Who were the British people who died in the race to the south pole?

Answer 1

Five members of Captain Robert F. Scott's Terra NovaExpedition (1910-1912) died on their return journey from the South Pole. They were Captain Scott, Dr Edward Adrian Wilson, Lieutenant Henry Robertson Bowers, Captain Lawrence E.G. Oates, and Petty Officer Edgar Evans. P.O. Evans suffered multiple injuries, including wounding his hand while fixing one of the party's sledges, being severely concussed falling through a snow-covered crevasse, and showing signs of scurvy, and died at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Captain Oates suffered severe frostbite on his feet, and - fearing that he was endangering his companions by slowing them down - he asked them to leave him behind. When they refused, he walked out into a blizzard without food or equipment, effectively committing suicide. Scott, Wilson, and Bowers were caught in a blizzard on the Great Ice Barrier (now the Ross Ice Shelf), and ran out of both food and oil for heating the tent. Scott's last diary entry was on 29 March 1912, suggesting that the three men died on or soon after this date.

However, other Britons also lost their lives in the course of exploring the South Pole. On the first British expedition, usually known as the Discovery expedition of 1901-1904, Able Seaman George Vince was killed when he fell over the edge of a cliff when his party was caught in a blizzard and attempted to return to their ship, rather than remaining in their tent. On Sir Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition, Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis died when he fell through a crevasse on 14 December 1912. On the same expedition, the Swiss explorer and ski expert Xavier Mertz was also killed.

The Ross Sea Party of Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Transantarctic Expedition also lost three of its ten members. After being stranded in Antarctica without sledging supplies when their ship was frozen in by sea ice and snapped its moorings, the Ross Sea Party took refuge in Scott's old hut from the Terra Novaexpedition. They took old sledging supplies from this, as well as Shackleton's Nimrod Hut at Cape Royds and Scott's Discovery Hut on Hut Point, and completed their mission of laying depots for Shackleton's party, which planned to cross the Antarctic continent from coast to coast. In the process, the Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, the Party's chaplain and photographer, Victor Hayward, a banker from London signed on as a general assistant for the party, and Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, the Party's commander, all died.