Amundsen who? It’s almost inconceivable that the man who breezed up first to the South Pole and left a note pinned to his tent for Scott to find could be so much less famous than the men who inched their way up and then staggered back to die, however heroically, in their tracks.
The last Scott heard from Amundsen before leaving for the Antarctic, in 1910, was that he was making a trip to the Arctic. Then, a marvelously brief telegram reached them in Melbourne:
Madeira. Am going South, AMUNDSEN.
Cherry has the analysis:
The telegram was dramatically important, as will appear when we come to the last act of the tragedy. Captain Roald Amundsen was one of the most notable of living explorers, and was in the prime of life – forty-one, two years younger than Scott. He had been in the Antarctic before Scott, with the Belgica Expedition in 1897-9, and therefore did not consider the South Pole in any sense our property…. When he reached Madeira he sent this telegram, which meant, ‘I shall be at the South Pole before you.’ It also meant, though we did not appreciate it at the time, that we were up against a very big man.
They put the telegram at the back of their minds for the next several months. They were down on the ice, just returned from the Depot Journey that had taken eight of their ponies and seen Scott plunge down a crevasse to the length of his harness. Campbell had sent word from his side-expedition eastward:
‘Every incident of the day,’ Scott wrote, ‘pales before the startling contents of the mail-bag which Atkinson gave me – a letter from Campbell setting out his doings and the finding of Amundsen established in the Bay of Whales.
For an hour or so we were furiously angry, and were possessed with the insane sense that we must go straight to the Bay of Whales and have it out with Amundsen and his men in some undefined fashion or other there and then.
Amundsen had chosen a starting point 60 miles closer to the pole than Scott, and his dogs were able to start nearly two weeks earlier than Scott’s ponies.
From Campbell’s eye-witness report:
The Norwegians are in dangerous winter quarters, for the ice is breaking out rapidly from the Bay of Whales which they believe to be in Borchgrevink’s Bight, and they are camped directly in front of a distinct line of weakness. On the other hand if they get through the winter safely (and they are aware of their danger), they have unlimited dogs, the energy of a nation as northern as ourselves, and experience with snow-travelling that could be beaten by no collection of men in the world.
“The energy of a nation as northern as ourselves”! Here is just a hint of that colonial racism that simmered just below the surface in polite society. Cherry himself, two pages later, casually drops a slur of bewildering dimensions, dressed up as a compliment:
The truth was that Amundsen was an explorer of the markedly intellectual type, rather Jewish than Scandinavian, who had proved his sagacity by discovering solid footing for the winter by pure judgment.
It’s the natural arrogance of a culture that thinks itself at some sort of pinnacle of evolution (sound familiar to anyone?). The French were just as bad, 50 years later. Here’s Mario Marrett, a French explorer who spent a winter with the emperor penguins along with seven men. One was Australian:
An interesting thing that struck me was that he was the only one of us to fix up a photograph of someone dear to him – in his case his wife….
On consideration I came to the conclusion that the simple, direct, and almost naive way in which Dovers pinned his heart on his sleeve had something healthy and vital about it. That sort of thing is probably typical of an unsophisticated pioneering people. Americans, Australians, and Canadians all have something simple and natural in their behavior which makes us people of older civilizations seem sophisticated.
Moving on: In the end, it was indeed Amundsen that reached the pole a month ahead of Scott and in very much better shape, behind a horde of dogs and without man-hauling his sledge a single mile.
I have described what it had cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had still to suffer in returning until death stopped them. Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North. The moment Scott saw the Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already known.
There’s quite a bit more dissection of Amundsen strategy vs. Scott strategy. It’s not all pro-Scott revisionism, but most of it is. There’s the chivvying at Amundsen:
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.
But the main excuse? Science:
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.
He goes even farther, a bit fancifully, here:
The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things were done…. 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 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.
Here you realize that even though the “practical man” is right – that Amundsen was wiser, more experienced, more practical, more deserving – Cherry (and Scott) had their own degree of perverse rightness, too.
