Artic Heros

By Ross McGuiness - 9th December, 2011

‘Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’

Next March marks the 100th anniversary of the death of British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, whose journal charts his attempt to reach the South Pole and return alive.

He perished with four of his expedition team two months after getting to the Pole – and having realised he had lost the race to his Norwegian adversary, Roald Amundsen.

‘The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances from those expected,’ wrote Scott after arriving there on January 17, 1912, when he was greeted with the Norwegian flag. ‘Great God! This is an awful place.’

Amundsen and his team of expert skiers had reached the Pole on December 14, 1911 – 100 years ago next week.

Their legacies are intertwined (the US research centre in Antarctica is called the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station), yet both have been maligned. Scott has been criticised by some who question his planning for the Terra Nova expedition.

Factfile: How Scott and Amundsen measured up

Amundsen is almost the forgotten man of the story, as it was largely retold through Scott’s  diary. The Norwegian has also been criticised for keeping his intentions from everyone until as late as possible.

He had aimed to conquer the North Pole but, on hearing that two Americans had claimed it already in separate voyages, he turned his attentions south. ‘I don’t think there was any other motive in Amundsen’s mind other than to be first and, when someone robbed him of one Pole, he cunningly switched without telling people to the other Pole,’ Britain’s own modern-day adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes told Metro.

Sir Ranulph said history in Antarctica started with Scott. ‘He got persuaded to go off into an area he knew nothing about,’ he added.

‘He had obviously thrown a few snowballs at his sisters in Plymouth but, as far as snow and ice knowledge was concerned, he knew nothing.’

For polar biographer Roland Huntford, Amundsen’s cunning was an admirable trait and Scott was incompetent in comparison. ‘The English view of heroism as exemplified by Scott is equated with suffering – if you don’t suffer, you’re not a hero,’ he said.

‘The Norwegian idea of a hero is the Homeric hero, the survivor, someone who survives by using ingenuity and cunning.’

In a controversial joint biography on Scott and Amundsen published in 1979, Huntford branded Scott a ‘bungler’. His position has not changed.

‘Scott’s adventures are glorified as a way of hiding his incompetence,’ he said. ‘He knew nothing about travelling on snow.

‘My view is, as Amundsen won the race, he’s the hero of the story. There was a necessity to sweep Amundsen’s victory under the carpet and glorify the dead hero.’

Huntford said Scott’s preferred method of travel across the ice, man-hauling, where the sledges were pulled by his team instead of dogs, cost him dearly.

Scott also used a route taken by Shackleton a few years before.

‘He was going over known territory but Amundsen was basically blazing a trail over completely unknown territory.

‘Scott was not exploring, he was simply covering ground.’ Sir Ranulph said Huntford’s book ‘assassinated Scott’s reputation’ and insisted Amundsen was ‘useless’ as an explorer.

‘An explorer discovers something, maps new territory, which is what Scott did,’ he said. ‘He not only mapped it but he surveyed it and he sketched it or photographed it.

‘He wanted to be first to the Pole but he didn’t want to do it in a rush and come back with nothing tangible other than having got there because he was a very inquisitive bloke.

‘His two expeditions down there, including when he died, produced far more scientific knowledge than all the other international polar expeditions of the first half of the 20th century, including the fact it was a continent, not floating islands.

‘The other guy, he didn’t explore: he raced. What did Amundsen produce? Nothing,’ said Sir Ranulph.

Kay Smith, curator of the museum of Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, concluded: ‘The difference is Scott and his companions died on the way back. It creates an emotional story that resonates and, even though he didn’t make it, that’s what people remember.’