One evening in the Antarctic winter of 1912, some months after all hope of Scott had been given up, the surviving members of his expedition at base camp sat down to vote on their sledging plans for the coming spring. Along the coast to the north of them a party of five men under the command of Victor Campbell might or might not still be alive, while to the south of them, somewhere out on the ice between Hut Point and the Pole itself, 700-odd miles away, lay the bodies of Scott and the four men with whom he had set out on his final journey. ‘The problem was a hard one,’ wrote Cherry Garrard, historian and conscience of the expedition:
On the one hand we might go south, fail entirely to find any trace of the Polar Party, and while we were fruitlessly travelling all the summer, Campbell’s men might die for want of help. On the other hand we might go north, to find that Campbell’s men were safe, and as a consequence the fate of the Polar Party and the result of their efforts might remain for ever unknown. Were we to forsake men who might be alive to look for those whom we knew were dead?It says a lot for the moral ascendancy Scott exercised over his party, and the sense of priorities he had bequeathed to them, that with only one abstention the 13 men voted for the dead. It was not as though they did not know how it would look if they got it wrong — Campbell’s men survived to let them off that particular moral hook — but with the benefit of hindsight their decision looks so inevitable that it never occurs to anyone to ask what polar history would look like if the vote had gone the other way.
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