OHYAY: Return to Civilisation, Part II

[tealin]

ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO YESTERDAY, after a safe margin for receipt and dispersal of the telegram with news of the expedition, the Terra Nova arrived at Lyttelton, the port for Christchurch, and found quite the reception.

At dawn the next morning, with white ensign at half-mast, we crept through Lyttelton Heads. Always we looked for trees, people and houses. How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe we were not dreaming still.

The Harbour-master came out in the tug and with him Atkinson and Pennell. "Come down here a minute," said Atkinson to me, and "It's made a tremendous impression, I had no idea it would make so much," he said. And indeed we had been too long away, and the whole thing was so personal to us, and our perceptions had been blunted: we never realized. We landed to find the Empire — almost the civilized world — in mourning. It was as though they had lost great friends.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World