Sunday, 5 February 1911

Scott

A blizzard kept the depot party in camp. The dogs could curl up and sleep in the snow, but the ponies suffered terribly. The wind, Cherry wrote later, "is raging chaos. It is blowing a full gale: the air is full of falling snow, and the wind drives this along and adds to it the loose snow which is lying on the surface of the Barrier. Fight your way a few steps away from the tent, and it will be gone. Lose your sense of direction and there is nothing to guide you back." [1]

Campbell directed the Terra Nova back to McMurdo Sound with the news of Amundsen, amongst "heavy arguments in wardroom about the rights and wrongs of Amundsen's party and the chances of our being able to beat them. Their experience and number of dogs seem to leave us very little." [2]

"Well!," Priestley wrote in his diary that night, "we have left the Norwegians and our thoughts are full, too full of them at present. The impression they have left me with is that of a set of men of distinctive personality, and evidently inured to hardship, good goers and pleasant and good-humoured. All these qualities combine to make them very dangerous rivals, but even did one not want to, one cannot help liking them individually in spite of the rivalry." [3]


Amundsen

The day after the Terra Nova's visit, wrote Amundsen, "our hut was baptised and given the name 'Framheim' ["Home of Fram"]. The idea was Prestrud's. We had the ship's party, or as they are called, the pirates, for a house warming." [4] They had to visit in shifts, four to lunch and six to supper, as they could not all leave the ship at the same time.


Notes:

[1] Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, ch.5.
[2] Wilfred Bruce, diary, 5 February, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.360.
[3] Raymond Priestley, diary, [5 February, 1911], quoted by David Crane in Scott of the Antarctic (New York : Knopf, c2005), p.425.
[4] Roald Amundsen, diary, [date not given], quoted by Roland Huntford in The Amundsen Photographs (London : Hodder & Stoughton, c1987), p.85.