Capturing the Discovery Expedition

Capturing the Discovery Expedition

by Ainsley Vinall

When the RRS Discovery entered the Antarctic Circle in January 1902, pushing its way through the pack ice, it was carrying more photographic equipment than any ship that had made the journey before. As well as cameras, tripods and glass plates, two hydrogen balloons for aerial observations were also on board and the crew boasted an official photographer in the form of chief engineer Reginald Skelton. 

In addition to Skelton, nine other men had photographic experience and captured their own images during the 1901 - 1904 British National Antarctic Expedition. These were navigator Albert Armitage, physicist Louis Bernacchi, geologist Hartley Travers Ferrar, chief steward Charles Reginald Ford, naturalist Thomas Hodgson, surgeon and botanist Reginald Koettlitz, first lieutenant Charles Royds, third lieutenant Ernest Shackleton and assistant surgeon Edward Adrian Wilson. Together they would take almost 1,000 photographs documenting the expedition’s progress and their daily life in Antarctica.

In total there were 57 crew members, but as some were discharged before the ship reached Antarctica or joined partway through the journey, they were not all on board at the same time. A few others were sent back on the relief ship SY Morning in March 1903, when George Mulock took over from Shackleton, and so left before the second winter. Almost all these men were photographed in Antarctica during the Discovery expedition, including famous figures such as Frank Wild and Tom Crean who would return to the area on later voyages.

Although the expedition was organised by the Royal Society as part of a joint committee with the Royal Geographical Society, it did not take any Fellows to Antarctica. George Murray FRS was on board as temporary scientific director for the first part of the voyage south, but he departed at Cape Town long before the ship reached colder waters. The photographs show that Arctic explorer Leopold McClintock FRS was present for the departure ceremony in Cowes on the Isle of Wight, which was also attended by King Edward VII, but the Royal Society’s main role was in the administration of the journey, setting out its scientific objectives and publishing its observations and reports.

A proportion of the expedition photographs were published when the ship returned. Robert Falcon Scott included around 230 in his The Voyage of the Discovery, released in 1905, and another 250 images were featured in the official Album of Photographs and Sketches, produced in 1908. These publications had some overlapping images, and the Album released several landscape panoramas compiled from multiple individual prints, but between them they still only revealed around half of the photographs taken during the expedition. 

Beyond the published images, albums of photographic prints produced directly from the glass plates were presented to individuals and organisations associated with the expedition. The National Maritime Museum holds an album containing 48 of Shackleton’s prints that he originally gave to Miss Elizabeth Dawson-Lambton, one of the expedition’s financial backers. More complete volumes of photographs were presented to the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the institutional organisers, with another set held in the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge.

The Royal Society set is a collection of six bound volumes covering 944 photographic prints. As there are 13 panoramas in the collection produced from multiple photographs mounted together, the set is arranged as 909 images. Due to the handmade nature of these albums, each set is a little different. The RGS has records for 758 images on their catalogue and the SPRI Picture Library has 815 images online, including a few shots of the crew that are absent from our collection. By launching our complete set of these newly-digitised photographs on Science in the Making, we are releasing images from Scott’s first Antarctic expedition that have never been published before, including group photographs of the crew and landscapes captured on the journey south.

The unpublished photographs tend to show a less formal side to the expedition. Alongside the more official photographs of the sledging parties, geological discoveries and scientific work, there are plenty of images of the crew struggling with their skis, playing with the sledging dogs and sliding down snowdrifts.

Where possible, efforts have been made to identify the crew members featured in each of the photographs and to geotag them with the coordinates of the locations that they show. We have written a description of each one with searchable terms and tagged them with the name of the photographer and the date the image was taken.

Assigning dates to the photographs and identifying the photographers was largely undertaken by Judy Skelton, Reginald Skelton’s granddaughter and the editor of his diaries. Her patient work to compare the three sets (RS, RGS and SPRI) and cross reference them with her grandfather’s diaries, paired with her generosity in sharing her results, has allowed us to analyse the images in chronological order and to recreate the different sledging journeys based on the photographs taken and the routes plotted by the crew.

During the main journey south, Shackleton used his camera to document the progress he made with Scott and Wilson from November 1902 to February 1903. Bringing a small camera with him and a limited number of glass plates, Shackleton was able to capture the sense of solitude on this slow march towards the pole. When they set up camp on Christmas Eve 1902, a few days before reaching their Furthest South of 82°17′, Shackleton was able to take a photograph of the rather exhausted looking trio by rigging up a length of rope to operate his camera.

By placing Shackleton’s images from this journey in order and matching the landmarks they show against the route the party took, we can map the progress Scott, Shackleton and Wilson made on their historic southern journey.

As a photographer, Shackleton made efforts to expose the extreme Antarctic conditions with his camera. Harsh winds are shown through views of sastrugi carved into the snow, frigid temperatures are represented by huge ice crystals on a fishing line and the tremendous snowfall by shots of the deck of the Discovery after a gale.

All the photographers were drawn to the Antarctic wildlife, with many glass plates expended capturing images of penguins and seals. The crew succeeded in photographing all the major species present in the area including five varieties of seal, Emperor and Adélie penguins, and numerous skuas, albatrosses and petrels. They also captured some more unusual specimens including an enormous 4-foot-long fish that they could not identify, as it was missing its head, and a starfish that they found in the waters of the McMurdo Sound.

Some photographs show the animals that the crew brought to Antarctica themselves. As well as 23 sledging dogs, two ship's cats were also carried south on board the Discovery. Named Blackwall and Poplar after districts of London, they were regularly photographed by Charles Ford and are seen either walking on the snow or sitting in sunny spots on the deck of the ship.

Ford also photographed the sledging dogs and when three gave birth in August 1902, he captured images of puppies taking their first steps on the ice. Due to problems with their food and the inexperience of the crew, the dogs proved largely ineffective in pulling the sledges, but these photographs show that they were valued by the crew as a source of companionship in the barren icy landscape.

For researchers working on the Antarctic, the visual nature of this trove of photographs permits a new perspective on the otherwise well-documented Discovery expedition. Seeing the smile on Scott’s sunburnt face as he staggers back into Winter Quarters Bay after the journey south provides an insight into his character that is hard to gain from his rather stoic journal. Photographs of the glaciers, rock forms, ice fields and volcanoes captured in 1902 also provide research opportunities for geologists, meteorologists and climate scientists, especially when analysed alongside the weather data collected by the crew.

More than once whilst cataloguing these photographs in our rather cold climate-controlled reading room I thought I could hear the crunching of a ship through sea ice or the howling of the distant wind. With these images now available online, we hope that researchers all over the world can experience a little of these Antarctic conditions wherever they are.

About the Author:

Ainsley Vinall is a Curator at the Royal Society, responsible for the collection of paintings, prints and photographs.  He started cataloguing the Discovery Expedition photograph albums when he joined the Society in 2023. He has previously held positions at the William Morris Gallery and at Vestry House Museum, specialising in British art and visual culture in the long nineteenth century.