In my day job I sometimes take groups of kids to this place, the Scott Polar Museum in Cambridge.
Before we go on trips there we do an activity which involves making a list of what you would take with you on a trip to the Antarctic. This is an odd task to give them, because the big reveal (you wouldn’t take ponies instead of dogs or dress in tweed instead of furs, but guess who did!) is never made. Not a huge surprise as the Scott Polar Museum was founded in memoriam of Robert Falcon Scott, by one of his associates, using funds raised in response to his (heroically?) disastrous trip.
The “was Scott a tragic hero or a tragic idiot?” pendulum has swung forwards and backwards a few times in the last few decades, and it’s probably beyond the scope of this site to come down on one side or the other, except to say that flawed human beings are the kind interesting stories are written about, so we shouldn’t be surprised that more attention is paid to Scott’s doomed trip than to the success of Roald Amundsen, the supposedly cold, professional Norwegian polar explorer who soundly beat him to the South Pole and lived to tell the tale.
As with many old stories, the tale of the trip has acted as tea leaves, in which we see what we want to see. Was he a hero, showing the pluck and courage of boarding school and the army? Was he an egotist, refusing all intelligent input and taking his men to their doom? Was he a hero of science, losing his life to bring back 35lbs of geological specimens? Was he a typical man of the British Empire, brought up to believe that confidence in yourself and your country should be the be all and end all, with a legacy of encouraging the same type, these “heroes” whose blustering incompetence won short-term plaudits, but sowed the seeds of many of the problems of the modern world?
These debates are (IMO!) ultimately more interesting than the story of the expedition, but that’s what we’re here for anyway, so here are some resources on Robert Falcon Scott and the Terra Nova Expedition of 1910—1913