Scott of the Antarctic: the lies that doomed his race to the pole . He halted and discovered the tip of a tent. The team, from the Scott expedition base camp, knew their comrades were dead: their provisions would have run out long ago. But how and where had Scott perished? Wright had found the answer. The men began digging and revealed a tent, perfectly pitched, as Scott would have insisted. He was lying at its centre with Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Dr Edward Wilson on either side. His companions appeared at peace but Scott looked agitated, as if he had struggled to the last. The Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, was an expedition to Antarctica which took place between 19. It was led by Robert Falcon Scott and had various scientific and geographical. Discover the story of Robert Falcon Scott's second Antarctic Expedition in 1910. His race to the South Pole, the scientific discoveries & his death. Of his other men, diaries showed that Petty Officer Edgar Evans had suffered concussion after a fall and died a few weeks after the group began trudging back from the pole, while Captain Lawrence Oates had walked out of their tent to his death because he felt that he was holding back his comrades. Those diaries also showed that Scott had been beaten to the Pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. The cold had turned the skin of Scott, Wilson and Bowers yellow and glassy. We took the bamboos of the tent away and the tent itself covered them. Over them we built the cairn. Four days after the news arrived, a memorial service was held at St Paul's, attended by the King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the elite of British society. Scott’s Antarctic Expedition Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole is most well known for its tragic conclusion, but what a lot of people don’t know is that it was primarily a scientific expedition. Captain Scott's Antarctic Expedition 1910-1913 The Photographs of Herbert Ponting. The British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, 1910-1913, on which Captain Robert Falcon. Caption: Scott's Antarctic expedition. Historical image of the team of the Terra Nova Expedition standing by a Norwegian tent at the South Pole. The Terra Nova Expedition (officially the British Antarctic Expedition 1910) was. Doomed Expedition to the South Pole, 1912 Sinking of the Titanic, 1912. Amundsen relied on dogs to haul his men and supplies over the frozen Antarctic wasteland. Scott's British team distrusted the use of dogs preferring. More than 1. 0,0. Just as it did when Princess Diana died, Britain reacted with an outpouring of national grief. Over the following century, Scott's death provided Britain with a powerful legend imbued with heroism, sacrifice . On that day, at exactly 3pm, Amundsen and his four companions reached the planet's most desolate, inhospitable spot. Amundsen noted in his diary: . The victory of the former was therefore assured, it is assumed, while the latter was doomed from the start. He should have been at the other pole.' Scott in his naval uniform and Roald Amundsen. Photograph: Getty. In fact, the arrival of Amundsen at the South Pole that day was by no means a certainty, a point that remains one of the least appreciated aspects of the Scott- Amundsen story. Indeed, it had taken an extraordinary chain of events . By rights, he should have been standing on our planet's other pole that year. From this perspective, Scott was a victim, not simply of bad luck but of deception. As UK polar expert Nick Cox says: . He was also inspired by the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had come close to conquering the North Pole in 1. Amundsen vowed to achieve the goals that had eluded his two heroes. In 1. 90. 0, aged 2. Gjoa which he then sailed through the knots of tiny islands, ice floes and shoals of northern Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Northwest Passage had been conquered. Amundsen turned to the North Pole and his hero, Nansen, agreed to lend his ship, the Fram, for a new expedition. And then the bombshell dropped. Within weeks of each other, in 1. US explorers . Neither man's claim is accepted today, so poor was their proof of arrival and so incredible were the speeds with which they claimed to have travelled over the ice. Even at the time, there were mutterings. Both were backed by rival New York newspapers, it was noted. But it was enough for Amundsen. There was no glory in going north, he decided. Robbed of one pole, he simply chose to bag the other. But there were complications: Robert Scott, the 4. Antarctica from 1. Amundsen knew this and was aware he would probably be refused permission to use the Fram to go to Antarctica. So he sailed off from Oslo, on 3 June 1. Fram round Cape Horn and back north to Alaska and the easier route to the North Pole. Only when he reached Madeira, while Scott was on his way to Australia, did Amundsen reveal his new plan. A telegram awaited Scott in Melbourne: . As one of them remarked: . He was a meticulous planner, easily the best organised explorer of his generation. It was not good news for Scott. Scott, Bowers and Wilson died 1. They just might have made that with the spring of victory in their steps. Apart from the expedition's geological, meteorological and biological goals, he had included ponies, dogs and mechanical sledges to try out each one's transport potential and carry out many other tests. By contrast, Amundsen merely telegrammed the scientists he had promised to collect in San Francisco en route to the North Pole and told them not to bother. Unencumbered, his teams of dog sledges