Scott of the Antarctic: The Definitive Biography [Paperback]

‘Many have trodden this path before but this is the masterpiece.’ Gildes Foden

‘Moving…a balanced and gripping account…David Crane has written a fine biography of Scott, the flawed but timeless hero, and I read it all with pleasure.’ Guardian

‘He [Crane] has freed himself from the tyranny of the card index to let Scott live again as a man.’ Daily Telegraph

‘Compelling…impressive…moving…’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Crane’s exhilarating biography avoids the excesses of either approach, humanising the man without diminishing his epic endeavour. As the end nears, Crane turns to the men’s dignified accounts of their ordeal. It is as Scott prophesied: no heart could remain unstirred.’ Observer

‘The most balanced biography yet. Like Scott’s own writings, Crane’s stylish prose is a sheer pleasure.’ New York Times

In terms of writing the book, though, I actually found the trip that three of us made to the Arctic much more useful. We flew up to the north of Baffin Island and just took off across the sea ice with skidoos and a sledge for four or five hundred miles, and if that hardly constitutes a Scott-like experience, it was a lot closer to it than a cruise ship and Viennese cooking in McMurdo Sound.
Scott said he never tired of the Antarctic landscape. Could you see what he meant?
Yes, Antarctic or Arctic, what is immensely impressive is the absence of any human scale by which to judge height or distance. It’s astonishing. No matter how many times you’ve read about it, you can’t grasp it until you realise you are looking at one mountain in one direction and another in the other and they might be 250 miles apart.

It’s also witlessly beautiful, if you see it under the right climatic conditions. It’s interesting that because of Ponting and Hurley we see the heroic age of polar expeditions in black and white, but actually it was the colour that seduced the explorers. The variations seem infinite. Hitting the pack for the first time is possibly the only boundary left on the planet – that absolute sense that you are entering a different world – and the colour is so exciting. I don’t think you could ever get blasé about that. What really impressed me about Scott, after I’d seen it for myself, was his ability to convey what an Antarctic landscape looked and felt like. He had this curious mixture of sensibility and scientific accuracy, which is so rare. Go up Observation Hill even now and you’ll see things through Scott’s eyes.
Did you in any way identify with Scott?
Absolutely not. I would rather saw off my foot than go to the South Pole. The only bits that don’t interest me are the bloody marches to the Pole – it’s one damn foot after another. On that Arctic journey I mentioned I was with two experienced sailors and it was fascinating to see at first hand just how essential all those skills I lacked are for survival on the ice. If I had been tempted by any kind of identification with Scott, a day with those sailors out on the ice was enough to make me realise that, if I was going to identify with anyone, it would have to be with the complete idiots who messed up everything. I went very badly snowblind for days and had to abandon my skidoo. I was brought back on one of their sledges in absolute agony. It was quite instructive in that sense. Ten minutes of that soon disabuses you of any vainglorious ideas that you might have been there with Scott and Shackleton, or that they might have wanted to have you.
What was the most moving moment in your research?
Oh, that’s a very easy answer. It was late in the afternoon at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. It was ten minutes before it closed and I knew I didn’t have time for a big file of letters so I asked to see Wilson’s prayer book. I gave whatever the catalogue number was and this folder arrived. In it was the volume given to Wilson by his wife. It had lain with his body until the search party found him and brought it back. It’s a small, black book with beautifully neat pencil marks in the faintest, smallest hand. There are Wilson’s notes and annotations, certain passages of the psalms underlined, and lines in the margin. It is one of those unbearable documents. It’s very, very moving. At the beginning he’s written – I can’t remember the exact words, but good Protestant theology – that because Christ has died for us there is nothing more we need to do. That is the faith in which he died and by which he lived. To have in your hand the physical evidence of that faith is wonderfully touching. The literature of polar exploration is so dominated by either the Boys’ Own angle or questions of science that this offers an important corrective. Wilson’s prayer book wakes you up to a different culture, a different world, a different concept of humanity.
I like the way your book is peppered with references to English literature. Was this a self-conscious decision or do they just crop up?
It’s utterly un-self-conscious. I don’t go looking for a literary parallel, but don’t seem to be able to avoid them. It makes me realise how much one mediates one’s apprehension of the outside world through literature. That seems, at least, to be how I think, though probably it’s just laziness. It’s interesting too, that you hear literary echoes with Scott all the time. Take his Voyage of the ‘Discovery’, when he’s talking about the last sight of their families in England as they say farewell. It’s a beautifully gradated passage, but you know damn well – whether he does or not – that it’s a Captain Harville talking in Persuasion that lies behind it. You can tell, in fact, from day to day what Scott’s reading, whether it’s Shakespeare or Wordsworth. Little phrases keep creeping through. In his love letters to Kathleen he talks of being in the suburbs of her love. This is either a memory of reading Julius Caesar when he was twelve or he has just re-read it. England’s literary tradition is clearly there in everything he writes.
If you were to meet Scott and could ask him one question, what would it be?
You know what they wrote when the news came of Shelley’s death? ‘Now the atheist Shelley knows whether or not there is a God.’ There must be some such big question one ought to be able to ask Scott. He said in his last letter to his wife that he regretted nothing, but I suppose I would like to ask him whether, if he’d known the cost – not to himself, but to the four men who died with him – would he have pushed on? I suspect the answer would be yes. There are two kinds of explorers: the one who comes back a day early and the other who pushes on a half-day more, and Scott distinctly belonged to the second category. He should have been all right too, but his luck was seriously out. It’s curious that the only sense you ever get of any foreboding is the way in which he seems to erase himself from his son’s future. Even before he’s reached the Antarctic, his letters have that tenor, as if he never actually sees himself as part of his son’s life. But I think once he was in the South his self-confidence returned. A supplementary question would be: ‘When did you first realise you weren’t going to get back?’ I suspect he knew early on the return journey from the Pole that things were going to be pretty parlous. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.