#meares

In 1909 Meares was commissioned to obtain 20 Manchurian ponies and 34 sled dogs and transport them to New Zealand to meet the Terra Nova the following year.  This he did: through much of the winter 1909-10 he 'auditioned' dogs and tried them in various combinations to make up ideal teams; the story of how he acquired the infamous ponies, however, is much more difficult to pin down (and believe me, I've tried).

Once united with the ship, the ponies fell into Oates' care, and Meares was at last in charge of the dogs alone, a role in which he seems to have taken some relish.  Scott had announced plans to use dogs all the way to the pole in 1909, and while Shackleton's report of the conditions on the Beardmore Glacier put that partly in doubt, it was still mooted as a possibility as late as the Depot Journey in early 1911.  On the return leg, however, the team Scott and Meares were driving went through the lid of a crevasse, and Meares refused to go down and rescue the dogs, whose line was suspended over the depths.  Scott ended up doing so himself, apparently absorbing a salient lesson in the liability of dog teams in crevassed terrain and the reliability of his chief dog handler.

Meares was a favourite in hut society for the yarns from his varied and well-travelled life, but as the winter wore on he hied away to Hut Point, ostensibly to lay up supplies of seal pemmican for the dogs, but as Scott observed on August 29th: “he is … tired already of our scant measure of civilization.”  He partook in the Southern Journey as planned – and more, as the dogs did so well that Scott took them on 300 miles further than expected – but he and Dimitri had a hard return journey; once back at Cape Evans, Meares stayed put despite orders to the contrary, and caught the ship home when she came to relieve the shore party in early 1912.  (It is with great effort I refrain from writing so, so much more here – if you're curious as to the details, I recommend looking up Karen May's article “Could Captain Scott Have Been Saved?: Cecil Meares and the Second Journey That Failed.”)

In WWI, Meares served on the Western Front as an 'Interpreter', then joined the the precursor to the RAF.  After the war he helped Japan set up its air force (thank you for that) and continued his wandering life, now with a wife in tow.  They split their latter years between Santa Barbara and Victoria, BC, where he died in 1937.  In Imperial Vancouver Island: Who Was Who, 1850-1950, where you might expect a reminiscence along the lines of “Nice bloke, loved his rose bushes”, the most they could dredge up was: “Local friends new little about him and reported only that 'he was a jolly reticent chap' with a good grasp of world affairs.”