A century ago, the South Pole was the last unexplored continent. Several explorers raced to be the first to reach the Antarctic -- and many died in the process.

Adrian Raeside, the Times Colonist's editorial cartoonist, is the grandson of Sir Charles Wright, a member of Robert Scott's ill-fated 1910 expedition to the Pole. His great uncles, Thomas Griffith Taylor and Raymond Edward Priestley, were also on the team.

Raeside retraced some of his grandfather's steps last winter. On his return he wrote Return to Antarctica, combining information from his grandfather's diaries with an account of his own journey. The book includes dozens of photographs from Wright's collection, including many that have not been published in other books on the expedition.

What follows are abridged excerpts from Return to Antarctica.

THE BACKGROUND

After arriving at Cape Evans, about 1,500 kilometres from the South Pole, in January 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott was anxious to cache as many supplies as possible along the route he and some of his men would take to the Pole the next spring.

Because they could carry limited provisions with them on the trek, he wanted to lay supply depots as far south as possible before the short summer ended.

At the same time, Charles "Silas" Wright and a party that included Thomas Griffith Taylor, Frank Debenham and petty officer Taff Evans set out for the Western Mountains to explore the glaciers and the dry valleys -- later to be named the Taylor and Wright Dry Valleys.

It was the first experience Wright and most of the others had of the harsh Antarctic climate. Despite the conditions, the men got along and were able to explore deeper inland than they had anticipated. But for those with Scott out on the Great Ice Barrier, things were less pleasant.

Lawrence Oates had already had one argument with Scott over what he felt was the misplacement of the food depots, ponies were dying from cold and exhaustion and the weather was rapidly deteriorating.

THE EXCERPTS

On Feb. 14, 1911, the depot-laying team was still plodding south. Tryggve Gran, and his pony, Weary Willie, were lagging behind the main party and got stuck in a snowdrift. The dog team, which was nearby, spotted the trapped pony and set upon Weary Willie with the intention of tearing him to pieces.

Weary, Cecil Meares and Gran fought the dogs off, with Meares breaking his stick beating the dogs. Eventually Weary Willie was able to shake off the dogs and gamely trotted on, bloodied, but alive.

Scott was furious that he almost lost a pony to the dogs.

"I was much annoyed and feel there is blame in many places: I ought not to have allowed a pony to get so far behind," he wrote. "Meares should have kept them far out of range of a single horse especially a tired straggler ... Oates does not shine well as a judge of the animals' capacity for covering distance."

The Western Party didn’t have any animals to worry about, but they were about to encounter the indigenous wildlife. They had climbed over the Butter Glacier and arrived at the foot of the Ferrar Glacier.

There appeared to be enough sea ice to be able to get around the ice foot this time, but part way across, a crack appeared ahead of them which widened as the ice heaved.

The winds were calm and there was no ocean swell to speak of, there could only be one thing causing the ice to heave like that. Killer whales.

The men beat a hasty retreat back to the glacier, before the whales broke through the ice. It was decided they’d be better off traversing the Ferrar Glacier, where Silas drove stakes into the ice at various intervals, and tied them in with the theodolite — the idea being to return in the spring to measure how far the glacier had moved over the winter.

On Feb. 16, they made their way off the Ferrar Glacier by lowering the sledge down to the sea ice on ropes. Keeping a sharp eye out for killer whales, they made good time around the peninsula to Chocolate Camp. The ice here was unstable with many pools of water and rotten ice, resulting in slow and painful progress. Taylor’s boots were now in tatters, and he had tied sealskin around his boots in a futile attempt to keep them together until they made Hut Point.

The short Austral summer of 1911 was fading fast, with temperatures dropping. Gear and sleeping bags were continuously soaked from sweat and soaking up the melt from the ice.

Socks and finnesko that would normally have dried in the sun were now wet 24 hours a day and frozen solid by morning — meaning late starts while everyone struggled to get into frozen gear. They learned that, before turning in for the night, it was a good idea to leave socks and finnesko in shapes they could get into the next morning.

Physically, they were getting played out. Debenham’s heel was giving him trouble, Taylor’s feet were severely blistered and his boots were as Taylor put it, “awful wrecks.”

Silas was starving, and even their cameras packed it in, as the bitter cold caused shutters to seize. The only person who seemed unaffected was PO Evans.

On the Barrier, Jimmy Pigg had survived the march to Safety Camp and was relaxing behind his pony walls while Lt. Teddy Evans, Robert Forde and Patrick Keohane waited for Scott and Meares to return with the dog teams.

