A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  I do not know how long we were there, but when all was finished, and the chapter of Corinthians had been read, it was midnight . . . The sun was dipping low above the Pole, the Barrier was almost in shadow. And the sky was blazing – sheets and sheets of iridescent clouds. The cairn and Cross stood dark against a glory of burnished gold.

  Atkinson wrote his own tribute: ‘There alone in their greatness they will lie without change or bodily decay, with the most fitting tomb in the world above them.’9

  After a miserable and eerie night an abortive attempt was made to locate Oates’s body. However, they found only his sleeping bag with the great slit down its front which he had made to help him climb in and out with his bad feet. The party erected a cairn to him at the point where he had walked out to meet his death and left a note recording how this ‘very gallant gentleman’ had sacrificed himself for his comrades. The search party then retraced its steps, minds still benumbed with the horror of their discovery and the knowledge that the party had died just eleven miles from One Ton Depot. Gran wore Scott’s skis so that they completed the journey. The note they left at the cairn gave the cause of death as ‘inclement weather and lack of fuel’ but there was more to it than that.

  18

  The Reason Why

  Why the Polar party came to grief puzzled Scott’s contemporaries as well as subsequent generations. Was it bad luck, bad judgement or a combination? Why should Amundsen the adventurer and interloper have prospered while a carefully organized British naval expedition ended in disaster? Was there too much reliance on the British talent for ‘muddling through’? Was Scott merely a gifted amateur who should have done things differently?

  Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’, written under enormous stress with his two friends dying at his side, was a careful vindication of his conduct of the expedition. He wanted the public to know that the disaster was not ‘due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken’. He cited the loss of ponies during the depot-laying journey which had obliged him to start out later than he had intended and limited the amount of supplies which could be transported; the bad weather and in particular the gales which delayed them for four days in early December; the soft snow on the lower reaches of the Beardmore Glacier. He claimed that every detail of the food supplies, clothing and depot laying had been worked out ‘to perfection’ but that what could not have been foreseen was the ‘astonishing failure’ of Petty Officer Evans which, compounded by bad weather, delayed their descent down the Beardmore. Yet these events were as nothing compared to ‘the surprise which awaited us on the Barrier’.

  Scott maintained that ‘no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we encountered at this time of year’ but even then, despite a hellish month and ‘the severe weather’, he believed the party would have come through but for the weakening of Captain Oates, the unforeseen shortage of fuel and the storm which halted their advance just eleven miles from One Ton Depot. Scott acknowledged, ‘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.’

  Scott was writing not only to vindicate himself and seek comfort in his last moments but to secure financial support for the families of those who had perished, including his own – with Kathleen’s full support he had invested in the expedition most of his own small capital, some £3,000. The expedition had to be seen by the public in the context of British men battling bravely against unforeseen odds and finally struck down by the hand of cruel fate. That is why he kept writing as long as he could, pencil gripped in his chilled hand – his final words a scrawled ‘For God’s sake look after our people’. Yet what did Scott believe in his heart as the end drew near? A man so prone to doubt, anxiety and critical self-analysis must have known there was more to it than sheer bad luck and that his arrangements while for the most part carefully thought out had not been ‘perfection’.

  The reasons for the failure to return safely to Cape Evans were complex. Scott was in part right to blame ill fortune. The aura of bad luck which Kathleen had divined early in their acquaintance clung to him throughout the expedition. After receiving a letter from him from Antarctica she wrote to the Royal Geographical Society, ‘My husband has always the most appallingly bad luck!’1 Amundsen would not have had much sympathy with this view. He believed that ‘Victory awaits him who has everything in order – luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time – this is called bad luck.’2 However, this is too harsh a view when applied to Scott. He did experience a series of misfortunes and they impacted on each other with the relentlessness of a Greek tragedy.

