South

by National Maritime Museum

  Both also derived some wrong messages from their experiences. If either had been less insularly British, they would have realised from Norwegian experience that the failures of their dogs resulted partly from their own failures as dog-handlers. Had things been different, they would have relied mainly on dogs in their further expeditions and Shackleton would probably have been first to the Pole in 1909. Scott and Shackleton’s strong and very different personalities and the competitive tensions between them also fuelled a strong personal rivalry.

  But, of course, this rivalry could not be aired in public. The attainment of the South Pole must be first and foremost for Britain’s glory. When, in 1907, Shackleton announced his Nimrod expedition, Scott was angry at what he saw as trespassing on his territory, but his terse correspondence with Shackleton remained strictly private. All the public knew was that yet another British venture was underway. Shackleton’s subsequent return in 1909, after sledging to within 156km (97 miles) of the Pole, was greeted with rapture and, within a few months, a knighthood. Shackleton was more comfortable with fame than Scott and relished courting the public. In articles about ‘How I made for the South Pole’, he charmed his readers with light-hearted tales of how the extreme cold had fuelled his passion for sweet puddings and how the explorers painted their hut with scenes of blazing fires and of Joan of Arc being burned to a crisp to ‘convey at least an imagination of warmth’.

  A master of public relations, Shackleton underplayed the drama of his experiences and this was approvingly noted. One paper proclaimed that: ‘It is well that popular triumph should be accorded to other than military heroes. Lieutenant Shackleton and his companions have been the lions of the month, and never did a lion roar more modestly and more becomingly than the gallant hero, who in his speeches has shown a fund of dry humour not usually found among such men.’

  Another rejoiced: ‘We seem to be living in times when men have reverted to the age of the elemental heroes.’

  Shackleton’s decision to turn back, when so close to the Pole, was seen, in itself, as courageous. The Dublin Express comment that ‘it is a brave thing to turn back’.

  Lacking Scott’s literary application, Shackleton employed a ghost writer to help him produce The Heart of the Antarctic, which was published to critical acclaim. One journal exulted: ‘What may be done with a free hand by a man full of ability and confidence has been demonstrated this year by EH Shackleton.’ It went on: ‘He was fitted for his task by the possession of great organising power, a vivid imagination, the originality of genius in devising plans, and sufficient experience on which to base them, but not enough to make caution hamper his ambition.’ In other words, a hero’s flair and daring mattered more than experience. It was a paean in praise of that most British phenomenon, the gifted amateur.

  We seem to be living in times when men have reverted to the age of the elemental heroes.

  The first edition of The Heart of the Antarctic. Both Scott and Shackleton recognised the importance of publishing their expedition experiences for a wider audience.

  And it was as a gifted amateur that Scott again went south on the final, fatal Terra Nova expedition of 1910. Dogs were taken but not taken seriously. Many of Scott’s colleagues were expert scientists but not one was an expert explorer. Two of the four men he was to take to the South Pole – Captain ‘Titus’ Oates and ‘Birdie’ Bowers – had never set foot on Antarctica before but had applied to join the expedition because it promised adventure. The other two, Edward Wilson and Edgar Evans, had been with Scott on the Discovery and had no more experience than their leader, to whom they felt great loyalty.

  Scott’s team contrasted starkly with Amundsen and his men. The Norwegian had chosen exploration as a career, cutting his teeth on Adrien de Gerlache’s Belgica expedition, and was a focused ‘professional’ experienced in travel over snow and ice in the Arctic, and an expert skier and handler of dogs. From the moment Scott received the telegram from Amundsen informing him that he, too, was going south, Scott knew inwardly that the Norwegian might well beat him. This took a psychological toll. Yet publicly he had to preserve the good sportsmanship and coolness the public expected. Media ‘hype’ had prepared it for a British victory despite Amundsen’s late intervention. Questioned by a journalist about his chances, Scott made the nonchalant response: ‘We may get through, we may not. We may have accidents to some of our transports, to the sledges or to the animals. We may lose our lives. We may be wiped out. It is all a question that lies with providence and luck.’ On the surface Scott had to appear cheerful and, above all, sporting. This was, after all, the era of good sports, the luck of the game and plucky losers.

  We may lose our lives. We may be wiped out. It is all a question that lies with providence and luck.

  And Scott was soon to be cast as the archetypal ‘plucky loser’. The news that he had reached the Pole only to find himself beaten by Amundsen, and to perish on the return, prompted an immense national outpouring of grief on a scale comparable to the reaction to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997. Headlines like ‘Eight days starvation’, ‘His dying Appeal to England’ and ‘Homage to Heroes’ held the country in thrall.

  Scott with Kathleen on Quail Island, New Zealand, during a visit to the expedition ponies, November 1910. Her support and encouragement was vital for Scott, as she understood his insecurities.

