A First Rate Tragedy

by Diana Preston

  Edgar Evans was also bitterly disappointed. Devoted to Scott since Discovery days, the failure at the Pole may have shaken his confidence in his captain and thus weakened his mental resistance to his physical collapse. Of course this physical weakening in turn played a part in the disaster. Not only was it unnerving to see the big Welshman decline to a state of helplessness, but it also delayed the others. There is honest relief in Scott’s diary about the natural death of Evans. Some suggest that Evans would have been under stress as the only member of the lower deck in a party of officers. However, against this is that Evans knew Scott well – he had shared a sleeping bag with him on the Discovery expedition and had been able to persuade Scott not to banish him from the Terra Nova expedition because of his drinking bout in New Zealand. He was also noted in several diaries for his general affability and the easy way he mixed with scientists and officers at Cape Evans. What did have a bearing, however, was that perhaps out of loyalty to Scott and ambition to go to the Pole, Evans did not disclose how badly he had injured his hand while adjusting the sledges.

  The personalities of the other members of the Polar party also contributed. Captain Oates personified the laconic Edwardian officer. He would probably have been relieved to have been asked to return with the Last Supporting Party. His war wound in his left leg was perhaps troubling him. He had already recorded problems with the tendons at the back of his other knee – the right – before the choice of the final party was made. The unbalancing effect of his shortened left leg would have placed a heavy, distorting, strain on his right leg as well as his spine and pelvis after walking and skiing so many miles.

  Oates did not share the others’ passionate devotion to Scott. If anything he, far more than Edgar Evans, was the odd man out – a military man from a different social stratum who had little to prove or to gain from being in the Polar party. However, he was conscious of the honour of his regiment and of the army and like others of his generation had a profound sense of duty. It would never have occurred to him to ask to return with either Atkinson or Evans. Nevertheless, his sense of duty was unfortunate. Had he disclosed his weakening, he would not have gone to the Pole. Oates’s collapse, like Evans’s, significantly delayed his comrades. Unfortunately Wilson, who had not been a practising doctor since the Discovery expedition, did not spot the problems with Oates or Evans. Had he given his colleagues even a rudimentary medical at the turning-back point, despite the cold, he might have discovered the seriousness of Evans’s wounded hand and Oates’s foot, perhaps, in turn, influencing Scott’s choice of the Polar party. Scott had made his own views on those who concealed medical problems clear in an excised diary entry when Atkinson failed to report his injured foot during the depot journey: ‘He might have wrecked it. Surely, small consideration ought to suggest to anyone that they risk others’ lives beside their own in concealing ailments in this way’.29 As already discussed in an earlier chapter, Scott’s chances of survival might have been appreciably better had he taken Lashly and/or Crean in place of Edgar Evans and Oates.

  Wilson’s and Bowers’s physical and mental stamina and devotion to Scott were a counterbalance to the decline of Evans and Oates and a source of strength to Scott. However, Wilson and Bowers were perhaps too loyal and unquestioning towards their leader. Bowers had earlier written: ‘I am Captain Scott’s man and I shall stick to him right through.’ They seldom, if ever, challenged his spur of the moment and sometimes illogical decisions or probed his indecision. Paradoxically, this may have put an additional onus on Scott as leader, contributing to his isolation and feelings of guilt and responsibility. Their loyalty also made it difficult for them to leave him at the end and try to break through to One Ton Depot. Bowers and – to a lesser extent – Wilson were in better shape than Scott, crippled by frostbite, and might have pressed on. Bowers wrote in his last letter to his mother: ‘I am still strong and hope to reach [One Ton] depot.’

  It is not clear from the diaries why they did not try to. No one will ever know what really happened in that cold green tent. The weather may simply have been too bad – though, according to Susan Solomon’s meteorological research, it is unlikely that the white-out persisted the whole time they lay in the tent.30 There is no evidence that Scott tried to dissuade them. Equally, there are no hints that Scott attempted to replicate the sacrifice of Captain Oates to make the decision easier for them. Even if he had they would probably not have allowed it. Whatever options they may have discussed, they may have chosen to lie down beside their leader and wait for death. Of course, as well as being deeply loyal to Scott, both Wilson and Bowers were deeply religious and inclined to see God’s hand in everything. This gave them a calm acceptance of their fate and both met death serenely. Not so Scott, who appeared to have struggled in his dying moments, perhaps trying to free himself from his sleeping bag to allow the cold to hasten his end. If, as often said, he was the last to die, it must have been truly dreadful for a sensitive agnostic such as him to lie waiting for death by the bodies of his companions.

