scientific work. I
will try here briefly to give the reader some idea of the personality and
activities of these men as they work any ordinary day in the hut. It
should be noticed that not all the men we had with us were brought to do
sledging work. Some were chosen rather for their scientific knowledge
than for their physical or other fitness for sledging. The regular
sledgers in this party of officers were Scott, Wilson, Evans, Bowers,
Oates (ponies), Meares (dogs), Atkinson (surgeon), Wright (physicist),
Taylor (physiographer), Debenham (geologist), Gran and myself, while Day
was to drive his motors as far as they would go on the Polar Journey.
This leaves Simpson, who was the meteorologist and whose observations had
of necessity to be continuous; Nelson, whose observations into marine
biology, temperatures of sea, salinity, currents and tides came under the
same heading; and Ponting, whose job was photography, and whose success
in this art everybody recognizes.

However much of good I may write of Wilson, his many friends in England,
those who served with him on the ship or in the hut, and most of all
those who had the good fortune to sledge with him (for it is sledging
which is far the greatest test) will all be dissatisfied, for I know that
I cannot do justice to his value. If you knew him you could not like him:
you simply had to love him. Bill was of the salt of the earth. If I were
asked what quality it was before others that made him so useful, and so
lovable, I think I should answer that it was because he never for one
moment thought of himself. In this respect also Bowers, of whom I will
speak in a moment, was most extraordinary, and in passing may I be
allowed to say that this is a most necessary characteristic of a good
Antarctic traveller? We had many such, officers and seamen, and the
success of the expedition was in no small measure due to the general and
unselfish way in which personal likes and dislikes, wishes or tastes were
ungrudgingly subordinated to the common weal. Wilson and Pennell set an
example of expedition first and the rest nowhere which others followed
ungrudgingly: it pulled us through more than one difficulty which might
have led to friction.

Wilson was a man of many parts. He was Scott's right-hand man, he was the
expedition's Chief of the Scientific Staff: he was a doctor of St.
George's Hospital, and a zoologist specializing in vertebrates. His
published work on whales, penguins a