The South Polar Times reminds us of Captain Scott's doomed voyage The glamour of thy smoky-gleam, The savour of thy smell. "The funniest part now," Cherry wrote in his journal, "is to see everybody going round and spotting who wrote the different things. They are quite wrong, and quite certain they are right. Contributions included a hymn to the reindeer-skin sleeping bag: On the outside grows the furside, on the inside grows the skinside; So the furside is the outside, and the skinside is the inside. As the skinside is the inside, and the furside is the outside; One side likes the skinside inside, and the furside on the outside. Another piece was called "Extracts from some Antarctic Archives." It began: And it came to pass that on the month of January Scothe-ohnah [Scott was known respectfully as the Owner, the standard naval term for the captain of a warship] took up wintak watahs [Winter Quarters] on ros-is-land 3. and there was a great barkinofdogs and neighinof horses. Subsequent scenes were depicted in hieroglyphics. The geologist Thomas Griffith Taylor was the most assiduous contributor of written copy. He was a gaunt, untamed figure who talked non-stop, and a popular butt of wardroom jokes. Besides an article on the geological history of the region, Taylor composed a skit entitled "Valhalla," which recounted the men's arrival at the gates of heaven and their conversation with St Peter. Scott himself was a keen stringer for the paper. In the piece "At Sledging" by Experto Crede (the captain's pseudonym), he wrote: "You may note with some surprise that you have apparently got over an unconquerable aversion to paraffin in your food; if you do not regard it as quite a condiment, it will not interfere with your enjoyment." Under his own name, Scott wrote a piece on his plans for the journey to the Pole - a topic of constant discussion in the hut. The South Polar Times reveals a good deal about educational standards in the Edwardian period, at least for the professional classes. Pinned down by a blizzard on some sledging journey and bored to tears in the tent, one scientist would challenge another to compose a sonnet in iambic pentameter in praise of the Primus stove. The man would tug on his pipe, think for a minute - and then come out with perfect scanned verse. The illustrations are wonderful. Besides silhouettes and caricatures, the paper included watercolours of landscape and penguins by Scott's chief of scientific staff, Edward Wilson. As the oldest man, Wilson was dubbed Uncle Bill, and he was a revered figure on upper and lower decks alike. He was also a gifted artist who had published ornithological paintings in academic journals. Someone else produced exuberant drawings of an ill-fated hockey game (the puck, which they had made out of shellac, shattered on bully-off). Much of the South Polar Times reads like a school magazine: Wilson drew a picture of Griffith Taylor being towed along by a seal he had tried to lasso for the pot. Unusually for Englishmen, they avoided matters lavatorial - but that was probably because Scott had announced that the paper would be published in a limited run on their return to Britain. Remarkably, the South Polar Times includes photographs. The explorers who battled to the headwaters of the Nile in the 19th century had to rely on artists to bring images home, and so did the first Arctic explorers. On Scott's expedition, almost for the first time, photography and exploration worked together. The photographer Herbert Ponting took a Zeiss 12 X prismatic binocular and a 7 X 5 reflex camera, and called these two "my inseparable companions," though he dropped his best lens, a 9in double protar, from the poop rail of the Terra Nova. Among his equipment he had a few frames of experimental colour film, a variety of lenses and a gun loaded with magnesium powder to illuminate winter outdoor shots. Ponting had to develop his pictures in a minuscule dark room at the back of the hut, quarrying ice from a glacier to wash the glass plates. He had fixed up the room himself, installing a 30-gallon iron tank, a carbide gas plant and a kinematograph developing machine. He even slept in this room on a fold-out bed. I lived in another hut at Cape Evans, 80 years after Ponting set up his camera, so I know how difficult it is to manipulate equipment once the temperature plummets. Once I threw a mug of boiling tea in the air at around -46°C and the liquid froze before it hit the ice. Ponting's lubricating oil solidified, his colour filters shattered and wind dispersed his magnesium powder. On one occasion, his mouth touched the metal part of his viewfinder and the two froze together. When he jerked the camera away, it took half his lips off. Yet his pictures in the South Polar Times capture the Transantarctic Mountains glimmering on the other side of McMurdo Sound, the icebergs silvered with soft moonbeams, or the banner of smoke unfurling from the snout of Mount Erebus. The last edition appeared during the hallucinatory winter of 1912, after Scott and his four companions had reached the Pole. Thirteen men in the hut waited for them to come back as winter rolled over the Antarctic like a tide. When an especially savage blizzard hurled a stone against the wooden wall of the hut during the night, they woke up, and raced outside, shouting, "They're in!" But they never were. On March 30 Edward Atkinson, who was in charge, recorded in his diary that he was "morally certain that the party had perished." The South Polar Times reads like a fugue now, knowing what unfolded out there on the lonely ice shelf. "Here in these pictures," Cherry-Garrard wrote of Ponting's images in the paper, "is beauty linked to tragedy - one of the greatest tragedies - and the beauty is inconceivable for it is endless and runs throughout eternity." The South Polar Times 1902-1912 is published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies by the Folio Society Sara Wheeler is the author of Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Cherry: a Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard [both published by Vintage at £9.99 each]