William Lashly

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William Lashly (1867 - 1940) was a Royal Navy seaman who was a member of both of Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expeditions.

Lashly was born in Hambledon, Hampshire, a village near Portsmouth. At the time he joined Scott's Discovery expedition in 1901, he was a 33-year-old stoker in the Royal Navy. On this expedition, Lashly was a member of Scott's "Farthest West" party exploring Victoria Land in 1903.

On Scott's second expedition in Terra Nova in 1911-1913, Lashly was initially in charge of one of the expedition's two motor sledges which were to haul supplies southward in support of the polar party. However, the sledges quickly broke down, and the motor party had to switch to man-hauling the supplies.

Along with Lieutenant E.R.G.R. "Teddy" Evans and Tom Crean, he was a member of the last support party to turn back from Scott on his way to the pole. On the return journey, Evans became seriously ill with scurvy and Lashly had to stay to nurse him while Crean walked the rest of the way to the expedition's base camp to fetch help. Extracts from Lashly's polar journals, chronicling his tribulations with the motor sledges and the return journey with Evans, were included in Apsley Cherry-Garrard's book The Worst Journey in the World. Both Lashly and Crean received the Albert Medal for saving Evans' life.

After returning from the Antarctic, Lashly retired from the Royal Navy with a pension, but promptly joined the reserves and served in World War I in HMS Irresistible and HMS Amethyst. Later he served as a customs officer in Cardiff. Upon his retirement in 1932, he returned to Hambledon where he lived in a house he called "Minna Bluff", after one of the landmarks on the road to the South Pole. Lashly died in 1940.

In 1969, William Lashly's diaries were edited and published by Commander A.R.Ellis. "Under Scott's Command - Lashly's Antarctic Diaries" provides a fascinating insight into both the Discovery and the Terra Nova expeditions from the perspective of one of the men rather than the more common accounts published by officers.

[edit] References

• Preston, Diana: A First Rate Tragedy. ISBN 0-618-00201-4
• Huntford, Roland: The Last Place on Earth. ISBN 0-689-70701-0
• Cherry-Garrard, Apsley: The Worst Journey in the World. ISBN 0-88184-478-0
• Ellis, A.R: Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries. Gollancz, 1969