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Arctic Expedition : 1937

Join James Wordie on his 1937 Arctic expedition venturing the frozen seas of Baffin Bay encountering native Greenlandic Inuit along the way.

Amateur film 1937 56 mins Silent

Overview

Footage capturing Polar explorer and geologist and one-time companion of Ernest Shackleton, James Wordie on an expedition in the vast expanse that is Baffin Bay. Stopping off at various points along the Greenland coast they record the lives of the native Inuit. Meteorologist and fellow Scotsman, Edmund Dymond completes a series of experiments with weather balloons up and down the coast.

Sir James Mann Wordie (1889-1962) was born at Partick, Glasgow, and educated at the Glasgow Academy and University. Wordie would continue his studies at St. John's College, Cambridge where his lifelong association with polar research began. In 1912 he met with scientists who had returned from Scott’s second expedition. This connection would see him appointed on Shackleton’s Endurance expedition as geologist and chief of the scientific staff which set sail in 1914. Wordie’s morale amongst the men on this near-disastrous voyage and scientific findings would be commended with a medal from the Royal Geographical Society. Wordie would go on to devote much of his life to arctic research and would serve as the President of the RGS between 1951 and 1954.