Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tents, fuel and depots - was arranged for four-man units, at the eleventh hour he decided that five
were to go to the Pole. The perfect hero of the great English myth never existed, just as our nation-
al emblems, the lion and the unicorn, never roamed the South Downs.
All the same, there is much that is heroic about Scott. His expeditions still constitute landmarks
in polar travel. As a man, rather than a Navy captain, Scott was much more than a wooden product
of his background. Like all the best people, he was beset by doubt. 'I shall never fit in my round
hole,' he wrote to his wife Kathleen, and on another occasion, 'I'm obsessed with the view of life
as a struggle for existence.' He was a good writer, especially towards the end of his journey. 'Will
you grow to think me only fitted for the outer courtyard of your heart?' he asked Kathleen. The
Antarctic possessed a virginity in his mind that provided an alternative to the spoiled and messy
world, and he wrote in his diary about 'the terrible vulgarizing which Shackleton has introduced
to the Southern field of enterprise, hitherto so clean and wholesome'.
Through his writings, Scott elevated the status of the struggle. It was no longer man against
nature, it was man against himself. The diaries reveal a sense of apotheosis: the terrible journey
back from the Pole was a moral drama about the attainment of self-knowledge. Scott went to the
mountaintop, there on the blanched wasteland. He failed to return from the last journey, but in that
failure he found a far more precious success. Defeat on this earthly plane was transfigured. The
journey becomes a quest for self-fulfilment, and Scott's triumph is presented as the conquering of
the self.
Similarly, after George Mallory and Sandy Irvine disappeared into the mists of Everest twelve
years after Scott perished, everyone quickly forgot what had actually happened and glorified the
climbers' transcendental achievements. At their memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral, the Bish-
op of Chester used a quotation from the Psalms to establish a connection between Mallory and
Irvine's climb and the spiritual journey upwards, referring to it 'as the ascent by which the kingly
spirit goes up to the house of the Lord'. So it was, too, that out of the tent on the polar plateau rose
the myth of the saintly hero.
By nimble sleight of hand in their portrayal of Scott, the mythmakers reversed the David and
Goliath roles of Norway and Britain. Scott was the gentlemanly amateur who played the game and
didn't rely on dogs. Amundsen, on the other hand, was a technological professional who cheated
by using dogs. Frank Debenham, Scott's geologist on the
Terra Nova
expedition, wrote in his topic
Antarctica: the Story of a Continent
, published in 1959, that both Scott and Shackleton deployed
techniques which were slower, more laborious, and failed, but that to criticise them for doing it
their way instead of Amundsen's 'is rather like comparing the man who prefers to row a boat
across a bay with the man who hoists up a sail to help himself'. Scott's advocates made a virtue of
the fact that he had hauled to the Pole without dogs or ponies, and they still do, but this is disin-
genuous. He had been perfectly prepared to use caterpillar motor-sledges and took three south on
the
Terra Nova
(these were a failure). Furthermore, as Debenham himself wrote, 'The fact of the
matter is that neither Scott nor Shackleton, the two great exponents of manhauling, understood the
management of sledge dogs.'
As he lay dying, Scott somehow found the rhetorical language to invest the whole ghastly busi-
ness with the currency of nobility. This is his greatest achievement, and with it he paved the way
