Scott vs Amundsen – a very British failure
The race for the South Pole in 1911, between Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen and Royal Navy captain, Robert Scott, was mainly about personal pride. Scott’s failure arose not only from a litany of misjudgements, but also from a very toxic kind of Britishness: a haughty refusal to learn, a belief in spirit over common sense and the option for suffering over second place. This is what makes the story historically worth telling - because it would materially contribute to 880,000 service casualties on the battlefields of the Great War [4 episodes]
The race is on between Captain Robert Scott of the Royal Navy and Norwegian Roald Amundsen. As Scott’s wife, Kathleen Bruce, requires, and as Edwardian culture expects, Scott will test the manliness and endurance of himself and his team. Amundsen will test the efficacy of Norwegian Telemark skiing combined with Inuit survival techniques. We know which team we would prefer to be on.
Over a year before he and two of his men starved to death, just two days’ march from a depot with food and fuel, Scott confided to young biologist Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘This is the end of the pole.’ He wasn’t questioning his planning or his leadership. He was blaming what he saw as the failure of their ‘transport,’ their dogs and ponies. Now they would have to rely on the British Naval tradition of man-hauling sledges into blizzards of the Arctic winter. Scott doubted it was possible.
It’s difficult to avoid taking the basic narrative of Scott and Amundsen from Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen. (Abacus 1979) It is a deeply problematic book. Huntford pulls together a vast quantity of detail, but takes so aggressively a critical line toward Scott that it becomes difficult to tease reasonably established fact from hostile guesswork. Read Huntford with caution, and put it alongside other material.
Above all, read Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (2 vols, Constable 1922 and many subsequent editions). It is typical of those who went with Scott and quotes extensively from their accounts and from Scott’s own. Cherry-Garrard is of course unapologetic about what happened. Although he explains a number of mistakes and miscalculations, he describes his book as the narrative of a ‘system, I will not say perfected, but developed, to a pitch of high excellence’ and which, in Cherry-Garrard’s view, ‘should be handed down as completely as possible to those who are to follow.’ We can of course forgive the man. He was particularly close to Wilson and Bowers, who died with Scott. But if you want feel what it was like aboard Terra Nova, in the hut at Cape Evans, leading a truculent, sick pony through the snow, or cooking on a primus in a tent, there is nothing better. His day-by-day account of the first stages of the final pole trek itself are extraordinary. After the point he himself turned back he continues with the diaries kept by Scott, Wilson, Atkinson, Lashly and Bowers until picking up his own diaries from the long wait and the search party.
Add to Cherry-Garrard for example, Bill Alp, ‘Captain Scott changed his mind: the dogs shall not go to the South Pole’, Polar Record 57 (2021), pp. 1-15. Read also the poignant first hand account of the finding of Scott’s final camp in the journal of Thomas Williamson, a Royal Naval rating who was there. You can find it in Polar Record 14 (1968), pp. 33-39.
Edward Larson An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science (Yale University Press 2011) broadens our perspective on the reasons men risked everything to go to the pole. Larson investigates the very mixed motivations of the Royal Geographic society and reconsiders the science the expeditions undertook. He also paints a poignant picture of the months after Amundsen’s return when the British pinned their hopes on Scott’s reappearing after a second season collecting scientific data. It was not, of course, to be. Larson also puts Scott into something of a more favourable light. But his material still can’t diminish the impression of arrogance and incompetence.
Max Jones, The Last Great Quest: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Sacrifice (OUP 2004) explores the imperial dimension, and the way the deaths of Scott and his companions were used by the British military to influence the minds of soldiers during the First World War and by others in the years that followed. Jones sees Scott’s expedition as a turning point – the last of the great journeys of exploration, and hence an image that endured into the 1930s.
We argue that, at the heart of Scott’s ruinous approach was the Edwardian cult of manliness, which then fatally infected British military strategy and tactics throughout the Great War. Michael Roper’s revealing study of manliness is ‘Between manliness and masculinity: the “War Generation” and the psychology of fear in Britain, 1914-50’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005), pp. 343-62. Haig’s despatches, which we mention in the series, can be found in Lt Col JH Boraston (ed.), Sir Douglas Haig’s Despatches (JM Dent, London and Toronto 1919). Larson is also good on the use the British military made of Scott’s story during the war.
You can find the political and diplomatic manoeuvring behind British government backing for Antarctic adventure – and much besides - in John Dudeney and John Sheail, Claiming the Ice: Britain and the Antarctic 1900-1950 (Cambridge Scholars 2019). The details of the Royal Geographic Society deputation to persuade Balfour are in Francis Mowett, ‘The National Antarctic Expedition. Deputation to the Government’, The Geographic Journal 14 (1899), pp. 190-202. David Sweet’s now aged paper, ‘The Baltic Diplomacy before the First World War’ Historical Journal 13 (1970) pp. 451-490 also explores the role played by Antarctic expeditions in British diplomacy during this period.
Then read Peder Roberts, The European Antarctic. Science and Strategy in Scandinavia and the British Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2011) which does what it says in the title. Only the first chapter concerns our period here. GE Fogg, ‘The Royal Society and the Antarctic’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society 54 (2000), pp. 85-98 adds more context for the scientists working with the expeditions.
There is a mass of colourful and helpful material in the websites of New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust and the Fram Museum. Better still, go to the Fram museum. It’s at Bygdøy, near Oslo, and you can board the Fram herself, filled with many artefacts from Amundsen’s time and surrounded by wonderful displays, films and much more.
Lester Chaplow’s short unpublished thesis ‘The Financing of Antarctic Expeditions 1890-1922’, (Canterbury, New Zealand 2000) pulls together a good deal of material on Scott’s funding otherwise scattered elsewhere. He adds fun details, for example about the schools’ sponsorship of Scott’s dogs and ponies. It is online here.
Olav Orheim, ‘The present location of the tent that Roald Amundsen left behind at the South Pole in December 1911’, Polar Record 47 (2011), pp. 268-70 is an intriguing footnote. And in the same volume, see RK Headland, Captain Scott’s last Camp, Ross Ice Shelf, p. 270.
Some of the books listed here are old, rare or very expensive to buy. As always, you can often find them free to read on archive.org. Don’t let the publishers close the site down!