January 26.
I enjoyed Anvar Khan's well-composed article on Scott and the
Antarctic, but I cannot accept it is more than a narrow and unjust point
of view (January 21).
Scott's and Amundsen's race to the South Pole in 1912 is a story of
such Homeric proportions and historical example that the difference
between success and failure is hardly relevant.
It has to be remembered that the expedition included scientific
exploration, and one has but to turn to the account of one of its
intrepid young scientists, Apsley Cherry Gerrard in his The Worst
Journey in the World, to learn of its magnificent fulfilment.
Allied to this was the product of the official photographer, Herbert
Ponting, who along with Dr Edward Wilson and his watercolours brought
back a superb and graphic record of Antarctica and of those early
explorers of a continent in those days as forlorn as the moon.
All these events occurred in an age of empire glory, when the rallying
words of Tennyson, the late Victorian poet laureate, were still ringing
in the ears of the Edwardians: ''To strive, to seek, to find, and not to
yield'' -- so fittingly quoted on the tomb of Scott and his companions
in those frozen wastes.
That the Discovery, which, of course, relates to Scott's first
expedition of 1902 and not to the second, has found a safe haven at
Dundee may, I trust, help to stimulate and inspire a healthy spirit of
adventure and endurance in the youth of today as an antidote to the
prevalence of unemployment and the social dangers of our times.
John M Ramsay,
1 Carters Place,
Irvine.
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