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Captain Robert Falcon Scott |
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Robert Scott was born 1868 in Devonport into a navy family and became a cadet at the age of 13. He soon attracted the notice of the Royal Geographical Society, which appointed him to command the National Antarctic Expedition of 1901-1904. The expedition reached further south than anyone before them and Scott returned to Britain a national hero. He had caught the exploring bug and, by 1906, was planning an expedition to reach the South Pole. The whaling ship Terra Nova sailed from New Zealand in November 1910 and the expedition set off from base the following October, with mechanical sledges, ponies and dogs. However, the sledges and ponies could not cope with the conditions and the expedition carried on without them, through appalling weather and increasingly tough terrain. In mid December, the dog teams turned back, leaving the rest to face the ascent of the Beardmore Glacier and the polar plateau. By January 1912, only five remained: Scott, Wilson, Oates, Bowers and Evans. In mid January, they reached the pole, only to see that a Norwegian party, led by Raoul Amundsen, had beaten them there. Scott wrote, 'It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions.' They started the 1,500 km journey back. Evans died in mid February; by March, Oates could also go no further and knew he was holding back his companions. Scott wrote: 'One morning he said, 'I am just going outside and may be some time'. He went out [of the tent] and we have not seen him since.' The final blizzard caught them in late March, trapping them in their tent, running out of food but only 20 km from a pre-arranged supply. Eight months later, the search party found the tent, the bodies and Scott's note-books. His final diary entry, on March 29th, read: '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.' Their bodies were left beneath a cairn of ice and a cross of skis and are still there, buried beneath the snow and ice. |