The Worst Journey in the World (86 page)

All this heartsickness has passed away now; and the future explorer will
not concern himself with it. He will ask, what was the secret of
Amundsen's slick success? What is the moral of our troubles and losses? I
will take Amundsen's success first. Undoubtedly the very remarkable
qualities of the man himself had a good deal to do with it. There is a
sort of sagacity that constitutes the specific genius of the explorer;
and Amundsen proved his possession of this by his guess that there was
terra firma in the Bay of Whales as solid as on Ross Island. Then there
is the quality of big leadership which is shown by daring to take a big
chance. Amundsen took a very big one indeed when he turned from the route
to the Pole explored and ascertained by Scott and Shackleton and
determined to find a second pass over the mountains from the Barrier to
the plateau. As it happened, he succeeded, and established his route as
the best way to the Pole until a better is discovered. But he might
easily have failed and perished in the attempt; and the combination of
reasoning and daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated.
All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative whaling captain
might have refused to make Scott's experiment with motor transport,
ponies and man-hauling, and stuck to the dogs; and to the use of ski in
running those dogs; and it was this quite commonplace choice that sent
Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or
dogs, and no great hardship either. He never pulled a mile from start to
finish.

The very ease of the exploit makes it impossible to infer from it that
Amundsen's expedition was more highly endowed in personal qualities than
ours. We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have
suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition,
with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more
important than any other acre of the plateau. We followed in the steps of
a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its
forerunners: Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most
efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We
were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took
on the work of two or three expeditions.

It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a division of energy.
Scott wanted to reach the Pole: a dangerous and laborious exploit, but a
practicable one. Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin:
a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which is none the less
impracticable because the three men who achieved it survived by a
miracle. These two feats had to be piled one on top of the other. What
with the Depôt Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were
sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and our worst year
was still to come. We, the survivors, went in search of the dead when
there was a possibly living party waiting in the ice somewhere for us to
succour them. That turned out all right, because when we got back, we
found Campbell's party self-extricated and waiting for us, alive and
well. But suppose they also had perished, what would have been said of
us?

The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things
were done. He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how
they could have been got up and down the Beardmore. He is scandalized
because 30 lbs. of geological specimens were deliberately added to the
weight of the sledge that was dragging the life out of the men who had to
haul it; but he does not realize that it is the friction surfaces of the
snow on the runners which mattered and not the dead weight, which in this
case was almost negligible. Nor does he know that these same specimens
dated a continent and may elucidate the whole history of plant life. He
will admit that we were all very wonderful, very heroic, very beautiful
and devoted: that our exploits gave a glamour to our expedition that
Amundsen's cannot claim; but he has no patience with us, and declares
that Amundsen was perfectly right in refusing to allow science to use up
the forces of his men, or to interfere for a moment with his single
business of getting to the Pole and back again. No doubt he was; but we
were not out for a single business: we were out for everything we could
add to the world's store of knowledge about the Antarctic.

Of course the whole business simply bristles with "ifs": If Scott had
taken dogs and succeeded in getting them up the Beardmore: if we had not
lost those ponies on the Depôt Journey: if the dogs had not been taken so
far and the One Ton Depôt had been laid: if a pony and some extra oil had
been depôted on the Barrier: if a four-man party had been taken to the
Pole: if I had disobeyed my instructions and gone on from One Ton,
killing dogs as necessary: or even if I had just gone on a few miles and
left some food and fuel under a flag upon a cairn: if they had been first
at the Pole: if it had been any other season but that.... But always the
bare fact remains that Scott could not have travelled from McMurdo Sound
to the Pole faster than he did except with dogs; all the king's horses
and all the king's men could not have done it. Why, then, says the
practical man, did we go to McMurdo Sound instead of to the Bay of
Whales? Because we gained that continuity of scientific observation which
is so important in this work: and because the Sound was the
starting-point for continuing the exploration of the only ascertained
route to the Pole, via the Beardmore Glacier.

I am afraid it was all inevitable: we were as wise as any one can be
before the event. I admit that we, scrupulously economical of our
pemmican, were terribly prodigal of our man-power. But we had to be: the
draft, whatever it may have been on the whole, was not excessive at any
given point; and anyhow we just had to use every man to take every
opportunity. There is so much to do, and the opportunities for doing it
are so rare. Generally speaking, I don't see how we could have done
differently, but I don't want to see it done again; I don't want it to be
necessary to do it again. I want to see this country tackle the job, and
send enough men to do one thing at a time. They do it in Canada: why not
in England too?

But we wasted our man-power in one way which could have been avoided. I
have described how every emergency was met by calling for volunteers, and
how the volunteers were always forthcoming. Unfortunately volunteering
was relied on not only for emergencies, but for a good deal of everyday
work that should have been organised as routine; and the inevitable
result was that the willing horses were overworked. It was a point of
honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told
afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They
should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never
insisted on a regular routine.

Money was scarce: probably Scott could not have obtained the funds for
the expedition if its objective had not been the Pole. There was no lack
of the things which could be bought across the counter from big business
houses—all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment was
first-class—but one of the first and most important items, the ship,
would have sent Columbus on strike, and nearly sent us to the bottom of
the sea.

