Robert Falcon Scott (June 6, 1868 - March 29, 1912) was a Royal Navy officer and explorer who led two expeditions to the Antarctic regions: the Discovery Expedition, 1901-04, and the ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition, 1910-13. During this second venture, Scott led a party of five which reached the South Pole on January 17, 1912, only to find that they had been preceded by Roald Amundsen's Norwegian expedition. On their return journey, Scott and his four comrades all perished from a combination of exhaustion, starvation and extreme cold. He was 43 years old. Following the news of his death, Scott became an iconic British hero, a status maintained for more than 50 years and reflected by the many permanent memorials erected across the nation. In the closing decades of the 20th century, the legend was reassessed as attention focused on the causes of the disaster that ended his and his comrades' lives, and the extent of Scott's personal culpability.
