EP 01 - Scott vs Amundsen

Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

- Episode 04-

‘A live donkey or a dead lion?’

DOWNLOAD

LISTEN

A live donkey or a dead lion?

9 April 2025

All History Café links

NEW SERIES Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

English-speaking readers wanted heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if those conditions were of their own making

Watercolour of a Parasalena, a moonlike optical illusion caused by moonlight passing through ice crystals in the upper atmosphere, June 1911, McMurdo Sound, by Scott companion Edward Wilson

'We shall march for the depot... and die in our tracks'

By March 23 1912 Scott and his two surviving companions Wilson and Bowers were in their tent just eleven miles from One Ton Depot. They were using the last drop of their fuel and had only a couple of days of food left.

Scott wrote in his journal that 'the end must be near.' He recorded that they had agreed ‘we shall march for the depot with or without our effects [presumably meaning their sled] and die in our tracks.’ But by now Scott had lost the toes on his right foot and was unable to go any further. ‘Amputation is the least I can hope for.’

Bowers and Wilson were ready to press on for the depot to replenish their stores and come back for Scott. But it was blowing a blizzard and they could not even make a start.

Scott spent his time writing. There was, of course, a letter to his wife. But he put more energy into defending his record. To his former commander, now the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Francis Bridgman, Scott wrote, ‘I was not too old for this job. It was the younger men that went under first. We are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we get there.’ To his son’s godfather J.M. Barrie (author of Peter Pan) ‘we are showing that Englishmen can still die with a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end… I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future.’

In a long piece that Scott entitled ‘Message to the Public’, Scott wrote, ‘the causes of the disaster are not due to faulty organisation but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken… the loss of the pony transport… the weather… the soft snow in lower reaches of the glacier… Every detail of our food supplies, clothing and depots work out to perfection… I do not think human beings ever came through such a month as we have come through… we should have got through… but for the sickening of Captain Oates, and a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account.’

Sailmaker Martin Rønne, dancing with a dog in the absence of a female partner, on the journey south with Amundsen on the Fram. Rønne had sewn the Cooke tent they left at the South Pole.

‘Three cheers for the dogs’

Had the British – and Scott in particular – been willing to learn from others’ previous polar experience, all of his hardships could have been avoided or overcome. Arriving in Bergen, but before Scott’s fate was known, Amundsen's team mate, Oscar Bjaaland, told the press that they were confident Scott would have reached the pole, but that he probably failed to reach his main depot on the way back. Scurvy and the winter weather would have defeated him. It was all so utterly predictable.

The American press trumpeted Amundsen's success and he went on a lucrative tour of the States from January to March 1913. But he was not a good talker and a worse writer. The publisher William Heinemann wrote ‘I am disappointed with the lack of imagination he displays… in even so thrilling a thing as his achievement…. I cannot help feeling that, however great Amundsen’s feat is, he is not likely to write a good book.’ But as the historian Beau Riffenburgh points out, the real problem was that what English-speaking readers wanted was heroic tales of desperate survival in appalling conditions - even if, as Riffenburgh points out, those conditions ‘were, to a great extent, of their own making.’

The British, of course, were furious that Amundsen had, as they saw it, trespassed on Scott’s territory, and then beaten him to the pole. England’s Royal Geographical Society (RGS), which was part funding Scott, had no option but to invite Amundsen to address them as they did all returning explorers at the Queen's Hall. Scott’s wife, Kathleen, ostentatiously returned her invitation, but sneaked in anyway to hear him.

In his speech thanking Amundsen, Lord Curzon, the new RGS President, ended by announcing a toast. ‘I propose 3 cheers for the dogs’.

He intended to imply, of course, that Amundsen had cheated by giving all the hard work to dogs, rather than hauling his own sleds, like any manly Briton would have done.

Armchair explorers would blame Petty Officer Edgar Evans. His lack of breeding had caused him to falter first and hold the others back

Players Cigarette cards, 1916, from left Scott, Oates, Wilson, Bowers

'in the end, they starved to death’

As the Antarctic Spring came, in November 1912, the rescue party led by Edward ‘Atch’ Atkinson, expedition surgeon, set out. They found Scott, Wilson and Bowers in their tent. They had got within eleven miles of One Ton Depot.

