South

by National Maritime Museum

  On 4 January the other three cheered and waved as Scott, Wilson, Oates, Edgar Evans and Bowers diminished to specks on the horizon, vanishing into whiteness, memory and legend. They then turned on their own desperate journey home. It was to end with Teddy Evans on the brink of death from scurvy at Corner Camp, on the Barrier near Ross Island, in mid-February 1912. He only survived thanks to Lashly and Crean – the former tending him while the latter made a heroic single-handed dash to fetch rescue from Hut Point.

  Scott’s progress, initially fair, was soon bedevilled by heavy surfaces and sastrugi – wind-formed ridges of snow – which made the use of skis so difficult that he temporarily abandoned them. On the 8th the party was tent-bound by a minor blizzard (though no worse than had seen Amundsen make 21km – 13 miles – a day in similar conditions) and on 9th Scott jubilantly passed Shackleton’s furthest south, exactly four years to the day he had been there. It was his last cause for rejoicing. Everyone was now increasingly cold as malnutrition and exhaustion tightened their grip, with only the hope that they would beat Amundsen to the Pole buoying them up. The ‘appalling possibility’ that they would not came true on 16 January 1912 when Bowers picked out a black spot in the distance. It was a marker flag near the remains of a camp, with signs of many dogs.

  Amundsen had laid his last depot 153km (95 miles) from the Pole on 8–9 December, heading out well-rested on 10th. As for his outward journey as a whole, his target distance was 24km (15 miles) a day, which he rarely attempted to exceed, though his final average was 26km (16 miles) a day. Dogs, sledges and skis all continued to run well through expertise in dealing with the same snow conditions that added to Scott’s problems. The weather was generally fine and their main problems were altitude-related, though after they reached a height of 3,200 metres (10,500 feet) on 12 December, the run south then became a gentle downward slope: Scott’s relatively slower ascent up the Beardmore at least gave him more time to acclimatise.

  Hanssen’s photograph of Wisting, Bjaaland, Hassel and Amundsen at the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Amundsen wrote that planting the flag together ‘was the privilege of all those who had risked their lives’.

  Wisting or Hanssen with his dog team at the South Pole, 14–16 December 1911. Seventeen of the original 52 dogs made it to the Pole and 12 made it back. Photograph by Bjaarland.

  On 15th at 3pm in the afternoon, with Amundsen skiing in the lead, his drivers cried ‘Halt’ and told him that the sledge meters said they were now at the Pole. ‘God be thanked’ was his simple reaction. All five held the Norwegian flag as they planted it and Amundsen named the area the King Haakon VII Plateau. The formal photographs he took failed because of damage to his camera, and only Bjaaland’s private snaps record the scene. Mindful of the Arctic disputes of Cook and Peary, the Norwegians undertook careful observation over the next two sunny days, and fixed what they thought to be the exact point of the geographical pole about 10km (6 miles) further on, marking it with a spare tent and a flag. Here they left a letter addressed to King Haakon VII of Norway with a request to Scott to forward it, thus verifying their achievement: it was later found with his body. On 18th they marched out again. Amundsen left behind surplus equipment with a note inviting Scott to take anything he needed, and considered also leaving a can of fuel. Unfortunately, believing he would be well supplied, he did not.

  Despite seriously missing their bearings for a while near the top of the Axel Heiberg Glacier, the Norwegians and their 12 surviving dogs returned to Framheim on 26 January 1912, fit and well, down their regular depot-line across the Barrier. They had covered more than 2,575km (1,600 miles) in 99 days. The type and quality of their dried rations and plenty of fresh meat had prevented any trace of scurvy and the men had even put on weight on the return. Fram was already in the offing and on 30th they sailed for Hobart, Tasmania, where they arrived on 7 March to announce their great news, after a long and stormy passage.

  When Scott found Amundsen’s flag, and then his tent on 18 January, it was under cloud, wind and a temperature of -30˚C. ‘Great God!’ he wrote in despair, ‘this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.’ Bowers consoled himself with the heroic struggle of the journey, and only Oates was sufficiently detached to note that Amundsen ‘had his head screwed on right … they seem to have had a comfortable trip with their dog teams, very different from our wretched man-hauling’. They left a note at Amundsen’s tent, collecting his letter and a spare pair of reindeer mitts for Bowers. A short distance away they then erected a cairn where, wrote Scott, ‘we put up our poor slighted Union Jack, and photographed ourselves – mighty cold work all of it’. On the 19th, they marched out facing ‘800 miles of solid dragging – and goodbye to most of the daydreams’.

  Inspecting the tent left by Amundsen at the South Pole. Scott wrote: ‘The Norwegians have forestalled us and are first at the Pole … I am very sorry for my loyal companions.’ Photograph by Bowers, 18 January 1912.

