“I am just going outside and may be some time.”
Scott wrote that they “realized he was walking to his death and tried to dissuade him, but knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit,” he added.
A little later Scott wrote in his diary:
“Every day we have been ready to start for our depot eleven miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. 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.”
Eight months after when a rescue party succeeded in reaching the tent, they found the bodies of Wilson and Bowers lying with their sleeping bags closed over their heads. Near them was Captain Scott, with the flaps of his sleeping bag thrown back. Under his shoulder were his note-books and letters to those at home, which he had written up to the very last when the pencil slipped from his fingers. His thought in dying was not for himself but for those that would be left to grieve.
On the spot where they died, their friends left the bodies of these brave men covered with the canvas of their tent, and over them they piled up a great cairn of ice in which was placed a wooden cross made of snow-shoes. On the cross were carved these words of a great poet, which no one better than Captain Scott had made living words:
“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” Now we can see why this tale of Captain Scott is truly an undying story. As long as true hearts beat those words will find an echo, and also those other words which he so nobly proved by his life and death:
“The soul of a brave man is stronger than anything that can happen to him.”
A MODERN VIKING: JACOB RIIS
I doubt no doubts: I strive, and shrive my clay;
And fight my fight in the patient modern way.
Sidney Lanier.