One of the most remarkable scientists of the 20th century spent his final years in Greater Victoria -- and his legacy lives on in the Times Colonist, thanks to his grandson.
Sir Charles Seymour Wright, KCB, CB, OBE, MC, MA, tramped the Antarctic snow with Capt. Robert Scott and directed British naval scientists in their wartime battle of wits with the Nazis.
As a young, eager scientist, he talked his way into the Scott expedition of 1910-1913, went in the party accompanying Scott as far as latitude 83.30 in the dash for the pole, then navigated for the searchers who found Scott frozen to death.
He was the only Canadian of the six scientists on the expedition. Wright and the other scientists spent the first winter at Cape Evans studying glacier ice, snow and sea ice. Magnetism, gravity and aurora were added to these studies the subsequent winter.
He worked in naval scientific research for 28 years, heading the research program through the Second World War.
Sir Charles was a scientist-adventurer, crossing both mental and physical frontiers. He respected bravery, effort and endurance. He had the skepticism and cold detachment of the modern scientist.
He was born in Toronto on April 7, 1887, the son of Alfred Wright, Canadian head of a British insurance company. He attended Upper Canada College, and a teacher who spotted his talent for mathematics encouraged him to go to Toronto University, where he won a scholarship entitling him to two years' study anywhere. He chose to go to the famous Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge for two years of physics research, devoting most of his time to study of the phenomenon now called "cosmic rays."
When Capt. Robert Falcon Scott, already well known for his previous voyage to the Antarctic, was named chief of an expedition aiming at the South Pole, where no one had been before, "just about everybody in England" applied to join.
"I couldn't resist applying and was promptly turned down," Sir Charles said in a 1952 interview with the Colonist. "I was so sure of myself in those days that I went down to London and explained what a frightful mistake Scott had made -- and walked off with a job. I must have had a lot of gall."
Sailing in the barque Terra Nova, the expedition spent Christmas of 1910 in the pack ice. Early in the new year, they landed on Ross Island.
The expedition split in several parts. One struck south over the frozen sea to lay the first dumps of food and fuel for the polar journey. A scientific group moved north, got marooned and spent the winter in an ice cave. A third scientific group, to which Wright belonged, worked in the Western Mountains of the Antarctic continent, charting the movement of glaciers, effects of ice on the land and related matters.
One party made a disquieting find -- Roald Amundsen, who had previously announced his intention of going to the North Pole, had made a sudden about-face and was now camped on the Bay of Whales at the edge of the ice barrier, presumably getting ready for his own trip to the South Pole.
Scott and 15 men (including Wright) began the polar journey in November 1911, laying cairns of food and oil roughly every 100 kilometres.
By pre-arrangement, the party dwindled in size on the way south, as sections of it peeled off and returned to base. Men with dogs went back first. The group with ponies carried on as far as the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier, 600 kilometres from the pole, slaughtered the ponies, and slogged the 800 kilometres back to base on foot. Wright was with this group.
Eight men went on for another 190 kilometres, when three turned back. The remaining five went on to the pole.
A party sent to meet Scott on the return journey failed to make the rendezvous, and returned to base according to plan. Scott had been delayed by unexpectedly bad weather.
Surgeon Commander L.A. Atkinson led a search party, with Wright as navigator. The exact position of every cairn was recorded, so when Wright, straining his eyes in the blank whiteness of snow and sky, picked up a cairn where none should have been, he knew the search was at an end.
All five in Scott's party had died, three of them in a tent just 17 kilometres from the ample food and oil of One-Ton Depot. The bare, noble phrases of Scott's diary told how they had reached the pole, found that Amundsen had beaten them to it, turned back and struggled on to the end.
The search party collapsed the tent on the three bodies and left them there.
Back at Cambridge after nearly three years in the ice and snow, Wright set to work to sort out the results. He taught cartography and surveying until the First World War broke out.
He spent four years in France and Belgium. He became officer in charge of wireless for the Second Army, then was promoted to captain and became a general staff intelligence officer.
In 1919, he joined the newly organized naval research department, in which he served until 1941. For the last 13 years of this time he was director of scientific research.
Wright gave Britain a running start in the new field of radar. Long before the war, he persuaded the Admiralty to place a contract with a firm to investigate very short radio waves. As a result, Britain was far ahead in developing suitable vacuum tubes to build radar gear.
Wright retired in 1947, joined the British Columbia Research Council briefly to advise on operational research, then hustled away to Washington, D.C., as scientific adviser to the British Joint Services Mission (Navy).
Then, it was off to Victoria to spend time puttering about in his garden. But taking it easy didn't last. Wright joined the staff at the Pacific Naval Laboratory at Esquimalt in 1955. He revisited Antarctica in 1960 and 1965. In 1967, he joined the Institute of Earth Sciences at the University of British Columbia and Royal Roads Military College.
He died in 1975.
One of his grandchildren is Adrian Raeside, who has been the Times Colonist's cartoonist for almost 30 years.