1911 was chilly even by Antarctic standards, but a band of pale Englishmen led by Robert Falcon Scott nonetheless determined that they would be the first to reach the South Pole.\u00a0They organized their dogs and supplies, and a caravan set off in November. Much of the caravan was a support team, which cleverly dropped caches of food and fuel on the way out so that the small final team that would dash to the pole could retrieve them on the way back.<\/p>\n
Little by little, more of the caravan peeled off, and finally, after slogging along for months on foot, five men, led by Scott, arrived at the pole in January 1912 – only to find a brown pup tent, a Norwegian flag, and an annoyingly friendly letter. Scott had lost out to Roald Amundsen, whose team had arrived a month earlier. Scott recorded the moment curtly in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the daydreams must go.” And shortly afterward: “Great God! This is an awful place. Now for the run home and a desperate struggle. I wonder if we can do it.”<\/p>\n
Dejected as Scott’s men were, their return trip would have been difficult anyway, but Antarctica threw up everything it could to punish and harass them. They were marooned for weeks in a monsoon of snow flurries, and their journals (discovered later) showed that they faced starvation, scurvy, dehydration, hypothermia, and gangrene. Most devastating was the lack of heating fuel. Scott had trekked through the Arctic the year before and had found that the leather seals on his canisters of kerosene leaked badly. He’d routinely lost half his fuel. For the South Pole run, his team had experimented with tin-enriched and pure tin solders. But when his bedraggled men reached the canisters awaiting them on the return trip, they found many of them empty. In a double blow, the fuel had often leaked onto foodstuffs.<\/p>\n
Without kerosene, the men couldn’t cook food or melt ice to drink. One of them took ill and died; another went insane in the cold and wandered off. The last three, including Scott, pushed on. They officially died of exposure in late March 1912, eleven miles wide of the British base, unable to get through the night.<\/p>\n
Culled from:\u00a0The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements<\/a><\/p>\n Here’s Scott and his men at the South Pole, the day after they realized they’d been beaten to the punch by Amundsen. \u00a0Happy fellas, huh? \u00a0That’s Scott standing in front of the Union Jack on the pole. Eyewitness to History<\/a> has an interesting article about Scott’s doomed trek that includes his last diary entries:<\/p>\n
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