After Robert Falcon Scott’s frozen body was discovered, halfway out of his sleeping bag and with one arm slung over the corpse of his friend Edgar Wilson, eleven miles from his base camp in Antarctica, news of his disastrous trek spread rapidly around the world. Almost immediately, he was celebrated as a British national hero. When his ship, the Terra Nova, steamed into harbour on the Thames, months later, it was greeted with a procession of citizens and dignitaries. King Edward presented Scott’s widow Kathleen with posthumous medals of honour.

In the last one hundred years, Scott’s reputation has been tarnished with accusations of foolhardy poor planning, mismanagement of food and supplies, and his refusal to heed the best advice of his more knowledgeable comrades. It has been easy for modern historians to underestimate the challenges he faced in 1911-12 in an unexplored continent that “wants so much for you to be dead.” Scott did not have the luxuries of airplanes, freeze-dried food, GPS, or modern cold-weather apparel. You be the judge of how he met his challenges and how he sought to overcome them.

It's been an honour and a pleasure to work on this play, of such historical significance, and an honour to have spent the better part of a lifetime teaching in the first degree-granting drama department in the British Commonwealth. I hope you enjoy the play.

Thank you to Butch Amundson and Beverley Brenna.

Thank you also to the DRAM 221 students (Jessie Bruce, Molly Chartier, Raven Dallman, Ian Kimpton, Julia Kowalski, and Michael Kruger) for all their support.