EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Scott of the Antarctic and Butch Cassidy
IT WAS BEYOND freezing, probably close to minus 60 degrees and defeat in the guise of a Norwegian flag must have intensified the agony of the vicious cold and unrelenting blizzards. The men were already dying of starvation, exhaustion and frostbite, but their leader still believed that they could make their way back to camp, 800 miles away.
Next Thursday marks the centenary of the death of the polar explorer Scott of the Antarctic and his companions. The sad fate of Scott’s second polar expedition remains an iconic tragedy of exploration. His first foray to the region, between 1900 and 1904 as commander of the Discovery, when leading the pioneering National Antarctic Expedition had been a triumph, and resulted in a comprehensive survey of the interior of what was a forbidden ice kingdom. Robert Falcon Scott had become a naval cadet at the age of 13. The sea held his destiny; he had been born in Plymouth in 1868, and initially dedicated his life to naval service. The ill-fated second expedition began in 1910 and he and four companions made their way to the South Pole by sled. They arrived in January 1912 only to discover that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it, having reached the South Pole five weeks earlier. Amundsen had already proven his courage when navigating the North-West Passage between 1903 and 1906. Crossing the ice by sledge, he also located the site of the magnetic North Pole. The intrepid Amundsen would eventually die during an expedition in 1928, his body was never found.
Scott was a perceptive diarist; at one point he noted of the Antarctic: “Great God! This is an awful place.” Admittedly the most famous quote from the expedition is the last words spoken by the dying Captain Lawrence Oates as recorded by Scott: “I am just going outside and may be some time.” When news of the deaths finally reached Britain, Scott was posthumously knighted. In the later half of the 20th century, opinions changed as they do, and he was dismissed as incompetent for his misjudged use of ponies and failure to recognise the superiority of dog teams. But his reputation has been restored. In a shrinking world, explorers were replaced by travel writers. The genre appeared, perfected by Freya Stark, Laurens van der Post, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colin Thubron and Paul Theroux.
Then a restless eccentric named Bruce Chatwin reinvented it with In Patagonia in 1977, an episodic account of travelling there to replace a family heirloom, a fragment of Giant Sloth skin. En route he traced the tracks of Butch Cassidy as well as Magellan. Bordered by Chile and Argentina, Patagonia is both hell and heaven, attracting all manner of dreamers and losers; the confused and the tenacious. There are also many Welsh settlers.
Ironically, Chatwin the wanderer’s finest book, his novel, On The Black Hill, published 30 years ago, is about two Welsh brothers who never left the family farm.