The journey took seven days. Stein made his first finds at Lou Lan – wooden tablets which confirmed the survival of the Indian Kharotshi language long after the Chinese sixth-century invasion, and a scrap of paper which was inscribed with the first example of the lost Sogdian language that a Westerner had ever seen. At Miran he discovered mounds which were the earth-covered remains of Buddhist shrines that predated the Tibetan invasion. Excavations revealed the remains of painted frescoes. Stein carefully detached them from what was left of the shrines, packed them on his camels and moved on. On 12 March 1907 he reached the Tun-huang oasis. Twelve miles southeast lay the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas.
The annual pilgrimage to the shrines began two days after Stein’s arrival and, anxious not to offend local opinion, the expedition held back until the rituals had been completed. It proved to be a shrewd tactic, for it enabled Stein to strike up a friendship with Wang, the shrine’s guardian. Wang was persuaded by a combination of flattery and bribery first to show the expedition a selection of ancient manuscripts and then to allow Stein to enter the inner sanctum. It was filled with Chinese Buddhist manuscripts of the fifth century.
Stein gave Wang enough Chinese silver ingots to renovate the disintegrating shrine – ‘a sum which would make our friends at the British Museum chuckle’.20 In return the custodian agreed to the removal of the manuscript rolls as long as their illegal sale was kept secret until Stein’s expedition had left Chinese territory. The rolls filled seven packing cases. Another five cases were packed with paintings and embroidery. Stein felt no need to justify the looting of Chinese national treasures. His justification was that they had been ‘locked in a dismal prison’ until he had liberated them.
Neither Stein nor his treasure arrived back in Kashmir until October 1908. During the return journey, he crossed the Taklamakan Desert from north to south, surveyed the Nan Shan Mountains and traced the Khotan River to its source. The price he paid for his achievement was frostbite and the amputation of his left foot. The reward, received almost four years after the booty had been classified and deposited in the British Museum, was a knighthood. But the real prize was already won. In 1904 Marc Stein had become a subject of King Edward VII by naturalisation.
It took Ernest Shackleton almost four months to travel from the Discovery in McMurdo Sound to England and far longer to find suitable employment. In December 1903 he was appointed Secretary/Treasurer of the Scottish Geographical Society. He interrupted his work to get married, to greet the arrival of Scott and the Discovery in London – a reunion of such warmth that the stories of dissent briefly seemed unlikely – and to be adopted as prospective Liberal Unionist parliamentary candidate for Dundee. When the election came in 1906, he resigned from the Society, but his defeat concentrated his mind on what he had always known to be his destiny. On 12 February 1907 he announced to a dinner of the Royal Geographical Society’s Kosmos Dining Club that he proposed to return to the Antarctic. A subsequently forgotten Belgian called Arctowski announced that he too planned a polar expedition – and that he had the money with which to finance it.
William Beardmore, a Clydeside shipbuilder for whom Shackleton had briefly worked, guaranteed an overdraft. Shackleton expressed his gratitude by naming a glacier after his benefactor. The plan was to repay the overdraft by writing an account of the expedition. It was a perilous notion since the £10,000 Heinemann promised for the book was contingent on the expedition reaching the South Pole. His ‘desire to wipe out terra nova’21 – the passion attributed to him by his first biographer – was great enough for him to take the financial as well as the physical risk. His passion for the unknown was uncontainable. He told his sister, ‘You can’t think what it’s like to walk over places where no man has ever been before.’22
Shackleton began to draw up a plan to use as a prospectus to attract backers. To complete it he needed to announce the names of the expedition’s officers. When he approached George Mulock, who had replaced him in the 1903 expedition, he was told ‘… I have volunteered to go with Scott’.23 It was the first time that Shackleton had heard of his old chief’s new enterprise. The news that Scott was planning a second expedition meant that he could not use the base at McMurdo Sound. Indeed, in the estimation of Edward Wilson, it meant that he could not go at all in case he was thought to be competing with his old chief. Shackleton was not the man to allow such a consideration to hold him back.
