarctic blizzard after uttering ten words that would bring tears of pride to mourning Britons. During the long months in between, Oates’s concern for the ponies paralleled his growing disillusionment with the expedition’s leader, Robert Falcon Scott.

Lawrence Oates

Oates had paid one thousand pounds for the privilege of joining Scott on an expedition that was supposed to combine exploration with scientific research. It quickly became a race to the South Pole after the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, already at sea with a crew aboard the Fram, abruptly changed his announced plan to go to the North Pole. “BEG TO INFORM YOU FRAM PROCEEDING ANTARCTIC—AMUNDSEN,” read the telegram he sent to Scott. It was clear that Amundsen would leave the collecting of rock specimens and penguin eggs to the Brits; he wanted simply to arrive first at the pole and return home to claim glory on the lecture circuit.

Treacherous Norskie, Roald Amundsen

Born in 1880 to a wealthy English family, Lawrence Oates attended Eton before serving as a junior officer in the Second Boer War.  A gunshot wound in a skirmish that earned Oates the nickname “Never Surrender” shattered his thigh, leaving his left leg an inch shorter than his right.

Still, Robert Scott wanted Oates along for the expedition, but once Oates made it to New Zealand, he was startled to see that a crew member (who knew dogs but not horses) had already purchased ponies in Manchuria for five pounds apiece. They were “the greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen,” Oates said. From past expeditions, Scott had deduced that white or gray ponies were stronger than darker horses, though there was no scientific evidence for that. When Oates told him that the Manchurian ponies were unfit for the expedition, Scott bristled and disagreed. Oates seethed and stormed away.

Oates with the Unfortunate Ponies on the Terra Nova

Inspecting the supplies, Oates quickly surmised that there was not enough fodder, so he bought two extra tons with his own money and smuggled the feed aboard the Terra Nova. When, to great fanfare, Scott and his crew set off from New Zealand for Antarctica on November 29, 1910, Oates was already questioning the expedition in letters home to his mother: “If he gets to the Pole first we shall come home with our tails between our legs and make no mistake. I must say we have made far too much noise about ourselves all that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc. etc. is rot and if we fail it will only make us look more foolish.” Oates went on to praise Amundsen for planning to use dogs and skis rather than walking beside horses. “If Scott does anything silly such as underfeeding his ponies he will be beaten as sure as death.”

Terra Nova in the Antarctic

After a harrowingly slow journey through pack ice, the Terra Nova arrived at Ross Island in Antarctica on January 4, 1911. The men unloaded and set up base at Camp Evans, as some crew members set off in February on an excursion in the Bay of Whales, off the Ross Ice Shelf—where they caught sight of Amundsen’s Fram at anchor. The next morning they saw Amundsen himself, crossing the ice at a blistering pace on his dog sled as he readied his animals for an assault on the South Pole, some 900 miles away. Scott’s men had had nothing but trouble with their own dogs, and their ponies could only plod along on the depot-laying journeys they were making to store supplies for the pole run.

No place for ponies!

Given their weight and thin legs, the ponies would plunge through the top layer of snow; homemade snowshoes worked only on some of them. On one journey, a pony fell and the dogs pounced, ripping at its flesh. Oates knew enough to keep the ponies away from the shore, having learned that several ponies on Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907-1909) had fallen dead after eating salty sand there. But he also knew some of his animals simply would not hold up on any lengthy journey. He suggested to Scott that they kill the weaker ones and store the meat for the dogs at depots on the way to the pole. Scott would have none of it, even though he knew that Amundsen was planning to kill many of his 97 Greenland dogs for the same purpose.

“I have had more than enough of this cruelty to animals,” Scott replied, “and I’m not going to defy my feelings for the sake of a few days’ march.”

“I’m afraid you’ll regret it, Sir,” Oates answered.

Sled Dog Used in ‘His Master’s Voice’ Recreation

The Terra Nova crews continued with their depot-laying runs, with the dogs becoming “thin as rakes” from long days of heavy work and light rations. Two ponies died of exhaustion during a blizzard. Oates continued to question Scott’s planning. In March of 1911, with expedition members camped on the ice in McMurdo Sound, a crew woke in the middle of the night to a loud cracking noise; they left their tents to discover they were stranded on a moving ice floe. Floating beside them on another floe were the ponies.

