Cherry (11 page)

Undaunted, Taylor announced that the two of them should go down to London, face Scott and Wilson and persuade them to change their minds. They set off on foot, with twelve hard-boiled eggs and a few bars of chocolate to sustain them, and walked the fifty miles in a day.

It worked. Like most of the
Terra Nova
scientists, Wright was engaged on the flat rate of four pounds a week for the first year. (It was uncertain if the expedition would remain for a second year, and if it did, salaries would have to be renegotiated.) He was quickly nicknamed ‘Silas’, on the grounds that it was the most ‘Yankee’ name the others could think of. Cherry described him as ‘robust, willing and uncompromising’, and along with his friend ‘Griff’ Taylor, Silas injected a healthy dose of irreverence into expeditionary life. Like Cherry, he was short-sighted, but he made up for the difficulties this caused him out on the trail with his athleticism and unflagging energy. After the first season Scott described him as ‘goodhearted, strong, keen, striving to saturate his mind with the ice problems of this wonderful region’. Silas was a committed physicist and physiographer, though it was probably in the field of glaciology that he made his greatest contribution to the expedition’s scientific programme.

Sing-songs were a regular occurrence in the wardroom (not surprising, after all that champagne), ‘though there was hardly anybody in it who could sing’. Instead of grace, at the start of most meals they sang a music-hall song about the ‘Sisters Hardbake with the goo-goo eyes’, and schoolboy rough-and-tumble inevitably followed. One night, Wilson recorded in his diary, ‘Campbell, Cherry-Garrard and I held the nursery, which has two doors, against the rest of the wardroom. The struggle lasted an hour or two and half of us were nearly naked towards the finish, having had our clothes torn off our backs.’ Nicknames proliferated. Girls’ names were popular, with Pennell metamorphosing into ‘Penelope’ and Edward Nelson, a biologist, into ‘Marie’. As the oldest man on board Wilson was dubbed ‘Uncle Bill’, and Scott was known respectfully as ‘the Owner’, the standard naval term for the captain of a warship. Apsley was inevitably ‘Cherry’ (sometimes pronounced ‘Chewwy’), and the name stuck until the end of his life.
¹⁴
The lower ranks were naturally suspicious of hyphens and called him ‘Mr Gerard’.

On 26 July the
Terra Nova
reached South Trinidad (now the Brazilian Ilha da Trindade), a coral-ringed, uninhabited volcanic island 680 miles east of Brazil. Several parties went ashore: Cherry set off to find specimens with Wilson and Pennell. Pursued by locusts and red-legged flies, they climbed up the crumbling lava and basalt almost to the top of the island and picnicked on captain’s biscuits among the yellow land crabs while the sun burnt all the blue from the sky. When a swell rose, the men who had stayed on board hoisted a warning flag and fired a rocket to call the scattered parties back. Cherry and his two companions scrambled down, denting their guns, but the sea was already too rough for the ship’s boats to land, and the men were obliged to swim one by one through the surf among cruising sharks. Cherry noted Wilson’s psychological leadership during the crisis: ‘When we first got down to the shore and things were looking nasty, Wilson sat down on the top of a rock and ate a biscuit in the coolest possible manner. It was an example to avoid all panicking, for he did not want the biscuit.’

‘One of the days of a man’s life and an exciting ending,’ Cherry wrote in his diary that evening. The reality of the trip – even the gruesome hours shovelling coal – was endorsing the vision he had glimpsed during his long walks across the Scottish moors with Wilson. After an uncertain journey through school and university, he had at last found congenial companionship, a genuine outlet for his talents and true adventure authenticated by a clearly defined purpose. The relief was inexpressible.

He spent the next day skinning the birds they had shot on South Trinidad, staying up all night to get the job done. Together with Wilson he worked in a small lab on the upper deck which he had painted and fitted with specimen shelves. Cherry loved learning from his sympathetic mentor in this cubby-hole, and he was turning out to be a practically adroit zoological assistant. Under Wilson’s tutelage, he had also taken up sketching. But his primary debt to the older man was emotional. When it was all over, Teddy Evans noted in his account of the expedition, ‘Wilson took Cherry-Garrard under his wing and brought him up as it were in the shadow of his own unselfish character.’

They rounded the Cape of Good Hope and on 16 August anchored in the sheltered bay at Simonstown, just south of Cape Town. It had taken them two months to reach South Africa; they now had eighteen days on land, and mail waiting.

