Clues and Evidence

As news of their demise reached England, Robert F. Scott and his teammates were regaled as heroes who’d given their lives in service of the British Empire. Yet, as the years passed, such flattering sentiment began to stale. More recently, Scott has been characterized as incompetent, and blamed for his team’s failure to return safely from the Pole. A litany of mistakes and misestimations have been cited as evidence that Scott was an ill-suited explorer who had prepared insufficiently for a long expedition through the earth’s most hazardous landscape.

Some of these critiques have a certain amount of merit. The ponies on Scott’s journey proved less efficient than expected. His experiments with primitive motor sledges were disastrous: one crashed through the ice while it was being unloaded from the Terra Nova, sinking to the bottom of McMurdo Sound and nearly taking several men with it; the others broke just a few days from Cape Evans. A shortage of fuel caused by leaky oil cans could have been avoided had Scott, like Amundsen, reinforced the cans with extra soldering. The reindeer skins chosen for the sleeping bags were of poor quality. “The sleeping bags are moulting badly,” one of the team’s geologists, Frank Debenham, said, “and the hairs get into every nook and cranny.”

Scott chose four men to accompany him on the final leg of the journey, even though his original plan had been to only bring three. Perhaps Scott felt he needed extra strength for the final push to the Pole, or maybe he simply wanted to reward an extra team member for his commitment. Regardless, the decision has been cited as a crucial mistake — extra time in the evening needed for sleep was devoted to cooking for the extra man. “Scott confessed that it was a big problem,” says Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “The tent was really too small for five men, somebody would get kind of pushed off the floor cloth and onto the edge of the tent, that’s obviously not a good situation. So for many reasons, having five instead of four was a mistake, but I don’t think it would have been a fatal one.”

Scott, Wilson, and Bowers, despite the setbacks of extreme weather, frostbite, and Evans’ accidental death, made good progress for most of their journey. Not until the end of February, when temperatures dropped to 30 to 40 degrees below zero, did the team fall off pace. One theory is that the team hadn’t taken enough precautions against scurvy and that, at the end, they were succumbing to its effects. Yet Dr. Wilson, a seasoned Antarctic explorer, was quite familiar with the symptoms of the disease. His expedition journal, which includes detailed accounts of each man’s various ailments, does not include any signs of scurvy. Furthermore, around the time the three-man team started slowing down, they had come upon a depot of horseflesh that would have provided the vitamin C needed to ward off any such illness.

When Scott, Wilson, and Bowers died, they were carrying thirty-five pounds of rock specimens. Many have suggested that, as the team struggled just to stay alive, the rocks were an unnecessary and, even, dim-witted burden. Susan Solomon thinks otherwise. “The weight of the rocks was only a small fraction of the total the polar party had to drag behind them on every step,” she states in her book about Scott’s journey, THE COLDEST MARCH. “…[T]he difficulty or ease of sledge dragging is governed primarily not by the weight carried on the sledge but by the character of the snow, especially under cold, windless conditions with recent hoarfrost.”

Scott described the ground surface his team experienced in late February as, “covered with a thin layer of wooly crystals … [that] cause impossible friction on the runners.” Normally, the movement of the sledge would create enough heat to melt these crystals, providing a smooth, icy surface and relatively easy hauling. But in temperatures below negative 20, these crystals simply won’t melt. After February 26, Scott’s team experienced temperatures below -20° on all but one day. According to polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who pulled a sledge across Antarctica in 1993, “You want to get two six-foot, fat men, put them in a bathtub with no legs and pull them for, in [Scott’s] case, 1600 miles over sand dunes. That’s the friction that you actually get. There’s no sliding.”

Essentially, it was the cold weather — and not the rocks — that rendered the sledges virtually impossible to tow. In fact, Scott himself blamed the group’s demise on this weather, writing, “…no one in the world would have expected the temperatures and surfaces which we have encountered at this time of the year” in one of his journal’s final entries. Certainly Scott wasn’t prepared for weeks of temperatures below negative 30, but should he have been?

In preparation for the journey to the Pole, Scott and his meteorologist, George Simpson, compiled mounds of data about the Antarctic weather. Simpson constructed one of the continent’s first weather stations, and conducted balloon experiments to test the atmosphere and determine how altitude affects temperature. The year before the Pole trip, Scott ordered an expedition into the Barrier to test the March weather there. By the time they were ready to launch the final mission, Scott and Simpson were confident that temperatures on the Barrier in late March would be in the ten to twenty below zero range — and that is what they prepared for.

When he learned of Scott’s death, Simpson pored over his meteorological data, certain that the 30 to 40 below zero temperatures of late February and March of 1912 had been atypical. Unfortunately, he simply didn’t have enough data to be certain. According to Solomon, who spent fifteen years studying modern readings from automated weather stations across Antarctica, Scott and Simpson’s projections were right on. “[Simpson] figured out that they would have made it back in about nine out of ten years,” she says. “Turns out he was a little conservative — it’s more like fifteen out of sixteen.”

One could argue that Scott should never have put himself in a position to depend on a weather prediction. This reliance on science is behind nearly all of the mistakes Scott made, from the motor sledges to the climate. As Solomon states in THE COLDEST MARCH, “Perhaps those very scientific leanings lie at the root of Scott’s tendency to choose paths that ought to work, instead of those with large enough margins for error to ensure success under the worst cases rather than the likely ones.” Yet the simple fact remains that Scott froze to death. Had some of the fiercest weather humans have ever encountered not stood between him and the cabin at Cape Evans, there is no doubt Scott would have returned safely.