Scott is faulted today for a series of mistakes he made—opting to rely on ponies instead of dogs, allowing himself to be distracted by scientific pursuits (like collecting ancient rocks) instead of focusing monomaniacally on reaching the pole, hiding his intentions from the other men, and so forth. But his greatest blunder lay in not recognizing Nature for what it was and thinking he could somehow defeat it by refusing to admit unpleasant facts—the way a poker player with poor cards will try to bluff his way to the pile of chips. Scott wagered his life—and those of his companions—on his being able to outwit an Antarctic environment he knew little about, and he lost this bet badly. Still, at the end, with time and hope rapidly running out, he seems to have come around to admitting the folly of his approach to life and to letting reality set in. Scott may have gone south as the quintessential romantic hero, but, like the corrupted ivory trader Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, he eventually perceived the world in sharp relief, without illusions—as a place rampant with “horror.” Before he breathed his last, Scott had become a twentieth-century existentialist—a man all alone against the indifferent elements.
Some of Scott's contemporaries—products of a skeptical, post-Victorian era—looked at the world with a cold, unsentimental gaze. For them, the ice kingdom was a battlefield that had to be negotiated warily, as one must tiptoe past a sleeping polar bear—or trigger a savage, unprovoked attack at any moment. Ernest Shackleton—who, more than any other polar leader, understood human psychology and realized that survival in the Antarctic depended on his men knowing how much he cared for them—was also astute in sizing up Nature.38 Sailing in April 1916 with five others from Elephant Island to South Georgia Island through some of the most treacherous seas on the planet, in a twenty-three-foot-long peapod named the James Caird, Shackleton acknowledged, during a lull in the gale that had thwarted their progress for two days, that their lifeboat was but a “tiny speck in the vast vista of the sea—the ocean that is…pitiless always to weakness.”39 The next day, as if to prove Shackleton's point, the Caird was struck by a gigantic wave and nearly swamped, tossed about like “a cork in breaking surf.”40 Above them, albatrosses looked down with “hard, bright eyes,” taking an “impersonal interest in our struggle to keep afloat amid the battering seas.”41 Shackleton's highly experienced New Zealand navigator, Frank Worsley, less frightened by such storms than his landlubber “Boss,” got his own lesson in terror and human insignificance on the gale-wracked slopes of South Georgia several days later, when the unbridled power of Nature was unleashed on them like an army run amuck:
The hell that reigns up there in heavy storms, the glee of the west gale fiends, the thunderous hate of the grim nor'wester, the pitiless evil snarl of the easterly gales, and the shrieks and howls of the southerly blizzards with ever oncoming battalions of quick-firing hail squalls, followed by snow squalls, blind a man or take away his senses. The wind fiends, thrown hissing, snarling, reverberating from crag to crag, from peak to precipice, hurtle revengefully on to the ice sheets, and clawing, biting, gouging, tear out great chunks and lumps of ice to hurl them volcanically aloft in cloud dust of ice and snow.42
In the case of a youthful explorer with a dry sense of humor like Apsley Cherry-Garrard (a self-proclaimed idealist whose favorite writer was Kipling, and who would look back on polar exploration wryly as “at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised”43) a “strong urge to conquer the dreadful forces of nature”44 may have induced him to sign up for Scott's last expedition in 1910, and to concur that its mission was to “go forward and do our best for the honour of the country without fear or panic.”45 But his unalloyed optimism, reverence for the “utmost peace and beauty” of the Antarctic coastline, and selfless dedication to “pure science” (with no thought given to “personal gain”) could not withstand the “horror” of their nineteen-day trek in the Antarctic winter to Cape Crozier in search of a few penguin eggs.46 In total darkness, with temperatures so low (minus 75.8 degrees) that his clothes froze stiff as steel sheets within fifteen seconds of putting them on in the morning, Cherry, “Uncle Bill” Wilson, and “Birdie” Bowers