South with ScottMy rating: 3 of 5 stars

I’ve always been fascinated by Antartica, it’s natural beauty, people who’ve tried to explore it, and, to be honest, it was the setting of one of my favorite John Carpenter films, The Thing. (I realize that film was shot in British Columbia, but the id of the place is conveyed, I believe, accurately.)

I was turned onto this book in a weird way, in that I saw a copy of it come up for sale from a rare/antiquarian bookseller. The copy was valuable due to its provenance, being owned by a more recent mountaineer who recently died.

The book is the story of the “Terra Nova” expedition of 1910-1913. This event was the British attempt to be the first to the geographic South Pole. The expedition wasn’t solely for heroics or fame, there was also a rather large scientific component to it. It included physics, marine biology, geology, etc. and many samples were collected over the entire period. Unfortunately, Scott arrived five weeks after the Norwegian Roald Amundsen became the first to have arrived at the Pole. On Scott’s return trip, many problems arose and his entire party died.

I enjoyed reading this book, all the while realizing that it did, at times, romanticize the final Antartica expedition of Capt. Robert Scott. But, it was written by one of the men who was on the expedition, suffered injuries himself, and was writing about Scott less than ten years afterward. So, I did try to set any judgements aside and enjoy the story being told. It was a quick read. One section that captured some of the beauty was in Chapter 8, “The Winter Closes In”:

”One passed out of the hut hourly at least and, on moonlight nights especially, one found something beautiful in the scenery about Cape Evans. At full moon time everything turned silver, from towering Erebus with gleaming sides to the smooth ice slopes of Ross Island in the north-east, while away to the southward the high black Dellbridge Islands thrust up from a sea of flat silver ice. Even the conical hills and the majestic Castle Rock, fifteen miles away, stood out quite clearly on occasions.”