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.
Somehow, it comes off as both preposterous and admirable.
It’s so interesting to hear their side of the Amundsen voyage! And it’s sad (for many reasons) that the ice shelf on which he camped broke off and floated out to sea in 2000!
“Amundsen who? It’s almost inconceivable that the man who breezed up first to the South Pole and left a note pinned to his tent for Scott to find could be so much less famous than the men who inched their way up and then staggered back to die, however heroically, in their tracks.”
Not everyone imbibed the legends and myths of Victorian adventurers at their mother’s knee as you did, my boy. I learned in grade school that Amundsen was the “discoverer” of the South Pole. I never heard of Scott until I was 23 (incidentally, from the same source you did). Over the world, though, Amundsen is recognized as the premier polar explorer, while Scott is rightly consigned to a footnote.
VetNat
I didn’t intend to say that Amundsen is an absolute unknown – but I think it’s fair to say that compared to the Brits he’s relatively unknown. It’s true – and probably just – that Scott’s ordeals and the awe in which they are held have diminished. But that just means that the grand story now most familiar to the public is Shackleton.
Amundsen was certainly a monumental explorer – even Cherry said as much in 1922. But Amundsen’s story is not the one that’s endlessly repeated or made into movies. By pointing that out, I’m not slighting him – or glorifying Scott. That’s already been done, and it seems to say something about what we want in our heroes.
Amundsen was Norwegian, a man from a small country whereas Scott was an Englishman. That very fact explains why he’s relatively unknown, at least for Britons. Amundsen was the practical explorer, Scott was more a scientist and a dreamer than a true explorer. He believed that heroism meant a great deal of personal agony and sacrifice, and that’s no way to approach the dire and extreme elements of Antarctica. He willingly made the expedition even more difficult than it had to be. That’s stupidity, not heroism! His almost romantic approach to Antarctica greatly contributed to his death. The men did not have the right clothing, and above all the transportation system were poorly planned and simply too intricate. The motorized sledges, on which so much depended on, broke down almost immediately. And that’s only one example.
Amundsen had the practical and humble approach, the less spectacular one. Get to the Pole and get out asap! Work with nature to overcome it, you can never defeat nature by fighting! He had already learned from the Inuits how to be properly clothed to be able to face the elements. I’m Norwegian and maybe biased, but there are so many basic and obvious explanations to why Scott failed so miserably and died with his men. The bad weather they encountered doesn’t hide the fact they were doomed from the start.
Hi Trond,
Thanks for giving us an authentically Norwegian perspective. You’re dead on in what you say about Amundsen’s more practical and competent approach. I think it might be going a bit too far to say Scott’s men were doomed from the start. The English approach was cumbersome and perhaps a bit pig-headed, but it had sustained the men of the 1902 and 1908 expeditions without dooming them. Those expeditions reached halfway and 90% of the way to the Pole, respectively, and returned with all sledgers alive. I think the foul weather on the return journey had something to do with Scott’s death, and his men were heroic if misguided. Conceding that doesn’t diminish the truth that Amundsen was more elegant and accomplished (and heroic). Thanks again for your comment – Hugh
Hi there. I have been fascinated, almost obsessed by the story of the South Pole conquest since childhood and being Scottish have always endured the arrogance of our English neighbours in that they believe they have a God-given right to be the best or most deserving in anything that they do (particularly football/soccer) and the story of the pole was no different. In school we were always taught that Scott was a glorious hero and Amundsen was the villain of the piece but to me his methodology, meticulous planning, respect for the environment he was in and narrow-mindedness to attain his goals for me makes Amundsen a true hero. It was a shame that the two men were denied their true goals and I guess in an ideal world, if history could be written again, Amundsen would have conquered his beloved North whilst Scott would have captured the South.
Information about the early Antarctic expeditions:
http://www.antarctic.talktalk.net/