1912 (43 page)

In Germany, after World War I, Wilhelm Filchner helped the Kaiser flee to the Netherlands. He never went south again but continued his work in Nepal and Tibet, spending World War II in India, where he made public his anti-Nazi feelings. Filchner died in Zurich in 1957, aged eighty.

Douglas Mawson went on to marry his love, Paquita Delprat, with John King Davis as his best man, and then served in the war as an army major. He later returned to Antarctica as part of the British, Australian and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, where he explored vast sections of the continental coastline. He was appointed professor of geology at the University of Adelaide in 1920 and died in 1958, aged seventy-six, the last of the great leaders from the Heroic Era of Exploration.

And the man who started it all? Sir Clements Markham died in an unpleasant way that was anything but heroic. In 1916 he was overcome by smoke from a candle that set fire to his hammock. He was eighty-five, and had defended Scott's efforts over all others to his last day.

The centenary of 1912 is an opportunity to celebrate scientific exploration in the south. No group encapsulates the spirit more than Robert Scott and his South Pole party. Unfortunately, their deaths overshadowed their expedition's great work—and arguably much of that achieved by the other teams.
Heroic tales of sacrifice and endurance in the face of extreme hardship became the main story, to the detriment of almost everything else.

When I started this project I had no desire to add to the commentary on the deaths of Scott and his men. There are many wonderful books on the events surrounding this journey and all give a more comprehensive view of them than I could hope to. But, during my research, I stumbled across a new part of the story, with implications for the way we honour the men's memory and, more generally, how science is communicated to people outside the profession.

Scott's fellow explorers were at a loss to explain what had gone wrong. How could one of the best-provisioned expeditions in Antarctica have ended so badly? When told of Scott's death, Shackleton was incredulous: ‘I cannot believe it is true. It is inconceivable that an expedition so well equipped as Captain Scott's could perish before a blizzard.' There is no doubt that the weather played a major role, but might something else have contributed?

With the news of the tragedy, rumours circulated that the full story had not been told: that something else had happened on the ice, something that was being quietly ignored. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was convinced of it. Writing in his diary in January 1914 Cherry reports that he went to Lincoln's Inn Fields for a meeting with the expedition's solicitor, Arthur Ferrar, who was also Cherry's own legal advisor. The response was swift. ‘They would not listen,' Ferrar insisted when Cherry said he wanted to go before the Antarctic Committee handling the expedition in Britain. ‘They will say you are overstrained. You see, there must be no scandal.'

‘The Committee,' Cherry noted in the margin of his journal, ‘meant to hush up everything. I was to be sacrificed.' Nothing was ever proven and Cherry's concerns were put down to paranoia. But the speculation persisted. To try to understand why, I
went in May 2011 to view some of Lord Curzon's papers held by the British Library.

The first clue was in a short set of notes: seven pages that had been buried in a file for nearly a century. They shed light on a chain of events that was precipitated in April 1913 by Lady Kathleen Scott's arrival in London from New Zealand, returning after news of her husband's death. During the month-long voyage Lady Scott had pored over her late husband's diary and correspondence. Arriving in London on 14 April, she immediately contacted Lord Curzon, in his role as president of the Royal Geographical Society, and arranged a meeting in two days' time.

Curzon made the meeting notes after what appears to have been a wide-ranging discussion over Lady Scott's findings. The deaths of all five men were discussed. Oates, it was claimed, most probably took opium before leaving the tent to commit suicide. But the meeting began, unsurprisingly, with talk of her late husband: ‘
Scotts words
in his Diary on exhaustion of food & fuel in depots on his return. He spoke in reference of “lack of thoughtfulness & even of generosity”. It appears Lieut Evans – down with Scurvy – and the 2 men with him must on return journey have entered & consumed more than their share.'

This must have come as a shock to Curzon. Had one of the returning parties, led no less by the expedition's second-in-command, taken more than their fair share of supplies? Scott's Antarctic venture was seen in some quarters as the society's expedition. If Teddy Evans was even remotely suspected of being complicit in Scott's death, the RGS might be asked some very difficult questions, particularly as he had since assumed the leadership of the expedition.

Curzon immediately initiated an inquiry, asking several senior RGS members if they would discreetly help him investigate the matter. Most were supportive, but he received a confidential note of caution from Admiral Lewis Beaumont:

As you have seen and talked to Lady Scott you now know that Evans had lost Scott's confidence to a great extent and that he will be dependent upon what Lady Scott gives him, out of the Diaries and Journals, for the building up of his paper. I think your idea of having an informal meeting of those you name…a very good one—the important point, to my mind, being the necessity of deciding what attitude the Society should take with regard to your questions (a) & (b) that is:- the exhaustion of the supplies of food & fuel—and the conduct of the relief parties. I am not in favour of the informal meeting becoming a Committee of Enquiry—because for the Society to be on sure ground it would have to probe very deep and would have probably to disapprove of what was done in many particulars—it would be different if good could come of the enquiry, but I fear nothing but controversy would come of it.

Curzon was not so sure—but things changed a few days later, when he met Edward Wilson's widow.

