A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  Not only was the diet insufficient in calories, it also lacked vitamins. Vitamins were not, of course, understood at the time. Casimir Funk who later came up with the word ‘vitamin’ only isolated the first vitamin (B). While the Terra Nova was in the Antarctic, and vitamin C was not identified until the 1930s. Doctors recognized that fresh food, especially meat and vegetables, cured scurvy. However, they had less faith than some earlier generations that they actually prevented the disease in the first place because they contained something essential to the body. Instead, they thought that scurvy was caused by some form of ptomaine poisoning or acid intoxication related to tainted tinned food. Not until the early 1930s was it finally accepted that scurvy arose from ascorbic acid deficiency. Scott’s sledging rations contained no vitamin C at all. The men’s only intake came when a pony was killed and eaten. Lack of vitamin C probably accounted for the failure of Edgar Evans’s hand to heal and for possible problems with the scar tissue from Oates’s Boer War wound.12 All other important vitamins were also absent, notably the B group, sustained lack of which can produce mental and nervous disorders.

  However, if other factors had not combined to slow their progress, poor nutrition need not have prevented the Polar party from coming through their ordeal, and Scott can hardly be blamed for not appreciating the importance of vitamins in 1912. But his decision to take five men, not four, to the Pole may have had an impact. In the first place there was less food and fuel to go around because all the preparations had been based on four men returning with the Last Supporting Party. It had never been the intention to feed a fifth man for those extra miles to the Pole and back (nearly 300 miles in all). Also, the food had been packed in units for four. The rations therefore had to be broken open and reapportioned – a time-consuming as well as tiring operation which left room for error. Furthermore, it took some twenty minutes longer and used more fuel to cook for five rather than four, while the tent was not big enough and the consequent discomfort was an added pressure on men already under stress. More food and space did become available after Evans died and, even later, when Oates left the tent, but by then the damage was done.

  Scott should also have investigated more fully why fuel evaporated in the Antarctic from its storage tins. This had happened on the Discovery expedition and Scott believed the cause to be the cork stoppers. Therefore for the Terra Nova, he used metal caps and leather washers, but does not appear to have tested them since the cans still leaked. Amundsen had encountered the same problems during his Arctic travels. He had had all the welds on his cans re-soldered to reinforce them, apparently solving the problem which probably originated from leakage at the seams caused by rough jolting on the sledges. Even had the fuel not evaporated, Scott probably underestimated the amount he needed. Today, ample supplies of fuel are considered so vital that the British Antarctic Survey uses a fuel ration double the size of Scott’s in warm conditions and double that again in the cold.13

  As a result of the leakage, Scott had insufficient fuel to cook with and, almost as importantly, to melt enough drinking water. Dehydration must have had a significant effect on the party’s physical well-being as they trekked across the high Polar plateau. The body needs a great deal of fluid at altitude and dehydration can lead to altitude sickness. Recent studies show that Scott’s party’s daily water consumption was only about the level actually required per hour when sledging.14 In the Polar regions air pressure is less than at the equator. Thus, 11,000 feet on the Polar plateau was roughly the equivalent of 13–14,000 feet in Europe, quite high enough to cause shortness of breath and ultimately cerebral oedema. On the Discovery expedition one of the seamen, Handsley, collapsed with altitude sickness at around only 9,000 feet above sea level. Another consequence of insufficient fuel was that Scott and his men could not dry out their clothes and equipment thoroughly after each day’s march. They therefore became progressively more frozen, heavier and stiffer and consequently painful to get into.

  Scott’s orders, in particular his oral instructions to Atkinson and Evans, about sending out dog teams to assist the Polar party were too vague and relied on the messengers returning safely and on time to Cape Evans. Scott himself seems to have been equivocal about what he expected the dog teams to achieve and to have been torn between preserving them for the following season’s sledging and using them to speed the Polar party’s return. Just as many mountaineers have died or fallen on their return from the summit, Scott, like many other Polar explorers, seriously underestimated the difficulties of the return journey, being over-focused on the achievement of the Pole itself. This probably also explains why Scott did not consider planning for supporting parties out across the Barrier towards the Beardmore to assist the Polar party to return in the same way that he had used them on the outward journey.