Cherry, Oates, Henry Bowers and Edward Atkinson, a quiet navy doctor and parasitologist, stayed out at Coghill’s Hotel in Wynberg, up in the hills about five miles south of Cape Town. ‘We are [a] peaceloving party,’ wrote Bowers, ‘and want quiet and little gaiety.’ The foursome got on well (‘we usually hunt in a quartet’), and Bowers and Cherry had already laid the foundations of a friendship that was to be one of the closest of the expedition. ‘Cherry-Garrard is a great pal of mine,’ Bowers wrote to his sister May, describing him as ‘our young millionaire . . . a thorough gentleman and very keen’.

The 27-year-old Bowers was a short, solid Scot with red hair, limbs as tough as teak and a hooked nose which had conferred the nickname ‘Birdie’. He had inherited a passion for seafaring from his father, a hardy old seadog who had died when his adoring son was four. The widowed Emily Bowers, left to fend for herself in modest but not indigent circumstances, had devoted herself to her son and his two elder sisters. Birdie accepted his position as head of the family, and like Scott he gladly supported his widowed mother. But like Scott he went to sea as a teenager despite the pulls of kinship. When he was fourteen he enrolled as a cadet on the training ship HMS
Worcester
, and in 1899 qualified for the Merchant Service. For six years he worked his way through the ranks, gaining valuable experience under steam and sail. In 1905 he was gazetted as a sub-lieutenant to the Royal Indian Marine, a service which ranked second in prestige only to the Royal Navy.

The lower ranks adored Bowers. He was a good-tempered, hard-working officer and a cheery optimist who exuded warm good sense: as one of his sisters said, ‘There wasn’t a twist in him.’ He was devoid of intellectual pretension or aspiration. He simply marched resolutely through life getting things done, eschewing undue attention and avoiding show. Indeed, Bowers was almost unnaturally modest, a trait that was in part a consequence of his goblin-like appearance. In his attitudes he was an imperialist, a Conservative and a patriot. ‘I love my country,’ he once wrote, ‘and trust that I shall not be found wanting when the day comes to act.’ Above all, he was a deeply religious man whose life was grounded in his faith. Standing alone on deck in the long night watches, contemplating a becalmed and starry ocean, he often sensed the mystical presence of Christ, and he wrote movingly about this subject in his long letters home to his mother and sisters.

In the Indian Marines Bowers sharpened his navigational skills on the Irrawaddy in Burma, polished up his Hindustani and qualified as a lieutenant before proceeding to the Persian Gulf to serve on a battle-cruiser. His constitution and strength were legendary, and he was hungry for adventure. The challenges of the Antarctic called him with sirens’ voices. ‘Ever since I went within three degrees of the Antarctic Circle, I looked due South,’ he wrote in 1907. ‘I have thought – as I thought then – that’s my mark . . . Reading Captain Scott’s books (2 vols) on the
Discovery
Expedition made me as keen as mustard.’ When he read news of Shackleton’s thrilling journey towards the Pole on the
Nimrod
expedition, he wrote home, ‘If only they will leave the South Pole itself alone for a bit they may give me a chance. Don’t laugh!’

Nobody laughed. As a young cadet Bowers had been introduced to Sir Clements Markham, and he made such an impression that in 1909 the old man recommended him to Scott for the
Terra Nova
. The suggestion was enthusiastically endorsed by Bowers’ old commandant on the
Worcester
, and, to Birdie’s unending delight, he was accepted without an interview and without submitting a formal application.

It was a difficult time for Emily Bowers, who was distraught to see her son vanish again, and to such an impossibly remote destination. Their parting scenes at Waterloo station in London as Birdie caught the train to Portsmouth to meet the
Terra Nova
were inhibited by the presence of a truckload of coffins on the platform alongside them.

