Success Quote by Robert Falcon Scott

Cheerfulness, here, isn’t optimism so much as a final act of command. Robert Falcon Scott writes from the Antarctic death zone, when the expedition is effectively over and survival has narrowed to arithmetic: distance, rations, temperature, time. “We are very near the end” lands with the bluntness of a field report, but the clause that follows is where the sentence turns into a performance of character. “Have not and will not” is a vow in the future tense, a refusal to let the story end in panic, self-pity, or recrimination.

The intent is partly private - a man steadying himself and his companions - and partly public, aimed at the imagined reader who will eventually recover the words. Scott knows he’s writing for posterity, and that awareness shapes the subtext: if the body fails, the narrative must not. “Good cheer” sounds quaint, even underpowered against starvation and frostbite, which is exactly why it works. It’s the language of Edwardian stoicism, the cultural code that prized restraint over confession. By choosing understatement, Scott turns catastrophe into proof of discipline.

Context matters: this is not just personal tragedy but the collapse of a national romance about heroic conquest, arriving after the crushing discovery that Amundsen had already beaten them to the Pole. The line functions as reputational triage. It asks the world to remember not the miscalculations, but the demeanor - as if morale itself could be a last, clean victory.