Griffiths discusses the epic, ill-fated journey of Scott to the Antarctic and the diaries that Scott constructed in his own and his companions' final days. Griffiths then reflects on some of the imaginative re-writings of that expedition. He particularly focuses on Roland Huntford's Scott and Amundsen (1979) and also mentions Douglas Stewart's The Fire on the Snow. Griffiths is interested in 'the latitude for legitimate historical imagination, the speculative space'.