Richard Kossow has a copy of the New Testament which Levick had on this expedition. It is the Oxford Bible-paper edition, a small edition for which I didn’t get full details. Here is the description I have:
Bible, owned by Dr. G. Murray Levick, Surgeon for Northern Party
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Race to the End: Amundsen, Scott, and the Attainment of the South Pole.
MacPhee, Ross D. E. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 2010.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
A straightforward and well-written recounting of the Terra Nova expedition, intended as a companion volume to the AMNH’s 2010 centenary exhibition on Scott and Amundsen’s 1910 expeditions. MacPhee is a moderate critic of Scott’s deficiencies and Amundsen’s megalomania.
Memo
Osborne, Henry Fairfield. From AMNH Central Archive 488, Febr. 10, 1913.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
AMNH President, Henry Fairfield Osborne: I am inexpressibly shocked and grieved to learn of the disaster that has overtaken the members of the Scott Expedition to the South Pole. The blow is as unexpected as it is crushing. Captain Amundsen confidently expected that the Scott party would reach the tent, records and welcome which he left at Solheim. Only recently in conversation, both Captain Amundsen and Sir Ernest Shackleton have expressed to me their expectation of soon hearing favorably from this fourth attempt to conquer the South Pole. Neither expressed the least doubt as to the result. It is a fresh demonstration of the great hazards attending extreme Arctic exploration. …
The Great White South, or with Scott in the Antarctic. Being an Account of Experiences with Captain Scott’s South Pole Expedition and of the Nature Life of the Antarctic… and an Introduction by Lady Scott.
Ponting, Herbert G. London: Duckworth, 1921.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
p. 1: I might almost say that I first met Captain Scott in Siberia. I may at least state that it was there that I first got to know him, for I occupied myself during a journey over the Trans-Siberian railway in January, 1907, by reading his recently published work ‘The Voyage of the Discovery.’ I had bought the two volumes in Tokyo, thinking that they might furnish appropriate reading for a journey in the frigid conditions of climate which prevail in Siberia at that time of the year; and during my two weeks’ incarceration in the train, as it meandered over a third of the circumference of the globe, from Vladivostock to Moscow, I found that virile story of adventure of absorbing interest. Little then did I imagine that I should one day meet the great explorer in the flesh; much less that before four years had elapsed I should be accompanying him on his second voyage to the Antarctic regions. Wonderful, indeed, are the ways of Fate in the framing of our destinies!
Scott of the Antarctic
Pound, Reginald. New York: Coward-McCann, 1967.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
4th plate following p. 148—men reading on deck of Terra Nova.
Antarctic Adventure: Scott’s Northern Party.
Priestley, Raymond E. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914. [A new edition, with a New Foreword by Sir Vivian Fuchs, was published in London: C. Hurst & co., 1974.].
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
The northern party under V. L. A. Campbell, was forced to winter in the Antarctic when the Terra Nova failed to pick them up. They survived despite being without winter clothing and they eventually crossed 230 miles of sea ice to Cape Evans. Spence 939. Conrad 186: This is gripping reading. The first edition is unfortunately rare, as many copies were destroyed during a fire. [ABEBOOKS]
Work and Adventures of the Northern Party of Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1913.
Priestley, Raymond E. Geographical Journal 43 No. 1(Jan. 1914) 1-14.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
p. 11: Every Saturday evening we held a singsong, when every man participated to the best of his ability. Every Sunday we managed to scrape together at least a dozen hymns and a couple of Psalms, and Campbell read us a chapter of the New Testament, of which we had a pocket edition. The other three books we possessed, ‘David Copperfield,’ ‘Simon the Jester,’ and Balfour’s ‘Life of Stevenson,’ were successively read, one chapter a night, by Levick. Every subject of conversation was thrashed out again and again until it was pretty well threadbare, and the only things we were careful to avoid were questions on which either of us had much at heart.
Captain Scott’s Desert Island Discs: A Favour of What Were the Happening Sounds in Antarctica 100 Years Ago.
Rees, Jasper. (Wednesday, 11 April 2012) [Online source unknown.].
