, Henry Bowers and
Apsley Cherry-Garrard on their return from
Cape Crozier. Bowers joined
Robert Falcon Scott's
Terra Nova expedition in 1910, after having read the accounts of Scott's earlier
Discovery expedition, and of
Ernest Shackleton's expedition in . He had no previous polar experience but was recommended to Scott by the ex-President of the Royal Geographical Society, Sir
Clements Markham, who had been the main organizer of Scott's earlier
Discovery expedition. Markham had met Bowers aboard HMS
Worcester and had been so impressed with him that Scott invited Bowers to join the expedition without a prior interview. After Bowers fell 19 feet into a hold when loading the ship (someone had carelessly left the cover off), Scott was less impressed by the short, stout young man. "Well, we're landed with him now, and must make the best of it," said Scott, but he soon changed his mind. Originally appointed as a junior officer of the ship's party in charge of expedition stores, Bowers quickly distinguished himself as an extremely hard-working, highly skilled organiser. By the time the
Terra Nova left New Zealand, Scott had promoted him to be a member of the shore party, in charge of landing, stores, navigation and the arrangement of sledging rations, a role in which his extraordinary powers of memory served Scott well. He would pull up a chair to his bunk, stand on it, and use the bunk as a standing desk to work out some of these logistics while his bunkmate slept. During this time, Cherry-Garrard remembers: Bowers' middle watch especially became famous for the way in which he put the ship at the ice, and more than once Scott was alarmed by the great shock and collisions which were the result: I have seen him hurry up from his cabin to put a stop to it! But Bowers never hurt the ship, and she gallantly responded to the calls made upon her. Six months after arriving in Antarctica, Bowers made the winter journey to the
emperor penguin breeding grounds at
Cape Crozier in July 1911 with
Edward Adrian Wilson and
Apsley Cherry-Garrard. The aim of the party was to secure an unhatched egg for scientific study. In almost total darkness and with temperatures ranging from , they man-hauled their sledge from Scott's base at
Cape Evans to the far side of
Ross Island. Frozen and exhausted, they reached their goal, only to be pinned down by a blizzard. Their tent was ripped away and carried off by the wind, leaving the men in their sleeping bags under a thickening drift of snow. When the winds subsided, by great fortune they found their tent lodged about half a mile away in rocks. Having successfully collected three eggs and desperately exhausted, they eventually arrived back at Cape Evans on 1 August 1911, five weeks after setting off. Cherry-Garrard later referred to this trip as
The Worst Journey in the World, which became the title of his book published in 1922 recounting the fate of the 1908–1912 expedition. On 1 November 1911, the long trek to the
South Pole began. Scott had not originally planned to include Bowers in his polar party. He had been a member of the sledge team led by Scott's second-in-command, Lieutenant
Edward Evans and the last support party to accompany Scott and his team southward, but on 4 January 1912, just as Evans party was about to turn back, Bowers was assigned to the polar party. Some have argued that this seems to have been an impulsive decision by Scott; however, others, such as Antarctic explorer
Ranulph Fiennes, have indicated that this was a logical decision – particularly when one intended to increase the speed of a polar land-crossing, in an effort to reduce the consumption of resources. Only a few days earlier, he had ordered Evans's men to depot their skis, so that Bowers had to travel on foot to the pole while the others were still on skis. In addition, adding a fifth man to the party meant squeezing another person into a tent made for four, and having to split up rations that were packed in units for four men. The most likely motivation for Scott to add Bowers to the polar party was a realisation that he needed another experienced navigator to confirm their position at the South Pole to avoid controversy, such as that surrounding the claims of
Frederick Cook and
Robert Peary at the
North Pole, although why he did not substitute Bowers for another member of the party—most likely Oates—is not clear. To back this theory up, it was Bowers who eventually took the sights to fix the exact location of the geographic South Pole for the Polar party. It was also Bowers who was in charge of the expedition's remaining camera and took most of the famous photographs at the South Pole and at Amundsen's tent. On 16 January 1912, as Scott's party neared the Pole, it was Bowers who first spotted a black flag left at a camp made by
Roald Amundsen's polar party over a month previously. They knew then that they had been beaten in the race to be first to the South Pole. On 18 January, they arrived at the South Pole to find a tent left behind by Amundsen's party at their
Polheim camp; inside, a dated note informed them that Amundsen had reached the Pole on 14 December 1911, beating Scott's party by 35 days. , Henry Bowers and
Robert Falcon Scott. During the return journey, they first made good progress, but P.O.
Edgar Evans died on 17 February, presumably of a brain injury after a fall. At the end of February, temperatures fell sharply, the dog relief team failed to show up at the prearranged meeting point on 1 March, and Oates's foot became frostbitten and gangrenous, slowing the party down; in a vain attempt to save his companions, he deliberately walked out of their tent to his death on 16 March. Scott, Bowers, and Wilson continued on for three more days, progressing more, but were stopped short of the next food depot by a blizzard on 20 March. The blizzard continued for days, longer than they had fuel and food for. Too weak, cold and hungry to continue, they died in their tent on or soon after 29 March—Scott's last diary entry— from their base camp. Their bodies were found by a search party the following spring on 12 November 1912. The search party collapsed the tent over them, thus burying them where they lay under a snow cairn topped by a cross made from a pair of skis. Among the items they found and took back with them were the Kodak film rolls with the photographs at the South Pole and geological specimens which later proved the
Gondwana theory. The Bowers Hills in Antarctica, later renamed the
Bowers Mountains, were named in his honour. ==Character and nickname==