Status Updates From The Voyage of the Discovery...

A lot of people (mostly rightly) say that Shackleton would be a good companion on these polar trips, but let’s take a moment to appreciate Lashly!! King of the calm

(Also I love that whenever Wilson turns up in the narrative, it’s always some much more positive trip like observing cute penguins. Spoiler alert for Terra Nova ten years on: that doesn’t last)

‘…nothing but this terrible limitless expanse of snow. It has been so for countless years, and it will be so for countless more. And we, little human insects, have started to crawl over this awful desert, and are now bent on crawling back again. Could anything be more terrible than this silent, windswept immensity when one thinks such thoughts?’

Love the inherent Lovecraftian nature of this

‘… for yesterday I captured a black eye from a ball furiously driven by Royds.’

There’s bad days then there’s ‘pelt your boss in the eye with a ball’ bad days 😅

I didn’t realise quite how close Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson were to dying during their Farthest South venture 😬 Also, the rivalry/antagonism between Scott and Shackleton absolutely fascinates me. Scott doesn’t give much indication of it brewing here but I desperately need to know more 😅

‘Report says that frequently one man was trying to capture another under the impression that he was a penguin’

Got me 😂

‘Life was a bright thing to him, and it is something to think that death must have come quickly in the grip of that icy sea.‘

Vince’s death and the near loss of that sledging party on the precipice is terrifying

Ascending in a balloon in Antarctica is just a wild idea

‘So there rest the remains of the only human being who has found burial on this great southern continent, and above his body still stands, in touching memorial, a plain wooden cross.’

That’s the most insane bit of foreshadowing 😬

Isle of Wight represent! (The Discovery sailed from Cowes)

Scott referring to the regions of the Antarctic as ‘the Wendell quadrant’ etc is giving sci fi, I love it 😂