‘I AM JUST GOING OUTSIDE AND MAY BE SOME TIME.’ ————————————————————————

PORTRAIT OF CAPTAIN OATES ———————————————————————— HERBERT PONTING

Genre: Portrait

Date: 1911

Location: SS Terra Nova, Antarctica

Format: Unknown “Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) is a pioneer of modern polar photography. He accompanied Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to Antarctica and set up a darkroom in the base hut at Cape Evans. He took more than 1,000 photographs of Antarctica landscape and wildlife. He did not, however, accompany the expedition on its trek inland to the South Pole. This portrait shows Capitan Lawrence Oates with some of the nineteen horses he cared for on the expedition ship Terra Nova. The animals were intended to haul food and supplies, but Oates, a former cavalry officer, wrote that they were ‘very old for this sort of job’ and ‘a wretched load of crocks’. Oates was right; the ponies could not cope with the freezing conditions. Scott’s team struggled to reach the Pole, and there discovered that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition had got there first. Oates was the tragic hero of the doomed return trip from the South Pole. Suffering from appalling frostbite to his feet, and convinced that he was slowing the group’s progress, he walked out to his death in a blizzard, uttering his famous last words: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’”(CJbyd)

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