One of the world's most famous explorers, Robert Falcon Scott, began a new life in cyberspace - "tweeting" about his journey from New Zealand.
Twitter messages extracted from his diary began yesterday with his departure from Port Chalmers on the hugely overladen supply vessel Terra Nova - after which the expedition was later named.
That was 99 years ago, on Saturday, November 26, 1910, and historians at Cambridge University plan daily "tweets" to attract readers to an internet blog, done on dates corresponding to the original diary entries," The Times in London reported.
"The text comes alive to new readers, and in a short format that blog readers already understand and enjoy," said Christopher Hughes, who developed the blog at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.
"Matching the dates of the text with the historical events also means that those familiar with the story will get a new sense and appreciation of the endurance of the explorers, their true goals, and a deeper understanding of their self-sacrifice,' he said.
From New Zealand, the tweets and blog will track his trek across Antarctica and his discovery on January 17 1912 that a Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten him to the South Pole by 33 days. Scott and his party all perished, but their records, retrieved by a search party eight months later, have made possible the re-telling of the journey in cyberspace.
"We advertised our start at 3pm., and at three minutes to that hour the Terra Nova pushed off from the jetty," Scott wrote on his departure from Dunedin. "A great mass of people assembled. K. and I lunched with a party in the New Zealand Company's ship Ruapehu".
Scott wanted his British Antarctic Expedition "to reach the South Pole and to secure for the British Empire the honour of this achievement".
He had taken on additional supplies in Dunedin, including 34 sled dogs, 19 Siberian ponies and three motorised sledges.
In the next few days, modern day readers will be able to follow the expedition's tribulations as it was hit by a heavy storm with the crew bailing the ship with buckets in big seas after the pumps failed.
The storm cost them two ponies, a dog, and 10,160kg of coal ... that was just the start of the "sheer bad luck", according to Scott.
Some of Scott's diary entries run to more than a thousand words, but the historians have promised they will not be reduced to "textspeak" abbreviations, which would render the last words in the diary as "4 Gds sake lk aftr r pple".
NZPA
To follow Robert Falcon Scott on twitter click here