60 Fun Facts About Robert Falcon Scott

Scott's last diary entry was written in March 1912, about two weeks before which famous disaster?

The sinking of the Titanic came on 15 April 1912, yet the world mourned the liner first: nobody outside Antarctica knew Scott's party was dead until the following February.

Who scored the film Scott of the Antarctic?

Ralph Vaughan Williams later reworked his music for the film into a full symphony, his seventh, the Sinfonia antartica, first performed in 1953.

Amundsen's tent at the South Pole held a letter he asked Scott to deliver to whom?

King Haakon VII of Norway was the addressee: Scott kept Amundsen's note and logged the request in his diary with an exclamation mark, the beaten man asked to play postman for the winner.

Where was Scott born in 1868?

Near Devonport, Plymouth: with soldiers and sailors on both sides of the family, Scott and his younger brother were marked out for the armed services from boyhood.

Which Royal Geographical Society president backed Scott to lead the Discovery Expedition?

Clements Markham had marked Scott out years earlier, after watching the young midshipman win a boat race in the West Indies, and he stayed Scott's firmest champion.

In 1902 Scott made Antarctica's first flight, rising above the ice in what?

A tethered balloon, bought so the Discovery Expedition could survey from the air, took Scott up first, and another officer followed him for a look across the ice shelf.

What feature did Scott's 'western journey' of the Discovery Expedition discover?

The Polar Plateau proved so featureless that Scott's party, their navigation tables lost in a gale, no longer knew where they were, until a tumble down a slope landed them beside a glacier they recognised.

What was needed to free Scott's vessel Discovery from the Antarctic ice in 1904?

Two relief ships and explosives were needed: Morning and Terra Nova came with orders to abandon Discovery if she stayed stuck, and the ice broke up less than two weeks before the deadline.

Which member of Scott's Discovery Expedition died in March 1902 after slipping over a precipice in a blizzard?

George Vince could get no grip on an icy slope and slid over a cliff into the sea; his body was never found, and the wooden cross his shipmates raised at Hut Point still stands.

Which famous author, a friend of Scott, was godfather to his son Peter?

J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was the boy's godfather, and one of Scott's last letters from the tent asked him to 'help my widow and my boy'.

Which organisation did Scott's only son, Peter, go on to help found?

The World Wide Fund for Nature had Peter Scott among its founders in 1961, half a century after his father's last letter begged his wife to 'make the boy interested in natural history'.

Scott insisted the McMurdo Sound area was his own 'field of work' in a dispute with whom?

Ernest Shackleton promised to land elsewhere but, with pack ice barring the way and his coal running low, based himself in McMurdo Sound after all.

Which port gave Terra Nova such a generous send-off in June 1910 that Scott promised she would return there first?

Cardiff held Scott to it: Terra Nova left its docks on 15 June 1910 and, three years later almost to the day, came back to them without him.

Three of Scott's men hauled sledges through the darkness of the polar winter to collect what for science?

Emperor penguin eggs were the prize, because the embryos were thought to hold the missing link between reptiles and birds; only three of the eggs survived the journey back.

Before his 1910 telegram told Scott he was heading for Antarctica, where had Amundsen said he was going?

The North Pole was his announced goal until Cook and Peary each claimed it; he then switched in secret, telling even his own crew only as Fram left Madeira.

What did Scott's party find running mysteriously short at depot after depot on the march back from the Pole?

Stove fuel had leaked away: in the cold, paraffin crept past the leather washers of the stored cans, a fault Amundsen had avoided by soldering his cans shut.

In which Scottish city, where she was built in 1901, is Scott's ship Discovery now preserved?

Dundee won the order because by 1900 few British yards could still build a big wooden ship, and its shipwrights had long made whalers for Arctic ice.

How was Terra Nova saved when a storm choked her pumps?

Bailing with buckets, in a chain the officers and scientists kept going for hours, held the water down until a hole cut through a bulkhead let them reach the choked pump.

What did Scott refuse to do to get One Ton Depot to 80°S?

Kill weak ponies for food and push on, his horse expert urged; Scott would not, the depot went in about 35 miles short, and he was warned he would come to regret it.

Where had Amundsen made his base, well to the east of Scott's?

The Bay of Whales put Amundsen about 60 nautical miles nearer the Pole, and Scott learned of it only when his own ship, hunting for a landing place, found the Norwegians camped there.

What did Scott's written orders of October 1911 tell the dog teams to do?

