Chapter 27

AN EPIC OF DEVOTION

NEVER since the world began has a group of men, engaged on a hazardous venture and facing desperate odds, become so devotedly attached to one of their number as the Polar party led by Captain Scott became attached to Dr. Edward Thomas Wilson. Wilson was the one man whose presence Scott regarded as absolutely indispensable to the success of the expedition; he was his leader’s constant companion; he stood beside Scott in that poignant moment in which they discovered that Amundsen had beaten them to the Pole; and he sat next to Scott in that melancholy tent from which Captain Oates walked out into the blizzard and in which the others, having completed their journals and written their last letters, settled down to die. During both his visits with Scott to the Antarctic, in 1901 and 1910, he was not only doctor, naturalist, artist and general adviser, but he was a kind of father-confessor to every member of the party. They all loved him, believed in him, poured their secrets into his sympathetic ear, sought his shrewd counsel on matters of the utmost privacy, and would cheerfully have sacrificed life itself for his sake.

Scott himself worshipped the ground that Wilson trod. ‘He is,’ Scott declared, ‘the finest character I ever met; the closer one gets to him, the more there is to admire; every quality is so solid and dependable.’ ‘If,’  wrote Scott, a few years after the first expedition and a few years before the second, ‘if ever I go South again, there is no one. in the world I would sooner have with me than you.’ And, among the last tragic records, Scott simply overflows with Ms enthusiastic testimony to the energy, tact and superb unselfishness of Wilson. ‘He is beloved by us all,’ the leader writes; ‘he wields the power of an oracle. He has proved himself a greater treasure than even I expected to find him.’ Without an exception, all the other members of the party express themselves in similar terms.

Wilson started well. Born at Cheltenham in 1872, his father and mother were determined that he should be denied nothing that could make for his happiness and prosperity. In some of his last letters he says that, if his parents had known the destiny that awaited him, they could not have trained him more suitably for his life work. He was encouraged to note with precision all that he observed in his rambles among the fields; the portraits and statue at Cheltenham School bear eloquent witness to the laurels that he won in the classroom. His penchant for sketching everything that caught his eye was fostered with such success that when, between his two expeditions, he gave an exhibition of his paintings in the Bruton Galleries in London, the place was crowded during the three weeks in which the pictures were on display.

The scion of a long line of Quaker ancestors, Wilson was at heart a deeply religious man. Except in intimate and confidential letters, he said very little about his convictions. In him, faith was always incarnate but seldom articulate. His ideal was Francis of Assisi, the subject of one of his best paintings. He carried his New Testament, his Prayer Book and his ‘In Memoriam’ with him, even on the dash to the Pole. At sea, his companions often wondered why he was so fond of clambering up to the crow’s nest. But his wife, Oriana Souper—whom he had married just before embarking on his first expedition and after whom he named several of his geographical discoveries-perfectly understood. ‘I simply love the crow’s nest, my private chapel,’ he tells her, in one of his beautiful bursts of confidence. I have spent the happiest times you can possibly imagine there, alone with God and with you. Nothing above but the sky: nothing below but the sea and the ice: I just love it.’ That dizzy cubby-hole at the masthead was his sanctuary, and, so far as spiritual communion with his wife was concerned, his trysting place.

But, although he kept this side of things very much to himself it permeated and dominated all his thought. It inspired his great adventure. In one of the few poems that he is known to have penned, he wrote:

The silence was deep with a breath like sleep,
As our sledge runners slid on the snow;
And the fateful fall of our fur-clad feet
Struck mute like a silent blow;

And this was the thought that the silence wrought,
As it scorched and froze us through—
Though secrets hidden arc all forbidden
Till God means man to know,

We might be the men God meant should know
The heart of the Barrier snow.

His journals, which now repose in the British Museum, abound in evidence of the lofty aspiration and the passionate consecration that underlay his daring, his comradeship, and his unquenchable humour.

In several of his letters, written whilst death was staring him in the face, Scott gives Wilson credit for preserving, under the most adverse circumstances, the harmony and geniality of the party. Scott had good cause to appreciate Wilson’s skill in this regard. George Seaver tells of the way in which, during the first expedition, Scott had allowed one member of the group to get on his nerves, with the result that his attitude towards this man was less tolerant and less tactful than it should have been. Subjected, as they all were, to the terrific and continuous strain of their brave adventure, all the men saw the disastrous possibilities of the position. Somebody should speak to Scott. But who was to beard the lion? At length, Wilson undertook the ordeal. Dreading the issue, he sought his leader, said his say, and was relieved bey and measure when Scott rose, grasped his hand, and murmured: ‘Thanks, Bill!’ It was noticed that, ever after, Scott’s face brightened at Wilson’s approach; and when, twelve years later, the two bodies were found amidst the ice, Scott’s arm was flung affectionately across the body of Wilson.

Dr. F. W. Boreham