The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [4]
“Cannot understand what the English mean when they say that dogs cannot be used here,” Amundsen puzzled in his diary. On January 16, 1912, Scott and his debilitated team staggered to 89° south to find the snow crisscrossed with the tracks of Amundsen's party.
“The worst has happened,” Scott allowed in his diary. “All the day dreams must go.” The following day, the dispirited party continued to the pole, planted their flag, took their notes and photographs, and prepared to turn back.
“Great God! this is an awful place,” wrote Scott. “Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.”
They could not. Each of the five men in Scott's company died on the ice. The end came in a raging blizzard that trapped the party, down to three survivors, in their single tent, a mere eleven miles south of a vital supply depot. Now Scott unfurled his real greatness—not for expeditionary leadership, but for language.
“We shall die like gentlemen,” he wrote to the expedition's treasurer in England. “I think this will show that the Spirit of pluck and power to endure has not passed out of our race.” His Message to the Public is a litany of excuses stirringly pre-sented—failed pony transport, weather, snow, “frightfully rough ice,” “a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account,” the illness of his brave companion Titus Oates. Yet, it is a cynical reader indeed who remains unmoved by this tide of final words penned in the gallant little tent and poured forth into the white night that raged around it.
“Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions, which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.”
“It seems a pity,” he wrote as his diary's last entry, on March 29, “but I do not think I can write more.”
It took nearly a year for Scott's last words to reach the outside world. When they did, in February 1913, they plunged the entire empire into deep mourning. “With the sole exception of the death of Nelson in the hour of victory, there has been nothing so dramatic,” a journalist noted. Scott's tragedy was commemorated in the press and in the pulpit. In the public telling, his party's fatal, perverse blunders were not merely forgotten but evaporated out of existence. A myth was born, and propagated by the eventual publication of Scott's diaries, subtly edited by Sir James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan and a master of sentimental prose.
This, then, was the background against which Shackleton pulled together his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Setting out the year after the news of Scott's death, the Endurance expedition was ambivalently perceived as both a gripping national event and an anticlimax. In the public imagination, Antarctica was very much the place for heroic adventure; yet it seemed unthinkable that any future success could surpass Scott's glorious failure.
Shackleton's aims, as stated in his expedition's prospectus, were compelling:
From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made. It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys—the crossing of the Continent.
Shackleton eventually cobbled together funds for his grand venture. His principal backers were the British government and Sir James Key Caird, a wealthy Scottish jute manufacturer who contributed a princely gift of £24,000. Other benefactors of note were Miss Janet Stancomb-Wills, daughter of a tobacco tycoon, and Dudley Docker, of the Birmingham