While Amundsen’s team was returning to base in the early part of January 1912, the Fram, waiting for them at the Bay of Whales, unexpectedly encountered another exploratory vessel: the Kainan-maru, carrying the Japanese South Polar Expedition, led by army lieutenant Nobu Shirase. Shirase was another Pole-hunter. Like Amundsen, his focus had been on the north until Cook and Peary forestalled him. Initially failing to generate much Japanese interest in his Antarctic venture, he eventually raised enough funds to support a small expedition, which, cheered on by a large crowd, departed in late 1910 with the aim of reaching the Pole the following summer. Pack ice prevented a landing, however, and the men spent the winter in Sydney. By the time they returned south in November 1911, aware that their original aim was now redundant, they focused on undertaking ‘as much scientific exploration as practicable’.31 They were the first humans to stand on Edward VII Land, and sledged southwards for more than 290 km (180 miles) across the Ross Ice Shelf, using teams of Karafuto dogs and moving more quickly than any other expedition at the time.32 They planted a Japanese flag at their southernmost point – just over 80 degrees – and returned home to an enthusiastic public.
Members of the Japanese expedition to Antarctica on board the Kainan-maru, 1910–12.
While the crews of the Fram and Kainan-maru were exchanging visits in the Bay of Whales, Scott’s team of five men were hauling their sledges over the polar plateau. They received the message inside Amundsen’s tent on 18 January, having reached the Pole the previous day ‘under very different circumstances from those expected’.33 The dawning realization that they would be the second, not the first, team to reach 90 degrees south had been triggered by a flag left at the initial Norwegian camp, a black speck in the distance. ‘It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions’, recorded Scott: ‘All the day dreams must go; it will be a wearisome return.’34
Sir Clements Markham, and Kathleen and Robert Scott on board the Terra Nova.
Until he had read Amundsen’s telegram in mid-October the previous year, when he was in Melbourne en route to Antarctica, Scott had anticipated his team being alone on the plateau. He knew the possible consequences of the news wired from Norway, writing to his wife Kathleen before he set out on the polar journey: ‘If [Amundsen] gets to the Pole, it must be before we do, as he is bound to travel fast with dogs and pretty certain to start early.’35 Even though Scott’s second expedition, like his first, had both scientific and geographic goals, the stakes were high, since the attainment of the Pole had been announced as an explicit aim.
Scott took a tiered approach to the journey, with an advance support team using the new technology of motor-powered sledges setting out with supplies in October 1911, followed by a second group including men, dogs and ponies. These would then be whittled down to a team of four men who would haul sledges along the last leg to the Pole. The use of ponies (a decision influenced by Shackleton’s positive reports36) meant a later start in the season: the second group departed on the first day of November. From their base at Cape Evans on Ross Island, they planned to cross the Barrier, following the route trail-blazed by Shackleton up the Beardmore Glacier and onto the plateau.
Problems of various kinds – including issues with the motor sledges and the ponies, and difficult snow surfaces – beset the outward journey, but by early January they were on the plateau, fewer than 280 km (150 nautical miles) from the Pole. Scott selected his final team at this point, now deciding on four, rather than three, companions: Wilson, who had accompanied him on his earlier polar trek; Petty Officer Edward ‘Taff’ Evans, another veteran of the Discovery expedition; Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers, a naval man who had previously displayed a remarkable imperviousness to the cold; and Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, an army captain. On 4 January the polar party headed south alone. Although the outward trek had had its problems, the decision to continue was not a case of the British choosing lionization over life. They had around a month’s rations for the five of them to make the journey to the Pole and back to their depot: ‘it ought to see us through’.37 Fewer than two weeks later, Bowers saw the Norwegians’ black flag.
Postcard from 1912, with image of Captain Scott ‘en route to the South Pole’.
J. S. Fry & Sons Cocoa advertising postcard, c. 1910. Fry’s Cocoa was one of many commercial sponsors of the Terra Nova expedition.
Oates in the stables with some of the Siberian ponies during the Terra Nova expedition.
