As commander of the ship Discovery he led the National Antarctic Expedition (1900–04), surveying the interior of the continent and charting the Ross Sea. On a second expedition (1910–12) Scott and four companions made a journey to the South Pole by sled, arriving there in January 1912 to discover that the Norwegian explorer Amundsen had beaten them to their goal by a month. Scott and his companions died on the journey back to base, and their bodies and diaries were discovered by a search party eight months later. Scott, a national hero, was posthumously knighted. He was the father of the naturalist and artist Sir Peter Scott.