plodded on, knowing that “it was folly to go forward,” but unable to turn back—caught in an Edwardian moral straitjacket as constricting as their ice-caked garments. As they neared the cape, the Great Ice Barrier rose up like a curtain and “seemed to cast a spell of cold immensity, vague, ponderous, a breeding-place of wind and drift and darkness.” Like someone who had just entered the Gates of Hell, Cherry let out an uncharacteristic cri de coeur anticipating Scott's at the pole: “God! what a place!” On the way back, it was even worse: one night, beaten into submission by the “indescribable fury and roar” of a great wind that ripped away their tent, Cherry closed his eyes and prepared to die, giving up all pretense of playing the hero. In the darkness, “Birdie” somehow succeeded in locating the shredded canvas and propping it up so that they had enough shelter to make it through that night. The rest of the way back was just a blur in Cherry's memory. Afterward, he could not pretend it had been “anything but a ghastly journey.”47
And more suffering was still to come. In November 1911, Cherry set out with Scott and fourteen other compatriots, still hoping to beat Amundsen to the pole. But at the base of the Beardmore Glacier, he was sent back by Scott, assigned the mundane task of bringing food for the returning polar party to a cache known as the One Ton Depot, located not far from their base camp on Cape Evans. He arrived there on March 3rd and waited a week for the five men who had gone on ahead to arrive. Then, because of exceptionally cold daytime temperatures, Cherry decided not to go out and look for the overdue party and instead returned to the Terra Nova hut. It was a fateful decision—one that would haunt Cherry for the rest of his life (he died in 1959)—because Scott, Wilson, and Bowers ended up freezing to death only eleven miles from One Ton Depot—easily within a day's march. Perhaps to assuage his guilt, perhaps to keep faith with his dead comrades, Cherry refused to repudiate the idealism that had brought him and the others so far and then cost them so much. At the end of The Worst Journey in the World, Cherry reminds his readers that the English may be a nation of shopkeepers, but the brave souls who trudged through Antarctic snows had a nobler lineage, stronger nerves, and a higher calling. A “desire for knowledge” set them apart and made them heroic.48 In his mind, this may have been true, but the world at large remembers Scott's old-fashioned manhauling team mainly for its tragic shortcomings—arriving second at the South Pole and then dying on the way back. Cherry's tribute has the ring of a speaker looking back over his shoulder with moist eyes, recalling for his audience a glorious past when feats they might now—in light of World War I—consider wasteful and inexplicable had meant a great deal. If history be the judge, then these martyred Englishmen cannot escape an ironic reappraisal: their assault on the world's last remaining unconquered geographical marker strikes us today as the last, futile gasp of a dying age, innocent of the blood that was about to be shed in its name on the fields of France, and the tarnish that this holocaust would bring to once-noble words like “duty,” “honor,” and “country.”
Scott himself would die with at least some of his innocence intact. He could not have known that his sacrifice would be used as inspiration for young men to put on British Army uniforms and march off lockstep toward the Western front to the strains of the “Colonel Bogey March.” Nor could he have foreseen the hundreds of thousands of soldiers being blown to pieces in the trenches or mowed down by machine-gun fire in their own quixotic effort to carry forward the Union Jack, defy the odds, seize new territory, and thus attest to their own heroism. How he would have reacted to these events—had he lived—is, of course, impossible to say. Scott was a complicated person, a very private and secretive man who wrote eloquently and left behind a moving testimonial to his unsuccessful quest, but also someone who used language to camouflage what he really thought. But one senses that he may have had an inkling of what lay ahead fo
r the generation of patriotic young men who imitated his example—because he had already had a peek himself. His awareness of the limits on his will imposed by Nature—barriers he could not possibly transcend—appears here and there in the journal entries he made during the final weeks of his life.
