London – Knowing he was days from death on a tragic trek back from the South Pole in 1912, Capt. Robert Falcon Scott wrote to his wife that “we are in a very tight corner and I have doubts of pulling through.”
He assured Kathleen Scott he faced his end without regret. “How much better it has been than lounging in comfort at home,” Scott wrote in the letter, recovered the year after he and his companions died of cold and starvation.
Scott’s courage in facing his doom – following the bitter disappointment of losing the race to the South Pole – burnished his stature as a national hero, and was an inspiration to generations of British youth.
Now the British explorer’s last letter to his wife, previously published only in part, will be among those displayed to the public in his own sprawling handwriting for the first time beginning Jan. 17 at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University.
Scott’s correspondence was recently donated to the institute by Philippa Scott, widow of the explorer’s only child, Sir Peter Scott, who died in 1989.
“Make the boy interested in natural history if you can, it is better than games,” Robert Scott wrote from Antarctica. His son, then 3, went on to have a distinguished career in ornithology.
The letter was found along with the explorer’s body and his effects several months after his death.
