Thoughts on the Seventeenth of January, Two Thousand and Twelve.

I've been thinking about this day for a long time.

Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the day on which Captain Scott -- brave, bold Robert Falcon Scott -- arrived with four other intrepid British explorers at the South Pole.

The Scott party at the South Pole, looking as miserable as you might expect. L-R: Oates, Bowers, Scott, Wilson, Evans

They had walked a total of 895 miles, dragging behind them enormous sleds laden with supplies. The plan, of course, was to be the first human beings to set foot at the remote and desolate bottom of the world.

They walked 895 miles to find the Norwegian flag that Roald Amundsen and his men had planted at the Pole a month earlier.

Scott's diary entry for the day is heartbreaking. "The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected," he wrote. "Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority."

And then there was nothing left to do but ... walk back to their base camp.  Eight hundred ninety-five miles away.

All five members of Scott's party would die trying to get there.

A quarter of a century ago, I discovered Ted Tally's intriguing play TERRA NOVA and fell in love with it at once. After a while, though, I realized that my fascination was not so much with the play as with the real events on which it was based: the disastrous 1911-1912 British expedition to the South Pole.

The men of the SIU production of TERRA NOVA. L-R: (standing)Brent Lappin, David Flavin, Paul Engelhardt, Tyler Warfield, (seated) Don Evans, Mike Seagle

I directed a production of TERRA NOVA in 1987 and so was inspired to learn everything I could about the real expedition. Captain Scott and his doomed companions -- Wilson, Oates, Evans, and Bowers -- filled my waking thoughts and dreams alike. As our little band of immensely talented actors began to cast the shadows of these long-dead men, my fascination deepened into something approaching obsession.

What was so gripping about this story, this tragic page from history?

I imagine part of it was the novelty of the story for me, an American. From British friends I learned that no child can grow up in England without knowing all the details of the Scott expedition. And English boys had Scott and his men held up to them as role models, as examples of what a Real Englishman should be like. They were continually reminded of the noble sacrifice of Oates, who saw that the food and fuel rations could not possibly keep the entire company alive -- and left the shelter of their only tent, saying "I am just going outside and may be some time." My British friends told me it could be disheartening for a little boy to be continually compared -- unfavorably -- to a man like Oates.

And now that the centennial of that most awful day in Scott's life has come, I am wondering again why my soul is so stirred by the hopeless plight of these five men, walking back from the game they lost, more alone than any other people on the planet. They would be pinned down by blizzards, watch one of their number die after a fall, see another sacrifice himself, and then the rest would die huddled together in their tent, starving and freezing.

Or did they die of broken hearts?

Some critics, in the intervening century, have observed that Scott missed every opportunity to succeed the way Amundsen did. He was too proud, they say, too set in his ways, too sure of his own ideas even when they were untested. Some have even said that he was sure he would arrive at the Pole first -- and bring everyone back alive -- simply because he was British.

If so, I can't say I admire him very much. I don't think there's anything to be praised in simply being stubborn.

And perhaps that is the fascination the story has held for me. Is it a quorum on our concept of manhood? Is someone who sets out on an impossible task with great gusto a Real Man -- or simply a fool?

This I do admire: Scott kept his diary right up to the end, and his last written words were a plea that his wife and son and the families of all his men would be cared for. "For God's sake look after our people," he wrote, and there his record ends.

We don't know if he was granted the release of death at that moment. I hope he was. I would like to think of Scott as leaving this world with the thought, not of the praise of men or of his place in the history books, but of the loved ones left behind.