It was unreasonable for Scott to treat the Pole as private property, but he had already written to the Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society to request backing for a new expedition and therefore felt, with some justification, that Shackleton had stolen a march. The resentment that he must have felt was revealed by the letter which followed Arctowskis announcement: ‘It will soon be on record that I want to go and only need funds … it won’t look well for the Society if an inexperienced foreigner cuts in and does the whole thing while we are wasting time.’24
The tone of the message – demand rather than request – was typical of Scott’s style. Shackleton’s announcement, made two weeks later, was typical of his determination to let nothing stand in his way. Whether or not its timing was meant to pre-empt Scott or to balk Arctowski, the ‘inexperienced foreigner’, it looked like an unfriendly act. Scott certainly saw it as one. However, on 17 May 1907, Scott and Shackleton met in London and drew up a compact which, they hoped, would prevent the two expeditions that they planned to lead crossing each other’s paths.
The agreement was not kept. On 7 March 1908, Scott read in his Daily Mail, ‘A MESSAGE FROM THE ANTARCTIC. Lieutenant Shackleton is camped near the foot of Mount Erebus, the most southerly of the volcanoes.’25 The promise to keep out of McMurdo Sound had been broken. Scott could not disguise either his distress or his rage.
Shackleton, on the bridge of the Nimrod, had left England for the Antarctic on 30 July 1907. He had reached the Antarctic Circle on 14 January 1908. After a winter of training and exercises – on the model of Scott six years earlier – he had set out for the Pole on 29 October, accompanied by Lieutenant Jameson Boyd Adams, Doctor Eric Marshall (the expedition’s senior surgeon) and Frank Wild (an able-seaman who had been with Scott in 1902). It was ‘a glorious day for a start … Everything that could conduce [to an] auspicious beginning.’26
The euphoria did not last for long. After only three days’ march, Shackleton concluded that the rations, which had been intended to last for ninety days, would have to provide the expedition’s food for one hundred and ten – a figure quickly revised to one hundred and twenty. There were new mistakes as well as the repetition of old. Some of the horses, thought to be superior to dogs, had to be shot. Acts of God added to the depression. Adams developed severe toothache. It took Marshall four attempts before he was able to remove the tooth.
Spirits were much improved on 26 November when Shackleton announced that they had passed the point at which Scott had turned back. They made camp two miles further south at latitude 82° 18½’ south and celebrated with a bottle of orange curaçao which Mrs Shackleton had given her husband for use on such an occasion. The high spirits were dampened by the discovery that immediately ahead lay a mountain covered with snow and ice. Shackleton decided that, since it could not be circumnavigated, it would have to be climbed. What they saw when they reached the summit ‘was well worth the double labour’.27 In their elation they called the peak Mount Hope. ‘To the South, a great glacier extended as far as the eye could reach, flanked on either side by rugged ice-covered mountains, until lost sight of sixty miles distant … The glacier flowed from the distant plateau, which we now realised guarded the secrets of the Pole itself.’28
Four days later, Socks, the one remaining horse, suddenly disappeared down a crevasse. From then on the sledges had to be manhandled in relays – one taken a short distance forward before the men returned for another. It took nine hours (double-hauling all day) to travel three miles. Food became so short that maize, intended for the horses, was ground between two stones
and used like flour. Worst of all, as they pushed on across the glacier, the ground continued to rise steeply. They lived on the hope that tomorrow, or the day after, the glacier would flatten out and they would be on the plateau.
