So then someone questioned received wisdom and found out there's actual documentary proof that Scott wasn't an idiot:

Scott Could Have Been Saved Had His Orders Been Followed

Captain Scott of the Antarctic may have returned alive from the South Pole if officers under his command had not disobeyed orders he had left for them, according to new ( Read more... )

Scott's wrecked ship Terra Nova found off Greenland

Google Allows Visitors to Explore Scott's and Shackleton's Huts

I haven't poked around with it myself, yet, but it appears they've applied their Street View type technology to Cape Evans and Cape Royds. Could be fun!

A hundred years after it happened ... fifty years after the magazine was published ... it makes it to the front page of BoingBoing!

Wrathful Whale Wednesday

That would be, um, this Herbert Ponting, not Action Man there. Actually, the man in the illustration looks a bit like Levick, but I may be swayed by the hat ...

This is really more of an overview article and chances are people here will know most of it already, but:

Four things Captain Scott found in Antarctica (and one that found him)... If nothing else it's worth checking out for the embedded video of Richard Attenborough talking about the first time he went in the hut at Cape Evans ( Read more... )

There's a Scott exhibition in Sydney right now, coming to the Natural History Museum in London next year, then going to Christchurch roughly the year after. The NHM has a pretty good writeup on it here, as well as quite a nice little video with footage of inside the hut, including Wilson's desk, so of course they have won my heart forever. Also: ( Read more... )

If you are lucky enough to live within easy travelling distance of London, you might be interested in some new stuff they've got on display in the Treasures room ...

(Well, I say 'new,' obviously not new new)

Photograph of Scott's Polar party (Scott, Oates, Wilson and Evans) - presumably one of the photos taken by Birdie, if he's not in itSouth ( Read more... )

I was just telling vandee2008  about how much I enjoyed Shackleton when I first saw it, and that was what got me really really interested in polar exploration in my recent years.  But I explained that I'm also related to Scott (very very distantly) so I grew up hearing about him and Amundsen and the race to the pole, so I was interested in Antarctica from my ( Read more... )

I love this post about polar knitting.  In it, the author posts commentary on sweaters etc. that appear in the miniseries The Last Place on Earth.  Say what you like about the series, but it did have some pretty awesome costumes, props, set and all that.

And I like polar knits anyway.  I think my favorite polar knitted items are these:

( pics )

So ... the London 2012 Olympics has announced they are going to inscribe an inspiring quote from English poetry on a wall in the athletes' village. What is it?

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

I can't help feeling ... I've seen that somewhere beforeOkay, okay, the poem existed long before the line was extracted and used on a ( Read more... )