  What were the physical causes of the deaths of the Polar party? The most likely explanation for Edgar Evans’s collapse was that starvation aggravated by scurvy weakened his blood vessels and that the blow to his head when he fell down a crevasse triggered a brain haemorrhage. At the end he was probably also suffering from hypothermia – staggering and fainting are recognized symptoms of exposure.31 An alternative thesis is that his death resulted from cerebral oedema and other effects of dehydration at high altitude, which a descent to lower levels had not improved.32 A third but less likely theory is that he contracted anthrax from contact with the ponies or their equipment or from spores on the leather and skins with which he worked to make the sleeping bags.33

  Captain Oates was the victim of severe frostbite in his foot. The pain must have been intolerable and his ability to march severely restricted, hence the decision to walk out into the snow and seek death. The frostbite was probably exacerbated by problems with his circulation caused by his old war wound, which may itself have been reopened by incipient scurvy. Scott, Wilson and Bowers died of starvation and exposure. The food and fuel simply ran out.

  As Cherry-Garrard sadly observed: ‘The whole business simply bristles with “ifs”.34 Yet, criticism is all too easy with hindsight and, tempting as it is to focus on what went wrong, the fact remains that Captain Scott and his companions achieved something remarkable, exhibiting courage, loyalty and extraordinary physical endurance. The final trio struggled for 1,450 out of a 1,600 mile journey in the worst conditions on earth. Had the weather been just a little better and had they only managed just 350 yards a day more after leaving the Pole, they would have reached One Ton Depot. The point is not that they ultimately failed but that they so very nearly succeeded.

  Epilogue

  On 18 January 1913 a spruce and festive Terra Nova, flags a-flutter, arrived at Cape Evans under the command of a healthy and renewed Teddy Evans. He and his crew leaned over the edge, eager to hear the news, but the figures on the ice seemed strangely subdued. Teddy Evans shouted through a megaphone, ‘Are you all well?’1 There was an ominous silence before Campbell could bring himself to reply that while Scott and his party had reached the Pole, all were dead. Flags were immediately lowered to half mast, the banners and ribbons decorating the wardroom taken down and the champagne and cigars put out to welcome the returning heroes removed. What should have been a joyful reunion became a sombre leave-taking. Before boarding the Terra Nova the men gathered around the simple nine-foot-high cross of Australian jarrah they had erected on Observation Hill. On it they inscribed the names of the five who had died and at Cherry-Garrard’s suggestion their epitaph was taken from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’. This quotation had been inscribed in a volume of Browning’s poems found in the tent by Scott’s body.

  The grief of the survivors was a bond between men who had shared an extraordinary experience and suffered a common loss. However, on their r
eturn to civilization, they found their emotions mirrored on a vast scale. As Cherry-Garrard described, they landed ‘to find the Empire – almost the civilized world – in mourning’. The news, telegraphed by the men of the Terra Nova, was made public in Britain in early February 1913. After Amundsen’s vict ory interest in Antarctica had declined and other topics like suffragette militancy, coal strikes and tension in Ulster had dominated the headlines. Now the newspapers vied with each other in emotional and patriotic outpourings. The disaster pushed other news items such as ‘Crimes passionelles in France’, ‘The Motor Bandits Trial’, ‘Rioting in Tokyo’, ‘Serbian and Montenegran Attacks’ and ‘The Race Question in South Africa’ off the front page. The Times of 11 February declared that: ‘For a time after the arrival of the news yesterday afternoon, people hoped against hope, wondering whether the information had not been understood, since Arctic and Antarctic news at first is largely impregnated with rumour.’ It also recalled Tennyson’s lines on the death of Sir John Franklin while seeking the North-West Passage but changed one word:

