I am just going outside...

What must it be like to be remembered for one's last words? I suppose it isn't "like" anything; after all, to have last words, one must be dead, and at that point - to an extent - does it matter what people remember you for at all?

Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates set off for the South Pole as a member of Captain Scott's ill-fated team at the end of the year in 1911. The romantic age of Arctic exploration was well underway, but the bottommost point of the earth had not yet been reached, and the nearly 900-mile journey would not be an easy one. The plan was to take the journey in stages, setting up checkpoints along the way until Scott and just four of his core group remained to reach the Pole in 79 days, only to find they had been beaten at the race - a Norwegian tent and a note from an just 35 days earlier marked their destination.

The return journey was catastrophic. Poor weather, low visibility, meager rations, injuries, scurvy, and frostbite slowed the party to a crawl. One member, Edgar Evans, died from a concussion sustained during a fall while traversing a glacier field. Despite the diminished size of the group, supplies were low enough and the pace was painstaking enough that it was clear the next base, where food and help would be assured, was impossibly distant. Oates, with his severely frostbitten feet (current speculation also suggests that scurvy had reopened a wound to the thigh sustained during the Second Boer War), knew he was slowing everyone to their deaths, and asked to be left behind. Scott refused. The next day, the day before his 32nd birthday, Oates knew he could not go on, and so walked shoeless into the snow, saying to his companions, "I am just going outside, and may be some time." It was -40° (interestingly, the scale makes no difference - this temperature is the equilibrium point for Fahrenheit and Celsius). This, wrote Scott, was "the act of a brave man and an English gentleman."

Ironically, or just plain tragically, the brave sacrifice made no difference. Four days and twenty miles later, the remaining three men were caught in a snow storm and killed by the blizzard. A search party recovered their frozen remains nine months later, but Captain Oates was never recovered; the movement of ice floes on the Ross Ice Shelf had long since taken his body to be crushed under ice and drowned in the freezing arctic water.

In some ways his death, just before the start of WW1, marks the end of an idealized era of chivalry, gentlemanliness, sacrifice, and selfless bravery. In a few short years, dog-sled exploration of 'Terra Nova' would truly be a thing of the past, and horse-drawn gun wagons would be rolling across Europe.

Here's a painting by J.C. Dollman done in 1913, entitled A Very Gallant Gentleman, which, despite its disturbingly poignant subject matter, is now kept in relative obscurity at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

I don't know...depending on your point of view, the most depressing part of it all is that, for the majority of us, the name Lawrence Oates means nothing at all.