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Adrian Raeside traverses Antarctica in his grandfather's footsteps
The literate Adelie penguin in the photo was taken at Cape Adare, Antarctica, while I was aboard an icebreaker heading for a 98-year-old wooden hut still standing in a state of almost perfect preservation on Cape Evans, at the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf. My grandfather, Canadian-born Sir Charles Wright, was the physicist and glaciologist on Robert Falcon Scott’s 1910 Expedition to the South Pole, and the Cape Evans hut was where he and his companions lived from 1911 to 1913. This voyage was my last chance to put the final touches on my upcoming book, Return to Antarctica an account of my grandfather’s time on the ill-fated Scott Expedition.
Scott’s plan to reach the Pole was simple. Drag heavily loaded sledges from Cape Evans to the South Pole and back, (think of dragging the contents of your living room from Houston to Denver and back at an altitude of 10,000 feet and at a temperature of minus 40ºF) a total of 1,800 miles. What could possibly go wrong?
Wright was part of the main sledging party that left Cape Evans, November 1911, heading for the Pole and was confident his experience surveying in Northern Ontario and his navigational skills would assure him a place on the small team that would make the final dash across the Polar Plateau to the Pole. But one by one, the supporting parties, including Wright’s, were sent back to Cape Evans. Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans continued on to the Pole, arriving there on January 17, 1912, only to find Amundsen had beaten them by four weeks. Bitterly disappointed, Scott turned back and ran into a series of disasters -- Evans died from a combination of scurvy and a head injury, and one month later, Oates walked out into a blizzard and was never seen again. Finally, frostbitten, gangrenous and out of food and fuel, Scott, Wilson and Bowers perished in their tent on March 29, 1912 – only eleven miles from a supply depot.
The next spring, Wright navigated for the search party that went back out on the Ross Ice Barrier to find out what had happened to Scott’s party and it was Wright who spotted the tent containing the frozen bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers. If it wasn’t for my grandfather’s navigational skills and sharp eyes, the world might never have known what happened to Scott and his four companions.
After three years of going over the diaries, journals and letters left behind by my grandfather and rummaging through archives on three continents, I came to some startling and unsettling conclusions about Scott, and the disaster that befell his Polar Party.
Both my journey and the full story of the Scott Expedition will be in Return to Antarctica published by JW Wiley, fall, 2009.
Adrian Raeside is the Editorial Cartoonist for the Victoria Times Colonist and the creator of The Other Coast comic strip, syndicated by Creators Syndicate.
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