  The poignant photographs of the exhausted, downcast party at the Pole gave their tragedy a terrible immediacy. But it was above all Scott’s letters and diaries, written in pencil because ink would have frozen, and found beneath his body, that fuelled the grief and sense of loss. If their bodies, books, letters and photographic film had not been found, the impact would have been much less. They gave substance to the heroic image. People could relive, day by day, through his eyes, a truly epic tale of men battling bravely against ever-increasing odds; selflessly caring for their starving, frostbitten comrades; dragging their geological specimens with them until the end out of duty and pride but eventually succumbing in that blizzard-whipped green tent, just a few miles from a depot of supplies that might have saved them. He wrote of colleagues who were ‘unendingly cheerful’ although they knew they were doomed. Scott’s understated, carefully chosen words resonated and formed an elegiac and heroic epitaph: ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell … which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’

  Of course, his tale did stir hearts. In particular his account of Oates’s death caused a collective lump in the throat and huge national pride. Here was a man who, rather than put his friends at risk, walked out into a blizzard to die with the briefest of comments: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ It was the quintessential ideal of a British officer and gentleman – unsentimental, without self-pity, self-sacrificing. The Daily Mail lauded the ‘immortal chivalry of Captain Oates’. His former army comrades were quick to write articles recalling his gritty valour during the Boer War, which had won him the nickname ‘No Surrender Oates’. Ironically, the reopening of his old Boer War wound, one of the effects of scurvy, was probably a major contributor to his death.

  Oates’s real thoughts and feelings can only be guessed. During the dark Antarctic winter at Cape Evans he had told his comrades that anyone whose weakness was jeopardising other members of the team had a duty to shoot himself. His last letters betray a passionate attachment to life and longing for home, yet tortured by frostbite and denied his wish to die in his sleep, he had indeed contemplated suicide. His thoughts and feelings on the day he walked to his death were more complex than the public perception of simplistic heroes. Each reader must decide how much irony to read into those famous farewell words.

  Similarly, the image of Scott that crystallised in the popular imagination was simplistic. His earlier letters to his wife, Kathleen, reveal his real self. It was only to her that he had felt safe to confide his dislike of the Navy and the rigidity that his creative, dreaming side had found so stifling: ‘Knock a few shackles
off me, you find as great a vagabond as you… I shall never fit in my round hole. The part of a machine has got to fit – yet how I hate it sometimes… I love the open air, the trees, the fields and the seas, the open spaces of life and thought.’

  The Daily Mirror made showing the cairn built over Scott and his companions in November 1912 front page news, reflecting overwhelming public interest in the fate of the expedition.

  But private doubts had no place in a heroic tale. Just as Scott had concealed his true feelings in life, so they were suppressed after his death. Kathleen learned of her husband’s death while she sailed south to New Zealand for what should have been their reunion. In deep despair she opened her diary and confided her feelings. She tried to comfort herself with the hope that, before he died, ‘the horror of his responsibility left him, for I think never was there a man with such a sense of responsibility and duty…’ The word ‘horror’ was replaced by ‘weight’ in the published version of the diary. The idea that Scott might have felt ‘horror’ at his responsibilities would have jarred with his heroic image. Just as with the human failings of Livingstone, General Gordon and Baden-Powell, his insecurities must not be revealed.

  The press played a key role in Scott’s metamorphosis into a national icon. They were quick to make comparisons with another recent and shocking tragedy, the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, when women and children were flung into boats by men who knew themselves doomed, while the band played till the end. Papers reminded their readers that many of the British passengers had displayed the same cool courage and selfless concern for others. Even if there was increasing and uneasy acceptance of Darwin’s theory that man was descended from the apes, and of Freud’s emerging theories of the human psyche, Scott and his men, like the Titanic’s passengers, seemed to epitomise man’s nobler instincts. But as one leader put it: ‘Captain Scott died in more awful circumstances than the Titanic.’

  The public were mesmerised. Thousands attended a memorial service in St Paul’s. On the same day the 750,000 children of London’s County Council schools were told Scott’s story by their teachers. The Daily Mirror commented: ‘What English boy or girl may not gain courage by saying “I will be brave as Captain Scott was – as he would wish me to be.”’ A memorial fund was flooded with far more money than Scott had managed, with much effort, to raise in sponsorship. Kathleen was given the status of a wife of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath, on the grounds that this honour would have been bestowed on Scott had he survived. She was a talented sculptress and was commissioned to create several statues of her husband.

  Tales about heroes generally require villains. Amundsen, genuinely distressed by Scott’s death and needlessly tormented by the thought that he should have left supplies for him at the Pole, was tailor-made for the role. He was foreign. He was seen as an interloper. Even worse, perhaps, he was a ‘professional’ whose tactics did not conform to the heroic ‘amateur’ mould. His achievements based on dogs rather than man-hauling seemed less virile and manly than Scott’s. Put crudely, according to the chauvinist press he had won but he had not ‘played the game’.

