Next Stop Antarctica

'Discovery Dinner' memento [framed], signed by Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, Ernest Shackleton and other members of the Discovery expedition crew, Dunedin Club, 23 December 1901

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) first arrived in Dunedin as leader of the British National Antarctic Expedition in 1901. His mission was to study the Great Ice Barrier and undertaking other scientific research. Upon reaching Port Chalmers on 23 December, Scott’s ship, the Discovery, was met in port by Governor-General Lord Ranfurly (1856–1933), Premier Richard Seddon (1845–1906), and other members of Parliament.

That night, Scott and his senior staff were given a farewell dinner hosted by local dignitaries at the Dunedin Club. In his history of the first fifty years of the Club, Gordon Parry writes that: ‘the dinner, unlike that on the night of the Duke and Duchess [of Cornwall] … earlier in the year, was a comparatively quiet affair’ (Parry 43). The following morning, the Discovery set sail for the Antarctic to the sounds of a cheering crowd.

Memento courtesy of the Dunedin Club.

Gordon Parry. Tradition & Change: The First 50 Years of the Dunedin Club. Dunedin: The Dunedin Club, 2008.

'Discovery Dinner' memento [framed], signed by Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, Ernest Shackleton and other members of the Discovery expedition crew, Dunedin Club, 23 December 1901
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Edward Wilson. Diary of the 'Discovery' Expedition to the Antarctic Regions 1901–1904. London: Blanford Press, 1966.

One of the members of the scientific staff present at the farewell dinner was Edward A. Wilson (1872–1912), who served as doctor, artist and vertebrate zoologist. A keen field naturalist, one of Wilson’s tasks was to examine and record the seals and birds of the region, and it was with delight that Wilson accepted a copy of Walter Buller’s Birds of New Zealand, loaned to him by Dr William Brown (a member of the Dunedin Club) for the voyage.

Wilson was also a member of Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition in 1912. The diaries he kept during that and the previous Discovery Expedition remain fascinating and insightful accounts of both endeavours. In the pages exhibited, Wilson records the untimely death of crewman Charles Bonner, who fell from the Discovery’s main mast shortly after departing Lyttelton and is buried in Port Chalmers Cemetery, the arrival into Port Chalmers, and the ‘very jolly’ occasion of the farewell dinner at the Dunedin Club.

Edward Wilson. Diary of the 'Discovery' Expedition to the Antarctic Regions 1901–1904. London: Blanford Press, 1966.
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