Man-hauling on the Beardmore Glacier, December 13th 1911. Front from left – Cherry-Garrard and Bowers. Rear from left – Keohane and Crean, while Wilson pushes.

The Worst Journey in the World

Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a young zoologist who had paid his own way to come on the expedition. In 1922 he published an account using his diaries and those of the men who died with Scott. He called it The Worst Journey in the World.

Back in 1911, on 2 March, over a year before their deaths and the day after three of their best ponies had drifted away on the ice because nobody had dared question Scott’s orders, Scott had told Cherry-Garrard that ‘this is the end of the pole.’  On 17 March 2011, exactly a year before Oates would die on their way back from the South Pole, Scott confided in his journal, ‘it is ill to sit still and contemplate the ruin which has assailed our transport.’

By 27 April 1911 he had rallied. He announced the timetable of entertainment for the winter and scheduled a lecture by himself for 8 May. It was entitled ‘Future Plans for the Expedition.’ He would explain his new method for getting to the glacier, up and over it, and on to the pole with their poorly depleted number of ponies, and malnourished dogs.

On the day of Scott's lecture the Russian dog expert, Dimitri Gerov, was not in camp. Nor was Cecil Meares, who had purchased the dogs and whom Scott had put in charge of the dogs. Hmm.
 
So what was the new plan Scott presented? He wrote ‘I could not but hint that in my opinion the problem of reaching the Pole can best be solved by relying on the ponies and man-haulage. With this sentiment, the whole company appeared to be in sympathy.’ 

Was he being entirely honest? There was, indeed, a British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges, drawing on a kind of pride in manliness that Scott and the other naval officers on the team admired. 

But as long ago as 1876, after a disastrous Arctic expedition, one former sledger had written about man-hauling sledges, ‘I would confine everyone who proposed such a thing in a Lunatic Asylum, burn every sledge in existence and destroy the patterns.’
 
Scott had presented his plan with pages of calculations – distances, loads, food for the men, fodder for the ponies. But the dog men had not been present. And those present were given no other option but to agree with him. Civilian meteorologist, George Simpson, wrote, ‘I think what he said comes as a revelation to us all… He went into great detail and long calculations, and it appears that with all our resources there is little margin.’