SOUTH POLE EXPLORERS DIED ‘LIKE GENTLEMEN’
A photograph of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his team at the South Pole was sold at auction this week. James McCarthy looks at the story behind the picture
IT WAS January 17, 1912. Captain Robert Falcon Scott, surrounded by his team, posed for a photograph at the South Pole. They were exhausted. Demoralised.
Lawrence Oates, Henry Bowers, Scott, Edward Wilson and Welshman Edgar Evans had raced to the bottom of the world.
But they had been beaten. They were victims of bad luck and deception.
“It is a terrible disappointment,” Scott wrote.
The men had set off from Cardiff on the Terra Nova to travel 850 miles across Antarctica in the hope of becoming the first to reach the pole.
But they had been beaten by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.
The photograph was sold this week at Sotheby’s for £12,500 – 15 times more than the estimate.
It was one of a limited edition of prints taken during Scott’s expedition.
After the image was taken the tragedy of the trip unfolded.
The explorers headed back to base camp where they would be safe.
But one by one Antarctica’s extremes picked them off.
“I fear we must go,” Scott wrote to financier Sir Edgar Speyer in the last days of his life.
“But we have been to the pole and we shall die like gentlemen – I regret only for the women we leave behind.
“If this diary is found it will show how we stuck by our dying com- panions and fought this thing out t to the end.” Evans, of Gower, went first. By February 7, Scott realised his friend was “going steadily downhill”.
He kept falling behind as they tramped across the empty continent.
Ten days later, Scott found “the poor man”.
He was “on his knees with clothing disarranged, hands uncovered and frostbitten and a wild look in his eyes”.
That night Evans died, perhaps of brain damage caused by a fall.
The party was still hundreds of miles from base camp.
As the weather closed in, the four survivors spent days huddled in their tent. Outside the wind howled. Food was running out.
“We very nearly came through, and it’s a pity to have missed it, but lately I have felt that we have overshot our mark – no-one is to blame and I hope p no attempt mpt will be made to suggest that we lacked support,” Scott wrote in his missive.
By mid-March, Oates was crippled by frostbite. He could barely y walk.
On March 16 he staggered from m the tent into a blizzard.
It was then he uttered what have e become some of the most famous s words of all time.
“I am just going outside and may be some time,” he said.
No one expected him to come back.
“We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman,” Scott wrote.
A week later the three remaining men – Bowers, Wilson and Scott – were three days from the next food depot. They became caught in another blizzard. They never left their tent. Wilson wrote to his wife, Oriana. Bowers wrote to his mother.
Scott penned missives to friends, family and colleagues. His final words were written on March 29.
“It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R Scott,” he said.
But there were a few more words left in him.
“For God’s sake look after our p people,” he wrote.
Eight months later the tent cont taining Bowers, Scott and Wilson w was discovered. Scott lay with his
two friends on either side. Scott appeared tense. He looked as though he had fought to stay alive.
His comrades looked peaceful.
The search team took the tent’s bamboo supports and built a cairn on top. It is now buried beneath the Antarctic ice
Observation Hill a nine foot high memorial cross was erected.
Inscribed upon it are the names of the party and the last line of Tennyson’s poem Ulysses: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
In January 1913, a cable was sent to Britain with news of the deaths.
Days later, a memorial service was held at St Paul’s. The King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and British society’s elite were there.
More than 10,000 gathered outside. Britain was heartbroken.
For decades, Scott was regarded as a national hero.
In the 1970s and 1980s, his reputation dwindled.
But since then Ranulph Fiennes and others have expressed support for him.
Another interpretation of events has also emerged – that Scott was the victim of deceit.
By 1905 Amundsen had navigated the Northwest Passage in the Arctic.
He needed new goals. He began preparations to conquer the North Pole.
But in 1909 Americans Robert Peary and Frederick Cook each separately claimed they had reached the pole.
These claims are no longer accepted.
But then they seemed plausible.
Amundsen looked south. But there was a problem. Norway had just achieved independence from Sweden. Britain had been an ally in its struggle.
Protocol dictated Scott should not face rivalry from Norway. Amundsen had a plan. On June 3, 1910, he set sail from Oslo in.his ship, Fram, claiming O he was heading for the North Pole. When they were at sea he told his crew what they were really doing.
In Melbourne, Scott received a telegram.
It said: “Beg leave to inform. Fram heading south. Amundsen.” Scott was horrified. He was planning a complex, scientific expedition to study geology, meteorology and biology in the Antarctic. He also planned to try to reach the pole.
But Amundsen would be simply racing to his destination.
David Crane summed up the problem in his biography, Scott of the Antarctic.
“Faced with a man uninterested in anything but the pole, unfettered by science and unburdened by any of the gentlemanly baggage of a British explorer, there was little that Scott could do,” he said.
Scott stuck to his research plans and arrived 34 days after Amundsen.
The British team’s fate was sealed from the moment Perry and Cook’s false claims were believed.
Scott and his company would not have arrived any quicker without competition. But they would have been buoyed by confidence and happiness.
And that could have made all the difference.