Ernest Shackleton, Robert Peary and Roald Amundsen in Philadelphia, 1913 [Ed Webster collection/ Hedgehog House]
“Sir Ernest Shackleton! That name has a fresh ring. It has only to be mentioned for us to see before us a man glowing with invincible will-power and boundless courage. He has shown us what one man’s will and energy can accomplish.”
— Roald Amundsen, The South Pole [read online]
Map showing Scott and Amundsen’s routes to the South Pole in 1911.
Map showing Amundsen’s route to the South Pole, and Shackleton’s Furthest South in 1909 (which route Scott followed in 1911).
“The one member of the expedition who shows us such inner disturbance is Scott.”
“One of the most fascinating and disturbing traits in the British party is their clinging circumspection in such extreme circumstances. This is not to say that several men were not moved by the wilderness, the desolation and the natural evidence of human insignificance. Still the hut was a club; not a London club perhaps, but one that would have fitted any military establishment where club rules held. Of these rules, none was as profound, heartening or disappointing as the unwritten code that institutional hierarchy freed men from deeper philosophical thoughts on their station in life. But perhaps this sounds censorious or carping. Why should men not be jolly, decent and reasonable with one another near the South Pole? Of course they must be, but they might have been more, for surely life is not neatly wrapped up in these qualities? I have compared the Pole with the Moon, and there is another point to be added to that comparison. When Americans landed on the Moon, they sounded like the men they were: trained, eerily normal, undeviant, middle-class, healthy Americans. Therefore they were a little dull; and there was both charm and a deeper sense of valuable human ordinariness in their monotonous, cliché observations. But man has always nurtured the chance of poetry, and perhaps life on Earth now is so perilous that we needed to send a poet to the Moon. None went with Scott, but action itself, in the shape of disaster, made a sort of epic poem out of the journey and has ever afterwards left the question of going south in our imaginations.”
— David Thomson, Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen: Ambition and Tragedy in the Antarctic, p. 197.
Last page of Robert Falcon Scott’s diary, 29 March 1912.
“Title: Last words in Capt. Scott’s journal
Description: glass plate negative;Includes typescript of last entry
Collection: British Antarctic Expedition 1910-13 (Ponting Collection)
Summary text: Photograph of last entry (variation made by Ponting of his original negative).
Date: 1913”
— from the Scott Polar Research Institute, Ponting Collection
“After discovering the frozen bodies of Scott, Edward Wilson and Henry Bowers, Cherry-Garrard wrote: ‘We have found them – to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it – it is too bad for words.'”
Read more about Apsley Cherry-Garrard and the end of the Terra Nova expedition: Daily Mirror, 2012.
The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard: read online.
“Scott was found frozen to death with several men south of the 1 Ton Supply depot in a tent, marked Tent, on the map.”
Map by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World: Antarctic 1910 – 1913, Vol. II, p. 542., pub. 1922.
“Great God! This is an awful place.” — Scott’s diaries
Robert Falcon Scott and his men at the South Pole, in front of Amundsen’s “Polheim.” Left to right: Scott, Bowers, Wilson, and P. O. Evans, 18 January 1912. Photo: Lawrence Oates.
Team photo at the South Pole: Wilson, Scott and Oates (standing); and Bowers and Evans (sitting), 18 January 1912. Photo by Henry Bowers.
“Taking an observation at the pole”. In: “The South Pole”, by Roald Amundsen, 1872-1928. P. 112, Volume II, Library Call Number M82.1/99 A529s, NOAA Photo Library.
“Using Amundsen’s diary, Roland Huntford (in The Amundsen Photographs) describes the photo as “Shooting the sun at the South Geographical Pole. Amundsen (left) is holding a sextant. Helmer Hanssen (right) is bending over the artificial horizon, which is a tray of mercury. Amundsen is lining up the direct image of the sun with its reflection in the surface of the mercury.” — [Controversy and more information about this photograph: southpolestation.com]
Shackleton. 