The Doomed South Pole Voyage's Remaining Photographs
A 1912 photograph proves explorer Captain Robert Scott reached the South Pole—but wasn't the first
- By Victoria Olsen
- Smithsonian magazine, January 2012, Subscribe
“Great God!” British Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal on January 17, 1912, the day he reached the South Pole. He was not exultant. “This is an awful place,” he went on, “and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
For more than two months, Scott and his men had hauled their supply sledges across 800 miles of ice from their base camp at Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound, hoping to become the first people to reach the pole. But the photograph at left, taken by Lt. Henry Bowers the same day, makes clear the reason for Scott’s despair: The Norwegian flag flying above the tent had been left by the explorer Roald Amundsen, whose party had arrived five weeks earlier. Inside the tent, Scott’s men found a letter Amundsen had written to Haakon VII, king of Norway, along with a note asking Scott to deliver it for him.
Even if you don’t know what came next, Bowers’ photograph conveys a sense of failure. The men show no arm-in-arm camaraderie. Their faces are weather-beaten. No supplies are visible. In fact, Scott and the four men he brought with him on the last 150-mile dash to the pole were running low on food and fuel. (Bowers had been added at the last minute, dangerously stretching their rations.) Their return trip would become one of the most dismal failures in the annals of polar exploration.
In the late Antarctic summer, the men encountered unusually cold temperatures of minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and blizzards kept them tent-bound for days on end. Petty Officer Edgar Evans died on February 17, probably from a head injury sustained in a fall into a crevasse. As resources ran low, Capt. Lawrence Oates famously sacrificed himself: Crippled by frostbite, he left the party’s tent during a March 16 snowstorm with the words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”
The following November, a search party came upon Scott’s last camp, a mere 11 miles from a cache of supplies. Inside a tent were the bodies of Scott, Bowers and Edward A. Wilson, the expedition’s chief scientist. Scott’s journals were there too, with the last entry dated March 29, along with 35 pounds of geological specimens carried at great cost and Bowers’ undeveloped film. David M. Wilson, a descendant of Edward Wilson and author of the recently published The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott, says Bowers’ pictures proved that both Scott and Amundsen had reached the pole.
Bowers’ straightforward work contrasts with that of Herbert Ponting, the photojournalist Scott had hired to document his expedition. Ponting had traveled extensively in Asia and sold his work to prominent London magazines, and the Scott assignment made him the first professional photographer to work in the Antarctic. The image on this page shows Ponting’s artistry: It captures the textures of ice, water and cloud in a perfectly balanced composition, with Scott’s ship, Terra Nova, in the background. Scott described the scene in terms that suggest his own sensitivity to art and nature: “It was really a sort of crevasse in a tilted berg parallel to the original surface....Through the larger entrance could be seen, also partly through icicles, the ship, the Western Mountains, and a lilac sky.”
Ponting did not accompany Scott to the pole—among other things, his equipment was considered too heavy. As planned, he left Antarctica for England in February 1912, while Scott and his men were still struggling to make it home. At first, the news of Scott’s fate overshadowed Ponting’s pictures, but after World War I the photographer published his work, to great acclaim, in a book titled The Great White South. “All subsequent Antarctic photography,” Wilson wrote to me in an e-mail, “is a footnote to his pioneering work.”
Taken together, the two images reflect the two poles of Scott’s expedition; despite the tragedy, the words and images Scott and his men left behind became a lasting legacy to science and art. As Scott noted in his final diary entry, “these rough notes and our dead bodies” would tell his tale. Amundsen planted the flag, but it was Scott who captured our imagination.
Victoria Olsen last wrote for Smithsonian about the photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston.
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Comments (2)
I am writing to take issue with the point of view Victoria Olsen presented in "Cold Comfort" (Jan 2012), her essay on the 1912 expedition to the South Pole led by Robert Scott. The goals of both the Scott mission and the Amundsen mission were to reach the Pole, to reach it first, and to come back alive. Amundsen planned his trip precisely. He executed his plan exactly, and he accomplished what he set out to do. His journey should be justly celebrated. Scott, on the other hand, planned less well and then thoughtlessly permitted an extra man to join the trek to the Pole. This crucial lapse in judgment led inevitably to a shortage of food and fuel on the return trip, and it ensured that the crew would die. Certain deaths may be deemed glorious, but not when they are so obviously preventable. Scott's widow campaigned successfully to transform her late husband into a hero, but "muddling through" should never capture our imagination. Henry Bowers's photographs, the subject of Olsen's essay, are wonderful, but he rightfully should have lived to present them to history himself.
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Best,
Steve Gietschier
Posted by Steven P. Gietschier on January 12,2012 | 01:32 PM
It's too bad that you continue the myth of Scott. He killed his men, and himself because he refused to see reality. He had every opportunity to prepare and chose not to. He brought dogs, yet received no training in mushing before the trip. None of his men had even been on skis until they arrived in Antarctica. Scott was more interested in glory and career than proper preparation for a polar expedition, and because of his selfishness killed his men along with himself. I suggest you read "The Last Place on Earth" by Roland Huntford.
Posted by Ren Huschle on December 29,2011 | 03:34 PM