The Slaughter of the Ponies

The ponies had carried more than their bodies could sustain, their overload uncorrected as the silent motor sledge stood abandoned at Corner Camp. Their legs sank through the crust with each step. Their breath came hard in air that offered no oxygen. The loads strapped to their backs—petrol tins, fodder bags, geological cases—pressed down on spines that had been bred for the steppes of Manchuria, not the snows of the Ross Ice Shelf. By the first week of December, the animals that had been expected to carry the expedition to the Beardmore Glacier and return were instead being converted into the food that might allow men to survive the return.

On 4 December 1911, Scott wrote in his sledging journal: “We killed Chinaman to-day.” Four words. The entry sat between a note on the thermometer reading and a calculation of the distance covered. The pony had collapsed twice that morning. The party had halted at 81° 17’ S, within sight of the Beardmore’s fractured terminus. The animal’s carcass yielded, by Scott’s estimate, some four hundred pounds of meat. They cached it in the snow beside the track, marking the site with a black flag on a bamboo pole. The entry continued to the next day’s marching order.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard, twenty-five years old, was already seventy miles north of this killing. He had turned back on 3 December with the first support party. His diary recorded the animals he passed in those final hours: two ponies moving with a gait he recognized from his own brief experience with the expedition’s transport. The animals were still standing when he saw them last. He did not witness the shootings. His account was composed later, in England, from the journals of those who remained. But he carried with him the sound of the animals’ breathing in the final days of his own march south—the harsh, labored noise that preceded collapse. The emotional strain, he admitted, was considerable. The ponies had names. They had been loaded in New Zealand with the expectation that they would carry the expedition to the glacier’s foot and return. None would return.

The Beardmore Glacier rose ahead of Scott’s party as a wall of disturbed ice. Geological survey notes from the 1907–09 Nimrod expedition, which Scott had studied, described a staircase of crevasses and icefalls leading to the polar plateau. The glacier was the only practicable route through the mountains that guarded the interior. Its base lay at approximately 81° 20’ S, 150 miles south of the expedition’s main base at Cape Evans. The ascent would cover thirty-five miles and rise seven thousand feet. The notes gave no indication of the surface conditions in December, when the Antarctic summer brought neither warmth nor stability, only twenty-four-hour daylight and the constant threat of snow.

Scott’s transport strategy, revealed on 13 September 1911, had depended on a phased withdrawal of animal support. Sixteen men would set out from Cape Evans. Two motor sledges, already proven inadequate, would attempt the initial Barrier crossing. Ponies and dogs would carry the main loads. At the Beardmore, the dogs would return to base and the ponies would be shot for food. Thereafter, twelve men in three groups would ascend the glacier and begin the crossing of the polar plateau, using man-hauling. The plan assumed margins: extra food, extra fuel, extra strength in reserve. By 4 December, the margins had disappeared. The ponies had failed early and badly.

Bowers’s diary, kept in the cramped script of a man who wrote with gloved fingers, recorded the arithmetic of collapse. On 1 December: “James Pigg very weak.” On 2 December: “Nobby down twice.” On 3 December: “Victor found dead in camp.” The cold had killed him overnight, his body frozen to the snow where he had lain down. They flensed the carcass immediately. The meat went into the depot cache. The hide, useless now, remained with the skeleton. Bowers noted the coordinates: 80° 32’ S. The party was still fifty miles from the glacier.

The killing of Chinaman on 4 December established the pattern. Scott’s journal entry for 5 December recorded a halt: the party could have continued, but the remaining animals required rest that the Antarctic summer would not permit. The temperature stood at -20°F. The snow surface, which had supported the ponies’ broad feet in early November, had softened into a powder that swallowed their hooves to the fetlock. Each step required the extraction of a leg weighted by sixty pounds of flesh and eighty pounds of load. The calories expended exceeded the calories consumed. The ponies had been fed on compressed fodder, shipped from England, which they refused to eat in the cold. They had been fed on oil cake, which they ate reluctantly. They had been fed on snow, which provided no nourishment. Their bodies consumed themselves.

The geological survey notes from the glacier’s periphery, compiled by Frank Debenham during the 1911–12 summer journey, recorded the terrain that would receive the slaughtered meat. The survey party had mapped the lateral moraines and the pressure ridges where the glacier met the Barrier ice. They had noted the wind-scoured hollows that could serve as natural cold stores. The notes gave temperatures, wind directions, snow depths. They did not describe the psychological terrain: men who had tended these animals since New Zealand, who had named them, who now raised rifles to their heads.