The men hopped over to the animals and began moving them from floe to floe, trying to get them back to the Ross Ice Shelf to safety. It was slow work, as they often had to wait for another floe to drift close enough to make any progress at all.

Then a pod of killer whales began circling the floe, poking their heads out of the water to see over the floe’s edge, their eyes trained on the ponies. As Henry Bowers described in his diary, “the huge black and yellow heads with sickening pig eyes only a few yards from us at times, and always around us, are among the most disconcerting recollections I have of that day. The immense fins were bad enough, but when they started a perpendicular dodge they were positively beastly.”

Oates, Scott and others came to help, with Scott worried about losing his men, let alone his ponies. Soon, more than a dozen orcas were circling, spooking the ponies until they toppled into the water. Oates and Bowers tried to pull them to safety, but they proved too heavy. One pony survived by swimming to thicker ice. Bowers finished off the rest with a pick axe so the orcas at least wouldn’t eat them alive.

“These incidents were too terrible,” Scott wrote.

Worse was to come. In November 1911, Oates left Cape Evans with 14 other men, including Scott, for the South Pole. The depots had been stocked with food and supplies along the route. “Scott’s ignorance about marching with animals is colossal,” Oates would write. “Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition.… He is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere.”

Robert Falcon Scott

Unlike Scott, Amundsen paid attention to every detail, from the proper feeding of both dogs and men to the packing and unpacking of the loads they would carry, to the most efficient ski equipment for various mixtures of snow and ice. His team traveled twice as fast as Scott’s, which had resorted to manhauling their sledges.

Manhauling

By the time Scott and his final group of Oates, Bowers, Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans had reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, they saw a black flag whipping in the wind. “The worst has happened,” Scott wrote. Amundsen had beaten them by more than a month.

“The POLE,” Scott wrote. “Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected. We have had a horrible day—add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature -22 degrees, and companions laboring on with cold feet and hands.… Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”

The Defeated Men at the South Pole.
L-R: Wilson, Bowers, Scott (standing), Evans and Oates. 

The return to Camp Evans was sure to be “dreadfully long and monotonous,” Scott wrote. It wasn’t monotonous. Edgar Evans took a fall on February 4th and became “dull and incapable,” according to Scott; he died two weeks later after another fall near the Beardmore Glacier. The four survivors were suffering from frostbite and malnutrition, but seemingly constant blizzards, temperatures of 40 degrees below zero and snowblindness limited their progress back to camp.

Evans, Scott, Bowers, and Wilson getting into their sleeping bags

Oates, in particular, was suffering. His old war wound now practically crippled him, and his feet were “probably gangrene,” according to Ross D.E. MacPhee’s Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott and the Attainment of the South Pole. Oates asked Scott, Bowers and Wilson to go on without him, but the men refused. Trapped in their tent during a blizzard on March 16th or 17th (Scott’s journal no longer recorded dates), with food and supplies nearly gone, Oates stood up. “I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said—his last ten words.

The others knew he was going to sacrifice himself to increase their odds of returning safely, and they tried to dissuade him. But Oates didn’t even bother to put his boots on before disappearing into the storm. He was 31. “It was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman,” Scott wrote.

“A Very Gallant Gentleman” by John Charles Dollman, 1913

 

Two weeks later, Scott himself was the last to go. “Had we lived,” Scott wrote in one of his last diary entries, “I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.  These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”

Roald Amundsen was already telling his tale, one of triumph and a relatively easy journey to and from the South Pole. Having sailed the Fram into Tasmania earlier in March, he knew nothing of Scott’s ordeal—only that there had been no sign of the Brits at the pole when the Norwegians arrived. Not until October 1912 did the weather improve enough for a relief expedition from Terra Nova to head out in search of Scott and his men. The next month they came upon Scott’s last camp and cleared the snow from the tent. Inside, they discovered the three dead men in their sleeping bags. Oates’s body was never found.

Culled from: Smithsonian

 

Wretched Reviews: The Worst Journey in the World

Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated adventure is on my mind right now because, on the advice of MFDJ patron Kevin Zurawel, I just finished reading the book The Worst Journey in the World written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the men on the expedition who was fortunately not selected for the dash to the Pole. So, why not a review?

