‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’
FROM THE JOURNAL OF CAPTAIN SCOTT
An Antarctic search party has just discovered a tent pitched on the frozen ice, many hundreds of miles from civilization. Inside the tent are three bodies. They are wrapped in their sleeping bags, and look for all the world as if they’ve just fallen asleep.
In fact, they’ve been dead for eight months.
On closer examination, their skin looks yellow. It’s covered with frostbite.
Two of the men look peaceful. The third, lying between the others, appears to be stretching out in agony, as if he had died wrestling against death itself.
In life, their names were Lieutenant Henry Bowers, Dr Edward Wilson and, lying between them, Captain Robert Falcon Scott.
Scott of the Antarctic.
The epic story of his doomed expedition to the South Pole is a humbling reminder of the sheer grit of a team of men who pitted themselves against the worst nature could throw at them, and lost.
A team that, even when they knew they were defeated – both by nature and by their rival explorers – remained dignified, and resolute to the last.
*
Before we hear the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, let’s hear about the Antarctic. Because it is arguably the toughest, most hostile place on our entire planet.
The continent is massive. Take Britain. Then multiply it by fifty. Or take Australia, and double it.
Next, consider that it’s 99 per cent covered in ice. In some places the ice is three miles thick.
Temperatures in the Antarctic can reach 89°C below freezing. On average, nowhere on earth is colder than that. And yet, technically, it’s a desert. No camels, but not much rain either, which is why it is classified as desert terrain.
And in many ways the climate is more dangerous than any normal desert. Not only does the daytime last for twenty-four hours for part of the year but, just like in the desert, the Antarctic will dehydrate you fast. The sun, reflecting brutally up off the permanent sheets of ice, will also scorch your skin and burn your eyes. And then there’s the altitude, much of the continent being above a body-draining 10,000 feet.
And you get blizzards too. Like you never saw. Shocking, violent white-outs of snow and ice, kicked up by biting, gale-force winds. Winds that would spin humans up into the air like dust.
Even today, Antarctica is almost totally unexplored. The vast majority of the continent has never seen human footfall upon it. If ever a place is to be called wild and unforgiving, it is Antarctica. And nothing prepares you for when you first land on its surface. I know. The beauty. The scale. The cold. It takes your breath away – literally.
The Antarctic is surrounded, almost guarded, by the Southern Ocean, where the winds are stronger than anywhere else on earth. The waves rise like mountains and crash with Newtonian forces that are hard to imagine.
It is the only place on earth that has no permanent human inhabitants, and no indigenous people. For a good reason. Nobody could live here for long. For a human to live off the land in the vicinity of the South Pole is almost impossible. There’s simply nothing there to hunt or forage.
Some of the bravest explorers have tried, and failed, to make headway into the Antarctic. Even Captain Cook attempted it during his Pacific voyage of 1772–4. He braved the rigours of the Southern Ocean, but only managed to circle the Antarctic, without ever landing on the continent itself.
Whenever he tried to get close to the ice shelves his ship became enshrouded in a menacing and potentially deadly cloak of ice and fog. If the winds and seas picked up, as they often did, his would be a grizzly fate, smashed against the 500-foot shelves of vertical sea ice that surround and protect the land mass itself.
He didn’t get within 1,000 miles of the South Pole, and declared that it was most likely impossible to get any closer.
‘Impossible’, of course, is not a word that sits comfortably in the minds of the great explorers. But impossible or not, one thing’s for sure: any man or woman who pits themselves against the Antarctic is going into battle with nature at its most vicious and violent.
In 1912, Captain Scott and his four companions – Captain Lawrence Oates, Bowers, Wilson and Petty Officer Edgar Evans – did just that. History tells us that the wild won that battle.
But sometimes, great and gutsy deeds are performed on the road to defeat. The deeds of Captain Scott and his men were among the greatest and the gutsiest ever told.
