'Reducing Down': D. H. Lawrence and Captain Scott

Abstract

It was ten and a half months later that the truth was learned; but on the afternoon of the 10th of February 1913 a telegram reached London from New Zealand to say that Captain Scott and the four members of his assault party had all died on their return from the South Pole, prevented by blizzards from reaching the stores that were, tantalisingly, a mere eleven miles away. The bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers still lay just as they had lain at the end of the previous March, when they had died; and with them were Scott’s journal and unsent letters which would bring the story home to the British public in all its unforgettable drama. Extracts from the journal were published the following day in The Times, and the following paragraph in particular was reprinted again and again: ‘I do not regret this journey, which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardship, help one another, and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past. We took risks – we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last’. The story of Captain Oates too, whose body had not been found, was told again and again, and his last words would become famous: ‘I am just going outside and I may be gone some time’. To sacrifice his own life so that the other members of his party might have the chance to reach safety was, in Scott’s own words, ‘the act of a brave man and an English gentleman’. The events were terrible enough; but it was the journal that gave them their air of tragedy.