The Worst Journey in the World
by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

First of all, I have to admit that I thought this book would never end! It was recommended to me by a Morbid Fact Du Jour follower for its first-hand depiction of the ill-fated British expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Falcon Scott in 1912. And yes, the chapters that detailed the painful journeys across the frozen wasteland, both a ridiculous trip to collect Emperor penguin embryos in the darkness of the Antarctic winter and the actual push for the South Pole, are fascinating.

However, for every chapter like that there are four chapters of pure tedium. The book was written by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the members of the expedition, and he spares no detail in his retelling of the journey. I mean it. NO detail. “Cherry” could spend one chapter just describing what the arctic looked like on one particular day. And the next chapter he could describe the next day, or he could detail everything you could possibly (not) want to know about the Adelie penguin. Or he could tell you every detail of what every person did on a given day. One guy walked his mule, another took meteorological readings, another did the cooking, another read a book, etc. etc. I mean, I guess if his point was to try to make the reader feel the same endless tedium that he felt in his two year journey, it’s a stunning success! Suffice to say, I did a lot of skimming while reading this one.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the animal abuse. I know it was a “different time” but these assholes actually traveled across the ocean with the sled dogs, uncovered, on the deck. One dog actually slid off the deck to its death during the journey. They were depicted as shivering, soaking wet, huddled together with their backs to the constant spray. And the ponies didn’t fare much better. Who takes ponies to the Arctic anyway??? They hardly have the coats for that kind of cold, and hooves are not especially good at navigating snow. Needless to say, they suffered immensely and the ones that hadn’t died during storms or from being devoured by Orcas ended up being sacrificed for dog/human food by the end of the journey.

The chapters that detail the two main journeys of the expedition are stay-up-past-your-bedtime fascinating though. The first journey, to collect Emperor penguin eggs, was suicidally insane.  Since the penguins lay their eggs in the deep of winter, the three-man team (including the author) had to travel through complete 24-hour darkness and -75 f temperatures. Their clothing and sleeping bags froze into solid sheets, they were constantly in danger of falling into a crevasse in the dark, they ran low on fuel and food, and at one point the cold was so intense that Cherry-Garrard actually shattered his teeth from intense chattering.

Even more harrowing was the hurricane that hit their igloo after they had collected the eggs, just before they were going to head home. The intense gale blew the roof off their igloo and blew their tent away, and they were left to huddle together in a corner under the building snow, thinking that if they couldn’t find their tent they would surely freeze to death on the way home. Amazingly, they were able to find the tent only a short distance away after the gale finally lifted, and they were able to trudge back home, broken but having survived the most intense journey ever undertaken.

Of course, the big story revolves around Scott, who was trying to become the first person to the South Pole.  When Scott and four of his men arrived at the Pole they found that those dastardly Norwegians (who tricked the English by saying their expedition was for the North Pole and switching directions after leaving port) had gotten there first – 34 days earlier. The five disheartened Englishmen started their long trek home, dragging their gear behind them, and were beset by unseasonably cold weather (we’re talking -50 f. and that’s without wind chill), blizzards, and rough terrain that made their sled an incredible burden to pull. Food and fuel shortages weakened the men while frostbite, snow blindness and injuries hobbled them, and eventually two of the five died from their injuries. The remaining three were found in their tent eight months later, the cause of death being a combination of exhaustion, cold and hunger. They were 11 miles from the depot that might have saved them but they were stuck in a blizzard and literally ran out of gas.

One wonders if they might have survived if they had been successful in their goal of being first to the Pole? Would that burst of victory-fueled adrenaline cheer have quickened their step enough to avoid the deadly blizzard? We shall never know thanks to those damned (much better prepared) Norwegians!

I had originally planned on ending this review by saying I was glad the book was behind me, but now a peculiar thing has happened: I find myself wanting to re-read it.  After reading about the journey in articles online, I realize I missed some details in my skimming, and I find myself a bit obsessed with this expedition.  I guess that makes it a better book than I had originally deemed it.  It’s certainly the most detailed book about an arctic expedition you’re likely to read.

3/5

 

Morbid Sightseeing to Scott’s Hut!

And then I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome to go see Scott’s base camp hut, which has been preserved as it was abandoned in 1913?  So I searched and I actually found a company that will take you there!  For the low price of $27,500.  Alas, guess I’ll have to satisfy myself with the virtual tour online.