The entry says that the journey to Cape Crozier carried two instruments, the case for the embryos and the thermometer, and that the thermometer’s record was the one that was read. This piece is that record, and what was made of it. The temperatures are Fahrenheit, as the expedition kept them, and the daily readings are those Wilson wrote into his official report, which he says were “taken directly from Bowers’ record”. What the three men dragged and ate is in The ledger.

The readings

A temperature given as a minimum is the lowest reached in the night, read from the minimum thermometer, which was set under the sledge.

On 27 June they left Cape Evans at eleven in the morning, with the temperature between minus 14.5 and minus 15 on the sea ice, and a minimum of minus 26 that night. On 28 June it was minus 24.5 by Castle Rock in the morning, minus 26.5 at Hut Point at half past one, and minus 47 at the edge of the Barrier that evening, “a stream of very cold air” flowing down the snow slope; they camped on the Barrier at seven, and the minimum was minus 56.5.

On 29 June it was minus 49 when they turned out at nine, and “remained at − 50° all day”, with Cherry-Garrard’s big toes and Wilson’s heel and sole frostbitten on the march; the minimum that night was minus 66. On 30 June they could no longer move both sledges and began to relay, by daylight from eleven to three and by candle-lamp from half past four to a quarter to eight, making three and a quarter miles; “the temp. to-day ranged from − 55° in the morning to − 61.6° at lunch and − 66° on camping for the night.” Cherry-Garrard adds that the minimum “as taken under the sledge was − 69°; and as taken on the sledge was − 75°.”

On 1 July they relayed again with a breeze in their faces at minus 66, and made two and a quarter miles in eight hours; the night’s minimum was minus 65.2 “notwithstanding a breeze of force 3 from the S.S.E. with slight drift”. On 2 July the temperature “ranged from − 60° to − 65° with calm”, they saw the new moon for the first time, and made two and a half miles. On 3 July the minimum was minus 65 and the day ran “from − 52° to − 58.2°”; they made two and a half miles and lay on their backs to watch the finest aurora of the journey. On 4 July the minimum was minus 65.4, and then the sky clouded over, snow fell, and at half past nine in the morning the temperature had risen to minus 27.5 with a wind of force four: “Nothing was visible anywhere by which to make a course, so we had breakfast and turned in again.” The day’s minimum was minus 44.5 and the night’s minus 54.6.

On 5 July, after the lie-in, the surface was the worst yet, and in seven and a half hours they made a mile and a half; by evening it was minus 61.1, with mock moons and a halo. The night’s minimum was minus 75.3. On 6 July “at starting in the morning it was − 70.2° and at noon − 76.8°. At 5.15 P.M., when we camped for lunch, it was − 77° exactly, and at midnight it had risen again to − 69°”. Bowers’s register, as printed in the expedition’s volume, has at 5.15 p.m. “− 77 (carefully checked by Wilson)” and beneath it “− 77.5 (other thermometer)”, and the minimum “− 75.8”. Cherry-Garrard, who gives this as the day they found out “that records are not worth making”, notes the previous Antarctic record, minus 67.7 on a Discovery spring journey, and in a footnote a thermometer “which registered − 77° at the Winter Quarters of H.M.S. Alert on March 4, 1876”, preserved by the Royal Geographical Society: “I do not know whether it was screened.” They made a mile and a quarter. It was the tenth day out. (Cherry-Garrard’s chapter prints the time of the reading as 5.51 p.m.; Wilson’s report and Bowers’s register both have 5.15.)

On 7 July they got away at noon in a thick white fog at minus 68, and camped at a quarter to ten having made a mile and two-thirds; the minimum “from 12 to 2 P.M.” had been minus 75.8, and at two in the afternoon it was minus 58.3, and by seven minus 55.4, “a change which we felt as a grateful one both in our hands and feet on the march”. Cherry-Garrard wrote that night: “There is something after all rather good in doing something never done before—these temperatures must be world’s record.” On 8 July the minimum was minus 59.8, minus 52.3 at half past ten with south-easterly airs, and minus 47 at a quarter past seven; they made a mile and a half in four hours in the morning and one mile in three hours in the afternoon. On 9 July, in dense mist, fog and falling snow, relaying was impossible, but the surface had improved enough to take both sledges at once; the temperature rose from minus 36 at eleven to minus 27 near midnight, when they camped, lost, among the pressure ridges.

