Century-Old Notebook Belonging To Member Of Scott’s Antarctic Expedition Team Discovered

Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A photographer’s notebook that had been left behind by a member of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica more than a century ago has been recovered from the British explorer’s base in Cape Evans, officials at the Antarctic Heritage Trust in New Zealand announced last week.
According to LiveScience News Editor Megan Gannon, the book belonged to a photographer, zoologist and surgeon named George Murray Levick, who was a member of Scott’s team during his ill-fated Terra Nova expedition in 1910-1913. Levick, Gannon said, is also known for his observations of Cape Adare’s Adélie penguins and their “depraved” sexual behaviors.
“The newly discovered book also shows he kept fastidious notes, scrawled in pencil, about the photographs he took at Cape Adare,” Gannon said. “The book has notes detailing the date, subjects and exposure details from his photographs. In his notes, Levick refers to a self-portrait he took while shaving in a hut… and shots he took of his fellow crewmembers as they set up theodolites (instruments for surveying) and fish traps and sat in kayaks.”

“It’s an exciting find,” Nigel Watson, executive director of the Antarctic Heritage Trust said in a statement. “The notebook is a missing part of the official expedition record. After spending seven years conserving Scott’s last expedition building and collection, we are delighted to still be finding new artifacts.”
Identified as the ‘Wellcome Photographic Exposure Record and Dairy 1910,’ the notebook’s binding has been dissolved by 100 years of ice and water damage, the Antarctic Heritage Trust officials explained. The pages were separated, stabilized and digitized before the pages were sewn back together and the cover rebuilt. It has since been returned to Antarctica, where it takes its place among the approximately 11,000 artifacts at Cape Evans.
Levick, who died in 1956, was not a member of the team that accompanied Scott during his attempt to reach the South Pole, said Ed Mazza of The Huffington Post, and his notebook contains dates, subjects and exposure details – all written before he and his colleagues were forced to spend a harsh Antarctic winter living in an ice cave in 1912.

Scott, meanwhile, was able to lead his expedition team to the South Pole on January 17, 1912, but discovered that their treacherous 10-week journey was all for naught as Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had made it there first, Gannon said. On the way back to their base camp, however, Scott and four other members of his crew succumbed to bad weather and dwindling supplies. Scott died on March 29 or 30, 1912, at the age of 43, Mazza added.
Last December, a team from the Antarctic Heritage Trust discovered undeveloped photos taken during one leg of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in an expedition hut used by Scott during his 1912 expedition. The negatives were developed and produced 22 pictures taken during Shackleton’s 1914-1917 Ross Sea Party and found in Scott’s hut, where expedition members were forced to live when their ship blew out to sea.
Follow redOrbit on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.