"I may be some time..."

"...before I get back to my cosy beanbag" thinks Casey, obliged to accompany me on a snowy ramble and to pose reluctantly on a stone bridgelet that was very cold on the pads.

It may also be some time before Captain Lawrence Oates, who supposedly uttered the above words before he sacrificed himself in the snow, is released from the Antarctic icecap where he and the rest of the polar party are entombed since their demise in 1912. Their last camp was on the Ross Ice Shelf where the ice is approximately 110m thick. The bodies, ever more deeply buried, are moving slowly towards the ice front and, having already travelled about 60km from where they died, it has been calculated that they will reach the sea 350 km away in 2470 (if the ice sheet holds up that long.)

Oates (such an apt name for the man appointed to take charge of the expedition's ponies!) was one of Scott's big mistakes for inclusion in the party aiming for the south pole: his old war wound opened up as food supplies dwindled and scurvy took hold.

A particularly gruesome symptom of scurvy is that old wounds re-open. Wounds are kept closed by scar tissue with a high proportion of collagen, this collagen is continually replaced in the healthy body. With scurvy, the replacement collagen is defective and so wounds from decades beforehand can re-open and bleed once again. On one Arctic expedition in 1875 an Admiralty surgeon specified that no sailors with "old wounds" would be accepted.

Didn't Scott know that? Old soldier Oates limped from a serious gunshot wound that had shattered his thigh in the Boer War 11 years earlier.

I'm glad to report no such problems for Casey but he had a good appetite for his supper.