Grave of Scott and his Men
For my first post on this blog, I thought I would share with you one of those interesting connections of two great figures of history, which I first came across at the Scott Polar Research Institute Museum in Cambridge.
The two figures? Captain Robert Falcon Scott and J.M Barrie.
The pinnacle of the museum's display is its collection of the letters written by Scott and his men in their last days, made poignant by their reflection on their impeding deaths.
Missing from this collection is one Scott addressed to J.M. Barrie, the renowned author of Peter Pan. We know the contents of this letter, however, partly from a speech Barrie delivered at St Andrews University on May 3rd, 1922 - a decade after Scott's death. The speech was entitled Courage, and praised Scott as an exemplar of this virtue. In the middle of his speech, Barrie unfolded the letter from his pocket - 'I have the little filmy sheets here [...] The writing is in pencil, still quite clear, though toward the end some of the words trail away as into the great silence that was waiting for them.'
He read the letter aloud:
We are pegging out in a very comfortless spot. Hoping this letter may be found and sent to you, I write you a word of farewell. I want you to think well of me and my end.' [After some private instructions too intimate to read, he goes on]: Goodbye — I am not at all afraid of the end, but sad to miss many a simple pleasure which I had planned for the future in our long marches. . . . We are in a desperate state — feet frozen, etc., no fuel, and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and our cheery conversation.... Later — [it is here that the words become difficult] — We are very near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves when things proved like this, but we have decided to die naturally without.' 1The portion of the letter read aloud by Barrie does not express how deep the friendship ran. The letter Scott had written to him had never left his side, and was a point of pride for Barrie. Moreover, the "private instructions" alluded to in the speech were regarding Scott's wife and his son Peter - Barrie's godson, named after the most famous character of Barrie's creation, Peter Pan. We are aware of how other parts of the letter ran. 'I want you to help my widow and my boy—your godson [...] As a dying man, my dear friend, be good to my wife and child. Give the boy a chance in life if the State won't do it.'
At the time of writing, Scott and Barrie had been in an argument and had not been speaking with each other. Yet clearly on Scott's dying day, as he lay freezing and starving in his tent in the Antarctic, all of this became irrelevant. The letter finishes on a heartfelt note.
'I never met a man in my life whom I admired and loved more than you, but I never could show you how much your friendship meant to me, for you had much to give and I nothing.' 2Echoes of the friendship between the two men can be heard in Scott's description of his team's gallant approach to death. Not only in Scott's letter to Barrie, but also in other letters he wrote on his last day, Scott expresses the sentiment that he and his men will die a proper death: the death of an English gentleman. This hope is reminiscent of the wish that, according to Wendy in Peter Pan, all mother's have: "We hope our sons will die like English gentlemen."
Scott can have only hoped that these last letters would reach the intended recipients, to be retrieved as they were from his final resting place, but he seems to have been aware that his stoic death may be remembered as heroism: 'I think this makes an example for Englishmen of the future' he writes in his letter to Barrie. And this is exactly what he gave Barrie, in the end: a heroes myth. J.M. Barrie wrote of Scott's bravery in newspaper columns, and spoke in his speeches on the gallantry of Scott and his men. Around 1913, a book was published for children titled "Like English Gentlemen", which told the story of Captain Scott's expedition, and is believed to have been authored by Barrie. It helped to immortalise the Scott myth - one that would be retold and reworked to inspire similar courageousness in young men, notably in the First World War. It seemed to give some truth to a famous line from Peter Pan - that 'to die would be an awfully big adventure'. It would not be until the 1960s, that the Scott myth would lose its traction, as the culture of the English gentleman was coming under scrutiny and post-war change was beginning to be truly felt.
Yet even today, the idea of the heroic death - no matter what mishaps led Scott and his men to that point - still retains some appeal. The self-sacrifice of Captain Oates in particular is still deeply embedded in our collective memory, especially his last words before he disappeared - '"I am just going outside and may be some time". That Scott's legend continues to inspire can be seen at the Scott Polar Institute Museum, with Scott's words emblazoned on the walls as you enter; a tribute to his effort, his valour, his heroic image, which seem to refer to a truth greater than the story of Scott himself.
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| In the Entrance Hall to the Scott Polar Museum |
The oft-quoted observation by D.H. Lawrence sums up the tragedy of this author: 'J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.' Yet Scott and his men died like true English gentlemen, and for that reason their story engages us still, over 100 years on.
If you want to visit the Scott Polar Museum, head over to their website: http://www.spri.cam.ac.uk/museum/
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For the text of Barrie's Courage Lecture, and his letter from Scott, see:
Blupete
Archive.org
Photo source:
Atlas Obscura
Wikipedia
Britannica
Pintrest
Scott Polar Institute
Ebay
Trip Advisor
To learn more, and to see the articles I sourced my information from:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9086554/Captain-Scott-and-J-M-Barrie-an-unlikely-friendship.html
http://thehereticmagazine.com/peter-pan-in-antarctica/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/antarctica/robert-falcon-scott/8967968/Farewell-letter-from-Captain-Scott-pledged-Antarctic-team-would-die-like-gentlemen.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/31/bookend/bookend.html
http://www.anta.canterbury.ac.nz/documents/PCAS_15/Literature%20Review/PCAS_15_Lit_Lesley%20McTurk.pdf
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