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Captain Sir Robert Falcon Scott (June 6, 1868 - March 29, 1912) was a British Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. Having narrowly failed to become the first man to reach the South Pole, beaten by Roald Amundsen and his party, Scott died on the Ross Ice Shelf whilst trying to return to the safety of his base.

Early career

Scott was born in Devonport, England. He joined the navy as a midshipman in 1881, first sailing on Boadicea, the flagship of the English Channel fleet at that time. After numerous postings around Britain and North America, Scott rose through the ranks to become a lieutenant in 1891, specializing in torpedoes.

Discovery expedition 1900-1904

At the behest of the Clements Markham, the former polar explorer and then President of the Royal Geographical Society, Scott commanded the National Antarctic Expedition which began in 1900. The major achievements of the expedition were an exploration of the Ross Sea, the land to the east of the ice sea was sighted for the first time and named "King Edward VII Land" named in honour of the then current British monarch and a new "furthest south" was achieved. Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson reached 82°17′ S on December 31 1902.

It was during this expedition that Scott met and explored with Ernest Shackleton, who served as his third lieutenant. Many subsequent biographers of both men wrote of an intense personal animosity and rivalry between the two. However Ranulph Fiennes, in his biography of Scott published in 2003, writes that there was in fact little evidence of this and that the two were friendly on the expedition. Fiennes dismisses the autobiography of Albert Armitage, Scott's navigator and second-in-command on the trip, whose account provides most of the primary source data of the split between Scott and Shackleton because Armitage, Fiennes says, felt slighted by Scott. Fiennes writes that Shackleton was sent home early (on the first relief ship) from the Discovery expedition only because he was ill, as Scott claimed, rather than because of a strained relationship between the two, as others have suggested.

Terra Nova expedition 1910-1912

Inspired partly by the wish to improve his family's fortunes, Scott became obsessed with the idea of being first to the South Pole, which he saw as an important and necessary achievement for his country. After his marriage to Kathleen Bruce on September 2nd 1908, and the birth in 1909 of his only son, Peter Scott, he embarked on his second polar expedition. His ship, Terra Nova, left London on June 1 1910, sailing via Cardiff, which it left on June 15th. Scott sailed with the ship only as far as Rotherhithe and then returned to London, and departed a month later to join the ship in South Africa.

Scott soon found himself in a race with the Norwegian Roald Amundsen to be first to reach the Pole. On arriving at the Pole January 17-18, 1912, with a five-man party (Scott, Lieutenant Bowers, Dr Wilson, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, Lawrence Oates), Scott found that Amundsen had been there a month earlier. Amundsen returned to his base in good order while Scott's entire party perished while returning from the Pole in conditions of extreme cold that have only been recorded once more since the introduction of modern weather stations in the 1960s.

The first to die was Evans, who was injured in a fall and suffered a swift mental and physical breakdown. A little later, Oates, who was suffering from an old war wound, deteriorated to the extent that he was holding back the rest of the party. Gradually becoming aware of the burden he was placing on the others and the fact that he had no chance of survival, Oates voluntarily left the tent and was never seen again.

The bodies of the remaining three members of Scott's party were found six months later in their camp, only eleven miles from a massive depot of supplies. With them were their diaries detailing their demise. Scott's journal contains the famous entry: '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 Briton'. It ends with the words, 'For God's sake look after our people. R. Scott'. Scott was greatly mourned in England and counted a hero. Recent biographies however, particularly that of Roland Huntford, published in the 1970s, have questioned the organisation of the expedition. His insistence on first using Siberian ponies and then man-hauling his goods instead of using sled dogs is considered to have contributed to his defeat - Scott did use dogs, but only as far as the Beardmore Glacier, whereas Amundsen, a more experienced dog-driver, took them all the way to the Pole. Perhaps this unwillingness to take dogs further was because of Scott's well-known abhorrence of killing dogs and then feeding them to others. Fiennes' biography suggests that Scott simply used the method which worked best for him, as man-haul had in the Discovery expedition.

Critics have also pointed out the Englishmen's distaste for learning from the indigenous peoples of the Arctic - the undoubted experts at cold climate survival - as Amundsen had done. That criticism would be more precisely levelled at the Royal Navy rather than Scott himself who never visited the Arctic. He took his advice from his forerunners and superiors in the Navy who had not learnt as much as others such as Amundsen in Norway and Robert Peary in the United States from the native Inuit.

The precise cause of Scott's death is also the subject of much debate. It is likely that starvation, exhaustion, extreme cold, and scurvy all contributed to the death of Scott and his men, as did more general strategic factors such as poor planning for contingencies, not positioning supply depots far enough south, Scott's last-minute decision to take five men to the Pole rather than the originally planned four, and plain bad luck.

After his death

Scott was posthumously knighted, and a statue of him by his wife, Kathleen, a sculptor, was erected in London, at Waterloo Place. Scott's brother-in-law, the Reverend Lloyd Harvey Bruce, was the rector of the tiny Warwickshire village of Binton, and he commissioned a large stained glass memorial window, showing scenes from Scott's expedition, which still exists to this day in the Parish Church. A large and recently refurbished memorial to Scott can be found in Plymouth, England over-looking the harbour. It is engraved with words from Scott's journal. Other notable memorials can be found in Christchurch and Port Chalmers, New Zealand, the Terra Nova's last two ports of call before sailing for Antarctica.

Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is jointly named after Scott and his rival.

External links

• Southern Polar exploration - Robert Falcon Scott
• Secrets of the Dead - Tragedy at the Pole (PBS)

References

• Scott of the Antarctic by Reginald Pound was published in 1966 and is based on original research
• Captain Scott, Ranulph Fiennes, ISBN 0340826975
• The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford

• 1868 births
• 1912 deaths
• Explorers of Antarctica