Tag Archives: Edward Wilson

Sir Ranulph Fiennes; His Winter Trans-Antarctic Expedition

27 Sep

 Sir Ranulph Fiennes plans to lead a team across the Antarctic Continent in the coming polar winter. This would be an unbelievable feat, the first winter expedition ever since Edward Wilson’s trek across Ross Island in search of Emperor Penguin eggs in 1911. Like that early venture the expedition will take place in darkness, in temperatures that could reach minus 90 degrees Celsius and will attempt to break new scientific grounds. Unlike 1911, the expedition will take place at elevations of 11,000 feet; a level that can cause altitude sickness and will cover nearly 4,000 kilometers, starting from the Russian base Novolazareskaya and traveling via the Pole to Ross Island.

It is an amazing venture. Can it possibly succeed? The team will have to be self-sufficient, there will be no search and rescue – aircraft can’t fly inland in winter, because of the darkness and the risk of fuel freezing.

Shackleton planned this journey in 1914. His team was caught in the Weddell Sea and although they got tantalizingly close to the continent, ‘Endurance’ was carried onward around the Weddell Sea until finally the expedition famously got back to habitation after grueling and heroic exploits. Sir Vivian Fuchs finally crossed the continent in 1958. Neither of these expeditions was planned for the winter

There are to be six members in the team. Ranulph Fiennes is quoted as saying that this is his greatest challenge to date -and he has had plenty – and that it will stretch the limits of human endurance, a unique opportunity to carry out scientific tasks in the extreme polar environment, which will make contributions to our understanding of polar warming on the Antarctic continent.

Remarkable! It will be wonderful if they pull it off.

 

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Antarctic exhibition in the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace

29 Nov

I love this exhibition. It shows the photographs of Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting. The images are very different. Hurley’s were made under conditions of great stress when “Endurance” was caught in the ice and then when the crew were drifting on ice floes for well over a year. Ponting was a wonderful professional photographer; Hurley was not, but made a matchless record of the Endurance and her crew.

Both created memorable scenes. Ponting’s picture of the “Terra Nova” through the window of an iceberg imprints itself on the memory, whilst Hurley’s photograph of the brilliantly lit Endurance in the black Antarctic winter is an unforgettable image.

Ponting did a “mock-up” of the expedition members sitting round a Nansen cooker in a tent before they set off on their ill-fated journey to the South Pole. In this image “Taf” Evans, “Birdie” Bowers, Edward Wilson and Captain Scott smile optimistically at each other.

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Antarctic explorers Dr Edward Wilson and Chief Petty Officer Edgar Evans

23 Sep

My interest in Antarctica started when I was a junior doctor in St George’s Hospital London, where the Antarctic explorer Dr Edward Wilson had been a student seventy years previously.

He was a wonderful artist and St George’s had many of his paintings. I became fascinated by him and wrote a biography of this remarkable man. As I wrote the book I became interested in the lives of the Ratings, the sailors, who obeyed orders, kept cheerful and kept the expeditions going.

I have now written the biography of Chief Petty Officer Edgar Evans. This is to be published by The History Press in January 2011.

Not only did Edgar go with Scott on both his Antarctic expeditions of 1901 and 1910, he was also the first to die on the ill-fated return from the Pole and was – most unfairly in my opinion – blamed by many for the demise of his four companions.

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