‘Well, we’re landed with him now and must make the best of it,’ Scott allegedly said to Wilson when they finally met their new recruit. Scott was taken aback by the quasi-comical appearance of this muscle-bound, fivefoot-four-inch sailor with red hair, a pink face and a large nose. But Scott never regretted his decision. Bowers was appointed primarily as a junior officer in charge of expedition stores, possibly the most arduous and thankless position on board. Scott was consistently impressed by his mastery of detail, astonishing hard work and stamina, and the crew quickly got a measure of the man when, on one of his first days on duty, Birdie fell nineteen feet into the ship’s hold, stood up, retrieved his peaked cap and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Scott and his wife Kathleen had sailed directly to the Cape in a merchant ship. Soon after their arrival they went out to Wynberg, turning up at Coghill’s to find Cherry and the others in bed. Two other wives joined their husbands in Simonstown. These were Hilda Evans, wife of Scott’s second-in-command, and Wilson’s wife Oriana. Some of the men were irritated by their presence (‘the wives are much in evidence’). But it was Kathleen Scott who was most in evidence. She was suspected of having too much influence over her husband.

The least conventional thing about Scott was his choice of wife: Kathleen Bruce was a sculptress given to bohemian behaviour and exotic friends. After a strict upbringing in a Jacobean rectory she had gone off to Paris to study art – a daring course of action in 1901. There she became close to Rodin, who taught and encouraged her; and to the avant-garde dancer Isadora Duncan, whose illegitimate child she later helped deliver. Kathleen loved to dance herself, but not on a stage: preferably barefoot in the garden, as she was happier outdoors. She had met Scott in 1907 at a lunch party given by Mabel Beardsley, sister of the illustrator Aubrey (there were scandalous rumours that the two had enjoyed an incestuous relationship). Scott had been famous since his return from the Antarctic on his first expedition, and he was a draw at any social function. ‘I glowed rather foolishly and suddenly,’ Kathleen remembered, ‘when I clearly saw him ask his neighbour who I was.’ She was not beautiful, but she was striking, even handsome, with long, thick and slightly frizzy chestnut hair, and throughout her life she was pursued by amorous men. In 1908 Kathleen married her handsome captain (‘Darling,’ she had promised him, ‘I will be good when we’re married’), and the following year their son Peter was born, Kathleen having spent much of her pregnancy sleeping on a beach wrapped in a blanket. She loved babies almost as much as she loved men.

Kathleen held forceful opinions, none expressed more regularly or with more conviction than her view that women were far less interesting than men. If she was bored, as she often was in the company of more conventional women, she found it difficult not to reveal her feelings. Scott often had her with him, and everyone could see that he discussed expeditionary matters with her in detail, and that she had much to say on every subject.

A herd of young British officers bound for the Antarctic, many in uniform, must have had a devastating effect on the young women of the small Cape colony. At one dance Birdie was introduced to the Misses Williams, two young sisters who turned out to be ‘little rippers and ladies too’. So much for wanting a quiet time. A few days later the Misses Williams came aboard, Birdie reported to his sister May, ‘with staid and proper Cherry-Garrard who had accidentally appeared from nowhere when they wanted to come down’. Cherry went on to ‘make hay’ with the Misses Williams. He might have been shy in large groups or at cocktail parties, but he was not diffident with women, or if he was, he overcame his diffidence when an opportunity presented itself. He issued Birdie with peremptory orders to organise a day out with the girls.

At 8.30 on Wednesday morning Birdie and Cherry got hold of a car and driver and called at the Williams’ residence in Cape Town. After being introduced to the girls’ parents (‘the Pater, a lawyer . . . a very sound chap indeed’) they motored off with Kitty and Betty to Hoow-Hoek, about fifty-five miles to the south-west. Birdie let Cherry pick his girl. ‘As I was not in the least particular I let Cherry – who was somewhat near the line one knows so well – have his choice while I kept out of the way with Miss Betty – an absolutely ripping little girl.’ What Betty made of it was not recorded.

After lunch and a stroll they started back in high spirits, but ten miles later, in the middle of rolling moorland, the car broke down. They were obliged to walk five miles to the nearest village. ‘Cherry took a shorter cut by another way to get us time to wire and the girls and yours truly plugged on for what seemed like crossing Africa before we sighted the village. They stuck it out most pluckily against a stiff breeze . . .’ The hapless driver was eventually set up for the night in his car and Cherry and Birdie joined the girls at the village hotel, having meanwhile reassured the Pater by wire. They had a sing-song in the parlour. ‘The proprietress,’ continued Birdie, ‘who looked upon us all with suspicion, looked in from time to time. At 10 p.m. she assured us that the motor could not come and said she had got a room for the ladies and indicated that Cherry and I had better quit.’ As she spoke, they heard a toot. ‘We had a jolly drive back though it was a wild night and arrived at 2 a.m. when we found the Pater waiting up . . .’