When Scott, Oates, Wilson, Bowers, and Edgar Evans finally reached the pole, on January 17, 1912, only to find the Norwegians’ flag and flagstick protruding—like a sword plunged into their hearts—from the lopsided tent they had erected there five weeks before, the British explorers were understandably crushed. After crossing some eight hundred miles of Antarctic ice in two-and-a-half-months, after battling through deep snow and being battered by storms, they had made this final push on the brink of exhaustion, believing the prize was still theirs for the taking. But the names of the five Norwegians, scribbled on a piece of paper inside their tent, spelled out defeat—perhaps the most sardonic greeting card ever written. Scott, who, a month earlier, had still counted on his luck and just days before written with schoolboyish ardor of the men building castles in their minds—à la Thoreau—now that the pole was within grasp (only about eighty miles away), let out a Conradian wail of anguish in his journal as the truth sank in—“Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.”49 When this raw reaction of Scott's later came to light in print, Cherry-Garrard, devout keeper of the flame, refused to read it as a “cry of despair” (over coming in second?), only as Scott's conceding the “ghastly facts”50: they were frostbitten, snow-blind, and incapacitated mentally as well as physically, and this was not a cheerful spot. But the expression on his face (along with the drooping Union Jack behind him), captured in a commemorative photograph of the five taken on January 18th—the disconsolate look of a man who has just been told his wife and children have been found murdered—reveals much more about Scott's state of mind. Here is a man who has drunk deeply from the bitter well of disappointment, and still has to go on. The journey back was just as long as the one to the pole, and infinitely more pointless.
If Scott's real adversary was not really the Norwegians, but Nature—and his naïve approach to it—one needs to look back over the course of his life to see how he had formed this outlook and how, ultimately, it did him in. Ironically, for a man remembered for two trailblazing treks into the heart of Antarctica, Scott spent remarkably little of his forty-three-plus years on the earth's surface. At the age of twelve, after a carefree and somewhat dreamy childhood, he was packed off (per his father's orders) to a naval preparatory school to study for his officer exams, and after passing them and donning a midshipman's uniform, he remained for almost all of his adult life on, or near, ships. (In this odd deficiency he was the inverse of Shackleton, who had no previous experience steering a small sailboat or scaling snowy cliffs—the two miraculous accomplishments that would earn him immortality.) Out of inclination (having been a melancholy and insecure boy) or lack of opportunity, a reserved, slight, and physically delicate Scott was inclined to look inward and distance himself from events as well as from the people around him. He reportedly had a scandalous love affair when he was in his early twenties and thereafter shied away from the fair sex until he was thirty-eight, a famous explorer, and—like a character out of Jane Austen—badly in need of a wife.51 (In part because of his prolonged absences at sea, two years would elapse before Scott and the free-spirited and sophisticated sculptress Kathleen Bruce, ten years his junior, would marry.)
Before traveling to Antarctica for the first time, in 1901, Scott visited Norway and trained for a while under conditions similar to what he expected to face at the bottom of the earth. But, aside from this limited exposure to a quasi-polar environment, Scott came south for the first time largely unprepared for Antarctica. He did gain considerable experience—and fame—for going (with Shackleton and Wilson) further south than any previous explorers, coming within 530 miles of the South Pole at the end of December 1902. However, his Discovery expedition was hampered by its unfamiliarity with skiing and dog handling. Scott took these inadequacies as vindication of his own preference for manhauling. He subsequently returned to Norway to try out the motorized sledges he felt could supplement manpower in covering the 1,766 miles from Hut Point to the South Pole and back—the equivalent of going on foot from New York City to Chicago. (His advocacy of these largely untested vehicles with tank-like treads again shows his poor judgement: Scott wrote a memorandum suggesting that even though they could only cover two miles in an hour, these machines were a “practical” option.52 He did not consider how well their engines would hold up in extreme cold, or on soft and uneven ice. One of these gas-powered vehicles fell through the ice during unloading in Antarctica and was lost; another broke down just a few miles from the Southern Party's starting point. The remaining two failed to perform as expected and played no part in the trek toward the pole.)