  Scott was right that he encountered exceptionally bad weather, both at the base of the Beardmore Glacier in December 1911 and on his final fatal March 1912 journey back across the Barrier towards McMurdo Sound. Susan Solomon, a leading US climate scientist honoured for her work in Antarctica on the ozone hole above the continent, has shown in her book The Coldest March that in each case the conditions were exceptional.3

  Using data collected over a number of years from two modern automated weather stations in the area of the Beardmore Glacier, one at the base of the glacier itself, she demonstrates that the worst December storm recorded lasted only two days with winds reaching 40 miles per hour. The storm experienced by Scott lasted four days (5 to 8 December 1911) with winds of around 80 miles per hour according to the expedition’s meteorological log. On a continent where most blizzards consist of strong winds blowing existing ice crystals around and where the annual precipitation is about four to six inches and just over an inch at the South Pole, snow fell almost continuously on Scott for four days as warm, wet air pushed unusually far across the Barrier. The consequences for Scott were not just in the inability to move during the four days of the storm but also in the very difficult travelling conditions thereafter. The snow came over the tops of the men’s boots and sometimes up to their knees, rendering pulling the sledges, which were themselves sinking into the snow, in Scott’s understated words ‘extremely fatiguing’.

  Bowers kept detailed meteorological records until nearly the end, using instruments carefully calibrated by George Simpson, who later became the head of the UK Meteorological Service. Simpson himself kept detailed records back at Cape Evans. Comparing these data with those produced by automated weather stations along Scott’s return route across the Barrier, Susan Solomon shows that in only one year in a fifteen-year period did the March temperatures approximate to those of March 1912 and that the March 1912 temperatures Scott experienced were between 10 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit colder than an average March.

  In planning his journey Scott had used a profile of the likely weather compiled by Simpson which Susan Solomon commended as ‘stunning in its accuracy’. The effect of March weather so much worse than anticipated was manifold. Not only were more calories consumed in just keeping warm, food took longer and more fuel to cook. Frostbite struck more easily and harder. It took longer to force painfully sensitive, frostbitten limbs into deeper-frozen sleeping bags and boots. But above all, the lower temperatures altered the composition of the surface of the Barrier, changing ice and snow crystals into a granular form which inhibited the sledge runners, causing Scott to write, ‘Not the least glide in the world . . . on this surface we know we cannot equal half our old marches, and that for that effort we expend nearly double the energy.’ In average conditions for the area at that time of year, it is possible that Scott and his men might have reached One Ton Depot, perhaps even when Cherry-Garrard was there with the dogs.

  Scott was undoubtedly extremely unlucky with the weather. However, that he reached the Beardmore Glacier when he did in December 1911 and that he was out on the Barrier in the cold of March 1912 was a result in great part of his choice of transport – using ponies and manhauling while relegating dogs to only a minor r
ole. Using dog teams he would probably have set out about two weeks earlier, as Amundsen had done, and been beyond the effect of the Beardmore storm and back to base before the worst of the March weather.

  Scott in his planning was preoccupied with the achievements of his British rival Shackleton, whose methods and route provided his template. Scott did not analyse Shackleton’s experience to identify why he failed to reach the Pole. Instead he focused on why he got as far as he did. Consequently, Scott’s strategy was simply to add more of the same basic ingredients as Shackleton, in terms of men and equipment, rather than to vary the recipe. Unfortunately, his rivalry with Shackleton had become so great and their relations too strained to allow him to seek Shackleton’s advice direct. Scott gleaned his lessons about Shackleton’s expedition at second and third hand and, during the expedition itself, from the diary of Frank Wild, which he brought with him.

  Shackleton had used ponies and not dogs and therefore so did Scott. Both men had drawn the wrong lessons from the Discovery expedition when Scott had made much better mileages on his western journey manhauling than on his southern journey with dogs, and both had developed a blind spot. They failed to appreciate that the problems with the Discovery dogs were not insuperable – they derived from their own ignorance of how to handle them properly. The irony is that had either of them trained seriously with dogs and selected them well, one – probably Shackleton – might well have been first to the Pole.

