January 28, 2011

Saturday, 28 January 1911

Scott

"Sledge-hauling on the Great Ice Barrier" by E.A. Wilson, 1903. [1]

The depot-laying party reached the Barrier.

"Those first days of sledging were wonderful!" wrote Cherry in retrospect. "What memories they must have brought to Scott and Wilson when to us, who had never seen them before, these much-discussed landmarks were almost like old friends." [2]

"I expect we were all a little excited, for to walk upon the Barrier for the first time was indeed an adventure: what kind of surface was it, and how about these beastly crevasses of which we had read so much? Scott was ahead, and so far as we could see there was nothing but the same level of ice all round -- when suddenly he was above us, walking up the sloping and quite invisible drift. A minute after and our ponies and sledges were up and over the tide crack, and beneath us soft and yielding snow, very different from the hard wind-swept surface of the frozen sea, which we had just left."

The Terra Nova left for the western shore of McMurdo Sound to land Taylor's geological party.


Notes:

[1] Source unknown.
[2] Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, ch.5.

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