At the turn of the 20th century, Antarctica, the last uncharted continent, captured the world’s imagination. In 1911, Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer, and Roald Amundsen, his Norwegian counterpart, both launched expeditions with the ambition to be the first to reach the South Pole. National pride was at stake, and such a feat would guarantee immortality. A year of breathless anticipation came to an end on 7 March 1912 with Amundsen’s announcement via telegram that he and his team had reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. When newspapers around the globe trumpeted Amundsen’s triumph the next day, Scott was writing in his diary as a gale howled outside his tent: “We are in a very bad way, I fear.” One member of his team had already perished, and the others were all in bad shape.
When Scott embarked on the Terra Nova Expedition, he was already an Antarctic veteran. The Press, a newspaper in Christchurch, wrote about the crew before they left for the Pole:
There is no spirit of boasting, but every man spoken to seems confident that success will be theirs…That spirit comes from Captain Scott, who is one of the most modest and retiring of men, but who possesses the rare quality of getting the best possible work from his subordinates.
In October 1911, Scott and his team set off from base for the Pole. But early on things went terribly wrong. The motor sledges and ponies could not cope with the conditions and the team had to pull heavy sleds by hand. After a gruelling march of nearly 850 miles, the five-man polar party of Scott, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, Edgar Evans and Lawrence Oates reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find a Norwegian flag planted a month earlier by his rival Amundsen. With this vision burned into their minds, the five disconsolate explorers started the tortuous journey back. Thus began the most harrowing and tragic tale of Antarctic exploration.
Evans, the strongest man in the team, was the first to go—presumably due to a head injury incurred in an earlier fall. The party was still hundreds of miles away from the base camp and rations were running perilously low. They were battered by some of the worst weather ever recorded in the area. The dog teams that Scott had pinned high hopes on failed to turn up at the appointed time.
Oates was next. By mid-March, he was lame from frostbite. Knowing that he was slowing the team down, he asked his comrades to leave him in his sleeping bag, a request that was refused. “I am just going outside and may be some time.” With these words, Oates, the man they affectionately called “the Soldier”, staggered out of the tent into a raging blizzard, never to be seen again.
Sadly, Oates’s selfless sacrifice did not save his comrades from a similar fate. A week later, another ferocious blizzard swept in and trapped the three remaining men in their tent with precious little food and no fuel with which to melt snow for water. The temperature was -40˚C. On 29 March, as Scott lay dying between Bowers and Wilson, a mere 11 miles away from the next supply depot, he scrawled his final words: “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.” His last exhortation was: “For God’s sake look after our people.”
The frozen bodies of Scott and his two comrades were found eight months later in their tent by a search party from the base camp. A high cairn of snow was built over their final resting place, topped with a solitary cross made of skis.
The five men had battled their way through the most forbidding territory on earth for nearly five months, enduring a highly abnormal and sustained period of intense cold that they could hardly have predicted. Despite extreme hardship, they had not only stuck to their sick companions, but also managed to lug 35 pounds of geological specimens to the last, making significant contributions to science and geography. Their names have since been linked inextricably to the great southern continent. Scott’s last diary entries, at the point of death and dissolution, give voice to the heroic endurance, personal sacrifice, and indomitable spirit of all intrepid explorers who brave fearsome odds to achieve their goals. Scott wrote:
We are weak, writing is difficult, but 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 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.
In January 1913, before leaving the Antarctica for good, the surviving members of the Terra Nova Expedition erected on Observation Hill a large wooden cross in memory of Scott and his companions. Overlooking the Expedition’s base camp in McMurdo Sound, it still carries, to this day, the inscription of their names and the concluding line from Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” — “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