His notes continue with the subsequent meeting he held with Mrs Oriana Wilson. It records an unknown part of the expedition's story: ‘Mrs Wilson told me later there was a passage in her husbands diary which spoke of the “inexplicable” shortage of fuel & pemmican on the return journey, relating to depots which had not been touched by Meares and which could only refer to an unauthorised subtraction by one or other of the returning parties. This passage however she proposes to show to no one and to keep secret. C.'

Scott's dog driver, Cecil Meares, was known to have removed extra supplies from one of the supply dumps, the Mount Hooper Depot. Halfway back across the barrier in 1912, Meares was starving. He had travelled the entire ice shelf on the outward journey, and the extra two weeks meant he and his dogs were desperately short of food. Taking the bare minimum, he left a letter telling the others of his actions.

However, it was not Meares's removal of the food that Wilson was referring to. The returning South Pole team did not reach Mount Hooper until 10 March, eleven days after Wilson's last journal entry. The shortage of food must have been elsewhere. But the published version of Wilson's diary makes no mention of a shortage of fuel or of pemmican.

To check Curzon's claims, I was fortunate to view Wilson's original journal at the British Library. The small dark hardback book contains remarkably light writing in pencil. Dates are jotted in the margins and the accompanying text is of varying length before the entries end abruptly, on 27 February 1912. All the material aligns with the published version, but the latter fails to convey a vital characteristic of the journal. Before 11 February, each line is filled with jottings; not one is wasted. After this date there are gaps in the text, with some entries missing entirely.

The key date seems to be 24 February, when the returning party reached the Southern Barrier Depot. Scott was horrified to find there was a large fuel shortage, and could not account for it. It appears there was natural leakage through the lids: something Amundsen avoided by soldering all his tins. In the published version of his diaries Wilson not only fails to mention the fuel shortage in the relevant entry; he does not even remark upon the team having reached the all-important depot. In the original diary there are gaps in the text: the final statement of the day, ‘Fat pony hoosh', is a separate entry from the rest of the text; half a line, clear of text, precedes it, followed by a blank two and a half lines before the next day's entry.

Whether someone has rubbed out text is unclear, but the gaps in the diary entry for 24 February correlate with Curzon's notes. It suggests that one or more individuals did indeed take more than their fair share of food. And this was not the first time. On its return the South Pole team found a full day's biscuit allowance missing in the Upper Glacier Depot on
7 February, and both Scott and Wilson remarked upon this in their diaries.

Determining nutritional needs for working in polar environments was not an exact science in 1912. Past efforts—most of them operating near sea level—were the principal guide in expedition planning. Low temperatures and high altitudes are massive energy drains when dragging sledges for days on end. As a result, the estimated five thousand or so calories Scott had allowed for each man every day—reasonable for traversing the Ross Ice Shelf—was far too low on the Antarctic Plateau. Contemporary estimates suggest the men probably needed somewhere around double that amount. Scott and his men were starving long before they died. So a shortage of food was the last thing they needed, particularly as—regardless of fuel supplies—the pemmican could have been eaten cold.

The evidence pointed towards Evans's team as the guilty party. And Lord Curzon could not risk the story getting out. Scott and his companions had been declared heroes. To suggest that one of the returning teams—albeit suffering scurvy—had helped themselves to more than their share of food, contributing to the men's deaths, would have changed everything. The deaths would no longer be mere ‘bad luck' but in part due to others' need for self-preservation: not in the spirit of selfless Antarctic exploration. Survivors' lives would be tainted and reputations—not least of the RGS, so closely aligned with the expedition—would be damaged.

Lady Scott's comments had sparked concern, and Mrs Wilson had made the accusation explicit. But there was little appetite for public scandal. Curzon appears to have shut down the inquiry—after 24 April 1913, there were no further references to it.

Newspaper reports expressed suspicions from the start. The
Daily Chronicle
interviewed Teddy Evans shortly after the
Terra Nova
reached New Zealand and remarked that the new expedition leader became reticent when asked about shortages on the ice, commenting, ‘I think you had better not touch upon it.' Some RGS fellows privately expressed fears that more had happened on the ice than was publicly known. On the expedition, Cherry despised the Welshman: ‘I should like to see that man branded the traitor and liar he is,' he wrote in his diary, and, later, ‘It would be an everlasting shame, if the story of this Expedition were told by the one big failure in it.' By the end of July 1913 Evans had been removed from the official leadership of the expedition.

Of the returning Last Supporting Party, only William Lashly's sledging diary has been published, the most popular version apparently reproduced in full within Cherry's
The Worst Journey in the World
, some ten years after the events they describe. Although Lashly would later insist their contents were true, the entries appear to have been significantly embellished. Curiously, the original diary entries give no detail on how much food the three men took from the allegedly impoverished depots, despite the definite statements in Cherry's version; and Evans's scurvy—a possible justification for taking extra food—is not commented on until the men were halfway across the Ross Ice Shelf, eight days after that given in the popular version when the men were still descending the Beardmore Glacier. There is nothing in Lashly's diary to refute Lord Curzon's notes.