*
Robert Falcon Scott was a born adventurer. He came from a fairly well-to-do family, and both sides of his family had a history of seafaring. Even so, he must have been unusually eager to see the world, as he first went to sea at the age of 13. This was on HMS Boadicea, where he served for two years as a midshipman. As his teenage years progressed he worked his way up the ranks of the Royal Navy, and when the opportunity came to join HMS Discovery on the National Antarctic Mission of 1901–04, he grabbed it.
The seeds of his future fame were sown, and within only a matter of years he would be known all around the world as Scott of the Antarctic. It was a name that would come at the cost of his life.
The Discovery’s voyage was celebrated as a great success, though it was not without its troubles. The ship itself became icebound in the frozen waters of the Southern Ocean. But that didn’t stop the men setting foot on the Antarctic continent – a landmark moment for the Navy.
The men had taken dogs along, hoping the beasts would pull them as close to the South Pole as possible. But they didn’t know how to manage these dogs effectively, and soon they became weak. The crew were forced to slaughter the weakest of the animals and feed its warm flesh to the others just to keep them alive and working.
Add frostbite, scurvy and snow blindness into the mix, and you’ll get some idea of what that early Antarctic voyage was like. The explorers spent a total of ninety-three days on the unforgiving ice. On the way back, all the dogs died and one of the men collapsed with scurvy.
Despite all this, however, they did go further south than any man had ever gone, and Scott’s appetite for exploration had not been quashed by the hardships he’d undergone.
For a second time, he and his companions then stepped out on to the Antarctic ice, this time on an expedition that would last for fifty-nine days. On their return journey to Discovery Scott and two companions almost died when the ice collapsed beneath them and they fell down a deep crevasse. But miraculously they clawed their way back out and survived.
Even this could not dampen Scott’s ardour to endure the worst, in order to achieve the best. He would conquer the South Pole somehow – or he would die in the process.
Both eventualities would come to him soon enough.
Captain Scott had been bitten by the Antarctic bug. Crucially, though, on this second journey, the explorers found that they had covered more ground per day on foot than when they’d been pulled by dogs. This was a fact that Scott would remember on his next journey to the Antarctic, nearly ten years later.
*
The members of the Terra Nova expedition, named after the ship that would return Scott and his new companions to the Antarctic, had just one objective: to be the first men to reach the South Pole. They knew, however, that they were not the only people with the same idea. A Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, had the same plan. This was a race to the Pole, pure and simple.
The two teams employed different tactics. Amundsen would rely on dogs to pull his men and their supplies over the bleak Antarctic ice. He ordered a hundred of the animals, knowing that, as he approached the Pole, some of them could be shot and the meat fed to dogs and humans alike.
Scott had strong feelings about that. Perhaps the gruesome image he had of feeding a weak hound to its pack-mates had stuck with him, as had the memory of the remaining dogs dying on the ice. But more than that, he felt that relying solely on dogs was somehow less noble. As if it were ‘cheating’ their way round the challenge.
Scott and his men did, however, decide to use some horses. But Scott planned only to employ this mix of horse and dog in order to help establish the team’s supply camps. For the final push, the dogs would be sent back and the horses shot. For the last march, the men would carry their equipment themselves.
It was a fatally heroic and brave decision. And whatever the reasoning, Scott emphatically believed it gave him the best chance of success.
The Terra Nova was beset with problems as it headed south towards the Antarctic. It got trapped in sea ice for twenty days. As they waited for the ship to break free, the weather started to get worse.
Already the horses were showing signs of strain. Once the men had unloaded their supplies on to the Antarctic ice and started towards their first supply depot, six of the beasts died – either through cold or because they were slowing the men down and had to be shot.
It was looking as if Scott’s decision to rely more on ponies than dogs had been a bad one.
On 1 November 1911 Scott’s five-man team set out on the final push towards the Pole. The conditions were dreadful. If they weren’t blinded by blizzards, the men were blinded by the sun. The terrain was practically impassable, especially as, unlike Amundsen, they were hauling their own heavy supply-sledges rather than using dogs.
