When a Search Party Discovered the Frozen Body of a British Explorer Who Raced to the South Pole—and Lost

Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men reached the geographic South Pole on January 18, 1912, only to meet with disappointment in the form of a tent and a Norwegian flag.

Scott and his crew weren’t the first people to reach the southernmost point on the planet. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team had beaten the British Terra Nova Expedition by just over a month.

“Great God! This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority,” Scott wrote. “Well, it is something to have got here.”

Now, a more existential challenge stood before the Terra Nova crew: to make it back to Cape Evans on the coast before the Antarctic winter set in and temperatures dropped to excruciating, potentially fatal lows.

Along the way, two of Scott’s men died. Edgar Evans collapsed on February 17 after sustaining several injuries that left him in a precarious state. Lawrence Oates, consumed by infection and cold, walked out of the group’s tent and into a blizzard in mid-March. His parting message spoke to the haunting nature of his self-sacrifice: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

The three survivors—Scott, Henry Robertson Bowers and Edward Wilson—continued the trek back to base camp, but they were soon waylaid by a storm that confined them to their tent for four days. Frostbitten, running low on supplies and still 11 miles from a supply depot they had set up on the way to the pole, the men penned their final words and resigned themselves to a bitter, frozen end.

“What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better has it been than lounging in too great comfort at home,” Scott wrote in a letter to his wife. “But what a price to pay.”

The captain’s final journal entry was dated March 29, 1912. “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more,” he said, closing with a plea on behalf of the explorers’ families back in Great Britain: “For God’s sake, look after our people.” The three remaining men died over 150 miles away from their destination on the coast.

The dangerous race for the South Pole - Elizabeth Leane

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By the time a search party came across the three bodies on November 12, 1912, more than seven months had passed since Scott wrote his last words.

Tryggve Gran, a young Norwegian explorer, was part of the 11-man team that found Scott’s party.

“I will never forget it so long I live,” Gran wrote in his diary. “A horrible nightmare could not have shown more horror than this.”

The explorer described the gruesome sight of bodies ravaged by months of Antarctic winter. “The frost had made the skin yellow and transparent, and I’ve never seen anything worse in my life,” Gran said. “[Scott] seems to have struggled hard in the moment of death, while the two others seem to have gone off in a kind of sleep.”

The rescue team buried Scott, Bowers and Wilson in the area where they had died. Gran insisted on using his own skis to form a cross over the grave. He then used Scott’s skis on the return trip, convinced that the gear should make the complete journey, as its ambitious owner had always intended.

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.