Fresh Air Fiend (59 page)

Yet Cherry-Garrard maintains that Scott was heroic, and it is characteristic of his book that this subtlety is so memorably conveyed. It is in contemplation of the negative aspects of Scott—his weaknesses—that the heroism of his men can be truly appreciated. He had many triumphs, Cherry-Garrard says, and goes on, "Surely the greatest was that by which he conquered his weaker self, and became the strong leader whom we went to follow and came to love."

Scott's leadership qualities have been questioned. Scott has been variously depicted in other accounts as a blunderer, an enigma, and something approaching a villain, with a merciless ambition. But it is for the compassion in this apparent paradox that I have read
The Worst Journey in the World
again and again, because among many other things it is a book about overcoming enormous odds while at the same time preserving civility and humanity. Cherry-Garrard was quite specific in asserting that conventional heroism is essentially a display of foolishness. It is fear and faint-heartedness that make a person truly brave. He writes similarly of T. E. Lawrence: "The fact that in the eyes of the world Lawrence lived the bravest of lives did not help him prove to himself that he was no coward. For we are most of us cowards, and had not Lawrence been a coward to himself he would have had no need to prove his bravery. The man who is not afraid has no feelings, no sensitiveness, no nerves; in fact he is a fool." It was also a satisfaction to Cherry-Garrard that at the worst moments of the Winter Journey his comrades still said "please" and "thank you" and kept their tempers—"even with God."

He was of ancient lineage, and lived with his wife on his family estate. They had no children. In many ways he seemed a sort of lord of the manor, but the causes he championed were uncharacteristic of that role. In his later years, Cherry-Garrard became interested in animal rights. He was part of a vocal opposition to the destruction of penguins; he stood firm and made himself unpopular by campaigning against fox hunting. He saw himself as weak and nearsighted but regarded these apparent handicaps as a lasting source of strength.

He was always philosophical, his feet firmly on the ground. As he writes in his last chapter, "Never Again":

 

And I tell you, if you have the desire for knowledge and the power to give it physical expression, go out and explore. If you are a brave man you will do nothing; if you are fearful you may do much, for none but cowards have need to prove their bravery. Some will tell you that you are mad, and nearly all will say "What is the use?" For we are a nation of shopkeepers, and no shopkeeper will look at research which does not promise him a financial return within a year. And so you will sledge nearly alone, but those with whom you sledge will not be shopkeepers: that is worth a good deal. If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg.

W
HAT MOST PEOPLE
know of the conquest of the South Pole is that Captain Robert Falcon Scott got there and then died heroically on the return journey. That when the polar party lay tent-bound and apparently doomed, Captain Oates unselfishly said, "I am just going outside and may be some time"—and took himself out to die so that his comrades might live. That Scott represented self-sacrifice and endurance, and glorious failure, the personification of the British ideal of plucky defeat. Scott's expedition was essentially scientific; he was beset by bad weather. Roald Amundsen is sort of an afterthought: oh, yes, the dour Norwegian actually got to the Pole and planted his flag first, but that's a mere detail; he was very lucky and a little devious. So much for the South Pole.

Roland Huntford, in his
The Last Place on Earth
—its original title was
Scott and Amundsen
—proves all of this wrong, and much more to boot. Thus the kerfuffle.

It is a measure of the power of this book that when it first appeared in Britain, it caused an uproar. A few years later, a television series that was adapted from it created a flurry of angry letters to newspapers and a great deal of public discussion in which the book was rubbished and its author condemned, even vilified in some quarters, for suggesting that Fridtjof Nansen was engaged in a sexual affair with Kathleen Scott while her husband lay freezing in his tent.

The polar quest was not just exploration, a journey of discovery, but was indeed (although Scott tried to deny it) an unambiguous race to be the first at the South Pole. National pride was at stake, Norwegian and British; two different philosophies of travel and discovery, skis versus trudging, dogs versus ponies, canvas and rubberized cloth versus fur anoraks and Eskimo boots; two cultures—Norse equality ("a little republic" of explorers, as one of the Norwegians wrote) versus the severe British class system; and two sorts of leadership—more particularly, two different and distinct personalities, Roald Amundsen's versus Captain Scott's.

