Polar art exhibition sheds light on explorer who saved Capt Scott

Scott carried with him the hopes of an empire when he led the Terra Nova expedition to the Antarctic in 1910, bidding to be the first to reach the South Pole.

He arrived on January 17, 1912, only to find a Norwegian party led by Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it.

Scott and his four comrades died on their way back, an heroic failure which inspired admiration for his stoicism and bravery, and questions about his competency and egotism.

But that he was there at all owes much to the exploits of an unassuming seaman and explorer from Hull, who eight years earlier had rescued Scott from the ice.

Captain William Colbeck, a former pupil of Hull’s Trinity House naval school, had been a member of the first British Antarctic expedition of 1898, and was the man Sir Clements Markham, head of the Royal Geographical Society, asked to rescue his protege Scott when his ship Discovery became rapped in McMurdo Sound.

Colbeck commanded the relief ship Morning, which had 16 other Hull sailors in her crew, and on February 14, 1904, they reached Discovery after spending weeks using dynamite to blast through the last 20 miles of ice.

Sir Clements was so delighted he had a trophy made for Colbeck, but as his son Markham Colbeck later wrote, this irked the ambitious Scott.

He wrote: “Later when the fears about Scott were realised Sir Clements insisted on my father commanding the relief expedition in the face of Naval wishes to have a regular naval officer in command.

“The success of the relief expedition was manifest and Sir Clements had the quite magnificent loving cup made for presentation to my father.

“In fact Scott was quite upset at the recognition of my father’s work. Sadly, my father was an explorer of classic type and was not prepared to enter into the rat race of recognition and so all that he achieved was overwhelmed by the great furore of Scott’s last expedition.

“Captain William Colbeck is really one of the most famous and unrecognised sons of Hull.”

Earlier, in 1898, Colbeck had been invited by the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink to join the Southern Cross expedition to the Antarctic. This was the first to spend winter on the Antarctic mainland, during which Colbeck took charge of the expedition’s magnetic observation work.

He is one of several Yorkshire Antarctic veterans being remembered in a new exhibition at Hull’s Maritime Museum.

The display is called The Yorkshire Ones in Antarctica, named after the Yorkshire One, a unique design of yacht which Colbeck sailed in Bridlington and which is still used in the resort today.

Vivien Stamford, from Bridlington, has made embroidered woolwork pictures of the ships and crews – including one of the iconic photograph Scott’s party took of themselves just after realising they had been thwarted by Amundsen, which is made from fabric washed up on a beach.

Mrs Stamford also believes Colbeck is an unsung hero.

She said: “He was an absolutely wonderful sailor and nobody has a bad word to say for him. He was such a wonderful seaman and got the ship out of terrible scrapes.

“He gave Scott most of the coal he took with them, which meant he had to sail most of the way back and Scott steamed back.”

She added: “I spoke to his granddaughter who lives in Scotland and she was absolutely thrilled we are doing the exhibition.”

Mrs Stamford has also created a replica of the skull and crossbones pennant of the Hull-based Pirate Yacht Club, which Colbeck took as his sledge pennant and later donated to the Royal Yorkshire Yacht Club in Bridlington.

Artist and milliner Susan Bradshaw has created hats inspired by polar scenery and garments worn by the adventurers, also using her skills as a former blacksmith to forge the hat stands.

Beaded jewellery by Sheila Ridgeon and silver pieces by Jackie Warrington are on display, as are Cathy Corbishley Michel’s cyanotype prints of photographs taken by Frank Hurley on Shackleton’s 1914-16 Imperial Transantarctic (Endurance) expedition.

Also featured is the Yorkshire-born explorer Frank Wild, who visited the Antarctic five times between 1901 and 1922 with both Scott and Shackleton.

The exhibition in the community display space opens today and will run for three months.