British explorer Robert Falcon Scott was born today in 1868.  He died, along with his four companions, on the way back from the South Pole in 1912.   They had successfully reached the pole, only to learn that they had been beaten by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition.

Scott’s legacy has been marked by controversy. Long hailed as a hero, in recent years, some have portrayed him as a bungler.   The Scott expedition ended in tragedy while Amundsen arrived first and returned safely, without losing a man.  Nevertheless, Amundsen is largely forgotten and Scott still fascinates the public.  Two new exhibitions opened yesterday which feature Scott’s ill-fated expedition.   Edward Rothstein writes in his review of an exhibition, Race to the End of the Earth, which opened yesterday at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York:

What chance did the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen ever have? Yes, he won the race to the South Pole in 1911 … leaving his British rival, Robert Falcon Scott, far behind. Yes, he made his way over uncharted Antarctic territory to the pole, taking 57 days to do what Scott, beginning from previously mapped terrain, could only do in 81. And yes, Amundsen attained the glory offered every pioneer in that waning era of exploration, without having lost a single man and with 39 of his sled dogs still alive, while Scott and his party, well …

But what chance did Amundsen have, after nearly a year of living in triumph and delivering lectures on his great feat, when the bodies of Scott and two other members of his expedition were finally discovered in 1913 by a search party, frozen dead in their sleeping bags in a tent?

On the other side of the Atlantic, Captain Scott’s last diary from South Pole expedition was put on exhibit at Cambridge University’s renovated Scott Polar Research Institute, yesterday.

Captain Scott’s last diary from South Pole expedition unveiled