People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west
from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of
magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively
to the resources of that time, much better than the one old tramp in
which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and morning are
the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers
can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration
ad hoc
.
Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra
Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for
the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar
expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific
work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act
making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply
between London Bridge and Ramsgate.

And then the begging that is necessary to obtain even this equipment.
Shackleton hanging round the doors of rich men! Scott writing begging
letters for months together! Is the country not ashamed?

Modern civilized States should make up their minds to the endowment of
research, which includes exploration; and as all States benefit alike by
the scientific side of it there is plenty of scope for international
arrangement, especially in a region where the mere grabbing of territory
is meaningless, and no Foreign Office can trace the frontier between King
Edward's Plateau and King Haakon's. The Antarctic continent is still
mostly unexplored; but enough is known of it to put any settlement by
ordinary pioneer emigration, pilgrim fathers and the like, out of the
question. Ross Island is not a place for a settlement: it is a place for
an elaborately equipped scientific station, with a staff in residence
for a year at a time. Our stay of three years was far too much: another
year would have driven the best of us mad. Of the five main journeys
which fell to my lot, one, the Winter Journey, should not have been
undertaken at all with our equipment; and two others, the Dog Journey and
the Search Journey, had better have been done by fresh men. It is no use
repeating that Englishmen will respond to every call and stick it to the
death: they will (some of them); but they have to pay the price all the
same; and the price in my case was an overdraft on my vital capital which
I shall never quite pay off, and in the case of five bigger, stronger,
more seasoned men, death. The establishment of such stations and of such
a service cannot be done by individual heroes and enthusiasts cadging for
cheques from rich men and grants from private scientific societies: it is
a business, like the Nares Arctic expedition, for public organization.

I do not suppose that in these days of aviation the next visit to the
Pole will be made by men on foot dragging sledges, or by men on sledges
dragged by dogs, mules or ponies; nor will depôts be laid in that way.
The pack will not, I hope, be broken through by any old coal-burning ship
that can be picked up in the second-hand market. Specially built ships,
and enough of them; specially engined tractors and aeroplanes; specially
trained men and plenty of them, will all be needed if the work is to be
done in any sort of humane and civilized fashion; and Cabinet ministers
and voters alike must learn to value knowledge that is not baited by
suffering and death. My own bolt is shot; I do not suppose I shall ever
go south again before I go west; but if I do it will be under proper and
reasonable conditions. I may not come back a hero; but I shall come back
none the worse; for I repeat, the Antarctic, in moderation as to length
of stay, and with such accommodation as is now easily within the means of
modern civilized Powers, is not half as bad a place for public service as
the worst military stations on the equator. I hope that by the time Scott
comes home—for he is coming home: the Barrier is moving, and not a trace
of our funeral cairn was found by Shackleton's men in 1916—the
hardships that wasted his life will be only a horror of the past, and his
via dolorosa
a highway as practicable as Piccadilly.

And now let me come down to tin tacks. No matter how well the thing is
done in future, its organizers will want to know at first all we can tell
them about oil, about cold, and about food. First, as to oil.

Scott complains of a shortage of oil at several of his last depôts. There
is no doubt that this shortage was due to the perishing of the leather
washers of the tins which contained the paraffin oil. All these tins had
been subjected to the warmth of the sun in summer and the autumn
temperatures, which were unexpectedly cold. In his Voyage of the
Discovery Scott wrote as follows of the tins in which they drew their oil
when sledging: "Each tin had a small cork bung, which was a decided
weakness; paraffin
creeps
in the most annoying manner, and a good deal
of oil was wasted in this way, especially when the sledges were
travelling over rough ground and were shaken or, as frequently happened,
capsized. It was impossible to make these bungs quite tight, however
closely they were jammed down, so that in spite of a trifling extra
weight a much better fitting would have been a metallic screwed bung. To
find on opening a fresh tin of oil that it was only three-parts full was
very distressing, and of course meant that the cooker had to be used with
still greater care."
^[330]
Amundsen wrote of his paraffin: "We kept it in
the usual cans but they proved too weak; not that we lost any paraffin,
but Bjaaland had to be constantly soldering to keep them tight."
^[331]

Our own tins were furnished with the metallic screwed stoppers which
Scott recommended. There was no trouble reported
^[332]
until we came up to
One Ton Camp when on the Search Journey. Here was the depôt of food and
oil which I had laid in the previous autumn for the Polar Party, stowed
in a canvas 'tank' which was buried beneath seven feet of snow; the oil
was placed on the top of the snow, in order that the red tins might prove
an additional mark for the depôt. When we dug out the tank the food
inside was almost uneatable owing to the quantity of paraffin which had
found its way down through seven feet of snow during the winter and
spring.

We then found the Polar Party and learned of the shortage of oil. After
our return to Cape Evans some one was digging about the camp and came
across a wooden case containing eight one-gallon tins of paraffin. These
had been placed there in September 1911, to be landed at Cape Crozier by
the Terra Nova when she came down. The ship could not take them: they
were snowed up during the winter, lost and forgotten, until dug up
fifteen months afterwards. Three tins were full, three empty, one a third
full and one two-thirds full.