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You can read more original fiction from Emily Chesley in the Meanderings of the Emily Chesley Reading Circle<

Read Frozen on the spot Scott

Frozen on the spot Scott
Grunting Bear Press, 1914

Robert Falcon "Sweet Jesus It's Cold" Scott

Historical Note:

On November 12, 1912, a party lead by British naval surgeon Edward Atkinson discovered the bodies of Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers. These were the last to die on Scott's ill-fated, and fatal, trek to the South Pole. Scott's party had died in March on the return trip from the pole (where they had arrived three weeks after rival Roald Amundsen.) The Norwegians had taken a shorter route making good use of skis and sled dogs.

Scott's party had started with both ponies and sled dogs but ended up losing both. The poorly trained dogs attacked the ponies, the Englishmen, and each other. The ponies that weren't killed by dogs sank in the snow when their snow shoes where accidentally left behind. Several where euthanized with pistol or axe while others died of exhaustion. Some were lost on an ice flow and presumed eaten by killer whales. A large motorized sledge also broke through the ice and sank in 60 meters of water. The Scott party would arrive at the pole - and attempt to return - on foot.

Scott and his men with their blackened bits falling off.

Two other members of the Scott party had died earlier in the return journey - Evans, who went snow mad, and the frostbitten Oates who sacrificed himself for the others when he left the tent with the words "I am just going outside and may be some time". The Atkinson party found the three remaining men inside a partly buried tent. Wilson appeared to have died peacefully with arms folded across his chest. Bowers too was in his sleeping bag. Scott, the last to die, appeared to have had a tougher time of it. He was half out of his bag with an arm outstretched toward Wilson.

Emily Chesley's poem, Frozen on the Spot Scott, takes as its setting the final resting place of Scott and his men as it was discovered by the Atkinson party. The poem is intended to be a sad elegy for the lost Scott expedition. At the time of its publication, however, some pronounced the poem "rude and tasteless". Indeed, the poem does include a number of rather questionable images such as the comparison of Scott's outstretch arm with an "icy leg of mutton". However, on closer examination, the criticisms of Chesley's poem had nothing to do with morbid imagery and everything to do with the author not knowing her place.

These attitudes toward "that woman from Canada" were best summed up by Times literary critic Sondum Asghit, who pronounced:

Grunting Bear Press in The Collected Poems of Canadians and Other Colonial Persons published Frozen on the Spot Scott in July 1914.

Read Frozen on the spot Scott...>

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