Saturday 14th January

It was just one hundred years ago (almost – the seventeenth actually) when Scott discovered the South Pole.  Though, of course, it had always been there, he thought he was the first human to get there. The tragedy was that he wasn’t; a Norwegian, Amundsen, had beaten him by just over a month, but apart from discovering the Norwegian flag and a letter to him, he had no way of knowing.  Imagine that, in this age of instant news and mobile phones; they were so cut-off that although they knew Amundsen was attempting to reach the pole too, they didn’t know he had already beaten them by a month. The letter was asking Scott to inform the King of Norway of Amundsen’s achievement, in the event of Amundsen not returning.  Was this a gentlemanly thing to do, or a sophisticated cold-handed slap in the face for Scott, who already exhausted from the attempt, now had to trudge back to base empty-handed.

I have always been fascinated by this story, and in fact by all the Edwardian Arctic explorers like Shackleton.  The amazing resilience, the courage and the determination of these quite untrained and amateur men is heart-rending, especially the end for Scott.  All of his men were slowly starving, (he had underestimated the rations needed and had to continually cut them down) they were also suffering from hypothermia, frost bite and most probably scurvy too.

As the men slowly died they continued their pointless plodding homewards.  We were all taught at school the story of Captain Oates, who realizing he was slowing the group down and suffering from acute frost-bite exited the tent with the famous words “I am just going outside and may be some time.”  Of course he was deliberately walking to his certain death, hoping to give the others a better chance,  We were taught that this was the ultimate sacrifice and somehow an example of English gentlemanly behaviour.

Well, brave or not it was actually pretty pointless, as the three remaining men only lasted a few more days before they too died, huddled in their tent in the middle of a howling blizzard.  The real tragedy was that they were only 11 miles from a depot where they would have found enough supplies to get them back safely.  Scott’s last entry in his diary was “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.”

It was only one hundred years ago, no time at all.  And now almost every year some other group, young teenagers, women, over seventies – you name it, manages to get to the South Pole.  It won’t be long before Richard Branson has holidays there.