Scott of the Antarctic

by Elspeth Huxley

Book Overview

After Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole in 1909, polar explorers looked toward the South. Robert Falcon Scott, whose 19011904 expedition into Antarctica's frozen shoulder had made... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0689108613
• ISBN13: 9780689108617
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Atheneum Books
• Length: 303 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.

Customer Reviews

like a Greek tragedy

Lasting fame usually requires the death of the hero, as Elspeth Huxley notes in her preface. Had Robert Falcon Scott returned from the south pole, only the historian - and perhaps the scientist - would care about his story. But Scott and four companions died valiantly on the ice. Their courage, fortitude and dignity helped sustain Britain through dark years of war. And they inspire us still. Huxley focuses on Scott's character and how it shaped his motives and decisions. Fortunately, she does not overdo the `psychoanalysis'. She gives detailed accounts of Scott's two expeditions, and reaches sensible conclusions on the major points: his reluctance to use dogs, the complexity of his plans, the reasons for his failure. The latter she ascribes to incipient scurvy, bad weather and bad luck. But one simple, irrefutable fact hangs over all; ponies do not belong in Antarctica ... and Scott's plan centered around pony transport. His last expedition unfolds like a Greek tragedy, complete with warnings from the gods and universal moral lessons. Appropriately, his men inscribed their memorial to their five comrades with the closing line of Tennyson's Ulysses: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

The cold hard facts

A true classic of the genre, "Scott.."chronicles the exploration of the world's last frontier: the great polar ice caps. The reader is emersed in the expedition as the pair of explorers plod endlessly in the tractless permafrost, unaware of the gaping crevaces hidden beneath the snow, but painfully aware of the howling winds that pelt their faces with stinging ice, and numbing cold. This very well written book is indeed a fitting tribute to those intrepid scientists who brave hostile regions to further man's knowledge of the globe.

Best book on the background of Scott's South Pole expedition

Huxley gives the background information on why and how the South Pole expedition of 1910 -1913 became a disaster. The author gives valuable information to understand the history of this endeavor and why Scott was chosen as a leader beginning in the 1880s. She gives an excellent insight on preparations of the expedition and Scott's rivalry with Shackleton. The analysis on why Scott chose ponies and motor sledges as auxillary means of transport over dogs is excellent. The mixture of amateurism and masochism that led to failure shown by the immense feeling of pride to do everything -especially man-hauling the sledges- the hard way has not been explained as well in any other book I have read on the subject. In the foreword the author states that Scott only became a hero because he died and led his four companions into death. After reading the book one can only wonder how muchbecoming a hero might have been a motive that led to self-destruction after having only been second to the Pole after Amundsen's Norwegian expedition.