little girls whose inner life is thought to warrant imagery of scorching and freezing. Jane's constricted life moves, however, between emotional dangers that Bronte can best illustrate with fire and ice. 'A ridge of lighted heath,

it seems unlikely that they were in a strict sense personal feelings. Grace Scott seems confident that she is naming well-known, indeed conventional stimuli to feeling when she mentions 'the call of the vast empty spaces', 'the But then explorers are notoriously bad at saying why. Or perhaps they are notoriously good at avoiding giving a satisfactory answer. They laugh at themselves, they deplore the sensationalising of their expeditions, they say it all made sense at the time, His memorable phrase lives on in the English-speaking world both as among the most famous of last words and as the epitome of heroic understatement and allusion. Pratchett, Terry (1994). "Soul Music (Discworld #16)(3) by Terry Pratchett". Gollancz . Retrieved 24 December 2016. of hope, and by a child's inability to see beyond present misery. She knows about 'multiplied rigours', and all her perceptions are 'concentred' (a word used repeatedly by Coleridge in his self-investigations)

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There is a famous painting by Millais called The Northwest Passage; it was the hit of the 1874 Royal Academy spring show, and was praised by the explorer Sir George Nares for ‘influencing the spirit of the nation’. Like the same painter’s Boyhood of Raleigh, it seized the mood of patriotic pride in which the public admired British sailors and polar explorers. Shortly afterwards Nares himself set off on that century’s last attempt to reach the North Pole. The expedition was, alas, an ignominious failure. The general view however, if not expressed quite so crudely, was that failure was somehow a necessary part of the polar story; heroes were heroes, whether or not they reached their goals. In his dying moments Captain Scott wrote in his diary: ‘I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.’ The Lawrence Oates school in Meanwood, Leeds (closed 1992), was named after him. On the 100th anniversary of his death, a blue plaque was unveiled in his honour at Meanwood Park, Leeds. [36] Delhi, could perhaps scarcely say why exploration 'is most suitable to my tastes'. Each chapter is an archaeology of one aspect of the hazy love affair between the ice and the English. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard said of a book I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with 'the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space -- that reservoir of frost and

Why that should have been so is an essential part of Spufford’s study, involving such considerations as imperial assumptions of superiority, nostalgia, disdain for lesser breeds, and so on. Sir John Franklin and his party perished in a hopeless quest for the Northwest Passage, freezing or starving to death before they had gone very far, and yet the territory they were crossing supported a native population who knew perfectly well how to survive there. Because the Eskimos were not thought by superior Europeans to be worth consulting, a hundred or so men were lost. In much the same way the Scott expedition took little account of Eskimo experience. Amundsen, on the other hand, did not share these assumptions; trained by Eskimos and equipped with their dog teams, he glided smoothly to the South Pole, leaving there a Norwegian flag to greet the struggling British party, hauling their own sledges, when they finally arrived.

they write books filled with practical detail which make readers ask why again. They decline to answer in terms that match a question arising as this one does. Maybe then the question is impossible, less of a real question than a gesture expeditions showed a great appetite for shooting and eating their discoveries, the reports published after each returned usually included an ornithological appendix. In 1821, a 'Memoir on the Birds of Greenland', by Captain Sabine, Terry Pratchett uses Captain Oates's last words at least three times in his Discworld Series in similar situations. These include #11, Reaper Man, in which the words "I am just going out. I may be some time" are spoken by Windle Poons; #13, Small Gods, in which the line "I'm just going out. I may be some time" is spoken by Brutha; and #16, Soul Music, in which the line "I may be some time" is spoken by the character Death. [41] [42] Scratch, scratch goes Oates' pen, which he holds like a schoolboy. He has just heard that he has almost certainly been accepted for Scott's expedition to the Antarctic. 'Points in favour of going. It will help John Charles Dollman (1851-1934), 'A Very Gallant Gentleman' (Captain L.E.G. Oates walking out to his death in the blizzard, on Captain Scott's return journey from the South Pole, March 1912)". Christie's . Retrieved 19 January 2020.