Meet his returning party about 1 March near latitude 82, the orders said, so the dogs could hurry it home; in the event the teams went no farther than One Ton Depot, far short of that.

What did Scott's diary call the South Pole on the day he reached it?

'An awful place' was his phrase: 'Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority', written once his party knew the Norwegians had been first.

What did the fifth man added to Scott's polar party march without?

His skis had been cached days earlier with the rest of his supporting team's, so the fifth man walked to the Pole on foot and all five squeezed into a tent made for four.

What did the polar party spot in the distance the day before reaching the Pole?

Amundsen's black flag, tied to a sledge bearer, was first taken for a trick of the wind-carved snow; around it lay ski tracks and the prints of many dogs, and the race was plainly lost.

Which member of Scott's polar party was the first to die, near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier?

Edgar Evans, the strongman of the five, went downhill fastest after a fall on the glacier left him 'dull and incapable', and he collapsed and died near its foot.

Which tribute did the search party inscribe where Scott's frostbitten companion had walked into the blizzard?

'A very gallant gentleman' went on a cross raised near where he vanished, because his body was never found; he had walked out willingly, the inscription said, to try to save his comrades.

How far short of One Ton Depot was the final camp of Scott, Wilson and Bowers?

About 11 miles was all that lay between the tent and the depot's supplies when a blizzard pinned them down, and the depot itself had been laid well short of its planned position a year earlier.

On the march back from the Pole, Scott wrote that hauling the sledge was like pulling over what?

Desert sand was his image for the ice shelf's soft, sandy snow, with 'not the least glide in the world', so every mile cost the weakening men far more effort.

What were the concluding words of Scott's final diary entry?

'For God's sake look after our people' sits below his signature like a postscript: he had written nothing for six days, then managed one last entry as the supplies ran out.

Which farewell document did Scott write in the tent to defend the Terra Nova Expedition's conduct?

The Message to the Public blamed weather and bad luck, not planning, and closed by asking 'a great rich country like ours' to provide for the dead men's dependents, which it did.

What did the search party do with the bodies of Scott and his companions?

Buried them where they lay, under a snow cairn: the tent was lowered over the three men and a rough cross set on top, while their diaries and letters were carried home instead.

Which scientific specimens, hauled to the very end, were found with the bodies of Scott's party?

Rocks bearing plant fossils were kept on the sledge at Wilson's special request; their Glossopteris leaves later helped show that Antarctica was once forested and joined to other continents.

Which poet wrote 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield', the line on the memorial cross to Scott's party?

Tennyson beat the Bible: some of the survivors wanted a scriptural text, but the closing line of his Ulysses was chosen and cut into a great cross of jarrah wood made by the ship's carpenter.

From which port was the news of Scott's death first cabled to the world in February 1913?

Oamaru, New Zealand, saw two officers row ashore in the early morning and cable the news in code to the expedition's agent, before catching a train to rejoin the ship farther up the coast.

Which country runs the South Pole's Amundsen–Scott base?

The United States built it in 1956 for a worldwide science year, named it for both rivals and has kept it staffed year-round ever since, winner and runner-up sharing the spot they raced to reach.

In which English university city does the Scott Polar Research Institute, the national memorial to Scott's party, stand?

Cambridge has housed it since 1920, when it began as a single room in a geology museum, founded by Frank Debenham, who had been a geologist on Scott's last expedition.

In 1913 Scott's widow was granted the rank she would have held had he lived to receive which honour?

A knighthood was what he was expected to come home to, so Kathleen was given a knight's widow's place in official precedence, though that did not make him Sir Robert after death.

Who played Scott in the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic?

John Mills played him in a film made with the help of nearly all the surviving expedition members, only two declining, and it became one of Britain's most popular films of 1949.

Which 1979 book branded Scott a 'heroic bungler'?

Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen set British muddle against Norwegian professionalism, and was dramatised for television in 1985 as The Last Place on Earth.

Scott's son Peter won an Olympic bronze medal in 1936 in which sport?

Sailing a one-man dinghy won him bronze in Berlin, a wry answer to his father's last letter home, which had called natural history 'better than games'.

Which survivor of Scott's last expedition wrote The Worst Journey in the World?

Apsley Cherry-Garrard took his title not from the march to the Pole but from an earlier trek in the winter dark, so cold that his teeth split to pieces, made with two men who later died beside Scott.

Which June day did Scott's men mark at Cape Evans with a feast, speeches and a homemade tree hung with presents?

