CAPTAIN SCOTT
IN 1900, A thirty-two-year-old naval lieutenant named Robert Falcon Scott was chosen to lead the National Antarctic Expedition, the first major British attempt to explore the Antarctic since James Clark Ross’s venture of 1839–43. Scott had no polar experience and no particular interest in Antarctica, but he saw polar exploration as a means to promotion, something for which there were few other avenues in the peacetime Royal Navy. He also had a widowed mother and an unmarried sister to support. On his first trip south, he proved a capable leader with a natural inclination for scientific research, and as a result the Discovery expedition – known like most polar expeditions by the name of ship in which it travelled – achieved impressive results in increasing human knowledge of Antarctica.
Scott’s first expedition, however, also demonstrated the limits of the methods of polar exploration that the British had developed over the course of the nineteenth century. These relied on man-hauling, in which men pulled the sledges themselves, as the primary mode of transport. Scott and his men made considerable improvements to the sledging techniques that had been used in the Arctic, but their shortcomings as a mode of polar travel were also revealed. In 1902, a sledging journey undertaken by Scott and two companions, Edward Wilson and Ernest Shackleton, established a new farthest south at 82°17’S. This was only 200 miles (320 km) further than the Norwegian Carsten Borchgrevink had gone in 1900, however, and only a third of the way to the South Pole. The party had sledged for ninety-three days, far longer than the Arctic explorers of the mid-nineteenth century had managed, but at nowhere near the speed it would take to get to the Pole and back before they ran out of food and other vital supplies. Suffering from exhaustion, extreme cold and malnutrition, Shackleton had nearly died.
In recognition of the expedition’s achievements, Scott earned a bevy of medals and a promotion to captain, and was made a Commander of the Victorian Order. Far greater heroic stature, however, awaited the conqueror of the South Pole. It was Shackleton who made the next attempt, and very nearly succeeded: in January 1909, he and three companions made it to 88°23’S, only 97 miles (155 km) from the Pole. But he had fallen short, and it was now left to Scott to finish the job. It was a deceptively simple-looking task: follow in Shackleton’s footsteps, but go just a bit faster, and the Pole would be his. Scott left nothing to chance: he devised an elaborate system of transport, using newly invented motor-sledges (the precursor to today’s Sno-Cats), ponies (in imitation of Shackleton) and dogs. He was beginning to recognize the limits of man-hauling, but even so, it was to be the sole means of transport for the crucial last stages of the journey to the Pole and for virtually the entire journey back. (See Figure 49.)
The task was demanding enough in itself, but at the eleventh hour Scott was surprised to learn that he had competition. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had led the first expedition to sail through the Northwest Passage from 1903 to 1906, had been intending to try to reach the North Pole first, but after Frederick Cook and Robert Peary both claimed to have got there in 1909, he turned south instead. Because Amundsen had raised the funds for his expedition by stating his intention to go to the Arctic, he feared that if he revealed that he was heading for the opposite end of the globe, his patrons might demand their money back. He therefore kept his new objective a secret until the last possible minute, not even telling his men where they were headed when they set sail. It was not until Scott reached Melbourne in the summer of 1910 that he received a telegram simply stating: ‘Am going south Amundsen.’1 Scott readily understood what this meant: Amundsen was a hardened polar explorer whose abilities were not in doubt. He was, moreover, only trying to reach the Pole, whereas Scott’s expedition had an extensive scientific programme to carry out as it made its southern journey. Scott opted not to alter his plans, but he recognized that Amundsen was likely to win the race.
Explaining Defeat
From the time it first became known to the British public, Amundsen’s conduct was the subject of debate and criticism. In September 1911, John Scott Keltie, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote to Scott: ‘It is certainly sad that Amundsen should seem to have done such a low-down thing … He was deeply in debt and had to make money somehow … It does seem mean that for such a motive a man should rush in and try to snatch the goal from another who, he knew, has been preparing his way for years … However it is now a race and I hope with all my heart that you will win.’2 Scott did not win: in early March 1912, the news that Amundsen had reached the Pole on 14 December 1911 captured headlines around the world. Though they doubtless wanted to, the Royal Geographical Society could not entirely ignore Amundsen’s achievement. They did not invite him to come to London to give a lecture, but informed him that, if he was coming to England for other reasons, ‘the Society would be glad if he would attend one of our meetings and give an account of his expedition’. Amundsen, though insulted, agreed, and the lecture was scheduled for November 1912. The Royal Geographical Society, however, refused to book the more prestigious Albert Hall for the triumphant explorer, but instead banished him to the smaller Queen’s Hall.3 In a letter that survives in draft form in the Society’s archives, Keltie reported on the lecture to Scott’s widow, Kathleen. The manuscript retains his numerous alterations and excisions, showing how he could barely contain his wrath:
Even … if Amundsen’s whole statement is true still it does not exonerate him from doing a thing which no Englishman with a spark of chivalry in him would have dreamt of doing a thing which to say the least shows a lack of chivalry trying to get in front of a man who had practically devoted 12 years of his life to the attainment of his object. What would have been thought and said of an Englishman who had tried to sneak in through the Behring Straits and snatch the victory of the North Pole from poor Peary, who had been working at it stage after stage for some 20 years? However, the thing has been done and I have no doubt that Amundsen actually has been at the Pole.4
Already, then, a narrative had taken shape to justify Scott’s failure on the grounds that Amundsen had cheated. By not telling Scott, and the world, that he was going for the South rather than the North Pole, he had not played the game fairly and allowed an honest, manly competition to take place.
