1. Scott, Amundsen and Science 100 Years Later. Article by Edward Larson. One
hundred years ago this winter, in December 1911, a five-man Norwegian team ...
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Scott, Amundsen and Science 100 Years Later Article by Edward Larson
One hundred years ago this winter, in December 1911, a five-man Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen became the first people to reach the South Pole. Five weeks later, a similarly sized British band under the command of Robert Falcon Scott reached the same place only to find that the Norwegians had gotten there first. The losers in this supposed “Race to the Pole” never returned. Over time and in countless retellings, their story became an epic tale of adventure, completion, sacrifice and tragedy in a frozen land.
Given the drama of the British death march, the remarkable efficiency of the Norwegian effort, it should not be surprising that historians and popularizers alike have focused the narrative of these expeditions on the quest for the Pole. As a historian of science, however, I’m drawn to science. Researchers on Scott’s two Antarctic expeditions and the intervening one led by Ernest Shackleton opened an unknown continent to science and enriched our understanding of global meteorological, biological, and oceanographic systems. For the first time, they proved that the southern continents were once linked and offered surprising evidence of climate change. To me, not only are these stories of doing science in extreme conditions at least as gripping as those about getting to the Pole, they are part of a more significant narrative that continues today in the vast amount of research still conducted in the Antarctic.
While Amundsen travelled with only eight other men, all focused on getting a small team to the Pole, Scott travelled with three times as many men, many of who were conducting scientific research that had nothing to do with gaining the Pole. Indeed, all of Scott’s men did not even winter at the same place. Six of them, including the expedition’s third officer Victor Campbell and the experienced Australian geologist Raymond Priestley had been dispatched to conduct research at Cape Adare, and were wintering over at a hut there in 1911. When the winter ended, this party was transferred by ship to Terra Nova Bay for a planned month of mid-summer research.
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Image: The party that wintered in the Ice Cave after its return
Terra Nova Bay was a fine place in summer research but in winter, after the ship was blocked by pack ice from retrieving the party, it became an awful place to live. With their tents worthless in the cold and wind, the men dug a cave into a snowdrift. When finished, it became the party’s winter quarters. The men heated and cooked with a jury-rigged tin stove that burned seal blubber and caked everything inside the cave, including the men, with greasy black soot.
With shelter found, food became their preoccupation. Their stores nearly gone, the party lived on what it killed, which meant every seal and penguin that wandered its way that winter. Dysentery became endemic and the meat-only diet also caused a loss of bladder control. “Some of us,” Campbell wrote, “have been wetting our clothes in our sleep. One of us even while he was awake before he could get out of the door – and these are the clothes we have to live in for about 8 months.” Somehow, the party survived the winter and, in spring, man-hauled two sledges over two hundred miles to the expedition’s main base. Priestley gathered rock specimens along the way. These exploits were not the only diversion of resources from Scott’s pursuit of the Pole. During the months leading up to the Polar Journey, two of the five men who would accompany Scott –
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Edward Wilson and H.R. “Birdie” Bowers – were not even preparing for the Pole, but instead for a death-defying research trip.
Image: The party that went to Cape Crozier on its departure.
At Ross Island’s Cape Crozier during Scott’s previous expedition, the explorers had discovered an Emperor penguin rookery and Wilson had determined that these birds breed in mid-winter. Now he wanted to go back to the site for further research. To reach the rookery during the breeding season, Wilson, Bowers and Apsley Cherry-Garrard left winter quarters in June on a 140-mile trek. With scientific equipment, cold-weather gear, and supplies loaded onto two 9foot-sledges linked end to end and to the men by harnesses, the party hauled over 750 pounds in the mid-winter darkness.
The outbound journey went as well as one could expect. With the temperature plunging below 70°F, the surface snow took on the consistency of sand, forcing the men to relay the sledges for parts of the journey. Upon reaching the Cape three weeks after they began, the men built a stone hut with a canvas roof to serve as a makeshift research lab. They needed a warm place to examine eggs.
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After the party had made only one brief trip to the rookery, however, a blizzard struck. The storm’s first strong gusts ballooned the canvass roof upward until finally it exploded outward in shreds, leaving the men cowering in their sleeping bags. The storm ultimately subsided but, having lost their many of their supplies, the men had to race back to the main base without conducting further research.
The eight-day return trip was a living hell. The temperature again plunged toward -70°F, rendering the sleeping bags worthless for warmth. So that they could get in them the next night, the men let their bags freeze open each morning and laid them flat on the sledge. By the end of the trip, each bag had accumulated up to 27 pounds of ice. Cherry-Garrard’s jaws chattered so much that all of his teeth shattered. Three two months later, though, Wilson and Bowers set off with Scott for the Pole.
These two extreme efforts were only the most dramatic distractions from the expedition’s focus on reaching the Pole. Whenever in residence at winter quarters, all the officers and scientists participated in a rigorous regimen of meteorological, magnetic, and oceanographic research – with data collected on a daily, and in some cases hourly, basis. During the expedition’s first summer, two Australian geologists quarters led an extended journey into the TransAntarctic Mountains. They spent the winter examining their collections before heading out on a similar journey during the second summer. Surveying this research shortly before leaving the Pole and recognizing by then that Amundsen would probably beat him there, Scott wrote, “It is really a satisfactory state of affairs all around. If the Image: Australian geologist Frank Debenham, who went on the two expeditions to the Trans-Antarctic Mountains
[polar] journey comes off, nothing, not even priority at the Pole, can prevent the Expedition ranking as one of the most important that ever entered the Polar regions.” Science would make it so.
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Scarcely a month after returning from this trek, and by then ten days behind Amundsen in leaving, Scott headed for the Pole with teams of men, ponies, tractors, and dogs. Unlike Amundsen, who traveled light and only with those who would go the entire distance, Scott planned to have the various supporting teams drop back in stages until one group was left to man-haul a single sledge to the Pole. In the end, this group consisted of Scott, Wilson, Bowers, Edgar Evans, and British Army Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates.
On January 16, less than twenty miles from the Pole, Scott and his party sighted debris left by the Norwegians. “It is sad that we have been forestalled by the Norwegians,” Bowers wrote, “but I am glad that we have done it by good British man-haulage.” For Wilson, solace came in science. While the Norwegians won the “race,” he noted, “We have done what we came for all the same and as our programme was made out.”
The return trip has become the stuff of legend, as the men struggled back in worsening conditions on diminishing supplies. Of course they never made it all the way but still, on the way back, they took time out for science. Deep snow and ice covered most of the return route from the Pole, with the mountains above Beardmore Glacier providing the only relief from the featureless monotony. Upon reaching the glacier, they steered toward the moraine beneath Mount Buckley. They took away thirty-five pounds of rock samples. Those specimens could help salvage meaning from a failed attempt to reach the Pole first.
The party others marched its last on March 19. Two days earlier, they had left behind everything except the barest essentials and, at Wilson’s request, diaries, field notes, and geological specimens. These they carried until the end. Their final camp stood only eleven miles shy of a massive depot, stocked with special treats. Then a blizzard struck. The following spring, a search party found them there along with their notes and specimens.
The polar trek of Amundsen and his men was a remarkable human feat. Scott and his men, however, contributed something more than gaining the Pole. They advanced human knowledge of an unknown continent and its place in global systems. For their achievements, both human and scientific, both groups have earned the honor they now receive on this, the 100th anniversary of reaching the South Pole.
