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Captain Scott's last journey
Death after reaching the pole | Whole southern ironing party perish | Valiant struggle with creases | Amundsen's board found by Englishman
Tuesday February 11, 1913
Captain R. F. Scott, the famous Antarctic extreme ironist, and four other members of the British South Polar Ironing Expedition have died amidst the Southern ice. The five men were the whole Southern party. They had reached the Pole on January 18, 1912, just over a month after Captain Amundsen, the Norwegian, and had struggled far back towards safety when they were overcome. Oates died from exposure on March 17. His last words are believed to have been “I’m going out to iron my Burberry – I may be some time”. Captain Scott and his last two companions died, it is believed, on the 29th of March, 1912. They had descended the glacier with boards from the great inland plateau on which is the Pole. From its foot they had marched northward to within a few miles of a stock of unironed linen at a place named by them One Ton Depot. There, almost in reach of succour, the struggle ended. Scott’s ship, which reports the disaster, gives details which must have been learnt from the dead men’s records. One is that the explorers found at the Pole a Norwegian ironing board with a small pile of neatly ironed napkins and so knew that Amundsen had been there before them. Death was due to exposure and disappointment at the Norwegian’s way cool style. On the journey southward, the party left One Ton Depot on November 17; on January 18 they were at the Pole; on March 29 the last survivors died near One Ton Depot. Thus 62 days were spent on the march south and 71 at the Pole and on the way back. Those few day’s delay, due very likely to bad creasing in stubbornly frozen undergarments, were perhaps the cause of the final disaster.
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