It has forged new weapons in laboratories, found new ways to arm itself against danger, and all resistance only increases its avidity. It wants to know the whole truth, in its very first decade it aims to conquer what all the millennia before could not. The rivalry of nations keeps company with the courage of individuals. They are not competing only to reach the Pole now, but also for the honour of flying the national flag first over newly discovered land: it is a crusade of races and nations against places hallowed by longing. The onslaught is renewed from all quarters of the earth. Mankind waits impatiently, knowing that the prize is the last secret of the place where we live. Peary and Cook prepare to set out from America to conquer the North Pole, while two ships steer southward, one commanded by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen, the other by an Englishman, Captain Scott.

Scott

Scott, a captain in the British Navy. An average captain, with a record befitting his rank behind him. He has served to the satisfaction of his superior officers, and later took part in Shackleton’s expedition. Nothing in his conduct suggests that he is a hero. His face, reflected by photography, could be that of 1,000 Englishmen, 10,000: cold, energetic, showing no play of muscles, as if frozen hard by interior energy. His eyes are steely grey, his mouth firmly closed. Not a romantic line in it anywhere, not a gleam of humour in a countenance made up of will-power and practical knowledge of the world. His handwriting is any Englishman’s handwriting, no shading or flourishes, swift and sure. His style is clear and correct, strikingly factual, yet as unimaginative as a report. Scott writes English as Tacitus writes Latin, as if carving it in unhewn stone. You sense that he is a man who does not dream, fanatically objective, in fact a true blue Englishman in whom even genius takes the crystalline form of a pronounced sense of duty. Men like Scott have featured hundreds of times in British history, conquering India and nameless islands in the East Indian archipelago, colonizing Africa and fighting battles against the whole world, always with the same iron energy, the same collective consciousness and the same cold, reserved expression.

But his will is hard as steel; you can sense that before he takes any action. Scott intends to finish what Shackleton began. He equips an expedition, but his financial means are inadequate. That does not deter him. He sacrifices his own fortune and runs up debts in the certainty of success. His young wife bears him a son, but like another Hector he does not hesitate to leave his Andromache. He soon finds friends and companions; nothing on earth can change his mind now. The strange ship that is to take the expedition to the edge of the Antarctic Ocean is called the Terra Nova—strange because it has two kinds of equipment: it is half a Noah’s Ark, full of living creatures, and also a modern laboratory with a thousand books and scientific instruments. For they have to take everything that a man needs for his body and mind with them into that empty, uninhabited world. The primitive equipment of primitive people, furs, skins and live animals, make strange partners here for the latest sophisticated modern devices. And the dual nature of the whole enterprise is as fantastic as the ship itself: an adventure, but one as calculated as a business deal, audacity with all the features of caution—endlessly precise and individual calculations against the even more endless whims of chance. They leave England on 1st June 1910. The British Isles are a beautiful sight at that time of year, with lush green meadows and the sun shining, warm and radiant in a cloudless sky.