‘Widows of the Ice: The Women That Scott’s Antarctic Expedition Left Behind’
By Anne Fletcher
Amberley Publishing, 288 pages

Captain Robert Falcon Scott, with British government and private support for his scientific and geographical goals, led the Terra Nova Expedition (1910-12) as he set out to be the first to reach the South Pole. While Norwegian Roald Amundsen’s team claimed that honor, Scott became a national hero after reaching the Pole and perishing along with four of his party.

Anne Fletcher explains that the British valued the quest at a time when many saw the empire in decline, especially after the bloody war in South Africa. Scott became even more important when eight months later a search party discovered the dead men and the diaries and letters they left behind.

In his last letter, Scott wrote: “I do not regret this journey which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help one another and meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.” English soldiers took those words into battle with them after enlisting to fight in World War I.

What of the wives of these men, though? These women did more than look after their husbands’ homes and families: As Ms. Fletcher shows, women of different types and classes created a kind of infrastructure that these men relied on, a support system that stirred them into action and that comforted them in thoughts of their lives after exploration.

Ms. Fletcher recounts what happened to three polar widows: Kathleen, Scott’s independent wife who had her own career as a sculptor; Oriana, who devoted her life to gaining recognition for her husband, Ted Wilson, the expedition’s chief scientist; and Lois, the working-class wife of Edgar Evans, a Royal Navy officer, the most physically fit and controversial team member.

After the Great War and the initial grief over these celebrated sacrificing heroes, the press began to inquire into the exact conditions in which the men died. Suspicion focused on Evans because Scott’s diaries showed he had been the first to weaken and become a burden to the team, in spite of his great strength and resourcefulness.

Little was known about how diet and polar conditions made the sturdy Evans particularly susceptible to a breakdown, especially after he cut his hand. Instead, the ethos of the time put a premium on the fortitude of gentlemen, educated to endure privation and self-sacrifice, and cast Evans as part of what were seen as the degenerate lower classes, people who didn’t possess the inner resources to prevail.

Evans’s wife, Lois, stood by her husband’s memory but was at a loss regarding what to do about the press attacks on him. The evidence for her actions is minimal, and that leads Ms. Fletcher into great difficulties that she seeks to overcome by relating what she thinks Lois “must have” felt.  Sometimes whole paragraphs are filled with two or three of these.

The proliferating must haves (68 in all) become saddening. With the exception of Kathleen, who kept her own diary, so much is unknown because these women’s lives were not recorded by themselves or others. Ms. Fletcher is able to recoup some of their stories by interviewing surviving family members, but the gaps are enormous. Too often the biographer forces her narrative.

Here is a sentence about Lois watching her husband in a documentary of the expedition: “Lois must have strained to catch glimpses of Edgar and would have laughed with everyone else as images of crewman playfully running after Adélie penguins filled the screen.” Such a scene should be underplayed, not compromised with overstatement.

The documentary of the expedition brought the men to life, allowing the nation’s viewers to feel they had gone along with them, and Lois no doubt was part of that feeling — though what she was doing in her theater seat the biographer really cannot say. Instead, Ms. Fletcher could have presented the context of the scene, the qualities of character, and refrained from indulging in a bogus intimacy. 

“Widows of the Ice” has a great, epic story to tell that takes place in the domestic, sometimes elusive sphere of history, and that is precisely why the biographer should not diminish the poignancy of what has been lost.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Nothing Happens to the Brave: The Adventurous Life of America’s Most Glamorous and Courageous War Correspondent”