Cecil Meares

Cecil Henry Meares (1877-1937) was the chief dog handler and Russian interpreter on the Terra Nova Expedition, the British expedition to Antarctica that took place from 1910 to 1913. Born in County Kilkenny, Ireland, the son of an army officer, Meares was an adventurer and linguist: a man of action who liked to have fun, which made following the orders of Robert Falcon Scott, the expedition leader, difficult at times. Before his involvement in the expedition, he was a British military officer, a fur-trader in Kamchatka and Okhotsk in Siberia, a fighter in the Russo-Japanese War and the Boer War and a traveller to various places including Tibet.

Meares’s task before the expedition included selecting and purchasing the dogs and ponies and then transporting them from Siberia to New Zealand. Meares knew little about ponies, but nevertheless followed Scott’s orders and went to Nikolayevsk, Siberia to select the dogs and ponies. There he met Dimitri Gerov, an experienced dog driver, who helped him choose the 39 dogs required for the sledging tasks and was also recruited as a dog driver for the expedition. Scott specifically wanted white ponies for the expedition because during the 1907 Nimrod Expedition, Ernest Shackleton observed that the white ponies outlived the dark ponies. Lawrence Oates, the British Army Captain on the expedition whose role was to look after the ponies, was disappointed in Meares’s selection as they had “such deficiencies as: narrow chests, knocked knees, …aged” and were the “greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen.” Once the Terra Nova Expedition began, Meares and Gerov looked after the animals. He resigned from the expedition for unsubstantiated reasons [There are differing accounts as to why Meares resigned. Huntford (p435) claims a row with Scott: Fiennes (p340) says Meares had to return to England to deal with his late father's affairs] and returned home on the Terra Nova in March 1912. Some controversy surrounds why Meares was "not available" for further Barrier (Ross Ice Shelf) work for the 2 months prior to his boarding the Terra Nova to return home.

After the ill-fated expedition, he went on to become a Lieutenant-Colonel. He later became a resident of Victoria BC, Canada.

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