Midwinter Day, 22 June, was their Christmas because it marked the sun turning back towards them; after dinner a tree knocked together from odds and ends was carried in, lit with candles and bearing a gift for every man.

Which active volcano towers over Ross Island, where Scott built the huts for both his expeditions?

Mount Erebus wore a steam cloud that the men at Cape Evans watched like a wind vane; James Clark Ross had named it after his ship, and its extinct neighbour after her consort, Terror.

What advice from Nansen does the film Scott of the Antarctic show Scott ruefully recalling?

To take only dogs is what the film has him remember as he stares at his broken-down motor sledges; the real Scott had consulted Nansen in Norway in 1910 while testing those very machines.

On hearing how Scott died, Amundsen reportedly said he would gladly give up what to have saved him?

Any honour or money, he is reported to have said on learning the details; the man who won the race was, by more than one account, troubled afterwards by the way his rivals had died.

Which relic of Scott's Discovery Expedition is kept at Exeter Cathedral?

His sledging flag, the personal banner he carried in the Antarctic, was given to the cathedral by his family in 1920 and is usually on display there.

Which cavalry officer, in charge of Scott's ponies, left the tent saying 'I am just going outside and may be some time'?

Lawrence Oates, a Boer War veteran nicknamed 'Titus', could barely walk on his frostbitten feet and hoped that without him the other three might still move fast enough to live.

Which Irish sailor was sent back with Teddy Evans and Lashly at 87°34'S?

Tom Crean, on that return march, walked the last 35 miles alone across the ice shelf to fetch help for the collapsed Teddy Evans, and was awarded the Albert Medal for saving his life.

What kind of family business paid for Scott's comfortable early childhood?

A brewery, inherited from his own father, was sold by Scott's father, who lost the proceeds and ended up managing another man's brewery.

On which training ship at Dartmouth did Scott start out as a 13-year-old cadet?

HMS Britannia was the navy's cadet training ship and took only boys who passed her entrance exam, so Scott was sent to a Hampshire crammer first, bound like his uncles for the services.

What happened to one of Scott's three motor sledges as it was unloaded at Cape Evans?

It fell through the sea ice and sank to the seabed, and Scott blamed himself for letting it be unloaded that morning; the other two machines broke down early on the march to the Pole.

Which photographer on Scott's last expedition later turned his footage into the film The Great White Silence?

Herbert Ponting, the expedition's self-styled 'camera artist', sailed home a year before the news broke, so his pictures became an epitaph rather than a celebration and earned him little.

As a young lieutenant in the 1890s, Scott trained as a specialist in which naval branch?

Torpedo training at HMS Vernon, passed with first-class certificates, made him a specialist: he was still torpedo lieutenant of the battleship Majestic when he volunteered to lead an expedition south.

What became of the sledge dogs on Scott's record southern march during the Discovery Expedition?

Every dog died, sickened by dried fish that had spoiled in the tropics, the weakest being fed to the rest.

A crater near the south pole of which body is named after Scott?

The Moon: the crater Scott lies right next to the crater Amundsen, so the two rivals are neighbours again at the southern end of another world.

What did the men of Scott's Discovery Expedition write and illustrate each month of the Antarctic winter?

A magazine, The South Polar Times, which Scott called 'our excellent monthly publication': Edward Wilson painted its pictures, only one copy of each issue was made, and Scott revived it on his last expedition.

What did the motor sledges Scott took to Antarctica in 1910 run on?

Caterpillar tracks: the machines that set out for the Pole soon broke down, yet one of Scott's men later called them 'the direct ancestors of the tanks in France'.

Scott's Discovery men built an Australian settlers' bungalow in Antarctica but never made it their home, so where did they live?

Aboard their ship, Discovery, which lay frozen in close by. The hut, hard to heat, became a storehouse and, in the winter dark, the 'Royal Terror Theatre', with a stage and a row of footlights.

Scott's ship Terra Nova survived the Antarctic pack ice, only to sink in 1943 off which Arctic island?

Greenland: back at work as a Newfoundland sealer, she sprang a leak while carrying wartime supplies to bases there, and the coastguard took off every man before she went down.

The Coldest March, a 2001 defence of Scott, was written by the scientist who explained which Antarctic phenomenon?

The ozone hole: Susan Solomon led the 1986 expedition that tied it to CFCs, then compared Scott's weather logs with modern records and argued that exceptional cold, not incompetence, killed his party.