Scott of the Antarctic, the last journal entry

Some defeats are written in the running, and some are written in the sitting still. There are expeditions whose meaning is decided not at the turning point of the march but in the hours when the men have stopped marching, when the tent is pitched for the last time, and when the only instrument left to a commander is the pencil in his right hand. The polar journey of 1911 to 1912 reached its hinge not at the South Pole, where the Norwegian tent had stood since December, nor on the Beardmore Glacier where Edgar Evans went down, but in a small canvas shelter on the Ross Ice Shelf, where a forty-three-year-old naval officer, his right foot blackened to the knee, lifted a notebook onto his knee and chose what the expedition would leave behind.

THE SAILOR FROM OUTLANDS

Robert Falcon Scott was born at Outlands near Plymouth on the sixth of June 1868, the son of a brewery owner with Plymouth-Yorkshire roots, and was sent to the training ship Britannia at thirteen. He had been in the Royal Navy since 1881; he was a torpedo officer, a methodical man, a writer of clean reports. He had commanded the Discovery expedition of 1901 to 1904, and had returned south on the Terra Nova in 1910 with a programme that yoked the geographical prize of the Pole to a full scientific survey, geological, biological, meteorological, magnetic. The Norwegian under Amundsen had reached the Pole on the fourteenth of December 1911. Scott's five-man party arrived there on the seventeenth of January 1912, found the Norwegian tent and flag, and turned for home with eight hundred miles of barrier still to cross. Great God! this is an awful place, Scott wrote in the diary at the Pole.

THE TENT

It is twenty past two on the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of March 1912, on the Ross Ice Shelf at about seventy-nine degrees fifty south. Outside the canvas: a blizzard in its ninth day, the temperature near minus forty, the wind driving the drift across the door so that the door is no door. Inside: three men in reindeer-fur sleeping bags of the Norwegian Arctic pattern, in three layers of wool. Two of them are dead. Edward Wilson, surgeon and zoologist of Cheltenham, has been dead about twenty-four hours. Henry Bowers, lieutenant of the Royal Indian Marine, has been dead about thirty-six. The third man is alive, just. His right foot is black and purple to the knee, gangrenous from frostbite. He cannot walk. Eleven miles to the north, at One Ton Depot, there is food and there is fuel. Since the twentieth of March, the eleven miles have been the impossible distance.

Two of the polar party are not in the tent at all. Petty Officer Edgar Evans, the Welsh naval rating, fell at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on the seventeenth of February, his hand gone septic from a crampon cut, his head injured in a fall on the ice. Captain Lawrence Oates of the Inniskilling Dragoons, his feet ruined, walked out into the blizzard on the morning of the seventeenth of March, his thirty-second birthday, with the words I am just going outside and may be some time, and did not come back. Scott had written the line down at once, in the diary, with the explicit instruction that the record should show Oates had walked out like a soldier and an English gentleman.

THE NOTEBOOK ON THE KNEE

On the right knee, six inches by four, oilcloth-bound: the Royal Navy issue notebook, one of thirty-nine he has filled in pencil since the Terra Nova sailed in 1910. The hand is weakening. He has known for some days now that the relief party from Hut Point will not come up before the spring, that the search when it comes will be a search for a tent and three bodies and a sledge, and that the only thing in this tent which will leave it is the diary. Wilson's geological specimens are on the sledge outside, thirty-five pounds of rock he refused to jettison even when the dragging on the soft surface was killing them, the Glossopteris fossils brought down from the Beardmore moraines, the scientific justification of the whole long march. Those will leave too. But the account of how the five men died, the apportionment of cause, the dignity afforded each name, those are on the knee, in pencil, in a hand that has perhaps an hour of writing left in it.

The temptation of the dying officer is to explain. Weather unprecedented for the season. The breakdown of the ponies. The soft surfaces on the Barrier in February. The failure of the fuel cans at the depots, the leather washers gone, paraffin evaporated. The miscalculation of rations for five men where the plan had been for four. The early winter that closed the door behind them. All of it true; all of it, set down at length, would read as the excuse of a beaten man. The other temptation is the opposite: to write nothing, to let the bodies and the sledge and the silence make the case. He has watched Wilson die with his hands folded, and Bowers beside him, and neither asked him for words. But Wilson has a wife in Cheltenham. Bowers has a mother at Sidmouth. Evans had a wife at Portsmouth dockyard, Oates a mother at Gestingthorpe Hall. His own wife Kathleen is, by the post, sailing south from Europe to meet the Terra Nova. Five widows and mothers, and a country, and the British public's appetite for an account. He picks up the pencil.

