Robert Falcon Scott



Robert Falcon Scott (June 6, 1868 – March 29, 1912) was a British Royal Naval officer and explorer, and a friend of J. M. Barrie. Scott secured Jack Llewelyn Davies a spot at Osborne Naval College at Barrie's request. Scott's son Peter was Barrie's godson.

Scott's greatest fame is for the two expeditions he led to the Antarctic regions, including the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, in which he led a party of five which reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition had already beat them to it. On their return journey Scott and his four comrades all perished from a combination of exhaustion, hunger and extreme cold. Realizing he was doomed, Scott wrote a handful of final letters to individuals; Barrie was one of them. In fact, Barrie's friend and producer Charles Frohman claimed that the letter to Barrie was Scott's last, with its final words trailing off into indecipherable marks and then stopping.

In 1914, Barrie anonymously donated the last $50,000 (roughly a million modern dollars when adjusted for inflation) needed by Scott's protege Ernest Shackleton to mount an expedition to cross the continent by land (which did not meet its goal, but proved to be something of an epic two-year tale of endurance).