David Crane

Grace under pressure

issue 17 December 2005

One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the command of Victor Campbell might or might not still be alive, while to the south of them, somewhere out on the ice between Hut Point and the Pole itself, 700-odd miles away, lay the bodies of Scott and the four men with whom he had set out on his final journey. ‘The problem was a hard one,’ wrote Cherry Garrard, historian and conscience of the expedition:

On the one hand we might go south, fail entirely to find any trace of the Polar Party, and while we were fruitlessly travelling all the summer, Campbell’s men might die for want of help.

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