Rest in Peace: Robert Falcon Scott, died OTD in 1912

From my upcoming book, Losing the Nobel Prize:

“After his first failed, attempt to reach the pole Robert Falcon Scott declared: “I may as well confess that I had no predilection for polar exploration.”

After his second, successful attempt in 1912 he said,  “Great God this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

Antarctica is unforgiving of mistakes. One of Scott’s biggest was his utter devotion to the scientific goals of the expedition. When he lost the Pole to Amundsen, he was depressed, but he could console himself with the prospect of the mission having achieved scientific success: the vast collection of Antarctic artifacts they collected. Yet even these samples contrib- uted to his demise. Weighed down by sleds full of rocks, animal carcasses, and other specimens destined for London’s Natural History Museum, the Englishmen moved even more slowly as the days passed. Though he lost the pole to Amundsen, who’d arrived nearly a month earlier, as Scott hoped, their artifacts did indeed make it to the Natural History Museum. But they bore a cost higher than any scientific expedition should suffer—they ended up dying for science.”