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has been sedulously stripped away from Dr. Wilson's objective record, written with a more strictly scientific outlook.
Such notes have a manifold value. Every personality receives its own impression of the same incidents, recalls a different aspect, throws sidelights from a different angle. The young traveller records for himself a fresh and vivid personal impression, undiminished by reshaping into the perhaps necessary reticence of an official report. Not least, also, he gives us details about his chief which Dr. Wilson could not or would not have set down.
His own share in the expedition is the more remarkable because, short-sighted as he was, he could not wear his spectacles under such conditions.
With the help of these notes, the reader can fill in somewhat of those lights and shades which the official report, addressed to a Polar explorer, needed not to add. Now that the other two comrades in the adventure are no more, Mr. Cherry-Garrard has been prevailed upon to let his diary be used as it is used here. Let him be assured that his chief fear is groundless—the fear that in allowing such very personal jottings to be quoted, he should be imagined to magnify his own share in the expedition, instead of insisting, as he would have insisted in a public report, on the wonderful work of his friends: the strength, the steadfastness, and the serenity with which they carried it through. There was never an angry word from beginning to end, even in the most trying times. These unpremeditated notes help to make Wilson and Bowers stand out in their true colours.