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On the first expedition, he set a new southern record by marching to latitude 82°S and discovered the Antarctic Plateau, on which the South Pole is located. On the second venture, Scott led a party of five which reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912, less than five weeks after Amundsen's South Pole expedition.
Edward Adrian Wilson, Robert Falcon Scott, Lawrence Oates, Henry Robertson Bowers and Edgar Evans at the South Pole. The Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition, was an expedition to Antarctica which took place between 1910 and 1913.
Scott and his financial backers saw the expedition as having a scientific basis, while also wishing to reach the pole. However, it was recognised by all involved that the South Pole was the primary objective ("The Southern Journey involves the most important object of the Expedition" – Scott), and had priority in terms of resources, such as the best ponies and all the dogs and motor sledges ...
Petty Officer Edgar Evans (7 March 1876 – 17 February 1912) was a Welsh Royal Navy petty officer and member of the "Polar Party" in Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole in 1911–1912. This group of five men, personally selected for the final expedition push, attained the Pole on 17 January 1912.
It was also Bowers who was in charge of the expedition's remaining camera and took most of the famous photographs at the South Pole and at Amundsen's tent. On 16 January 1912, as Scott's party neared the Pole, it was Bowers who first spotted a black flag left at a camp made by Roald Amundsen's polar party over a month previously. They knew then ...
Reaching the South Pole on 17 January 1912, they found that Roald Amundsen's expedition (based on Fram) had beaten them by thirty-four days. Worse was to come, as all five men died on the return journey. The frozen bodies of three were discovered eight months later, in November 1912. Their journals and papers were found and retrieved.
The expedition then swung into preparations for a march from Cape Evans to the as-yet-unreached South Pole. This march was to be done during the Antarctic summer in 1911–1912. Scott's strategy called for a large team of men, ponies, motor sledges and dogs to start out southward from their base, hauling food and fuel on sledges.
In 1997, Diana Preston published A First-Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole, a documentation of Scott's expeditions. While she admits some of Scott's weaknesses such as his short temper and jumpy style of decision-making, she also gives mitigating aspects to every questionable event.