He writes the Message to the Public first, the longer document, separate from the diary entry: the reasons, the surfaces, the weather, the sickness of Evans, the cold that finished Oates, the fuel shortage, the storm. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. He writes the letters: to Wilson's wife, to Bowers's mother, to his own wife, to Sir Edgar Speyer the expedition's treasurer, to Sir J. M. Barrie. He writes them in pencil, in the cold, with the right hand the only working instrument left to him, while the left foot and the right leg are no longer his. Then, last, he turns to the diary itself, the notebook on the knee, and gives it the closing line.

THE CLOSING LINE

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.

The signature is the naval signature, R. Scott, the form he had used on every report since the Discovery. The last sentence is not a flourish; it is an order, written by a commanding officer to whoever opens the notebook, on behalf of the dependents of the five dead men. He closes the notebook. He lies back. The date is the twenty-ninth of March 1912, or possibly the thirtieth; the diary entry of the twenty-ninth is the last and the bodies, when found, were already long beyond the telling of a precise hour.

THE SEARCH IN NOVEMBER

The relief party from Cape Evans came up onto the Barrier on the first of November 1912 under the surgeon Edward Atkinson, with Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Tryggve Gran, Charles Wright and seven others. They were looking for a tent in eight hundred miles of barrier and they found it on the twelfth, the bamboo poles a faint dark spike above the drift, eleven miles south of One Ton Depot, exactly where Scott had said it would be. Cherry-Garrard cut the tent open. The three men were in their sleeping bags, Scott in the centre with the flaps thrown back from his shoulders and the notebook beside him, Wilson and Bowers on either side. Atkinson read the diary aloud to the assembled party in the snow. They took the thirty-nine notebooks, the letters, the photographs Bowers had carried, and the thirty-five pounds of Glossopteris-bearing rock from the sledge. Then they collapsed the tent over the three bodies, built a cairn of snow blocks over the tent, and lashed a cross of two skis above. Gran put on Scott's skis for the march back, so that, he said, the skis at least should complete the journey.

THE PUBLIC AND THE ROCK

The Terra Nova reached Oamaru, New Zealand, on the tenth of February 1913 and the news went out by cable to London. The country took it the way it had taken Gordon at Khartoum, with a public grief whose register was already prepared. The diary was published almost at once, the closing entry in facsimile, the pencil hand of the dying man reproduced for a reading public that turned the page into the closing paragraph of an entire imperial sentiment. For God's sake look after our people became a sentence schoolchildren learned without being told it was a sentence at all. Scott's widow Kathleen, intercepted at sea on the way to meet him, was made a Lady by the king with the rank she would have held had her husband returned alive. A statue went up in Waterloo Place, sculpted by her. The thirty-nine notebooks went, in time, to the British Library, where the closing entry is on permanent display.

The Beardmore rocks went to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. The Glossopteris fossils, ferns of a vanished forest, were the same species Wegener had identified in South America, Africa, India and Australia; their presence in Antarctica, brought back at the cost of those five lives, supplied a piece of the evidence which in the 1940s and 1960s overturned the geology of the world and established continental drift. The rock Wilson would not let off the sledge proved, decades later, to be the part of the expedition that altered what was known.

THE SLOW JOURNEY NORTH

The tent is still on the Barrier. By the British Antarctic Survey's mapping, it lies now under about forty-five feet of accumulated snow, and the slow flow of the ice shelf has carried it, in the century since, some forty miles north of the place where Atkinson built the cairn. The flow continues. In about three hundred years the bodies, in their reindeer bags, in the canvas, will reach the seaward edge of the Ross Ice Shelf and calve into the Ross Sea inside an iceberg, and complete the journey home by a route no member of the polar party would have predicted. The notebook left first, carried out by Cherry-Garrard in a sledge bag in November 1912. The fossils left next, in the holds of the Terra Nova, in February 1913. The men are taking longer. The ice is patient.

A commander's last act is sometimes the writing he does when he can no longer command anything else. In a canvas tent eleven miles short of a depot, a man with one working hand chose what would leave the tent and what would stay, and arranged his sentences so that the five dead would be accounted for in the order their families would need. The pencil he used is in the British Library, beside the notebook, beside the line.