PROJECT TITLE
The Rant of Cecil Henry Meares (1877-1937)
Meares was an adventurer and linguist: a man of action who liked to have fun, which made following the orders of Robert Falcon Scott, the expedition leader, difficult at times. Before his involvement in the expedition, he was a British military officer, a fur trader in Kamchatka and Okhotsk in Siberia, a fighter in the Russo-Japanese War and the Boer War and a traveller to various places including Tibet. He could not tolerate Capt. Scott's style of leadership and what he considered inept bungling. Meares and the Russian Gerov turned back north with the sled dogs on 14 December at the foot of the Beardmore glacier. He resigned from the expedition for unsubstantiated reasons and returned home on the Terra Nova in March 1912. This clarity of vision and unwillingness to submit to inept leadership saved Meares life.