Talk:Cecil Meares

Bulgarian Gerov???

Sorry my bad English. Yes, Gerov is a Bulgarian surname. But Dimitri Gerov is not Gerov. He is Dmitri Girеv (Дмитрий Гирев in cyrillic). But the Captain Scott wrote his surname as Geroff in his diaries. The mother of Dimitri was from Perm province of Russia, the father was from Saratov in Russia. Obviously Dimitri is Russian, not Bulgarian. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ethereal0000 (talk • contribs) 09:09, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Unavailability for further work?

Scott was aware that Meares might not be available to carry out his proposed instructions.

In his written instructions for the commanding officer of the Terra Nova Scott stated: In regard to the constitution of the Wintering Party for the second winter, much must remain in doubt. The following will return in any case: 1. Taylor, whose leave of absence transpires. 2. Ponting who will have completed his work. 3. Anton, who has had enough of it. Meares may possibly return home; it depends on letters from home.

By taking a further trip South to meet Scott, Meares would risk missing the departure of the relief ship Terra Nova and be obliged to spend another year in the Antarctic. Meares was not only a volunteer but he (and Cherry-Garrard) had donated the sum of £1,000 (more than £110,000 as of 2018) to the expedition. Without this money the expedition would have been unaffordable for Scott.

As it was Scott had to ask every civilian member of the expedition to forgo any payment should they remain for the second year. No one, even Scott was qualified to demand that Meares risk missing the depature of the ship.

The expedition was not run "on strict naval lines" that is an assumption for which no citation has been provided. Cherry-Garrard made a number of criticisms of the expedition at the end of his book The Worst Journey in the World. One was that dicipline was slack where work was concerned. Members of the shore party were not assigned work, but tasks were carried out by volunteers, resulting in the keener members of the expedition becoming overworked. Scott admired those who put in a lot of effort and he constantly praised those he saw as "tireless" in his diary. It seems he saw a place on the final polar party as a form of reward for those who had made the greatest effort, resulting in some of the most tired men being selected to go the furthest. Scott himself complained that some members of the expedition couldn't be bothered to learn how to ski. He didn't intervene and insist that they should, he just made a note of the fact and presumably judged them accordingly.

It was a private expedition, privately financed with some serving naval crew being volunteraly assigned. In order to fly the White Ensign, the Terra Nova had to be registered with the Royal Yacht Squardon, which cost Scott £100 from his megre funds. It might also be noted that as this did not require the ship to be inspected by the Board of Trade it was somewhat overloaded when departing from London. Atkinson was certainly not in a position to force Meares to do anything on his return to Cape Evans on January 6th, as Atkinson was still man hauling a sledge back across the ice himself and did not arrive back until January 26th, when it was too late to make a 2 week round trip to One Ton Depot and then turn straight around and get back to 82.30 by March 1st.

There is no evidence that Meares "resigned" from the expedition. He simply declined to make the journey to meet Scott as he wanted to return home. Huntford made the suggestion, Fiennes created a counter argument. recording these revisionist and counter revisionist claims merely obscures fact from conjecture. 86.178.255.8 (talk) 12:20, 24 February 2018 (UTC)

References

Chronic Insubordination

Quoting as evidence the comments of chronic grumblers like Meares and Oates does a disservice to Scott, who tried to run the Expedition along fair and rational lines. Neither man was capable of taking orders or executing them, but had always to do their own thing. 47.232.145.208 (talk) 12:29, 10 January 2024 (UTC)