  However, convinced by Shackleton’s success with ponies, Scott followed suit, disregarding evidence from Arctic expeditions and the advice of Nansen and others who urged the use of dogs as his main transport. True, he did take about 24 dogs on his journey south, acknowledging that dogs had some contribution to make, but he never considered it practical to take them beyond the Barrier. Thus, he never paid them the attention necessary to realize their potential, for example giving little thought to the best size of team, or to how to configure the traces for efficient pulling. He left too much to Meares, with whom his relationship was anyway an uneasy one, who was not really up to the job and soon lost interest.

  In many ways Scott’s attitude to the dogs was ambiguous – he acknowledged their success on the depot-laying journey in his diary but did not allow this to alter his Polar plans. Perhaps Amundsen’s avowed reliance on dogs inhibited him – he did not wish to appear to be altering his plans to emulate his rival. However, his error must have confronted him starkly when he arrived at the Pole to find the surface of the ice criss-crossed with paw prints, evidence not only that Amundsen had managed to get his dogs up the glaciers to the Polar plateau but that they had whisked him quickly and efficiently all the way to his goal. In fact Amundsen’s journey of 1,400 miles took him only 99 days while Scott took over 140 days to cover a comparable distance. Furthermore, Amundsen had enjoyed the benefit of his dogs, as transport and as food, for the whole trip, while from the Beardmore Glacier onwards Scott and his men had had to rely on their own pulling power, assisted occasionally by a sail to catch the wind.

  In truth, despite Shackleton’s success, ponies were demonstrably unsuited to the Antarctic. The greatest problem was their vulnerability to the cold. Their coats gave them little protection and snow walls had to be built to protect them from blizzards, whereas dogs could simply dig a snug hole, curl up and go to sleep. Ponies also struggled over soft ground, floundering up to their hocks, while dogs could trot lightly over the surface. The ponies therefore made poor progress on the crucial depot-laying journey in early 1911. This, in turn, meant that One Ton Depot was laid 30 miles farther north than Scott had originally intended. Scott ignored Oates’s advice to force the ponies as far south as possible, and then kill them and depot the meat for dog food for the Polar journey. Yet had he taken Oates’s advice it might have saved human lives. Scott, Wilson and Bowers died 19 miles north of where One Ton Depot should have been laid. It is, of course, debatable whether reaching the depot would have saved them, weak as they were and with over a hundred miles still to go to Hut Point. However, it would have given them a fighting chance. George Bernard Shaw later observed to Kathleen that Scott, whom he had never met, was ‘not a man of sagacity, but a man of sentiment, when his feelings were touched his judgement ceased to exist’.4 This is too harsh but contains a grain of truth. Scott on occasion allowed guilt about causing suffering to animals to cloud his judgement in his use of both dogs and ponies.

  Interestingly, the underlying ethos of Scott’s and his men’s approach to travel – that the truly manly way was to strive with your own unaided efforts – is the one adopted by latter-day Polar travellers. Explorers like Ranulph Fiennes and Roger Mear have, like Scott, relied on their strength and endurance rather than on animals or motors. Helmar Hansen, who reached the Pole with Amundsen and wrote: ‘What shall one say of Scott and his companions who were their own sledge dogs . . . I don’t think anyone will ever copy him’,5 was wrong. Indeed, his own compatriot Borge Ousland, who in 1996 became the first person to cross Antarctica on foot, alone and unaided, echoed Scott’s sentiments exactly when he said afterwards: ‘It’s still possible to break frontiers of human endurance in a plastic world where there are few genuine things to do.’6

  Given that Scott intended to rely on ponies, it seems curious that he did not take more care over their selection. He allowed himself to be persuaded by the loquacious and pushy Teddy Evans to keep Oates, the horse expert, in England to help with the preparations for the Terra Nova instead of sending him to Siberia as originally intended to help Cecil Meares buy the ponies. The net result was that Meares – certainly no horse specialist – was left to manage the business with only the ineffectual Wilfred Bruce to help. Also, Scott ordered Meares only to buy white ponies. This instruction was based on a deduction from Shackleton’s expedition that these must be the most robust since they had survived the longest. The four darkest had died even before the Polar journey began. All other things being equal, the random probability of all four dark ponies dying first is one in seventy and therefore Scott’s instruction may have had some theoretical validity. However, in practice it seriously restricted Meares’s choice because according to what he told Debenham white ponies only made up around 15 to 20 per cent of those available, thus almost forcing him to buy the group of ‘crocks’ that so appalled Oates.