  Not here! The white south hast thy bones and thou heroic sailor-soul

  Art passing on thine happier voyage now

  Toward no earthly pole

  Headlines like ‘How Captain Scott died’, ‘Eight days of starvation’, ‘His dying appeal to England’, ‘Homage to Heroes’ and ‘No Surrender Oates’ held the public in thrall. Scott had become a national icon. The King’s message of sympathy reflected the mood when he referred to ‘that shocking catastrophe which the English race and the whole scientific world are lamenting’. Only ten months earlier the nation had mourned the loss of the Titanic. Now, as one leader put it, ‘Captain Scott died in more awful circumstances than the Titanic.’ Emotional crowds packed into St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 February for a memorial service attended by the King, while thousands stood outside. On the same day, at noon, the 750,000 children of London’s County Council Schools were told the story of Scott’s death by their teachers. It certainly caught the imagination of the young – the Mitford sisters nicknamed their freezing loo ‘the Beardmore’.

  As the news reached Britain one journalist reminded his readers that there was ‘one who is still ignorant of the frightful tragedy, that hapless woman, still on the high seas, flushed with hope and expectation, eager to join her husband and to share in the triumphs of his return’. Kathleen, who would not have relished being depicted in this way, had set out in January. After ‘vagabonding’ with cowboys on a ranch in Mexico, sleeping round a cedar wood campfire at night and riding on the engines of trains as they tore across the Mexican prairies she had boarded the RMS Aorangi in San Francisco. On 19 February as the ship steamed between Tahiti and Raratonga a nervous captain handed her a wireless message: ‘Captain Scott and six [sic] others perished in a blizzard after reaching the South Pole.’ A stunned Kathleen thanked him politely and went off to have a Spanish lesson, have lunch and then read a book on the Titanic. Yet her outward display of strength, so characteristic, masked a deep anguish. She wrote that had she believed ‘firmly in life after death’ she would have thrown herself overboard. However, as she did not, her duty was to make the best of things and exercise the ‘complete self-control’ she had learned from Scott.

  On Kathleen’s arrival in New Zealand Atkinson handed over Scott’s journals and his last letter. Their powerful, beautiful language and the spirit they conveyed were what she would have expected. However, during the months that followed, she must have been struck by the irony that so many things which had eluded Scott in life were posthumously heaped on him. Kathleen was given the status of a wife of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath on the grounds that this honour would have been bestowed on Scott had he survived. The money for which he had always had to struggle began to pour in as the nation responded to his ‘Message to the Public’. By July 1913 the Scott Memorial Fund amounted to £75,000, more than Scott had ever raised in his lifetime. This provided grants of £8,500 to both Kathleen and Oriana, with an additional £3,500 for Peter, £6,000 to Hannah Scott and her daughters, £4,500 to Bowers’s mother and her daughters and £1,250 to Lois, the widow of Edgar Evans. As Oates had been a wealthy man a donation was made to a memorial planned by his regiment. There were also government annuities and pensions – Lois Evans received £48 a year for herself and her three children while Kathleen received £100 a year plus her Admiralty pension of £200 with £25 a year for Peter. Scott’s mother and sisters received an annuity of £300. The residue from the fund of some £12,000, after debts had been settled, was put towards the foundation of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University.

  Kathleen resumed her independent and gregarious life, seeking occasional solace in trips abroad to escape from the ‘eulogy and sympathy and notoriety of the Antarctic disaster’,2 and was passionately, even obsessively, devoted to her son. She was gaining increasing recognition as a sculptress and her work now included busts and figures of her dear ‘Con’ like the bronze figure clad in full sledging gear unveiled in London’s Waterloo Place by Balfour in 1916. Others were placed in Portsmouth and Christchurch, New Zealand. In 1922 she married the politician Edward Hilton Young, later created Lord Kennet of the Dene, after flirting with the idea of T.E. Lawrence, whom she was sculpting in marble, as a suitor. She lived to see her son Peter fulfil Scott’s ambition for him by becoming a renowned naturalist. She died in 1947.