  Some of Scott’s other decisions were also doubtful, at least with hindsight. For example, he allowed Wilson and Birdie Bowers – men he must have been certain he would take on the Polar journey and, in the case of Wilson at least, probably to the Pole itself – to undertake the gruelling and debilitating winter journey to Cape Crozier within three months of setting out for the Pole. Also, with Evans already dead and Oates weakening fast, did it make sense to drag some 35 pounds of rock specimens on the sledge? Gran thought they might have saved themselves the weight. It might have been better to store them under a cairn for retrieval during the next sledging season and conserve their dwindling energy. But such a conclusion lacks understanding of the Polar party’s characters. Wilson, who had written before the expedition set out to his father that ‘we want the scientific work to make the bagging of the Pole purely an item in the results’, was particularly insistent that they kept them. It was indeed a matter of pride to them all to prove they had stuck to the scientific spirit of their expedition. The specimens were certainly valuable to science.

  Perhaps Scott was hampered in planning and managing the expedition by the competing claims of the race for the Pole (which attracted the public’s sponsorship) and the quest for scientific knowledge, which genuinely enthused him. He may have had difficulty in reconciling this duality of purpose even within himself. In any case, the twin aims demanded a larger management and logistical effort and a greater degree of fundraising, distracting him from concentrating in detail on any one aspect. By contrast, Amundsen was absolutely focused on the one goal of reaching the Pole and was not sidetracked by new technology or science. The secrecy about his true destination allowed him to make his plans relatively free of publicity and the burden of public expectation, particularly once his publicly declared goal of the North Pole had been claimed by Peary. A practical and experienced professional, he planned carefully and applied all the lessons he had learned in the Arctic. His depot-laying journeys in early 1911 took supplies much closer to the Pole than Scott’s. Less sensitive, and at bottom, more emotionally self-contained than Scott, he relied exclusively on the well-tried means of dogs for transport and unsentimentally exploited their food potential. He was similarly efficient and unsentimental in his management of his men.

  All these factors beg the question of whether Scott was a good leader. He has been castigated for being doctrinaire, rigid and unapproachable. Yet while with hindsight he made some mistakes, his errors were often the result of lack of knowledge he could not have been expected to have and lack of time caused by the conflicting pressures on him. It is wrong to suggest that his leadership was inherently flawed and hence doomed to failure. Scott was as Cherry-Garrard wrote, ‘a subtle character full of lights and shades’. He was perhaps not best-fitted to lead by temperament. When Kathleen Scott first heard of his death she wrote in her diary that she hoped ‘the horror of his responsibility left him for there never was a man with such a sense of responsibility and duty’. In the published version of the diary ‘horror’ was replaced by ‘weight’. Cherry-Garrard wrote similarly of Scott in the draft of his book, ‘leadership to such a man may be almost a nightmare’. In the published version he replaced ‘nig
htmare’ by ‘martyrdom’.15

  However, Scott on the whole mastered his weaknesses – impatience, quick temper, oversensitivity and periodic bouts of depression. Cherry-Garrard was correct when he wrote, ‘What pulled Scott through was character, sheer good grain, which ran over and under and through his weaker self and clamped it together.’ Scott was generally liked and respected by his men, some of whom, including Wilson, Edgar Evans, Lashly and Crean, were veterans of the Discovery expedition and knew exactly what kind of leader he was. Crean wrote, ‘I loved every hair on his head. He was a born gentleman . . .’16 Wilson, who was no fool and quite capable of taking a realistic view of his fellow man, made his own feelings about Scott clear, commenting to Markham: ‘With him it will be an honour to drop down any crevasse in the world! I am really very fond of him.’17

