When the party reached Discovery after a 93-day-long trek, Scott learned that a relief ship, the Morning, had arrived to check on the expedition’s condition. The commander decided that Shackleton was too weak to remain aboard Discovery and ordered him back to England with the relief ship and several other non-essential crewmen. Discovery itself could go nowhere. The Antarctic summer had not been mild enough for the ice in which she was trapped to break up, and so Commander Scott decided that he would spend yet another winter on the ice shelf.

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It was late September, 1903, before the long Antarctic night ended and conditions again permitted Scott to venture on another long trek. I am not sure that a polar night is not worth the living through for the mere joy of seeing the day come back, he noted.

A number of parties set off in various directions at the start of the new sledging season and during the course of the summer the expedition achieved further successes in mapping and studying glaciers, geology, and the local population of penguins. None of the parties, however, ventured any nearer the Pole than Scott, Shackleton, and Wilson had the previous year.

As of the first days of 1904, the ice that held Discovery in place appeared as if it would outlast yet another Antarctic summer. On 5th January, another relief expedition arrived, bringing news that the Admiralty had had enough of both the expedition and the unexpectedly high costs attached to it. Commander Scott was ordered to either free Discovery and bring her home, or to abandon her. As the deadline approached, the ice finally began to break up, and on 16th February Discovery at last headed towards England.

A hero’s welcome greeted Commander Scott in England, but his arrival was also a time of personal troubles. While the public idolized him, the Government and scientific community were critical of his handling of the expedition. He himself was disappointed over his failure to reach the Pole, and he began to plan for a second expedition. To his annoyance he learned that his former subordinate, Ernest Shackleton, was launching his own mission to Antarctica. More fortunately, another potential rival, the famed Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, announced that his sights were set instead on the North Pole.

In August 1907, Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, headed south. From start to finish his expedition upstaged Scott’s and in January, 1909, he reached a new furthest south. But while his achievement stole the spotlight from his rival it left him still 112 miles short of the Pole.

Meanwhile, the recently promoted Captain Scott’s second expedition was proving to be in complete contrast to the first. This time the voyage was a personal quest and the man who previously had no predilection for exploration spent a full year tirelessly raising money, though he had little liking for such work. He attempted to buy Discovery, but to his frustration its new owners refused to sell her and he settled for the whaler Terra Nova.

Despite Scott’s efforts to find financial support for the mission, there was barely enough money to pay the crew and fuel the ship when the time came to get underway. The biggest discouragement of all, however, was a telegram that awaited him when Terra Nova stopped in Melbourne. It was sent by Roald Amundsen to inform Scott that the Norwegian had changed his plans and was heading south.

The expedition had become a race, and Terra Nova got off to a slow start. Unexpectedly bad weather and thick ice delayed her arrival at the ice shelf, but by the end of December a camp had been established. The following month teams set out across the ice to set up supply caches the would be used by the Pole party the following year. They named the most important of the caches One Ton Depot. Scott had planned to locate it at latitude 80 degrees south, but severe storms stopped him short of that location, and he reluctantly left the stores 20 miles north of the intended site.

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