Bowers’s diary for 6 December named two more deaths. Both animals were in very low condition. The party made a depot of their meat. The entry was longer than Scott’s, detailed as Bowers always was. The party’s strength was now twelve men, five surviving ponies, and the accumulated weight of the dead animals’ loads, redistributed onto the living. The march resumed on 7 December. The surface improved temporarily, a wind-crust supporting the ponies’ weight. They covered nine miles. The Beardmore’s shattered ice cliffs grew visible on the horizon, a disturbance in the flat white of the Barrier that indicated the presence of land beneath.

Scott’s journal for 8 December recorded the decision to kill again: “We killed Nobby to-night.” The phrasing was identical to the entry for Chinaman. The repetition suggested routine, or the exhaustion that prevented variation. Nobby had been one of the strongest ponies, purchased in Manchuria, accustomed to cold. He had carried Bowers’s personal gear and the theodolite. His meat added to the cache at the glacier’s foot. The party was now dependent on three remaining ponies: Bones, Christopher, and the weakest of all, who would be shot in turn.

The support parties turned back in sequence. Cherry-Garrard’s departure on 3 December had reduced the party to twelve. Atkinson and Keohane would turn at 85° S, leaving eight. Evans, Lashly, and Crean would turn at 87° 32’ S, leaving the final five. The plan required these departures to occur at specific latitudes, with specific loads transferred to the remaining sledges. The ponies’ deaths disrupted the arithmetic. Each slaughtered animal required the redistribution of its load onto men or surviving ponies. The men pulled more. The ponies pulled more. The ponies died faster.

Cherry-Garrard, writing in England with the full knowledge of what followed, identified the moment of transformation. The ponies had been intended to take the expedition to the glacier and back. Instead, they reached the glacier and stopped. The distinction was critical. The living transport units became static larders. The calories they had consumed—fodder, oil cake, the energy of their own bodies—were converted into cached meat that would not move.

The return journey would require the polar party to locate these caches, to excavate the frozen flesh, to consume it in place of the planned rations. The strategy assumed that the party would reach the pole, would return to the glacier, would find the caches intact. It assumed that the weather would permit excavation. It assumed that the meat would not be buried too deep, spoiled by summer thaw, dispersed by wind. Each assumption was a debt against the future.

Bowers’s diary for 9 December noted two animals very done. The adjective was his standard measure of exhaustion. Done meant finished, completed, at the end of capacity. The ponies had marched eleven miles that day, the best progress in a week. The surface had frozen hard enough to support them. But the effort had consumed reserves that did not exist. Scott’s journal for the same date recorded the shooting of Christopher. The entry added that Bones was still going, but very weak.

The final killing came on 10 December. Scott’s journal named the last pony. The party stood at the glacier’s foot, surrounded by the accumulated meat of five animals, with two more carcasses cached on the march south. The transport strategy was complete. The ponies had carried the expedition to the point where the ice began to climb. They had not carried it back. The men who remained—Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers, Evans, Atkinson, Keohane, Lashly, Crean, and two seamen, Forde and Dimitri—would now pull the sledges themselves, or reduce the loads further, or advance more slowly than planned.

The geological survey notes recorded what they faced. The Beardmore’s lower reaches were a maze of crevasses, the ice fractured by its acceleration over the underlying rock. The surface was not snow but névé, granular and resistant to sledge runners. The gradient increased from one in fifty to one in ten within the first ten miles. The notes from Nimrod’s crossing, made by Shackleton’s party in 1908, suggested a route up the western flank, avoiding the central icefall. But Shackleton had crossed in late November, earlier in the season, with ponies that survived to the plateau. Scott’s party faced December conditions, softer snow, and the full weight of their own bodies substituted for animal muscle.

The calorie arithmetic, reconstructed from the expedition’s ration records and later physiological studies, exposed the cost of the transition. A pony in working condition consumed approximately 15, 000 calories per day in Antarctic conditions, drawn from fodder and body reserves. A man hauling a sledge consumed approximately 6, 000 calories per day. The expedition’s standard ration provided 4, 500 calories per day. The deficit was deliberate, intended to be made up from the ponies’ meat caches and from supplemental rations at the depots. But the ponies’ early death meant that their meat was cached at 80° 32’ S and 81° 17’ S, below the glacier. The ascent would consume calories that could not be replaced until the summit. The men would climb on deficit.