‘Great God! this is an awful place’, Scott famously wrote in his diary on his first ‘night’ at the Pole (it was, of course, continually light at this time of year). At lunch the next day, calculating that they were half or three-quarters of a mile from the Pole, they put up their ‘poor slighted Union Jack’ and took photographs.38 After a second night they headed back to base, taking the ‘ominous black flag’ they had originally spotted with them, using its staff as a sail. Scott’s journal entry shows the impact on their spirits of their discoveries at the Pole: ‘I’m not sure we don’t feel the cold more when we stop and camp than we did on the outward march … I’m afraid the return journey is going to be dreadfully tiring and monotonous.’39 It was this, and far more. While they found their food depots, Wilson, Oates and particularly Evans were suffering. Evans had earlier hurt his hand badly while mending a sledge, revealing his injury only when he was in the final team marching towards the Pole. Now it was really beginning to tell, and a concussion sustained in a crevasse encounter made things worse. By early February they were reaching the edge of the plateau, most of them ‘fit’ but Evans ‘going steadily downhill’.40 By 16 February he had ‘nearly broken down in brain’, according to Scott; the next day he became delirious, collapsed and lost consciousness, dying in the tent around midnight.41
Without Evans, the team was able to move more quickly, but Scott was now worried about the conditions in the late summer season. They were plagued by extreme cold and snow surfaces that made sledging ‘like pulling over desert sand, not the least glide in the world’.42 Soon it was Oates who began to struggle; the harsh conditions had troubled an old war injury to his leg. Scott’s diary entries show rising anxiety turning into doubt, by early March, of their chances of ‘getting through’ while nursing a dying man.43 Around 16 March Oates famously ended his own suffering, and the team’s delay, by walking out of the tent to his death. By now only Scott was keeping a diary, aware that it, rather than the men themselves, would tell the record of their story:
[Oates] slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning – yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’. He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since … We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.44
Now desperately short of food and fuel, the three remaining men walked for a few more days, to within 17.5 km (11 miles) of the next depot. Terribly weak, with ‘whirling drift’ constantly outside their tent, they died, having written farewell letters to their family and friends and, in Scott’s case, a compelling ‘Message to the Public’.45 Scott’s last diary entry, asking for their families to be looked after, was made on 29 March 1912. It was more than seven months before the diary, in the tent along with the three men’s bodies, was found by their traumatized friends. They collapsed the tent over their companions’ remains, built a cairn to mark it and returned north. The public did not hear the news until the expedition returned to New Zealand early the following year.
Statue of Robert Falcon Scott in Christchurch, New Zealand (prior to the 2011 earthquake, when the statue was damaged). The statue was sculpted by Scott’s widow Kathleen and erected in 1917.
While the quest for the South Pole may have ended on 14 December 1911, no narrative of its exploration ends there: it is not so much Am
undsen’s victory but the excitement and tragedy of the so-called race to the Pole that has held the popular imagination ever since. It has also generated unending and passionate debate. Even while the British press and public began the inevitable process of mythologizing their polar heroes, questions were asked: about, for example, Scott’s organization of the expedition; his selection of four, rather than three, men to accompany him on the run to the Pole; and his decision not to use dogs for the final leg. And while Amundsen’s achievement the previous year had been acknowledged and celebrated, even in Britain, issues were raised here, too, especially about the Norwegian’s decision to keep his plans a secret.
As the century continued, Scott’s reputation in particular was butted and rebutted to the point of tedium, with Roland Huntford’s polemical dual biography Scott and Amundsen (1978) being particularly influential. It became obligatory towards the end of the twentieth century to assume that the British leader, far from the heroic martyr celebrated by the British press, was incompetent, underprepared and class-bound; inconsistent and overly sentimental in his attitude towards animals; a poor leader; and suffering from a death wish. In this popular view the explorer was talented only in his ability to write a whitewashing narrative of the journey. Detractors pointed out the numerous mistakes they believed the explorer had made; defenders attempted to explain, contextualize or correct these perceptions in turn. New analyses shed light on controversial points: Susan Solomon in The Coldest March (2001), for example, used meteorological data to confirm that the weather on the plateau during Scott’s return voyage was, as the team had observed, unusually bad.
Creative writers came into the mix, with the tools at their disposal – multiple perspectives, ambiguity, unreliable narrators – enabling insights and interpretations unavailable to historians. The Norwegian novelist Kåre Holt’s Kappløpet (The Race, 1974) weaves the two leaders’ stories together in alternating chapters; the British writer Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys (1991) deals with Scott’s men only, but each member of the polar party narrates in turn. The American author Ursula K. Le Guin changed the focus by publishing an anonymous story, ‘Sur’, in the New Yorker in 1982, the narrator of which claims to have been part of a secret all-women South American expedition that arrived at the Pole before either Scott or Amundsen.
Meanwhile, Scott’s journals, appearing in numerous editions and reprints, continued to speak for themselves. When they first appeared in print in 1913 they had been edited, as with the publication of most private journals, and this process became a source of controversy. However, a facsimile of Scott’s original entries appeared in the late 1960s, and the whole handwritten account is now available online digitally from the British Library.
Amundsen’s account of a seemingly safe and pleasant polar journey was also challenged, although to a lesser degree. Some commentators pointed to his falling out with the experienced but troubled Arctic explorer Hjalmar Johansen: after the first, aborted start for the Pole, Johansen criticized his leader for speeding home ahead of his men, leaving Johansen with no food or tent, and a dangerously frostbitten companion, Kristian Prestrud. Neither man was included in the second polar party; Johansen later committed suicide. Others questioned the treatment of the dogs, some of which were in very poor condition when they were killed. Amundsen himself admitted that the ‘over-taxing of these animals’ was the ‘only dark memory of my stay in the South’: the ‘daily hard work and the object I would not give up had made me brutal’.46
Scott’s image looks out from a snow globe purchased from a museum gift shop.
