In 1910 Captain Robert Scott, an English explorer, went in a ship from New Zealand to Antarctica with a party of Englishmen. They wanted to reach the South Pole. The ship was small, but it carried fifty-nine men, some horses and dogs, three motor sledges, instruments of different kinds and much food for the men, the dogs and the horses.
They travelled south and in some months they saw the white mountains of Antarctica. Scott found a place for their camp, and they spent the autumn and winter at that camp. Scott planned their journey to the South Pole in three parts.
The first part of the journey began in November 1911, when the long Antarctic winter was over. Eleven men went with Captain Scott to the Pole, the others stayed in the camp. Scott took the motor sledges, the horses and the dogs with him. They had to cross a large plain of ice which was about eight hundred kilometers long. The motor sledges ran for eighty kilometers and then the motors broke. Now only the horses and the dogs pulled the sledges. The men crossed the ice-field and reached very high mountains with ice on their sides and their tops. They killed the horses and put the meat in the snow for the journey back.
Then the second part of the journey began. The men had to cross the mountains and they pulled three sledges. A strong wind blew, but each day the men walked for nine hours.
After they crossed the mountains there were only two hundred kilometers to the South Pole. Captain Scott decided to take only four men with him. These were Captain Oates, Edgar Evans—a sailor, and two more men. On the 3rd of January, 1912, the seven men went back to the camp. The five men went on to the Pole. That was the last part of the journey.
On the 18th of January, 1912, Captain Scott and his men at last reached the South Pole. They were hungry and ill. At the Pole in the snow stood a tent with a Norwegian flag on it. They were not the first to reach the South Pole. Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, was the first. In the tent there was this letter from Amundsen to Robert Scott:
Scott left a small British flag at the South Pole. Then the men looked around the place and began the long, long journey back. The way back was much more difficult than the way to the Pole. They had no horses and no dogs. It was the Antarctic summer, but the weather was very cold, a strong wind blew very often and there were snowstorms.
When the men came to the mountains, they put up a tent. But they could not sleep, their sleeping-bags were cold and the tent was soon full of snow.
Soon Evans died. “We did not leave him till two hours after he died,” wrote Scott in his diary.
It was more difficult now to pull the sledge without Evans. Oates was very ill. One day when they were in the tent, he said to his friends, “I am going out and I shall not come back.” And he went out into the storm and died in the snow.
At last Scott and his two friends were seventeen kilometers from the camp, but for some days there was a snow-storm and they had to wait.
The men put up a tent. They had food only for two days.
Four days later they died.
Before he died, Scott wrote in his diary that they were very ill and were going to die, but they did not regret this journey.
Eight months later people found the tent and the three dead men in their sleeping-bags. The diary and the letters were near them.
Captain Robert Scott, who made that long and very difficult journey to the South Pole, is the hero of England.
