Scott's Last Expedition by Robert Falcon Scott

First published: 1913

Type of work: Journal of exploration

Time of work: 1910-1912

Locale: Antarctica

Principal Personages:

• Captain Robert Scott, R.N.,, in charge of the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910-1913
• Lieutenant Edward R. G. R. Evans, second in command of theexpedition
• Lieutenant Victor L. A. Campbell, in charge of the Eastern Party
• Edward A. Wilson, chief of the scientific staff
• Captain Laurence E. G. Oates,
• Lieutenant Henry R. Bowers, and
• Petty Officer Edgar Evans, members of the Polar Party
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Wilson’s assistant
• Ernest H. Shackleton, a member of Scott’s Discovery Expedition
• Roald Amundsen, discoverer of the South Pole, 1911

Analysis

The complete isolation and inaccessibility of Antarctica mean that all the literature relating to it falls into an equally self-contained unit. No man is a native of Antarctica, and it is the one part of the globe Western man can truly be said to have discovered; only in 1895 did he land on its shore. Three years later the first men to live through an Antarctic winter led to the Discovery Expedition under Captain Robert Falcon Scott R.N., from 1901 to 1904. The expedition spent two successive winters there. Scott thus became the first name associated with Antarctic living, and he established the pattern of arriving in summer, wintering, and exploring the following summer. Eight years later his death showed the perils not only of cold and blizzards but also of altitude, starvation, and scurvy which met those in search of the main prize in the Antarctic, the South Pole.

The South Pole has continued to dominate polar exploration in this century but not to the extent that it did before December 14, 1911, when Amundsen first reached it. The deaths of Scott and his party in March, 1912, closed that chapter, leaving the way free for the main twentieth century activity of scientific exploration. Operation Deepfreeze took over after the Geophysical Year and its men now live the year round at the Pole, using as their main base in Antarctica the same McMurdo Sound from which Scott and Shackleton set out for the Pole in 1911 and 1908.

Scott’s second, and last, expedition began as scientific exploration which included the Pole as a bid for popular support; the size and achievements of the expeditions and the fatal ending of the polar party have produced a whole sub-literature by some of the thirty-three members of the expedition—officers, scientists, and “men”—of which the best-known are SOUTH WITH SCOTT, by E. R. G. R. Evans, and THE WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The former, by the second in command of the expedition, was a result of hero worship of Scott; the latter serves as a corrective; written years later by a scientist, it is an attempt to place the whole expedition in context. This attempt was necessary because the primary source, SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION, was a two-volume assembly of records of which the first volume was rapidly separated from the second and reprinted alone many times. It contains “the personal journals of Captain R. F. Scott, R.N., C.V.O. on his journey to the South Pole.”

SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION has therefore two contexts: first, the two-volume work from which it comes, together with other books about the expedition. The second context is the record of Royal Navy exploration in the Antarctic, begun by Captain Cook in 1773 when he first penetrated the Antarctic Circle, and continued by Sir James Clark Ross in the nineteenth century when he discovered the Ross Sea and McMurdo Sound, and by Scott’s Discovery Expedition. From this last came Shackleton’s expedition 1901-1909, when he got to within two degrees latitude of the Pole and his colleagues discovered the South Magnetic Pole. But the book which gives the first volume of SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION both ironic and tragic overtones is Amundsen’s record of his success in first reaching the Pole, a month before Scott. The irony of failing not only to discover the Pole but also to get safely back is provided by the elaborate preparations for the polar dash which fill the latter part of Scott’s journal; the tragedy comes from the sight of the tracks of Amundsen’s dog teams, showing Scott how easily the Norwegians team had traveled to the Pole, while Scott’s party painfully manhandled their sledges most of the way there and most of the eight hundred miles back to McMurdo Sound.

Scott’s expedition consisted of a Shore Party and a Ship Party, the latter to sail the Terra Nova, a broken-down tramp steamer, to McMurdo Sound in 1911 and to return in 1912 (and in 1913) to pick up the Shore Party. The Shore Party was divided into the Main Party at the base at Cape Evans and the Eastern or Northern Party under Lieutenant Campbell to explore the Great Barrier of continuous ice which covered the southern part of the Ross Sea. Three journeys were made by the Main Party in the first year: first, the depot journey to One Ton Depot about one hundred miles south on the Great Barrier; second, the winter journey to Cape Crozier to study the embryology of the Emperor penguin; third, the first geological journey to the Western Mountains. Scott’s journal covers only the first of these; Campbell’s report with its record of a winter spent in an ice cave with no supplies except seal meat, is contained in the second volume of SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION, as are records of the winter journey and the first and second geological journeys.

The polar journey consisted of five parties: two tractors (a third sank through the ice while being unloaded from the Terra Nova) hauled supplies to the Mid-Barrier Depot, about one hundred and fifty miles south of One Ton Depot; a dog party took supplies to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier up which the rest struggled to get off the Barrier and on to the Polar Plateau; two other parties hauling sledges by hand returned from the top of the Glacier and from Three-Degree Depot. The polar party comprised five persons: Scott himself, E. A. Wilson, head of the scientific staff, Lieutenant Bowers, Captain Oates, and Petty Officer Evans, the only one of the “men” to be included; the decision to include Evans was made because of his size and strength which would be useful in pulling the sledges. Although the calculated rations in the depots could accommodate the extra man, they were planned to keep the party going, not to replete the exhausted strength of these human animals; the rations were also planned to combat scurvy, the dreaded disease of exploration, but they failed in this because, totally deficient in vitamins, they consisted largely of ship’s biscuit and pemmican. It is probable that Evans, on the same rations as smaller men, simply starved to death, and in this collapse of the strongest at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the return journey Scott could read the fate of his party. They became desperate. When they descended from the high Polar Plateau (over ten thousand feet) they no longer suffered from the altitude sickness but met with blizzards; the Polar night was coming on. Evans died a month before Oates walked out of the tent into a blizzard to give his starving companions a chance of reaching One Ton Depot. They perished within about eleven miles south of it.

SCOTT’S LAST EXPEDITION ends with the final letters of Scott; the “Message to the Public,” records of finding and burying the bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson, and a number of appendices. As the book develops, the reader’s foreknowledge of the end becomes increasingly tragic, giving to the final pages a glow which, on coldly rational grounds, they should not possess. Amundsen made it easily; he complains of having to rest fifteen hours a day because the dogs went so fast. One can add up the mistakes of Scott’s expedition beginning with its divided purpose of scientific exploration and reaching the Pole. One can also sense in the doggedness and rigidity of mind shown by Scott and many of his party something of the spirit which was to lead to the glory and horror and futility of World War I, which began the year after the last of Scott’s expedition returned to civilization.