The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard (online e reader .txt) 📗

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. His achievement was a mere precaution against Amundsen perishing on his way back; and that risk was no greater than his own. The Polar Journey was literally laid waste: that was the shock that staggered them. Well might Bowers be glad to see the last of Norskies’ tracks as their homeward paths diverged.

All this heartsickness has passed away now; and the future explorer will not concern himself with it. He will ask, what was the secret of Amundsen’s slick success? What is the moral of our troubles and losses? I will take Amundsen’s success first. Undoubtedly the very remarkable qualities of the man himself had a good deal to do with it. There is a sort of sagacity that constitutes the specific genius of the explorer; and Amundsen proved his possession of this by his guess that there was terra firma in the Bay of Whales as solid as on Ross Island. Then there is the quality of big leadership which is shown by daring to take a big chance. Amundsen took a very big one indeed when he turned from the route to the Pole explored and ascertained by Scott and Shackleton and determined to find a second pass over the mountains from the Barrier to the plateau. As it happened, he succeeded, and established his route as the best way to the Pole until a better is discovered. But he might easily have failed and perished in the attempt; and the combination of reasoning and daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated. All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative whaling captain might have refused to make Scott’s experiment with motor transport, ponies and man-hauling, and stuck to the dogs; and to the use of ski in running those dogs; and it was this quite commonplace choice that sent Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or dogs, and no great hardship either. He never pulled a mile from start to finish.

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. We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have suffered from too much. 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. We followed in the steps of a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its forerunners: Scott’s Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took on the work of two or three expeditions.

It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a division of energy. Scott wanted to reach the Pole: a dangerous and laborious exploit, but a practicable one. Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin: a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which is none the less impracticable because the three men who achieved it survived by a miracle. These two feats had to be piled one on top of the other. What with the Depot Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and our worst year was still to come. We, the survivors, went in search of the dead when there was a possibly living party waiting in the ice somewhere for us to succour them. That turned out all right, because when we got back, we found Campbell’s party self-extricated and waiting for us, alive and well. But suppose they also had perished, what would have been said of us?

The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things were done. He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how they could have been got up and down the Beardmore. 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 will admit that we were all very wonderful, very heroic, very beautiful and devoted: that our exploits gave a glamour to our expedition that Amundsen’s cannot claim; but 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. No doubt he was; 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.

Of course the whole business simply bristles with “ifs”: If Scott had taken dogs and succeeded in getting them up the Beardmore: if we had not lost those ponies on the Depot Journey: if the dogs had not been taken so far and the One Ton Depot had been laid: if a pony and some extra oil had been depoted on the Barrier: if a four-man party had been taken to the Pole: if I had disobeyed my instructions