  Inevitably there were flash points, especially during the long Antarctic winter. Isolation, monotony and claustrophobia take their toll and the leader becomes an obvious target for criticism. However, one must be careful not to read too much into complaints about Scott in various diaries and letters as some have done. Diaries and letters often provide a relief valve for bottled-up tensions. Oates admitted as much when he wrote to his mother, telling her not to pay too much account to his criticisms of Scott in earlier letters.18 Bowers told his sister ‘In the journal you see my feelings at the time as I have not got to play to public sentiment . . . if I seem depressed I don’t think I really am.’ In such notes members of expeditions let off steam by recording complaints and grievances too dangerous to voice out loud.

  Naturally, Scott got on better with some of his colleagues than others – for example, he and Meares never really understood each other, neither did he communicate well with the laconic Oates and he doubted the ability of Teddy Evans. Meares himself recalled arguments between Scott and Teddy Evans which went on all day with Scott swearing repeatedly at Evans. Yet, as Debenham said, the Terra Nova expedition was reasonably harmonious. All expeditions experience some friction. On Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition, one of his men, Marshall, wrote that he had ‘not an iota of respect for him’19 and that he considered Shackleton a coward, a cad and incompetent to boot: ‘Following Sh. to the pole is like following an old woman. Always panicking.’20 On the same expedition Wild regularly complained in his diary that his companions Marshall and Adams were not pulling properly. He described Marshall as a ‘big hulking lazy hog’.21 He and Adams were ‘grubscoffing useless beggars’ and the reason for the failure to reach the Pole.22 On Scott’s expedition there was nothing like the rupture which occurred between Amundsen and Johansen, who had the temerity to criticize Amundsen in front of the others after the abortive first sortie to the Pole. Amundsen removed him from the Polar party and never forgave him, treating him as a pariah even after the expedition’s return. Johansen shot himself in January 1913.

  All these expeditions avoided the mutinies which beset some 19th century Arctic expeditions, particularly the American expeditions of Charles Hall in the early 1870s and Major Adolphus Greely, who led an American Army expedition in the early 1880s. There are strong grounds for believing Hall was murdered by an expedition member. He died from a violent sudden illness just after drinking a warming cup of coffee on returning from a sledging expedition. When his body was disinterred in 1968, tests showed that Hall had ingested arsenic just before he died. His expedition had suffered disunity before his death and there were more violent arguments and outright mutiny against his second-in-command after it. Greely’s expedition got into difficulties and morale plummeted so far that he felt compelled to court-martial and execute one of his men for pilfering. When survivors were eventually rescued, concealed evidence of cannibalism was found on the bodies of some expedition members who had died.

  The morale of the Terra Nova expedition can also be compared with more modern expeditions. Roger Mear and Robert Swan’s account of a journey ‘in the footsteps of Scott’ in the mid 1980s refers frequently to antagonism and intolerance and stress within the party. They found it all too easy to understand the pressures:

  Imagine the frustration when, returning from the Pole, short of food and time, Scott’s party hauled their single sledge across the snows of the Polar Plateau. First, Bowers has to stop and pull up a sock that is causing trouble, then, ten minutes later, Wilson needs to pee, and Scott who is steering their course has to halt repeatedly to check their bearing, and each time their progress is delayed. Imagine the brewing suspicions that the others are not pulling as hard as they might.23

  Ranulph Fiennes’s account of leading the Transglobe expedition – the first Pole to Pole circumnavigation of the world – is equally frank:

  Human beings are not ideally designed for getting on with each other – especially in close quarters . . . On many expeditions there is no way out, no means of transport, so a situation of forced togetherness exists that breeds dissension and often hatred between individuals or groups.24

  On the Discovery expedition even the mild Edward Wilson noted in his diary that ‘familiarity breeds contempt’.25 Fiennes confessed to feeling ‘positive hatred’ towards members of his team for some petty and irrational reason and to being hurt at the critical comments made about his leadership in a colleague’s diaries. Thor Heyerdahl pinpointed some of the same problems:

  The most insidious danger on any expedition where men have to rub shoulders for weeks is a mental sickness which might be called ‘expedition fever’ – a psychological condition which makes even the most peaceful person irritable, angry, furious, absolutely desperate . . . until he sees only his companions’ faults . . .’26

  At a more mundane level, even those of us who have spent a wet weekend hiking and camping in a small tent with our nearest and dearest can appreciate how quickly tensions and exasperations can mount, leading to things being said that were better left unspoken.

