Remembering Greatness

My roommate is in England for three weeks for the centenary of the ill-fated Scott Polar expedition, Terra Nova, whose history she is utterly captivated by.

Captain Scott's doomed polar expedition remembered.

Above, January 1912: (standing L-R) Captain Lawrence Oates, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, (seated (L-R) Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Edward Wilson posing at the South Pole in front of flags including the Norwegian flag planted by Roald Amundsen.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthpicturegalleries/8950890/100-year-anniversary-exhibition-of-Captain-Scotts-Antarctic-polar-expedition.html

The event was a blow to Edwardian British pride, but took a backseat to the more glamorous sinking of the Titanic (not to take away from that tragedy). My roommate wants to write a graphic novel about the story (she's an artist and animator at Disney, so no slouch). Me, I think it can be a film, the main character being the guy who survived and carried around his self-imposed guilt for the demise of his comrades, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who wrote The Worst Journey in the World.

An excerpt from The Telegraph:

At least Evans did not have to deal with survivor guilt, unlike fellow expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Few came closer to death in the Antarctic than this short-sighted and erudite figure, who, in June 1911, went off with Bowers and the expedition doctor Edward Wilson to search for Emperor Penguin eggs, the embryos of which might, it was thought at the time, provide a link between dinosaurs and birds.

It was a nightmarish trip, as recorded by Cherry-Garrard in his book The Worst Journey In The World. The men hauled equipment-laden sledges in constant darkness, their tent was blown away, and the temperature fell so low (-76C) that their teeth shattered.

All in vain, too, for by the time Cherry-Garrard got home and presented the Natural History Museum with the finds that he and his two late comrades had made, the original theory had been disproved, and the embryos were no longer wanted. Indeed, for Cherry-Garrard, who was among the party which found the bodies of Scott and his companions (“That scene can never leave my memory”), life back in Britain proved even harder than it had been in the Antarctic.

“He suffered from clinical depression and paranoid phases,” said his biographer, Sara Wheeler. “All the time, he was entering tunnels of nervous collapse. The reason he never had children was because he didn’t want to pass on his own mental fragility.”

My roommate's obsession with these men, their arduous, horrific journey, and its lingering effects in the British subconscious has made her what I would call a 'significant amateur historian' of the expedition. Her blog gets quite a bit of attention, and she's assisted a friend of hers, another Scott researcher, in researching a scholarly article that led to some new insights on the demise of the party.

While she's gone, then, I have the apartment to myself and the kitties. It's been nice, I admit, and it does sort of make me wish I could live on my own now. But it's fine; soon enough I'll be able to do that. For now, I actually enjoy living with my roommate, whose cooking, sense of humor and view of the world have done much to keep me afloat in these first few difficult months. While I enjoy this time to myself, I look forward to her return, and to her stories of how she and her fellow historians honored and celebrated the worst journey in the world.