Scott could easily be confounded by the unexpected. On the voyage south, when the Terra Nova had to constantly dodge erratic pack ice, he became frustrated, exclaiming “What an exasperating game this is!” In spite of his long naval career, Scott was at a loss about how to navigate through this veritable minefield: he had never seen anything so “formidable.” The ensuing twenty-day delay at sea he attributed to “sheer bad luck.” While taking supplies ashore at Cape Evans on January 8, 1912, he and his party were temporarily cut off from the three-masted Discovery by shifting ice—a near-calamity that caught him off guard. Even with the help of a university-trained meteorologist, George Simpson, Scott was flummoxed by the volatile Antarctic weather. When it turned unfavorable, he would attribute this—again—to his bad luck. (At one point, confounded by powerful wind gusts that hardened the snow underfoot, Scott noted with resigned irony how this demonstrated “the balance of nature whereby one evil is eliminated by the excess of another.”53) The Manchurian ponies he had counted on to carry much of their equipment had suffered terribly during the extended ocean journey. Once on unfamiliar ice, they struggled to keep their footing, and then, famished and worn out, they started to die off. None of these outcomes Scott had anticipated. Only “Titus” Oates, a former cavalry officer, had done so, pronouncing these “knock-kneed” and old animals on first sight “the greatest lot of crocks I have ever seen.”54
Like other polar explorers before and after him, Scott soon learned how this fickle climate could defeat even the best laid of plans. Earlier on, he had projected his own stolid personality onto the silent Antarctic expanse, as a way of comprehending and coming to terms with it. In the course of the Discovery expedition, he and the others had found that to “go out on a still winter evening to appreciate total silence, as if on a dead planet, was a profound experience.”55 But, as a career naval officer accustomed to being in charge and adhering to well-established rules, Scott was constitutionally ill suited to cope with an environment that was so uncertain, mercurial, and uncontrollable. He had never experienced the utter chaos of war to shatter his faith in an ordered existence, and so he found Antarctica baffling, like a country where he couldn't speak the language, didn't know his way around, and couldn't relate to what was going on. As his recent biographer, David Crane, has well expressed it, here was “nothing he could predict, nothing that behaved as he wanted or expected it to, or prayed that it would…. It was the bewildering contrast of appearance and reality that baffled Scott's imagination, the co-existence of beauty and danger in so extreme a form.”56
His realizing that he was—borrowing Shackleton's nautical simile—merely a cork bobbing on the surface of the sea must have shaken Scott to the very core of his being. For he had no overarching trust in an all-knowing God, or in an afterlife, as his dear companion Wilson did—no belief other than in his own abilities to solve problems by examining them closely and thinking them through.57 And here he was confronted by enormous problems for which there did not appear to be any solutions. Reaching that conclusion left him helpless, with no other resources to fall ba
ck on except his stub of a pencil and a blank sheet. And so Scott kept writing, to the very end, his words conveying his final wishes to a far distant world where he no longer belonged, and in which he no longer believed. Yet he still wanted to. Two weeks after the indomitable ex-soldier Oates—suffering from an old war wound, scurvy, and frostbite—had murmured, “I am going outside, and may be some time,” and then staggered shoeless out of the tent and disappeared into a blizzard, on March 17, 1912, a morning when the temperature outside was minus forty degrees, Scott scrawled a last, somewhat maudlin letter (“To my widow”) to Kathleen asking her to make their three-year-old son Peter “interested in natural history if you can—it is better than games,” adding, as if cover all the bases, “Try and make him believe in a God; it is comforting.”58
When fifty-nine-year-old Sir John Franklin sailed out of the Thames estuary on May 19, 1845, on board HMS Erebus—bound first for Greenland and then for parts unknown—he was traveling in grand style, as befitted a senior Royal Navy captain, knighted decades before for his discoveries in the Canadian Arctic. At that moment, he was arguably England's most admired living hero, the descendant of a long line of country gentlemen, and, most recently, the Crown's emissary to Tasmania. To maintain his standard of living, Franklin had taken along silverware engraved with his family crest, cut-glass wine goblets, and exquisite china plates for the dinners he intended to host nightly for several of his officers. On these occasions they would arrive wearing dark-blue woolen frock coats, adorned with gold lace buttons, and sup by candlelight on mock turtle soup, cured Westphalian ham, calves’ heads, pickled tripe, macaroni, canned vegetables, and Double Gloucester cheese, while sipping fine claret, polishing off the meal with chocolates or biscuits slathered with raspberry jam. Afterward the officers would adjourn to the ship's twelve-hundred-volume library to read a few chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield or browse through an earlier explorer's journal over cigars before listening to a tune cranked out on the hand organ Franklin had brought along to enliven evenings at sea. This elaborate display of food, drink, and entertainment was, in the words of one of his biographers, “the ultimate expression of Franklin's idea that you could take everything with you.”1 As commander of this naval expedition, he was determined to show his officers and men that they could exist in the Arctic as comfortably as at home.
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