Scott of the Antarctic: A Life of Courage and Tragedy in the Extreme South
David Crane has given us the definitive biography of one of Britain’s greatest heroes and explorers.‘It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more…For God’s sake look after our people.’These were the final words written in Scott’s diary on 29 March 1912, as he lay dying in his tent with Birdie Bowers and Edward Wilson. Oates had taken himself into a blizzard a few days before, and the fifth member of the Polar party, Edgar Evans, had died some ten days previously, worn out by the cold and physical effort of the journey across Antarctica.Since then Scott has been the subject of many books – many hagiographical, others dismissive and scathing. Yet in all the pages that have been written about him, the personality behind the legend has been forgotten or distorted beyond all recognition.David Crane’s magisterial biography, based on years of close and detailed research with the original documents, redresses this completely. By reassessing Scott’s life and his substantial scientific achievements, Crane is able to provide a fresh and exciting perspective on both the Discovery expedition of 1901-4 and the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-12. The courage and tragedy of Scott’s last journey are only one part of the process, for the scientific enquiry that led up to it transformed the whole nature and ambition of Antarctic exploration.Scott’s own voice echoes through the pages. His descriptions of the monumental landscape of Antarctica in all its fatal and icy beauty are breathtaking; his honest, heartfelt letters and diaries give the reader an unforgettable account of the challenges he faced both in his personal life and as a superlative leader of men in possibly the harshest environment on the planet.Written with the full support of Scott’s surviving relatives, this definitive biography sets out to reconcile the very private struggles of the man with the very public life of extremes that he led.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC
DAVID CRANE
CONTENTS
NOTE ON DISTANCES, TEMPERATURES AND WEIGHTS
11 Man Proposeth … God Disposeth
The known extent of Antarctica in 1893
Present-day Antarctica
Ross Island and McMurdo Sound
Scott’s Southern Journey, November 1902–January 1903
Frustration: Mist obscured the view up the inlet to a Nunatak that would have shown them that it was a glacier
The Conquest of the Western Mountains
The Discovery Expedition, 1901–04
Disaster: February – March 1911
Polar Journey, 1911–12
Unless stated, all distances are given in geographical (i.e. nautical) miles. One geographical mile equals 1.15 statute miles, or c.2,025 yards (1,852 metres). Temperatures are given in Fahrenheit and weights in imperial measures.
I am more proud of my most loved son’s goodness than for anything he has done and all this glory & honour the country is giving him is naturally a gratification to a Mother’s heart but very little consolation – you know how much my dear son was to me, and I have never a bitter memory or an unkind word to recall.
Hannah Scott, 21 February 1913
Your children shall ask their fathers in time to come, saying ‘What mean these stones?’
Joshua IV. 21. Scott Memorial, Port Chalmers, New Zealand
IN THE EARLY HOURS of 10 February 1913, an old converted whaler ‘crept like a phantom’ into the little harbour of Oamaru on the east coast of New Zealand’s South Island and dropped anchor. For many of the men on board this was their first smell of grass and trees in over twenty-six months, but with secrecy at a premium only two of her officers were landed before the ship weighed anchor and slipped back out to sea to disappear into the pre-dawn gloom from which she had emerged.
While the ship steamed offshore in a self-imposed quarantine, the officers were taken by the nightwatchman to the harbour master’s home, and first thing next morning to the Oamaru post office. More than two years earlier an elaborate and coded arrangement had been set in place to release what everyone had then hoped would be very different news, but with contractual obligations still to be honoured, a cable was sent and the operator confined to house arrest until Central News could exploit its exclusive rights to the scoop the two men had brought.
The ship that had so quietly stolen into Oamaru harbour was the Terra Nova, the news was of Captain Scott’s death on his return from the South Pole, and within hours it was around the world. For almost a year Britain had been learning to live with the fact that Scott had been beaten by the Norwegian Amundsen in the ‘Race for the Pole’, but nothing in any reports from the Antarctic had prepared the country for the worst disaster in her polar history since the loss of Sir John Franklin more than sixty years earlier. ‘There is a dreadful report in the Portuguese newspapers,’ a bewildered Sir Clements Markham, the ‘father’ of British Antarctic exploration and Scott’s first patron, scrawled from his Lisbon hotel the following day, ‘that Captain Scott reached the South Pole on January 18th and that he perished in a snow storm – a telegram from New Zealand … If this is true we have lost the greatest polar explorer that ever lived … We can never hope to see his like again. Telegraph if it is true. I am plunged in grief.’
If there had ever been any doubt of its truth in London, it did not last long, and with Scott’s widow, at sea on her way to New Zealand to meet her husband, almost alone in her ignorance, the nation prepared to share in Markham’s grief. Less than a year earlier the sinking of the Titanic had brought thousands to St Paul’s Cathedral to mourn, and within four days of the first news from Oamaru the crowds were out in even greater force, silently waiting in the raw chill of a February dawn for a memorial service that was not scheduled to start until twelve.
There could have been nowhere more fitting than the burial place of Nelson and Wellington for the service, no church that so boldly embodied the mix of public and private sorrow that characterised the waiting crowd. During the second half of the old century Dean Stanley had done all he could to assert the primacy of Westminster Abbey, but as London’s Protestant cathedral, built by a Protestant for a Protestant country, St Paul’s spoke for a special sense of Englishness and national election as nowhere else could. ‘Within the Cathedral all is hushed and dim,’ recorded