  It was a depressing journey from the beginning. A sail helped push the sledge on a following wind but this soon became too strong, obscuring their outward tracks and making the small cairns and depots that had marked their course hard to find. Bowers was grateful to retrieve his skis on 31 January, having marched 360 miles without them, but by then Wilson was badly snow-blind and had strained a leg, Oates’s toes were turning black and Evans was failing. The largest man of the party, Evans was suffering most from malnutrition, his cut hand was worsening, his fingernails were dropping off and his extroverted confidence had become withdrawn taciturnity. On 4 February, when both he and Scott fell into a crevasse, Scott noted how Evans seemed ‘dull and incapable’ as they were rescued. On 8th, after a ‘panic’ over the loss of a day’s supply of biscuit, he ordered a day of relaxed ‘geologising’ as they began to descend the Beardmore – which improved morale, though it wasted precious time and added 16kg (35lb) to their load. (The samples were to prove important, however, by demonstrating Antarctica’s origin in the Gondwana southern supercontinent.)

  At the South Pole. Captain Oates, Lieutenant Bowers, Captain Scott, Dr Wilson and Petty Officer Evans pose with the Union Flag and sledge flags. Photograph by Bowers, 18 January 1912.

  Things rapidly worsened thereafter, as they lost their way and ran very short of supplies until Wilson spotted their mid-glacier depot. Then on 17 February, after Evans had fallen behind several times, they had to look for him and found him in a state of mental and physical collapse. He had lost consciousness by the time they got him into the tent and, mercifully, he died in the night. The reasons are unclear but malnutrition, exposure, scurvy and perhaps concussion from one of his falls cover the probabilities. They sat with him for a couple of hours but left no note of what they did with his body, then made a rapid descent to the Barrier.

  Here there were plentiful supplies of pony meat at the Shambles Camp but a worrying shortfall of fuel at their Southern Barrier depot. Unlike Amundsen’s hermetically sealed containers, Scott’s had a leather washer through which the paraffin could leak or evaporate as extreme cold perished the leather, especially if the tin was also exposed to sunshine. Temperatures were now dropping to between -30 and -40˚C with the advancing season and they were only making about 10 or 12km (6–7 miles) a day. Oates stopped keeping a diary on 24th and Wilson on 27th, leaving Scott the only one recording their slowing progress. On 1 March they arrived at their mid-Barrier depot to find a further critical shortage of fuel, with Oates finally owning up to the desperate state of his frostbitten feet. By 6th he could no longer pull and by 10th he probably knew he had no chance. This was the day that Cherry-Garrard, Gerov and the dogs, after confusion over Scott’s orders concerning lookout missions and the rescue of Evans and Lashly, finally abandoned a six-day wait for the Polar Party at One Ton depot and headed for home. On 11th Scott was around 88km (55 miles) from One Ton, with seven days of food, little fuel, and the probability that both would run out two days’ march before the depot.


  The bitter wind, low temperatures and their failing strength now kept them all longer in the tent, and they began to lose track of dates. Scott had ordered Wilson to share out all their opiates, sufficient for painless suicide. They were not used. On what was probably the evening of 16th, Oates’s gangrenous feet made it impossible for him to continue and he went to sleep hoping not to wake. When he did, there was a blizzard blowing and it was his 32nd birthday. No one stopped him when, as Scott recorded, he said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’, opened the tent and was gone.

  On 21 March the last three were some 18km (11 miles) from One Ton, already trapped for two days in their tent by another blizzard, and at the end of their fuel and rations. Scott was now in the worst condition with a gangrenous right foot, and had started writing his last letters as early as 16th. Wilson and Bowers, who were still the fittest, considered a joint dash to the depot for fuel and supplies, but the weather prevented any move. Beyond One Ton, if they could find it, there were 210km (130 miles) to go and Scott may have argued it was better that their bodies and records be found together than lost separately in forlorn hopes. Tragically, had the depot been laid where originally intended they would already have reached it. Exactly when and how they died is unknown but the last entry in Scott’s diary is dated 29 March. Even at the end, his literary gift did not desert him:

  Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…

  Outside… it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

  It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. For God’s sake look after our people.

  R. Scott.

  The bodies were discovered seven months later. Atkinson and ten others had been resupplied by Terra Nova and were left with the dilemma of whether to search for the dead or to try and rescue Campbell’s party, which had spent a second winter unrelieved, living in a snow cave on the coast of South Victoria Land. It proved a short search for Scott, however, the tent being found two weeks’ march south from Cape Evans on 12 November 1912. Atkinson recovered their papers, the sledge, the geological samples and various personal items before collapsing the tent on the bodies and building a large cairn over the spot. A search for Oates proved fruitless and only his abandoned sleeping bag was found. On 27th, Campbell and his men miraculously turned up unassisted at Hut Point. It was above here on Observation Hill that a large wooden cross was erected as a monument to Scott and his four companions as soon as Terra Nova arrived in January 1913, now with a recovered Teddy Evans back in command. It still stands, bearing their names and a line chosen by Cherry-Garrard from Tennyson’s Ulysses: ‘To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.’

  The Polar Party’s tent as found by the relief expedition. ‘We have found them – to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it…’, recorded Cherry-Garrard in his diary on 12 November 1912.

  Scott’s sealskin ski overshoes, recovered from the tent by the relief expedition. Their battered condition reflects the extreme conditions they experienced as the Polar Party returned.