At the time Keltie wrote the letter, unbeknownst either to himself or to Kathleen, Scott had been dead for eight months. His southern journey, which had begun in October 1911, had been a struggle from the start. The motor-sledges had broken down almost immediately, and the ponies floundered in the soft snow. As they strained to haul their food and supplies up the 110-mile (176 km) Beardmore Glacier, which ascended 10,000 feet (3,048 m), they were making barely 10 miles (16 km) a day, while Amundsen, who had already reached the Pole, averaged 25 miles (40 km) using skis and dogs.5 Amundsen’s men actually gained weight on the polar journey and sometimes left food behind in their supply depots as they went faster than expected, whereas Scott’s, who burned more calories due to the physical exertions of man-hauling, were slowly starving to death.
Scott selected four men for the final push to the Pole: his old Discovery companion and close friend Edward Wilson; the army officer Lawrence Edward Grace ‘Titus’ Oates; Henry Robertson ‘Birdie’ Bowers of the Royal Indian Marine Service; and the naval petty officer Edgar Evans, another Discovery veteran. On 16 January 1912, around ten miles from the South Pole, they saw a black flag fluttering in the snow, irrefutable evidence that they had been beaten. They reached the Pole the next day; Scott captured their disappointment when he wrote: ‘Great God! this is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’6 (See Figure 50.)
As they turned north, the temperature began to drop as the Antarctic summer came to an end. This was dangerous, not only because the colder temperatures sapped calories at a faster rate, but because it caused the surface to freeze into ice crystals that impeded the glide of the sledge runners.7 It was, as Scott recorded, as if they were dragging the sledges ‘over desert sand’.8 Their progress slowed so that they rarely reached their next cache of supplies with food or fuel to spare. Evans, the biggest man of the party and thus the one who needed the most calories, was the first to succumb. By early February, he was, as Scott recorded in a passage that was later excised from the published version of his diary, ‘dull and incapable’.9 On the 17th, Evans collapsed, forcing them to camp. He died that night.
The others carried on, but they were moving very slowly. On 1 March, the thermometer plunged to −40°C; they were all aware that their pace was not sufficient for survival. ‘Thing look very black indeed,’ Scott wrote two days later.10 On 16 March, Oates, who had been suffering badly from frostbitten feet and from scurvy which had caused a leg wound that he had received in the Boer War to reopen, declared that he could not continue and begged his companions to leave him in his sleeping bag. They convinced him to limp on for one more day, but that night, in what became one of the defining moments of the tragedy, Oates left the tent and walked out into the snow. Scott recorded that he told his companions: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ ‘We knew,’ he said, ‘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.’11
Oates’s sacrifice, however, could not save them. Two days later, on 19 March, they were pinned in their tent by a blizzard. Scott’s feet were now badly frostbitten, and Wilson and Bowers made a desperate attempt to reach One Ton Depot, 11 miles (18 km) away, but were forced back when the weather worsened. As they lay waiting to die, Scott wrote the last entries in his diary, as well as letters to his family and friends, and a final ‘Message to the Public’:
For my own sake I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but to bow to the will of providence, determined still to do our best to the last … 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.12
The news of Scott’s death did not reach Britain until 10 February 1913. The word ‘shock’ was frequently employed to describe people’s immediate response. One friend of Scott’s sister Ettie described being ‘so shocked at seeing posted up the awful news’, while another reported: ‘I had only just come back home when I saw the appalling, shocking news on a poster.’13 However it was heard, the news produced strong emotions. Another friend of Ettie’s, Georgina Francis Dalrymple Gervais, wrote from County Tyrone in the north of Ireland that her husband ‘quite broke down when telling me the news’.14
In the immediate aftermath of the disaster, the Royal Geographical Society struggled to cope with the barrage of letters of condolence that arrived each day and with the need to satisfy the public’s demand for a demonstration of reverence for the dead. ‘I never knew anything that created so widespread an impression, not even, I believe, the death of Queen Victoria,’ Keltie wrote to Kathleen Scott. The Society was inundated with requests for tickets: first for the memorial service that was held at St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 February and then for a special meeting that was held at the Albert Hall in May. Ten thousand people were turned away from the former event; the demand for tickets was so intense that even some ‘ex-Inniskillings’ – men from Oates’s regiment, the Inniskilling Dragoons – were denied entry. A. C. Shawyer of the Old Comrades’ Association reported to Oates’s mother, Caroline: ‘Although Colonel Pennefarther tried hard to get [tickets] … I am afraid he and several other old officers did not get in. However, I met eight of the men who loved your son and we made a bold bid to get in and succeeded. We sent in a policeman to say we were a party of ex-Inniskillings and he got permission for us to enter and we were given a good seat just behind the band.’15 The chaos was such that a friend of