Flight of the Falcon: Scott's Journey to the South Pole 1910-1912

Andrew Vaisius is a Winnipeg day-care director.

The main fault with Flight of the Falcon is the dearth of original writing. The material for a potentially compelling book is present. The subject is Robert Falcon Scott and his march to death in Antarctica on the return leg of his venture to the South Pole. Wainwright includes poems, photos, sketches, journal entries and an historian’s perspective as literary devices. The problem arises in Wainwright’s mediation among the devices. Of 151 pages, only 19 pages are of titled poems (by far the strongest written material in the book); 11 pages are direct quotes by one historian, L.B. Quartermain; but 80 split pages are entries on paraphrases from Scott’s journal (top) and a sort of omniscient voice of Scott invented by Wainwright (below). Wainwright chooses the official words of Scott counterpointed by his “unofficial” voice to convey the tragic journey. As a literary device it is a marvelous idea, the perfect door into the subject’s darkest closet. Yet when this invented voice is mostly used for simple exposition of the official journal the result is drudgery. For example, Scott’s entry for “January 6. — Beyond Shackleton’s farthest camp. Has no one been this far before?” has “No Englishman, at least” underneath it (p. 82). And “December 23. — All directions of the compass to avoid crevasses. How does a hardened crust form over a crack? Dead reckoning 85°22’S. 159°31’E” is accompanied by “All those measurements. Finally we know where we all were. Where we were not” (p. 70). Few insights are to be gleaned from this kind of writing. Scott became a hero, paradoxically, because he stubbornly subjected his men (and himself) to being harnessed like dogs to sledges to man-haul over the Antarctic. This Scott thought a “noble” thing to do. That Scott was chauvinistically British and bullheaded in the conception of the expedition, that he was a bungler, that there was something abject in his disorganization and faulty planning, are not to be found in Wainwright’s book. Nor, thankfully, are Scott’s heroics. Wainwright concentrates on a middle ground, expecting the incredible journey to impress.

The best part of the book, and the one given short shrift, is the titled poems. One poem, “Vanishing Point: January 18, 1912,” is printed facing a photograph of the polar party. It carefully translates into poetry the expressions and postures of the men in the photo, then goes beyond to an image of Scott not likely garnered from his journals. It represents the fine intelligent writing which begs to be expanded into the book that could have been.