The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard [free ebooks for android TXT] 📗

of the floor not yet levelled, Levick, Browning and Abbott sit discussing their seal hoosh, while the primus hums cheerily under the cooker containing the coloured water which served with us instead of cocoa. As the diners warm up jests begin to fly between the rival tents and the interchange is brisk, though we have the upper hand today, having an inexhaustible subject in the recent disaster to their tent, and their forced abandonment of their household gods. Suddenly someone starts a song with a chorus, and the noise from the primus is dwarfed immediately. One by one we go through our favourites, and the concert lasts for a couple of hours. By this time the lamps are getting low, and gradually the cold begins to overcome the effects of the hoosh and the cocoa. One after another the singers begin to shiver, and all thoughts of song disappear as we realize what we are in for. A night with one one-man bag between two men! There is a whole world of discomfort in the very thought, and no one feels inclined to jest about that for the moment. Those jests will come all right tomorrow when the night is safely past, but this evening it is anything but a cheery subject of contemplation. There is no help for it, however, and each of us prepares to take another man in so far as he can.”27

In such spirit and under very similar conditions this dauntless party set about passing through one of the most horrible winters which God has invented. They were very hungry, for the wind which kept the sea open also made the shore almost impossible for seals. There were red-letter days, however, such as when Browning found and killed a seal, and in its stomach, “not too far digested to be still eatable,” were thirty-six fish. And what visions of joy for the future. “We never again found a seal with an eatable meal inside him, but we were always hoping to do so, and a kill was, therefore, always a gamble. Whenever a seal was sighted in future, someone said, ‘Fish!’ and there was always a scramble to search the beast first.”28

They ate blubber, cooked with blubber, had blubber lamps. Their clothes and gear were soaked with blubber, and the soot blackened them, their sleeping-bags, cookers, walls and roof, choked their throats and inflamed their eyes. Blubbery clothes are cold, and theirs were soon so torn as to afford little protection against the wind, and so stiff with blubber that they would stand up by themselves, in spite of frequent scrapings with knives and rubbings with penguin skins, and always there were underfoot the great granite boulders which made walking difficult even in daylight and calm weather. As Levick said, “the road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but it seemed probable that hell itself would be paved something after the style of Inexpressible Island.”

But there were consolations; the long-waited-for lump of sugar: the singsongs⁠—and about these there hangs a story. When Campbell’s Party and the remains of the Main Party forgathered at Cape Evans in November 1912, Campbell would give out the hymns for Church. The first Sunday we had “Praise the Lord, ye heavens adore Him,” and the second, and the third. We suggested a change, to which Campbell asked, “Why?” We said it got a bit monotonous. “Oh no,” said Campbell, “we always sang it on Inexpressible Island.” It was also about the only one he knew. Apart from this I do not know whether ‘Old King Cole’ or the Te Deum was more popular. For reading they had David Copperfield, the Decameron, the Life of Stevenson and a New Testament. And they did Swedish drill, and they gave lectures.

Their worst difficulties were scurvy29 and ptomaine poisoning, for which the enforced diet was responsible. From the first they decided to keep nearly all their unused rations for sledging down the coast in the following spring, and this meant that they must live till then on the seal and penguin which they could kill. The first dysentery was early in the winter, and was caused by using the salt from the seawater. They had some Cerebos salt, however, in their sledging rations, and used it for a week, which stopped the disorder and they gradually got used to the sea-ice salt. Browning, however, who had had enteric fever in the past, had dysentery almost continually right through the winter. Had he not been the plucky, cheerful man he is, he would have died.

In June again there was another bad attack of dysentery. Another thing which worried them somewhat was the “igloo back,” a semipermanent kink caused by seldom being able to stand upright.

Then, in the beginning of September, they had ptomaine poisoning from meat which had been too long in what they called the oven, which was a biscuit box, hung over the blubber stove, into which they placed the frozen meat to thaw it out. This oven was found to be not quite level, and in a corner a pool of old blood, water and scraps of meat had collected. This and a tainted hoosh which they did not have the strength of mind to throw away in their hungry condition, seems to have caused the outbreak, which was severe. Browning and Dickason were especially bad.

They had their bad days: those first days of realization that they would not be relieved: days of depression, disease and hunger, all at once: when the seal seemed as if they would give out and they were thinking they would have to travel down the coast in the winter⁠—but Abbott killed two seals with a greasy knife, losing the use of three fingers in the process, and saved the situation.

But they also had their good, or less-bad, days: such was midwinter night when they held food in their hands and did not want to eat it,