Polar Heroism: 1. Captain R.F. Scott: National hero or sentimental bungler?

[Image: (l-r) Shackleton, Scott, Wilson before their march south, 2 November 1902]

“Are you pro- or anti-Captain Scott?” the bookseller asked me. I looked back non-plussed. I hadn’t known there was an anti-Scott position. It was 1996 and I was in a Liverpool bookshop buying Roland Huntford’s book on the 1911-2 race to the  South Pole between Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. “Come back and tell me what you think,” the bookseller said.

Until reading The Last Place of Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole (1979; later retitled Scott and Amundsen), I couldn’t imagine a case against Captain Scott. I had grown up with school assembly stories of how plucky Englishman Scott had been pipped to the post by the Norwegian team of Amundsen, who hadn’t previously announced he was making an attempt to reach the South Pole. Amundsen used dogs to haul sledges, unlike the British team, which man-hauled sledges laden with supplies and equipment. Underhand tactics gave the Norwegians the edge and they reached the South Pole first, with Scott and his men keeping their honour in death. The assembly story concluded with Scott’s last inspiring message. “[…] Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.”[i]

The case against Scott

The common view of the British Polar party (Scott, Wilson, Evans, Bowers, Oates) was Scott’s own portrayal, as recorded in his diary. Scott’s diary makes compelling reading and is brilliantly written. It records the suffering of the Polar party, as they strove to overcome the odds, and their failure as due to a blizzard keeping them confined to their tent, only 11 miles from a supply depot. Captain Oates knew that his deteriorating condition was slowing down the party as they raced to the coastal base before their supplies ran out. He elected to walk out into the snow and die alone so that his companions would have a better chance without him. When this account was made public, it epitomised British dignity and self-sacrifice. 

Amundsen was taciturn and prickly and not a little sensitive to the consensus that he had benefited from Scott’s misfortune. It took Huntford’s book to rehabilitate Amundsen to the English-speaking world. Most importantly, Huntford gravely damaged Scott’s reputation. Huntford revealed tensions inside the British expedition, that had been recorded in diaries and letters. The expedition suffered from complexity, lack of snow-technique training and unclear chains of command. Scott took huskies to pull supply sledges but he did not encourage men to develop dog-driving skills; he placed more faith in ponies. Dogs were proven in Polar regions and could be fed local seal meat (or even each other), whereas ponies depended on fodder brought on the expedition ship. Scott rejected driving dogs to the Pole because he thought them unsuitable for crevassed terrain and knew they would have to be killed as food ran out. His sentiments that ruled out that option.

Scott took skis but never bothered to get his men proficient in their use. The British Polar party pulled their sledges in harnesses, which was gruelling work and required massive calorie intake. The calorie expenditure of man-hauling in Antarctica is between 7,000 and 11,000 per day is depleting; the human body cannot absorb more than 7,000 calories per day.[ii] By contrast, the Norwegians, far from starving actually gained weight on the Polar expedition.

Oates: “I dislike Scott intensely…”

According to some in the British expedition, Scott was difficult, emotional and inconsistent, prone to impatience. Oates wrote, “Myself, I dislike Scott intensely and would chuck the whole thing if it were not that we are a British expedition and must beat these Norwegians… He is not straight, it is himself first, the rest nowhere, and when he has got what he can out of you, it is shift for yourself.”[iii] Yet Scott did command respect and loyalty. While some praised for his kindness, his habit of keeping to himself important operation considerations left colleagues uncertain. Scott’s devised logistics of multiple parties laying supplies for the four-man Polar party; they were complicated and used four different means of transport. When Scott changed plans at the last minute, this led to dangerous ambiguity.

Huntford thought that Scott was afflicted by melancholy and sentimentality and that he was inclined towards martyrdom – a dangerous combination for an expedition leader. By contrast, Amundsen was more even tempered and relied on extensive experience of arctic exploration. He had no pretensions to be a writer, scientist or hero and treated his Polar expedition like a grand cross-country ski trip, with tested materials and methods, as well as incorporating innovations, such as the hooded fur parka, which he had seen the Inuit use. The British wore scarves, hats and waxed coats; many contend that furs are suited for dog-driving rather than man-hauling.

Huntford’s Amundsen was a genius of technique, an adroit (though introverted) man manager and a fanatical planner who demanded a safety margin. Huntford’s book conveyed to readers the exhilaration of Amundsen’s coup in contrast to the suffering of the British. The implications were clear: the two approaches to the task embodied different worldviews.

