Empire Antarctica by Gavin Francis

Author:Gavin Francis [Gavin Francis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2012-11-01T04:00:00+00:00

My copy of The Worst Journey in the World is in two volumes, a reprint by Penguin that came out in 1937, some fifteen years after the first edition. ‘I am glad the Worst Journey is coming out in Penguin,’ Cherry-Garrard notes at the start of it, ‘after all it is largely about penguins.’ The description of the winter journey is the final chapter of volume one. So it is that the last pages in the book jump forward two years to 1913, as the three embryos are presented to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as Wilson would have wanted. It is a chilling postscript, and long after publication still has the power to shock. Wilson and Bowers are dead, buried in the Ross Ice Shelf. To their bearer the embryos have become symbols of the courage and self-sacrifice of the two men. Outside the office of the museum custodian Cherry-Garrard is ignored, then spoken to rudely (‘This ain’t an egg-shop’), then after finally handing them over is refused a receipt for them. On his return a few months later with Captain Scott’s sister he finds that no one knows what has been done with them.

In the end, thanks no doubt in part to the fury of Scott’s sister, the embryos were found. They were passed to a Professor Assheton who, owing to the distraction caused by the war, did little with them. Assheton then died and they were passed on to a Professor Cossar Ewart of Edinburgh University. In 1922 Cossar Ewart published a brief external examination of them which is appended to The Worst Journey, and which concluded that the feather papillae of the emperor embryos did indeed suggest a connection with reptilian scales.

In 1932 and 1934 an anatomist called Parsons published deeper studies of the three embryos and came to a different conclusion – the three specimens had not added greatly to human knowledge about penguin embryology or ancestry after all. It is in this context that, having crashed his aeroplane off the Antarctic Peninsula, Bernard Stonehouse made his collection of timed penguin embryos in 1949.

When Stonehouse brought his embryos back to the British Museum in 1950 he was accorded a more cordial welcome than Cherry-Garrard had received. The Department of Natural History put him in touch with the anatomist T. W. Glenister of Charing Cross Hospital, whose assessment was published by FIDS in 1953. From the start it is clear that Glenister had a good idea not only of the potential scientific importance of the embryos but of the sensitivity that had to be shown in discussions about them, given what they represented. Cherry-Garrard was still alive at the time, but after decades obsessing over his part in the Terra Nova expedition, seemed to have lost interest. ‘Cherry-Garrard was living largely in a world of memories when I met him over lunch in 1950,’ Bernard Stonehouse told me. ‘He spoke freely about the Worst Journey, but seemed not very interested in our findings. I sent him copies of my publications, but he did not acknowledge them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.