On 10, 11 and 12 July the blizzard held them. The temperature rose to plus 9 on the morning of the eleventh with the wind at force nine, and to plus 2.9 on the twelfth with the wind at force ten; the minimum on the night of the eleventh was minus 7.6. “The temperature had thus risen over eighty degrees.” On 13 July, after digging out, they made seven and a quarter miles in seven and a quarter hours with both sledges, with the minimum minus 22.2 and the evening at minus 28.6, and the moon came out of cloud in time to show them a crevasse “with an unsafe looking sunken lid”. On 14 July they made five and a third miles with the minimum at minus 35, minus 17.4 at half past eight in the morning, and minus 24.6 in the afternoon. On 15 July the minimum was minus 34.5, it was minus 19.2 at half past ten with a breeze of force three, and at lunch, a quarter past four, “we still had a southerly wind of force 4, with the temp. at − 13°”, on the moraine shelf 800 feet up.

At the Knoll the thermometer behaved differently, because they were no longer on the Barrier. On 16 July “the temp. varied to-day between − 20.8° and − 28.5°”; on the eighteenth it was minus 30 at the top of the slope with a wind of force four to five; on the nineteenth, the first attempt on the rookery, it “had varied from − 30° with south-westerly wind of force 2 at 4 P.M. to − 37°, which had been the minimum in the early morning”; on the twenty-first, the day before the blizzard, “the temp. ranged from − 20.4° to − 23.7°”. Through the blizzard of 22 to 24 July no readings could be taken. On 25 July, the first day home, it was minus 15.3 to minus 17 under an overcast sky; on the twenty-sixth, when the sky cleared as the wind fell, it “dropped from − 21.5° at 11 A.M. to − 45° at 9 P.M.”; on the twenty-seventh, the day Bowers hung in the crevasse, it was minus 46; on the twenty-eighth minus 49 in the night and minus 47 at starting.

Then the Barrier again. On 29 July, calm, with southerly airs, the temperature ranged “from − 42° A.M. to − 45.3° P.M.” and they made six and a half miles. On 30 July, “a day of perfect weather”, seven and a half miles: “the temp. was low, − 55.3° in the morning, − 63.2° to − 61.8° in the afternoon.” Cherry-Garrard’s bracketed note in the report reads: “Apropos of the cold: we now got low temperatures once more, but − 60° now hardly called for comment; in fact some nights of − 60° we never even enquired temperature.” On 31 July they turned out soon after five and were at the Barrier edge by half past ten, “notwithstanding that the temperature was still − 57°”; where they lunched on the sea ice, a hundred yards out of the stream of cold air, “the temp. here was − 43°”, and at Hut Point that evening, with the sky overcast, it “had gone up to − 27°”. On 1 August it was minus 27.3 at Hut Point and minus 31 off Glacier Tongue, and a northerly breeze met them off Inaccessible Island on the way in.

What Simpson found

George Simpson, the expedition’s meteorologist, kept a thermometer screen at Cape Evans through the winter, so that for every day the party was away there was a reading at home to set beside Bowers’s. In the first volume of the expedition’s Meteorology, published at Calcutta in 1919, he drew the party’s course on a map, plotted their readings through each day, measured a mean from the curve at four-hourly intervals, and tabulated it against Cape Evans.

The first thing the comparison showed was the Barrier edge. At half past one on 28 June, off Hut Point, the party had read minus 26, “which was the temperature at the same time at Cape Evans”; at eight that evening, camped on the Barrier, they read minus 44.5, “18°F. colder than the temperature they had measured off Hut Point only six and a half hours previously”, while Cape Evans had risen two degrees. “The temperature on the Barrier must have been nearly 20 degrees lower than the simultaneous temperature at Hut Point only five miles away. The stream of cold air encountered at the edge of the Barrier must have been the direct consequence of this large difference of temperature.” On the way back it was the same in reverse: minus 57 seven miles from the edge, 24 degrees below Cape Evans; minus 43 on the sea ice; minus 27 at Hut Point; “while the temperature at Cape Evans had only varied from − 33° to − 28° F. during the whole period.” Simpson used this to explain a puzzle from the Discovery years, when a thermometer at Cape Armitage had read far lower than the ship’s: the readings “were the direct consequence of the cold air flowing off the Barrier from which the small bay in which the Discovery lay was entirely screened.”

