Robert Falcon Scott: The Debt-Driven Explorer and 35 Pounds of Fossils

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Robert Falcon Scott was born in 1868 to a family with a brewing business and military ties, and he began naval cadet training at 13. In 1894 his father's disastrous finances bankrupted the family, and the deaths of his father and younger brother left Scott as sole provider for his mother and sisters. When he met Clements Markham of the Royal Geographical Society on a London street in 1899, he volunteered to lead an Antarctic expedition for the pay and promotion, with no polar experience. The Discovery Expedition of 1901 to 1904 was marked by poor skiing, mishandled dogs and scurvy, yet Scott, Edward Wilson and Ernest Shackleton set a farthest south record and reached the Polar Plateau before Scott sent the collapsed Shackleton home.

That decision began a long feud: Shackleton broke a written promise to stay away from McMurdo Sound and came close to the pole himself. Scott's Terra Nova expedition of 1910 hedged on motor sledges, Manchurian ponies, dogs and man-hauling, and soon learned Roald Amundsen was camped closer to the pole. Scott, Wilson, Henry Bowers, Lawrence Oates and Edgar Evans reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, five weeks after Amundsen. On the return Evans died near the Beardmore Glacier, Oates walked out into a blizzard on March 16, and the last three died about 11 miles from One Ton Depot, still hauling Glossopteris fossils.

• An unexplained eight-month gap in Scott's naval record around 1889 and 1890 has fueled theories of a covered-up scandal.
• Scott married sculptor Kathleen Bruce, who had studied under Auguste Rodin.
• One of the experimental motor sledges broke through the sea ice and sank during unloading.
• At minus 40 degrees the snow lost its glide, so pulling a sled felt like dragging it over coarse sand.
• Roland Huntford's 1970s attack on Scott was later tempered by Susan Solomon's weather analysis and Karen May's discovery of his written orders for the dog teams.