Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four of his men reached the geographic South Pole on January 18, 1912, only to encounter a disappointment in the form of a tent and a Norwegian flag.

Scott and his crew were not the first to reach the southernmost point on the planet. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team had beaten the British Terra Nova Shipping in a little over a month.

“Great God! It’s a terrible place, and terrible enough that we would have worked there without the reward of priority,” Scott wrote. “Well, it’s something to have gotten here.”

Today, a more existential challenge stood before the Terra Nova crew: to return to Cape Evans to the coast before the Antarctic winter sets in and temperatures plummet to excruciating, life-threatening levels.

Along the way, two of Scott’s men died. Edgar Evans collapsed on February 17 after suffering several injuries that left him in a precarious condition. Lawrence Oatesplagued by infection and cold, walked out of the group’s tent and into a snowstorm in mid-March. Her farewell message spoke about the obsessive nature of his self-sacrifice: “I just go outside and it might take a while. »

The three survivors—Scott, Henry Robertson Bowers And Edward Wilson– continued the journey back to base camp, but they were soon attacked by a storm which confined them to their tent for four days. Frozen, short of provisions and still 18 kilometers from a supply depot they had set up on the road to the pole, the men wrote their last words and resigned themselves to a bitter, frozen end.

“How many things I could tell you about this trip. Has it been much better than luxuriating in too much comfort at home,” Scott wrote in a letter to his wife. “But what a price to pay.”

The captain’s final journal entry was dated March 29, 1912. “It seems a shame, but I don’t think I can write more,” he said, concluding with a plea on behalf of the families of the explorers who remained in Britain: “For the love of God, take care of yourself. our people. The remaining three men died more than 150 miles from their destination on the coast.

The Dangerous Race to the South Pole – Elizabeth Leane

When a search party found the three bodies on November 12, 1912, more than seven months had passed since Scott wrote his last words.

Tryggve Grana young Norwegian explorer, was part of the 11-man team that founded Scott’s group.

“I will never forget him as long as I live,” Gran wrote in her diary. “A horrible nightmare could not have shown more horror than this.”

The explorer described the macabre spectacle of bodies ravaged by months of Antarctic winter. “The gel had turned the skin yellow and transparent, and I’ve never seen anything worse in my life,” Gran said. “(Scott) appears to have struggled mightily at the time of his death, while the other two appear to have gone into some sort of slumber.”

The rescue team buried Scott, Bowers and Wilson in the area where they had died. Grandma insisted on using her own skis to form a cross over the grave. He then used Scott’s skis on the return trip, convinced that the equipment should make the full journey, as its ambitious owner had always intended.