Cherry Garrard was one of two who crawled inside the tent. Wilson and Bowers, he recorded, had died ‘quietly’. On Scott he is silent. He notes that the tent had been expertly pitched and that everything was orderly. He even found a book he had lent Bill Wilson, and which they had carried all the way back. They had also kept the little notes of encouragement the other members of the expedition had left them. Most terribly of all, having seen the bodies of Scott, Wilson and his good friend Birdie Bowers, Cherry Garrard came to the conclusion that ‘in the end, they starved to death.’

One of the rescue party wrote that he and others of the men wept. ‘Everyone seemed dumbfounded.’ They removed the men’s journals and scientific instruments, and Atch Atkinson read as much of the journals as he needed to to discover that Scott and his men had made it to the pole but that the Norwegians had beaten them by a month. Then they collapsed the tent and buried the men under twelve foot of ice with a cross made from a pair of skis.

Atch read a burial service. Then he led them a further 20 miles south, where they found a cairn with Oates’s sleeping bag, the camera, and the other objects the three others had discarded to lighten the load after Oates had died. They never found Oates’s body. But they put up a cross with a sign, ‘hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman.’ Then they turned for home. They did not try to look for Edgar 'Taff' Evans’s body, or put up a memorial to him.

Later, scandalously, armchair explorers would blame Petty Officer Edgar Evans. His lack of breeding had caused him to falter first and hold the others back. In 1916 Players Cigarettes issued a set of cigarette cards celebrating Antarctic exploration. Amundsen was there. Scott and Oates were included of course, and so were Wilson and Bowers. But ‘Taff’ Evans was completely left out.

#111 A live donkey or a dead lion?
Ep 4 Scott vs Amundsen - a very British failure

During WW1, Scott's photographer, Herbert Ponting, gave lectures to soldiers to illustrate manliness. Here shares slides of his trip to Japan with team members at base camp.

'the true story of ﬁve of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began'

Williamson, a member of the rescue party, wrote in his journal, ‘Of their great sufferings, hardships and devotion to one another the whole world will soon know, the deeds that were done were equally as great as any committed on [a] battlefield and will win the respect, and honour of every true Britisher.’

He was, of course, entirely correct. Ever since Scott had started raising funds, his quest had always been imagined as a demonstration of manliness, defying the widespread unease that the British and their Empire were in long-term decline.

During a Service of Commemoration at St Paul’s a million and a half children in more than 50 towns were read The Immortal Story of Captain Scott’s Expedition. How five brave Englishmen died. ‘Children: You are going to hear the true story of ﬁve of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began. You are English boys and girls, and you must often have heard England spoken of as the greatest country in the world, or perhaps you have been told that the British Empire ... is the greatest Empire that the world has ever seen.’

Captain Scott and Captain Oates were now singled out for celebrity. Their story was put alongside Admiral Nelson, General Gordon, and other naval and military heroes who had been killed in action and held up to schoolchildren as examples to follow.

Scott went on to be glorified in the First World War by men like Haig who used young men as German cannon fodder because they believed the British spirit was stronger than German bullets.

Scott’s photographer, Herbert Ponting was made to give illustrated lectures on Scott on the battlefields in France. As the Senior Chaplain to the Forces wrote to him, ‘The splendid story of Captain Scott is just the thing to cheer and encourage out here....’

In the wake of the disaster that overtook the British army on the Somme 1916, and at Passchendaele in 1917, the whole empty nonsense of manly fortitude and sacrifice began to wane. By then it had done its terrible worst.

Listen To Our Full Series

Every series we add to the History Café catalogue is available on our website. You can click the images below or choose to listen on any of your favourite platforms.

Images top and l to r: Lunatics take over the Asylum: Neoliberalism uncut/ Why did Kennedy cause the Cuba Missile Crisis?/ Trading with the Nazis/ 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their führer, the lobster/ Dr Livingstone, I presume?

View All Episodes

View this email in your browser