Summary
Kevin Fong looks beyond the failure of Robert Falcon Scott's expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole and focuses instead on the scientific legacy of Scott's explorations of Antarctica between 1901 and 1912.
In recent years, much has been written about Scott the polar loser and bungler. But that personalised focus ignores the pioneering scientific research and discoveries. The revelations transformed Antarctica from an unknown quantity on the map into a profoundly important continent in the Earth's past and present.
Before Scott and Shackleton trekked across the vast ice sheets in the early 1900s, no-one was sure whether there was even a continent there. Some geographers had suggested Antarctica was merely a vast raft of ice anchored to a scattering of islands. The science teams on Scott’s expeditions made fundamental discoveries about Antarctic weather and began to realise the frozen continent's fundamental role in global climate and ocean circulation. They discovered rocks and fossils which showed Antarctica was once a balmy forested place. They mapped the magnetism around the South Pole for both science and navigators. They found many new species of animals and revealed the extraordinary winter breeding habits of the penguins.
The dedication to scientific discovery is most poignantly revealed by fossils that Scott's party collected after their disappointment of being beaten by Amundsen and a few weeks before they froze to death trudging across the Ross ice shelf. They found a particular plant fossil which had been one of the Holy Grails on the early explorations of Antarctica's interior. Its discovery proved an hypothesis raised by Darwin among others that all the southern continents were once linked together by a landmass that would lain where Antarctica is today. The fossils were also important evidence to support the new and controversial theory of Continental Drift - a theory which now underpins the entirety of modern Earth science.
(Image: Captain Robert Falcon Scott writing at a table in his quarters at the British base camp in Antarctica. Credit: Press Association)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:08.9 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.2 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by their own light, |
| 0:23.9 | and that light is to be recognised by others. |
| 0:26.5 | The Long History of Heroism with me, Rory Stewart. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.6 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:35.4 | For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
| 0:39.5 | go to BBCworldservis.com slash podcasts. |
| 0:46.9 | One hundred years ago, British Antarctic Explorer, Robert Falcon Scott and his team died on their way back from the South Pole. |
| 0:57.6 | They'd been beaten to the bottom of the world by the Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen. |
| 1:03.2 | But in this BBC programme, I'm looking at Scott's great successes for science. |
| 1:09.6 | I'm Kevin Fong, and this is Scott's legacy. |
| 1:14.1 | It was just a blank hole on the map. These were the equivalent of going to the moon or Mars today. |
| 1:19.6 | In fact, when people do leave for the moon or Mars, they know more about where they're going |
| 1:24.5 | than those gentlemen did when they left for the Antarctic |
| 1:27.8 | a hundred years ago. People get so bogged down in, should they've used Pogo sticks, ponies |
| 1:33.9 | and all the rest of it, that they forget that there were some extraordinarily real |
| 1:38.0 | scientific accomplishments made by the expedition. They turn the world upside down and they put |
| 1:43.5 | Antarctica at the center. |
| 1:45.9 | It's a time we were focusing on that rather than, you know, what ifs, I think. |
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