When Henry Worsley died last month attempting the first solo, unaided expedition across the Antarctic, he was 30 miles short of the finish line. He fits right in with a long British tradition of heroic failures: General Gordon killed at Khartoum; the defeat of the British by the Zulus at Isandlwana. And the most precise parallel with Worsley’s tragedy, Captain Scott, who also died in the Antarctic, just 11 miles short of the next food depot.
Stephanie Barczewski, Professor of History at Clemson University in South Carolina, is on to something when she identifies a peculiarly British propensity for glorifying disaster. Where she is crashingly wrong is in her interpretation of the reason why: that it’s all down to the desire to show the British empire in a good light.
According to the professor’s theory, Gordon’s heroic death gave a bene-volent face to the increasing aggression of British imperialism in late-19th-century Africa. Likewise, the glorification of the defeat at Isandlwana helped disguise the broader success of the brutal, violent expansion of the empire. And Captain Scott’s death was so celebrated because it apparently reassured us that the empire was still powerful, just as we were losing top dog status to America.
I’m afraid it’s all utter cobblers. Barczewski has become so brainwashed by life in the American academy that she projects the modern white man’s guilt on to historic figures who felt no such thing. When it came to their imperial mission, British soldiers and sailors in the 19th and early 20th centuries felt differently to 21st-century American history professors. There was no need for them to go in for elaborate displays of self-flagellation at their wickedness. Brutality and violence were neither here nor there; the British felt a duty to colonise much of the planet.
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