Swansea's Antarctic Explorer 🗺️

Good morning, Swansea!

In the late 1800s, many people living in Gower never travelled further than Swansea town - but Edgar Evans made it to the South Pole.

Born in a Rhossili cottage, famed explorer Captain Scott chose him for the most dangerous journey on Earth - an 800-mile march across Antarctic ice to be the first people to reach the bottom of the world.

This week, grab a cuppa and journey from Gower to the ends of the Earth - featuring a race against Norway and a tragedy that still echoes today.

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew

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Edgar Evans was born in 1876 in Rhossili, at the far western end of the Gower Peninsula. His father was a sailor, so the household was used to long stretches apart and work that depended on the sea.

Edgar spent part of his childhood in Gower before moving to central Swansea, where he went to St Helen’s Boys School. In Swansea he would have seen docks, ships, sailors, and news from outside of Wales. And like many boys of his generation, he didn’t stay in school long. At fifteen, he ran away to join the Royal Navy.

Life aboard a naval vessel was brutal for a teenage recruit - cramped quarters, rigid discipline, and months at sea with basic rations. But Evans adapted and thrived.

Over the next twenty years Evans became a career sailor - learning how to work in rough weather, handle heavy gear, follow orders, and keep going when conditions were uncomfortable or dangerous - and by the late 1890s, he was serving aboard HMS Majestic, one of the Royal Navy’s flagship battleships.

It was aboard HMS Majestic that he met now-famed explorer, Robert Falcon Scott, then a young naval officer. Evans wasn’t part of Scott’s social world, but he stood out as someone dependable and physically tough. Evans had a reputation as one of the strongest men in the crew and showed exceptional skill at sledge repair - practical abilities that would prove crucial on the ice.

A few years later, when Scott led his first Antarctic voyage aboard HMS Discovery, Evans was one of the sailors he took with him. On the Discovery expedition, Evans worked as part of the hauling and support teams that kept Scott’s journeys going across the ice - someone relied on to pull sledges, fix equipment and keep moving when things went wrong.

When Scott began planning a second Antarctic expedition in 1909, this time aboard the Terra Nova, Evans was one of the men he already knew he wanted back. After setting sail from Britain in 1910 and arriving in Antarctica in early 1911, the expedition spent months building its base and laying supply depots. Before the ship left Britain, Evans wrote home:

In late 1911, Edgar Evans and four others left their base on the Antarctic coast and began the final journey south. Their aim was to reach the South Pole before anyone else, travelling more than 800 miles across ice, glaciers and high polar plateau.

The journey would take nearly two months of relentless hauling.The five-man group consisted of Scott, Edgar Evans, Edward Wilson, Henry “Birdie” Bowers, and Lawrence Oates. Everything they needed had to be dragged behind them on sledges - food, fuel, tents, and scientific instruments.

For weeks they moved steadily forward, first across the flat Ross Ice Shelf and then up the huge Beardmore Glacier, climbing thousands of feet into the interior of the continent. Progress was slow. Each day meant hours of pulling weight through snow in temperatures well below freezing.

By the time they reached the polar plateau - the vast, flat icefield at the heart of Antarctica, more than 9,000 feet above sea level - they were already tired and running short on spare energy. On 17 January 1912, they finally arrived at the Pole… and found a tent and a flag already there. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them by more than a month.

Scott wrote in his diary: "The worst has happened... Great God! This is an awful place."

After taking photographs, recording their position and leaving a note behind, there was nothing else to do but turn around and start the long journey back.

The return trek from the South Pole was far harder than the journey out. The men were thinner, more exhausted, and surviving on carefully measured rations, while the weather closed in and temperatures dropped even further. Temperatures had plummeted to minus 40 degrees Celsius.

Edgar Evans began to struggle first. Weeks earlier he had badly cut his hand while repairing a sledge, and in the cold the wound never healed properly. Infection and frostbite followed, and he started to lose weight and strength more quickly than the others. Scott noticed the change, writing in his diary that Evans “looks very thin and his fingers are in a very bad state.”

By early February 1912, Evans was finding it harder to keep his balance and stay focused. Then, while the party was descending the Beardmore Glacier, he fell into a crevasse and hit his head. After that, his condition worsened. He became confused, struggled to walk in a straight line, and sometimes could not answer when spoken to.

On February 16th, 1912, Evans collapsed on the ice. Scott found him kneeling with his coat open and his frostbitten hands bare, barely able to speak. The others dragged him into a tent, but his condition was beyond help. In the early hours of the next morning, Edgar Evans died. He was 35 years old and more than 10,000 miles from home. “It is a terrible thing to lose a companion in this way," Scott wrote.

The remaining four men packed up and continued on, leaving Evans behind as they tried to reach safety.

They never made it. Lawrence Oates, suffering badly from frostbite and gangrene, walked out of the tent into a blizzard on March 17th, 1912, reportedly saying "I am just going outside and may be some time." He never returned. His sacrifice bought the others a little more time, but it wasn't enough. Over the following weeks, Edward Wilson, Henry Bowers and Robert Falcon Scott all died on the return journey, just short of a supply depot that could have saved them.

In November 1912, a search party found the tent where Scott, Wilson and Bowers had died, along with their diaries and final letters. When news of the expedition reached Britain in 1913, the deaths of Scott and his party were treated as a national tragedy.

Evans left behind his wife Lois and their three young children. A public fund was raised across Britain to support the families of the men who had died, but Evans’s widow received less than Scott’s. She was given a lump sum of about £1,500 and a small annual pension from the Navy, which helped but did not remove the need to work.

In Rhossili, Lois had a memorial plaque placed inside St Mary’s Church for her husband. It carries a line that would later be used for Scott as well: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

For years after the expedition, Evans was often described as the weak link in Scott’s team. Some writers blamed his background, his lack of education, or even his character for the way the journey ended.

Later historians and the expedition diaries showed that this was unfair. Evans had been one of the strongest and hardest-working members of the party, and his death came after injury, illness and extreme conditions, not personal failure.

Today, his name appears on a blue plaque on Middleton Hall near Rhossili, where Evans was born - and on a memorial in Antarctica itself. Swansea Museum holds one of his boots, letters, and a bronze bust made from the famous South Pole photograph.

Catch you on Sunday!

Andrew.

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