This is not intended as "Good Stuff" in the sense that it was good, but rather because I wanted to include this note about Robert Falcon Scott's last expedition in one of my blogs.
I hope readers will avail themselves of a copy of Scott's last diaries. They are collected in a volume called Scott's Last Expedition, available at Amazon and elsewhere.
On Jan. 16, 2012 after a two-and-a-half month slog across a glacier, over the Transantarctic Mountains, and through blinding snow, the team discovered they'd been beaten to the South Pole.
Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had gotten there first, on Dec. 14, 1911, a full month before Scott and his four companions spotted a telltale flag whipping in the wind over the coveted spot. [Race to the South Pole in Images]
"It is a terrible disappointment, and I am very sorry for my loyal companions," Scott wrote on the occasion.
From there, things only got worse. Hampered by the tightening stranglehold of Antarctic winter, Scott lost two of his men. Petty Officer Edgar Evans was done in by injury, and, hobbled by frostbite, Lawrence Oates famously sacrificed himself by walking out alone into a snowstorm to avoid slowing his companions' progress.
"He said, 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since," Scott wrote on March 16.
"We had fuel to make two cups of tea apiece and bare food for two days on the 20th. Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.
It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.
R. SCOTT.
For God's sake look after our people."
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Eight months later, in November 1912, a search party found three frozen bodies in a tent half-buried by snow. Bowers and Wilson were zipped into their sleeping bags, in the attitude of sleep.
Scott apparently died after his companions did. His sleeping bag and his coat were thrown open, his diaries stuffed beneath his shoulder. His arm was stretched across the body of his friend Wilson.
The searchers covered the tent with snow, marked it with a cross made from skis, and left the dead men where they lay.
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Much of the above was compiled by Andrea Mustain at:
https://www.livescience.com/19364-antarctic-explorer-death-centennial.html
And see the diary: Scott’s Last Expedition by Captain Scott, available at Amazon and elsewhere.
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