Scott of the Antarctic, the last journal entry

It is twenty past two on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of March 1912, in the small canvas-and-bamboo polar tent of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13, on the Ross Ice Shelf at about seventy-nine degrees fifty south, in heavy blizzard with the temperature outside at about minus forty Celsius and the winds at about thirty miles an hour. He is forty-three years old. He is Captain Robert Falcon Scott, born at Outlands near Plymouth in Devon on the sixth of June 1868, son of John Edward Scott the Plymouth-Yorkshire-descended brewery owner and Hannah Cuming, schooled at Stubbington House preparatory school and Britannia at the age of thirteen, in the Royal Navy since 1881, in his forty-second day of the return-march from the South Pole.

He is in a reindeer-fur sleeping-bag of the Norwegian Arctic-pattern, in three layers of wool underclothing, with his right foot black-and-purple to the knee from the gangrenous frostbite. Beside him in the tent are the bodies of his two surviving companions: Lieutenant Henry Robertson Birdie Bowers of the Royal Indian Marine (twenty-eight, dead about thirty-six hours ago), and Dr Edward Adrian Wilson of the Royal Navy Medical Service (thirty-nine, dead about twenty-four hours ago). The fifth and fourth companions of the polar party are no longer in the tent: Petty Officer Edgar Taff Evans (the naval rating, dead at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the seventeenth of February of a head-injury and gangrene from a crampon-cut to the hand) and Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Titus Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons (the thirty-second birthday on the seventeenth of March, walked out of the tent in the blizzard on the same day with the line I am just going outside and may be some time).

On his right knee is the brown-leather notebook of the expedition diary, in the dimensions of the Royal Navy issue (six inches by four inches, oilcloth-bound). He has been writing in pencil since the fifth of January 1912 (the date of the departure of the polar party from the One Ton Depot on the march south). He has, in the past two weeks since Oates's death, made increasingly brief entries.

He thinks: the relief party of Atkinson and Cherry-Garrard from the Hut Point base will not come up to find us now. The blizzard has been on for nine days. The relief depot is at One Ton, which is eleven miles north of this tent. The depot has food and fuel. The eleven miles to the depot have, since the twentieth of March, been the impossible distance.

He thinks: Wilson is dead beside me. Bowers is dead beside me. Wilson's wife Oriana is in Cheltenham. Bowers's mother is at Sidmouth. Oates's mother is at Gestingthorpe Hall. Edgar Evans's wife is at Portsmouth dockyard. My wife Kathleen is in Berlin on a sculpture commission and is, by the post-record, currently coming south from Berlin to Bordeaux to meet the Terra Nova on its return.

He thinks: the diary is on my knee. The diary is the public record of the expedition. The diary is the only thing in this tent that will, when the relief party finds us in the spring, leave the tent.

He thinks: the closing entry has to be brief because I cannot, by the weakness of the right hand, write at length. The closing entry has to provide the accountability for the failure of the expedition and the dignity for the five men who died.

He picks up the pencil with the right hand. He writes, in the diary, in the brown notebook on his knee, in the increasingly faint pencil hand of the dying man: 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. For God's sake look after our people.

He died of exhaustion, exposure and starvation on the twenty-ninth of March 1912, or possibly on the thirtieth (the date is uncertain because the diary entry of the twenty-ninth was the last; the bodies were found in the tent on the twelfth of November). He was forty-three.

The relief party of Edward Atkinson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Tryggve Gran, Charles Wright and seven other men of the wintering-over base at Cape Evans came up from the winter quarters on the first of November 1912 and found the tent eleven miles south of One Ton Depot on the twelfth. The three bodies were laid in the sleeping-bags in the tent; the tent was collapsed over them in the form of a small canvas cairn; a wooden cross of the skis lashed together was set above. The relief party took the thirty-nine notebooks of the diary, the thirty-five pounds of geological samples collected by Wilson on the return march (which Scott had refused to abandon despite their weight on the sledge, since they included the first Glossopteris fossil-plants from the Beardmore Glacier and were the scientific justification of the whole expedition), and the photographs taken by Bowers on the march. The party returned to Cape Evans and the Terra Nova in February 1913. The news of the deaths reached London via the Terra Nova at Oamaru, New Zealand, on the tenth of February 1913.

The thirty-nine diary-notebooks of the expedition are in the British Library; the closing entry of the twenty-ninth of March 1912, in Scott's pencil hand, is on permanent display. The tent and the three bodies are still on the Ross Ice Shelf, by the report of the British Antarctic Survey's standing 2010 satellite-mapping, now buried by about forty-five feet of accumulated snow and, by the slow ice-shelf flow, about forty miles north of the original site on the 2012-projection of the 1912 position. The bodies, by the slow ice-flow, will reach the Ross Sea front and calve into the sea in about three hundred years from the present. The geological samples Wilson refused to abandon are in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London. The Glossopteris fossils proved, in the 1940s, the continental-drift hypothesis on which the modern plate-tectonics is built.