They marched on for four weeks. On Christmas Day they indulged themselves on cocoa, cigars and a spoonful each of crème de menthe. Then they decided to cut the rations again – spreading over ten days food they had decided, after two previous adjustments, was essential for seven. They also agreed to leave behind everything which was not absolutely necessary to the completion of their journey. ‘It is the only thing to do for we must get to the Pole, come what may.’29
Spirits, Shackleton wrote in his diary, were kept high by the ‘cheerfulness and regardlessness of self’ displayed by his three companions. In temperatures of fifty degrees below zero (and with body temperatures below 94 degrees) they set out on a series of forced marches over ice which was covered in a ten-inch layer of soft snow. On 5 January they covered thirteen miles and reached latitude 88° 5’. Shackleton wrote in his diary, ‘Tomorrow we march south with the flag.’30 The unusually grandiloquent language was meant to boost his own morale. He knew the flag would not be planted at the Pole. The best he could hope for was a near miss of a hundred miles.
The hope that the last dash could begin on 6 January was not fulfilled. A sudden blizzard kept them in their snow-covered tent for two days. It abated on 9 January. Then they moved off, ‘as hard as we could pelt over the snow’. But the adventure was over and the diary entry made no attempt to hide the anguish.31
The last day out. We have shot our bolt … The wind eased down at 1am. At 2am we were up and had breakfast and shortly after 4am started south with the Union Jacks … At 9am hard quick marching. We were at 88.23 and there hoisted HM’s flag. Took possession of the plateau in the name of HM and called it KE Plat. Rushed back over a surface hardened somewhat by the recent wind and had lunch. Took photo of camp Furthest South and then got away. Marching till 5pm. Dead tired. Camped. Lovely night. Homeward Bound. Whatever regrets may be we have done our best. Beaten the South Record by 366 miles, the North by 77 miles. Amen.*
Shackleton’s view of leadership required him – and him alone – to take the decision to turn back, but he discussed the possibility of pressing on with his three companions. They still had a real chance of getting to the Pole. But there would be no hope of completing the return journey. Survival was given preference over a unique place in polar history. Safely back in England, Shackleton told his wife, ‘I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.’ He did not add that, lion or donkey, he meant to return to the Antarctic one day.
Shackleton returned a hero. Eight hundred guests, including the Prince of Wales, attended a banquet in his honour. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and knighted, and the government discharged the £20,000 debt which the expedition had incurred but could not meet. But one man, with some justification, felt less than joyful admiration. Scott had gone back to sea and become the Captain of HMS Albion. He was then retired on half-pay, brought back to the service (at a lower rank) and made captain of HMS Essex. On Shackleton’s return, he made a generous speech at a Savage Club Dinner. It ended, ‘Personally, I am prepared, and have been for the last two years, to go forth in search of that object. And before other countries can step in and take the credit of the result of these great works by Mr Shackleton, this country should come to the fore and organise another expedition.’32
Scott was right to fear the strength of international competition. On 6 April 1909, Commander Robert Peary of the United States Navy reached the North Pole at his sixth attempt. That goal having been achieved, attention turned south again. All pretence of scientific study was put aside. The newspapers wanted Britain to be the first at the South Pole, but potential backers did not share Fleet Street’s patriotic ardour. Scott, determined that he should lead the next British expedition, was reduced to making fund-raising tours. Honour as well as pride was sacrificed. He had invited Lieutenant Reginald Skelton (a Royal Navy engineering officer) to become his second-in-command. When he discovered that another naval officer, Lieutenant Teddy Evans, was planning an expedition of his own and had already raised a considerable amount of money, he suggested an amalgamation. Evans would only accept the suggestion if he took Skelton’s place. Scott agreed and Skelton was dropped.
As the money trickled in, the expedition’s members were recruited – Edward Wilson, this time senior doctor and scientific director, Sub Lieutenant Henry Bowers of the Royal Indian Marine, Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans, who had been with Scott on the Discovery, and Captain L. E. G. Oates of the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons, a sportsman who had taken his own pack of hounds to India when his regiment was sent to reinforce the garrison at Mhow. Oates was recruited to take charge of the horses; for Scott was determined to set sail with every possible means of transport – dogs, horses and mechanised sledges. Dogs were bought in Siberia, but Scott retained a deep antipathy to using them. He agreed that, in practical terms, their advantages outweighed the problems they caused, but the advantages could only be exploited if they were treated with continual cruelty. Scott could not subject his animals to the treatment which Amundsen accepted as normal as well as necessary. When Major, his leading dog on the final expedition, disappeared, Amundsen wrote in his diary ‘presumably he has gone away to die’.33 Scott would have agonised for days.
