Robert Falcon Scott

Captain Robert Falcon Scott RN (June 6, 1868 - March 29, 1912) was a British Naval officer and Antarctic explorer. Having narrowly failed to be the first to reach the South Pole, beaten by Roald Amundsen and his party, Scott and his party died on the Ross Ice Shelf whilst trying to return to the safety of their base. Scott has become the most famous hero of the "heroic age" of Antarctic exploration.

Rivalries with Shackleton and Amundsen

It was during the Discovery expedition that Scott met and explored with Ernest Shackleton, who served as his third lieutenant. Many subsequent biographers of both men wrote of an intense personal animosity and rivalry between the two. However Ranulph Fiennes, in his biography of Scott published in 2003, writes that there was in fact little evidence of this and that the two were friendly on the expedition. Fiennes dismisses the autobiography of Albert Armitage, Scott's navigator and second-in-command on the trip, whose account provides most of the primary source data of the split between Scott and Shackleton because Armitage, Fiennes says, felt slighted by Scott. Fiennes writes that Shackleton was sent home early (on the first relief ship) from the Discovery expedition only because he was ill, as Scott claimed, rather than because of a strained relationship between the two, as others have suggested. Scott and Shackleton both went on to organise and lead subsequent expeditions, and therefore found themselves in competition for experienced personnel and financial support.

Related Topics:
Ernest Shackleton - Ranulph Fiennes - 2003 - Albert Armitage

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At that time, there was a widely held view that the first explorer to reach a particular wilderness area obtained territorial rights over further exploration of that area. Shackleton therefore made a promise to Scott not to use the Discovery expedition base at McMurdo Sound, but was forced by circumstances to break this promise on his 1907 expedition, which Scott certainly resented. The same sense of ownership was at the root of the contempt felt by the British explorers for Roald Amundsen's "dash to the Pole" in 1911; the British felt that prior attempts on this goal gave them the sole right to discover the South Pole, and that Amundsen was intruding on this right. There was also resentment over the fact that Amundsen did not declare his objective in the early planning stages of his expedition; the British explorers regarded this as underhand and dishonest behaviour. Such tensions and ill-feeling arose out of an attitude of national pride that was common at a time, but which would simply not be an issue today.

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