Hmm!  It is a veritable winter wonderland outside. The snow is falling fast.  The great thing about snowstorms on a Saturday morning is that you can drink your coffee and conemplate how beautiful it is, withput any concern about having to drive in it. 8<)  And, of course, your mind is free to wander to colder and snowier places.

 So it is very much to the point or on my mind that The New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust has announced the discovery of a cache of 100 year old negatives from the hut at Cape Evans built by Captain Robert Falcon Scott but used by Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Transanarctic Expedition which wintered there in 1915-1916.  This is the other side of the story of the Worst Journey in the World.

The trust has found, and painstakingly restored and conserved a box of cellulose nitrate negatives found in the huts long abandoned darkroo,century-old photographic negatives found in a hut that served as base camp for the earliest Antarctic expeditions – literally frozen in time for a century. The cellulose nitrate negatives were clumped together in a small box in the hut’s long-abandoned darkroom.

The images are just a bit haunting in that they speak to us from isolation.  Yes they are a time capsule.  But even a century ago these explorers were isolate from the world, a world at the time exploding in the grip of the First World War.