A First Rate Tragedy (2 page)

However, in November 1912 the wider world guessed nothing of the disaster. The expedition’s only means of contact with the outside world, their ship the
Terra Nova
, had departed for New Zealand in March before there was any reason to fear that Captain Scott had come to grief. What the world did, however, know was that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had reached the South Pole and had beaten Scott. The news that Scott and his four companions had also reached the Pole but died during their return did not break until early February 1913.

When it did, the story was rendered even more poignant because Scott’s widow, Kathleen, was then sailing to New Zealand to be reunited, or so she thought, with her husband, unaware, as the newspapers were quick to point out, that she had been a widow for nearly a year. Neither was she aware of the great memorial service held in St Paul’s Cathedral on 14 February, just two days after the news had been announced. Crowds jostled to join a congregation headed by the King himself.

The tragedy had a profound effect. Scott immediately became and remained a far greater hero than if he had survived. But why? What was it in the achievements of a man who all his life had felt himself caught in the machine ‘that grinds small’,
²
a man who never felt quite master of his own destiny, who believed himself to be inherently unlucky, and who ultimately failed, that so caught at the British soul?

Partly, of course, heroes who die at the apex of their achievement such as Nelson or Wolfe cannot by their later actions fall from grace. Partly, the British have always loved plucky losers and heroic failures, even in Scott’s day. Though Britain dominated the 1908 Olympic Games, held at London’s White City, outclassing the Americans, the public took their triumph for granted and reserved their admiration for an Italian marathon runner who collapsed near the finishing line, while leading, and was disqualified for receiving help across the line. Queen Alexandra presented him with a gold cup and he was inundated with offers to appear in the music halls.

However, one of the key reasons was the context of the times. The Britain of 1913 was increasingly unsure of her place in the world. H.G. Wells, looking back from 1914, described the ripples of uncertainty and self-doubt that were troubling the nation: ‘The first decade of the twentieth century was for the English
a decade of badly strained optimism. Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers [the Boers of South Africa] amidst the jeering contempt of the whole world – and we felt it acutely for several years . . .’
³
The dismay and self-doubt at the loss of the ‘unsinkable’
Titanic
in April 1912 exemplified the nation’s waning self-confidence. At the same time, the heroism of the men who calmly loaded their wives and children into the insufficient lifeboats knowing that they themselves would go down with the ship seemed the very apotheosis of noble self-sacrifice.

This was a period when old and new ideas were colliding with some force. In parliament the Liberal Party was locked in a struggle with the Lords over Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’. The army and the navy were each engaged in soul-searching arguments about how to modernize their methods and equipment. This was the era of the Dreadnought and the machine gun. The capability of the submarine and the aeroplane were hotly debated. Other difficult issues clouded the scene – Home Rule for Ireland, confrontation between unions and employers, the increasingly stormy suffragette battle. Moral values and the established social order were under increasing challenge as the certainties of Victoria’s golden age faded away. Marie Stopes was advocating birth control. D.H. Lawrence was working on his first book,
The White Peacock
. As Balfour put it, Victoria’s death ‘affects us not merely because we have lost a great personality, but because we feel that the end of a great epoch has come upon us’.
⁴

The novelist Elinor Glyn, she of ‘Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin’, wrote that in observing Victoria’s funeral cortège she was witnessing ‘the funeral procession of England’s greatness and glory’.
⁵
Comparisons were increasingly made between the decadence and decline of the Roman Empire and Britain’s position. People like Baden-Powell worried over
signs of physical degeneracy in the British, warning that one cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire was the fact that the soldiers ‘fell away from the standard of their forefathers in bodily strength’.
⁶
Scott’s last letter to his wife, addressed unsentimentally to ‘my widow’, reflected that distaste of growing ‘soft’: ‘How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home.’

Britain’s sense of security, of her ability to fill her rightful pre-eminent place in the world was faltering before new threats and challenges. The greatest threat of all was war with Germany. Before he set out in 1910, Scott asked the editor of the
Daily Mail
when he thought that war might break out. With surprising accuracy he advised Scott to complete his expedition by August 1914! A Scottish traveller, Campbell MacKellar, recorded with concern that ‘an impudent native’ had approached him in Java and said: ‘All German man now. Englishman no good now.’ The traveller mused over how this idea had spread so quickly but concluded that it was partly ‘because it was true!’
⁷

Against this background there was much about Scott’s Antarctic odyssey that struck a reassuring note. It was brave and daring to venture into the unknown continent where British men would prove that the old values of courage in adversity, cheerfulness, persistence, loyalty and self-sacrifice had not died. Scott’s letters and diaries were greeted with deep emotion because they showed that he and his colleagues had held true to these ideals until the end. ‘My companions are unendingly cheerful,’ he wrote, ‘but we are all on the verge of serious frostbites, and though we constantly talk of fetching through I don’t think any one of us believes it in his heart.’

The very language in which they were couched – and Scott had considerable literary talent – could not fail to appeal to the heart of a nation that was losing confidence. ‘Had we lived I should
have had a tale to tell which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman’ was his message from the grave. The account of Captain Oates, tortured by frostbite, staggering out to his death in the blizzard to save his friends, with merely the terse comment that he might be ‘gone for some time’, could have come from the pages of
Boy’s Own
. Here was the very epitome of the English officer and gentleman doing his duty without fuss.