  But what of the others whose lives were touched by the tragedy? Amundsen was profoundly moved by Scott’s death. ‘Horrible, horrible,’ was his response when he heard the news in Madison, Wisconsin.3 Scott’s tragedy eclipsed his own achievement. The popular feeling grew that, by robbing Scott of his rightful prize, Amundsen had broken Scott’s heart. Amundsen also agonized over his decision not to leave a spare can of fuel for Scott at the Pole, now knowing that this might have made a difference to the final outcome.

  Amundsen never married but continued to seek new challenges. In 1923 he tried to fly from Alaska to Spitsbergen but his plane crashed on take-off. In 1925 he and some companions set off in two planes on a flight from Spitsbergen towards the North Pole but were forced down onto the pack ice. In 1926 he commanded the first expedition to cross the Arctic in an airship called the Norge piloted by the Italian Umberto Nobile. Two years later Nobile crashed on a flight to the North Pole aboard the airship Italia. Amundsen took off in a small seaplane to his rescue, flying into a chill winter sky, and was never seen again. Some months later the plane’s floats and a petrol tank were found. Amundsen and his comrades had clearly used them as liferafts but had nonetheless perished – a not inappropriate Polar end for Amundsen.

  Scott’s other great rival Shackleton was in New York when he first heard the news of Scott’s death. Reuters quoted him as saying: ‘It is inconceivable that an expedition so well equipped as Captain Scott’s could perish in a blizzard,’ adding that he had faced the severest blizzards without disaster.4 Shackleton also continued to explore. In 1914 he put together an expedition with the ambitious aim of crossing Antarctica from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. However, his ship the Endurance was crushed by the ice. The crew, under the command of Frank Wild, sought refuge on Elephant Island while Shackleton and five of his men, including Thomas Crean, made a desperate but successful bid to row nearly 1,000 miles to South Georgia to fetch help in a 22-foot whaler. The crew was eventually rescued. In 1922 an undeterred Shackleton set out once again with Frank Wild as his second in command to explore Graham Land, but the physical weakness he had fought so hard to master overcame him. He died of heart failure on board ship and was buried on South Georgia. He was forty-seven. Wild went to Africa, but developed drink problems. He died in Transvaal of pneumonia in 1930.

  Sir Clements Markham was cut to the heart by the loss of Scott. In fact, his own death was only three years away. Preferring to read by candlelight, despite the availability of electricity, his bedclothes caught fire and he died of shock at the age of eighty-five.

  Hannah Scott was g
ranted a grace and favour apartment in Hampton Court – a place with pleasant associations as it was where she had seen her son married. Oriana Wilson, who had sat so quiet and sphinx-like as the Terra Nova carried her husband away from her, proved as practical in her own way as Kathleen. She threw herself into activity, winning the CBE for her work with the New Zealand Red Cross during the First World War. However, the death of her husband caused her to lose her faith in God, once so central to her life and that of Edward Wilson. She later kept in close touch with the work of the Scott Polar Research Institute, never remarried and died at seventy in 1945.

  Captain Oates’s mother, Caroline – the only woman he had ever loved, as he confided in Wilson on the eve of his death – never recovered. Every night she slept in the room which had been his at Gestingthorpe and she carried one of his regimental epaulettes in her bag. She also erected a brass plaque to her son on the north wall of Gestingthorpe Church which she cleaned every week, and ordered his diary to be destroyed, though not before her daughter Violet had secretly copied extracts from it. Letters of condolence flooded in – the manner of Oates’s death struck a chord around the world as the epitome of what was to be expected from an English officer and a gentleman. Anton, the little Russian who became Oates’s stable boy, had a strange fate – he fought in World War One, joined the Red Army during the revolution and helped establish a collective farm, but was killed by lightning in 1932.

  Lois Evans, described by a condescending Western Mail as ‘quite a superior and refined little woman’, erected a memorial to her husband Edgar in Rhosili Church and settled in a Swansea suburb in a house she named ‘Terra Nova’. She was thankful that her husband had been spared the later suffering of the others, but had to contend with a persistent suggestion in the press that Edgar Evans’s mental and physical breakdown had cost the others their lives. In 1948 she attended the premiere of the Royal Command Film Scott of the Antarctic and watched James Robertson Justice play her husband. John Mills played Scott. She died in 1952.