[photo caption: The Tenements]
A Safe Place on the Web for the "Terra Nova" Boys R.F. Scott's British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1913 The Cape Evans Hut was home to men, dogs and ponies. Here were slide shows, experiments, a Christmas tree of penguin feathers, solstice celebrations with flags unfurled, a pianola -- considerable hijinks -- The South Pole Times, and toasts to absent friends. Here men waited for five of their fellows to return from the Pole, and waited in vain. The hut still stands. It seems to me to be a kind of time machine, or a never-never land, poignant but haunted only by friendly ghosts.
My interest in the "Discovery" and "Terra Nova" expeditions led me to Dundee to visit the Discovery; to a tiny room in the Cheltenham city museum with Wilson relics; and to stand in the rain in front of Lady Scott's statue of her husband in Waterloo Place, London.
Some sites, however, can be visited Virtually:
Phone: +44 (0)1382 201245
Fax: +44 (0)1382 225891
e-mail: dundeeheritage@sol.co.uk
Displays: The Royal Research Ship "Discovery"; built for the 1901 Antarctic expedition of the R.G.S. & Robert Falcon Scott. Displays, film, AV effects & school facilities aboard & in quay-side centre tell story of the ship & polar exploration.
More information on Maritime museums is available.
Books:
August 1999: This spring my book group read Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness. As I read of a flight over the Ice I was certain that LeGuin had read the Scott journals. (I announced this with some stern intensity at our meeting.) And I remembered that LeGuin wrote 'Sur', a short story about a women's expedition that made it to the pole before Amundsen and Scott. Yes, she had to have read the journals.
The following month: Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces. When I found the book I opened it, read one sentence, laughed outloud and closed it. I asked my fellow readers to let me know when they found what had made me laugh. I had opened to a passage about the protagonist's guardian, who was obsessed with Antarctica and the Scott expedition. At one point the two of them seek out Silas Wright's old home in Toronto, stand before it and say "It is the house," for Wright had said "It is the tent" when he recognized at a distance Scott's final resting place. I could have said, but didn't, "It is the birthplace." (Wilson's, in Cheltenham) Ah, the nature of obsessions -- harmless ones, I hope.
Was there an Antarctic reference the third month in a row? In a way. That month our book was The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett. It was about an expedition, the Franklin expedition to the Arctic Franklin's ships were the Terror and the Erebus. These ships gave their names to Antarctic volcanoes -- on Cape Evans, right above the hut.