Tender heart aside, Scott had another reason for wanting to leave the dogs behind before the last march to the Pole. He had a Promethean obsession with proving that man alone could beat the elements. ‘In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.’34
Scott had wanted – because of the ship’s suitability rather than his own sentimentality – to sail south in the Discovery, but the ship was chartered to the Hudson Bay Company who would not release her. So he bought the Terra Nova (the second relief ship on his first expedition) for a down-payment of £5,000 and an outstanding debt of £1,500. Because Scott was elected a member of the Royal Yacht Squadron, ships under his command were exempt from Board of Trade regulations. The Plimsoll line was painted out and on 1 June 1910 the Terra Nova, low in the water because of the weight of stores, set out for Cape Town. Scott stayed behind in England to raise more money. He sailed south on 16 July, waved off by (amongst others) Ernest Shackleton. The last £8,000 of his target would, he hoped, be raised in the Southern Hemisphere. So, after South Africa, the Terra Nova made for Australia. At Melbourne there was a telegram awaiting his arrival. ‘Beg leave inform you proceeding Antarctica. Amundsen.’35
Amundsen (and ninety-seven Greenland dogs) left Christiana on 9 August in the Fram, a ship he had borrowed from Fridtjof Nansen. Its crew were not told where they were bound, and the telegram to Scott was not sent until the ship left Madeira. It was the last port of call before the Antarctic – a feat made possible by Amundsen’s seamanship and the Fram’s diesel engines. Amundsen meant to be the first man at the Pole.
After a difficult journey south, and an unsuccessful attempt to land at Cape Crozier in rough seas, Scott tied up the Terra Nova in the McMurdo Sound on 4 July 1911. The first task was to establish depots along the early stages of the ultimate journey. To Scott’s disgust, Hut Point – which he had built for the 1902 expedition – was not ready for his immediate occupation. When Shackleton left in 1909 he had failed to close the windows. Snow had blown in, melted, and then frozen into a block of solid ice which filled the entire hut.
Worse news was to follow. Scott and his colleagues had convinced themselves, with very little justification, that the Norwegian was several weeks behind them and that he would approach the Pole along a quite different rout
e from theirs. On 3 February the Fram was sighted in the Bay of Whales. Amundsen had landed at a point which was sixty miles nearer the Pole than Scott’s base camp and sent home an explicit message. ‘We must, at all costs, get there first. Everything must be staked on that.’36
Hut Point was made habitable, but the forward depot-laying exercise met with almost every sort of disaster. Horses had to be slaughtered en route, with increasing brutality and mounting anguish. Lieutenant Bowers was almost lost on an ice floe. There was much talk about fate and providence – pious when their luck held, less so when it did not. Moments of barely credible recklessness imperilled the whole expedition. Edward Wilson took off a party to look for penguin eggs in the hope of discovering, through the examination of the embryos inside them, that scales evolve into feathers. After thirty-three days, during which the pus inside their frostbite blisters froze – they got back to base with three frozen eggs. Wilson’s theory was found to be fanciful.
The hardship increased the esprit de corps. On 31 October 1911 – the day before the expedition set out on its last journey – Bowers wrote to his mother, ‘I am Captain Scott’s man and shall stick to him right through. God knows what the result will be, but we will do all a man can do and leave the rest in His keeping.’37 In that spirit, the party hoped to cover 1,766 statute miles to the Pole and back. The morale held to the end – despite the failure of the motor sledges, the death (often in horrific circumstances) of the horses and the blizzard that kept them imprisoned at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. As always, delays meant a cut in rations, which in turn weakened their resistance and slowed them down even more. Even so, on 3 January 1912, when Scott chose the five men to make the final journey, those who were to be sent back to the depot felt only regret.
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