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.
In November 1912 the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson set out from Cape Denison in Antarctica with two companions — Lieutenant Belgrave Ninnis of the Royal Fusiliers and the Swiss ski champion Xavier Mertz — to sledge east across Adélie Land as the Far Eastern Party of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition. Two of the three died. On 14 December 1912, more than 300 miles out, Ninnis broke through the snow lid of a crevasse with the rear sledge and was lost into it, taking with him the strongest dog team, the tent, and almost all the party’s food. Mertz died on the return march around 8 January 1913, most likely poisoned by vitamin A from the dog livers the two starving men had been eating. Mawson covered the last roughly 100 miles alone, half-dead, and reached base on 8 February 1913 — only to find the relief ship had sailed hours earlier, condemning him to another year in Antarctica.
The journey is remembered, accurately, as one of the great ordeals of solo survival in polar history, but the verdict on the party itself is plain: a single crevasse fall, in a region riddled with hidden crevasses, destroyed the expedition’s margin in an instant and killed two of its three men. Everything that followed — the starvation, Mertz’s death, Mawson’s skeletal crawl home — flowed from that one collapse and from the decision, forced by it, to keep the men alive on a diet that was quietly poisoning them.
What makes the case unusually legible is that Mawson kept his diary throughout, recording the loss of Ninnis, Mertz’s decline and his own disintegration in clinical detail. His account, together with later medical analysis, allows the mechanism to be traced precisely: not a single villain but a chain — a crevasse, a catastrophic loss of supplies, an improvised survival diet, and a poison no one in 1912 knew to fear. Mertz and Mawson ate the livers of their Greenland huskies, and those livers carried concentrations of vitamin A high enough to be lethal.
In August 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed from England aboard the Endurance to attempt the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea by way of the South Pole. The expedition never set foot on the route. Yet of the 28 men aboard Endurance, not one died. The ship was beset in the Weddell Sea pack ice in January 1915, drifted helplessly for ten months, was crushed, and sank on 21 November 1915. The men then survived for almost a year on the ice and the sea — camping on drifting floes, sailing three open boats to Elephant Island, and watching as Shackleton and five others crossed 1,300 kilometres of the Southern Ocean in a 6.9-metre lifeboat to fetch help. It is the archetypal survival epic, and it is included here not as a disaster but as the rare counter-case: the doomed expedition whose people were not doomed.
The crossing itself was a total failure. The Endurance never reached the Antarctic mainland; the South Pole was never approached; the continent was not crossed until 1958, by a different expedition. By any measure of stated objective the expedition achieved nothing it set out to do. What it achieved instead was the preservation of every life under conditions that had killed comparable parties outright — the men of Greely, of the Jeannette, of Franklin. The difference was not luck alone. It was a sustained, deliberate refusal to let the party fracture, hoard, despair or split, enforced by a leader whose single surviving objective, once the ship was gone, was that everyone come home.
This account does not extend to the expedition’s other half. Shackleton’s plan required a second ship, Aurora, to lay supply depots from the Ross Sea side for a crossing party that never came; that Ross Sea party lost three men and is recorded under its own case file. On the Weddell Sea side — the Endurance and her 28 — the toll was zero, and the relevant question is how.
In August 1897 the Belgian naval officer Adrien de Gerlache sailed from Antwerp aboard the Belgica, a converted Norwegian whaler, with a crew of 19 drawn from five nations, intending to survey the Antarctic coast and press toward the South Magnetic Pole. In March 1898 the ship became trapped in the pack ice of the Bellingshausen Sea and could not be freed before winter. The Belgica thus became the first vessel ever to overwinter in Antarctic waters — not by design that the crew welcomed, but as a trap. Locked in the ice through the months-long polar night, the men were struck by scurvy, paralyzing depression and, in at least one case, insanity. Two died: one washed overboard before the ship was beset, one of a heart condition during the winter. The rest survived, and in March 1899, after sawing and blasting a channel through the floe, the Belgica broke free and limped home.
