CAPTAIN SCOTT. Ranulph Fiennes. 2003. London: Hodder Stoughton. xiv + 508 p, illustrated, hard cover. ISBN 0-340-82697-5. 20.00

H.G. Wells called the first decade of the twentieth century ‘a period of badly-strained optimism.’ Britain was just emerging from the Boer War. The war — which had gone badly at first — was partly about the rights of non-Boers in the Boer Republics but even more, perhaps, about the diamond fields of the Rand. When the British eventually won, Life magazine summed up international opinion: ‘a small boy with diamonds is no match for a large burglar with experience.’ Critics drew parallels between Britain’s poor military performance and the onset of degeneracy, both moral and physical, in the Roman Empire. As the naval race with Germany grew ever faster and the prospect of war ever more certain, the discomfited British looked for evidence that rumours of the demise of the national character had been much exaggerated and that their manliness would withstand the tests ahead. The death of Robert Falcon Scott and his companions in 1912 after being pipped to the South Pole by Roald Amundsen seemed to provide such reassurance. Scott’s papers, found with the bodies, described how his companions were ‘unendingly cheerful.’ Scott promised that, ‘Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell . . .which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.’ In particular, Scott’s account of Captain Oates stepping out to die with a laconic ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ resonated. The Daily Mail praised Oates’ ‘immortal chivalry’ for preferring to sacrifice himself rather than endanger his comrades. His old army comrades recounted his gallantry in the Boer War, when he was wounded and earned the name ‘no surrender Oates.’ Thousands attended a memorial service for Scott and his men in St Paul’s Cathedral while, that same day, their teachers told Scott’s story to three-quarters of a million of the capital’s schoolchildren. If Britain needed heroes in 1913, she needed them even more during the First World War, as a generation of young men obeyed the call to unquestioning sacrifice in the Flanders’ mud. The nobility of Scott’s sacrifice in the pure white Antarctic wastes achieved iconic status. That status was not questioned until the 1970s — a time when the debunking of icons, particularly of those with military or imperial associations — became the biographer’s favourite sport. Scott was among the last to fall, but Roland Huntford’s Scott and Amundsen in 1979 and the TV dramatisation based upon it provided one of the most thorough hatchet jobs of all. It portrayed Captain Scott as a vain and arrogant incompetent, disliked by his men and cuckolded during his absence by the far superior explorer Fridtjof Nansen. This portrait has remained the dominant one during the succeeding years, despite several attempts to balance the picture. Ranulph Fiennes’ intention, from the very first pages of his new biography, Captain Scott, is clear. The dedication reads ‘to the families of the defamed dead.’ His is a no-holds-barred debunking of the debunkers. Fiennes’ fluent, colloquially written account successfully refutes all of the more outrageous slurs on Scott’s good name. He demonstrates that Scott’s relationship with his men was better than that of most polar leaders and that his planning and training were good by the standards of his day. Citing Susan Solomon’s recent book The Coldest March and her work on meteorological history, he dismisses the charge that Scott exaggerated the cold on his return journey (he was unlucky enough to be out on the ice in one of the coldest Antarctic Marchs of the twentieth century). He also dismisses the unsubstantiated allegation of an affair between Scott’s wife Kathleen and Nansen. The way Fiennes applies his own polar experience to evaluate Scott’s key decisions gives this book particular authority. For example, he draws on his own experience of being cut off on an Arctic ice floe to inform his analysis of why Scott allowed some of his men to trust themselves and their ponies to sea ice during the 1911 depot-laying journey. Similarly, his own understanding of snow and ice conditions on the Polar Plateau underlies his explanation of the finely balanced nature of decisions on when and when not to use skis. His account of the inevitable calorie deficit suffered by Scott and his team is again underpinned by his own and Mike Stroud’s experience. Fiennes’ views on which two men Scott chose for the final party, in addition to Bowers as navigator and Wilson as doctor, carry great weight because, as he says, ‘As a manhauler with many polar journeys sharp in my memory, I can put myself in Scott’s finnesko and ask myself what attributes I would have recruited . . .There is but a single clear answer and that is pulling power, sheer enduring strength.’ He concludes that on the information available to Scott — he did not, for example, know of Taff Evans’ cut hand — Oates and Evans were the best choices, with Crean a close third. Most revealing, however, is the light his polar experience casts upon Captain Oates’ last brave exit and the acquiescence of his remaining companions in it: With useless fingers he [Oates] would have been unable to untie the lashings of the door funnel . . . Somebody must have done it for him. With a blizzard outside the bunched up ‘door’ material would have been carefully lashed and the ties frozen into a hard knot, difficult enough to untie with fit fingers. Once Oates was outside, those inside would have tied the door back up instantly to exclude blown snow and