A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole

On November 12, 1912, a rescue party trekking across Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier found what they had set out to find the snow-covered tent of the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott. Inside, they made a grim discovery: Scott's frozen body lying between the bodies of two fellow explorers. The remaining two members of the party were nowhere in sight, but Scott's eloquent diary soon revealed their fate. They, like the others, had perished in nightmarish circumstances after successfully reaching the South Pole.The elusive character of Scott, in whom incredible courage was fatally matched by self-doubt and miscalculation, continues to haunt the popular imagination. His story -- and that of the other four men on his final expedition -- has never been told more grippingly or with greater compassion than it is in this book. "It is a tale of perseverance and unquenchable spirit in the face of terrible odds", writes Diana Preston, "but it is also a story of stubbornness, sentimentality, and of men who are deeper and more complex than we sometimes acknowledge". Heroes, yes, but humans, too.