RARE PRINTING OF SCOTT'S POLAR ADDRESS
The Forthcoming Antarctic Expedition
Royal Institution of Great Britain, 1910.
First edition. A single quire of four leaves, stapled. Save for a little staining at the staple, a fine, clean copy.
An extremely rare offprint, unrecorded by bibliographers, of the address given by Scott to the Royal Institution just two and half weeks before the Terra Nova set sail for the Antarctic.
Scott left on what would be his final expedition on 15th June 1910, and this address at the Royal Institution's weekly evening meeting would be one of the last public statements he gave. He sets out his plans for the expedition and strongly makes the case for the value of Polar exploration, in the wake of a wider public that "can count success only in degrees of latitude":
"I submit that the effort to reach a spot on the surface of the globe which has hitherto been untrodden by human feet, unseen by human eyes, is in itself laudable; and when the spot has been associated for so long a time with the imaginative ambitions of the civilised world, and when it possesses such a unique geographical position as a pole of the Earth, there is something more than mere sentiment, something more than an appeal to our sporting instinct in its attainment; it appeals to our national pride and the maintenance of great traditions, and its quest becomes an outward visible sign that we are still a nation able and willing to undertake difficult enterprises, still capable of standing in the van of the army of progress".
Virtually unknown: we can find no record of any copy previously appearing in commerce and it exists institutionally only at the John Hay Library (Brown University).
Stock ID: 39189
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