Robert Falcon Scott

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on the 17th of January 1912, only to find a tent already standing there, left by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Inside was a letter dated the 18th of December. Scott's diary captures the blow without softening it: "The worst has happened … All the day dreams must go … Great God! This is an awful place."

  Scott never made it back. He and his four companions died on the return march, their tent becoming their tomb, somewhere on the ice approximately 12.5 miles short of the next supply depot. Eight months later, a search party found them. Beside their bodies lay 35 pounds of fossils they had refused to abandon even as they were dying.

  For decades after his death, Scott was celebrated as a martyr of exploration. Then came the revisionists, who called him a bungler. Then came the counter-revisionists, who called the revisionists wrong. What does the evidence actually show? That is the thread this documentary follows.

• 2. The Making of an Officer

  ›

  Scott was born on the 6th of June 1868, the third of six children, in Stoke Damerel near Devonport. His father John ran a small Plymouth brewery inherited from the previous generation. Naval and military service ran through the family: Scott's grandfather and four uncles had all served in the army or navy. For Scott and his younger brother Archie, a military career was less a choice than an expectation.

  At thirteen, Scott began his naval career as a cadet at Dartmouth, having passed the entrance examinations after preparation at Stubbington House School in Hampshire. By July 1883 he had passed out of Britannia as a midshipman, seventh in a class of twenty-six. On the 1st of March 1887, while stationed in St Kitts in the West Indies, he had his first encounter with Clements Markham, then Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, who watched a young Scott win a cutter race across the bay and made a mental note of the eighteen-year-old.

  Scott's career moved smoothly forward. He achieved his lieutenant's rank in 1889 and later graduated from torpedo training with first class certificates in both theory and practice. A mishap in the summer of 1893, when he ran a torpedo boat aground, earned him a mild rebuke but left no lasting mark on his record.

  The family's financial security did not hold. John Scott had sold the brewery and invested the proceeds badly, leaving himself virtually bankrupt at sixty-three and forcing a move to Shepton Mallet, Somerset. Then, three years after that, John died of heart disease. Then Scott's brother Archie died of typhoid fever in the autumn of 1898. By that point, the entire financial burden of supporting his mother and unmarried sisters rested on Scott alone. Promotion, and the pay that came with it, became urgent.

• 3. The Discovery Years

  ›

  Early in June 1899, Scott had a chance encounter in a London street with Clements Markham, by now knighted and President of the Royal Geographical Society. Markham mentioned a planned Antarctic expedition. A few days later, on the 11th of June, Scott appeared at the Markham residence and volunteered to lead it. His motivation, according to biographer David Crane, was the prospect of early command and a chance to distinguish himself, not any particular passion for polar exploration.

  The British National Antarctic Expedition that resulted, later called the Discovery Expedition, was a joint enterprise of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society. Scott sailed on the 6th of August 1901, departing with King Edward VII's blessing after the king visited the ship the previous day and appointed Scott a Member Fourth Class of the Royal Victorian Order.

  The fifty-strong party had almost no Antarctic or Arctic experience. Dogs were taken, and skis, but the dogs succumbed to disease in the first season. The expedition also lost a man: George Vince slipped over a precipice on the 11th of March 1902, after expedition members decided to leave their tent during a blizzard. Scurvy struck as well.

  Despite these setbacks, the southern journey undertaken by Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Edward Wilson reached a latitude of 82 degrees 17 minutes south, roughly 530 miles from the pole and a new southern record. The return march was grueling enough to cause Shackleton's physical collapse, leading to his early departure from the expedition. In the second year, Scott pushed west and discovered the Polar Plateau, on which the South Pole sits, a journey one writer described as one of the great polar journeys. Discovery returned to Britain in September 1904, and Scott came home a popular hero, promoted to captain and invited to Balmoral Castle.

