Robert Falcon Scott

Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) was a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition, 1901–04, and the Terra Nova Expedition, 1910–13. During this second venture, Scott led a party of five which made up the British part of what has become known as "the race to the South Pole." On January 17th, 1912 they reached the South Pole only to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition. The return journey that followed proved to be fatal, with Scott and the rest of his party dying from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold. The bodies were discovered by a search party on November 12th, 1912. Their final camp became their tomb which is now encased in the Ross Ice Shelf.