Captain Scott:
a second-rate hero?
After
a lifetime's research, Roland Huntford thinks he has
finally nailed the myth of Scott of the Antarctic: far from being a national
hero, the explorer was an amateur whose incompetence condemned his men to death
It
was hard to escape Captain Scott if you were a child growing up in
And
then, almost overnight, the Scott myth ended in 1979 with the publication of
Roland Huntford's book, ‘Scott and Amundsen’. For the
first time, the British and Norwegian expeditions to the south
pole were forensically examined side by side and Scott was found
seriously wanting.
The
undisputed facts remained the same, that Amundsen and his team reached the south pole on 15 December 1911 using skis, dogs and sledges,
before returning safely to their base camp just over a month later. And that,
after Scott's polar party reached the south pole on 17 January 1912 using skis,
dogs, sledges and man-hauling, the team died one by one: Edgar Evans died of
exhaustion, frostbite and starvation on or around 16 February; Captain Oates,
his leg frost-bitten and gangrenous, walked to his death on or around 17 March;
and Scott, Wilson and Bowers, too tired to go on, died in their tent out on the
Ross Ice Shelf on or around 21 March.
Everything
else in the story, however, was up for grabs. Where Amundsen's attention to
detail made his expedition seem no more demanding than a skiing trip in the
Norwegian outdoors, Scott's appeared a disaster almost from the off. According
to Huntford's account, he ignored the basic lessons
of previous polar expeditions by failing to either take enough dogs or learn
how to drive them properly; he took men who barely knew how to ski; he came
unprepared for extreme temperatures; he was indecisive, taking an extra person
with him to the pole when his supplies had been based on a team of four. Worst
was the veiled accusation that because of all this Scott had effectively
condemned his team to death.
It
was a damning indictment: one from which rehabilitation seemed impossible. And
yet, within 25 years or so, serious writers and academics began to rewrite
history in Scott's favour again. First came Ranulph
Fiennes in 2003, dismissing Huntford for not being an
explorer himself; in the same year, Susan Solomon suggested Scott had just been
unusually unlucky with the weather.
Huntford,
though, has never been one to duck a fight. He has devoted the last 35 years of
his academic career to the study of polar exploration, and in particular to the
Scott and Amundsen story. Indeed, his own reputation is now inextricably linked
to both men. Two years ago he wrote ‘Two Planks and a Passion’ and this week he
publishes ‘Race for the South Pole: The Expedition Diaries of Scott and
Amundsen’. The first of these was a history of skiing, the second the unedited
diaries, but the subtext of both was the same: to nail the Scott myth once and
for all.
The
Expedition Diaries breaks new ground by letting both men live and die side by
side in their own words. And so, on the very day Scott is complaining about
unexpectedly cold conditions, Amundsen writes that the temperatures are about
what he expected and he is making good progress. And on days when Scott is
tent-bound in a blizzard, Amundsen is again achieving his expected daily
distance, because he has brought proper sledge compasses. This is a story of
amateurs and professionals, heightened by entries from the diaries of Olav Bjaaland, Amundsen's lead skier, who makes the whole thing
sound like a day in the Norwegian mountains.
Even
more damning for Scott's reputation, Huntford has
restored all the cuts that Scott's family and literary executors had made to
his published diaries. Here we find a man given to blaming his colleagues for
his own failings; a man with a strong sense, quite early in the expedition,
that his preparations have been inadequate; a man who describes one of his
dying colleagues as stupid; a man who, on realising he has missed out on being
the first to the pole, writes that he can still salvage his reputation if he
can get the news to the outside world before Amundsen. A man
eager to mask his failure by playing up his mission's scientific endeavour.
A man who at one point writes his expedition is a shambles.
"Before
Scott left for the Antarctic, the British public had little interest in
him," says Huntford. "He was considered an
inferior version of Shackleton [who then held the
record for the going the furthest south] and polar exploration wasn't big in
the public imagination, being considered the preserve of the Royal Geographical
Society and the navy and therefore a hive of mediocrity. Those with the real
ability in extreme conditions went into mountaineering; the unwritten story of
British polar exploration is the men who didn't go."
Amundsen's
success in reaching the south pole was broadcast
almost a year before news of Scott's fate reached the outside world. In that
time, while some of the British newspapers were a little huffy about Amundsen
having concealed from Scott his intention of heading south, the British public
were fairly sanguine. Amundsen's
All
that changed in 1913 when news came through that Scott and his men had died.
"There was a public outpouring of grief almost on a par with what we later
saw with the death of Princess Diana," says Huntford.
"The British have frequently made a virtue of disaster, and have a
perverse attraction to romantic heroes who fail rather than to Homeric ones who
succeed. Most important of all was that Scott was dead; had he come home alive,
he would have been soon forgotten."
Yet
even this Diana moment was comparatively short-lived. When Scott's expedition
diaries came out towards the end of 1913, the reviews were mixed at best, as if
the critics suspected the edited diaries were covering up a truth altogether
more uncomfortably prosaic than the legend they had been sold. By the time the
first world war started, Scott's memory had been half eclipsed; by the end it
had been almost totally so.
It
was the aftermath of the first world war that was
largely responsible for Scott's revival. "The war was the first fought on
an epic scale and it left the country with a vacuum of heroes," says Huntford. "There were no
The
publication in 1922 of ‘The Worst Journey in the World’ by Apsley
Cherry-Garrard, the expedition member who had
discovered the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers, put Scott back on a national
pedestal, and with the release of the 1947 film Scott of the Antarctic, with
its Vaughan Williams soundtrack , his heroic status
remained almost untouched for more than 50 years.
By
the time Huntford began his research in the mid-70s,
the Scott family and the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in
The
Scott family were right to be concerned. Huntford had
been ruthless in his research, and though Scott did not go undefended, Huntford's version rapidly became widely accepted. And yet
the Scott legend refuses to die to this day.
"It's
strange," says Huntford. "Shackleton, who didn't lose a man when the Endurance was
crushed in the Antarctic ice, remains a footnote in the national psyche, while
Scott still has an iconic status. Only in
‘The
Race for the South Pole’ represents Huntford's final
attempt to get Scott and Amundsen's legacies restored to what he believes
should be their proper balance. There is simply no more evidence left to find.
Will it be enough? Possibly not.
Scott
will always have his supporters – and maybe that is as it should be. After all,
decline and fall is a paradigm of British life over much of the last hundred
years. Perhaps we get the national heroes we deserve.
John
Crace, The Guardian, Monday 27 September
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/27/captain-scott-antarctic-amundsen-south-pole