In the late autumn of 1912, in a tent half buried by Antarctic snow, five men were dying. They had reached the South Pole in January, only to find that a Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by a month. Now, on the long walk back toward their ship, the weather had turned and their supplies had run short. One man was already dead. Another had walked out into the blizzard, deliberately, so that he would not slow the others down. The three who remained lay in their sleeping bags as a storm howled outside, too weak to go on, knowing the end was close. Their leader, Captain Robert Falcon Scott of the British Royal Navy, did not spend all his remaining hours on hope. He spent a great many of them writing.
Scott had sailed south in 1910 aboard the Terra Nova, leading an expedition that was partly science and partly a race for glory. He was not the only man aiming at the pole. Amundsen had set up camp on the other side of the continent and was moving faster. In November 1911 the two parties were in effect racing each other across the ice, and in January 1912 Scott reached the pole to find a tent, a letter, and the Norwegian flag already planted there. He wrote in his diary that the worst had happened. The return journey, five men hauling sledges in the face of a deteriorating Antarctic autumn, became one of the most harrowing marches ever recorded.
Edgar Evans died first, in mid-February, weakened and possibly concussed after a fall. A month later Lawrence Oates, crippled by frostbite, chose his own end. His feet were so damaged that he could no longer keep up, and he knew he was costing the others their only chance. On his thirty-second birthday he stood up in the tent and said he was going outside for a while. He was not coming back. His last words, as Scott recorded them, were that he might be some time. He walked into the storm and was never seen again.
Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers struggled on for eleven more miles before a blizzard pinned them in their tent. They had food for a couple of days and fuel for almost none. It was then, in the last week of March 1912, that Scott turned to paper. He wrote letters to his wife, Kathleen, to his mother, and to friends. He wrote to the mother of Captain Oates and to the families of the other dead. And he wrote a short public statement that would become famous, a farewell to the nation he had sailed for. In it he admitted that the expedition had failed, but insisted it was not for lack of endurance or courage, and he asked that the story be told properly.
The letters are remarkable for what they do not contain. There is no self-pity, almost no anger at the fate that had stolen the prize. Instead there is tenderness and concern for the people he would never see again. To Kathleen he wrote about their young son, Peter, urging her to make the boy interested in natural history, which Scott thought was better than games. To his friend, the playwright James Barrie, he entrusted the memory of his companions, writing that the rough notes and their dead bodies would have to tell the tale, since the story was all they had left to give.
In November 1912 a search party found the tent. The three men were inside, Scott with his arm flung across Wilson, and the letters were beside them, tucked into their clothing. They had written messages that they knew would be read only after they were gone, words meant to travel across the gulf of death to people they loved. Kathleen received her letter early in 1913 and kept it for the rest of her life. Their son, Peter, grew up to become a naturalist and conservationist, and he would spend his life looking after birds and wild places, which is about as close to his father's last wish as a son could come.
There is something quietly profound in the fact that a dying man, freezing in a tent at the end of the earth, chose to spend his last strength not on survival but on words for the future. Scott could not control the weather or the ice, but he could still decide what would be remembered. He wrote letters the way we all hope we would write them: not for himself, but for the people who would have to live on without him. A thousand years from now, no one will remember which flag reached the pole first. But someone may still read what Scott wrote in his last days, and feel the weight of a man who understood that the only thing we truly leave behind is the message we bother to write down before we go.