swept easily to the pole. By contrast, Scott refused to give up a single scientific goal and that cost his men dearly. Photograph: Scott Polar Research Institute. Thirty miles north of London, at Tring in Hertfordshire, the Natural History Museum has one of its most important collections. Eggs from more than half of the world's 1. It is an astonishing array and involved a great many individuals undertaking hazardous missions to collect them. However, none endured the hardship of the men who gathered the collection's greatest prize: three emperor penguin eggs that are kept in a cardboard shoebox- sized container labelled . All that was needed were some fresh- laid emperor penguin eggs. There was a catch, however. The emperor penguin lays its eggs in June, in the Antarctic midwinter. No one had ever travelled in Antarctica during winter. But Scott's chief scientist, Edward Wilson, thought it would be straightforward and enlisted Bowers and Cherry- Garrard. If nothing else, the egg- collecting trip fitted in perfectly with Scott's goals. He recruited specialists in zoology, geology, physics and meteorology to take part. From the start, he had insisted research was to be the main purpose of his expedition. Bagging the pole would merely be a bonus, he claimed. Thus Scott established a substantial base camp on Ross Island when he arrived in Antarctica and arranged for his men to carry out several other mapping and geological missions while he made a bid for the pole. Of these other missions, the one led by Victor Campbell to the north would be the most arduous . The men had to pull two sledges of food, fuel and equipment to reach the penguin's breeding colony at Cape Crozier, 7. Temperatures plunged to - 6. C while the thick cloying snow forced them to pull their sledges in relay, so they gained only one mile for every three they walked. They could only navigate by moonlight or by the dim twilight around noon. The rest was utter darkness. The men took turns falling into crevasses. At one point, Cherry's teeth chattered so violently they shattered. For five weeks, the men had endured the hardest conditions on record, he added. Cherry never fully recovered. As to the eggs, after the death of the scientist they were intended for, they were passed around until 1. CW Parsons concluded, . Science can be a harsh mistress. Yet in many other ways, Scott played a key role in opening up Antarctica to scientific scrutiny. He used mechanised sledges . The sledges failed, but the lessons learned were crucial to their use in future expeditions. The meteorological readings made by his team provided science with the longest unbroken measurement of weather in Antarctica and are still used today. On 1. 2 February 1. Scott stopped at the top of the Beardmore glacier and, noting some interesting moraine, decided it would be a good day to spend . Incredibly, they added 3. Scott's critics as an act of utter folly. Roland Huntford describes it as . Climate expert Professor Jane Francis of Leeds University disagrees. On a sunny day, it is a beautiful place. Scott was probably giving his men a rest before the last trek home. And the weight would have made little difference to the energy they expended. Among the rocks, scientists found a fossil sample of a Glossopteris fern. But it was a very important find. Its discovery in Antarctica provided key support for the idea that all these continents had once been linked together in one vast supercontinent, a theory we now know to be correct. Edgar Evans, the team's strongest man, had already begun to weaken. On 1. 7 February, Scott found . Photograph: Getty. Oates was next. Lame from frostbite, he could hardly walk and had his reindeer- skin sleeping bag slashed on one side so he could keep his leg outside so it would freeze and kill the pain. He asked Scott to leave him to die, but was refused. By 1. 6 March it was obvious he could not go on and he walked out of the tent, into a blizzard, to his death, an act of self- sacrifice that has achieved mythic status. The search party that had found Scott, Bowers and Wilson in their tent later discovered Oates's effects and erected a cross there. By 2. 2 March they had two days' food left, but were three days short of their next depot. Then a blizzard struck and stopped them moving on. They never left their tent again. For his part, Bowers tried to soothe his mother. Scott, almost certainly the last to die, wrote copious letters to the expedition's backers, his colleagues and the families of his dead comrades. His final letter is dated 2. March. Written in pencil, they are hard to decipher, but nevertheless have a powerful impact. Oates's sleeping bag is also displayed there, with its slashed- open side, another poignant reminder of the men's suffering. As to Scott's last words, these were not a general cry of despair but a very specific call for financial help for his family, says Lane. He was frantic they would be left destitute. That is why he wrote those words. An appeal for funds by the Lord Mayor of London was so successful it provided pensions for all the polar party's widows and orphans, with enough left over to set up the Scott Polar Research Institute. There is one final twist to Scott's story. Edward Atkinson, the man left in charge of Base Camp, knew Scott was dead, but had no idea what had happened to a second expedition led by Lieutenant Victor Campbell to survey the coast to the north. The former were certainly dead while finding Campbell could make the difference between life and death for his men. Atkinson held a vote. There was one abstention. The rest voted to find Scott.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |