The still unwithered laurel wreath

In the reviewer’s childhood, Scott was a national hero, almost as revered as Nelson. Revisionists did what they could in the 1960s and 1970s to cut him down to size; generations have been brought up to despise him. David Crane’s new life seeks to restore the balance, to show the man as he was and to explain why he behaved as he did. He emerges a hero after all, even if a limited one.

He was trained as a naval officer in the rigid school of the old Britannia, under stiff discipline, with the watchwords of conformity and obedience. No one was encouraged to think for himself; but it was a help to have a patron. By a stroke of luck, he came under the wing of Sir Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographical Society, who had served on one of the expeditions that failed to find Franklin and remained ever thereafter a proponent of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, and an admirer of man-hauled sledging.