THE FIRST WINTER 203 
of leaving those dependent upon him in difficulties. You 
may read it over and over again in his last letters and 
messages.? 
He will go down to history as the Englishman who 
conquered the South Pole and who died as fine a death as 
any man has had the honour to die. His triumphs are many 
—but the Pole was not by any means the greatest of them. 
Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his 
weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went 
to follow and came to love. 
Scott had under him this first year in his Main Party 
a total of 15 officers and 9 men. ‘These officers may be 
divided into three executive officers and twelve scientific 
staff, but the distinction is very rough, inasmuch as a 
scientist such as Wilson was every bit as executive as any- 
body else, and the executive officers also did much scien- 
tific work. I will try here briefly to give the reader some 
idea of the personality and activities of these men as they 
work any ordinary day in the hut. It should be noticed 
that not all the men we had with us were brought to do 
sledging work. Some were chosen rather for their scien- 
tific knowledge than for their physical or other fitness for 
sledging. The regular sledgers in this party of officers 
were Scott, Wilson, Evans, Bowers, Oates (ponies), Meares 
(dogs), Atkinson (surgeon), Wright (physicist), Taylor 
(physiographer), Debenham (geologist), Gran and myself, 
while Day was to drive his motors as far as they would 
go on the Polar Journey. This leaves Simpson, who was 
the meteorologist and whose observations had of necessity 
to be continuous; Nelson, whose observations into marine 
biology, temperatures of sea, salinity, currents and tides 
came under the same heading; and Ponting, whose job 
was photography, and whose success in this art everybody 
recognizes. 
However much of good I may write of Wilson, his 
many friendsin England, those who served with him on the 
ship or in the hut, and most of all those who had the good 
w 
1 Scote’s Last Expedition, vol. i. pp. 599, 602, 607. 
