My captain’s marvel: The inspirational mother of a Scots pioneer
One of the most pivotal members of Scott’s expedition party was Henry “Birdie” Bowers, who was the first Scot to reach the South Pole. Born in Greenock in 1883, Bowers began his career in the merchant navy and was recruited by Captain Scott as a junior officer in charge of stores on the Terra Nova.
Scott had originally intended taking a four-man party in the journey to the Pole but, so impressed with Bowers, he was added as the fifth companion at the last minute. He contributed greatly to the scientific work of the expedition, something that was inspired by his mother, Emily Bowers, who considered education as her “second religion”.
“Birdie tried to justify going on such a risky expedition by promising Emily that they would be creating copy for the school geography text books, rather than just reciting them,” explained Macinnes, who read the many letters sent between Bowers and his mother. “Emily had been a missionary teacher in Penang, Malaysia, then called Further India, and she had also embraced adventure while sailing with her merchant sailor husband around the Straits Peninsula.
“On the final sledging journey, Birdie was the navigator. What could be more important than that in an unmapped nowhere like the South Pole? Quite apart from his unbelievable brain, Birdie was physically the toughest man on the expedition, and Scott’s letters to Emily are full of praise for her son. He was, in Scott’s words, ‘a marvel’.”
In his final letters home, Bowers wrote: “I shall consider no sacrifice too great for the main object – I am Captain Scott’s man and shall stick by him right through”.
In the wake of the news of her son’s death, Bowers wrote that she had a sense of duty to honour her son’s legacy. Macinnes explained: “Unlike Caroline Oates, who increasingly blamed Scott for her son’s death, Emily never did. She focused, quite deliberately, on creating a positive legacy, a future. They really loved each other – in Emily’s words, ‘My boy was my only son and fatherless from infancy and his loss is a great sorrow for we were more to each other than ordinary mother and son.”