Apart from the heroism there was the human interest. Through Scott’s diaries the public, then as now, could relive the details of moving events as they unfolded. They could share the awful disappointment and psychological effect of reaching the Pole only to find that Amundsen had stolen the prize; the frustration at the weather conditions which held up the party’s dash to safety; the shock and surprise at the weakening of the first and supposedly strongest member of the party, Petty Officer Edgar Evans; the dismay at finding that some of the vital supplies of fuel, carefully depoted, had evaporated; the pain of living with gnawing starvation and frostbitten limbs; the pathetic deterioration of Captain Oates; the tantalizing knowledge that at their final camp they were only eleven miles from a large depot of food and fuel but prevented from reaching it by violent blizzards; the wistful hope that a search party would find them in time; the picture of men lying helpless in their tent hoping above the shrieking of the blizzard to catch the eerie barking of the sledge dogs that would mean salvation; their strong desire to survive, coupled with the knowledge that they would not. If Scott and his party had vanished without trace, if there had been no diaries and letters and messages, he might perhaps have faded from memory.

Another important factor was Amundsen. Here, in the eyes of many at the time, was the villain and foil to Scott, the British hero. Foreigner, interloper and rival he was the man who had sneaked
out of Norway in the
Fram
, ‘the Viking ship of the Twentieth Century’ as another Norwegian Antarctic explorer Borchgrevink called her, concealing his intention to go south rather than north, until Scott was already on his way down to Antarctica. He was the man who turned reaching the South Pole into a race, the ‘professional’ who, by superior technique with skis and dogs and better luck and preparation, pipped Scott, the ‘gifted amateur’, at the post and stole the prize. Indeed, Amundsen himself called his journey ‘a sporting stunt’.

Amundsen was not perceived to have played the game and his achievement, which had not relied on hauling sledges himself, seemed less virile and manly than Scott’s. Scott had written ten years earlier that: ‘No journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problems of the great unknown.’
⁸
This ethos still underpins British Antarctic ventures, such as the unsupported trek across the continent by Ranulph Fiennes and Michael Stroud, Roger Mear’s attempt to walk alone to the Pole and Ranulph Fiennes’s abandoned lone trek across the continent.

The sheer mystique of Antarctica, the last frontier, also contributed. As exploration in the southern regions had gathered pace at the turn of the century the popular imagination had become gripped by descriptions of a place of surpassing beauty, mystery and danger. The accounts from both of Scott’s expeditions and from other explorers were lyrical and exhilarating. Tryggve Gran described how ‘It was as though we lived in a gigantic, wonderful fairy tale; as though we sailed over an ocean where thousands of white lilies lay rippling in the night air. And when the sun rose
the white lilies took on a violet hue and the whole of fairyland lay in rosy light’.
⁹

And there was the wildlife. Scott’s men left wonderful accounts of such curiosities as the little Adélie penguins. Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote that:

The life of an Adélie penguin is one of the most unchristian and successful in the world . . . Some fifty or sixty agitated birds are gathered upon the ice-foot, peering over the edge, telling one another how nice it will be, and what a good dinner they are going to have. But this is all swank: they are really worried by a horrid suspicion that a sea-leopard is waiting to eat the first to dive . . . What they really do is to try and persuade a companion of weaker mind to plunge: failing this they hastily pass a conscription act and push him over. And then – bang, helter-skelter, in go all the rest.
¹⁰

Such anthropomorphism was typical of a sentimental age which produced
The Jungle book
,
The Wind in the Willows
and
Peter Rabbit
. However, there was perhaps a deeper reason why such descriptions appealed. By pretending that an ordered animal world replicated the human one, the Edwardians rejected the possibility that baser ‘animal instincts’ could motivate human actions. Even if there was increasing acceptance of Darwin’s theory that man was descended from animals, Freud’s emerging theories of the human psyche and its motivation surely could not apply. Scott and his companions seemed to epitomize the nobler side of man, demonstrating self-sacrifice for the benefit of others, loyalty in death and the paramountcy of man’s quest for knowledge. Half-frozen and starving, they had continued to ‘geologize’ on their
return from the Pole and had dragged their heavy specimens with them till the end.

If Britain had needed heroes in 1913, she had an even greater thirst for them as the First World War progressed and a generation of young men obeyed the call to unquestioning sacrifice. However, after the war came the doubts. What had it all been for? Was the terrible cost justified? Scott’s heroism achieved an even greater prominence. His sacrifice in the pure clean wastes of Antarctica remained comfortingly unsullied amid doubts about what the mud, pain and squalor of Flanders had achieved.

The mystique and enduring power of Scott’s last Antarctic expedition lie in all these things. Of course, the modern age is less comfortable with heroes, cynically eager to show its sophistication and scepticism and dig for the feet of clay. There has been much debate in recent years about the scale of Scott’s achievement and he has been compared unfavourably with Amundsen. It is of course possible to pare the story down to clinical discussions of logistics, to a debate about methods of transport, the merits of dogs versus ponies, the quality of rations, the effectiveness of the planning, the routes which were followed, the risks which were run. Yet, while these things have their place, there is the danger of losing sight of the essential humanity of what happened out there in that forlorn and silent world.

It is important to strip away the improving tales that accrete to heroes and to reveal the true characters underneath. However, to believe that Scott and his companions achieved something heroic is not to imply that they were perfect. Heroes are not required to be. Scott undoubtedly made mistakes. He could be difficult, impatient and short-tempered. He suffered crises of confidence and periods of abstraction and depression but that does not detract from his stature. In the same way, the story of the South
Pole expedition of 1910 continues to fascinate and inspire but is not without light and shade. It is a tale of perseverance and unquenchable spirit in the face of terrible odds but it is also a story of stubbornness, sentimentality and of men who were deeper and more complex than we sometimes acknowledge. Heroes, but humans too.

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The Early Heats of the Great Race