To read the last letter written by Captain Scott to his wife before he perished trying to return from the South Pole feels like being catapulted back to a humbling age where honour, stoicism and bravery were virtues hailed every bit as highly as a command of reading, writing and arithmetic.

It is not just that in this moving farewell letter — which is published today in full for the first time — Scott writes with an aching tenderness to his wife, Kathleen, about how “my thoughts must have constantly dwelt on you . . . the worst aspect of this situation is the thought that I shall not see you again — the inevitable must be faced”; or how the explorer urges her “to take the whole thing very sensibly”; or how he implores her to seize happiness “when the right man comes to help you in life”. It is not even the way Scott makes light of his plight by telling Kathleen she “must not imagine a great tragedy”, or his brisk way of dismissing the killing cold as “biting and sometimes angering”. No, what slaps you so soundly is how the letter seeps with a stoicism and sense of patriotic honour that can seem as distant from modern-day life as togas and tea clippers and trains that run on time.

Today it is hard to imagine anybody undertaking such an expedition without first negotiating a six-part television series (with name to be guaranteed in series title); a book deal sealed after a fierce auction at the Frankfurt Book Fair; a Hollywood movie tie-in; and a contract with a perfume house to saturate the Christmas gift market with cut-glass flasks of Eau d’Antarctic.

Scott might have been beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, but his honour and his example endure.