Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

- Episode 03-

‘the worst has happened’

'the worst has happened'
1 April 2025
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NEW SERIES Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure
'we don’t know our distance from the next depot… we are pulling for food…'
Scott's party of eight men try to dig a heavy sled out of soft snow on the Beardmore glacier. (The negatives were thought lost for 100 years.)

The fifth man! 

Scott and seven men had already crossed 400 miles of the ice shelf and climbed 10,000 feet of glacier, treacherously criss-crossed with deep crevasses. They had shot their cumbersome ponies and sent their quick-footed dog-teams back because there were too few to continue with.

At last, Scott names the three men who would come with him to the South Pole. As expected, he would be taking his old friend from the Discovery expedition, William ‘Uncle Bill’ Wilson, the chief scientist. But when Scott named the army officer Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, there were immediate protests. Oates had been badly injured in the leg during the Boer War.

The expedition surgeon, Atkinson, whom Scott had sent back in one of the earlier parties (against Wilson’s advice) had pointed out that Oates’s boots leaked badly and his feet were already in a bad way. They were ‘like hay.’ But Scott insisted that Oates must come with him to represent the British Army. (We argue that Scott had his own personal reasons for keeping Oates with him.)
 
Last of all, Scott announced, he would take someone to represent the ranks… and it would be... Petty Officer Edgar ‘Taff’ Evans. Yet again there were protests.  Everyone pointed out that Scott needed a navigator and the only one on the glacier was Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers. Scott didn't agree. Evans was a mountain of a man and, if there was a sled to pull, Evans had just the kind of muscle to do it.

Eventually, Scott did see sense. Sort of. It was madness for him to be the only navigator and he agreed to take Bowers. But instead of replacing the struggling Oates, Scott announced that Bowers would come along as a fifth man.

Not for the first time, Scott’s endless calculations – pages and pages of scribbled notes on weights and distances and food and cooking fuel to carry – proved to be a waste of time. Not only would the man-mountain Evans consume more than the average Scott had calculated (which the expedition surgeon already believed was too little for men hauling a sled), he was now setting off with five men and food and fuel for only four. They also only had four pairs of skis. They would have to take it in turns to walk.

 
The tent left by Amundsen, photographed by a member of Scott's team, Birdie Bowers (Lieutenant Henry Robertson Bowers). What a poignant scene!

'Welcome to 90 degrees'

Meanwhile, Amundsen’s team consisted of four men, with four sledges and 52 dogs. They had set out on 20 October 1911, eleven days before Scott. By 8 November, Amundsen was recording in his diary ‘we are going like greyhounds over the endless flat, snow plain’. Moral was sky high. They had copious supplies. There was even time for one day off in four to rest.

On 6 December 1911 a blizzard was howling across the plain. ‘Can see absolutely nothing at all,’ wrote Amundsen. Hundreds of miles to the northwest, Scott’s expedition had ground completely to a halt and was hunkered down in its tents. Scott would insist that the weather had been his greatest enemy.  But that day Amundsen clocked up another 20 nautical miles – more than Scott ever achieved. Soft snow was faster going for dogs, but a disaster for ponies and manhauling. Amundsen and his team were now just over 100 miles from the pole.

Eight days later, Friday 14 December 1911, Helmer Hanssen – who was the best navigator and usually went ahead - called for Amundsen to take the lead. Around 3 o’clock they halted. Hanssen’s calculations told them that they had reached the pole. 

‘So,’ recorded Amundsen, ‘we arrived, and planted our flag at the geographical South Pole. Thanks be to God.’ They had got there with three sledges and 17 remaining dogs, though one – Helgi – was exhausted and now had to be put down. The men all gripped the flag as it was planted and they now sat down to what Amundsen called ‘our celebratory meal – a little piece of seal meat each.’

They named the place King Haakon VII’s Plateau. They called their base Poleheim. To compensate for any potential errors in their calculations the four of them (all navigators) each skied 10 miles to different points of the compass, creating a box around the Pole. They marked each corner with a 12-foot long black flag and a small bag tied to a sledge runner.