Heroic, perhaps, and a massive feat of physical endurance of its own. But it meant they were slow. And getting weaker with every step.
Still they struggled through the bitter cold, and through their own all-consuming exhaustion.
The air was not only cold but strangely damp. It felt like it was freezing their bones. The bleak monotony of their surroundings pummelled their morale: to see nothing but a frozen wasteland in every direction, knowing that there was no warmth or shelter or extra supplies anywhere, must have surely played deadly tricks with their minds.
But they dealt with it. And on 17 January, incredibly, they reached the South Pole. A phenomenal achievement of courage, endurance and sheer bloody-mindedness.
But there was a problem.
‘The Pole. Yes,’ Scott wrote in his journal, ‘but under very different circumstances from those expected.’
To their anguish they saw a small tent mounted with a black flag. They had lost the race. Amundsen had reached the South Pole a full four weeks before them.
It was devastating news to the exhausted men.
Captain Scott’s journal for 17 January tells us just what a body blow this discovery was.
We have had a horrible day. Add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5 with a temperature –22 degrees Fahrenheit [–30°C], and companions labouring on with cold feet and hands … Great God, this is an awful place!
To have reached the Pole was, of course, a remarkable achievement, but they had no reason to celebrate. They consumed ‘a fat Polar hoosh’ – a revolting mixture of lard, oatmeal, beef and vegetable protein, salt and sugar – and then they could do no more but apply their exhausted minds and bodies to the business of the epic return journey that awaited them.
If reaching the Pole in second place had been a bitter blow for Scott, he was about to encounter conditions that would make any thought of glory, or of the race, melt away into nothingness.
Scott of the Antarctic was about to encounter hell itself.
The story of Scott’s retreat from the South Pole has gone down in legend. But the true horror of his final weeks and days is sometimes forgotten. Scott was a proud man, and even in his own journals – which were found perfectly preserved in the snow, months after his death – we can hear his stiff upper lip as he describes the team’s deteriorating circumstances.
But you can also sense that stiff upper lip begin to quiver, ever so slightly.
Having borne the crushing disappointment of knowing Amundsen’s team had beaten them to the Pole, they faced the morale-sapping knowledge that they now had to drag their gear eight hundred miles back across the ice. Eight hundred miles.
They were now facing months of exhausting, demoralizing hell-hauling through the most unforgiving and harsh expanse of wilderness in the world. Fighting the cold and the wind, across broken, crevasse-ridden glaciers, with not even the promise of glory when they reached the Terra Nova. And all on ever-dwindling bare rations.
It’s a wonder they survived so long.
As they retreated, they grew tired. And as they grew tired, they started to stumble. Scott damaged his shoulder. Wilson ripped the tendons in his leg. Evans lost his fingernails. They sound like manageable things, but when you haul with your shoulders, march with your legs and handle everything with your fingers, you can see how such extreme conditions magnify small problems a hundredfold.
This was turning into a perilous death march.
On 17 February, a month after they left the Pole, they suffered what Scott referred to as ‘a very terrible day’. The conditions were especially bad.
There had been a fresh fall of snow, and the powder clogged up their sledge, making it twice as hard to pull. The sky was overcast. Visibility was poor. One of their number, Edgar Evans, looked to be in a bad way. He was dragging behind. When the team stopped to erect their tent, they saw that Evans was a long way back, so they returned to help him.
They found a man on the brink of madness.
He was on his knees. It looked like he’d tried to tear his clothes off, and his hands were open to the frozen air and completely frostbitten. There was a wild look in his eyes, and his speech was slow and slurred. One of the men thought he must have injured his brain in a fall.
They helped Evans to his feet, but he only managed a couple of steps before collapsing again on to the ice.