  This canvas bag contained Scott’s diaries for the polar journey. The edited diaries were very popular on publication, giving vivid immediacy as the heroic story became a tragedy.

  These snow goggles, worn by Scott, were to prevent snow blindness from the glare of the sun on snow. The goggles were removed from the tent and returned to his widow.

  5 FOOD FOR THE RACE TO THE POLE

  by Robert E. Feeney

  The role of vitamins in preventing many diseases had not yet been shown in 1911, the year of Scott and Amundsen’s attempts to reach the South Pole and just a year before the Polish scientist Casimir Funk gave vitamins their name. For the avoidance of scurvy, the disease caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet, explorers could only have faith in the well-known recommendations of the 18th-century Royal Naval surgeon Dr James Lind In 1753, Lind first demonstrated the efficacy of lemon juice as anti-scorbutic, although the less effective lime juice became more widely used at sea in the 19th century. Later explorers also held the near-opposite belief that canned meats, when subject to spoilage, could contain a poisonous agent that caused scurvy.

  Little new scientific information relating to scurvy and vitamins, especially vitamin B, came to light before Scott sailed in the Terra Nova, which left him still at the point he had been when in the Discovery, with perhaps a few more concerns. He had to rely on common sense, previous experiences and reports from other expeditions. His arrangements in 1911 were therefore little different from those he made for the Antarctic in 1901, after which he had summarised his belief in the causes of scurvy as follows: ‘For centuries, and until quite recently, it was believed that the antidote to scurvy lay in vegetable acids; scurvy grass was sought by the older voyages, and finally lime-juice was made, and remains, a legal necessity for ships travelling on the high seas. Behind this belief lies a vast amount of evidence, but a full consideration of this evidence is beset with immense difficulties. For instance, although it is an undoubted fact that with the introduction of lime-juice scurvy was largely diminished, yet it is apt to be forgotten that there were other causes which might have contributed to this result; for at the same time sea voyages were being largely reduced by steam power, and owners were forced to provide much better food for their men… I understand that scurvy is now believed to be ptomaine poisoning, caused by the virus of the bacterium of decay in meat, and in plain language, as long as a man continues to assimilate this poison he is bound to get worse, and when he ceases to add to the quantity taken the system tends to throw it off, and the patient recovers. It has been pointed out that scurvy depends largely on environment, and there can be no doubt that severe or insanitary conditions of life contribute to the ravages of the disease. Indeed, we saw how this might be from the outbreak in our western party, but I do not think such conditions can be regarded as prime cause.’ (RF Scott, The Voyage of the ‘Discovery’.)

  Watercolour drawing of the leg of a patient, aged 50, who had scorbutus (scurvy) of 12 months’ standing. By Thomas Godart, 1887.

  A 38-year-old man suffering from scurvy. Illustration from Kranken-Physiognomik by KH Baumgärtner, 1929.

  According to Scott’s listings, his daily rations for the Discovery expedition contained 243.8g (8.6oz) of protein, 127.7g (4.4oz) of fat and 442.3g (15.6oz) of carbohydrate. This works out to be about 3,500 calories per day. The amount of food (in ounces) carried per day, per man, as originally outlined by Scott was: biscuit, 12.0; oatmeal, 1.5; pemmican (preserved meat), 7.6; red ration (peameal and bacon powder), 1.1; plasmon (meat concentrate), 2.0; pea flour, 1.5; cheese, 2.0; chocolate, 1.1; cocoa, 0.7; sugar, 3.8. In addition, small quantities of tea, onion powder, pepper and salt were available. Scott deserves much credit for his attention to the rations on this expedition. He carefully compared his daily allowance of 33.5oz (1kg) to those of earlier polar explorers, including McClintock (1.19kg/42oz), Nares (1.13kg/40oz) and Parry (0.57kg/20oz), noting that Parry’s sledging trips were short and that his party must still have been famished. On the Terra Nova expedition, Scott used the 1911 midwinter foray to obtain Emperor penguin eggs at Cape Crozier, on the far side of Ross Island, as an opportunity to experiment on diets. Three different diets were allocated to Dr Edward Wilson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and ‘Birdie’ Bowers looking at combinations of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. However, these ambitions had to be sacrificed due to the very harsh conditions. Wilson wrote: ‘On July 6 [1911] Cherry felt the need for more food, and would have chosen fat, either butter or pemmican, had he not been experimenting on a large biscuit allowance. So he increased his biscuits to twelve a day, and found it did away to some extent with his desire for more food and fat. But he occasionally h
ad heartburn, and had certainly felt the cold more than Bowers and I have, and has had more frostbite in hands, feet and face than we have. I have altogether failed to eat anything approaching my allowance of 8 oz. of butter a day. The most I have managed has been about 2 or 3 ozs. Bowers has also found it impossible to eat his extra allowance of pemmican for lunch. So Yesterday – that is, a fortnight out – we decided that Cherry and I should both alter our diet, he to take 4 ozs. a day of my butter and I to take two of his biscuits, i.e. 4 ozs. in exchange.’