Scott Felt Abject Failure on Reaching South Pole

“Great God!” British Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his journal on January 17, 1912, the day he reached the South Pole. He was not exultant. “This is an awful place,” he went on, “and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”
For more than two months, Scott and his men had hauled their supply sledges across 800 miles of ice from their base camp at Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound, hoping to become the first people to reach the pole. But the photograph at left, taken by Lt. Henry Bowers the same day, makes clear the reason for Scott’s despair: The Norwegian flag flying above the tent had been left by the explorer Roald Amundsen, whose party had arrived five weeks earlier. Inside the tent, Scott’s men found a letter Amundsen had written to Haakon VII, king of Norway, along with a note asking Scott to deliver it for him.
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