William's Antarctic Letters

Little of William Lashly's correspondence has survived. However, several letters written on, or about, his Antarctic travels have been donated to the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge and may be read under normal archive regulations. The letters include five to family members, five to Lieutenant Skelton and one to Captain Scott's wife, Kathleen. Three letters to Robert Gibbings, who privately published his Terra Nova Expedition diary, also make interesting reading. Some extracts from what William wrote in his letters are included here but for a longer description click on the file at the endof the section.

Opportunities for communicating during William’s time on the Antarctic expeditions were extremely limited. Radio communication was still in its infancy and although the Terra Nova expedition set up an effective 15 mile telephone link between Cape Evans and Hut Point, it wasn’t until Mawson’s Australian Antarctic Expedition in 1912 that radio contact was possible between explorers in the Antarctic and the outside world. However, there must have been some discussion on the Terra Nova of the possibility because William wrote to his brother from Lyttelton, New Zealand on the eve of sailing on to the Antarctic in 1910, “I think they are going to put wireless on board and there will be a wireless station at the bluff the south end of NZ so that we may be able to send messages home before we come back.”

New Zealand happened to be at the forefront of developing radio communications, particularly for use at sea, and a high-power transmitter was opened at Bluff in December 1913, but too late to support Scott’s expeditions. Interestingly, when Mawson visited the Antarctic in 1929 on the Discovery, he reported, “Wireless has not given the service expected. The fact of a wooden hull and much rigging is effective in reducing our range”.

For Scott’s first expedition the Discovery remained in the Antarctic so letters could not be sent or received until the “relief ship” (for support rather than rescue) came in the Spring of the second year. Letters could also be sent when expeditions called in at Lyttelton on their return home to be carried by mail boat much more quickly than the explorers’ ships would make the journey back to Britain. During the last expedition the Terra Nova returned to New Zealand after dropping off the men in the Antarctic so letters were sent back with the ship, and then again during its relief visit after 12 months.

A letter from William on Terra Nova paper

Letters Home

In February 1903 William was living on the Discovery, locked into the ice, having spent a long winter in the Antarctic. The relief ship Morning had arrived in January bringing, among other things, long-awaited mail for the men. Collecting it from the ship anchored several miles away across treacherous ice was not without problems. William set off by sledge with Lt. Armitage and Lt. Skelton and 10 others to collect mail and to hear the news, but he wrote in his diary, “on arriving within a mile and a half of the Morning (relief ship) we had to proceed with the greatest of care, the ice being very unsafe, several going through”. It was several days before all the parcels and letters were eventually safely transported to the Discovery.

Among the mail was a letter from William’s brother Charles with news of his family. William wrote back to his “Brother and Sister” wishing them well in India, where Charles (with his wife and young daughters) was serving with the British Army, before moving on to describe his experiences of the last twelve months. “We have had a fairly good time while we have been here” he reported, with a degree of understatement, “but of course it is very cold during the winter months” (he recorded minus 58.5°F in his diary while in a tent on October 9th – “the lowest temperature ever registered when anyone has been out sledging,” he wrote then). But compared to what was to come, things were fairly quiet.

“The best of it is the sledge trips…” he reflected, though a little later qualified this with, “I don’t mean to say it is all honey dragging 200 pounds behind every day for a month or 6 weeks but you are never healthier in your life.”

He reported that on one trip they had been caught in a blizzard for five days and only managed to cook one meal. This was the first western journey during which William’s sleeping bag blew away while they were struggling to save the other tent and he had to share a thee-man bag, making “a four bag of it, but it was rather crowded”

William was optimistic about the expedition’s achievements in making observations and discovering new land, especially on Scott’s three-month trip south from which he had just returned. They had “made the chart complete as far as 83 south” and even more would have been achieved if the dogs “had not died.” (In fact, the dogs had not pulled well and Scott had killed them one by one to feed the others).

William concluded his letter by explaining how the Discovery was still frozen in the ice and the relief ship was 5 miles off, about to leave without him and most of the men who had agreed to stay for another winter.

As an afterthought he wrote across the top of the letter-sheet, “Don’t be alarmed if we don’t turn up this year as we are in a pretty safe corner but we may get out of here at the end of the month.” The letter went off with the Morning and William settled down to his winter work. At the end of March he wrote in his diary “I don’t think there is much chance of our getting out this year now, as the sea is frozen over again towards the north”.