A Midwinter's Tale

Seal consommé wasn't on the midsummer night menu at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich last Thursday evening. It wouldn't have been politically correct. And obtaining seal meat in southeast London for a party of 20 Britons and Norwegians — half of them descendants of men who had raced to be the first to the South Pole — would have been even more challenging than finding the live Christmas tree that adorned the dining area within the museum's "South: The Race to the Pole" exhibit.

Ninety years ago and a world away, the explorer Robert Falcon Scott and...