Ettie’s complained that ‘we were terribly hustled at the entrance’. Even so, the attendees found the service very moving. L. L. Morant wrote: ‘never before has the death of five men brought forth such a scene, such admiration, such honour, one can never forget it.’16 (Italics in original.) Demand for tickets for the Albert Hall meeting was just as strong. Although ten thousand tickets were given out, Keltie had to deal with numerous complaints about the denial of requests or the location of seats. ‘The demand for tickets … is unprecedented,’ he told one disgruntled fellow of the Society. ‘We could have filled [the seats] three times over.’17 Other memorial services that were held outside London were similarly oversubscribed. S. I. Richardson told Ettie that he had tried to attend the service held at the YMCA in Belfast, but, even though he had ‘arrived twenty minutes before the time’, he ‘could not get in’.18
From all across the United Kingdom, people sent condolences, poems and other communications, not only to the Royal Geographical Society but also to the families of the dead. The expressions of sympathy flowed in from all ranks of society: one ‘working man’ even offered to sell his violin to raise money for the memorial fund.19 Such was the intensity of the emotion that Scott’s death aroused that seemingly everyone who had ever come into even minor contact with him or with a member of his family – ranging from royalty to domestic servants – felt a need to write to express their sorrow. The outpouring threatened to overwhelm the families of the dead. Edward Wilson’s mother, Mary Agnes, wrote to Ettie that ‘there was so much to read – to reply to’. Kathleen Scott’s brother, Rosslyn Bruce, noted that ‘we have been almost overwhelmed with letters of sympathy, nearly 400, I think, in all … Most of them are from friends, but numbers (from all parts of the world) from strangers.’20
As had been the case with Franklin’s disappearance and Livingstone’s death, a few people sought personal advantage and profit from the tragedy. The American Newspaper Publishers Association in New York alerted Keltie that one Frank Morgan-Ash, ‘late of Southampton’, had published letters in several American newspapers in which he claimed to be the manager of the Scott Memorial Fund and asked for contributions to be sent to his address.21 The vast majority of people who responded, however, only intended to comfort Scott’s friends and relatives, and to share in the outpouring of national grief. Their messages contained many common elements: sympathy for the bereaved families; expressions of Christian religious sentiments; regret that the men had been so close to safety when they perished; and hopes that the nobility of their actions would provide solace to their relatives. There were also frequent descriptions of the kind of heroism Scott and his companions had represented, which focused on their endurance, fortitude and self-sacrifice. Janet Stirling-Hamilton, who had known the Scott family in Devonport, wrote to Ettie three days after the news reached Britain:
Since Tuesday my one thought has been of the wild reaches of Antarctic ice and those five heroic lives and their supreme sufferings. On reading of the disaster one marvelled that God should have permitted misfortune after misfortune to overtake those brave souls, but reflection showed how the all-loving Father saw in those four [sic] sons the capacity for the most heroic deeds of endurance, self-sacrifice for the sake of their country and of each other, and He tested them to the uttermost. Where others would have gone under, they, enduring to the end, triumphed gloriously, bearing fresh witness to the heroic heights that men can rise to. Each disaster bravely borne was another precious jewel in the immortal crown of glory that is theirs today.22
The Sailors’ Home, which provided accommodation for seamen while they were in London, wrote: ‘their splendid fortitude, courage and self-sacrifice under most arduous circumstances stand out as a noble example to all sailors and Britons.’23 The London-based Burdett Coutts Lodge of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes declared: ‘we regard the loss as a national one, but are proud to think that even in their last moments of extremity, the nobility of British endurance and self-sacrifice was so gloriously indicated.’24 Some organizations employed similar formulations, which suggests that boilerplate expressions of public grief quickly emerged. Both the Northumberland County Association and the Tynemouth Association of the National Union of Teachers, for example, expressed their ‘deep appreciation of the self-sacrifice and devotion to duty shown by Captain Scott and his comrades, under circumstances which cannot but appeal most strongly to all who have read of the dangers and difficulties which are cheerfully faced by those who undertake the work of polar exploration’.25
Seeking Answers
Almost immediately, Britons began to look for explanations for the disaster. A regular meeting of the Royal Geographical Society happened to be scheduled for the day that the news of Scott’s death arrived; a paper on the Balkans was hastily cancelled and instead Vice President Douglas Freshfield gave a brief address about the Antarctic tragedy:
It is a truism to say that in great adventures of this sort it is always the unexpected that happens. No Arctic or Antarctic party was … ever sent out better equipped or better fitted by the gallantry and experience of its members, from Captain Scott downwards, to meet with the ordinary perils of the Poles. But Arctic travel would not be what it is, a training ground for the highest qualities of the British race, if those perils were altogether avoidable.
