Clan Scott

The Honours of Scotland, the Crown of James V, the Sceptre, and the Sword of State, are the oldest crown jewels in Britain, used to crown every Scottish monarch from Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1543 to Charles II at Scone in 1651. After the Treaty of Union of 1707 they were locked in a chest in the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle. The doors were sealed; the country was left to assume that they had been quietly taken to London or melted down. By 1818 the door of the Crown Room had not been opened in a hundred and eleven years. Sir Walter Scott, the most-read writer in Europe, petitioned the Prince Regent for permission to open it. The warrant was granted. What came out reset Scotland's image of itself.

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On the twenty-ninth of March 1912, in a small canvas tent about eleven miles south of One Ton Depot on the Ross Ice Shelf, in a blizzard that had pinned them in the tent for the nine previous days, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, forty-three years old, Captain in the Royal Navy and leader of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13, dying of frostbite, starvation and exhaustion, wrote the closing entries of the journal he had kept since the voyage south on the Terra Nova in 1910. His two surviving companions, Henry Birdie Bowers and Edward Wilson, were already dead beside him in the tent. The third member of the five-man polar party, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, had died near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the seventeenth of February; Captain Lawrence Titus Oates, in his famous I am just going outside and may be some time, had walked out of the tent into the blizzard on the seventeenth of March, his thirty-second birthday. Scott's closing journal-line, written by the dying hand in pencil on the twenty-ninth of March 1912, has become the closing-paragraph of the British public-school heroic-failure tradition: 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. For God's sake look after our people. The search-party, under Edward Atkinson, found the tent on the twelfth of November 1912, eight months after Scott's death. The thirty-nine pencil-written notebooks of the expedition diary, the photographs by Herbert Ponting, and the geological-and-biological scientific specimens collected on the march back were retrieved with the bodies and brought home to England in 1913.

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