No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

The Terra Nova Expedition

tealin

OK Tumblr, sit down a sec, I’m going to try to tell you the story of the Terra Nova Expedition in one page of single-spaced size 12 type, plus pictures. Ready? Let’s go.

The Terra Nova left Cardiff on June 15th, 1910, and had a very exciting and fun-filled journey to New Zealand and thence to Antarctica. She made landfall in January of 1911, at a little outcrop of land on Ross Island which was christened Cape Evans. While the hut was being constructed, Scott and a selection of men set off to depot stores along the route to the Pole, culminating in a great cache called One Ton Depot. On their way back to base, Cherry, Bowers, and the sailor Tom Crean were on sea ice that broke up, and only by sheer pluck managed to get to safety instead of drifting out to sea.

Shortly after this, Scott learned that Roald Amundsen, who was making a surprise attempt on the Pole himself, had also set up his base on the Ross Sea coast, in direct competition with Scott. As nothing could be done about this, Scott decided to proceed according to plan and not make a race of it. (He wasn’t happy about it, though.)

The first winter was a happy one, but for three men – Cherry, Wilson, and Bowers – the conviviality of the hut was interrupted by a gruelling midwinter journey to the other side of Ross Island in search of Emperor penguin eggs, a trip they just barely survived.

They returned exhausted, but three months later set off again in the party who were to make the attempt at reaching the South Pole. It was arranged that two parties of four would turn back after helping the final four as far as they could. Cherry was selected to be in the first returning party while Wilson and Bowers ended up making it to the final Pole Party. Cherry was disappointed, but got on with life back at the hut, happy to have played his part in the great endeavour.

All was well until news came that the leader of the second returning party, Teddy Evans, was deathly ill with scurvy. The expedition doctor, Atkinson, was supposed to go meet the final party with the dog teams as they returned, but was instead sidelined into caring for Evans. Atkinson delegated the rendezvous to Cherry, who duly took the dogs out to One Ton Depot to meet his friends, but they never turned up; he waited as long as he could, but as winter was closing in and he was running out of food for the dogs, he turned back to base.

When the Pole Party failed to arrive in the next few weeks, it became apparent that they never would, and the remaining men faced another winter knowing that their friends had perished. The following summer, another southern journey was made, in search of any trace of the Pole Party. They were expected to have fallen down a crevasse somewhere en route, but were found snowed up in their tent about twelve miles south of One Ton Depot, a point they had reached nine days after Cherry had turned back from there. From their letters and journals, the survivors learned that the Pole Party had reached the South Pole, but had discovered there that Amundsen had beat them to it by a month.

On the return journey, two of the five men Scott had taken to the Pole suffered crippling mishaps, but instead of abandoning them, the healthy men slowed their pace. The injured men both eventually died, but by then the season had started to turn, and the remaining three – Scott, Wilson, and Bowers – were trapped in their tent by a blizzard which kept them from reaching the necessary food and fuel until they, too, expired.

The search party retrieved all the records and personal effects they could, then collapsed the tent over the Pole Party where they lay and built a great memorial cairn over them. They brought their story back to a world which, having been expecting great news, instead plunged into mourning. Cherry had his own personal torment beyond that, though, in the idea that, had he pressed on from One Ton, he might have been able to save his friends’ lives. He wrote The Worst Journey in the World largely as a tribute to them and the friendship they’d shared.

And that’s the book I’m adapting into a graphic novel – or rather, a series of graphic novels, because there is so much more to the story than that, and it is all super awesome. I am currently working on volume one, which covers … um, the first sentence of this writeup (don’t worry, there isn’t a volume for every sentence) and it is the prologue of that which you will see on Saturday, May 4th, for Free Comic Book Day! So please check back here to get the link for that and an open house at my Patreon where you can see progress made so far.