South Polar Times

Summary

On February 8, 1902, the steam-powered barque Discovery anchored in McMurdo Sound, carrying Robert Falcon Scott’s first Antarctic expedition. Its cargo included guns, axes, saws, sledges, skis, compasses, chronometers, barometers, thermometers, microscopes, telescopes, magnetographs, theodolites, fireworks for signaling, explosives for blasting through ice, a windmill to generate electricity, a balloon for aerial surveys, a set of magic tricks, a collection of theatrical costumes, a piano, a harmonium, 36 cases of sherry, 5,000 pounds of marmalade, and more than 1,500 books, 48 of them by Sir Walter Scott. The Discovery also carried a single typewriter, a Remington No. 7, on which Ernest Shackleton, the third lieutenant in charge of holds, stores, provisions, and deep-sea water analysis, would perform an additional and perhaps even more vital duty, as the founding editor of Antarctica’s only magazine, The South Polar Times. The South Polar Times is proof of something all editors know and all publishers deny: that the value of a periodical cannot be judged by the size of its circulation. There was only one copy of each of its twelve issues, to be shared (depending on the year) by between thirteen and forty-seven readers. It would come out monthly, but only in winter. The Antarctic sun set in April and did not rise again till August. Previous expeditions had learned that four months of darkness could make men despondent and mutinous. “I can think of nothing more disheartening, more destructive to human ambition, than this dense, unbroken blackness of the long polar night,” wrote the ship’s surgeon on the Belgian Antarctic Expedition of 1897–99, during which one man had died, two had gone insane, one had attempted to walk home to Belgium, and many had watched their hair turn gray. In the winter of 1899, a member of the British Southern Cross expedition to Antarctica wrote that “a gloom would envelop the mind in as thick a canopy as a London fog.” Scott had no intention...