6. Scott’s Quest for the South Pole

After Cook and the U.S. Exploring Expedition [section 5], Antarctica appeared on maps through the nineteenth century, often tied as in previous centuries to South America yet graphically separated as a distant and forbidding place [items 42–43]. The outline of the icebound continent was steadily updated through the rest of the century [item 35 in section 4]. Antarctica once again became the center of attention at the start of the new century, when the dramatic race for the North Pole [section 3] sparked a similar race to reach the opposite, South Pole. Although the race was won in 1911 by a team led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872–1928) [items 44 and 46], it is the ill-fated exploits and stiff-upper-lip courage of the British army captain, Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), that dominates public memory [item 52]. Scott led two expeditions, both funded by the Royal Geographical Society, which was also a major publisher of exploration accounts and maps of Antarctica [items 45 and 46, and item 62 in section 7].

Scott’s National Antarctic, or Discovery, Expedition (1901–1904) included the first aerial survey in Antarctica by balloon. Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton set out with dog teams and sledges, and they reached 82º16.5' South — a new “furthest south” — before scurvy, frostbite, and a shortage of supplies forced them to turn back [item 45]. The antagonism that developed between Scott and Shackleton subsequently led them to mount separate expeditions [see section 7].

After Shackleton just failed to reach the pole in 1909 [section 7], Scott organized the British Antarctic, or Terra Nova [item 48], Expedition (1910–1912). With four men, all hauling sledges, he followed the route pioneered by Shackleton. The party reached the Pole on January 17, 1912, only to discover the Norwegian flag that Amundsen had planted just a month before. Their return was gruesome. Five men shared rations meant for four and the weather was horrendous. Ravaged by hunger, scurvy, snow blindness, exhaustion, and injury, Scott and his four companions all perished [item 47].

A member of the search party that discovered their fate in October 1912 wrote, “… after we found the tent . . . snowed up and looking like a cairn. . . . Inside the tent were the bodies of Captain Scott, Doctor Wilson, and Lieutenant Bowers. They had pitched their tent well, and it had withstood all the blizzards of an exceptionally hard winter. . . . Wilson and Bowers were found in the attitude of sleep, their sleeping-bags closed over their heads as they would naturally close them. Scott died later. He had thrown back the flaps of his sleeping-bag and opened his coat . . . his arm flung across Wilson.”

Having served with Shackleton, as part of the advance team that laid in the food and fuel depots for Shackleton’s nearly successful attempt to reach the South Pole in 1909, Priestley returned to the Antarctic as a member of the Terra Nova Expedition. Priestly joined eight scientists at Terra Nova Bay for eight weeks of summer fieldwork, but the Terra Nova was unable to penetrate the ice pack to retrieve them, as arranged. Realizing that they would have to winter where they were, they excavated a small, twelve-foot by nine-foot ice cave in a snow drift, nicknamed “Inexpressible Island,” where they stayed for almost seven months, supplementing their meager rations with seal and penguin. With two of the party sick they left and walked for five weeks, fortuitously finding a cache of food left the previous year. They eventually arrived safely back at Cape Evans on November 7, 1912, only to be informed that Scott and the entire Polar party had perished months earlier.

Having won the tender from the British Admiralty to build a vessel for Antarctic exploration, the Dundee Shipbuilders Company laid down the keel in March 1900 and she was named “Discovery” in June 1900. Scott’s Discovery was barque-rigged. Her particular features, for ice work, included a rudder and screw which could be detached and lifted up through the deck at the stern, a massively reinforced bow whose stem was made up of blocks of scarfed wood, bolted and protected with steel plates, and heavily lined sides. She was launched by Lady Markham on 21 March 1901.

Both pieces of cutlery are hallmarked “RODGERS EP.” The fork is 7¼ inches long, the knife 8¼ inches.

Scott’s corpse and diaries were discovered in November 1912. Kathleen Scott was at sea on her way to meet him in New Zealand and did not receive the news until February 19, 1913. In this letter, written hurriedly and “without sleep,” she explained that she was forwarding to the admiral a letter to him that had been left with Scott’s diaries.

“It’s a glorious record wonderfully written stirring and inspiriting to the last degree — They would have got through if they hadn’t stood by their sick — & so I am very glad they did not get through . . . The last weeks of those 3 men is a wonderful tale & save for the brutal agony of having responsibilities unfulfilled there should be no regrets. He was the last to go & at the end he writes ‘Last entry — for God’s sake look after our people’ — One wishes that [he] hadn’t worried so . . .”

The great photographer Herbert George Ponting (1871–1935) put the exploits and tragedy of Scott’s last expedition into haunting visual form, creating in the process a body of the world’s finest Antarctic photography. He also wrote an important narrative of his experiences aboard ship and of life on the ice [56]. Ponting preserved 825 photographic negatives from Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition between 1910 and 1912: contact prints of 449 of the photographs are included in this album [57].