SCOTT’S IMAGE as a brave explorer of whom the British could be proud survived two world wars. In 1948 Ealing Studios brought out their massively popular Scott of the Antarctic, with John Mills in the title role. But it was not many years after this that the old-style hero, the Briton with the stiff upper lip, went out of fashion. Among biographers, character assassination became a major literary endeavour. Scott’s turn came in the mid-1970s when two biographies emphasised every flaw in his character and performance, but, in my view, failed to ruin a dead man’s reputation.
Then in 1979 came Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen, and, a few years later, a Central TV documentary based on the book. Neither made much impact on me until I too manhandled a heavy sledge-load across the Antarctic continent, suffering frostbite in the process. As my own experience as a polar explorer deepened, I read all the books I could get on Amundsen and Scott, 112 in all. I became convinced that there was something profoundly wrong about Huntford’s book.
The reason this matters so much and the reason I’ve devoted so much time and effort to this quest is that to this day Scott and Amundsen is used as the Scott reference book. New biographies of Scott, since Huntford’s, use his quotes and text. He is generally accepted as the world’s No 1 polar biographer, and much of his book is now treated as history. By the time a new edition of the paperback was published in 1999, Paul Theroux was writing in his introduction of Scott as “insecure, panicky, humourless . . . a bungler . . . always self-dramatising”. How did Huntford manage to convince his readers that his version of Scott was the correct one? First, he presented himself as a man with practical snow and ice experience, but shows his ignorance of polar regions with statements such as “about -40C . . . each breath burns like fire”. I have manhauled at -50C and have never experienced this phenomenon. He writes too that Amundsen’s man Stubbered, being a housebuilder, knew how to dig large snow grottos “without the risk of the roof collapsing”. Most expeditions that winter in Antarctica, including mine, dig such grottos to store gear or for work rooms. You don’t need a housebuilder.
Huntford wrote of Scott as “incapable of the specialised interplay of arms, torso and legs . . . the heart of cross-country skiing . . . struggled awkwardly . . .squandering energy with every step . . . ill-suited to bear the strains of polar travel”. In fact Scott, over a succession of polar journeys, was to prove himself eminently well suited to polar travel and by far the best individual manhauler of the age. I have taught army teams cross-country skiing using the interplay of limbs that Huntford mentions, and I have also manhauled heavy sledges for thousands of miles on skis. I can confirm that Huntford seems to have missed the point: good skiing techniques are irrelevant to heavy manhauling.
Scott is castigated for his use of man-made clothing materials, not furs, even though polar experts know that manhaulers would be unable to move in furs; they would perspire too much. For manhauling, even at -50C, it is best if you wear lightweight cotton clothes; otherwise your sweat is trapped and freezes on your skin as your body cools. Furs are correct only for dog-drivers — the dogs are the ones exerting themselves.
Huntford says: “Scott forced the pace. He covered 13 miles a day, not far short of Amundsen’s 15 . . . on the march for nine or ten hours, hauling heavy weights . . . dragging 200 pounds per man up to 10,000 feet was inhuman enough.” It is not inhuman for a leader like Scott to set such a manhaul pace; it is standard practice and remains so today. Nine or ten hours is the norm. Two hundred pounds (91kg) is a comparatively light load and 10,000 feet (3,000m) happens to be the average height of the polar plateau.
Huntford sometimes gets ahead of the evidence; as he has said: “One has to interpret now and then.” In a BBC TV interview he explained his description of Scott trying to force Oates out to his death as being based on his “intuition”. When Sara Wheeler interviewed him for her 1996 book, Terra Incognita, she asked if he ever hankered to go south, since his polar descriptions were so good. He replied: “No. These are landscapes of the mind, you see.” So even his scenery descriptions are intuitive. Moreover, Huntford damned Scott in the eyes of his readers through selective omission. He quotes rarely from the hundreds of diarists with good things to say about Scott to balance the quotes he frequently uses from the few critical diarists.
Huntford announced to the Norwegian reviewers of his book that he had discovered that Scott had altered his diaries. Later he admitted that these diaries had not been altered, but that “the establishment” covered up for Scott, “and that is exactly what we suffer from in England”. Huntford adds: “I have found more than 70 large omissions”, mostly “spiteful things about those he was responsible for”.
What Huntford is referring to is the private notes Scott made about his men which were never intended to go further than his private diary. I have been in the same position, writing things under huge pressure that I later put aside as unfair and unjustified. Once his expeditions had set out, Scott’s diary became his father confessor, as indeed it had been since he was a teenager, and his day-to-day notes often accentuate his black moods. Scott was under contract to write a book, so of course he intended to use the notes, but not as they stood. To use them to denigrate Scott is grossly unfair.
The 35lb of rocks that Scott carried back from the Pole were, in Huntford’s words, “a pathetic little gesture to salvage something from defeat”. Yet many decades later this material furnished scientists with their first proof not only of profound changes in the earth’s climate but in its very shape and structure. In fact, Scott’s specimens revealed the age of the Beacon Sandstone and the key to the origin of Antarctica.
Oates provides Huntford with his most potent ammunition. Like me, Huntford is clearly an Oates fan, though he chose to ignore Oates’s own advice when, recognising his tendency to overcriticise, he wrote “please remember that when a man is having a hard time he says hard things about other people which he would regret afterwards”.