Here, Freshfield placed Scott and his companions in the long tradition of British polar explorers who had tested themselves against the rigours of the polar environment. Their failure was thus a testament to the ‘perils’ of that environment, and to their courage and hardihood in taking it on. It was the unpredictable Antarctic weather that had caused their demise, not any errors or deficiencies on their part:
Of all the dangers of the region of snow and ice … there is none so terrible, so overwhelming as the blizzard. Even on European mountains it has counted its victims by the dozens. I lost a friend in the Alps only last summer in such a storm. And we can imagine how these terrors are multiplied a hundredfold on an icy wilderness in the heart of the Antarctic. In these conditions, unless shelter is at hand, human powers, even of the toughest, cannot long maintain a struggle against the malign forces of Nature – the end must come.
The deaths of Scott and his men were thus a tragic accident that confirmed their noble qualities, not an indication of weakness or failure. They were ‘a band of heroes whose names will shine as examples of that endurance which is the highest form of courage, and as a noble evidence of the qualities of Englishmen. Not once or twice in our rough island story have these qualities been shown, and never more conspicuously than by the members of this ill-fated expedition.’26
After Scott’s death, the idea that Amundsen had ‘cheated’ gained greater resonance. ‘Naturally enough,’ declared the London literary journal the Bookman, ‘we resented in a way the wondrous good fortune of one who … was a kind of interloper who had snatched the prize from the enclosing grasp of those who had more dearly won it.’27 Over time, two other points of criticism emerged beyond the fact that Amundsen had failed to inform Scott of his intended destination. First, it was argued that Amundsen had only made a ‘dash to the Pole’ rather than carrying out a programme of scientific research. ‘There was no question of racing,’ declared Sir Clements Markham, who as president of the Royal Geographical Society had selected Scott to lead his first expedition in 1900. ‘The grand object was very far from that. It was valuable research in every branch of science.’28 The Times echoed this line: ‘Nothing in the painful yet inspiring narrative is more touching than the fidelity with which Captain Scott and his comrades, fighting for their very lives with the remorseless force of Nature, clung with ever increasing peril and weakness to scientific records and geological specimens which it was the primary object of their expedition to secure. It is thus that they snatched victory out of the jaws of death.’29 In reality, this was a postmortem reinvention of events that would never have occurred had Scott won the race. Privately, Keltie admitted that attempts to argue that the Pole had only been an ancillary goal were specious. ‘It is no use in the papers saying the Pole was merely a secondary matter,’ he wrote to Kathleen in April 1912. ‘We know very well that he had set his mind upon it.’30 It was also misleading to claim a high value for Scott’s scientific results. The coastal areas of Antarctica had by 1910 been explored by numerous expeditions, while Scott’s trek to the Pole had explored no new ground because it had stuck so rigidly to Shackleton’s route. This was pointed out by the Scottish geographer Hugh Robert Mill, who was a friend and supporter of Scott and who had previously praised his scientific work on the Discovery expedition, when he was approached by Keltie in April 1912 about writing an article for the Royal Geographical Society’s journal:
I would gladly write an article on Scott’s results, but from the geographical point of view there are none … He kept so close to Shackleton’s track that he could discover nothing unless Shackleton had never been there … Even if Scott reaches the Pole he is tied to his line of depots for a return and can accomplish nothing except to bring his party back alive … Having referred so positively to the certainty of fine results from Scott’s expedition I feel rather sold by the turn of events and I really do not know what to do. There is nothing to praise, and to set out the facts in relation to previous explorations would seem to cast a slur on Scott for having done nothing new.31
Publicly, however, the argument that Scott had performed valuable scientific research while Amundsen made his mercenary dash to the Pole remained the stance of the British polar establishment.
