Only the husky dogs, curled up for a snooze, look entirely happy in a photograph taken more than a century ago on the Terra Nova, the ship that carried Captain Robert Falcon Scott on his fatal final attempt to conquer the south pole.

The silvery print, taken by the expedition’s official photographer Herbert Ponting, is one of five being sold at auction. Ponting’s magnificent images were intended for publicity when the explorers returned victorious. Instead they helped to make the story of the expedition – during which Scott and his companions died following the bitter discovery that they had been beaten to the pole by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen – one of the most famous in the annals of polar exploration.

Frozen in time: Scott at the South Pole Read more

The photograph of the Siberian ponies in their stable on the ship was taken in 1911 when it was already clear that bringing them was one of many mistakes in planning the mission.

“The ponies were a disaster from the start,” said Matthew Haley, the head of books and manuscripts at Bonhams auctioneers, which will sell the photographs in London on 1 February. “They weren’t at all happy when they got out into the ice and snow, but they weren’t keen on the ship either – they were kicking out all over the place, breaking their legs and having to be shot.”

The man standing by the ponies, with a distant anxious expression in his eyes, is Captain Lawrence Oates, who had paid £1,000 of his own money to join the expedition. He would become one of the four Scott chose to join him for the final march to the pole and died knowing that he was virtually crippled by gangrene and frostbite and would therefore slow the remaining three members of the group (one, Edgar Evans, had died a month earlier). He walked out of their tent into a blizzard on 17 March1912 with the famous remark: “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Herbert Ponting’s picture of the team beneath the Barne Glacier. Photograph: Oliver Williams/Bonhams

Haley’s favourite of the photographs is the view of the dogs resting beneath the Barne Glacier, when hopes were still high for the success of the venture. The dead ponies would become food for the dogs, but they too would die during the attempt. The expensive motor sledges, on which Scott was counting to do much of the heavy hauling, would prove useless long before the animals failed.

The tragic story of the expedition is personal to Haley: his great-great-uncle Harry Pennell was among the crew and took over command of the Terra Nova when Scott went onshore. He got back to England safely, only to die in 1916 when his ship was sunk at the Battle of Jutland.

Ponting returned to New Zealand on Terra Nova before Scott’s march to the pole, bringing back film and 1,700 glass plate negatives, which would illustrate fundraising lectures when the explorers returned victorious. Instead the images became their memorial after Scott and his companions – with letters and journals recording their fate – were found in their tent in November 1912, only a few miles from a food dump that could have saved their lives.

Ponting organised exhibitions, gave illustrated lectures and produced a film of the expedition, The Great White Silence. More than 1,000 of his glass plates are in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

The photographs in the sale are valued at up to £4,000 each. One was presented by George Simpson, a meteorologist to the expedition, to his old school, which had named a house in honour of Scott. The others were printed for Ponting for an exhibition in New Zealand in 1925.