Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
said in a leader that 'he may not have played the game', a notion which has been handed down the
generations like a mildewed heirloom, resurfacing (for example) in 1995 in a biography of Scott's
widow written by her granddaughter: 'At best, Amundsen's secrecy was underhand.'
In his excellent topic
The Return to Camelot
, Mark Girouard points out that the code of medieval
chivalry and the cultural appendages it towed in its wake were revived and adapted in Britain
between the late eighteenth century and the First World War, and that the Scott myth should be
seen in the context of the vanished world of late Victorian and Edwardian England. In
Westward
Ho!
, as Tom swims to the North Pole Charles Kingsley conjures up the frozen spectres of dead
explorers. 'They were all true English hearts; and they came to their end like good knights-errant,
in searching for the great white gate that never was opened yet.' The chivalric code created ideals
of behaviour. The concept of playing the game, which loomed so large in the British perception of
Antarctic exploration and in the code of conduct of the English gentleman of that time, ultimately
derived from that of medieval knights. Oates appears in Baden-Powell's bestselling
Scouting for
Boys
, in which the scouts are portrayed as little knights, and while Scott was slugging back from
the Pole the play
Where the Rainbow Ends
was packing them in at London's Savoy theatre; it was
repeated, in fact, every Christmas till the 1950s - the
More-cambe & Wise Show
of its day. In this
piece of deathless drama St George appears in shining armour, there is talk of dying for England
and at the end audience and cast sing the national anthem together.
In the context of the British exploration of Antarctica and this chivalric code, Girouard con-
cludes that Scott's last message suggests an attitude in which heroism becomes more important
than the intelligent forethought which would make heroism unnecessary.
By and large, the war put an end to all that.
Amundsen didn't labour under such a burden. It wasn't science that motivated him; he just
wanted to get there first. He wasn't eloquent, either on paper or in person, and he never played to
an audience. It is revealing that he alone of the Big Four did not take a photographer to the ice. He
had his own demons, however. For reasons of his own, perhaps jealousy, he humiliated Hjalmar
Johansen, a polar explorer whose feats in the north with Nansen had rendered him a national hero.
Johansen was a member of Amundsen's team, but was excluded from the polar party, probably
because he criticised Amundsen's judgement. When Johansen shot himself in a seedy hotel room
back home in 1913, his friends held Amundsen responsible.
The Norwegians had practically grown up on skis - Olaf Bjaaland, one of the five who reached
the Pole, was a former national skiing champion. Luck, as far as they were concerned, had very
little to do with it. When the victorious polar party boarded the
Fram
at the end of the season,
the captain, Nilsen, chatted to Amundsen for an hour before asking, 'You have been there, haven't
you?' Both men recorded this in their journals. 'Victory awaits him who has everything in order,'
wrote Amundsen. 'Luck, people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the
necessary precautions in time - this is called bad luck.' When the five of them set out from Fram-
heim, their base, to ski to the Pole, the cook, Lindstrom, didn't even come out to say goodbye. In
order to toast the return of the polar party he had slept all winter with bottles of champagne in his
bed to stop them from bursting. In his long account of the race to the Pole Amundsen makes it