While Amundsen had won the physical ‘race to the Pole’, then, the moral victory still seemed up for grabs, and it was (and is) quite possible to paint either explorer as hero or villain, by selective inclusion of event and quotation. A recent biographer of Amundsen, Stephen Bown, has put forward a plea for a ‘decoupling of these two lives’, dismissing the ‘so-called race’ as ‘a literary and historical conceit, contrived at the start by Amundsen and his brother Leon to generate publicity, and perpetuated by authors for nearly a century now, in which Scott’s and Amundsen’s stories are always told in tandem’. Bown points out that although Amundsen went on to undertake numerous Arctic expeditions and became an international celebrity-explorer, he is nonetheless remembered by posterity largely for his role in the ‘race’. The complexity of Scott’s character, circumstances and achievement have likewise been flattened for popular consumption into a two-dimensional caricature – a process ironically captured in a recent piece of polar kitsch, a Scott ‘snow globe’ sold in a museum gift shop as part of the merchandise accompanying a commemorative centenary exhibition. The posthumous fortunes of both men will no doubt continue to wax and wane, with neither able to escape from inevitable comparison with the other.
It was more than 40 years before humans again stood at the South Pole, and they arrived not by dog-sledging or man-hauling but in an R4D-5 U.S. naval aircraft. The Pole had not remained entirely in peace throughout this time, however. ‘Heroic Era’ explorers had recognized the potential of flight in the region, with Scott launching an air balloon during the Discovery expedition, from which Shackleton took photographs, and Mawson purchasing an aeroplane for his Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Neither effort went very well, but by the 1920s other explorers were taking up the challenge, and another ‘race to the Pole’ was in the making.
The Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins, famous for his aviation exploits in the Arctic and elsewhere, secured funding to attempt Antarctic flights from the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, who offered a $10,000 bonus if Wilkins reached the South Pole. Wilkins’s main focus, however, was on a different part of the continent.47 In late 1928 he and his co-pilot Ben Eielson made the first flight in the Antarctic, from Deception Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula. Soon after they flew over Graham Land, reaching over 71 degrees south before turning back.
Scott’s polar party’s famous ‘selfie’, now on a coffee mug.
In the early 1930s Parker Bros. Inc. released this board game based on Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition.
The American naval officer Richard Byrd, having heard about the bonus Hearst had promised Wilkins, was worried that the Australian might steal his thunder: ‘You must not forget that Wilkins is out to lick us’, he told his fund manager.48 Around the time that Wilkins made his first Antarctic flight, Byrd’s expedition arrived at the Ross Ice Shelf, establishing a base in the ice, ‘Little America’. Byrd was another Pole-hunter. He was already famous for his North Pole overflight of 1926, although the validity of his claim has been contested ever since. Amundsen flew over the North Pole in an airship just a few days later; thus, given that Cook’s and Peary’s claims have also been discredited, he may actually have achieved his childhood dream of being the first to reach (or at least fly above) the spot. On Byrd’s return, the Norwegian veteran asked the American explorer about his next goal, and received the reply – only half-joking – ‘The South Pole’.49
This was more easily said than done. Among other challenges, Byrd’s plane (a Ford Trimotor) needed to negotiate a mountain range and, unable to gain sufficient altitude to pass over it, had to fly up a glacier between the peaks. The plane took off in late November 1929, carrying a four-man team, including Byrd himself as navigator. To clear the pass they had to dump emergency food bags, and even then they made it by only a few hundred feet. They flew over the Pole in the early hours of the morning (darkness, of course, was not a problem), dropped an American flag and returned to base along Amundsen’s route, arriving around eighteen hours after they departed. The expedition had an enthusiastic welcome when it arrived back in the United States in 1929, with a documentary film of the achievement, With Byrd to the South Pole, released the following year.
No further attempt to reach the South Pole by land was made until early 1958, when Sir Edmund Hillary led a team of three tractors across from Ross Island. Hillary had not actually planned to reach the Pole: as part o
f the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, he was laying depots for another party led by the British geologist and explorer Vivian Fuchs, which was travelling from the Weddell Sea in motorized vehicles. Having laid his last depot 500 miles from the Pole, and with Fuchs delayed by the difficult terrain, Hillary – who had already hunted the ‘third Pole’ (Mount Everest) successfully four years earlier – decided to push on, arriving more than two weeks earlier than the other team. While Fuchs, the overall leader and instigator of the expedition, went on to complete the continental crossing a couple of months later, he was understandably put out.
Snowcat crossing a crevasse during the Commonweath Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1955–8).
Swedish poster (1930) by Erik Rohman, promoting Byrd’s expedition film.
Hillary’s arrival at 90 degrees, although an impressive achievement duly celebrated in the press, was very different from Amundsen’s. The New Zealander was ‘led off by friendly hands towards the warmth and fresh food of the Pole Station’.50 The empty plateau was now occupied by prefabricated buildings and ex-Korean War Jamesway huts, inhabited by a community of eighteen men. The Pole itself was surrounded by a circle of empty fuel drums. He had arrived at the end of the Earth and found a U.S. military base.
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