Captain Lawrence Oates Gallery

At The South Pole, (Bowers pulls the string), January 1912, (1913). Artist: Henry Bowers

At The South Pole, (Bowers pulls the string), January 1912, (1913). Left to right: Captain Lawrence Oates, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Petty Officer Edgar Evans, seated left to right: Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Dr Edward Wilson in front of flags including the Norwegian flag planted by Roald Amundsen a month earlier. Oates (1880-1912), Evans (1876-1912), Bowers (1883-1912), (1872-1912) and expedition leader Captain Robert F Scott (1868-1912) all died on the way back from the South Pole. The final expedition of British Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) left London on 1 June 1910 bound for the South Pole. The Terra Nova Expedition, officially the British Antarctic Expedition (1910-1913), included a geologist, a zoologist, a surgeon, a photographer, an engineer, a ski expert, a meteorologist and a physicist among others. Scott wished to continue the scientific work that he had begun when leading the Discovery Expedition to the Antarctic in 1901-04. He also wanted to be the first to reach the geographic South Pole. Scott, accompanied by Dr Edward Wilson, Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans, reached the Pole on 17 January 1912, only to find that the Norwegian expedition under Amundsen had beaten them to their objective by a month. Delayed by blizzards, and running out of supplies, Scott and the remainder of his team died at the end of March. Their bodies and diaries were found eight months later. From Scott's Last Expedition, Volume I. [Smith, Elder & Co. London, 1913]

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