At the point they reckoned was the Pole itself, they erected their special reserve tent designed by Frederick Cooke, and brought along for the purpose. Inside they left a bag with a letter to King Haakon of Norway. There was also a note to Scott asking him to forward the letter in case they didn’t make it back. The weather continued fair and they had enough supplies to spend three days and five hours at the Pole. Then they turned for home.
 
‘the dogs which would have been our salvation have
evidently failed’



 

At the South Pole, 17 January 1912, (from left) Wilson, Bowers, Evans, Scott, Oates

‘This is an awful place’

17 January 1912, the weather was grim, damp cold and the five men were chilled to the bone as they descended the final slopes to where they calculated the pole to be. ‘This is an awful place,’ wrote Scott in one of his most famous and poignant entries. Birdie Bowers set up a camera, slotted in one glass plate after another, and they photographed themselves with the British flag. Bitter disappointment is etched into their brown-burnt features. Roald Amundsen would later comment that the saddest thing about the photographs was how inadequately the men were dressed.

The return was fraught. Manhauling their sledges meant they were using many more calories than Amundsen’s men - and yet they had stored barely a third of the amount of food and fuel in their depots. If, that is, they could find the depots in the first place.

Before leaving England, strapping young ‘Taff’ Evans had charmed everyone with his ad for Crease’s White Petroleum Jelly. ‘In cold climates,’ the explorer had declared, ‘it is invaluable for use after shaving.’ But now Taff was dying.

Scott had only included him because he was a giant of a man. But, desperately short of food – and particularly of the right food - he began to show the unmistakable signs of scurvy and malnutrition. In particular, he had a painful wound in his hand that wouldn’t heal. Using the inadequate sun goggles Scott had brought, Evans had been hit by snow-blindness. He also had frostbite in his nose, cheeks and hands. 

He fell several times as they descended the treacherous Beardmore glacier and Wilson concluded that he must have suffered some kind of brain injury. On 16 February Wilson described ‘Taff’ Evans as ‘sick and giddy and unable to walk even by the sledge on skis.’  There was, of course, no possibility of hauling him on the sled itself – there was no room and he was too heavy for the others to pull. He eventually died of hypothermia. Scott wrote, ‘it is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way, but calm reflection shows that there could not have been a better ending to the terrible anxieties of the past week. Discussion of the situation at lunch yesterday shows us what a desperate pass we were in with a sick man on our hands at such a distance from home.’ The truth was that by now they were all sick.

 
Cecil Meares, the head dog driver, at base camp January 1912. Scott had tasked Meares with restocking One Ton Depot to enable a dog team rescue party in March 1912. He failed to go.

Contingencies and rendezvous

Scott had made a contingency plans for the possibility that he might not get to One Ton Depot in time for the rendezvous. He clearly knew that his chances of survival hung by a thread.

Naval historian Karen May writes that Scott had left written orders for the dog teams to travel beyond One Ton Depot to search for the returning polar party in late February or early March. They included orders for the expedition’s head dog driver, Cecil Meares, to go out in January 1912 to stock One Ton Depot with extra dog food. That way, if there was no sign of Scott, they would be able to venture beyond the depot in a rescue mission.

But mysteriously Meares never made that journey to restock. It meant that the two dog teams led by Dimitri Gerov and Apsley Cherry-Garrard which reached One Ton Depot on 4 March were unable to go looking for Scott who was in fact now less than 100 miles further south.

But the shortage of navigators was anyway decisive. Neither Gerov nor Cherry-Garrard could navigate. All those winter days and evenings could have been put to better use, training them all in navigation.

On March 9 Scott, hoping now to be rescued, wrote in his diary ‘the dogs which would have been our salvation have evidently failed.’ The next day Gerov and Cherry-Garrard turned for home. It was not the dogs that had failed but the lack of food and navigators.

Had Scott, Wilson and Bowers managed the last 11 miles to One Ton Depot it would have meant a brief respite from hunger, and a faint revival of hope. But without the dog teams to carry them home, they would still never have made the last 135 miles to their base in the depths of winter. One final attempt to rescue them, led by the expedition doctor, was simply driven back by the cold.


#110 'the worst has happened'
Ep 3 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure



 

 
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