Historical Notes: Captain Scott - a great 20th-century hero

IF A man's present historical status can be measured by the number of books published about him, Ernest Shackleton the Antarctic explorer must be top of the pile, with something like a dozen biographies, reprints and accounts of his exploits currently available. Publishers go to great lengths to get his name on their lists; one of the reprints is 40 years old, billed in The Bookseller with unpretentious modesty as "The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told". The author, Alfred Lansing, cannot blush for he is long dead.

Yet when Shackleton published South, his account of his greatest exploit, in late 1919, he earned nothing from it, having assigned all the rights to a creditor. He was hard up, reduced to giving readings in a public hall twice a day, six days a week, for five months.

How different the story would have been today. Lansing's book will be serialised in a tabloid, the film rights are sold with Liam Neeson to star, praise is lavished by Sir Ranulph Fiennes - even though, since the time Lansing wrote it, no new primary sources have become available.

What then accounts for the explosive growth of the Shackleton fan club? It flourishes almost more mightily in the United States, with articles in The New Yorker and the business press claiming that his expedition "offers an exceptional study in crisis management".

There appear to be two reasons. One is that readers today find the story vastly more exciting if accompanied by a generous helping of photographs taken by the crew's highly creative cameraman, Frank Hurley. We understand, for the first time, all the terrors and beauties facing the explorers.

A second reason for the glorification of Shackleton followed the furore on publication in the early 1980s of Roland Huntford's popular Scott and Amundsen, which, admittedly short on illustrations, was not short on debunking of both Scott and Shackleton. Huntford's extensive scholarship was next bent, in his Shackleton (1985), on an exploration of the many fault lines in his subject's behaviour which had been long hidden. These two works had the effect of elevating Shackleton of the Merchant Marine at the expense of Scott of the Royal Navy.

Shackleton himself must take some of the blame for this. He did not like Scott, and he put the dagger in when he claimed for his own voyage south (1914-17) that his men had been through Hell yet "not a life lost". The contrast with the tragic end of Scott, Oates and the others was all the sharper for its economy of expression. But this unspoken comparison was a lie. He, Shackleton, lost three men. His expedition was made up of dual parties, each sailing a vessel he owned, each charged with conveying his expedition to a separate polar destination. While he sailed in Endurance, Captain Mackintosh took Aurora to the Ross Sea base. Mackintosh and two others died.

To this day the effect has been to besmirch Scott's character. Huntford's criticism of Scott is almost unqualified, a typical comment being that his leadership in 1911-12 was "mindless bravado". He equates Scott's failure with the decline of Britain as a great power. The refrain has been taken up with vigour by the Washington Post ("Shackleton placed the safety of his men above personal ambition") and The Observer ("Unlike Scott, Shackleton thought survival more important than glory"). Shackleton is now "a natural leader with incredible charisma" while Scott is derided even as a leader of a scientific expedition.

Scott's handwritten journals are displayed for all to read in the British Museum though until this year his text was out of print. Expurgated editions had been published shortly after his death by Lady Scott, Sir James Barrie and other friends, curiously described as "arranged by" them. It is surely time that Scott's reputation was revalued, bringing Huntford-type scholarship to bear in a more objective way on one of the century's great heroes.

Peter King is the editor of Shackleton's `South' (Pimlico, pounds 10) and `Scott's Last Journey' (Duckworth, pounds 20)