The Harbour-master came out in the tug and with him Atkinson and Pennell.  “Come down here a minute,” said Atkinson to me, and “It’s made a tremendous impression, I had no idea it would make so much,” he said.  And indeed we had been too long away, and the whole thing was so personal to us, and our perceptions had been blunted:  we never realized.  We landed to find the Empire—­almost the civilized world—­in mourning.  It was as though they had lost great friends.

To a sensitive pre-war world the knowledge of these men’s deaths came as a great shock:  and now, although the world has almost lost the sense of tragedy, it appeals to their pity and their pride.  The disaster may well be the first thing which Scott’s name recalls to your mind (as though an event occurred in the life of Columbus which caused you to forget that he discovered America); but Scott’s reputation is not founded upon the conquest of the South Pole.  He came to a new continent, found out how to travel there, and gave knowledge of it to the world:  he discovered the Antarctic, and founded a school.  He is the last of the great geographical explorers:  it is useless to try and light a fire when everything has been burned; and he is probably the last old-fashioned polar explorer, for, as I believe, the future of such exploration is in the air, but not yet.  And he was strong:  we never realized until we found him lying there dead how strong, mentally and physically, that man was.

In both his polar expeditions he was helped, to an extent which will never be appreciated, by Wilson:  in the last expedition by Bowers.  I believe that there has never been a finer sledge party than these three men, who combined in themselves initiative, endurance and high ideals to an extraordinary degree.  And they could organize:  they did organize the Polar Journey and their organization seemed to have failed.  Did it fail?  Scott said No.  “The causes of this disaster are not due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken.”  Nine times out of ten, says the meteorologist, he would have come through:  but he struck the tenth.  “We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint.”  No better epitaph has been written.

He decided to use the only route towards the Pole of which the world had any knowledge, that is to go up the Beardmore Glacier, then the only discovered way up through the mountains which divide the polar plateau from the Great Ice Barrier:  probably it is the only possible passage for those who travel from McMurdo Sound.  The alternative was to winter on the Barrier, as Amundsen did, so many hundred miles away from the coast-line that, in travelling south, the chaos caused in the ice plain by the Beardmore in its outward flow would be avoided.  To do so meant the abandonment of a great part of the scientific programme, and Scott was not a man to go south just to reach the Pole.  Amundsen knew that Scott was going to McMurdo Sound when he decided to winter in the Bay of Whales:  otherwise he might have gone to McMurdo Sound.  Probably no man would have refused the knowledge which had already been gained.