• 4. Shackleton, Kathleen, and a Rivalry

  ›

  By early 1906, Scott was already querying the Royal Geographical Society about funding a future Antarctic expedition. When Shackleton announced his own plans to use Discovery's old McMurdo Sound base for a South Pole bid, Scott sent a letter claiming the area as his own "field of work" to which he had prior rights. Edward Wilson, the expedition's former zoologist, backed Scott, arguing his rights extended to the entire Ross Sea sector.

  The argument left a paper trail. A letter from Scott to a bookshop owner named Edward Stanford, dated in 1907 and only discovered in the shop archives in 2018, shows Scott objecting to a map that placed his and Shackleton's names together, implying what Scott called "dual leadership" between them, "not in accordance with fact." Shackleton eventually agreed, in a letter to Scott dated the 17th of May 1907, to work east of the 170 degrees west meridian. He could not keep that promise after failing to find alternative landing grounds and set up at Cape Royds, near the old Discovery base. The polar historian Beau Riffenburgh later stated that the original promise "should never ethically have been demanded" from Shackleton.

  In 1907, Scott first met the sculptor Kathleen Bruce at a private luncheon. She had studied under Auguste Rodin, and her circle included Isadora Duncan, Pablo Picasso, and Aleister Crowley. After a stormy courtship that also involved a rival suitor, the would-be novelist Gilbert Cannan, Scott and Kathleen married on the 2nd of September 1908 at the Chapel Royal in Hampton Court Palace. Their only child, Peter Markham Scott, was born on the 14th of September 1909. Peter would later found the World Wide Fund for Nature.

• 5. Terra Nova Sets Out

  ›

  Terra Nova sailed from Cardiff on the 15th of June 1910, an old converted whaler carrying Scott's hopes for the pole. Arriving in Melbourne in October 1910, Scott received a telegram from Amundsen: "Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic Amundsen." A race had begun that Scott had not entered.

  Scott's plan for reaching the pole was layered: motors to carry loads partway, horses and dogs for the middle sections, and man-hauling on the polar plateau. His engineer Reginald Skelton had developed a caterpillar track for snow surfaces. After consulting the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen during motor trials in Norway in March 1910, Scott added ponies and skis to the plan. The dog buyer Cecil Meares was not an experienced horse dealer, and the Manchurian ponies he selected proved mostly ill-suited to Antarctic conditions.

  Misfortune hit early. Terra Nova nearly sank in a storm between New Zealand and the Antarctic, then spent twenty days trapped in pack ice, far longer than other ships had experienced. A motor sledge sank through the sea ice at Cape Evans during unloading. The initial depot-laying journey was hampered by poor weather and weak ponies. Lawrence Oates, who was in charge of the ponies, advised Scott to kill the animals for food and push the main supply depot to its planned position at 80 degrees south. Scott refused. One Ton Depot was laid 35 miles short of where Oates had urged. Oates reportedly told Scott: "Sir, I'm afraid you'll come to regret not taking my advice."

  By the 2nd of August 1911, after a winter at base camp, Scott wrote with renewed confidence: "I feel sure we are as near perfection as experience can direct."

• 6. The Final March

  ›

  On the 20th of October 1911, Scott issued written orders to the dog driver Meares specifying that Meares should depart south around the first week of February to meet the returning polar party, aiming to intercept them near latitude 82 or 82.30 on the 1st of March. The march south began on the 1st of November 1911, with motors, dogs, and horses carrying sledges. By the 4th of January 1912, Scott made his selection: five men would press on for the pole itself, Wilson, Bowers, Oates, and Edgar Evans accompanying Scott. Three others, Teddy Evans, William Lashly, and Tom Crean, turned back.

  The group spotted Amundsen's black flag on the 16th of January, then reached the pole the following day. Scott's diary on that date records simply the worst of all possible arrivals. The return journey of 862 miles began on the 19th of January.

  Edgar Evans's condition had concerned Scott as early as the 23rd of January. A fall on the 4th of February left Evans "dull and incapable." He died near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the 17th of February. The remaining four men still had 400 miles of the Ross Ice Shelf to cross.

