Page 250 - The Secret Museum

explorer of our time’, and Wally was knighted in 2000.

If Wally Herbert was the first to the North Pole, then why hasn’t everyone heard

of him? Well, it was all in the timing. Just as the press were waking up to his arrival
at the North Pole, two men stepped on to the moon.

Also, his adventure took place a long time after Scott and Amundsen’s race to the
South Pole, which has become the stuff of legend. Interestingly, the two record-
breaking trips are linked. Many people had tried to get to the North Pole before
Herbert. In 1909, exactly 60 years before Wally Herbert officially reached the North
Pole, Robert Peary and James Cook claimed they had made it, but neither had enough
evidence to certify their claims. At the time, however, the two men’s tales were

enough to change history.
Roald Amundsen (after whom Roald Dahl was named) had been planning an

expedition to the North Pole; when he heard about the controversial journeys claimed
by Peary and Cook, he decided instead to turn the map around and turn south, to claim
the title of first to the South Pole, beyond any doubt. Captain Robert Falcon Scott
also changed direction, and the race to the South Pole began.

Everyone knows that Scott made it to the South Pole shortly after Amundsen, on
the Terra Nova Expedition. It ended tragically, as Scott, Oates, Bowers, Evans and
Wilson froze to death on their return journey to base camp. Scott’s diary has become
legendary, telling the story of how Captain Oates went out into the snow to die rather

than slow down his team mates. The final words of his diary, written on 29 March
1912, are heartbreaking: ‘It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R.
SCOTT. For God’s sake look after our people.’

The diary is in the British Library, but thousands of objects relating to the Terra
Nova Expedition are in the SPRI. They own Bowers’s diary and 1,701 (I love the
precision of that number) glass plate images taken by the Terra Nova’s photographer,
Herbert Ponting, as well as his camera. When I visited, the institute was about to
acquire hundreds of photographs taken by Scott on the expedition which until then

had been in private hands, as well as his writing desk, upon which he wrote the
famous diary.

In another museum in Cambridge, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, there
is a letter from Marie Stopes, campaigner for women’s rights, to Scott. She was also
a palaeobotanist, and was interested in the idea that the world’s continents were once
one supercontinent called Gondwanaland. She wrote to Scott asking if she could go
with him to Antarctica. He replied saying she could not, but he promised to bring
back fossil samples to help her with her theory. He had the fossils she had asked for

on his body when he was found.

‘We’re still very much connected with the explorers through their families. We
are in touch with children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. They come to
look at their family’s things – journals, clothes – and then they get involved in things