Memory of South Pole hero Robert Scott's exploits lives on

By Michael Donhauser Jan 15, 2012, 3:06 GMT

London - British Royal Navy captain Robert Falcon Scott and his men celebrated Christmas Eve 1911 at their base camp in Antarctica with a real feast.

The meal included horse meat flavoured with onions and curry powder, followed by cocoa with raisins and - very English - plum pudding.

The short time that they had left to live, as they raced to be the first to reach the South Pole 100 years ago, was to be replete with hardship and suffering.

After a gruelling two-and-a half-month trek, Scott's party arrived at the southernmost point of the planet on January 18, 1912.

What they saw could hardly have been more shocking: a tent and a Norwegian flag.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, having abandoned his plan to trek to the North Pole, had been there about a month earlier.

'The worst has happened,' Scott wrote in his diary, long excerpts of which were published in the book Scott's Last Expedition. He added: ''Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without reward of priority.'

The proud British Empire had been dealt a painful defeat by little Norway.

During the trek back, Scott died of starvation and hypothermia - most likely on March 29, 1912 - on the Ross Ice Shelf about 17 kilometres from a supply depot with plenty of food and fuel. The other four members of his polar expedition also perished.

A fateful chain of events, combined with serious errors, proved the men's undoing. Their choice of transport, in particular, has come under criticism. While Amundsen and his men went with sledge dogs and skis, Scott relied mainly on Siberian ponies and motor sledges.

But the ponies were weakened from the long journey to Antarctica and quickly gave out. And the motor sledges broke down in the cold.

Such problems affected an initial trek from the base camp to establish a supply depot, which was laid 50 kilometres further north than planned. Had it been situated where it was meant to be, Scott's party would have reached it on their march from the Pole.

British Army Captain Lawrence Oates, in charge of the ponies during the expedition, was reported by Scott biographer David Crane as saying, 'Sir, I'm afraid you'll come to regret not taking my advice.'

Oates had proposed that the party go forward and lay the depot at the intended spot, killing the ponies for meat if they collapsed on the way. On the final expedition, crippled by frostbite and not wanting to hold his comrades back, Oates left their tent in a blizzard to die.

The men sometimes hauled their sledges themselves, a practice that Norwegian polar expert Fridtjof Nansen called 'futile toil.'

On top of the mistakes made by Scott - who had led just one prior expedition, to the Antarctic in 1901 - came extreme weather. Polar storms and temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius often confined him and his men to their tents.

Despite his errors in judgement, Scott was revered worldwide as a hero after news of his death, especially in his native Britain, where many monuments to him remain to this day.

One of them is in St Paul's Cathedral in London, where a grandiose memorial service to Scott, attended by King George V, was held in February 1913.

Polar explorers later criticized him as stubborn, egocentric and incompetent - and responsible for the death of his men.

Scott's grandson Falcon Scott, who set off for the South Pole himself in December, finds the criticism overblown. 'We are all proud of him and what he achieved,' he told the Daily Record, a Scottish newspaper.

A century after Scott's expedition to the South Pole, experts continue debating whether he was heroic or foolhardy, the Yorkshire Post noted.

The gripping tragedy of the expedition has overshadowed its scientific achievements. The polar team studied the region's weather, fauna and flora and even conducted experiments in glaciology.

'They really made a great contribution to what was known about Antarctica,' Elin Simonsson of London's Natural History Museum recently told The Guardian.

An exhibition titled Scott's Last Expedition will open at the museum on January 20.

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