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January 8, 2002
SYNDICATED: Sticking it out in the cold
MOST people know two things about Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Antarctic expedition of 1911-12. One is Captain Oates saying, “I am just going outside, and may be some time”; the other is that Oates, Captain Scott and their team were beaten to the South Pole by a team of Norwegians led by Roald Amundsen and froze to death on their way back to base.
Some may recall the last entry in Scott’s diary. After 10 starving, frost-bitten days holed up in a tiny tent, besieged by a relentless blizzard and temperatures as low as -46C, he wrote on March 29, 1912: “I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. Last Entry. For God’s sake look after our people.”
Scott’s reputation as a model for schoolboys of Britain’s imperial era was made and broken within a very short time. For decades Scott and his expedition have been dismissed as vainglorious and incompetent bumblers: the end of the line for a breed of self-sacrificing, idiosyncratic military coves and amateur boffins who assumed that pluck would see them not just safely home after ripping adventures, but always one step ahead of Johnny Foreigner.
So it comes as a breath of crisp air to find Scott and his team sympathetically reassessed by Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colorado, and leader of the National Ozone Expedition. She was awarded a US National Medal for Science for her work in the Antarctic and has a glacier named in her honour; the author of this thoughtful, rigorous and nicely written book knows her subject.
Scott, Oates, Lieutenant Bowers, Dr Wilson and Seaman Evans died on the trek along what Solomon calls their “via dolorosa” because, whatever other mistakes they made, they were beaten down by freak weather. Solomon’s figures reveal that since 1965 there has only been one occasion when temperatures fell so low — in 1988.
The men were stuck in what Solomon describes as “a deep freeze of unimaginable agony”, although she does her best to describe the effect that just a few minutes in such conditions has on a modern visitor to the Antarctic: a 3km walk from a centrally heated base almost ends with her collapse from exposure. Solomon wonders whether people in Scott’s day were physically tougher than now.
But — and here is the but that makes her otherwise scientific account of Scott’s expedition so affecting — the evidence indicates that the dogged Wilson and the supremely tough Bowers might have made the 17.5 km that separated them from food, oil for their stove and possible survival. By then, though, Scott, stricken by severe frostbite, could barely walk. Wilson and Bowers chose to stand by the leader they loved and in doing so sacrificed their lives. “Whether such a choice was made,” writes Solomon, “and whether it reflected their own dedication or an order by a desperate Scott vainly attempting to save legacies rather than lives is a question not for science but for the human heart.”
It has often been argued that Scott, knowing that he had been beaten to the South Pole, in effect committed suicide. This seems unlikely. He was an emotional man, often in a hurry and occasionally slapdash, but he was the skipper of a decent bunch who were far from the bunglers they have been painted. Solomon brings these men alive: the taciturn Oates (“Titus”), who looked after the ponies; the medics, Atkinson (“Atch”) and Wilson (“Uncle Bill”); the ever cheery Bowers (“Birdie”); and the short-sighted and rather frail Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who died in 1959.
Cherry-Garrard’s The worst journey in the world (1922) is one of the finest travel books ever written. George Bernard Shaw befriended “Cherry” and, as he did with T.E. Lawrence, helped get the best from his pen. What Lawrence did for the desert sands, Cherry-Garrard did for the Antarctic snows.
The book’s title refers to a trek made as part of Scott’s expedition by Cherry-Garrard, Wilson and Bowers in the winter of 1911 to Cape Crozier, the breeding ground of the Emperor penguin. Their mission was scientific, their equipment barely up to the task; they nearly died. “Polar exploration,” wrote Cherry-Garrard, “is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”
Scott’s mission, Cherry-Garrard affirmed, had not been about glory, but about science. After reading Cherry-Garrard’s compelling book it is hard not to contrast the mean spirit of Scott’s detractors with Evans and Bowers on their journey to Cape Crozier; even at their limits neither forgot to say “please” or “thank you”.
Cherry-Garrard’s failure to rescue Scott and his team haunted him for the rest of his life, even though it was not his fault. Sara Wheeler’s superb biography of this charming gentleman explorer is beautifully told, and takes the reader almost effortlessly back to an age when celebrities were explorers and soldiers, not chefs or rock stars. Cherry-Garrard wrote a great book and, despite bouts of mental anguish and ill-health, found redeeming love when he finally married, at the age of 53. The last of the principal Scott expeditionaries, “Cherry” had seen great things and known truly great companions. The time for ridicule is surely over.— Dawn/Guardian news service
The coldest march: Scott’s fatal Antarctic expedition
By Susan Solomon
Yale
ISBN 0300089678
383pp £19.95
The worst journey in the world
By Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Picador
ISBN 0330335855
606pp £8.99
Cherry: a life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard
By Sara Wheeler
Jonathan Cape
353pp £17.99
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