Five of the best
Beryl Bainbridge
THE LAST GREAT QUEST: CAPTAIN SCOTT'S ANTARCTIC SACRIFICE by Max Jones OUP, £20, pp. 325, ISBN 0192804839 The blurb on the front of this mesmerising and superbly researched book reads, The first serious historical account of Scott's ill-fated expedition'. This is surely a mistake. Those of us obsessed by the death in 1912 of five men returning from the South Pole, three of whom were discovered frozen in their tent 11 miles from safety, will hardly have forgotten Cherry-Garrard's masterpiece of Antarctic prose. The Worst Journey in the World.
Max Jones's book is not that story, but rather an examination of the British traditions of exploration, the history of the Royal Geographical Society and the reverberations throughout the Empire when, in 1913, the relief party found the bodies of Captain Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Lt 'Birdie' Bowers. They had perished in the March of the previous year, a month before the sinking of S.S Titanic. The news reached London on the afternoon of 10 February. 'Nothing in our time, scarcely even the sinking of the Titanic,' proclaimed the Manchester Guardian, 'has touched the whole nation so deeply as the loss of these men.' The fact that the British expedition had reached the Pole a month after Amundsen had stuck the Norwegian flag into the snow no longer mattered. Indeed, death had secured Scott's immortality; he and his companions had made the ultimate sacrifice. Amundsen had merely ski-ed home with what amounted to an almost obscene lack of difficulty. The frozen bodies were buried in the tent in which they perished. They are still there, perfectly preserved, hundreds of feet below the ice, drifting towards the sea. A memorial service, attended by King George V, was held on 14 February 1913, in St Paul's Cathedral. The presence of the king, declared the Times, conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate. As the bells of St Paul's struck 12 and the service began, 1,500,000 children in schools in London and thousands more in 50 other towns and cities listened to a story written by Arthur Machen prefaced with the words, 'Children, you are about to hear the true story of five of the bravest and best men who have ever lived on the earth since the world began.' Max Jones was drawn to his subject out of a need to understand the generation who fought and died in the first world war. In his words, The celebration of the death of Captain Scott illuminates the passions and prejudices of Edwardian society on the brink of the greatest massacre in British history.' I agree with him, and with his thesis that after the first world war society was never the same again. Guggenheim changed from pyjamas to full evening dress as the Titanic began to tilt: he is quoted as shouting from the deck to the lifeboats below, 'Tell my wife I died like a gentleman.' The fact that he was accompanied on the voyage by his mistress was neither here nor there. Before he died Scott wrote in his journal, 'We have behaved like gentlemen.' When the relief party prised his notebook from under his jacket, his arm broke like a pistol shot. The first world war put an end to gentlemanly death, just as scientific progress in matters of exploration all but did away with the need for it. An article in the Observer of 1913 blaming Nature for both the death of Scott and the sinking of the Titanic would today be greeted with derision. In the 1970s it was the historian Roland Huntford who put the boot in against Scott. He saw only deceit in those last entries in Scott's journal which endeavoured to explain the causes of the disaster, including 'a shortage of fuel in our depots for which I cannot account'. It was, Huntford declared, the shameful self-justification of a man who had led his comrades to disaster. He went further, claiming that Bowers, fit enough to strike out for One Ton Camp, was prevented by Scott who thought it better to die rather than return to the Pole beaten by Amundsen. In Huntford's eyes, Scott was the hero of a nation in decline, an emblem of amateurism and incompetence which, he argued, would encumber Britain throughout the 20th century and beyond. He has a point. Even as Scott began to die, Amundsen's conquest of the South Pole had marked the symbolic completion of the map of the world. One other epic journey would be made, that of the landing on the moon, but that was an exploit made possible by a scientific machine rather than the dogged plodding of men. We live now, Jones argues, amidst the rubble of a Victorian culture fractured by two world wars and awash with mathematical insight and computerised technology. Modern exploration fails to extend the boundaries of our world. All are doomed, as Joseph Conrad predicted, to follow in the beaten tracks of the pioneers.
Previous page
