Yesterday we marched up the depot Mt Hooper – Cold comfort – Shortage on our allowance all round. I don’t know that anyone is to blame – but generosity + thoughtfulness has not been abundant – The dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed. Meares had a bad trip home I suppose – It is a miserable jumble.
(Scott’s journal entry for March 10th, 1912, describing the events of the 9th. Image from the British Library’s digitisation of his last journal.)
Mt Hooper was a depot between One Ton and the base of the mountains, which was laid by the outbound motor party earlier that year. While they waited for the main party to catch up, they built it into a massive pile of snow that served as a landmark on the otherwise featureless ice plain of the Barrier, and christened it “Mount Hooper” after the youngest member of the party, Frederick Hooper.
A certain amount of flexibility is necessary in exploration, where one has to adapt to any extent of unforseen circumstances. When the dogs did far better on the Polar Journey than their earlier performance had led Scott to expect, he took them on farther than his original plans had called for.
This required an amendment of the orders which originally expected the dogs back early enough that they could comfortably make a resupply journey before the parties started returning from the polar quest, and then come out to meet the returning Polar Party. Communication of this change of plan went back with the returning members of the motor party (including Fred Hooper), and while it amended the orders for the dogs in light of their later return, it didn't cancel the resupply.
Meares – in charge of the dog teams – did indeed have “a bad trip home”: deep fresh snow from a very unusual midsummer blizzard made the dogs’ progress very slow, and in fear of running out of food before One Ton he had taken more from the depot at Mt Hooper than was allowed for. He and the dogs did make it back to Cape Evans (albeit later than Scott’s amended orders had anticipated) and did not fall down a crevasse, as previous experience had indicated was a possibility, and which Scott may have had in mind when writing the above entry. Meanwhile, a manhauling party had brought extra rations out to One Ton Depot, as per Scott’s amended orders, but no further south, and due to the maximum weights possible for manhauling, that was only man food and not dog food. By the time the dogs had rested enough to essay their intended mission, the Terra Nova was on the brink of returning, and Meares delayed his departure, ostensibly in the interest of having news from home to give the Polar Party when he met them.
So it was that Cherry found none of the extra dog food at One Ton Depot that would have enabled a journey further south to meet Scott, and Scott found no resupply of rations at Mt Hooper, and no dog party to meet him. A miserable jumble indeed.
(Vastly more detail on this part of the story can be found in “Could Captain Scott Have Been Saved? Cecil Meares and the ‘Second Journey’ That Failed”)
