Polar biographies reviewed by Ken Catford
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'Don't go looking for Antarctica without this book.' - Susan Solomon
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With Scott in the Antarctic: Edward Wilson, Explorer, Naturalist, Artist
by Isobel Williams
The History Press
ISBN: 978-0-7509-4879-1
Price: £20.00
Men of Ice: The Lives of Alistair Forbes Mackay (1878–1914) and
Cecil Henry Meares (1877–1937)
by Leif Mills
Caedmon of Whitby (to order e-mail sales@smithsettle.com)
ISBN978-0-905355-69-6
Price: £20.00
As the year 1899 was drawing to a close the British were viewing the future with keen anticipation. The new century would surely build on the achievements of the great British Empire, and would bring to fruition the advances in science, technology and medicine which were already being pioneered. For 27-year-old medical student Edward Wilson, there must also have been some doubts as he looked to the future. He had just become engaged to his beloved Oriana, and his final medical examinations were approaching, but his studies had been interrupted by debilitating ill health. His comfort was that his religious faith would enable him to face with fortitude any continuing illness and perhaps premature death.
Wilson had no inkling that only three years later he and two companions would endure enormous physical hardships to reach closer to the South Pole than any human being had achieved. That subsequently his life would reach its grim end in the same Antarctic wilderness, just before his fortieth birthday, was not the cause of the untimely death he was imagining in 1899.
Also at the turn of the century another medical student interrupted his studies, but for very different reasons. 21-year-old Alister Mackay was a man of action. The newspapers were reporting the intensification of the Boer War, and Mackay needed little encouragement to join the affray. In January 1900 he was off to South Africa. That his future life, too, would become dominated by (and terminated by) the ice, would not have entered his mind.
The third character we meet in these two books is Cecil Meares. He was an unsettled young man and the turn of the century found him, aged 22, travelling in Siberia and China. He, too, was attracted by the action and heroism of the South African war and duly joined up. And he, too, found himself a few years later making history in the Antarctic.
The two books describe the very different contributions made by these three men to Antarctic exploration in the early twentieth century. Wilson played key roles with Scott and Shackleton on the Discovery expedition (1901-04), and again with Scott on the Terra Nova (1910-12). Meares was with them on the Terra Nova, while Mackay took part in Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition (1907-09).
Isobel Williams presents a discerning and thoughtful account of Edward Wilson and his contribution to both of Scott’s expeditions. Wilson’s talents as a medical doctor, as a naturalist, and as an artist, all deserve much wider recognition. His personal attitude to life, and towards his companions, was strengthened by his religious faith. He provided subtle, reliable personal support to Scott and the others, and this made the hardships of the expeditions much more bearable for everyone. The author’s medical knowledge is brought to bear in explaining Wilson’s work, and in demonstrating that he was at the cutting edge of medical and scientific progress.
A hundred years later it is hard for us not to be misled by hindsight and to dismiss too lightly the scientific innovativeness of all three of these major adventures. An example from the Terra Nova expedition was the winter overland trek to and from the emperor penguin colony at Cape Crozier in 1911. This was the infamous “worst journey in the world” as described so dramatically by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, and which has been dismissed by recent writers as foolhardy and futile. What we learn from Isobel Williams, however, is the important purpose for which the journey was made, and why it was seen at that time to be crucial to the advancement of scientific knowledge.
A book previously reviewed in Polar Worlds is The Coldest March by Susan Soloman. It also provides a modern, professional analysis of Scott’s (and Wilson’s) final fatal journey with particular reference to meteorology and the effects of extreme cold. Now Williams’s very readable book brings us the benefit of up-to-date medical knowledge to help us understand key health issues such as nutrition, scurvy and fatigue. Those two books together contribute greatly to a proper understanding of the reality of these extreme journeys.
Leif Mills’s book takes a completely different approach – much more direct and with less background analysis. Several participants in the expeditions have now faded from public memory, and Mackay and Meares are two of those. That they left little in the way of written accounts made research much harder, and Mills has done well to compile such complete pictures of their lives.
Meares’s story was the more obscure of the two, but Mills succeeds in revealing his wide-ranging activities before, during and after the Terra Nova expedition on which he was in charge of the dogs. It is interesting to read an account of the famous expedition from the viewpoint of one of its less well-known participants. Afterwards came action in the First World War, then service in Japan before retirement in Canada where he died in 1937.
Alister Mackay was “surgeon and biologist” on Shackleton’s expedition of 1907-09. Perhaps his most significant participation was on the side journey to locate the south magnetic pole. This was an arduous, but well organised, overland excursion with Mackay and Douglas Mawson and led by Edgeworth David. Extracts from Mackay’s diary give a personal day-by-day account. At that time huge advances were being made in both geology and navigation, and this expedition’s achievement was significant in locating with adequate (if not precise) accuracy the position at that time of the southern ‘zone of maximum dip’.
The final part of Mackay’s story takes us to the Arctic and the disastrous 1913-14 voyage of the Karluk in which much interest has been revived in recent years. Again the story as told from Mackay’s angle is revealing, culminating in his death in the ice in 1914.
Both books would benefit from additional maps and a suggestion would be that if you possess a copy of Beau Riffenburgh’s Nimrod book, then have it open at its excellent map pages while you read these two new books. A map of western China identifying the place-names of 100 years ago would have helped greatly to appreciate Meares’s adventures there in 1907-08. The small publishers Caedmon of Whitby have made several welcome contributions to polar history, and so it is disappointing to find this latest book marred by misprints. In particular Leif Mills explains with some care why he believes ‘Alister’ to be the correct spelling of Mackay’s name, but the book’s own title page gives the spelling ‘Alistair’ which we have therefore adhered to above.
There surely needs to be some serious justification for another two books to be published in this field. Williams’s book more than meets that justification with its enlightening interpretation of the under-appreciated Edward Wilson, while Mills’s contribution tackling less well-known team members brings a new dimension to the otherwise familiar stories.
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