Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition — five men reached the Pole second and died walking home

In January 1912 a five-man party of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition reached the South Pole and found that Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team had beaten them there by about five weeks. All five died on the return march across the Ross Ice Shelf. Petty Officer Edgar Evans collapsed and died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier on 17 February; Captain Lawrence Oates, crippled by frostbite, walked out of the tent to his death around 16 March; and Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Lieutenant Henry Bowers died in their tent at the end of March, pinned by a blizzard roughly 11 miles short of a supply depot that held the food and fuel to save them.

The expedition itself was large and well-financed: a shore party of sixty-five men, a scientific programme of lasting value, and a transport plan built around motor sledges, Siberian ponies, dogs and, in the final stage, men hauling their own sledges. The polar journey was the smallest and most exposed thread of that effort. The five men dragged their sledge some 800 miles to the Pole and turned back into deteriorating weather, weakening bodies, and a depot system that left them with too little margin at exactly the wrong moments.

Their bodies, diaries and photographs were found the following spring. Scott’s journals, recovered from the final tent on 12 November 1912, made the deaths public in extraordinary detail and turned the disaster into a national legend of stoic sacrifice. A century of reassessment has been less reverent, tracing the deaths not to a single villain but to compounding decisions — a fifth man added to a four-man ration plan, an over-reliance on human muscle, depots placed short or left thin, and a relief that never came — set against a March on the Barrier that was, by later analysis, abnormally and lethally cold.