Wilson’s diary, kept with the sketchbook precision that characterized all his records, noted the physical sensation of the transition. Hard pulling all day, he wrote on 11 December, the first day of man-hauling. The sledge was very heavy. The weight was 200 pounds per man, distributed across two sledges. The surface was deep, soft snow. The temperature was -15°F. The party covered four miles. At this rate, the thirty-five-mile ascent would require nine days. The rations allowed six.

Scott’s journal for 12 December recorded the first depot on the glacier: a cache of all spare gear and a week’s provisions at the base of the ascent, not the summit. The party was already reducing its load to what men could pull, already consuming the margin that might have sustained them through difficulty. The spare gear included scientific equipment, geological specimens, extra clothing. The week’s provisions would be retrieved on the return, if the return occurred, if the depot could be found, if the glacier’s movement had not buried or fractured the cache.

The emotional register of the diaries shifted in these days. Bowers, normally exhaustive in his observations, wrote shorter entries. Wilson noted the weather with mechanical precision. Scott’s journal began to record excellent surface on days when the mileage was poor, a rhetorical compensation for physical failure. Only Oates, the cavalry officer who had purchased and trained the ponies, maintained his characteristic reserve. His diary for 10 December, the day of Bones’s death, recorded the shooting and the response: very sorry. Four words. The sorrow was not elaborated. The shooting was.

The meat caches required labor to construct. Each carcass had to be flensed, the meat stripped from bone, the portions bagged in canvas, the bags buried in snow mounds marked with flags. The work took hours in temperatures that froze exposed flesh. The men who performed it had already marched twelve miles, already hauled sledges, already witnessed the failure of the transport system they had trusted. The labor was necessary, rational, planned. It was also a conversion of living animals into frozen inventory, a transformation that the expedition’s language acknowledged without sentiment. Made depot of their meat. Cached the flesh. Marked with black flag.

Cherry-Garrard’s later account emphasized the structural inevitability of what he had not witnessed. The ponies were bound to die. They were not suited to the work. The judgment was retrospective, informed by the deaths of Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Evans on the return journey. But it was also present in the diary entries of December 1911, where the killings were recorded with the regularity of weather observations. The expedition had known the ponies would die. The plan required their death at the glacier’s foot. The plan had not required their death so weakened, so early, with so much of the glacier still to climb.

The geological survey notes from the upper glacier, compiled by Debenham’s party in January 1912, would record the depots that Scott’s party established in December: the Lower Glacier Depot at 81° 35’ S, the Middle Glacier Depot at 82° 47’ S, the Upper Glacier Depot at 83° 35’ S. Each depot represented a reduction of load, a projection of need onto the return journey. The notes would also record the crevasses, the icefalls, the wind-scoured ridges where a sledge might tip or a man might fall. The survey party had the advantage of traveling in January, when the snow was harder and the days longer. They did not carry the weight of the polar journey’s outcome.

The final pony killing, that of Bones on 10 December, occurred at 81° 17’ S. The party was still three miles from the glacier’s formal beginning. They would reach it on 11 December, man-hauling from that point forward. The meat of five animals lay cached behind them: Victor at 80° 32’, Chinaman at 81° 17’, two more at 81° 17’, Nobby at 81° 17’. The meat of Bones would join them. The total weight of cached flesh was approximately 2, 000 pounds, sufficient to feed twelve men for three weeks at full ration. But the men who would need it were not yet at the pole. They were not yet on the plateau. They were not yet at the summit of the glacier, where the final depot would be laid and the final support party would turn back.

The transformation was complete. The ponies, purchased in Manchuria and Siberia, transported across the Indian Ocean and the Southern Ocean, trained on the slopes of Ross Island, had become frozen lumps in the snow. Their names survived in the diaries: Victor, Chinaman, Snippets, Jehu, Nobby, Christopher, Bones. Their function survived in the depot ledgers: meat, 400 lbs., location, mark, date. Their absence survived in the sledge traces, where twelve men now pulled what seven ponies had failed to carry.

Scott’s journal for 11 December, the first day without animals, recorded the new rhythm. The party started at 8:30, descending into a hollow, then climbing a slope of hard névé. The we was now entirely human. The slope was the beginning of the Beardmore. The névé was the surface that would resist their boots and their sledge runners for thirty-five miles. The diary continued with the day’s mileage, the temperature, the wind direction. The entry did not remark on the silence where pony breath had been, the absence of harness creak and hoof-fall. The expedition had crossed into a different kind of travel, one that would continue until the pole and, for five of them, until death.

The men stood at the base of the glacier with only their own strength to carry them forward, all animal support now converted into frozen meat.