--- title: "Robert Falcon Scott’s tent was found on 12 November 1912, just 11 miles short of a supply depot in Antarctica" url: https://badiyaa.com/robert-falcon-scott-tent-found-1912/ published: 2026-11-12T17:30:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-12T17:30:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Robert Falcon Scott’s tent was found on 12 November 1912, just 11 miles short of a supply depot in Antarctica On 12 November 1912 a search party found Robert Falcon Scott's tent on Antarctica's ice shelf, 11 miles from One Ton Depot and 8 months after his death. On 12 November 1912, a search party crossing the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica spotted the top of a snow-buried tent. Inside lay Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson and Lieutenant Henry Bowers. They had stopped just 11 miles (18 km) short of One Ton Depot, a cache of food and fuel that might have saved them. The men had been dead for about seven and a half months. The search team, led by expedition surgeon Edward Atkinson, now held the answer to a question the rest of the world had not yet thought to ask. ## A race already lost Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition, better known by the name of its ship, Terra Nova, sailed in 1910 with two goals: serious science and the first footsteps at the geographic South Pole. Scott and four companions reached the Pole on 17 January 1912 and found a Norwegian flag waiting. Roald Amundsen’s team had arrived 34 days earlier. “Great God! This is an awful place,” Scott wrote in his diary that day. ## The march home The return journey went wrong in stages. Petty Officer Edgar Evans, badly frostbitten and possibly concussed after falls on the ice, collapsed near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier and died on 17 February. On the flat ice shelf the remaining four met brutal cold, sticky snow surfaces that Scott compared to “pulling over desert sand,” fuel shortages at the depots, and no sign of the dog teams they had hoped would meet them. Captain Lawrence Oates, his feet ruined by frostbite, walked out of the tent into a blizzard in mid-March. Scott recorded his parting words: “I am just going outside and may be some time”. Scott, Wilson and Bowers pressed on until a blizzard pinned them down on 20 March. Scott’s last diary entry is dated 29 March 1912. It ends: “It seems a pity but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. Last entry. For God’s sake look after our people.” ## Eight months of not knowing Back at base, two relief attempts in early 1912 had turned back. Apsley Cherry-Garrard waited at One Ton Depot with dogs in March but, short of supplies, headed home while Scott’s party was less than 70 miles away. Atkinson tried again later that month and gave up at Corner Camp, writing that he was “morally certain” the polar party had perished. The men at Cape Evans then had to wait out the Antarctic winter. In spring they voted to look for Scott before rescuing another team, the Northern Party, and set out on 29 October with mules. Fourteen days later they found the tent. ## What the search party did Atkinson read the key parts of Scott’s diaries, which explained what had happened. The searchers gathered the journals, letters and records, then lowered the tent over the bodies and built a snow cairn on top, crowned with a cross made from the skis of team member Gran. They pushed farther south for Oates but found only his sleeping bag, and on 15 November built a second cairn near where he likely died. The outside world learned the news only on 10 February 1913, when Atkinson and Lieutenant Harry Pennell came ashore at Oamaru in New Zealand and cabled a coded message. ## A timeline of the polar party - **1 November 1911:** Scott’s main party leaves Cape Evans. - **17 January 1912:** Five men reach the South Pole, 34 days after Amundsen. - **17 February 1912:** Edgar Evans dies at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. - **Mid-March 1912:** Lawrence Oates walks out of the tent. - **29 March 1912:** Scott’s final diary entry. - **12 November 1912:** Search party finds the tent, 228 days after that last entry. Antarctica is still drawing attention for different reasons today, from the [Antarctic ozone hole reaching its largest size in a decade](https://badiyaa.com/antarctic-ozone-hole-2026-largest-decade/) to icebergs such as [A-81 drifting toward South Georgia](https://badiyaa.com/iceberg-a-81-south-georgia-shelf/). Before leaving in January 1913, the expedition raised a wooden cross on Observation Hill above Hut Point carrying the five names and a line from Tennyson’s Ulysses: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Terra Nova Expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_Expedition) *Image: Henry Bowers, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*