1912 (39 page)

The Cost of Scientific Exploration

Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!

R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
(1865–1936)

On 11 February 1913 England woke to the
Daily Mail
headline ‘Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return.' Just a day before, the press had reported that Scott was back in New Zealand; the Royal Geographical Society had even prepared a telegram congratulating him on his success. The palpable sense of anticipation and excitement now turned to despondence.

A few days later a hastily organised memorial service was held in St Paul's Cathedral, London. The numbers attending were staggering, exceeding those at the service for the 1500 lives lost on the
Titanic
in the same year. ‘The presence of the king,'
The Times
declared, ‘conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate.' The Empire grieved.

The details of what had happened in Antarctica appeared contradictory. The five men had last been seen heading
confidently towards the South Geographic Pole. They were well provisioned, and fit and strong. What had happened did not make sense—but the latest reports from Antarctica had a frightening ring of truth.

These accounts described a team returning from the pole in deteriorating weather conditions, the likes of which had never been seen before. Pushing on in the bitter cold the expedition had continued its scientific program, making observations and collecting geological samples as it travelled back to the Cape Evans base. And yet the journey proved fatal.

Petty Officer Edgar Evans (not to be confused with Scott's deputy, Teddy Evans) was the first to die, apparently from the effects of concussion at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. Later, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion, and recognising his ever-slowing pace was threatening the others, Captain Oates famously walked out into a blizzard with the words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.' Struggling forward with limited food and fuel, in plummeting temperatures, the remaining three men continued their trek to base.

In late March 1912 a nine-day blizzard pinned down Scott, Wilson and Bowers in their tent. There would be no escape. All three wrote messages for loved ones until the end, which came sometime around 29 March. Scott's diary reads: ‘Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now 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. R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people.'

They died disappointed men, 150 days out from base and a mere eighteen kilometres from salvation at One Ton Depot.

In his ‘Message to the Public', Scott wrote one of the finest short pieces of English prose:

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, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of 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, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly cared for.

Scott wrote to his ‘wife'—a word he later struck out and changed to ‘widow'—and said of their two-year-old son, Peter: ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games.'

On 12 November a search party from Cape Evans came across the frozen remains of the three men. Apsley Cherry-Garrard later wrote, ‘We have found them—to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it—it is too bad for words.' But Cherry was amazed: ‘We have everything—records, diaries, etc. They have among other things several rolls of photographs, a meteorological log kept up to 13 March, considering all things, a great many geological samples. And they have stuck to everything. It is magnificent that men in such case should go on pulling everything that they have died to gain.' With the papers and samples collected, the tent was collapsed over the men and, after a failed search for Oates's body, the search team returned to base.

Scott's death with his men was a defining moment early in the twentieth century, not least for those connected to Antarctic exploration. Sir Clements Markham eulogised in his diary: ‘There has passed away, if it is really true, a very exceptionally
noble Englishman. What struck me most was his chivalrous generosity in dealing with contemptible self-seekers such as Shackleton and Amundsen. Very rarely have so many great qualities been combined in one man. Perhaps the greatest was that which won him the love of all who served under him.'

Overseas, the shock was no less. Roald Amundsen was quoted as saying, on hearing the news, ‘horrible, horrible'; while Count Okuma, Nobu Shirase's public champion, wrote, ‘Scott rests forever in that frozen realm, and his great spirit watches for all eternity over the Antarctic's icy wastes.'

Lord Curzon reflected: ‘Arm-chair geographers were sometimes disposed to complain that the days of adventure and risk in exploration were over. The last year gave the melancholy lie to such fireside fallacies. The toll of human life was still demanded, and was still cheerfully paid. Should the day ever arise when it was not, then indeed might geographical societies shut their doors and hand over their work to an educational bureau of the State.' The loss of life counted for something.

In the aftermath of Scott's death there was serious soul-searching. Markham searched for a scapegoat. On 8 March he wrote to Fridtjof Nansen, describing Amundsen's actions as ‘not honorable'. He explained: ‘I allude to the proceeding of Amundsen in making a rush to the South Pole, to forestall Captain Scott, and scamper back for the reward. I do not think that it can be justified….The only possible excuse would be that the route was entirely different: but even then the secrecy would be dishonorable.'

Nansen did not agree. Responding politely, the great polar explorer said he considered that anywhere was up for grabs, and no one had a prior right to geographical science. ‘I took
naturally a keen interest in his [Scott's] expedition, and I was very sorry that he would not listen to my advice or take plenty of good well broken dogs and turned to them and not to ponies, which I never considered much fit for polar work of that kind. He took some dogs though but had he done what I would have had him do, we should still have had him around us.'

