The Man Who Walked Out Into The Ice
Heroism, tragedy and national identity
On the morning of 16 March 1912, Lawrence Oates woke inside a tent on the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, knowing he was going to die.
The question was how.
He had been dying slowly for weeks. Frostbite had destroyed his feet. Gangrene had set in. Every mile of the return march from the South Pole had cost him more than the men around him, and he knew — had known for days — that he was the reason they were falling behind. Without him, Scott, Wilson, and Bowers might reach the next depot. With him, they probably wouldn’t. He had already asked, the day before, to be left in his sleeping bag. They had refused.
So he made the decision himself.
He said: I am just going outside and may be some time.
Then he stepped through the tent flap, without boots, into a blizzard and temperatures of -40°C, and was never seen again.
The race that was already lost
The Terra Nova Expedition left Cape Evans on 1 November 1911 with Scott and sixteen men, bound for the South Pole. At pre-arranged latitudes along the 895-mile route, support teams were turned back. By 4 January 1912, only five remained for the final push: Scott, Oates, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers, and Edgar Evans.
They reached the Pole on 18 January. Thirty-five days after Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian team had already been there, planted their flag, and gone home.
Inside Amundsen’s abandoned tent was a note, addressed to Scott, asking him to forward a letter to the King of Norway in case Amundsen didn’t make it back. He was, in other words, already gone — the note a courtesy left by a man who had won cleanly and knew it. Scott wrote in his diary: Great God! This is an awful place, and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.
The return journey was 895 miles in the Antarctic autumn, with a winter that would kill them if they were still on the ice when it arrived.
The deterioration
Edgar Evans died first, on 17 February, after a fall that left him confused and weakened. He collapsed on the march and was dead within hours.
Oates lasted longer, but his feet had been deteriorating since before the Pole. The cold and the physical strain had combined with an old war wound (a bullet through the thigh in the Boer War that had left one leg slightly shorter than the other) to produce something Scott described, with characteristic understatement, as a terrible hindrance.
Scott’s diary entries from these weeks are extraordinary documents. Written in a tent in temperatures that made the pencil hard to grip, they record with precise, almost clinical detail the daily mileages, the state of the food depots, the condition of each man. On Oates, the entries become increasingly bleak. The poor Soldier is nearly done. A few days later: We cannot help him; more hot food might do a little, but only a little, I fear.
What the diary also records is that Oates knew. He had asked Wilson about the medical kit, about the options available to him. Wilson had eventually handed over the means — thirty opium tablets each, a tube of morphine. Oates was not a man who planned to wait passively for the end.
The night before he walked out, he slept hoping not to wake up. He did wake up. It was blowing a blizzard.
A man who disliked fuss
The story has been told so many times, and freighted with so much national mythology, that it can be difficult to see the person inside it. Oates was by all accounts a quiet man who found the conventional expressions of heroism embarrassing. He would have hated what came after.
He also didn’t think much of Scott.
His private letters from the expedition express this with a directness that sits awkwardly beside the official narrative of gallant, harmonious British explorers. I dislike Scott intensely, he wrote, and would chuck the whole thing if it was not that we are a British expedition and must beat those Norwegians. He went anyway. He stayed. When the moment came, he chose the door.
What he was trying to do — free his companions of the burden of carrying him — didn’t work. Scott, Wilson, and Bowers died eleven miles from a supply depot, nine days after Oates walked out. They were stopped by a blizzard that pinned them in their tent for four days and didn’t lift. They ran out of fuel. They froze.
His sacrifice had been in vain.
What remains
Two years later, the photographs from the expedition were being shown to British soldiers in the trenches of the First World War. A hundred thousand men staring death in the face themselves, shown images of Oates and his companions as an example of how to die with dignity. A military chaplain wrote from the front that the story was just the thing to cheer and encourage them.
The country needed its gallant dead, and Scott’s expedition had produced them in abundance.
This is worth sitting with. Oates walked into a blizzard on his thirty-second birthday: and within two years his death had been industrialised into morale material. The understatement of his last words, which in their original context was simply the way a certain kind of Englishman spoke in extremis, became a set piece. A lesson. An example of how to go.
His body was never found. The search party that discovered Scott and the others erected a cairn near where Oates was thought to have died, with an inscription: Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman. In March 1912, returning from the Pole, he walked willingly to his death in a blizzard, to try and save his comrades, beset by hardships.
His mother, Caroline, cleaned the brass memorial plaque at their village church in Essex every week for twenty-five years. She died in 1937, still asking uncomfortable questions about whether the expedition had been managed well enough to save her son.
The gallantry is real. So is the waste.
The two things do not cancel each other out.