There was clearly no way he could walk. The men went to fetch their sledge, then dragged their comatose companion back to the tent. They tried to make him comfortable, but he was past their help.
Edgar Evans died just past midnight. It says something of the state of mind of the others that Scott noted: ‘There could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week.’
The remaining four men struggled on. The weather deteriorated still further. So did their snow blindness, their frostbite, their hunger and exhaustion. All these elements got worse every day. Relentlessly. More pain, more hunger, more cold and more exhaustion. Scott knew his men were losing hope.
He forced Wilson, who was carrying lethal doses of morphine and opium, to hand over his supply. He could sense that everyone’s thoughts were turning to suicide, but Scott would not allow them that luxury.
No matter how bad things looked, they would carry on.
And they did. Day after day. Through grim pain and with true grit.
Then, one month after Evans’s death, disaster struck again.
Captain Oates was failing. He was unable to hide the agonizing pain that every feeble, frostbitten step caused him. He asked the others to leave him to die in his sleeping bag. They could not bring themselves to do it, and they helped him struggle on for another day.
As they made camp that evening, however, it was obvious that for Oates the end was very near.
Oates knew it too. Without him holding the group up, his comrades stood a slim chance of survival. But at the crawl of a pace that Oates could barely maintain, he knew they would all starve and perish.
Oates made it through the night, but awoke to another howling blizzard outside. It was a bridge too far. He turned to his companions and uttered perhaps the most famous last words in history: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
He staggered out of the tent, into the white-out, and disappeared.
*
Now only three men were left: Scott, Wilson and Bowers.
In his journal, Scott said of Oates, ‘He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint … He did not – would not – give up hope till the very end.’
The same could be said of the rest of them. They knew their chances of survival were minuscule. The easiest way out would be to lie down in their sleeping bags and let death take them.
But they refused to do this. They would continue to battle against the worst the wild could throw at them, and they would perish in the attempt.
‘We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit,’ Scott wrote, ‘and assuredly the end is not far …’
The day after Oates’s death, Scott’s right foot became consumed by frostbite. Still, they struggled on. The rations were now almost negligible. The men were like skeletal ghosts, shuffling, agonizingly slowly, through the blizzard. Running on empty.
They were now close to one of their pre-supplied depots – the infamous one-ton depot. Only 11 miles.
But 11 miles might well have been a thousand in those conditions.
The blizzard grew worse.
On 22 March the three men were literally unable to leave their tent because the conditions were so harsh. Scott refused to be bowed. He knew death was near, but was still determined to choose the manner of it: ‘It shall be natural – we shall march for the depot with or without our effects and die in our tracks.’
But they didn’t march that day. They couldn’t. The fierce blizzard and the continuing, howling gale kept them pinned into their tent. And the gale just would not relent.
Another whole week passed. We can only imagine the bitter desolation of those final starving, freezing days as they lay there, stubbornly resisting death, but knowing it was closing in.
We know nothing of Scott’s final moments, other than what is written in his last journal entry:
We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake, look after our people.
It is a mark of the man that his final words were for those loved ones he’d left behind in England.
His body was shutting down. The cruel Antarctic had won. But he’d faced it with total courage and humanity.
*
As he lay dying in that freezing tent, Scott did not just write in his journal. He also wrote letters to those closest to him, and one stands out in particular, which he dubbed a ‘Message to the Public’. This is what he said:
We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint … Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale …
But even though he didn’t survive, the story of Scott’s endurance caught the imagination and won the respect of a nation. He would forever be known as Scott of the Antarctic.
As Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouting movement, said, ‘Are Britons going downhill? No! There is plenty of pluck and spirit left in the British, after all. Captain Scott and Captain Oates have shown us that.’
We all need examples and inspirations in our lives, to make us better and stronger. And for me, it is not Scott’s successes, failures or flaws that move me. Rather, it’s the courage of his final weeks which, as an example of grit, valour and dignity, is hard to surpass.