Robert Falcon Scott

Robert Falcon Scott: The Explorer Britain Argued About for a Century

When a search party opened the tent on 12 November 1912 and found the three frozen bodies, they also found thirty-five pounds of rock. The dying men had dragged the fossils across the Ross Ice Shelf rather than abandon them. They were Glossopteris — the first fossils ever recovered from Antarctica, and proof that the continent had once been forested and joined to the others. Whatever else is said about Scott, and a great deal has been said, that sledge load is the fact that will not go away.

A Brewer's Son

He was born on 6 June 1868 at Stoke Damerel near Devonport, the third of six children and elder son of John Edward Scott, a brewer, in a family thick with naval and military service. He entered naval training at thirteen, passed out of HMS *Britannia* as a midshipman in July 1883, seventh in his class, and was promoted lieutenant in 1889. He took first-class certificates in torpedo training on HMS *Vernon* in 1891.

Then the family collapsed. His father lost the brewery investment around 1894 and the Scotts came close to bankruptcy; John died in 1897, and Scott's brother Archie of typhoid the following year, leaving a naval lieutenant responsible for his mother and unmarried sisters. Advancement was no longer ambition but necessity.

In June 1899 he met Sir Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographical Society, learned of a planned Antarctic expedition, and volunteered to lead it within days. His biographer David Crane concluded that what drew him was "the opportunity for early command" rather than any passion for the poles.

Discovery

Given command of the British National Antarctic Expedition and promoted commander, Scott sailed in 1901. The *Discovery* expedition reached 82°17′ South, roughly 530 miles from the Pole and a new southern record, and Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Edward Wilson discovered the Antarctic Plateau. It was, on the assessment of naval historians, the most comprehensive scientific and geographical exploration of Antarctica attempted to that date.

It was not painless. A team member, George Vince, died in a fall in March 1902; scurvy troubled the party; and the ship had to be blasted free of pack ice. Scott came home in 1904 to honours and a captaincy.

Kathleen, and a Telegram in Melbourne

In 1907 he met Kathleen Bruce, a sculptor who had trained under Rodin and moved among Isadora Duncan and Picasso. They married at Hampton Court in September 1908; their son Peter, born in 1909, would go on to found the World Wide Fund for Nature.

*Terra Nova* sailed from Cardiff on 15 June 1910. At Melbourne that October a telegram from Roald Amundsen informed Scott that he was now in a race he had not entered and could not decline.

Ponies, Motors and Dogs

Scott had never believed men could haul to the Pole unaided, and after consulting Fridtjof Nansen in March 1910 he settled on a mixed system: motor sledges, Manchurian ponies, dogs and skis. It was the ponies that failed. Cecil Meares, sent to buy them, procured animals largely unfit for the work. One motor sledge sank through the ice during unloading. Six ponies died, three by drowning.

Lawrence Oates urged Scott to kill the ponies for food and push the One Ton Depot further south to 80°. Scott declined. On 20 October 1911 he issued Meares written orders: the dog teams were to make a third journey south around the first week of February to hasten the returning polar party home.

"Great God! This Is an Awful Place"

The caravan left on 1 November 1911, shedding support parties as it climbed. On 4 January 1912, at 87°34′ South, Scott named the five who would go on: himself, Wilson, Henry Bowers, Oates and Edgar Evans.

On 16 January they saw a black flag. They reached the Pole on the 17th and found Amundsen's tent and a letter dated 18 December. Scott's diary is not stoic: "The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place."

Eleven Miles Short

They turned for home on 19 January, 800 miles from safety. Edgar Evans, failing since late January, died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on 17 February. Fuel was short in the depots for reasons never fully explained. In late February Scott reached the rendezvous at 82° three days early and found no dogs waiting.

On 10 March the temperature fell below −40°. Oates, his frostbitten feet gangrenous, walked out of the tent on 16 March with the line Scott recorded and Britain memorised: "I am just going outside and may be some time." Scott, Wilson and Bowers made their last camp on 19 March, about eleven miles from One Ton Depot, and a nine-day blizzard held them there. Scott's final entry, on 29 March, reads: "Last entry. For God's sake look after our people."

In his Message to the Public he refused to complain: "We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint."

Why Robert Is Called a Genius

Scott is the hardest case here: the word has been used about him and then loudly withdrawn.

The defensible claim is scientific judgement, not raw intellect. *Discovery* was the most comprehensive scientific survey of Antarctica to that point, and Scott ran *Terra Nova* as a research programme that happened to contain a race. The proof is grotesque: the thirty-five pounds of Glossopteris on the sledge, the first fossils recovered from the continent, proof it had once been forested. Men starving to death do not haul rock for sentiment.

The counter-case is a century old and still live. Pound and Thomson called his planning haphazard. Roland Huntford's *Scott and Amundsen* (1979) branded him a "heroic bungler" and became orthodoxy for two decades; Spufford and Theroux followed. A 2002 poll of great Britons placed Shackleton eleventh and Scott fifty-fourth. The specific charges — the useless ponies, refusing Oates on One Ton Depot, enlarging the final party from four to five — are real.

Then the pendulum swung. Susan Solomon's *The Coldest March* (2001) tied the deaths to a freakishly severe autumn. In 2012 Karen May published Scott's written October 1911 orders to Meares, showing that Huntford's central claim — that Scott left the dog relief to casual verbal instruction — was "pure invention based on an error." Stephanie Barczewski calls the result a revision of the revisionist view. Genius is probably the wrong word. Competent, scientifically serious and unlucky is nearer, and it took a hundred years of argument to arrive there.

Legacy

*Terra Nova* reached New Zealand on 10 February 1913 and Scott became a national icon within days. The Mansion House memorial fund raised £75,000, the equivalent of some £7.4 million today, though it was distributed with a class logic that gave Scott's family £18,000 and Edgar Evans's £1,500. Kathleen received the precedence of a knight commander's widow, and defended her husband's name until her death in 1947.

More than thirty monuments went up in Britain within twelve years, among them the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge, which remains one of the world's principal centres of polar science. It is a better memorial than the statues: the expedition that killed him was, first and last, an attempt to find things out.

Achievements

• Officer of the Legion of Honour
• Commander of the Royal Victorian Order
• Vega Medal
• Patron’s Medal
• Recorded as explorer, naval officer and non-fiction writer