They are meant for individuals, but speak to all mankind. They are written at a certain time, they speak for eternity.
He writes to his wife, asking her to take good care of his son, the best legacy he can leave her, and above all, he says, “he must guard and you must guard him against indolence. Make him into a strenuous man.” Of himself he says—at the end of one of the greatest achievements in the history of the world—“I had to force myself into being strenuous, as you know—had always an inclination to be idle.” Even so close to death he does not regret but approves of his own decision to go on the expedition. “What lots and lots I could tell you of this journey. How much better it has been than lounging in too great comfort at home.”
And he writes in loyal comradeship to the wife of one of his companions in misfortune, to the mother of another, men who will have died with him when the letters reach home, bearing witness to their heroism. Although he is dying himself, he comforts the bereaved families of the others with his strong, almost superhuman sense of the greatness of the moment and the memorable nature of their deaths.
And he writes to his friends, speaking modestly for himself but with a fine sense of pride for the whole nation, whose worthy son he feels himself to be at this moment. “I may not have proved a great explorer,” he admits, “but I think [this diary] will show that the spirit of pluck and the power to endure has not passed out of our race.” And death now impels him to tell one friend what manly reserve and his own modesty has kept him from saying all his life. “I never met a man in my life whom I loved and admired more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I had nothing.”
He writes one last letter, the finest of all, to the British nation, feeling bound to give a reckoning of what he did for the fame of the country on the expedition, blaming only misfortune for its end. He enumerates the various accidents that conspired against him, and in a voice to which the echo of death lends pathos he calls on “our countrymen to see that those who depend upon us are properly cared for”.
His last thought is not of his own fate, but of the lives of others. “For God’s sake look after our people.” The remaining pages are blank.
Captain Scott kept his diary until the last moment, when his fingers were so frozen that the pencil slipped out of them. Only the hope that the pages he had written would be found with his body, as a record of what he had done and of the courage of his countrymen, enabled him to make such a superhuman effort. The last thing he wrote, his frozen fingers shaking, was, “Send this diary to my wife.” But then, in cruel certainty, he crossed out the words “my wife”, and wrote over them the terrible “my widow”.
The Answer
For weeks their companions had waited in the hut. First confidently, then with some concern, finally with growing uneasiness. Expeditions were sent out twice to help them, but the weather beat them back.
The leaderless men spend all the long winter in the hut, at a loss, with the black shadow of the disaster falling on their hearts. Captain Robert Scott’s achievement and his fate are locked in snow and silence during those months. The ice holds him and his last companions sealed in a glass coffin; not until 29th October, in the polar spring, does an expedition set out at least to find the heroes’ bodies and the message they left. They reach the tent on 12th November, and find the bodies frozen in their sleeping bags, Scott with a fraternal arm round Wilson even in death. They also find the letters and documents, and dig the tragic heroes a grave. A plain black cross on top of a mound of snow now stands alone in the white world, hiding under it for ever the evidence of a heroic human achievement.
Or no! The expedition’s achievements are wonderfully and unexpectedly resurrected, a miracle of our modern technological world. The dead men’s friends bring back the records of the expedition on disks and films, the images are developed in a chemical bath, and Scott can be seen again walking with his companions in the polar landscape that only the other explorer, Amundsen, has seen. The news of his words and letters leaps along the electric wire into the astonished world; the king bows his knee in memory of the heroes in a British cathedral. And so what seemed to have been in vain bears fruit again, what appeared to be left undone is applauded as mankind’s efforts to reach the unattainable. In a remarkable reversal, greater life comes from a heroic death; downfall arouses the will to rise to infinity. Chance success and easy achievement kindle only ambition, but the heart rises in response to a human being’s fight against an invincibly superior power of fate, the greatest of all tragedies, and one that sometimes inspires poets and shapes life a thousand times over.
29 May 1453
The Discovery of Danger
On 5th February 1451, a secret messenger goes to Asia Minor to see the eldest son of Sultan Murad, the twenty-one-year-old Mahomet, bringing him the news that his father is dead. Without exchanging so much as a word with his ministers and advisers the prince, as wily as he is energetic, mounts the best of his horses and whips the magnificent pure-blooded animal the 120 miles to the Bosporus, crossing to the European bank immediately after passing Gallipoli. Only there does he disclose the news of his father’s death to his most faithful followers. He swiftly gathers together a select troop of men, bent as he is from the first on putting an end to any other claim to the throne, and leads them to Adrianople, where he is indeed recognized without demur as the master of the Ottoman Empire. His very first action shows Mahomet’s fierce determination as a ruler. As a precaution, he disposes of any rivals of his own blood in advance by having his young brother, still a minor, drowned in his bath, and immediately afterwards—once again giving evidence of his forethought and ruthlessness—sends the murderer whom he employed to do the deed to join the murdered boy in death.
In Byzantium, they are horrified to hear that this young and passionate prince Mahomet, who is avid for fame, has succeeded the more thoughtful Murad as Sultan of the Turks. A hundred scouts have told them that the ambitious young man has sworn to get his hands on the former capital of the world, and that in spite of his youth he spends his days and nights in strategic consideration of this, his life’s great plan.
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