Markham remained unconvinced about Amundsen but felt Nansen was right about the ponies, and commented, ‘I opposed the south pole but Scott was smitten by it. I have always felt that the rushes to the poles to please the newspapers and rake in money has been the curse of polar discovery.'

Others celebrated the work of the
Terra Nova
expedition. Rudmose Brown, a member of Bruce's
Scotia
party, wrote, ‘Great as the disaster has been, England is immeasurably the richer for it in tradition and inspiration. Luck was against him it is true, but without in the smallest degree minimising the heroic efforts of these men, it may be possible to indicate some contributory cause…In time all these scientific results will be appreciated. At present it is difficult to think of anything except the fate of the southern party, and the lesson in simple manliness that is has given to the nation.'

In Germany, Wilhelm Filchner was full of praise for the British leader: ‘Scott achieved his aim…The scientific notes and observations that have been saved promise to yield a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the Antarctic, in the exploration of which Great Britain has taken a prominent part. This fresh sacrifice will be painfully felt beyond the Channel and throughout the world.'

The RGS led calls for donations to meet Scott's final wishes. Money was urgently needed to support the families left behind, and to commemorate the death of Scott and his men through memorials and the publication of scientific results. Before, funding had proved difficult; now, money—government and
private—poured in, doubling the amount raised by the expedition. Clock towers were raised, streets renamed and monuments erected. Statues crafted by Scott's widow, Kathleen, were placed in London's Waterloo Place and Christchurch, New Zealand—sadly, the latter figure was badly damaged during the February 2011 earthquake. In Madame Tussauds, a wax model of Scott was put alongside one of Shackleton, remaining on display there until the 1960s.

Some eighty official scientific reports were produced from the
Terra Nova
expedition. Eight volumes on zoology were published, along with others on the aurora, botany, cartography, geology, glaciology, gravity and magnetism. All spoke of scientific insights gathered from a mysterious landscape, and many would lay the foundations for future polar scientific work. On the biological front alone, of the more than two thousand different species of plants and animals collected, more than four hundred were completely new to science. Unlike the aftermath of the
Discovery
expedition, there would be little criticism. The effort directed to developing a full scientific program had paid enormous dividends.

On a memorial cross erected to the dead men near their base in Antarctica, the departing expedition members inscribed a short quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson's ‘Ulysses': ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' Robert Scott achieved his aim.

Arguably some of the most significant scientific reports to come out of the expedition were the three volumes on meteorology. After leaving on the
Terra Nova
at the end of the Antarctic summer of 1912, George Simpson had diligently spent the next seven years working up the weather observations taken on the ice. His analysis was groundbreaking. All data had
value—including that taken by the different sledging teams and during Amundsen's expedition. The result was a stunningly comprehensive study of Antarctic weather as seen from the Great Ice Barrier and plateau, allowing the Briton to explore the role weather conditions played in Scott's death.

Simpson showed, for instance, that there was indeed a high-pressure system sitting over the Antarctic continent, fed by air flowing south from warmer climes in the upper atmosphere. Today we know that by the time this air reaches the southern continent it has been intensely chilled, falling to temperatures below -80°C, and sinks. This cold air—katabatic, or downhill, wind—periodically pours off the central plateau towards the coast, like air spilling out of an open refrigerator door.

What precipitated the fatally long storm Scott and his men experienced was not certain, but Simpson was amazed at how well connected Antarctica was with the rest of the world, writing, ‘This connexion between the pressure departures over the Antarctic and surrounding regions is most interesting and still more important. It appears that the Antarctic is one of the great “centres of action” of the world and further investigation is imperatively demanded.'

In 1912 the global climate was tumultuous. Exceptionally harsh droughts were experienced in Australia and Indonesia; heavy rain and flooding crippled parts of North America; in the North Atlantic high numbers of icebergs were spotted, sinking the
Titanic
two weeks after Scott and his men died. The world was feeling the effects of a massive upheaval in the tropical Pacific. Known as El Niño, this weather event occurs once in every five to eight years, when the warm western waters migrate out into the centre of the ocean. Weakening trade winds set off a cascade of change around the world—including Antarctica. El Niño had not been recognised when Simpson was analysing his data, but we now know that at the end of the summer and
through the winter the Ross Sea region is particularly vulnerable to its effects, through a peculiarity of geography.