ANTARCTIC LOG BOOKS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31330, 29 March 1967, Page 12

ANTARCTIC LOG BOOKS

£2600 Paid At Auction

A petty officer’s three Antarctic log books, in one of which is an account of the finding of the bodies of Captain R. F. Scott, Dr. E. A. Wilson, and Lieutenant H. E. R. Bowers in November, 1912, were sold at auction in London last week for £2600—10 times more than the owner expected.

The logs were written by Petty Officer’Thomas Williamson, a member of the search party which had set out to find Scott, and sold by his son, Mr Thomas Williamson, a probation officer, who said he wanted to make his father’s diaries public, because of their historical interest, but could not afford to present them to the nation.

They were bought, apparently as a speculation, by Mr C. Traylen, of Guildford, Surrey, after a spirited contest with a New York dealer. After the purchase, Mr Traylen told reporters: “They are on sale from today.” The Scott Polar Research Institute had been interested in obtaining Williamson’s logs for its archives, but was too short of money to obtain them.

Petty Officer Williamson served under Scott in both the Discovery and the Terra Nova. He ran away to sea at the age of 13, and was a labourer on the Portsmouth docks at the time of his death in 1940. His widow died recently and her son decided to sell the diaries. Williamson’s diaries at times misspelt and badly punctuated—bring back that morning of November 12, 1912, when Surgeon Edward Atkinson’s search party came upon the snowbound tent containing the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers. “It was a great blow to us, and I must own I shed a few tears, and I know others did the same. . . . Everyone seemed dumbfounded, we did not touch anything but just stood gazing, and wondering what awful secrets this tent had for us on opening it,” Williamson wrote. From a reading of Scott’s diary, found beside his body, the searchers learnt of his party’s dramatic homeward march from the South Pole, and the circumstances of their death, blizzard-bound in the small tent, only 11 miles from safety at One Ton Camp.