The British Polar Party of Five Who Reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 to Find Amundsen's Norwegian Flag Already There and Died in the Snow on the Return

Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912), Royal Navy, was 43 years old and the senior British polar explorer of his generation when he sailed from Cardiff on 15 June 1910 in the converted whaler Terra Nova. His stated objective was the first attainment of the geographic South Pole. The expedition reached its base at Cape Evans on Ross Island, Antarctica, in January 1911.

Scott discovered on his arrival that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen — whom Scott had previously believed to be planning a North Pole campaign — had announced from Madeira in October 1910 that he was racing for the South Pole as well. Amundsen’s expedition ship the Fram arrived in the Bay of Whales on the Antarctic side of the Ross Ice Shelf in January 1911, approximately 60 miles closer to the Pole than Scott’s Cape Evans base.

The two expeditions had radically different operational philosophies. Amundsen depended on dog teams — 52 sled dogs at the start — and on a small all-Norwegian polar team of four men. Scott used a complicated mixed-transport plan of motor sledges (which broke down within the first week of the polar march), Mongolian ponies (which were not suited to the climate and were shot for meat at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier), and man-hauling by the polar party over the southernmost 800 miles.

The race

Amundsen departed his Bay of Whales base on 19 October 1911 with four companions, fifty-two dogs, and four sledges. He reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911, raised the Norwegian flag, named the site Polheim, left a tent containing supplies and a note for Scott, and returned to the Bay of Whales by 25 January 1912 — losing only one man (he had returned to base with a tooth infection) and no dogs that had been needed for the return journey.

Scott departed Cape Evans on 1 November 1911 with sixteen men, ten ponies, and two motor sledges. The motor sledges failed on the second day. The ponies were shot at Shambles Camp at the base of the Beardmore Glacier on 9 December 1911. The polar party was reduced in stages to five men for the final 167-mile push to the Pole.

The final five-man polar party — Scott (43), the surgeon Edward Wilson (39), the cavalry officer Lawrence “Titus” Oates (32), the Royal Indian Marine lieutenant Henry “Birdie” Bowers (28), and the Royal Navy petty officer Edgar “Taff” Evans (35) — reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912.

They found Amundsen’s tent, the Norwegian flag, and a note from Amundsen requesting that Scott forward the letter to King Haakon VII of Norway in case Amundsen’s own party did not return. Amundsen had calculated, correctly, that Scott was the more likely party not to return.

Scott’s journal entry that evening:

Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.

The return

The 800-mile return march took them ten weeks. The five men were on subsistence rations, three of them showed early scurvy, the temperatures averaged below minus 30°C through February and March (Antarctic late summer / early autumn) with continuous headwinds.

Edgar Evans had been showing concussion-like symptoms since a glacier fall on the outward march. He died of brain injury on 17 February 1912 at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, aged 35.

Lawrence Oates had been losing toes to frostbite progressively through February. By mid-March his frostbitten feet made him unable to keep pace with the other three; he was, in his own view, slowing the party down enough to kill them. On the morning of 17 March 1912 — his 32nd birthday, in a blizzard, with temperatures at approximately minus 40°C — he walked out of the tent into the storm without his boots, having told his companions, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

His body has not been recovered.

Scott, Wilson, and Bowers continued north. They reached a camp eleven miles south of the One Ton Depot — the next pre-cached supply point — on approximately 20 March 1912 and were trapped there by a blizzard. The blizzard lasted nine days.

Scott’s last journal entry, dated 29 March 1912, is approximately one hand-written page:

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 shall stick it out to the end but 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.

The page is followed by a separate sheet — Scott’s “Message to the Public” — that argues the expedition’s failure was the product of unforeseeable weather conditions, not of operational error.

November 1912

The southern winter passed. The Cape Evans base party did not know what had happened to the polar party. A search party left base on 29 October 1912 under the meteorologist George Simpson and reached the polar party’s last camp on 12 November 1912. The three frozen bodies were inside the tent in their reindeer-skin sleeping bags. Wilson and Bowers had been laid out by Scott in postures of preparation for death. Scott was lying with his journal under his arm, half-out of his own sleeping bag, with one arm across Wilson’s body.

The search party recovered the journals, the unsent letters, the photographs, the rock specimens (about 16 kg of geological samples that the polar party had man-hauled the entire 800 miles back from the Pole), and a small Union Flag. The tent itself was collapsed over the bodies and a cairn of snow and stones was built over the assembly. The cairn is still on the Ross Ice Shelf and is gradually drifting north with the ice flow at approximately 30 metres per year.

Amundsen returned to Hobart in March 1912 and announced his Pole attainment to the world. He died in June 1928, aged 55, in an Arctic seaplane crash while attempting to rescue the Italian airship explorer Umberto Nobile from the Arctic ice.

Scott’s “Message to the Public” went through approximately fifty British editions between 1913 and 1922 and became the foundational document of a specifically Edwardian-era heroic-failure narrative. Modern historical revisionism (Roland Huntford’s 1979 Scott and Amundsen in particular) has been less generous, identifying the polar march’s logistical errors as the proximate cause of the deaths. The current consensus is somewhere in between.

The Pole was reached by both expeditions. One expedition came home; the other did not.