The second criticism of Amundsen that developed after Scott’s death was that he had used dogs rather than man-hauling as his main means of transport. Only foreigners, it was asserted, were willing to rely on dogs for travel in polar regions and then slaughter them for food when their use was at an end. Markham wrote that Scott
disliked the horrible and disgusting practice of comfortably [gliding] along on ski while the dogs do all the work, and then slaughtering them. This was one consideration which biased him on the side of traction by men. After alluding to what he considered the sordid necessity of so treating dogs on a long journey, he wrote that surely it was a finer conception when men set forth, and made important discoveries by their own unaided efforts … The foreign practice of killing [dogs] is revolting.32
This idea was expressed most famously by the Earl Curzon of Kedleston, president of the Royal Geographical Society, who at the banquet after Amundsen’s lecture in London in April 1912, declared: ‘I almost wish that in our tribute of admiration we could include those wonderful, good-tempered, fascinating dogs, the true friends of man, without whom Captain Amundsen would never have got to the Pole.’ Amundsen later claimed that Curzon then asked for the audience to give ‘three cheers for the dogs’.33
The British exploration and scientific establishment thus sought to frame an appropriate response to, and explanation for, the tragedy. They emphasized Scott’s high moral standards and gentlemanly character, in contrast to Amundsen’s unsportsmanlike and mercenary conduct. Markham wrote to Curzon that ‘it is very painful to see their marches compared, as if the man “who did not play the game” was on an equality or on the same plane in any way with a perfect gentleman like Scott’.34 The maintenance of this line, however, required the avoidance of awkward questions. Three days after the news of Scott’s death reached Britain, Freshfield wrote to Curzon: ‘There are a lot of questions which will be asked. What became of the fuel? Why [was] not the relief party at one ton hut [sic] ten days before the end provisioned to stay on there some time and make sallies along the south road? How come its provisions were cut so fine that delays by bad weather led to starvation? What were the distances between the depots as compared to Amundsen’s?35 The Royal Geographical Society did its best to ensure that such questions were swept under the carpet. Curzon asserted in his address to the Society on 24 February that the disaster had been a tragic accident: ‘I think we shall do well to accept the balanced judgment of the Commander of the Expedition himself, recorded in circumstances which render deception impossible. Just as Amundsen was favoured by an extraordinary combination of fine weather, physical health and good luck, so Scott had to battle with the triple foe of climatic conditions, unprecedented and unimagined for their severe and malignant intensity, the breakdown of two of his party and adverse fortune at every turn.’36 Curzon did, however, propose a private, informal meeting of the Royal Geographical Society at which some of the returned members of the expedition would be questioned. The retired commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy and Fellow of the Society Sir Lewis Beaumont vehemently opposed this idea, ‘because for the Society to be on sure ground it would have to probe very deep and would have probably to disapprove of what was done in many particulars – it would be different if good could come of the enquiry, but I fear nothing but controversy would come of it’.37 In the end, Beaumont’s view prevailed, and though a ‘memorial meeting’ was held at the Society in late February, no thorough questioning of the members of the expedition took place.
That same month, Kathleen Scott returned from New Zealand, where she had gone to welcome her husband upon his return from Antarctica. There had been no indication thus far that she was inclined to cause trouble. In March 1913, shortly after learning of her husband’s death, she had written to Keltie from Sydney to ask him to ‘see to it that none of the ridiculous reports of dissension, lack of support, tampering with depots or other harmful fabrications of detrimentalists be allowed to have a light. There is no blame anywhere.’ Even so, Curzon met with her immediately to ensure that she maintained a consistent public line. He need not have worried: Kathleen was from the outset determined to celebrate her late husband’s heroism, rather than apportion blame for his death. A scrawled note in Curzon’s hand records their conversation. They ranged over a number of issues, including ‘Scott’s words in his diary on exhaustion of food and fuel in depots on his return’, which he interpreted to mean that the three men of the last supporting party had ‘consumed more than their share’ on the return journey. Edgar Evans ‘gave out at the Pole’ because he ‘lost heart’ when he could no longer ‘perform his share of work’, while Oates ‘no doubt took opium and thus killed himself’; ‘had he not failed they would have got through.’ In the end, however, they agreed that it was better to maintain the public position that ‘they were killed by the weather and ill luck’.38
The line that Scott and his companions had perished due to bad luck thus became standard. Sir William Graham Greene, permanent secretary to the Board of Admiralty, wrote to Ettie that ‘one might think [that] the powers of nature, while they allowed one party to make a hasty rush to the Pole and back, resented the attempt to wrest from them their secrets and so thwarted Captain Scott’s scientific attack. Certainly nothing but ill luck dogged their steps.’ A friend of Ettie’s added: ‘They had dreadful bad luck, such vile weather,’ while Jasper More of Winchester echoed: ‘They did seem to have the most dreadful bad luck. One or two misfortunes they could have stood, but everything seemed to be against them.’ Bevill Towns wrote to Ettie from Perth: ‘I cannot tell you how shocked we were to read of all his sufferings and the magnificent way he struggled against the series of misfortunes which attended his journey. It really seemed as if his luck had altogether left him.’39
