I have been reading David Crane's Scott of the Antarctic and as conflicted as I am about his expeditions (why did so many mistakes have to be made in the name of British manhood?), I find some of Crane's conclusions about the lingering impact of Robert Scott's life to be fascinating. So much of what we know about that fateful doomed voyage to the Pole is due to the letters and journals that the dead explorers left behind. And I wonder if anyone other than British explorers of that age would have thought to write so much - to detail so much of what they hoped and feared and tried to do. Even the last words of Lawrence Oates are written down by Scott. He never thought, "I will remember and tell others about this man" instead he took the time - at 30 below zero in some sad little tent - to write down how Oates chose to meet his fate:

"He did not - would not - give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning - yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said 'I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since."

And yet what Oates said - and more importantly what Scott wrote down that Oates said - is now burned into layers not only of British memory but US memory (to a lesser extent) as well. And yet all of it could have been lost - if the relief party had not chosen to go in search of Scott (leaving another part of the expedition in a perilous situation which they might not have survived). Charles Wright later wrote about their decision to go after Scott - even though they were all certain he and his group were dead - was critical. "The first object of the expedition had been the Pole. If some record was not found, their success or failure would forever remain uncertain. Was it due not only to the men and their relatives but also to the expedition, to ascertain their fate if possible?"

The Pole, the Pole - always about finding proof of how far Scott and his men got, if they made it, if they defeated the weather and terrain long enough to get to that magical somewhere, somehow. And they weren't even first - but they got there, they recorded it, they flew the flag for a moment and they brought it back. "Send a small piece of the Union Jack to the King," Scott wrote to his wife as he lay dying. Even in the end, thinking of his country and how proud they should be.

But as Crane acknowledges in his narrative, all of that myth about Scott's noble quest would have lost if Wright and the relief party had not found the bodies. (Only three of them were found - Oates's body was never recovered, nor was Edgar Evans who died several days earlier of unknown causes and was buried by Scott and the others.) Crane writes:

"...one only has to try to think of an Antarctic history without Scott's last letters and diaries - of a history, that is, without the image of a fluttering black flag at the Pole, without the collapse of Edgar Evans, without Oates's death, without the drama of the last tent or the thirty-five pounds of rock samples or the Christian courage of Wilson and Bowers - to recognise the unarguable truth of Cherry's dictum. For all the scientific acheivements of the expedition - the eight volumes of zoology, the three volumes of meteoroloy, the geology, physics, cartography - it is the men and not what they did that matters, and nowhere can they be seen so clearly for what they were as in these last days of their lives."

The written record they left behind defined them beyond all acheivements - beyond the many samples of rock they brought back, beyond the measurements, beyond even the Pole itself. The record of who they were and tried to be until the very end is what made this particular myth so great that it remains strong a century later.

It is fascinating to me that it is not really their actions so much as their words that have made them heroes. And really, they immortalized themselves. If Scott had just written that Oates walked away to die quietly and allow the rest of the group a chance at survival (by moving faster without him), would he still hold the same stature? Do we need that last immortal line, the masterful way in which Scott wrote about his decision, in order to see him in such a heroic light?

They made themselves heroes in a way, and in such a strange way. I'm sure they thought they would live forever if they reached the Pole first; instead they gained immortality by being second and writing about it and then dying for their effort. I'm not sure if I should be inspired by this, or disheartened by it; by the great loss for such little gain. But I am mesmerized by who they saw themselves to be, and by how so many others have seen them ever since.