In addition to Scott’s Last Expedition and Priestley’s Antarctic Adventures, Griffith Taylor, who was physiographer to the Main Party, has written an account of the two geological journeys of which he was the leader, and of the domestic life of the expedition at Hut Point and at Cape Evans, up to February 1912, in a book called With Scott:  The Silver Lining.  This book gives a true glimpse into the more boisterous side of our life, with much useful information about the scientific part.

Though it bears little upon this book I cannot refrain from drawing the reader’s attention to, and earning some of his thanks for, a little book called Antarctic Penguins, written by Levick, the Surgeon of Campbell’s Party.  It is almost entirely about Adelie penguins.  The author spent the greater part of a summer living, as it were, upon sufferance, in the middle of one of the largest penguin rookeries in the world.  He has described the story of their crowded life with a humour with which, perhaps, we hardly credited him, and with a simplicity which many writers of children’s stories might envy.  If you think your own life hard, and would like to leave it for a short hour I recommend you to beg, borrow or steal this tale, and read and see how the penguins live.  It is all quite true.

So there is already a considerable literature about the expedition, but no connected account of it as a whole.  Scott’s diary, had he lived, would merely have formed the basis of the book he would have written.  As his personal diary it has an interest which no other book could have had.  But a diary in this life is one of the only ways in which a man can blow off steam, and so it is that Scott’s book accentuates the depression which used to come over him sometimes.

We have seen the importance which must attach to the proper record of improvements, weights and methods of each and every expedition.  We have seen how Scott took the system developed by the Arctic Explorers at the point of development to which it had been brought by Nansen, and applied it for the first time to Antarctic sledge travelling.  Scott’s Voyage of the Discovery gives a vivid picture of mistakes rectified, and of improvements of every kind.  Shackleton applied the knowledge they gained in his first expedition, Scott in this, his second and last.  On the whole I believe this expedition was the best equipped there has ever been, when the double purpose, exploratory and scientific, for which it was organized, is taken into consideration.  It is comparatively easy to put all your eggs into one basket, to organize your material and to equip and choose your men entirely for one object, whether it be the attainment of the Pole, or the running of a perfect series of scientific observations.  Your difficulties increase many-fold directly you combine the one with the other, as was done in this case.  Neither Scott nor the men with him would have gone for the Pole alone.  Yet they considered the Pole to be an achievement worthy of a great attempt, and “We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint....”