OHYAT: The Depot Journey

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY

A contingent of the men of the Terra Nova Expedition left base camp at Cape Evans on a journey to lay depots of food, fuel, and pony fodder for the trip to the pole the next summer. This trip, while obviously secondary to the central Polar journey, is interesting for two reasons:

1. It is entirely epic in its own right, mostly with adventures on the way back to Cape Evans, which involve drifting ice floes, orcas, doomed ponies, and Birdie Bowers running around in his socks. If you were to read just the story of the Depot Journey you might say 'Wow! this would make an awesome movie!' – as I did when I read it for the first time, completely ignorant of this chapter in the expedition. And it's not even the main story.

2. In the best tragic tradition, it sets up one of the crucial payoffs in everything going wrong at the end. The terminus of the Depot Journey was supposed to be a large cache of supplies at 80° South, but due to a number of uncompromisable circumstances (time, weather, condition of animals) they had to stop twenty miles short. On the return from the Pole a year later, the Polar Party made its last camp eleven miles short of the actual location of the depot. Had it been where it was supposed to be, they might have made it. Aristotle would be gratified.

On a much narrower scope, though, TODAY, they crossed the bay ice between Cape Evans and Glacier Tongue. To prove their luck didn't all go one way, the very next day it broke up, rendering the bay impassable as the surrounding land was too rocky and hilly to get sledges over.

ADVENTURE!