Robert Falcon Scott

Fire takes four of his ten planets, water three, earth two and a single one air, with five of the ten cardinal. Mercury, Venus and Uranus spread across nineteen degrees of Cancer. Saturn was the only retrograde planet. The record says Scott reached the South Pole in January 1912 to find Amundsen had been there a month earlier, and died with his party on the way back, and that his last journal entry asks people to look after their families.

Saturn sits at an awkward angle to Neptune at under half a degree, and the reading printed for that pair is structure dissolving: disillusionment, effort that seems to drain away, and the slow discovery that something relied upon was not solid. Set beside that record it looks like a description of the expedition. It is not one. It is a contact between two slow planets, held for everybody born across several years, and it was written as a general statement about mood long before this chart was cast. A man walked to the Pole, found a tent already there, and died on the way home. No arrangement of planets contains that, and a reading which appears to is the most dangerous kind on a page like this.

What the chart offers that belongs to him is milder. The Sun sits in quiet contact with Pluto at just over a quarter of a degree, power that is usable rather than overwhelming: resilience, and the ability to start again after a loss. Mars sits sixty degrees from Uranus at under three fifths, quick reflexes: acting well in an emergency. In a polar explorer both are readings a reader will want, they are also readings anybody with a job outdoors would be handed, and the second is a flat description of the trade rather than a finding about the man.

One more caveat belongs on this entry and it is about the date. The record gives 29 March 1912, which is the presumed date taken from a last journal entry, so the sky below is cast for a day nobody recorded at the time. Four contacts came inside three tenths of a degree of it: Venus sixty degrees from his natal Mars at a tenth, Mercury square his natal Venus at just over a tenth, the transiting Sun square his natal Mercury at fourteen hundredths, and the Moon in easy contact with his natal Neptune at just over a quarter. His own Moon sits eight arcminutes from the end of Sagittarius at noon with Capricorn still possible, so it is left out. The Moon that day was at its first quarter and eighty one per cent lit.