Introduction
Dr William Clark Souter (1880 -1959) was ophthalmic surgeon to the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary, Aberdeen Eye Institution, Aberdeen Maternity Hospital and lecturer in ophthalmology in the University of Aberdeen from c.1920 until his retirement in 1946. A long-serving member and president of the British Medical Association and of Aberdeen Medico-Chirurgical Society, he received the polar medal for his service as ship's surgeon on the Terra Nova relief expedition to the Antarctic, 1903 – 1904.

A series of 51 annotated prints illustrating his Antarctic trip was found during cataloguing of his personal papers in 2004. These document, with tremendous detail and personal insight, the voyage of the Terra Nova to free the ice-bound Discovery from Winter Harbour, August 1903 – February 1904. Charting her trip into Antarctica, they capture the crew’s first glimpses of icebergs and views of Franklyn Island and 'Majestic Erebus', the '13,000 foot, snow-clad, native volcano [that] seemed to watch like a grim sentinel ... the struggle of man against nature, which was being enacted so near it.' They include scenes of the Terra Nova and Morning’s slow passage through the pack-ice, of the Discovery lying in the frozen water of Winter Harbour, the efforts of the crews to blast her an exit route, her long-awaited exit into open water on 16th February 1904, and 'farewell' photographs of the snowy landscape that they left behind.

View the images here

See the catalogue entry for the photographs here. Also see the catalogue entry here for the Terra Nova medical accounts, 1903 – 1904.