Scott's Last Expedition (First Edition)

SCOTT, Captain Robert Falcon (illus. Herbert G. Ponting & Edward A. Wilson; ed. Leonard Huxley; preface Sir Clements R. Markham). Scott's Last Expedition. Volume I: Being the Journals of Captain R. F. Scott. Volume II: Being the Reports of the Journeys and the Scientific Work Undertaken by Dr. E. A. Wilson and the Surviving Members of the Expedition. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913. 2 vols.

Large 8vo. Both volumes bound in original vertically-grained dark blue publisher's cloth. Lettering and lining to covers and spines in gilt; top edge gilt to both volumes. Vol. I: frontispiece, xxvi, 633 pp., 2 pp. publisher's advertisements, folding map at rear; Vol. II: frontispiece, xiii, [i], 534 pp., folding map at rear. Six sketches in photogravure by Dr. Edward A. Wilson; 18 colour plates; approximately 260 further illustrations throughout, the majority from photographs by Herbert G. Ponting; numerous further panoramas and maps. First edition, first printing. Sans original dust jackets. Provenance: from the library of Warwick H. Williams.

On 1 November 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) set out from his winter quarters at Cape Evans on the Ross Sea coast of Antarctica, at the head of a party attempting to become the first men to stand at the geographic South Pole. His Terra Nova Expedition had already survived a near-catastrophic storm on the voyage south, and would go on to endure conditions of a severity that remain almost unimaginable to a contemporary reader. Scott's party reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find the tent and flag left there by Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition, which had arrived thirty-three days earlier. Scott recorded his devastation in his diary that night: "Great God! this is an awful place." On the return march, all five men of the polar party — Scott, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates, and Edgar Evans — perished, worn down by exhaustion, malnutrition, extreme cold, and, in Oates's case, a deliberate act of self-sacrifice intended to save his companions that has become one of the most famous stories of courage in the English-speaking world. Scott's body, along with those of Wilson and Bowers, was found in their tent by a search party eight months later, together with his diaries, his final letters, and the geological specimens the party had continued to carry even as their own survival became impossible.

Scott's Last Expedition, published the following year, presents Scott's own journal exactly as he had kept it, up to the entry of 29 March 1912 alongside a second volume assembling the scientific reports and journey accounts prepared by Dr. Edward Wilson and the expedition's surviving members, arranged for publication by Leonard Huxley, with a preface by Sir Clements Markham, the geographer and former president of the Royal Geographical Society who had championed British Antarctic exploration for decades. The work is illustrated throughout with the photographs of Herbert Ponting, the expedition's official photographer, whose images of the Terra Nova and the expedition's daily life at Cape Evans constitute one of the foundational visual records of polar exploration, alongside watercolours and sketches by Wilson himself, whose work is reproduced here in colour.

The book's reception on publication, and in the century since, has been extraordinary. News of Scott's death had reached Britain in February 1913, provoking a wave of national mourning that transformed the expedition's scientific and exploratory purpose into something closer to a story of national martyrdom and sacrifice. Scott's Last Expedition became one of instant legend, a work that has never been out of print since 1913, has been reissued in innumerable subsequent editions, and remains, by the consistent assessment of the antiquarian trade, the most widely known single publication in the entire literature of Antarctic exploration.

Very good. Mild rubbing and turning at corners. Very mild wearing along edges. Binding of both volumes square and tight. Some markings on gilt top edge of both volumes. Both volumes show mild age toning on endpapers, as well as mild foxing and toning here and there throughout contents. Sans original dust jackets.

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Catalogue Number: ON00018.