In some ways, the response to Scott’s death closely resembled that of Gordon’s three decades earlier, as condolences and expressions of sympathy were dispatched from a wide variety of clubs, political organizations, business enterprises and local government bodies. Also as in Gordon’s case, these groups extended beyond the British Isles to the empire. The Royal Geographical Society and Scott’s family received condolences from Lord Denman, the governor general of Australia; the prime minister of New Zealand; the government of Western Australia; and a multitude of municipalities, clubs and organizations in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa as they sought to embrace Scott as an imperial hero.40 Flora Macartney, presumably a relative of Ettie’s husband, Sir William Ellison Macartney, wrote to Ettie from Brisbane: ‘What a heritage [Scott] has left to the Empire, all the quiet intense heroism needed to write as he did in those last days may scarcely be comprehended by many.’41 J. T. Lawson, the honourable secretary of the Balmain East Young People’s Club in New South Wales, wrote: ‘There is no need to fear that the British Empire will decline, when it possesses men of the calibre of the late Captain Scott and those who shared his fate.’42
Expressions of sympathy from the empire took various forms. The Lord Mayor of Sydney wrote to Ettie to thank her for returning to him a ‘paper and envelope’ that Scott had handed him ‘the moment before leaving from Port Chalmers (Otago)’ in November 1910: ‘I always shall treasure them inasmuch as they were handled by a great hero whose name will go down with honour in British history.’43 Waitaki High School in Oamaru, New Zealand, boasted of being the first place in the dominions to erect a memorial to Scott, in the form of a tablet that quoted his final message in full, then listed the names of the five men who had ‘sacrificed their lives for their country’s honour’.44 In Canada, a Ladies’ Guild of the British and Foreign Sailors’ Society was formed in Scott’s memory to ‘promote the welfare of British sailors in Canada’.45 Lieutenant General Sir Reginald Hart, commander-in-chief of the British forces in South Africa, sent a proclamation expressing the army’s ‘heart-felt sympathy with the wives, parents and other relatives of the brave men who perished on the eve of success, overcome by the most adverse and unprecedented circumstances’. He further announced that on 14 February memorial services would be held in all military churches in South Africa and all military flags would be flown at half-mast.46 Sympathy was not limited to colonial citizens who were of British heritage. Kathleen Scott received a letter from the Maori residents of the Wairarapa district of New Zealand stating: ‘the deeds of your husband and his comrades bring to our memory the deeds of our ancestor “Kupe” who crossed the sea without compass and reached these islands in which we still remain and extend a welcome to our pakeha friends’.47
If it was similar in terms of the response it generated within the empire, the reaction to Scott’s death differed from that to Gordon’s in being much more global. As W. A. Bascand of the Christian Endeavour Society in Christchurch wrote: ‘It is indeed a catastrophe, not only to the British nation, but to the whole world.’48 Condolences poured in from individuals, clubs, schools, and scientific and geographical organizations all over Europe, including Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Ethel Herbert wrote to Caroline Oates from Florence: ‘the wave of comprehending grief which swept over Italy on that terrible news from New Zealand was extraordinary in a foreign country’.49 In March 1913, the French polar explorer Jean-Baptiste Charcot organized a meeting in Paris to raise money for the Scott Memorial Fund; he reported to Keltie that it was ‘a great success and the Paris public showed its admiration and deep sympathy for your country with over 6000 people being present, including many of our best men’. Charcot circulated a fundraising letter among French schools and gathered money for a memorial plaque to Scott at Col de Lautaret in the French Alps, where he had helped him to test the motor-sledges prior to his departure on his last expedition. The Norwegian Geographical Society also put up a memorial, in the form of a granite obelisk, at Lake Finse, where Scott had worked to improve British skiing and sledging techniques. In the spring of 1914, Commander Edward ‘Teddy’ Evans, Scott’s second-in-command on the expedition, went on a lecture tour of the European continent that included stops in Paris, Rome, Vienna, Budapest and Berlin. It proved very popular. The president of the Hungarian Geographical Society reported that two members of the royal family had attended and described Evans’s presentation as ‘very thrilling’: ‘The Hungarian public was deeply moved by the sad fate of the greatest and noblest British Antarctic explorer.’50
The United States also responded. The State Assembly of New York passed a resolution of condolence, while a group of citizens of Baltimore, Maryland, wrote to the Royal Geographical Society of their ‘grief over the death of Captain Scott and his companions in the Antarctic under circumstances that … cause true hearted men all the world over to thank God for the superlative example of true courage and heroism that He enabled them to leave to the world’.51 In their condolences to Kathleen, the British Schools and Universities Club of New York declared that Scott ‘has left us an example of the truest type of manhood inspired by thorough unselfishness to friends, superb endurance in time of peril, unconquerable patriotism and unswerving devotion to duty’.52 The American Arctic explorer Adolphus Greeley, the leader of the disastrous Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881–84, praised Scott’s men and said: ‘their sense of duty, their persistence of action, their endurance of fatigue, their accomplishment of purpose, their acceptance of disaster, their solidarity of spirit and their fearlessness of death, reflect credit not only on their country but also on mankind at large’.53 The Royal Geographical Society also received condolences from Argentina, Bolivia, Japan and Peru. (See Figure 51.)