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Centenaries are sizeable business in 2012. It just so happens that the Olympics are coming to the United Kingdom for the third time in a year which finds us thinking very hard about if being British still means the same thing as it did 100 years when two momentous calamities singed themselves into the national psyche: the Titanic sank, and Captain Scott and his four companions never made it back from the South Pole.
Scott’s Last Expedition. In Two Volumes. Vol. I Being the Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, R.N., C.V.O. Vol. II. Being the Reports of the Journeys and the Scientific Work Undertaken by Dr. E. A. Wilson, and the Surviving Members of the Expedition,
Scott, Robert Falcon. Arranged by Leonard Huxley, with a preface by Sir Clements R. Markham. London: Smith Elder, 1913.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
[There is a considerable difference in the lengths of the British and American first editions of these diaries which I’ve been unable to unravel or understand. Paginations below are from the London edition.]
Tragedy and Triumph: the Journals of Captain R. F. Scott’s Last Polar Expedition.
Scott, Robert Falcon. New York: Konecky & Konecky [n.d.].
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
These journals include rather little on reading. The expedition’s lecture series implies a good library available to the lecturers, all 13 of them. Subjects included mostly scientific matter: parasitology, scurvy, polar clothing, sledging diets, motor sledges, geology, volcanoes, surveying, Lololand, biology, horse management, Burma, China, India, Japan; Scott himself lectured on the icebarrier and inland ice, and on plays for the Southern Journey. Other topics were coronas, hales, rainbows and auroras, general meteorology, the Beardmore glacier, physiography, flying birds, penguins, ice problems, radium, and the constitution of matter. [see index p. 511-12]
‘Birdie’ Bowers of the Antarctic
Seaver, George. With an Introduction by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. London: John Murray, 1938.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Like Seaver’s biography of Wilson, his fellow death-mate, this is a gentle hagiography of a devout Christian and a much-loved mate. On his training ship he would sit on the main deck every evening “before the whole ship’s company,” and read his Bible for a quarter of an hour (p. 22). I found nothing else about his reading during the Terra Nova expedition, but earlier he speaks of reading and thinking a lot in his spiritual quest (p. 40), of his prayer book, and his “violent attack of skepticism” from reading Darwin’s Descent of Man (p. 47), and this in Ceylon in 1909: “I have brought my Wordsworth up here and read it a bit in my room at night, keeping one eye aloft for spiders, one of which fell on me the other night” (p. 119). He was phobic about spiders.
I Am Just Going Outside: Captain Oates—Antarctic Tragedy.
Smith, Michael. Staplehurst, Kent, UK: Spellmount [2002].
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Interesting if not well-written biography of Titus Oates, emphasizing his patrician background, his dyslexia and reading and examination problems, his love for horses, and his distaste for Scott. The Oates family gave no cooperation to the book, presumably because it ends with “A second tragedy”, the story of an illegitimate daughter about whom Oates knew nothing. He clearly didn’t do a lot of reading but he had Napier’s History of the Peninsular War and was an admirer of Napoleon (see p. 102 and 245) and had his portrait at Cape Evans.
South Polar Times
SPRI MS 505/4: Typescript.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Only copy, owned by Cherry-Garrard and largely produced by him. Introduction written later by Frank Debenham. No mention of Scott’s Polar party. “Ed., typed & illus. largely by me”—ACG. Drawings by Cherry have a remarkable delicacy.
I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination
Spufford, Francis. London, Faber and Faber, 1996.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
A fascinating study of the British flirtation with the Arctic and Antarctic in both intellectual and sociological terms, including its derogation (North Pole—Arsehole). Only the last chapter, dealing with Scott’s fatal expedition, covers an actual expedition, although there is a good bit on Lady Franklin’s attempts to find Franklin’s fate.
Birdie Bowers: Captain Scott’s Marvel.
Strathie, Anne. Stroud, UK: History Press, 2012.
- 1910-14 British National Antarctic Expedition (Scott on Terra Nova).
- Antarctic Reading: Expeditions
Preview
Biography of the sailor who went to the South Pole and then died with Scott in 1912. Brought up an evangelical whose father was a Freemason, the biography shows a gradual ebbing of his faith through the early part of his career until he was summoned by Scott from the Royal Indian Marines.