Cecil Meares had the sort of childhood that belongs in a Victorian novel: He was born in a small town in Ireland, but his mother died when he was three days old and his father was with the army in India, so he was sent to live with his spinster aunts in Scotland until he was old enough to pass through a succession of boarding schools. Upon graduation he tried to follow in his father's footsteps and join the army, but failed the physical examination, and so commenced a life of travel, starting with Spain and Italy before moving on to the Far East. It's certain in all but paperwork that he was an intelligence agent of some kind, and indeed he does seem to turn up in politically sensitive areas just as they're becoming of interest to the British Empire: the wild borders of India and China at the turn of the century; South Africa for the Boer War; Japan and Russia around the Russo-Japanese War of 1904. It was on the latter excursion that he met Herbert Ponting (in Japan) and got acquainted with bitter winter sledge travelling with dogs (in Siberia).
Meares had all the best qualifications to interest Scott when he was organising his next expedition: an Englishman fluent in Russian, experienced in Siberian bush life (he'd been a 'fur trader' for a few years, a trade conducted mainly in the winter, in the backwoods of the coldest part of the civilised world), intimately familiar with that geography and people – who better to handle the complicated business of acquiring and transporting the specialist animal transport which the expedition would require?
In 1909 Meares was commissioned to obtain 20 Manchurian ponies and 34 sled dogs and transport them to New Zealand to meet the Terra Nova the following year. This he did: through much of the winter 1909-10 he 'auditioned' dogs and tried them in various combinations to make up ideal teams; the story of how he acquired the infamous ponies, however, is much more difficult to pin down (and believe me, I've tried).
Once united with the ship, the ponies fell into Oates' care, and Meares was at last in charge of the dogs alone, a role in which he seems to have taken some relish. Scott had announced plans to use dogs all the way to the pole in 1909, and while Shackleton's report of the conditions on the Beardmore Glacier put that partly in doubt, it was still mooted as a possibility as late as the Depot Journey in early 1911. On the return leg, however, the team Scott and Meares were driving went through the lid of a crevasse, and Meares refused to go down and rescue the dogs, whose line was suspended over the depths. Scott ended up doing so himself, apparently absorbing a salient lesson in the liability of dog teams in crevassed terrain and the reliability of his chief dog handler.
Meares was a favourite in hut society for the yarns from his varied and well-travelled life, but as the winter wore on he hied away to Hut Point, ostensibly to lay up supplies of seal pemmican for the dogs, but as Scott observed on August 29th: “he is … tired already of our scant measure of civilization.” He partook in the Southern Journey as planned – and more, as the dogs did so well that Scott took them on 300 miles further than expected – but he and Dimitri had a hard return journey; once back at Cape Evans, Meares stayed put despite orders to the contrary, and caught the ship home when she came to relieve the shore party in early 1912. (It is with great effort I refrain from writing so, so much more here – if you're curious as to the details, I recommend looking up Karen May's article “Could Captain Scott Have Been Saved?: Cecil Meares and the Second Journey That Failed.”)
In WWI, Meares served on the Western Front as an 'Interpreter', then joined the the precursor to the RAF. After the war he helped Japan set up its air force (thank you for that) and continued his wandering life, now with a wife in tow. They split their latter years between Santa Barbara and Victoria, BC, where he died in 1937. In Imperial Vancouver Island: Who Was Who, 1850-1950, where you might expect a reminiscence along the lines of “Nice bloke, loved his rose bushes”, the most they could dredge up was: “Local friends new little about him and reported only that 'he was a jolly reticent chap' with a good grasp of world affairs.”
His wife bequeathed his effects to the BC Archives, and as I have reason to visit Vancouver Island fairly frequently, I've gone through them as thoroughly as I am able. As soon as one pokes one's nose into Meares' business one runs into obfuscation, disinformation, and most of all silence. His entry in Imperial Vancouver Island disagrees with his archive in several key facts, though the general outline is sound; his obituary in The News of the World has the facts straight but appears to have been published a week before he died – something which frankly doesn't surprise me in anything involving Meares. He didn't keep an expedition diary, and despite being trained by Ponting in Japan he didn't take any photos in Antarctica, though there is a collection from the dog trials in Siberia. His expedition correspondence is limited to a few letters from Siberia and a handful of postcards sent to his father along the way from Vladivostok to Christchurch, most of which have nothing more than his father's address on the back. He seems to have given a different version of the pony purchase to anyone who asked; I think the truth may be none of these, but I am going only on a dozen disordered photographs and a heap of deduction. He wrote monographs about, and engagingly recounted, his adventures in Tibet and elsewhere, but while others rushed to cash in on their Antarctic experiences post-1913, Meares seems to have entered a cone of silence.
