Captain Scott's Secret
Diaries from Robert Scott’s Terra Nova expedition shed new light on the deaths at the South Pole. Was a scandal silenced in the name of myth-making?
On February 11th, 1913 England woke to the Daily Mail headline ‘Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return.’ Just a day before, the press had reported that the British Antarctic expedition leader was back in New Zealand after succeeding in his goal to reach the South Geographic Pole; the Royal Geographical Society had even prepared a telegram congratulating him on his success. The palpable sense of anticipation and excitement now turned to despondency.
A few days later a hastily organised memorial service was held in St Paul’s Cathedral. The numbers attending were staggering, exceeding those at the service for the 1,500 lives lost on the Titanic in the same year. ‘The presence of the king’, The Times declared, ‘conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate.’
The details of what had happened appeared contradictory. The five men had last been seen heading confidently towards the Pole in early 1912. They were well provisioned, fit and strong. What had followed did not make sense but the reports from Antarctica had a frightening ring of truth. These accounts described a team returning in deteriorating weather conditions, the likes of which had never been seen before. Pushing on in the bitter cold the expedition had continued its scientific programme, making observations and collecting geological samples – including 16 kilograms of fossil-rich rocks – as it travelled back to the Cape Evans base. And yet the journey proved fatal.
Of the five men in Scott’s party, Petty Officer Edgar Evans was the first to die, apparently from the effects of concussion at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. Later, on March 17th, 1912, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion and recognising that his slowing pace was threatening the others, Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates famously walked out into a blizzard with the words: ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ Struggling forward with limited food and fuel, in plummeting temperatures, the remaining trio continued their trek to base. In late March a nine-day blizzard pinned down Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers in their tent. There would be no escape. All three wrote messages for loved ones until the end, which came sometime around March 29th. Scott’s diary reads:
Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now 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. For God’s sake look after our people.
Reaching the South Geographic Pole one month behind the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team, the British men died disappointed, 150 days out from base and a short distance from salvation at the aptly named One Ton Depot.
The death of Scott and his men was a defining moment of the early 20th century, not least for those connected to Antarctic exploration. On hearing the news Amundsen was quoted as saying ‘horrible, horrible’; while the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), Lord Curzon, reflected:
Arm-chair geographers were sometimes disposed to complain that the days of adventure and risk in exploration were over. The last year gave the melancholy lie to such fireside fallacies. The toll of human life was still demanded, and was still cheerfully paid. Should the day ever arise when it was not, then indeed might geographical societies shut their doors and hand over their work to an educational bureau of the State.
No group encapsulates the spirit of scientific exploration more than Robert Scott and his South Pole party. Unfortunately their deaths have overshadowed their expedition’s great work and, arguably, much of that achieved by the other Antarctic teams; a full scientific and geographic description of this newly discovered continent. Heroic tales of sacrifice and endurance in the face of extreme hardship became the main story, to the detriment of almost everything else.
With the news of the tragedy, rumours circulated among fellows of the Royal Geographical Society that the full story had not been told: that something else had happened on the ice, something that was being quietly ignored. While viewing some of Lord Curzon’s papers in the British Library I discovered seven pages of notes that lent support to these early rumours.
These papers shed light on a chain of events that was precipitated in April 1913 with Lady Scott’s arrival in London from New Zealand, returning after news of her husband’s death. During the month-long voyage Kathleen Scott had pored over Scott’s diary and correspondence. Arriving in London on April 14th, she immediately contacted Lord Curzon and arranged a meeting in two days’ time.
Lack of thoughtfulness
Curzon made his notes after what appears to have been a wide-ranging discussion. He records something that must have come as a shock. The meeting with Lady Kathleen began with talk of her late husband: ‘Scott’s words in his Diary on exhaustion of food & fuel in depots on his return. He spoke in reference of “lack of thoughtfulness & even of generosity”. It appears Lieut Evans – down with Scurvy – and the 2 men with him must on return journey have entered & consumed more than their share.’
Teddy Evans was the expedition’s second-in-command and following Scott’s death assumed leadership of the expedition. The Antarctic venture was seen in some quarters as the RGS’s expedition. If Evans was even remotely suspected of being complicit in Scott’s death, the society might be asked some very difficult questions. Curzon immediately initiated an inquiry, asking several senior RGS members if they would discreetly help him investigate the matter. Most were supportive. But a few days later he met Edward Wilson’s widow, Oriana, and there were further revelations. Curzon’s notes record:
Mrs Wilson told me later there was a passage in her husband’s diary which spoke of the “inexplicable” shortage of fuel & pemmican on the return journey, relating to depots which had not been touched by Meares and which could only refer to an unauthorised subtraction by one or other of the returning parties. This passage however she proposes to show to no one and to keep secret. C.
