On This Day: Captain Scott reaches South Pole a month late on ill-fated expedition

JAN 17, 1912: Captain Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole on his doomed Antarctic race on this day in 1912 – arriving a month after his Norwegian rival Roald Amundsen.

The Royal Navy officer and four British comrades died as they returned, burdened by knowing their dream of being the first men to stand at the world's bottom was over.

Scott, 43, Dr Edward Wilson, 39, Captain Titus Oates, 32, Lieutenant Birdie Bowers, 28, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans, 35, perished from exhaustion, starvation and cold.

Most famously, Oates, who feared his frostbite would hold the crew up, walked from his tent into a blizzard after saying: 'I am just going outside and may be some time.'

His personal self-sacrifice, combined with the others’ diary-documented bravery and stoicism, cemented their image the public’s mind as tragic heroes.

One of the last images Britons saw of the men was British Pathé footage of Scott’s ship Terra Nova leaving Cardiff on June 1, 1910.

A search party had found their frozen bodies in November 1912 – eight months after their presumed deaths.

They also discovered Scott’s diary – revealing a despondent final entry on March 29 as the crew were halted by extreme weather.

'Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift,' it reads.

'I do not think we can hope for any better things now. We shall stick it out to the end, but we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far.

'It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. Last entry. For God's sake look after our people.'

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The rescuers were delayed when naval surgeon Edward Atkinson returned to the ship after discovering severely frostbitten Evans, who had been separated from the group.

Despite Scott’s failure, it the expedition is treasured alongside the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade and 1940 Dunkirk troop evacuation as representing great British pluck.

Yet the polar explorer was later criticised with claims that he was a heroic bungler who led men to their deaths and then covered it with brave rhetoric in his diary.

By the 1960s, historians began accusing him of ‘haphazard’ and ‘flawed’ planning, in particular failing to take advice of using dogs rather than ponies.

The animals were also to be eaten once their hauling function had ceased – but they routinely froze to death while they were still needed to drag their supplies.

Also, even if the horses had survived long enough to do their jobs, their meat still would not have provided enough calories to supplement the men’s miniscule rations.

Also, Scott was criticised for having a five-man team, rather than four like Amundsen, who arrived at the South Pole 33 days earlier on December 15, 1911.

In turn, the attacks boosted the reputation of Ernest Shackleton, one of Scott peers whose death-defying escape from the Antarctic had largely been forgotten about.

After his ship was trapped in ice for a year in 1916, the three-times polar explorer spent 16 days in a tiny raft in his successful to help rescue 23 crewmates.

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But since the 1990s Scott’s reputation has once again seen a revival thanks to praise from modern British polar explorers like Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

Yet, in a 2002 BBC poll to determine the '100 Greatest Britons', Shackleton was ranked eleventh while Scott was down in 54th place.

MORE PICTURES OF CAPTAIN SCOTT'S DOOMED TRIP TO THE SOUTH POLE: