A view across the ice towards the Terra Nova, the supply ship of the ill-fated British expedition to Antarctica which took place from 1910-1913. Terra Nova was a whaler and polar expedition ship, her hull reinforced with seven feet of oak in order to withstand the ice. The team of five men, led by Royal Navy officer and explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), was striving to be the first recorded group to reach the South Pole. They arrived to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team and ultimately all perished on their return journey, a tragedy which nonetheless inspired the nation as a model of heroic endeavour and self-sacrifice.

Herbert George Ponting (1870-1935) was a professional photographer who joined the Terra Nova Expedition, capturing images of the hostile environment and bold explorers that typify the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Ponting captured this image on 7 January 1911. Alternatively titled ‘Death of an Iceberg’, he considered it to be one of his best polar studies. He described the eventful experience of taking the photograph in his book The Great White South (1921), ‘This picture always recalls to me one of the most dismaying episodes of my life. [...] I felt the ice sinking under me. I could not see a yard ahead because of my clouded goggles, but I felt the water wet my feet, and I heard a soft hissing sound as the ice gave way around me’. He describes his desperation to save his camera, ‘I would save it, or go down with it. We would survive or sink together’, before chancing upon some firm ice onto which he dragged both himself and his sledge with great effort. He recalls recovering from the exhaustion, and writes ‘When finally my knees would hold me up, I took the photograph’.