Tom Crean - Irish Legend, Antarctic Hero - Part 2: The Long Trek

February 1912. Lieutenant Teddy Evans is dying of scurvy in a tent on the Ross Ice Shelf. Hut Point is 56 km away. There is food for two days at most. Tom Crean pockets a few biscuits and a little chocolate, and starts walking.

Part 2 picks up where we left off, with three men on a runaway sledge on the Shackleton Icefalls. Crean, Evans and William Lashly then pick their way down the Beardmore Glacier through a maze of crevasses, crossing one chasm on a knife-edged snow bridge with the sledge balanced on its peak. Far to the south, Scott reaches the Pole and finds Amundsen's tent waiting for him.

Then scurvy takes hold of Evans. Crean and Lashly haul him on the sledge for around 100 km. Evans orders them to leave him and save themselves. They refuse.

With the rations almost gone, one man has to go for help alone. Crean had done it before. A year earlier, adrift on breaking sea ice with Henry Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard and killer whales circling, he leapt from floe to floe and climbed the face of the Barrier to raise the alarm. This time he sets out exhausted, half-starved and without water. He walks for around 18 hours with a single five-minute rest, and reaches Discovery Hut half an hour ahead of a blizzard.

Sources

• The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard
• South with Scott, Edward Evans
• Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries, William Lashly
• Scott's Last Expedition, the journals of Robert Falcon Scott
• An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean, Antarctic Survivor, Michael Smith