His table of daily means then runs across the Barrier. From 29 June to 2 July the party’s mean temperatures were minus 50.9, minus 59.7, minus 64.2 and minus 62.0, against minus 25.7, minus 31.7, minus 36.1 and minus 34.4 at Cape Evans, differences of 25 to 28 degrees, with the weather “clear and calm at Cape Evans and on Barrier”. On 3 July the difference was 21 degrees; on 4 July, with high wind and snow at both places, it fell to under 12; on 6 July, calm and nearly clear, the party’s mean was minus 72.9 against minus 43.7, a difference of 29.2 degrees, the largest of the journey; on 7 July minus 64.9 against minus 40.2. Through the blizzard of 10 to 12 July the two places came within a degree of each other. At the Knoll, from 15 to 21 July, the party was sometimes colder than Cape Evans and sometimes warmer, by a few degrees either way, from which Simpson concluded “that the temperature at Cape Crozier is very similar to that at Cape Evans”. On the four days back across the Barrier, 27 to 30 July, the party’s means were minus 46.7, minus 43.4, minus 45.5 and minus 63.4, and “the mean temperature for the four days was − 49.8°F. with a corresponding temperature of − 26.6°F. at Cape Evans, a difference of − 23.2°F.”

He drew three rules from it, which he said later observation confirmed for the whole year, “but much accentuated” in winter: that “temperatures on the Barrier during the winter are much lower than those found in McMurdo Sound and at Cape Crozier near to the frozen Ross Sea”; that “the greatest difference is found on clear, calm days”; and that “high winds not only raise the temperature in McMurdo Sound and on the Barrier, but also reduce the difference and occasionally remove it altogether.” A footnote adds two figures for comparison: a minimum thermometer left at One Ton Camp through the winter recorded minus 73, and the lowest temperature measured at Amundsen’s base at Framheim was minus 73.1. “This journey which Scott has described as ‘the hardest which has ever been done’ has revealed conditions on the Barrier in winter which had previously been suspected but never proved.”

The gales at home

The gales the party sat out on the mountain were logged at Cape Evans too. On 22 July Scott wrote of “another raging blizzard—the wind running up to 72 m.p.h. in gusts—one way and another the Crozier Party must have had a pretty poor time.” On the twenty-fourth: “The blizzard continued throughout yesterday (Sunday), in the evening reaching a record force of 82 m.p.h. The vane of our anemometer is somewhat sheltered: Simpson finds the hill readings 20 per cent. higher.” Simpson’s own note on the same days reads: “During this blizzard the party was nearly lost owing to the blowing away of their tent and the unroofing of the temporary hut which they had built. During this period the weather was too bad to allow of temperature observations being taken.”

That is the whole of what the second instrument gave: three rules about the cold of the Barrier, and a column of figures that nobody had held before. Cherry-Garrard’s note in the report, written when they were back on the Barrier at the end of July, is the log’s own epitaph: “− 60° now hardly called for comment.”

Sources

• Scott’s Last Expedition, Vol. II, Smith, Elder, 1913: Wilson’s report of the winter journey, with the daily temperatures and distances, and the appendix printing Bowers’s meteorological log. archive.org
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, vol. 1, Constable, 1922, chapter VII, for the readings under and on the sledge, the record of 1876 and the “world’s record”. archive.org
• G. C. Simpson, British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913, Meteorology, Vol. I: Discussion, Calcutta, 1919, pp. 21–26 and Table 4; Vol. III: Tables, 1923, “Register kept on Winter sledging journey from Cape Evans”. vol. I, vol. III
• Scott’s Last Expedition, Vol. I, Smith, Elder, 1913: the entries of 22 and 24 July 1911 on the gales at Cape Evans. archive.org