Oates confided to Wilson in the death tent that his mother was the only woman he had ever loved. This love was more than reciprocated. Caroline Oates never recovered from the blow of his death. She slept every night in his bedroom, dressed for the rest of her life only in black and bitterly attacked those who wrote biographies of Oates, however favourable. She hated Kathleen Scott and felt that Scott was the sole reason for her son’s death, choosing to forget that Oates had joined Scott fully aware that he might die. For years Mrs Oates would invite Scott’s associates to her London flat to grill them about him. She prompted them with her belief that Scott had driven her son to “the extremities of suffering”. Huntford adds: “Mrs Oates . . . was perhaps going too far when she called Scott ‘murderer’.” He gives no reference for this phrase: it appears nowhere in the only collection of Mrs Oates’s letters itemised in Huntford’s source list.
Huntford turns Kathleen into a shameless adulteress, claiming that she and Scott’s fellow polar explorer, the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen, “had been having a love affair” during her husband’s polar expedition. “It was consummated in a Berlin hotel.” In Berlin Kathleen actually stayed with American friends and with her cousin, an attaché at the British embassy there. Huntford also states that she marked in her diary when her periods were due at that time. This proves nothing since she made such entries all her life. Nansen undoubtedly had very strong feelings for Kathleen; Huntford’s main basis for the adultery charge are Nansen’s letters to her — hers to him do not survive. Nansen’s letters are in the Cambridge University Library, as well as two other letters in which Kathleen convincingly denies any affair with him. Writing to her son in 1938, she says of Nansen’s letters: “I think if anyone read carefully they would see it was not an affaire à outrance . . . I was a completely faithful wife — only I was not going to throw aside such a divine friendship . . . You know he was a very grand person. I am entirely proud of my friendship.”
The Scott of Huntford’s book has spread worldwide with the video of the Central TV drama scripted by Trevor Griffiths. The film was promoted around the world as “a gripping seven-episode film drama series telling the true story of that legendary contest and the men behind the myth”. As late as 2000 the video was still being shown at US science stations in Antarctica as a key part of the polar induction programme of the US National Science Foundation. And yet this film includes sequences of Kathleen being carried naked to Nansen’s hotel bed and of Scott using filthy language to his men. He was in fact well known not to use even mild bad language.
After the Central TV film the myth of Scott’s self-serving incompetence continued to spread. Huntford and those of like mind tend to brand any book that is not entirely critical of Scott as sycophantic. No doubt they will accuse me of wishing to identify with him. Nothing could be further from the truth. But as a member of Scott’s team once wrote: “It is difficult for those who have never been to the Antarctic to write about it.” To the best of my knowledge Huntford has never been there, nor has he any experience of leading men, of survival in the cold or of organising a huge endeavour into the unknown.
Did Huntford practise conscious deceptions? I can only present the evidence I have gained from my research and let readers make up their own minds. His fellow biographer, Elspeth Huxley, frequently met Huntford in the Scott Polar Institute while researching her own biography. According to a record of a telephone conversation with Sir Peter Scott (now among the Scott papers in Cambridge), she said of Huntford: “He was always spitting venom! I think he’s crackers . . . animated by a burning hatred of your father . . . He was convinced that there was some scandal in his naval career and the last time I saw him I asked whether he had found it. He said, ‘No, but I shall’.” Huxley also told him of Huntford’s assertion that Captain Scott “was the sort of man who would have been an admiral if he had survived and sent thousands of men to their deaths in the First World War”.
I wrote to Huntford and asked if I could interview him. He declined, saying: “It is perfectly clear that we are on opposing sides.”
Today’s polar trophies go to those who reach their goals by the toughest means, unsupported by outside contrivances, be they dogs or snow-machines. On this basis, Scott achieved more than Amundsen. One of Amundsen’s great pole team, Helmer Hanssen, said: “It is no disparagement of Amundsen and the rest of us when I say that Scott’s achievement far exceeded ours . . . Just imagine what it meant for Scott and the others to drag their sleds themselves, with all their equipment and provisions to the Pole and back again. We started with 52 dogs and came back with 11. What shall we say of Scott and his comrades, who were their own dogs? Anyone with any experience will take off his hat to Scott’s achievement. I do not believe men ever have shown such endurance at any time, nor do I believe there ever will be men to equal it.”
Captain Scott, by Ranulph Fiennes, is published by Hodder & Stoughton on October 9 at £20. Available from Times Books Direct for £16 plus £1.95 p&p. Call 0870-160 8080
THE OPPOSING VIEW
Scott was burdened by moral inhibitions and heroic ideals. If one goes into extreme conditions, one has to be prepared for the worst, and if he was taken by surprise, this was really bad planning. Stupid . . . recklessly incompetent.
Roland Huntford, the author of Scott and Amundsen
Scott had his pals among the officers, but he was not good at relating to the seamen. He hadn’t that warmth of heart that Shackleton had.
Jonathan Shackleton, Sir Ernest’s cousin and the co-author of Shackleton: An Irishman in Antarctica
It seems to me extraordinary that in the face of such obstacles they stuck to all their records and specimens. We dumped ours. I considered the safety of my party before the value of the records and extra stores. Apparently, Scott did not. His sledge contained 150lb of trash; he ought to have left it.
Lieutenant Edward Evans, Scott’s second-in-command, in a letter written in 1913 aboard the expedition ship Terra Nova as it returned to New Zealand. He said that he “deplored” some of Scott’s decisions
In many ways, Scott was a lesser man than Shackleton: weaker, vainer, more prone to despair and quite capable of taking his worries out on his men. When Shackleton became seriously ill and could not pull his weight in the 1902 expedition, Scott could not resist making digs about “our invalid” and the “lame duck”.
Lucy Moore, historian
Scott was a very unpleasant character who didn’t mix below decks.
The conservationist and historian Don Aldridge, author of The Rescue of Captain Scott, in which he claims that Scott covered up the part of his 1904 rescuer Harry McKay in order to save his reputation
DEBATE
Do you think that Captain Scott was a hero?
E-mail debate@thetimes.co.uk