This outpouring of grief reflected the global nature of Antarctic exploration. There was a great deal of prestige at stake in the quest to discover and map the frozen southern continent, and above all to win the race to the South Pole. John Kennedy Maclean had written in Heroes of the Polar Seas (1910) that ‘the honour of being first’ to the South Pole ‘has now become a matter of international competition’.54 In the first decade of the twentieth century, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Japan, Norway and Sweden had all sponsored Antarctic expeditions. The pressure was particularly intense for the British, who had already lost the race to the North Pole after having done so much work in the Arctic in the nineteenth century. ‘There is one Pole left, and it should be our Pole,’ Arthur Conan Doyle declared in 1909.55
These sentiments were expressed in the context of growing concerns about Britain’s ability to withstand the international competition that the race to the South Pole had engendered. The Edwardian period was marked by increasing anxieties about Britain’s economic, imperial and military capacities. These concerns were sparked in part by the Boer War, which lasted far longer and cost far more casualties than expected. In the first year of the war, close to a third of army recruits had been rejected as physically unfit, some due to their small stature and others to deficiencies such as heart disease, weak lungs and bad teeth. This gave rise to a campaign for ‘National Efficiency’, a phrase derived from the economist Sidney Webb’s book A Policy of National Efficiency (1901). At the core of National Efficiency was the concern that the physical fitness of Britain’s citizens had been adversely affected by the unwholesome urban and industrial environment in which many of them lived. This physical decline was undermining the nation’s military and economic strength. Movements such as the Boy Scouts and a bevy of patriotic organizations sought to address these problems, but National Efficiency remained a prevalent concern prior to the outbreak of the First World War and beyond.56
Scott’s defeat brought all of these fears to the forefront, as it confirmed the sense that heroic qualities were becoming increasingly scarce. ‘In these days, especially,’ wrote Major Frederick Jackson to Scott’s mother, Hannah, ‘the nation can ill afford to lose such brave and noble souls – England’s best.’ In a similar vein, a friend of William Ellison Macartney’s wrote to him: ‘England cannot afford to lose men like him, especially in these times.’ Others concurred. ‘Men like him can ill be spared’; ‘how badly England can spare such splendid men’; ‘we can ill afford to lose such men’ – these were common sentiments in the letters of condolence.57
In assessing the reasons for the disaster, a key issue was whether Scott’s men had ‘broken down’ because of the rigours of the Antarctic environment or because they were physically weaker than their Norwegian rivals. The Welsh petty officer Edgar Evans was a particular concern, as the debate over National Efficiency focused on the working classes, who were seen to have been the most negatively affected by urban and industrial life. (See Figure 52.) This helps to explain why he, among the five men who had died, was more frequently singled out for blame, for there was more anxiety surrounding his ‘breakdown’ than there was in relation to the others. In his address to the Royal Geographical Society on 24 February, Curzon referred to Evans’s ‘unaccountable breakdown’ as ‘the first symptom, and possibly the initial cause, of the ultimate disaster’. Markham, too, blamed Evans: ‘The delays caused by his inability to march, had fatally thrown out the calculations.’58 The press engaged in much speculation about the role of what the Daily Mail called Evans’s ‘sudden breakdown’, which it claimed had been a ‘disastrous blow and probably fatal’. A headline in the Daily Express pointed to ‘The Problem of Seaman Evans’, while another headline in the South Wales Echo proposed to explain why Evans, ‘the giant of the party’, had ‘failed’.59
But if the Antarctic disaster engendered fears of national decline, it simultaneously provided a counterbalance to them. Scott’s diary provided plenty of useful material. There was the death of Captain Oates, which Markham described as ‘one of the finest and most heroic deeds in our annals’, while Curzon asked: ‘Does history contain a finer picture than this young fellow … walking out of the tent into the shrieking snowstorm to give up his life for his friends?’60 (See Figure 53.) Cecil Williams, an acquaintance of Oates’s mother, Caroline, wrote in his letter of condolence of ‘how splendidly he behaved, and the nation must feel proud today that he was an Englishman’. Similarly, Herbert Whyte, a friend of Oates’s, wrote: ‘he died as he had lived, to the last, a noble and gallant English gentleman’.61 Ewing Paterson, a former member of the Inniskilling Dragoons, cited his death as ‘an example to every officer of the regiment who now realizes that once a pursuit is taken up it must be gone into even if death looms ahead’.62
The manner in which Scott had faced his own death also garnered much praise. Curzon declared:
Can anything be more beautiful than the calm heroism with which he sat down with death staring him in the eyes …? The result is that this plain man, who claimed powers neither of speech nor writing, has left a message which will outlive the highest flights of trained eloquence … I find it hard to say whether my impression is more vivid of the hardships and sufferings cheerfully endured, of the patient effort to add to human knowledge, or of the invincible spirit in which the writer faced his task.63
