Scott of the Antarctic

by Elspeth Huxley

Scott Of The Antarctic

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction

303 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 1977

About the author

Elspeth Joscelin Huxley was an English writer, journalist, broadcaster, magistrate, environmentalist, farmer, and government adviser. She wrote over 40 books, including her best-known lyrical books, The Flame Trees of Thika and The Mottled Lizard, based on her youth in a coffee farm in British Kenya. Her husband, Gervas Huxley, was a grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley and a cousin of Aldous Huxley.

Reviews

[Natalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read this book four or five times, and expect to read it a few more times in my lifetime. There is much to be learned here about planning, pride, loyalty, leadership and human nature.

For a present day analogy between Ernest Shackleton , Robert Falcon Scott, and
Roald Amundsen, see David Brin's talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRZG34... on ferrying freight into space.

[Branny · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the books that led me to go there.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Every time I picked up this book I'd read about four pages and doze off. How can a book about Antarctic exploration be so dull? And how did I even finish it? The mind boggles.

[Igenlode Wordsmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting rereading this after having just read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, which was of course one of the sources for this book - Cherry goes into far more detail and is writing about 'Scott's Last Expedition', as it became subsequently known, as a personal account. This is very much a biography and character study of Scott himself rather than focusing so much as I had remembered on the exploration; the detail is there, but the focus is on Scott from the inside out - constantly worried, meticulous, insecure - rather than young Cherry's view of him from the outside as a tower of strength and organisation. Cherry writes that Scott's private diaries represent a gloomier picture of the expedition than the account he would doubtless have intended to write on their return to England, and here we get an insight into the character traits that made them thus unwarrantably gloomy, and into the man behind the posthumous legend, who was in many ways just an ordinary naval officer (he had originally specialised in the then-advanced subject of torpedoes) pushed into Antarctic exploration by outside circumstances, rather than by any specific ambition of his own. Having been convinced that it was his duty to do it, he did it to the best of his considerable ability.

Sympathetically written, with an ear for the ethos and morals of the era (the pretend line between the 'officers' and 'men's side of Campbell's tiny igloo, for example, represented not some kind of class oppression but an opportunity for the seamen to yarn without constraint about the deficiencies of past commanders, to the tacit education of their current companions in misfortune!), the book is very readable and I found it hard to put down. The 'Con' of this biography (like Cherry, he was known to his intimates and even to his family by his nickname rather than the 'Robert' of his Christian name) is a very different figure from the heroic stoic of Edwardian legend, but one both personally likable and admirable. He didn't enjoy fame or adulation, he was constantly beset by money worries, he disliked animal suffering, he could be short-tempered on occasion, and he was stung by criticisms that the "Discovery" expedition had not been sufficiently scientifically rigorous, despite their best efforts. He was also passionately in love with a fey, unconventional, artistic wife (and wanted their son to be brought up to appreciate natural history rather than focus on the traditional games and classics of public-school life; Peter Scott - named for Peter Pan - would become a famous naturalist).

[Dave Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny how you can think you know a story, and then read a book that shows you a whole new world that existed around those few details you already knew …

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I read a book about Scott's doomed quest. No idea if this is the one or not. The PBS/British mini-series back in the 70's(?)...80'S(?) was excellent too. It was about the race between Scott and Amundsen. Date read is a guess.