Rehabilitating Scott   

The blow to Scott’s reputation was all the more marked because of the era. The year 1979 was an epochal one. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was elected and took up the sword of efficiency against the dragons of British industrial decline and low productivity. Huntford’s book heroized efficiency, small teams and adoption of foreign technology. The Norwegian expedition of 19 members outperformed the 65 men in the quasi-naval British expedition. This looked like a parable of Britain’s strike-riven, overmanned, under-producing economic plight. Huntford concluded, “Scott personified the glorious failure which by now had become a British ideal. He was a suitable hero for a nation in decline.”[iv]  

Inevitably, there was a feeling that Huntford had gone too far; the attack seemed meanspirited and overlooked the different expeditions’ goals. Books by Francis Spufford (1996), Diana Preston (1999), Susan Solomon (2000), British explorer Ranulph Fiennes (2003) argued that Scott was unfairly maligned. Preston and Solomon pointed out that Scott experienced temperatures that were unexpectedly low and that snow becomes much more difficult to traverse under such a condition. Supporters made the undeniable case that Scott’s large team conducted scientific research, collected geological and biological specimens and mapped new Antarctic regions, aside from the South Pole expedition. The Polar party collected fossil samples and carried them to their final camp and scientists published reports on different aspects of Antarctica’s meteorology, geology, geo-magnetism and biology. Amundsen’s small team had one goal alone: to reach the South Pole.

Fiennes, as a polar explorer himself and as a practiced man-hauler of sledges, took slights against Scott particularly personally. “[…] I know the present day Scott story to be a travesty of the truth.”[v] Trenchantly, he describes Huntford’s biography as written with “deliberate malice [to ruin] a dead man’s once fine reputation.”[vi] Fiennes did agree with Huntford on Scott’s temperamental faults: depression, temper, indolence.[vii] He thought that some expedition members bore personal grudges and used their accounts to spread rumours and disinformation to undermine their leader posthumously.

Fiennes made good observations that Scott was not expecting a race, and therefore did not prioritise speed, and that Shackleton’s use of man-hauling and ponies in 1908-9 had taken him to within 200 miles of the Pole, so Scott attempting to refine that method made sense. Scott’s reliance on man-hauling came from some success he had had over medium distances.

Fiennes identified a quality that was heroic but also fatal. “Scott possessed a rare characteristic, which separated him from most people, the ability to drive himself and his men beyond normal limits of endurance. […] Scott led them on remorselessly, eleven and sometimes twelve hours a day. He was, at nearly forty-three, one of the oldest there but his energy seemed limitless. He was annoyed by any delay and impatient with any team that could not keep up.”[viii] Although Scott raised the performance of his companions, he thought in terms of his limits rather than the limits of the weakest members of the team, such miscalculations came to the fore when “Taff” Evans broke down and Oates’s physical condition became critical during the final march.

Fiennes is a serious thinker and his 2003 book brings the insights of experience. Many of his points balance (if not outright rebut) Huntford’s arguments.

A divisive figure

Scott remains a divisive figure: acclaimed by patriots, traditionalists and independents as a brave hero and selfless leader; decried by sceptics, debunkers and anti-traditionalists as a flawed figure, whose attachment to convention and reliance on personal fortitude doomed men to death. Although sceptics may have valid reasons to critique Scott, there does linger the worry that Scott is simply another figure in a long line of heroes to be tarnished perhaps mainly because they are British heroes. As Fiennes puts it, “I hate to see history crudely distorted just for the pleasure of pulling down a hero from his pedestal.”[ix]

Ultimately, questions regarding chains of command, weather data and specimen collection are beside the point, which is “Does a leader have a duty to ensure the survival of his men and is it morally justifiable for him to expect of his men superhuman efforts of endurance as pre-requisite for success?” When people consider those questions, their minds turn to another polar hero, one who also failed but survived: Shackleton.

In part two (for paid subscribers only), Shackleton’s status as a heroic failure is assessed and we find out why he became a role model for team managers.

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[i] Quoted, Ranulph Fiennes, Scott, Hodder & Stoughton, 2003, p. 383

[ii] Op. cit. pp. 283-5

[iii] Quoted, op. cit., p. 1

[iv] Quoted op. cit. p. 418

[v] Op. cit., p. 2

[vi] Op. cit. p. 405

[vii] Op. cit. p. 16

[viii] Op. cit. p. 287

[ix] Op. cit. p. 397