The expedition’s place in history is double-edged. It opened the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration and proved that humans could survive a winter on the frozen Southern Ocean. It also served as a clinical demonstration of what that winter does to the unprepared body and mind: the slow assault of vitamin deficiency, the psychological collapse brought on by perpetual darkness and confinement, and the near-disintegration of a command structure as its officers fell ill. The ship was saved less by its nominal leadership than by two junior members — the American surgeon Frederick Cook and the young Norwegian first mate Roald Amundsen. As de Gerlache and the captain, Georges Lecointe, were laid low, Cook and Amundsen took charge, forcing the crew to eat fresh seal and penguin meat against the commander’s distaste, organizing the men against despair, and devising the scheme that finally cut the ship out of the ice. The Belgica is therefore both the first Antarctic winter and a case study in how a polar party survives one: by fresh food, enforced activity and the refusal to surrender to the dark.
The Ross Sea party was the forgotten half of Ernest Shackleton’s 1914–17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton attempted to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea, this second party, operating from the opposite Ross Sea coast under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to lay a chain of supply depots southward across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, so that Shackleton’s crossing team would have food and fuel for the final stretch to McMurdo Sound. The depots were laid. The crossing never came: Shackleton’s ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea pack before his party ever set foot on the continent. Three men of the Ross Sea party died completing depots for a journey that no one would ever make. Of the men stranded on the Antarctic side, seven survived and three did not.
The party’s ordeal was compounded by the loss of its ship. On 7 May 1915 a gale tore the Aurora from her moorings off Cape Evans and drove her out to sea, locked in the pack, leaving ten men ashore with minimal supplies, clothing and equipment. Marooned, under-provisioned, and unaware that the crossing party would never come, those men nonetheless judged that lives depended on the depots being laid. They sledged south through two seasons, improvising clothing and gear, hauling loads in temperatures and conditions that broke their health, and completed the depot chain to Mount Hope at the foot of the Beardmore. The cost was severe: scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and exhaustion ground the men down on journeys lasting months.
Arnold Spencer-Smith, the expedition’s chaplain and photographer, collapsed with scurvy on the return from the farthest depots and died on the ice on 9 March 1916, carried on a sledge to the end. Two months later, on 8 May 1916, Mackintosh and Victor Hayward walked out from Hut Point toward Cape Evans across newly formed, unstable sea ice during a blizzard, against advice, and were never seen again — almost certainly drowned when the ice broke up. The survivors were rescued in January 1917 by the refitted Aurora, with Shackleton himself aboard. They learned that the depots they had nearly died to lay had been needed by no one. It remains one of polar history’s bleakest demonstrations of effort and sacrifice rendered futile by a failure half a continent away.
Six men of Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, cut off by pack ice on the coast of Victoria Land in early 1912, dug a snow cave on a barren rock they later named Inexpressible Island, endured the Antarctic winter on seal and penguin meat, and then walked roughly 200 miles back to the expedition base — and every one of them lived. The party was led by Lieutenant Victor Campbell of the Royal Navy and comprised the surgeon and naturalist George Murray Levick, the geologist Raymond Priestley, and three ratings: Petty Officer George Abbott, Petty Officer Frank Browning and Able Seaman Harry Dickason. Unlike Scott’s polar party, dying that same season on the far side of the Ross Ice Shelf, the Northern Party suffered and survived intact.
The ordeal was not the goal of any plan; it was the consequence of one failing. The party had been set ashore at Evans Coves, near Terra Nova Bay, in January 1912 to do a few weeks of geological survey, with provisions sized to match. When the ship Terra Nova could not return through the ice to retrieve them — twice it tried and was driven off — the six were left on an open coast as the brief Antarctic autumn closed, with sledging rations meant for weeks and a winter of darkness ahead.
What followed was an exercise in disciplined improvisation. The men hunted seals and penguins while any could be found, killing an estimated 120 penguins and 15 seals; they excavated a cave roughly 12 feet by 9 in a hard snowdrift, lit and heated it with blubber lamps and a blubber stove, and lay through the polar night in filth, smoke and near-starvation, rationing each day’s food and reading aloud to hold morale. Dysentery and enteritis, probably from tainted meat thawed in contaminated vessels, ran through the group, and Browning was reduced to near-collapse. When the light returned, they harnessed themselves and hauled south, crossing the treacherous Drygalski Ice Tongue, and reached the safety of the main base in early November 1912 — emaciated, scurvy-touched, but all six alive.