"Points in favour of going. It will help me professionally as in the army if they want a man to wash labels off bottles they would sooner employ a man who had been to the North Pole than one who had only got as far as the Mile End Road. The job is most suitable to my tastes. Scott is almost certain to get to the Pole and it is something to say you were with the first party. The climate is very healthy although inclined to be cold..."
(as quoted in Francis Spufford's study of polar exploration, Ice and the English Imagination)
from a letter of Captain Laurence Oates, to his mother, on learning that he had been accepted for Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to the Antarctic.