The great surprise of the book is that Amundsen was not a moody, sullen Scandinavian but rather a shrewd, passionate, approachable, thoroughly rational man who tended to understate his exploits, while Scott—quite the reverse of the British stereotype—was depressive, unfathomable, aloof, self-pitying, and prone to exaggerate his vicissitudes. Their personalities determined the mood of each expedition: Amundsen's was spirited and cohesive, Scott's confused and demoralized. Amundsen was charismatic and focused on his objective; Scott was insecure, dark, panicky, humorless, an enigma to his men, unprepared, and a bungler, but in the spirit of a large-scale bungler, always self-dramatizing.

"It was Scott who suited the sermons," Huntford writes. "He was a suitable hero for a nation in decline." Amundsen had made the conquest of the Pole "into something between an art and a sport. Scott had turned Polar exploration into an affair of heroism for heroism's sake." Captain Oates's mother, who was privy to a running commentary on the Scott expedition through her son's letters home—Oates was throughout a remarkable witness—called Scott the "murderer" of her son. As for Oates's opinion, "I dislike Scott intensely," he wrote in Antarctica.

Far from being a belittler or having an ax to grind about the phlegmatic British, Huntford merely points out that Britain took Scott as a necessary hero; it is not the British character that is being assailed in this book, but the process by which Scott took charge of the disastrous expedition. Scott was the problem. Though he knew little of actual command (and was unsuited to it), he was ambitious and sought advancement, even glory, in the Royal Navy. He was a manipulator and knew how to find patrons, which he did in Sir Clements Markham, a wonderfully sly subsidiary character in the narrative—vindictive, pompous, queenly, attracted to Scott more for Scott's being strangely epicene. This femininity in Scott's personality was remarked upon by one of his own men, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest in the expedition. Cherry-Garrard also mentions that the men considered Amundsen "a blunt Norwegian sailor" rather than "an explorer of the markedly intellectual type," sagacious and weather-wise.

The weather has always been regarded as the determining factor in Amundsen's success and Scott's failure. Yet it offered little advantage: conditions were pretty much the same for both expeditions; the fact was that Amundsen was far better prepared, and Scott left no margin of safety for food, fuel, or weather. For a journey of four months, Scott had not allowed for four days' bad weather. Parallel diary entries for a given period show Amundsen hearty and bucked up as he skis through fog, and just behind him Scott's diary shows Scott fatigued, depressed, complaining, slogging along. Huntford sees this not as a difference in style but in approach:

 

Scott ... expected the elements to be ordered for his benefit, and was resentful each time he found they were not. This was a manifestation of the spiritual pride that was Scott's fatal flaw.

The difference between the two rivals is expressed in the way each called on the Deity. Scott did so only to complain when things went wrong; Amundsen, to give thanks for good fortune. In any case, Scott was an agnostic and believed in science; Amundsen was a Nature-worshipper. For that reason alone, Amundsen found it easier to accept the caprice of blizzard and storm. He and his companions were in tune with their surroundings; they were spared the angst that tormented Scott and, through him, pervaded the British expedition.

 

The Norwegian expedition, though vastly underfunded, were all of them skiers, had a better diet, simpler but more sensible gear, and the bond of friendship. Skis were a mere novelty to the non-skier Scott, whose class-ridden expedition had plenty of money and patrons. He had planned to depend on ponies and motorized sledges, but when these proved useless he was reduced to hauling sledges by hand. In the base camp, long before Scott's party set out for the Pole, one of his men—significantly it was the one Norwegian, Tryggve Gran—wrote, "Our party is divided, and we are like an army that is defeated, disappointed and inconsolable."

Amundsen had heart and compassion but had his peculiarities. He had a prejudice against doctors and wouldn't take one on an expedition. "He believed that a doctor created sickness," Huntford writes, "and, because of [a doctor's] priest-like role, meant divided command." On the other hand, his men were master navigators. Only one of Scott's men could navigate, and he was not taken on the polar party, though at the last minute Scott decided to bring along an extra man, which meant that rations would inevitably be short.

Casting a long shadow over the polar quest was the towering figure of Fridtjof Nansen, the greatest polar explorer, who was in fact bipolar—that is to say, manic-depressive. Nansen "demythologised polar exploration," and dismissed his own heroic first crossing of Greenland as "a ski tour."

