OHYAT: The Return Journey

[tealin]

For the past week, and for the next few days, Bill, Birdie, and Cherry have been making their frozen way back from Cape Crozier to the base camp at Cape Evans. I haven't logged specific anniversaries as there wasn't anything specifically monumental to commemorate, but the return trip as a whole deserves some mention, so I'll lump it all together here.


Cherry had thrown away his completely sodden (and therefore useless, and shortly after rock-solid) eiderdown sleeping bag liner during their final days at Cape Crozier. Birdie had never used his eiderdown and offered it to Cherry on the return journey.

I was feeling as if I should crack, and accepted Birdie's eider-down. It was wonderfully self-sacrificing of him: more than I can write. I felt a brute to take it, but I was getting useless unless I got some sleep which my big bag would not allow. Bill and Birdie kept on telling me to do less: that I was doing more than my share of the work: but I think that I was getting more and more weak. Birdie kept wonderfully strong: he slept most of the night: the difficulty for him was to get into his bag without going to sleep. He kept the meteorological log untiringly, but some of these nights he had to give it up for the time because he could not keep awake. He used to fall asleep with his pannikin in his hand and let it fall: and sometimes he had the primus.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard's journal, quoted in The Worst Journey in the World

"We had no light, and no landmarks to guide us, except vague and indistinct silhouetted slopes ahead, which were always altering and whose distance and character it was impossible to judge. We never knew whether we were approaching a steep slope at close quarters or a long slope of Terror, miles away, and eventually we travelled on by the ear, and by the feel of the snow under our feet, for both the sound and the touch told one much of the chances of crevasses or of safe going. We continued thus in the dark in the hope that we were at any rate in the right direction." And then we camped after getting into a bunch of crevasses, completely lost. Bill said, "At any rate I think we are well clear of the pressure." But there were pressure pops all night, as though some one was whacking an empty tub.

The Worst Journey in the World, quote from Cherry's journal

When they woke up the next morning they discovered they'd been wandering amongst pressure-jumbled ice for miles without noticing, and had even come a long way straight down a valley between two pressure ridges.

Then Birdie fell down a crevasse, and while he was hanging by his harness, more or less immobile thanks to his frozen clothing, he invented a new way of getting out of crevasses:

... I hung with the bottomless pit below and the ice-crusted sides alongside, so narrow that to step over it would have been quite easy had I been able to see it. Bill said, 'What do you want?' I asked for an Alpine rope with a bowline for my foot: and taking up first the bowline and then my harness they got me out.

Henry R. Bowers, from a letter home

I lay over the crevasse and gave Birdie the bowline: he put it on his foot: then he raised his foot, giving me some slack: I held the rope while he raised himself on his foot, thus giving Bill some slack on the harness: Bill then held the harness, allowing Birdie to raise his foot and give me some slack again. We got him up inch by inch, our fingers getting bitten, for the temperature was -46°. Afterwards we often used this way of getting people out of crevasses, and it was a wonderful piece of presence of mind that it was invented, so far as I know, on the spur of the moment by a frozen man hanging in one himself.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World

There was no wind, at any rate no more than light airs: our breath crackled as it froze. There was no unnecessary conversation: I don't know why our tongues never got frozen, but all my teeth, the nerves of which had been killed, split to pieces. We had been going perhaps three hours since lunch.
    "How are your feet, Cherry?" from Bill.
    "Very cold."
    "That's all right; so are mine." We didn't worry to ask Birdie: he never had a frost-bitten foot from start to finish.

ibid.

All through the journey [Bill] was quite self-controlled, and although the strain on his nerves must have been great, he appeared to be unmoved. As we approached Cape Evans and the hut that last night in pitch darkness, he and Birdie had quite an angry argument as to where Cape Evans was: that was because the strain was coming off. I remember that, because it was the only time.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, introduction to Edward Wilson of the Antarctic

Oh, and ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY? It was Birdie's birthday.

HAPPY LAST BIRTHDAY, BIRDIE BOWERS!