  Fiennes also gives an interesting sidelight on charges that Scott failed to consult, commenting that he himself steered clear of asking advice or seeking suggestions with one of his groups because ‘to do otherwise mostly encouraged them to offer further advice when it wasn’t wanted’.27 Scott had to be a leader; neither the navy nor a Polar expedition can be run as a democracy. Against this background, Scott’s leadership of the Terra Nova expedition and the general harmony look remarkable.

  Yet though the Terra Nova expedition was a comradely one, it was, as Scott himself claimed, not particularly fortunate, even leaving aside the question of the weather. Constant worries about funding the expedition distracted him throughout the planning phase and dogged him even in Antarctica. Instead of being free to work on the detailed arrangements Scott was unfortunate that he had to concentrate on fund-raising and seeking sponsorship – time which would have been better spent evaluating sledging clothing and equipment, training and studying cold weather technique, all things Scott has been criticized for failing to do thoroughly enough. Scott was also unlucky in being unable to obtain the Discovery for the expedition. She was a quicker, more fuel-efficient vessel than the Terra Nova and might have helped him reach Antarctica more quickly. Amundsen in the Fram took ten weeks less to reach Antarctica, albeit with fewer ports of call. The Terra Nova was twenty-two days behind her own schedule for reaching Cape Town. The problem was compounded because Scott encountered the pack ice much farther north than he had anticipated. Consequently, the journey through the pack took twenty days compared with four on the Discovery. His late arrival significantly delayed the depot-laying journey. Had it started earlier, One Ton Depot might have been laid farther south.

  However, perhaps the crowning piece of bad luck, at least from a psychological point of view, was Amundsen’s intervention and the manner in which he made it. From the moment Scott heard the news that the Norwegian was going south he was under pressure. How should he react? According to his lights his rival had acted in a sly, ungentlemanly way. Should he alter his plans? What if Amundsen’s approach proved superior? What would the world say of him if h
e were beaten by Amundsen? His hopes of fame and honours seemed suddenly to rest on slender foundations. The discovery of Amundsen in the Bay of Whales must have destroyed Scott’s peace of mind in the months before the Polar party set out, whatever brave front he may have assumed. And then there was the horrible discovery at the Pole. Scott was not exaggerating when he wrote that ‘the worst had happened’. Exhausted, malnourished and facing a gruelling return journey, the disappointment must have been tremendous. After all those years of struggle and effort there was only the dubious consolation prize of being first back with the news.

  It was a devastating blow to Scott personally. He would not return a conquering hero to the wife whom he regarded with such awe and who had encouraged him to go south. As he wrote in his last letter to her: ‘. . . you urged me to be leader . . . I have taken my place throughout, haven’t I?’ Oates had astutely commented much earlier: ‘If [Amundsen] gets to the Pole first we shall come home with our tails between our legs and no mistake. I must say we made far too much noise about ourselves, all that photographing, cheering, steaming through the fleet etc.’28 As Scott trudged northwards again such thoughts must have taken their physical and mental toll. He was by his own admission given to introspection and depression. He probably also suffered from stress, hence the attacks of dyspepsia on the Discovery expedition and at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier which made him fear he could not go to the Pole. These characteristics probably became more pronounced on the retreat from the Pole. His diaries show how he gamely tried to take solace from the cheerfulness of Bowers and Wilson but hint at a terrible heaviness of heart.