"Antarctic photos cast shadow on Scott's heroics" 

The exploits of Captain Robert Scott ... have captured
the public imagination for a century. But previously
unseen photographs released this month reveal a less 
heroic side to his character. 

The pictures document the rescue of Scott's ship,
Discovery, after it became marooned in the Antarctic
ice. Scott subsequently lied about the rescue and
deliberately wrote out of the history books the man who
saved him. 

He was Captain William Colbeck, a merchant sailor from
Yorkshire, who kicked off the race to the South Pole by
sledging a long way south with an Anglo-Norwegian
expedition as early as 1898 and planting his own marker
flag. 

Captain Scott's journey to the Antarctic in 1902 had
been backed by the Royal Geographical Society and the
Royal Society, which dispatched Colbeck to the rescue
when they became alarmed by a lack of news. When
Colbeck arrived in 1903, Scott at first refused
assistance and Colbeck was able to take only ailing
members of the ship's crew ... to safety. 

Scott insisted on seeing the winter out, determined to
press ahead with the scientific monitoring he had been
funded to do. But when Discovery found itself again in
trouble in 1904, Colbeck and his crew, dispatched this
time by the Admiralty, blasted the ice with dynamite to
free the ship. Captain Scott, however, refused to give
them credit. 

Sian Flynn, the maritime museum's curator, said:
"Colbeck was completely ignored. Scott claimed it was
a miraculous swell that had freed the ship because he
didn't want to be rescued by someone beneath him
socially. There was this whole Establishment trying to
whitewash what had happened and Colbeck was written out
of the official history." 

The photographs show scenes of the ice being blasted
and how Colbeck's skilful navigation led the rescue team
to details of Scott's position, which had been posted by
the Discovery crew in a box on a tiny island in case of
disaster. 

Scott returned to Antarctica in 1911 in the hope of
becoming the first man to reach the Pole. He reached his
destination only to find he had been beaten by the
Norwegian Roald Amundsen and died on the return
journey in March 1912. 

By Louise Jury 
15 January 2001

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     "Perceptions" note:

     Inadequate people often become 'snobs' - because
     'pedigree' snobbery (racism), financial snobbery, 
     intellectual snobbery and even political snobbery
     serve to conceal their own inadequacy.

     [The saddest are 'intellectual snobs' - who are too
     stupid to to realise that, given equal education 
     (see http://www.perceptions.couk.com/schools.html)
     most people in the world could be _more_ intellectual
     than the snobs themselves]

     We say - intellectual snobbery is a mark of the
     mentally deprived ]  

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     The item above appears to confirm, yet again, a 
     world-wide tendency for inadequate 'elites' to claim
     credit for achievements of ordinary people who actually
     achieve real _doing_ (& real _thinking_) in this world


     from:
     http://www.perceptions.couk.com/thedome.html
     http://www.perceptions.couk.com/answers1.html#reference
     http://www.perceptions.couk.com/subindex.html#snob
     http://www.perceptions.couk.com/genes2.html#news
     http://www.perceptions.couk.com/mead.html     


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              FURTHER REFERENCES

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