Was it bad luck, bad judgement or a combination? Why should Amundsen the adventurer and interloper have prospered while a carefully organized British naval expedition ended in disaster? Was there too much reliance on the British talent for ‘muddling through’? Was Scott merely a gifted amateur who should have done things differently?Scott’s ‘Message to the Public’, written under enormous stress with his two friends dying at his side, was a careful vindication of his conduct of the expedition. He wanted the public to know that the disaster was not ‘due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken’. He cited the loss of ponies during the depot-laying journey which had obliged him to start out later than he had intended and limited the amount of supplies which could be transported; the bad weather and in particular the gales which delayed them for four days in early December; the soft snow on the lower reaches of the Beardmore Glacier. He claimed that every detail of the food supplies, clothing and depot laying had been worked out ‘to perfection’ but that what could not have been foreseen was the ‘astonishing failure’ of Petty Officer Evans which, compounded by bad weather, delayed their descent down the Beardmore.
