Tom Crean - Irish Legend, Antarctic Hero - Part 1: The Last Support Party

Tom Crean's Long Walk, Part 1: The Last Supporting Party

January 1912. Tom Crean stands 268 km from the South Pole, the dream of a decade within a fortnight's march. Then Captain Robert Falcon Scott sends him home.

Tom Crean was the raw-boned Kerryman who served on Discovery, Terra Nova and Endurance, and was there for the defining moments of all three. In Part 1 we follow him up the Beardmore Glacier as Scott's party closes in on the Pole, unaware that Roald Amundsen has already beaten them to it.

We look at Scott's controversial choice to keep his men guessing about who would make the final push, and his last-minute decision to take five men instead of four. That call upended a plan built around fours and left Crean, William Lashly and Lieutenant Edward Evans facing a 1,200 km journey home with a single navigator, thin air, failing bodies and a closing season.

Along the way: a Christmas Day crevasse fall, Crean's wit at the lip of the abyss, the moment Crean wept, snow blindness on the plateau, and a desperate gamble at the Shackleton Ice Falls that sends three men hurtling towards a black void.

In this episode

• The South Pole Inn at Anascaul, Crean's pub and shrine to the Heroic Age
• The race between Scott and Amundsen, and what the Pole meant
• Scott's selection of the polar party, and why it still divides historians
• The Last Supporting Party turns north
• Sliding blind down the Shackleton Ice Falls

Sources

• The Worst Journey in the World, Apsley Cherry-Garrard
• South with Scott, Edward Evans
• Under Scott's Command: Lashly's Antarctic Diaries, William Lashly
• An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean, Antarctic Survivor, Michael Smith

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