When they finally arrived on Feb. 21, Scott’s dog team promptly fell down a crevasse near White Island.

Scott and the sledge were saved, but with the exception of Osman, all the dogs had disappeared down the chasm, and were dangling by their traces, snarling and snapping at each other.

Osman dug his paws into the snow, straining on his harness, the only thing preventing his companions from dropping to the bottom of the crevasse. Using ropes, the men were able to retrieve the dogs and raise them to the surface.

When they recovered from their ordeal, the dogs trotted over to Meares’ dog team and started a fight. (Presumably his dogs hadn’t been sympathetic enough to their plight.)

The last two dogs, who had slipped out of their harnesses, were trapped on a snow bridge 65 feet down the crevasse and were rescued by Scott, who was lowered down on a rope, where he found them curled up and sleeping like nothing had happened.

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On returning from exploring the Western Mountains and unaware of how horrible conditions were out on the Barrier, Silas Wright volunteered to join a small party sent by Scott to take more pony fodder out to a supply depot at Corner Camp.

It was Wright’s first time on the Great Ice Barrier and it was too late in the season to take on such a journey. The intense cold and blizzard conditions, coupled with a lack of adequate provisions was his first taste of what was in store for him on their march to the South Pole the next spring.

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Silas was shaken by the whole experience, and privately beginning to have doubts as to Scott’s ability as a leader. He wrote:

“It was of course foolish of me to dash off so soon after we got back from the Western Mountains with sleeping bag and all other gear full of ice and water, but it seemed worthwhile for the experience which was, in my opinion not a very well organised show and the worst thing was to take off with inadequate rations when blizzards were far too common and I could see no good reason for this sloppy arrangement.”

Unlike the laid-back atmosphere when the group explored the Western Mountains a few weeks earlier, the depot-laying party revealed tensions. Lt. Evans had not broken himself of his habit of, as Silas put it: “cadging matches and tobacco.”

Forde felt the cold more than anyone else (he was eventually invalided home on Terra Nova with severe frostbite), and since learning that Roald Amundsen was parked down the coast, Scott’s attitude towards Tryggve Gran had changed, with Scott finding fault with almost anything Gran did — at one point giving him a tongue-lashing in front of the party, which Silas thought was “off-side.”

Once back at Cape Evans, Silas wrote a longer account of sledging conditions on the Barrier:

“In really cold weather, the hard work leads to profuse sweating during the day much of which remains trapped as ice in one’s outer clothing which becomes windproof when frozen.

“All clothes except those actually touching one are thus frozen and this ice is carried into the sleeping bag melted or evaporated to condense in the coldest part of the bag being occupied by one’s cold feet.

“In the morning one gets up in the dark cold tent with a quarter of an inch, or more, of rime on tent and sleeping bags, which drops on one at every casual touch or shake of the tent. After a warm but shivery breakfast comes the ordeal of changing socks and finnesko, a truly unpleasant one if they are not frozen into a shape suitable for easy entry.

“It is because of this that care must be taken to take such gear to bed with you, so that they won’t become frozen overnight. While changing gear, smoke a pipe, roll up the sleeping bag for the sledge and plug away until lunch time which is easily the most pleasant time of the day. In really cold weather with the temperature down to -60 degrees or lower, the sleeping bag must not be rolled up because of the time taken to enter it at night when the feet are used to warm the ice and very slowly make one’s way in.

“After the afternoon’s toil and frozen sweat, supper is made by the cook for the week by candlelight, the frozen breath of the party of four and frozen steam from the primus causes a fog in the air which makes it extremely difficult for the cook to see what he is doing.

“And, of course, the cold utensils stick tight to one’s fingers when cold, causing repeated blisters on the fingers. The fog then condenses a bit on the tent walls, and the air in the tent clears somewhat while the struggle to get in the sleeping bags proceeds after changing finnesko and wet socks, which are put into the bag with you so they won’t be frozen when they are put on the next morning.

“Of course the supply of frozen sweat in the bag is increased each night, and all this must be melted before one can get to sleep in the wet bag. With luck, the ice in the bag will be melted in an hour or two of shivering (really heavy shudders which you can feel coming also from the bags on either side) and one can at last sleep.

“However, if unlucky, one has to turn out of the bag and tent during the night, the outer clothing freezes at once and becomes covered in hoar frost from the tent. In the morning one’s hands are as soft as putty from the continual wetness which persists all day as the process of taking the sweaty hand out of the gloves allows the mitts to freeze at once and to melt again when put on.”