8 Words That Can Change Your Life (Part 4)

The story below is Part 4, the final part, of Chapter 2 from an unpublished book by Dale Carnegie. Part 3 is here. Enjoy :)

Part 4:

I have read almost every book every written on fear; and I find that they have no more important message than this: substitute thoughts of courage for thoughts of fear. Let me repeat what Doctor Albert Edward Wiggam says in The Marks of an Educated Man,

"If You can keep your attention fixed on courage instead of fear, you can walk through Hell and be unafraid.”

Let me tell you the story of five men who did just that. It is one of most inspiring stories I know - one of the most heroic and one of the of most tragic. It is the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's struggle to reach the South Pole in 1912. On the final dash for the Pole, Scott and his four companions harnessed themselves to a sledge that weighed a thousand pounds. Day after day, they slogged over fields of rough ice, each man pulling, gasping and choking in the thin frigid air nine thousand feet above sea level.

After months of struggle, they reached a spot that explorers had sought for centuries, a spot where nothing lives or breathes, a spot where there is no sound because there is no ear to hear, a spot undisturbed by man since the Six Days of Creation - the South Pole. But instead of the glory and exultation that they expected, they found nothing but consternation and heartbreak. For there at the Pole, whipping triumphantly in the wind, was the flag of Norway! Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, had reached the Pole five tragic weeks before they did.

The story of their tragic struggle back toward civilization is an Odyssey of suffering. The stinging blasts coated their features with ice and froze their very beards. They stumbled and fell, and every injury brought them a step nearer to death. First, Petty Officer Evans, the strongest man in the outfit, slipped and crashed his skull against the ice, and died.

Then Captain Oates fell ill. His feet were frostbitten. He could hardly walk. He knew he was holding his companions back. So one night Oates did a godlike thing. He walked out into a raging blizzard to die in order that others might live. Without melodrama, he calmly announced: "I'm going outside. I may be gone some time."

He was gone forever.

His frozen body was never found. But today a monument stands on the spot of his disappearance. It reads "Hereabouts died a very gallant gentleman."

Scott and his two companions staggered on. They no longer looked like men. Their noses, their fingers, their feet were almost brittle with cold. And on the nineteenth of February, 1912, fifty days after they had left the Pole, they pitched camp for the last time. They had fuel enough to make two cups of tea apiece, and enough food to keep them alive for two more days. They thought they were saved. They were only eleven miles away from a depot of buried supplies. With one terrible march they could make it.

Suddenly they were overwhelmed with tragedy. Down over the rim of the earth roared a howling blizzard, a fury of wind so fierce, so sharp, that it cut ridges in the ice. No creature on earth could face it and live. Scott and his men were held prisoners in their tent for eleven days while the blizzard raged and snarled. Their supplies were exhausted. It was the end and they knew it.

They had an easy way to meet death. They had brought opium along for just such an emergency. A big dose of opium and they could all lie down to pleasant dreams, never to wake again. That would have been the easy way out, the cowardly way out. But they refused to take it. They resolved to die like men. They literally died like angels. We know how they died because during the last hour of his life, Captain Scott wrote a letter to Sir James Barrie, describing the end. "Good-bye," the letter read, "good-bye, I am not at all afraid of the end. . . . -We're in a desperate state. Feet frozen, etc. No fuel and a long way from food, but it would do your heart good to be in our tent, to hear our songs and our cheery conversation."

One day eight months later when the Antarctic sun shone peacefully over the gleaming ice, their frozen bodies were found by a searching party.

They were buried where they perished - buried under a cross made of two skis lashed together. And over their common grave were written these beautiful words from Tennyson:

"One equal temper of heroic hearts

Made weak by time and fate but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield."

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