Conference marking 100 years since Scott's trip to south pole will remember scientific legacy of Terra Nova expedition
The polar historian David Wilson expects a sharp intake of breath in Plymouth this weekend when he says: "It's about time we got over the tragedy of the death of Captain Scott. It's really not terribly important in the scheme of things. Get over it."
These are fighting words – especially as they will be delivered at a conference to mark Scott's ill-fated attempt to become the first man to reach the south pole.
On 6 June 1911 Robert Falcon Scott, who was born in Plymouth, celebrated his 43rd birthday at the south pole expedition base camp at Cape Evans. On 29 March 1912 he and his companions finally starved and froze to death in their tent, 11 miles from a supply cache, on the march back from discovering that the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them to the pole. Wilson's great uncle Edward Wilson, a naturalist, talented artist and medical doctor, died at Scott's side.
However, Wilson will be among speakers who believe Scott's instant elevation into the pantheon of heroic British failures – the black and white silent film of the expedition was shown to troops in the first world war trenches to stiffen their backbones – has obscured the true importance of the expedition: its unearthing of scientific evidence. Till the last, Scott's men were dragging 55lbs of rock samples with their supplies.
Wilson says: "The south pole was only ever a sideshow. They had to make getting there first the objective to raise the money for the expedition, but in the words of my great uncle: 'We aim to make bagging the pole merely an item among the results'. Because of their deaths, it became the defining story: the public reaction to the news of their deaths, months later, was extraordinary. The only modern equivalent would be the great wave of grief over the death of Diana," Wilson said.
"The truth is, had they come back alive in 1913 they would largely have been forgotten now – and most of them would have returned to active service, been swept up in the war and been dead within the year." Heather Lane, librarian and head of collections at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge – founded from money left over from public donations for the expedition widows and orphans – insists Scott was an extraordinary figure, but adds: "Nothing the British like more than a dead hero". She agrees that the science was the real legacy. "Because of his naval background, it was a challenge which Scott was peculiarly well equipped for. Their research programme was superbly planned and executed. Their mapping was impeccable, their two-hourly observations meticulous. They left us a baseline in Antarctic research for geology, botany and climate change still in use by scientists somewhere in the world every day of the week."
"They failed because they were extraordinarily unlucky: they were hit by a one-in-a-hundred-years run of appalling weather that they could not have anticipated."
Denis Wilkins, the retired doctor who is organising the conference, only realised how dangerous the Antarctic was when he volunteered to join the British Antarctic Survey as a medical officer in the 1970s, and had his perfectly healthy appendix removed first, just in case it became inflamed. In the event he had to remove a sailor's appendix at the base with the aid of a textbook and a geologist administering the anaesthetic. The man survived and sent regular Christmas cards.
The conference ends on Monday with a dinner marking Scott's last birthday. The original menu survives in a merry journal entry: "We sat down to a sumptuous spread with our sledge banners hung about us. Clissold's especially excellent seal soup, roast mutton and red currant jelly, fruit salad, asparagus and chocolate – such was our menu. For drink we had cider cup, a mystery not yet fathomed, some sherry and a liqueur."
On 29 March, with all their fuel and food gone, he wrote the famous last lines of his journal: "It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more – R. Scott. For God's sake look after our people". Wilson, working on books of his great uncle's drawings, and of photographs taken by Scott, sees their legacy in unexpected places.
"I think you can see my great uncle's influence in Scott's request to his wife to make their son interested in natural history, rather than bringing him up as an engineer or a sailor, say. Through Peter Scott you get the foundation of the World Wildlife Fund, the bird sanctuaries, the whole 20th century environmental concern that is now a worldwide movement. It is an incredible legacy from the friendship of two men on the ice."
A tale of six forgotten survivors
One of the most extraordinary stories the conference will hear is of the northern party, the six men of Captain Scott's forgotten expedition who survived an appalling Antarctic winter marooned in an ice cave with equipment, supplies and clothing intended for a short summer trip.
Meredith Hooper (an academic and author who told her son Tom a story which became his Oscar-winning film, The King's Speech) has trawled through unpublished letters and journals for her book The Longest Winter, published in paperback this month. She says the men connived at their own obliteration from history, overwhelmed at learning of the deaths of Scott and the other members of the south pole party, for which any one of them could have been selected.
The expedition ship the Terra Nova dropped them off to collect samples and make observations in January 1912, planning to collect them a few weeks later. Three return attempts were foiled by pack ice: the men would not be seen again for 10 months.
Scott had foreseen such a situation but left written instructions that no rescue mission should be sent for a shore party, who could survive "indefinitely" on seals and penguins for food, clothing and fuel. Too late they discovered, as polar summer turned to bitter winter, that seals disappeared once weeks of icy gales set in and penguins were summer visitors only. The men barely survived, racked with cramps and diarrhoea, living on frozen seal thawed over blubber fires. Hooper says that if their waterproof matches had not lasted, all would have died.
In November 1912 the sea ice was finally thick enough for them to trek 300 miles back to the base. They stripped off and washed in a tin bath for the first time in months and saw their own bodies had changed almost beyond recognition – every ounce of fat gone, the skin corrugated and wasted, their heads, the only parts exposed during their ordeal, blistered by repeated attacks of frostbite and burnt like old charred wood.
"Heroes? I think that every man who was part of any of the exploring expeditions in Antarctica in these early years was heroic," Hooper said.