Akaroa to Lyttelton put out to sea on her way and ranged close alongside. "Are all well?" "Where's Captain Scott?" "Did you reach the Pole?" Rather unsatisfactory answers and away they went. Our first glimpse, however, of civilized life.
At dawn the next morning, with white ensign at half-mast, we crept through Lyttelton Heads. Always we looked for trees, people and houses. How different it was from the day we left and yet how much the same: as though we had dreamed some horrible nightmare and could scarcely believe we were not dreaming still.
The Harbour-master came out in the tug and with him Atkinson and Pennell. "Come down here a minute," said Atkinson to me, and "It's made a tremendous impression, I had no idea it would make so much," he said. And indeed we had been too long away, and the whole thing was so personal to us, and our perceptions had been blunted: we never realized. We landed to find the Empire—almost the civilized world—in mourning. It was as though they had lost great friends.
To a sensitive pre-war world the knowledge of these men's deaths came as a great shock: and now, although the world has almost lost the sense of tragedy, it appeals to their pity and their pride. The disaster may well be the first thing which Scott's name recalls to your mind (as though an event occurred in the life of Columbus which caused you to forget that he discovered America); but Scott's reputation is not founded upon the conquest of the South Pole. He came to a new continent, found out how to travel there, and gave knowledge of it to the world: he discovered the Antarctic, and founded a school. He is the last of the great geographical explorers: it is useless to try and light a fire when everything has been burned; and he is probably the last old-fashioned polar explorer, for, as I believe, the future of such exploration is in the air, but not yet. And he was strong: we never realized until we found him lying there dead how strong, mentally and physically, that man was.
In both his polar expeditions he was helped, to an