His assessment was shared by the British public. ‘I never read anything so noble, dignified – so gloriously strong as that message to the world,’ (italics in the original) wrote a friend of Ettie’s. ‘It made one’s heart swell to know one had lived in the same age as such fine souls as these.’ Similarly, Flora Colhoun wrote to Ettie from Germany: ‘What a hero’s letter. Knowing no human help was possible – what thought for others.’ James T. Canton declared: ‘there can be no soul, however sordid, which did not thrill at the reading of your glorious brother’s last message, and generations yet unborn will read in those words an encouragement to the loftiest patriotism’.64
The way that Scott and his companions died had thus proved that British greatness remained intact. A letter of condolence to Ettie stated that Scott’s death was ‘a thing to be proud of, for real men are few and far between these days’, while others declared: ‘how splendid to think that England still produces such heroes’ and ‘it should make everyone feel proud of their country … that it can produce such men.’ Georgina Francis Dalrymple Gervais wrote: ‘in this money-seeking and self-advertising age it is a joy to note the Empire has still such heroes worthy of the greatest days of Elizabeth’. Sir William’s relative General Sir Gerald Francis Ellison wrote: ‘chiefly one is thankful that the heart and mind of the nation is still so sound that it can readily appreciate at its true worth real greatness when brought face to face with it’.65 Scott was compared to British heroes of old, as if to reassure a nervous nation that its strength and character still endured. ‘He and Franklin stand in the first rank of men,’ wrote one friend of Sir William Ellison-Macartney’s, while another asserted: ‘it is Nelson in the moment of victory over again.’ General Ellison wrote: ‘his name will go down to future generations of Englishmen associated with the names of Wolfe and Nelson as one of the great Englishmen who died nobly in the hour of victory’.66 The poet Everard Digby concluded from the manner of Scott’s death:
British pluck still lives again,
Endurance both with heart and brain;
Inherent in our Island race.
Courage to do, and Death to face.67
These claims, however, veiled fears lurking just beneath the surface that Britain was no longer capable of producing heroes of the same quality as in days of yore. Keltie told the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin: ‘it is some little comfort to know that the human race, and even Englishmen, have still some of the noble qualities of their ancestors’.68 Similarly, he wrote to the French polar explorer Charles Rabot: ‘We are often taunted in England with being a degenerate race, but when such deeds as these are possible still among us, I think we may cherish the belief that after all our degeneration has not proceeded very far.’69 These anxieties were on full display in a poem by Coulson Peart that was issued in pamphlet form as part of the ‘Patriotic Verses Series’:
Are there yet ‘Men’ in Britain? Are all land lubbers now?
O! who will face the long last race, the biting frost and snow?
There is one place of mystery, but one more post to win,
To open out, to tell about, for country and for King.
O! who will dare the iceberg’s glare, the Southern Pole to find,
And add the glory of the deed to future sons of all mankind?
O who will volunteer to steer, by sun, by moon,
By stars, through fear, into the ghastly Southern sphere?
Where cold will freeze and tempest blast, and blizzard wreck, starvation track?
Lives there a man who dares the deed? who with his life may ne’er come back,
Shall other nations find the man and Britain be the one to lack?
Arouse ye heroes? Hear the call? Up men of England! Scotland! All!
Shall honour fly? Shall Glory fall?
Scott provided a reassuring answer to these questions:
Out spake a young Devonian, a Captain by degree,
‘O I will brave the Southern wave and take a crew with me,
Give but the ship, right to equip, and men who fear no foe,
I will uphold through heat or cold, the honour of my country, so
That other nations seeing, say “Old England still can shew the way
To deeds as brave as in the past, to acts that evermore shall last.”’70
As we have seen, the global response to Scott’s death reflected the fierce competition among a variety of nations to win the race to the South Pole. Losing to the Norwegians was bound to raise questions in Britain about the reasons for their defeat. But because the race took place at a time when other nations, Germany and the United States in particular, had caught up to and even surpassed Britain’s industrial productivity and were challenging the supremacy of the Royal Navy, these questions went beyond the context of Antarctic exploration and hinted at broader anxieties about Britain’s status as a world power. In this sense, Scott was the first twentieth-century heroic failure. It is premature to describe him, as Roland Huntford has suggested, as a ‘suitable hero for a nation in decline’, for Britain did not truly begin to slip from great-power status until after the First World War.71 But it is accurate to say that his failure necessitated his transformation into a hero for somewhat different reasons than Sir John Franklin’s or General Gordon’s had. Britons needed Scott’s heroism not to show them that their empire was benevolent, just and moral, but rather to reassure them that their empire, and their nation, were just as strong and powerful as they had been a few decades earlier.