Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
there were no promises attached - the effort brought its own rewards. I had made myself believe
I could get to Cape Crozier, as he had done, but what mattered was 'the response of the spirit'. It
is surely the same whatever your personal Crozier - summiting without oxygen, building a garden
shed, telling someone you love them.
The crewman and pilot leapt over the low wall and landed on top of me.
'Bit cramped in here, with three,' the crewman shouted over the wind. Indeed. Cherry's party
had bulky reindeer sleeping bags to contend with, too, and the stove. One night a glob of boiling
blubber had sizzled from the stove and landed in Wilson's eye. He was temporarily blinded, and
in excruciating pain. Needless to say, they were dangerously underfed. 'Night after night', Cherry
wrote, 'I bought big buns and chocolate at a stall on the island platform at Hatfield station.'
'Let's go,' said the pilot, jumping up. 'We've got a sustained twenty-five knots here and it's sli-
cing through this gear like a knife.'
The manhauling winter journey to Crozier has been repeated once, though only one way. What
Mike Stroud, Roger Mear and Gareth Wood accomplished when they pulled sledges to Crozier
during the private Footsteps of Scott expedition in 1985 was a remarkable achievement. Mear,
however, who went on to make an aborted attempt at a solo crossing of the continent a decade later,
acknowledged in his book that the trip had been dominated by tensions and hostility. 'We came
out of it anxious and hurt,' he wrote. So Cherry had been right. For him, what counted was 'the
response of the spirit', but we are living in an age which doesn't give a fig about the spirit, an age
fatally compromised by ambition and worldly success. Cherry knew, somehow, that the men who
walked in his footsteps wouldn't be interested in 'gold, pure, shining, unalloyed' companionship.
It seemed unbearably sad.
When Mear and his companions returned to their Cape Evans hut, a twelve-pound tin of straw-
berries exploded and could easily have killed them. Imagine doing all that and being killed by a
strawberry.
∗
Bill Wilson, who went south with Scott on both the
Discovery
and the
Terra Nova
expeditions,
was the leader of the Crozier trek. He was a deeply religious man, even a mystic. That he was
called by God, he had no doubt. This is an extract from one of his poems.
And this was the thought that the silence wrought,
As it scorched and froze us through,
That we were the men God meant should know
The heart of the Barrier snow.
Wilson was a doctor, a naturalist and an accomplished artist; a renaissance man. He admired
Ruskin, and had a volume of Tennyson's poems in his pocket on the last sledging journey. He had
Scott's ear, so he was a natural confidant for the men. As the great southern journey grew nearer,
an increasing number of them came to him with their grievances, whether against Scott, other col-
leagues or the world in general. 'My goodness!' he wrote, 'I had hours of it yesterday; as though
I was a bucket and it was poured into me.' Yet back at home he found normal social intercourse