  At base camp, the relief situation was unraveling. When the Terra Nova arrived at Cape Evans at the start of February, Atkinson chose to unload the ship rather than take the dogs south as ordered. When he finally moved south, he encountered the scurvy-stricken Teddy Evans. Atkinson then tried to send the navigator Wright south to meet Scott, but the chief meteorologist blocked that. On the 25th of February, Atkinson sent the short-sighted Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who could not navigate, only as far as One Ton Depot, effectively canceling the planned rendezvous at latitude 82.

  Meanwhile, Scott's party reached the 82-degree latitude meeting point three days ahead of schedule on the 27th of February, noting in his diary: "We are naturally always discussing possibility of meeting dogs, where and when, etc. It is a critical position." No dogs came.

  By the 10th of March the temperature had fallen below minus forty degrees Celsius. Oates, whose feet had become frostbitten, voluntarily walked out of the tent on the 16th of March. Scott wrote down his last words: "I am just going outside and may be some time." The three remaining men made their final camp on the 19th of March, 12.5 miles from One Ton Depot. A fierce blizzard pinned them there. Scott gave up his diary on the 23rd of March. His final entry, dated the 29th of March, ended: "Last entry. For God's sake look after our people."

  The search party discovered the tent on the 12th of November 1912. Norwegian Tryggve Gran, who had been with the expedition, described what he saw: "snowcovered til up above the door, with Scott in the middle, half out of his... the frost had made the skin yellow and transparent and I've never seen anything worse in my life." The tent became the men's permanent burial place. A cairn of snow was raised above it, topped with a cross made from Gran's own skis.

• 7. Legacy and the Long Argument

  ›

  Terra Nova reached Oamaru, New Zealand, on the 10th of February 1913, and the world learned what had happened. Within days, the London Evening News called for the story to be read to schoolchildren throughout Britain, to coincide with a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral on the 14th of February. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts Association, declared: "There is plenty of pluck and spirit left in the British after all."

  Amundsen, for his part, is reported to have said on learning of Scott's death: "I would gladly forgo any honour or money if thereby I could have saved Scott his terrible death."

  In the dozen years after the tragedy, more than thirty monuments and memorials were erected in Britain alone. These included the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge. Scott's widow Kathleen sculpted a statue for his New Zealand base in Christchurch. Personal relics ended up distributed across multiple institutions: his snow shoes and sledging goggles at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, his pocket watch at the Museum of Timekeeping at Upton Hall in Nottinghamshire, his sledging flag in Exeter Cathedral.

  The reputation held for decades. The 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic became the third most popular film in Britain the following year. Then Roland Huntford's 1979 dual biography Scott and Amundsen depicted Scott as a "heroic bungler," and that characterisation became, in the words of biographer Max Jones, "the contemporary orthodoxy." Travel writer Paul Theroux called Scott "confused and demoralised... an enigma to his men, unprepared and a bungler." A 2002 United Kingdom poll naming the hundred greatest Britons placed Shackleton eleventh and Scott fifty-fourth.

  The counter-argument built slowly. Susan Solomon's 2001 study The Coldest March documented the extraordinarily adverse weather conditions of February and March 1912, including temperatures that fell to below minus forty Celsius, and characterised the dominant critical narrative as a "Myth of Scott as a bungler." In 2012, Karen May published her discovery that Scott had in fact issued written orders in October 1911 for the dog teams to meet him on the return, directly contradicting Huntford's claim that Scott had given only a casual oral instruction. May concluded: "Huntford's scenario was pure invention based on an error; it has led a number of polar historians down a regrettable false trail."

  David Crane's 2005 biography attempted to restore Scott's humanity without the stridency of either camp. Crane argued that what happened to Scott's reputation derives from the way the world changed after the First World War. At the moment of Scott's death, people found in his story evidence that the qualities they valued in themselves were not extinct. Later generations, shaped by the carnage of that war, read the same qualities of duty, self-sacrifice, and hierarchy differently. Among the personal effects retrieved from Scott's body was the final note he left the world, his "Message to the Public": "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."