Navigation
Jun. 19th, 2011 12:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO roughly this past week or so –
Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans gave his installment of the wintertime lecture series, on the basics of surveying. When I read Scott's journal entry on it I thought it must have been Edgar Evans, because he's described as "shy and slow, but very painstaking", which doesn't sound like Teddy "Let Me Show You My Party Trick" Evans at all. But the Director's Cut of the journals assures me that yes, Teddy it was. Upon reflection I came to the realisation that more may have been at play than stage fright: Scott had something less than a high opinion of his second-in-command and seems not to have been very good at hiding his feelings about people. There's a famous drawing of Walt Disney giving someone 'the eyebrow' (evidently not famous enough to turn up on Google Image Search, though) and I thought, if Grumpyface Scott was sitting in the front row appraising him like that, that could put anyone off their game.
After the lecture, Scott made a list of Basic Things About Navigation which All Officers Should Know, including how to find a meridian altitude – the measurement of a celestial object through a sextant which, after looking up the object and date in a big table of numbers and doing some calculations, tells you your latitude. The scientists counted as officers, and Cherry as "Assistant Zoologist" counted as one of the scientists, regardless of his highly unscientific education in Classics and Modern History. Later that week, Teddy approached Cherry with an example of a meridian altitude, and asked him "whether it was quite plain", which panicked him somewhat as he was no good at math, and was convinced that if anyone relied upon him for navigation they would find themselves "in Queer Street." He ran to Bill, who assured him he'd likely only have to navigate in the case of an emergency. Cherry seems to have tried, at least off and on, to figure out basic navigation, until October of 1911, when he summoned the courage to talk to the Captain himself about his lack of mathematical acuity, at which point Scott apparently calmed his fears – Scott writes in a letter home, "Of course there is not one chance in a hundred that he will ever have to consider navigation on our journey ..." With a statement like that, anyone who's ever seen a movie should know where this is going to end up.
Anyway, one early morning, as I was reading my email before coffee (always a dangerous thing), I read VanDee's correspondence on the Teddy/Cherry episode, and my half-conscious brain leapt in to say "Wa-hey! But for a matter of spelling that could be a really dreadful pun! Maybe Cherry just didn't get it!" So, of course, this happened:
Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans gave his installment of the wintertime lecture series, on the basics of surveying. When I read Scott's journal entry on it I thought it must have been Edgar Evans, because he's described as "shy and slow, but very painstaking", which doesn't sound like Teddy "Let Me Show You My Party Trick" Evans at all. But the Director's Cut of the journals assures me that yes, Teddy it was. Upon reflection I came to the realisation that more may have been at play than stage fright: Scott had something less than a high opinion of his second-in-command and seems not to have been very good at hiding his feelings about people. There's a famous drawing of Walt Disney giving someone 'the eyebrow' (evidently not famous enough to turn up on Google Image Search, though) and I thought, if Grumpyface Scott was sitting in the front row appraising him like that, that could put anyone off their game.After the lecture, Scott made a list of Basic Things About Navigation which All Officers Should Know, including how to find a meridian altitude – the measurement of a celestial object through a sextant which, after looking up the object and date in a big table of numbers and doing some calculations, tells you your latitude. The scientists counted as officers, and Cherry as "Assistant Zoologist" counted as one of the scientists, regardless of his highly unscientific education in Classics and Modern History. Later that week, Teddy approached Cherry with an example of a meridian altitude, and asked him "whether it was quite plain", which panicked him somewhat as he was no good at math, and was convinced that if anyone relied upon him for navigation they would find themselves "in Queer Street." He ran to Bill, who assured him he'd likely only have to navigate in the case of an emergency. Cherry seems to have tried, at least off and on, to figure out basic navigation, until October of 1911, when he summoned the courage to talk to the Captain himself about his lack of mathematical acuity, at which point Scott apparently calmed his fears – Scott writes in a letter home, "Of course there is not one chance in a hundred that he will ever have to consider navigation on our journey ..." With a statement like that, anyone who's ever seen a movie should know where this is going to end up.
Anyway, one early morning, as I was reading my email before coffee (always a dangerous thing), I read VanDee's correspondence on the Teddy/Cherry episode, and my half-conscious brain leapt in to say "Wa-hey! But for a matter of spelling that could be a really dreadful pun! Maybe Cherry just didn't get it!" So, of course, this happened:
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Date: 2011-06-20 02:35 pm (UTC)I need to figure out which ones (if any) lived so I can only read about them. :D
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Date: 2011-06-20 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-20 03:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-20 03:23 pm (UTC)I am adding The Longest Winter to my reading list :D
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Date: 2011-06-20 03:30 pm (UTC)To be perfectly honest I haven't read it myself, yet,* but it is On The List. I blame work and OMG EXTRACURRICULAR OBLIGATIONS for complete lack of reading time – really just about all I can manage these days is Scott's daily journal entry.
*well, not all of it – I've read the dozen or so pages about the flailing back at the base when everything starts to fall apart, but if the rest of it is that well-written you are in for a treat.