It is worth looking at Nansen for a moment, to understand his importance in the race to the Poles. It hardly matters that he never actually managed to stand on either Pole. Without Nansen's pioneering use of skis and dogs, Amundsen would not have made it to the South Pole; and Nansen was Amundsen's inspiration in his airship crossing of the North Pole. (It is now pretty much agreed that Robert Peary was telling a whopper when he claimed that he and his African-American partner, Matthew Henson, were first at the North Pole.)

Nansen began as a pioneer neurologist, a scientist and researcher. The polar regions were not the only unknown places in the world in Nansen's time. The human body also had its mysterious terrain. The erroneous "nerve net" theory of the central nervous system had not yet been disproved. Nansen's descriptions of nerve mechanisms were revolutionary, and correct. "His role was that of the often underrated historical figure; the enunciator of principles. He was one of the great simplifiers," Huntford writes. But Nansen went further as an imaginative scientist, prophesying that the tangle of nerve fibers would be proven to be "the true seat of the psyche."

His own psyche was complex and disturbed. His father was a stern, remote, and difficult man, and Nansen grew up having to prove himself. He too was a stern and remote father, which is perhaps not surprising. But bringing his micromanaging and fussbudgetry to exploration changed the whole business entirely and made it much more successful. Nansen, a passionate skier, saw this as the way to conquer the Poles. He was unorthodox in expedition planning: he opted for lightness and speed. He invented a new sort of cookstove, a compact sleeping bag, warmer clothes; he even devised a different cuisine. He invented a small landing craft, and in designing the research vessel
Fram,
he came up with a brilliant solution to sailing in polar winters. As an oceanographer he accurately predicted how a team might float north on current-borne ice. He was undoubtedly the first polar explorer to see the kayak as the marvel it is, and to use it.

Like many priapic men, Nansen was essentially solitary, a fantasist, a loner, a non-sharer—though he slept with many women, from the Valkyries in his native land to the duchess of Sutherland and Kathleen Scott. He was romancing Mrs. Scott even as her husband was breathing his last on his homeward journey, writing a pathetic note to the faithless woman. Nansen was a fickle, exasperating lover. Marriage and love affairs could throw him—later in life he begged Mrs. Scott in vain to marry him—but he was dauntless in exploration.

The Age of Discovery ended with the attainment of the South Pole. The trouble with exploration firsts is that they are nearly always generated by the meanest and narrowest demands of nationalism. Norway, emerging from Sweden's shadow in the last decades of the nineteenth century, needed heroes. Nansen was willing and was well equipped. He was physically strong, a true athlete, an intellectual, a scientist. He was handsome, humane, and well read—loved Goethe, spoke English well. He was something of an Anglophile.

That he was a legend in his own time made him more attractive to the ladies and got him invited to Sandringham, where he hobnobbed at Christmastime with King Edward VII (and noted with hot eyes that Mrs. Keppel was in residence, as well as Queen Alexandra); he played bridge with the queen of Spain and his own Queen Maud and the duke of Alva; and he went further, paddling palms and pinching fingers with Queen Maud. "Now don't you go and fall in love with Queen Maud!" Nansen's wife wrote from Norway. The Nansens seldom traveled together. The marriage that produced five children was unhappy, and Eva Nansen's early death caused a guilty grief in Nansen that was like madness. Remarriage did not ease his spirit.

Seconded to serve as a diplomat, he dealt directly with Lenin, who instructed his cronies, "Be extremely polite to Nansen, extremely insolent to Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau." Nansen was never less than a hero. But as he grew more famous, he became ever more distracted and sadder. For his inventiveness, his energy, and his fearlessness, he is for me the greatest of the polar explorers.

Because of Nansen's many accomplishments, he has been described as the "Renaissance ideal of the universal man," which isn't pushing things at all. It is clear that Nansen succeeded, as so many people do, precisely because of the weaknesses in his character—not just his impatience and his questionable leadership qualities, but also his fear, for fear is a necessity that prevents the best explorers from being foolhardy. Nansen saw himself as Faustian, and his biographer describes him as a "driven and tormented man who, in spite of his triumphs, felt strangely unfulfilled."