Scott’s dog driver, Cecil Meares, was known to have removed extra supplies from one of the supply dumps, the Mount Hooper Depot. Halfway back across the Ross Ice Shelf in 1912, Meares was starving. He had travelled the entire ice shelf on the outward journey and the extra two weeks meant he and his dogs were desperately short of food. Taking the bare minimum, he left a letter informing the others of his actions.
However it was not Meares’ removal of the food that Wilson was referring to. The returning South Pole team did not reach Mount Hooper until March 10th, 11 days after Wilson’s last journal entry. The shortage of food must have been elsewhere. But the published version of Wilson’s diary makes no mention of a shortage of fuel or of pemmican. The key date seemed to be February 24th, when the returning party reached the Southern Barrier Depot at the bottom of the Beardmore Glacier. To check Curzon’s claims, I examined Wilson’s original journal in the British Library but there is no reference to fuel or pemmican and when analysed under high powered microscope there is no evidence that any text has been erased or is missing.
Importantly, two sketchbooks were also found with the bodies of Wilson, Bowers and Scott that proved to be a gold mine of information. Housed by the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the perforated pages in these books contain numerous detailed sketches and a comprehensive outline of the science programme – including instructions from geologist Marie Stopes to ‘bring home at all costs’ any geological samples they discovered with plant remains. Curiously, six pages have been ripped out from the two books. It is clear from the indentations in the adjoining pages that the missing leaves detailed events on the journey. These documents are to be analysed by the British Library to decipher the text but regardless these observations correlate with Curzon’s notes that certain passages were to be kept secret. Importantly, three days after reaching the Southern Barrier Depot, Scott also noted in his diary that they were short of provisions. It suggests that one or more individuals did indeed take more than their fair share of food. And this was not for the first time. On their return the South Pole team found a full day’s biscuit allowance missing in the Upper Glacier Depot on February 7th, and both Scott and Wilson remarked upon this in their diaries.
The evidence pointed towards the expedition deputy Teddy Evans and his team as the guilty party. There is no doubt there was considerable mistrust among the leadership on the expedition. Before setting out for the Pole, Scott wrote to his expedition manager Joseph Kinsey in New Zealand and, in a letter held by the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, the British leader expressed his disappointment with Evans, whom he considered ‘to be rather a duffer in anything but his own particular work’. Regretting his decision to make the Welshman second-in-command, Scott vowed to ‘take some steps concerning this, as it would not do to leave him in charge [at the British base, Cape Evans] in case I am late returning’. Evans’ return to base proved more than eventful. On the Ross Ice Shelf he collapsed, ill with scurvy. Dumping geological samples to shed weight, his companions Tom Crean and William Lashly dragged him on their sledge. Finding they could pull no further, Crean walked, weak from exhaustion, the remaining 56 kilometres to Ross Island and returned with help, saving Evans’ life. Writing in 1912, Evans expressed his fury to a friend, convinced Scott had never intended to take him to the Pole and had appropriated Bowers from the Welshman’s team to make his sledge-pulling easier.
Significantly embellished
Of the returning Last Supporting Party, only Lashly’s diary has been published, the most popular version apparently reproduced in full within Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, some ten years after the events it describes. Although Lashly would later insist the contents were true, the entries are significantly embellished on the original, which is housed at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Curiously, the original diary entries give no detail on how much food the three men took from the allegedly impoverished depots, despite the definite statements in Cherry’s version. Evans’ scurvy – a possible justification for taking extra food – is not commented on by Lashly until the men were halfway across the Ross Ice Shelf, eight days after that given in the popular version when the men were still descending the Beardmore Glacier. There is nothing in Lashly’s diary to refute Lord Curzon’s notes.
Curzon could not risk the story getting out. Scott and his companions had been declared heroes. To suggest that one of the returning teams, albeit while suffering scurvy, had helped itself to more than its share of food, contributing to the men’s deaths, would have changed everything. There was little appetite for public scandal. Curzon appears to have shut down the inquiry. After April 24th, 1913 there were no further references to it. By the end of July 1913, however, Evans had been removed from the official leadership of the expedition.
It is a shame that the complete, unaltered text in this and the other diaries is not better known. The nature of the explorers’ deaths and the editing of their final words has for too long created a fixation on the ‘race’ to reach the Pole, rather than the bigger story of how the five expeditions of 1912 contributed towards our knowledge of Antarctica and the dawn of a new age in understanding the natural world.
By focusing on the race we do these men a disservice. Scott and his men died for science. I hope that, after a century, we can get the balance right and remember the pioneering scientific work they did.
