SCOTT'S LAST JOURNEY

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 26, 31 January 1923, Page 9

SCOTT'S LAST JOURNEY

THE WORST IN THE WORLD

LAND CRABS AND KILLER

WHALES

FINE STORY OF GREAT EFFORT.

Mr. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, in "The Worst Journey in the World," gives an account of Scott's last Antarctic expedition, with much additional information in. the form of diaries that did not appear in Scott's own posthumous work, says the " Daily Mail." The book also contains a full narrative of the heroic and marvellous journey which he made himself, in the company of Bowers and Wilson (two of the famous five who afterwards perished so tragically in the conquest of the South Pole), to the breeding ground of the Emperor penguins,, in the depth of the. Antarctic winter. < Scott, whose own standards as an Antarctic explorer were so high, described this march as one of the greatest feats accomplished by the men under his orders. What exactly it meant '-to travel for five weeks, often in pitch darkness, without any daylight, ovor surfaces of appalling danger—comparable -only with the worst ice-falls of a Swiss glacier— and in temperatures which repeatedly fell to 100 degrees ,of frost, Mr. CherryGarrard's pages show. IN THE CAUSE OF SCIENCE. It is one of the greatest, most breathless stories of. devoted adventure .that .he has to tell. And the end was worthy. It was to serve the cause of science that these men underwent sufferings almost unspeakable. ■ Mr. Cherry-Garrard's great merit is that there is no insincerity in his writing. He '"does not affect to have liked this " ghastly journey," as he calls it, nor does he deny that he was terribly afraid. ... In the .final chapter he examines, with great dispassionateness the reasons why Amundsen succeeded and why Scott's march closed in disaster to himself and his companions. His conclusion is memorable, even sensational; that Scott failed to return because the food allowance was throughput insuiScient^: "It is a fact thai the Polar party failed to make their distance because they became weak, and that they became weak although they were eating their full ration or more than their full ration - off food, save for a, few days when they -went short on the way down the Beardmore Glacier. The first man to weaken was the biggest and heaviest man in the expedition." In short, starvation was the cause of their troubles in,, their desperate wrestle with Death. Starvation brought the breakdown, first of Evans, and then of Oates, and delayed the party■ so much that they were caught by the fatal blizzard within sight of safety. "There is no censure attached to this criticism. Our ration was probably the best which has been used; but more is known now than was known then." LOATHSOME .MONSTERS. _ On the voyage out there were interesting experiences at South Trinidad, where a landing was effected. . We read:— "The land crabs are little short of a, nightmare. They peep at you from every nook and boulder.. Their dead, staring eyes follow your every step, as if to say: 'If only you will drop down we will do the rest.' To lie down and sleep on any. part of the island would be suicidal. These beasts even tried to nibble your boots as you stood—staring hard at you the wholo time. They ara all yellow, and pink, and next to spiders seem, the most loathsome creatures on God's earth.". ' But even they pale before the terror of the killer whale, which has a "huge iron, jaw and great blunt socket teoth," and hunts in ooHcerts "pressing up the thin ice from beneath and splitting it in all directions." It attacks man or beast. Bowers wrote of these gruesome creatures, which appeared 1 while the ponies, were being landed in the Antarctic:"The killers'were too interested'in us to be pleasant. They had a habit of bobbing up and down perpendicularly so as to sco over the edge of a floe in looking for seals. The huge black and yellow heads, with sickening pig eyes, only a few yards from us at times and always around us, are among Uie most disconcerting recolleotions I have of that day." SCOTT'S TEAKS. Of Scott himself we are given an affectionate pioture: ," England know Scott as a hero; she has little idea of him as a man. Few who knew him realised howshy and reserved the man was, and it was partly for this reason that he so often laid himself open to misunderstanding. He was not a very strong man physically, and was in his youth a weakly child, at one time not expected to live. He cried more easily, than any man I have ever known." ' ... Perhaps the Greeks were tight' when they said that the man who weeps most easily is the noblest man. "For him justice was God. His triumphs are many —but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to , follow and came to love." Some members of the expedition had a curious experience at Shackleton's old deserted hut. One of them wrote: " The whole place is very eerie, there is such a feeling of life about it. Not only do I feel it. but the others do also. Last night after I turned in I could have sworn that I heard people shouting to, each other.. I thought that I had only got an attack of nerves, but Campbell asked me if I had heard any shouting, for he had certainly done so." A haunted hut in the Antarctic is extraordinary indeed. As for the weather, it was appalling. " One ghastly blizzard blew for six weeks," and in the midwinter journey whirih Mr. Cherry-Garrard made the weather almost brought hi» death. A blizzard struck the party and blew their tent away. ■, THey believed death was certain, but they were not afraid. And then miracles happened, as they sometimes do in real life. They recovered the tent; their frost bites healed, and many, days later they staggered back to the base with the Emperor pern gum's eggs, which were of suoh vital importance to embryology., DISCOVERY OF THE DEAD. Mr. Cherry-Garrard was with the little band that found the dead: " Wright came across to us. It is the tent. I do not know how he knew. Just a waste of snow, to our right the remains of last year's cairns, a mere.mound. We walked up to it. I do- not think we quite realised. There were three men there. We never moved them." Yet they are being borne gently and steadily north towards the open sea by the march of the sheet of ice. ■ Shackleton's expedition a few years later could not find the tent and tomb of the dead, and Mr. Cherry-Garrard declares, poetically th«t Captain _ Scott is coming home from this land which he conquered.