On a green island in a sunny harbour, a husky called Osman pulled a sledge
on wheels through the grass. There was no snow here — but that was the
point. Before Robert Falcon Scott's men could trust their dogs to the ice,
the dogs had to learn to work as a team, and Quail Island was where that
training happened.
Osman began life on the wind-swept tundra of eastern Siberia, running a
dog-team postal route across the frozen Sea of Okhotsk for the Nivkh
people. In 1910 an expedition recruiter named Cecil Meares bought him and
thirty other Siberian huskies for Scott's Terra Nova voyage. The dogs were
shipped to New Zealand, where they met up with the crew — and newspapers
from Whangarei to Invercargill reported their arrival. Osman was singled
out. The Christchurch Press described him as a dog of importance, noting
"his heart would break if he were made other than the leader."
In the spring of 1910 the pack came to Quail Island in Lyttelton Harbour.
Meares and a Russian dog-driver, Dimitri Gerov, worked the dogs on
makeshift sledges fitted with small wheels to cope with the messy,
snowless reality of an island in a crater. Quail Island had been doing
this for explorers since 1901: Scott's first voyage, then Shackleton's —
dogs, ponies and mules quarantined and trained here before the long trip
south. The island belonged to both worlds at once, a green holding pen
between the farm paddocks of Canterbury and the white continent.
On 29 November the Terra Nova sailed. Osman and the others were chained on
deck, tails to the spray, "a picture of wretched dejection" in Scott's own
words. In the storm-tossed waters south of Campbell Island a wave hit the
ship with such force that Osman's chain broke and he was washed overboard —
and washed straight back on the next wave, caught by a crewman. From then
on Scott called him "our best sledge dog."
The crevasse came later, on an Antarctic sledging journey. Osman, running
lead, crossed the hidden gap, but the snow behind him gave way. The team
hung suspended in their harness above the abyss, Osman's neck slowly being
choked as he anchored one end. He was cut free, and it took nearly two
hours to haul the other dogs out — two had dropped to a ledge and waited.
Scott's men noted that Osman had saved the team.
He survived the whole expedition — unlike Scott and the men who died on
the return from the Pole. Osman came back safe, passed to his handler
Gerov, then to the expedition's New Zealand representative, and finally,
in August 1916, to Wellington Zoo, where he arrived as "Osman the Great."
He died about two years later, around ten years old.
Quail Island kept its kennels. A replica of the training barracks still
stands on the shore here, and in Lyttelton a bronze dog gazes out from the
main street toward this island and, beyond it, due south to Antarctica.
His ears have been worn shiny by the hands of passersby who stop to pat
him — a small memorial to a working dog who crossed the world, went over
the side of a ship in a storm, saved a team from a crevasse, and came
home.
Source
Canterbury Museum