Free A First Rate Tragedy by Diana Preston

well have tried to stop an express train. Whipped off his legs he joined the mad career. He described ‘a sort of vague wonder as to what would happen next’ and then became aware that they had stopped sliding smoothly and were now bouncing over a much rougher surface. He was sure they were going to break their arms and legs when suddenly they flew right up into the air and landed with an almighty thump on a patch of hard snow. They were badly bruised and shaken but to their great surprise no one was seriously injured. Looking upwards they saw that they had tumbled some 300 feet down one of the ice cascades of the very glacier they had been searching for. In the distance was the comforting sight of the smoke-capped summit of Mount Erebus. This was either luck again or else their improvised methods of navigating had been remarkably successful.
    However, the danger was not over yet. Further down the glacier both Scott and Evans suddenly fell the full length of their harness down a crevasse with walls of icy blue. Lashly was left on the top with the task of trying to rescue his companions while preventing the sledge, precariously balanced over the abyss, from following them. Slowly and carefully he secured the sledge with two skis over the crevasse. Meanwhile Scott removed his goggles and by dint of swinging backwards and forwards in his harness managed to find a spur of ice to stand on. He then helped Evans, who had responded to his call ‘in his usual calm, matter-of-fact tones’, to manoeuvre into a similar position. At least they were no longer dangling over the chasm but they were some twelve feet beneath the surface. The cold from the surrounding ice was intense, numbing their faces and fingers. While Lashly held grimly on to the sledge Scott struggled up out of the abyss to be greeted by aheartfelt ‘Thank God!’ from Lashly. Then he and Lashly helped Evans scramble to the surface.
    The loquacious Welshman was rather lost for words. As Scott described: ‘For a minute or two we could only look at one another, then Evans said, “Well I’m blowed”; it was the first sign of astonishment he had shown.’ Later that day at their camp he kept referring to their narrow squeak. ‘With his sock half on he would . . . say suddenly, “Well, sir, but what about that snow bridge?” or if so-and-so hadn’t happened “where should we be now?” and then the soliloquy would end with “My word, but it was a close call!”’ Scott found it touching and amusing. He was also more than ever convinced that he had chosen the right sledging companions. They had shown neither fear nor panic but had acted coolly. That night as Evans continued to shake his head in amazement Lashly sang a cheerful ditty over the cooking pot. Events had also shown Scott the utter unpredictability of Antarctic travel. All the planning in the world could not protect a sledging team from tumbling into a crevasse or down a glacier. He and his companions had been very lucky to survive. Scott’s belief in fate was reinforced.
    Arriving back at the Discovery on Christmas Eve Scott was disappointed to find her still fast in the ice. However, he now gave his time to writing up the achievements of the western journey. He calculated that they had averaged nearly fourteen and a half miles a day during their fifty-nine-day journey, sledging some 700 miles. This confirmed Scott’s view that men were better than dogs. The distances compared well with the agonizingly slow progress made on the journey south when the average was only around ten miles a day. Scott was also able to record a number of important geological discoveries arising from his journey, including one of the glacier’s tributaries where they found a deep moraine of mudthat struck the vegetable-loving Lashly as ‘a splendid place for growing spuds’ and a steep dry valley, one of the three forming the McMurdo oasis, the largest ice-free area in Antarctica.
    During his absence a number of other