  Scott did not fully exploit the new technology of skiing, a form of locomotion only slowly becoming appreciated in Britain around this time. (When Ponting wrote his book about the Terra Nova expedition he felt he needed to explain to the reader what skis were.) Although quite an accomplished skier himself, and although he took an expert skier, Tryggve Gran, on the expedition and ordered practice ski sessions, Scott did not ensure that the art was taken as seriously as it should have been. Both Edgar Evans and Captain Oates remained sceptical. Scott was perhaps influenced by the fact that Shackleton had not taken skis on his Polar journey.

  However, other difficulties had less to do with Scott’s emulation of Shackleton than with Scott himself. Scott was interested in leading edge technology – he had experimented with balloons on the Discovery voyage; he used a telephone in Antarctica between Hut Point and Cape Evans on the Terra Nova expedition; he had thought about bringing wireless equipment and was fascinated by Ponting’s cinematography, by Simpson’s meteorological observations and by the work of the other scientists. He was naturally intrigued, therefore, by the possibility of using motor sledges. However, he failed to ensure that the correct higher octane fuel was taken, leading to their early breakdown on the Barrier. Had he taken Skelton, a prime mover in their development, with him instead of Teddy Evans as his second-in-command a better performance might have been coaxed from them.

  Scott lost one of his three motor sledges through the ice during unloading, but there are arguments that in any case two sledges would have been quite sufficient. The extra £1,000 the third had cost would have been better spent on dogs or even ponies, which only cost around £3 and £5 respectively, as Oates had observed. H
owever, Griffith Taylor reported that during one of Scott’s lectures he had said of the motors that ‘he hoped they would help; but he was not using their loads in his calculations. He realized that he was here carrying out an experiment to benefit future expeditions’.7 In other words, while interested in the motors’ performance from a scientific and engineering perspective, he did not regard them as integral to his plans.

  Poor diet played a considerable role in the disaster, especially given the protracted time taken by Scott and his men on their journey. There is always a balance to be struck between the amount of food required by an expedition and the effort needed to transport it. However, despite complicated and meticulous planning, there was insufficient food and fuel at the various depots to provide a safety margin for men whose progress would be progressively slowed by bad weather, exhaustion and sick comrades. The depots themselves were not particularly well-marked and were probably too far apart. Scott studied various combinations of diet and part of his rationale for permitting the Winter Journey to Cape Crozier was to assess the effect of different diets on those taking part. However he still underestimated the number of calories needed by men who were manhauling.

  For the first 36 days to the Beardmore, Scott’s ‘Barrier’ ration allowed some 4,200 calories a day. Thereafter, the ‘Summit’ ration provided some 4,600 calories consisting of 210g of fat, 257g of protein and 417g of carbohydrate.8 However, though similar to what Amundsen consumed until he increased his rations on his homeward leg, this was at least 1,500 calories too little for men who were manhauling rather than dog-driving and perhaps as much as 3,000 calories too little, based on recent evidence of manhauling in Antarctica9 – even members of the 1955-8 Trans-Antarctic Expedition who drove Sno-Cats and had the benefits of modern Polar clothing lost weight on a diet that varied between 5,000 and 7,000 calories.10 Other recent experience shows that manhaulers in Antarctica can at peak use up to 11,000 calories a day, around 4,000 more calories than the healthy body can absorb in any 24-hour period.11 Undernourishment made Scott’s men far more susceptible to the cold. Furthermore, poor diet had a mental as well as a physical impact on them. When the body is undernourished it starts to live off its reserves of fat which in turn produce chemicals called ketones which circulate in the bloodstream and have an enervating, depressing effect.