  The grimness of the First World War gave Scott’s tragic expedition and Oates’s self-sacrifice a further, deeper significance. Their unseen battle and ultimate death in the unsullied white wastes of Antarctica seemed comfortingly pure amid doubts about what the pain, mud and blood of the trenches were achieving. Shackleton’s Endurance expedition, which set out in 1914, was similarly seized on by the press. Reports of his progress and even subsequent fears for his life were a welcome distraction from worrying news from the Front. By 1915 the papers were attracting their readers’ attention with such headlines as ‘Bad News from the Antarctic’ and ‘Shackleton’s Plight’. News of his survival reached Britain on the day of the Battle of Jutland. At a time when millions had already died, the public were cheered to learn that, despite appalling odds, Shackleton had not lost a single man. The news transcended national barriers: even the German press commented favourably. As with Scott’s last expedition, one of the most powerful heroic images was the gradual focusing down of the story onto the leader. First Shackleton had all his men with him, then he took only five on the boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia. Finally, he led just two companions over the mountains and ice of South Georgia to find help.

  As generations passed, the circumstances of Scott’s death and his extraordinary gift as a writer established him, rather than Shackleton, as the leading national hero until the reassessments of the 1960s and 1970s. Shackleton has now emerged alongside him as, perhaps, a more ‘modern’ hero – an inspirational leader with shrewd judgement and the common touch. His comment that he turned back from the Pole in 1909 out of a belief that his wife would rather be married to a live donkey than a dead lion is telling. So are some of his decisions, like jettisoning the team’s sleeping bags when they set out across South Georgia. He was a brilliant calculator of risk and it is easy to see why so many management consultants today use him as a case study in courses about risk and crisis management, and leadership skills. He did not allow his feelings to upset his judgement, as Scott did when he decided to take four not three men with him to the Pole. Amundsen, too, seems in tune with our own time. His organisational skills, logical mind and strong focus are qualities we value and admire today. And it should not be forgotten that Amundsen was first to the Pole, but that this was also just one achievement in a remarkable exploration career.

  Perceptions of heroism vary across generations. What seems to be determination in one age can appear as obsession in another, self-sacrifice can appear to be self-indulgence or even self-destruction, optimism becomes rashness, and bravery just foolhardiness. Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen were all physically strong, brave and undoubted ‘heroes’. However, from our perspective today we can see how part of Scott’s heroism – his successful struggle to master his own weaknesses – remained hidden, Amundsen’s achievement was denigrated and Shackleton’s spectacular contribution for a while overshadowed. The passing of time brings greater clarity and objectivity, though it can also make us more critical and suspicious of the ‘heroes’ of earlier times. But the story of the race for the South Pole transcends this: it has an extraordinary, universal power and rightly moves us still.

  4 THE RACE TO THE POLE

  by Pieter van der Merwe

  Exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic in the hundred years before the First World War involved similar risks and many of the same people. There was also a broad distinction between two types of expedition, irrespective of which Pole it was. The first, dominated by the British, involved largely official naval parties, heavily manned and well equipped, with a generally scientific and geographical motive. They often made arduous overland journeys, largely man-hauling their sledges, which became a British orthodoxy. Some casualties usually resulted, although the loss of Franklin’s expedition was exceptional. The second was the speculative hunting operations of whalers or sealers. These arrived in the Antarctic with experience of Arctic conditions and sometimes a non-commercial leavening of private scientific interest. While the Enderbys best represent the British involvement in such activity up to the 1840s (see here), by the 1890s it was the Norwegians for whom it was a more significant national business. Generally, this type of foray attempted little or no land travel, for obvious reasons.

  In between the Enderbys and the Norwegians, there were also other scientific expeditions, with or without some level of naval support. At the same time as the Discovery was preparing to head south, so too were a German party under Professor von Drygalski; Swedish and French parties to Graham Land on the Antarctic Peninsula under Dr Otto Nordenskjöld and Dr JB Charcot respectively; and another to the Weddell Sea under the experienced Scottish naturalist and explorer Dr William S Bruce. While both the Discovery and Nimrod expeditions fell into this bracket, the former was Royal Naval in its approach, scale and methods, whereas the latter had much in common with de Gerlache’s equally han
d-to-mouth and romantically motivated Belgica venture (see here), though it achieved much more.

  Scott represents the end of a long tradition of Royal Naval officers who took up polar exploration primarily as a means of advancing their careers, and he might have retired as an admiral had he not died as a result. Albeit not a commercial voyager in the whalers’ sense, Shackleton was no less a career seaman seeking the rewards of enterprise, though he showed no gift for accumulating fortune. He, too, went to the Antarctic by chance, caught the polar ‘bug’ and aimed to exploit his success as an explorer, both financially and for new projects as an early example of a ‘media celebrity’. His personality and presentational skills were much more suited to this than either Amundsen’s or Scott’s (though Scott was the best writer), and the fact that he was knighted on his return in 1909 was partly a recognition of his success as a public figure as well as his achievements as an explorer. The acclaim that his ‘near-miss’ at the South Pole garnered, in the year that also saw the North Pole reached, put polar exploration back on the British public agenda.

  Fram was specially designed for Nansen’s 1893–1896 Arctic polar-drift expedition, then reused for Sverdrup’s 1898–1902 Canadian Arctic expedition. Neglected for years after Amundsen’s Antarctic expedition, she eventually became a museum ship in 1936.