PROLOGUE
Robert Falcon Scott was already anchored off the coast of Australia when the telegram came. His ship, the Terra Nova, was already loaded down with men, dogs, horses, equipment, and several tons of provisions—everything one could possibly require, he believed, to embark on the first successful expedition to the South Pole.
Seasoned as an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy, already proven as an Antarctic explorer, Scott had now been authorized to carry the glory of the British Empire to the literal end of the earth. The North Pole had already been breached; the untouched South Pole was the last icy prize remaining, and the English were determined to raise their flag there ahead of any other.
But on an October evening in 1910, the mailbag from Melbourne brought an unexpected crosswind.
“Beg leave inform you proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen.”
Scott stared at the telegram and felt the rigging of his stomach tighten.
The Norwegians were coming. Roald Amundsen, their accomplished Arctic explorer, was suddenly pulling a global about-face. The race to the South Pole had just become a head-to-head affair. To the victor would go the spoils and the history books.
On board the Terra Nova, and back home in England, some were outraged by the Norwegians’ presumptuous interloping. Others, however, were stiffly unimpressed.
“[The Fram, Amundsen’s ship] has no more sailing qualities than a haystack,” said Sir Clements Markham, the noted English explorer and financier of many polar expeditions.
“Scott will be on the ground and settled long before Amundsen turns up, if he ever does.”
THE PLANS
No matter what route one took to the Pole, there were some obstacles that remained consistent.
Sub-zero temperatures and frequent blizzards were a given, of course. To get to a place where it could safely anchor, a ship would have to pick its way carefully through the Antarctic ice pack, usually for several weeks.
Once a base camp was established, the round-trip run to the Pole covered more than 1,800 miles—roughly the distance from San Francisco to Kansas City, Mo. The trek included a march up glacier faces that might stretch for more than 100 miles. The Pole itself was located on a plateau at a gasping 10,500 feet in elevation.
To have any chance at succeeding in this objective, a team first needed to spend an Antarctic summer sending out small sledding parties to establish food depots all along the chosen route. The final expedition team would then wait out a long, dark Antarctic winter in its base camp, and head out for the Pole the following spring—hopping from depot to depot and carrying on their sleds the additional provisions needed for the final stretch.
For his part, Amundsen built his plan around 97 Greenland sled dogs. He had gathered much information about how to select and train dogs during his previous Arctic interactions with the Inuit Indians, and he took great care to feed and protect the animals well. Before his trans-Atlantic journey in the Fram, Amundsen even had a false deck constructed above the dogs to shield them from the elements.
Scott had no such confidence in dogs, primarily because of his experience with them in an earlier Antarctic mission. On that trip, none of the crew members had been trained in driving sled dogs. What’s more, the wrong food had been chosen for the dogs, and it all went bad. The result was undisciplined dogs that eventually went lame and dragged behind the expedition rather than pulling it forward.
This time, Scott brought along three experimental motorized sleds to help with the work, and also pinned his bets on 19 Siberian-bred horses. Fellow Englishman Ernest Shackleton had earlier tried to use horses in the Antarctic and watched the effort fail miserably, but Scott nevertheless believed that the combination of horses, motorized sleds, and some dogs could be effective in reaching the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. From there, Scott’s men would haul the sleds themselves the rest of the way to the Pole.
“In my mind,” Scott wrote proudly, “no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realized when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days and weeks of hard physical labour succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.”
THE ARRIVALS
By January 1911, the two expeditions had negotiated the ice pack and were busy setting up base camps, each unaware of the other’s position some 400 miles away.
Scott anchored at a safe and familiar spot in McMurdo Sound. He had considered the Bay of Whales, some 60 miles closer to the Pole, but he was nervous about the location because it was afloat, with large chunks breaking off each year and drifting out to sea. What’s more, he was rightfully concerned that the Terra Nova—like some of its polar predecessors—would become trapped in pack ice and ultimately crushed by the immense pressure.
Amundsen’s Fram, however, had been built specifically for polar travel. It had a unique, round-bottomed hull, and it responded to encroaching pack ice by being pushed upwards and sitting safely atop the ice. Amundsen also knew that previous explorers—in 1841, 1900, and again in 1908—had all charted the Bay of Whales as being in the exact same geographic position. If it hadn’t moved over a period of 67 years, Amundsen reasoned, it wasn’t likely to move this year.
The Norwegians thus had no qualms about establishing winter headquarters at the Bay—where they were not only closer to the objective, but surrounded by an extraordinary supply of fresh meat in the form of seals and penguins. It took Amundsen three weeks to unload ten tons of supplies and set up his base camp. It took three more weeks for his dogs and sleds to establish food depots along the Pole route at 80oS, 81oS and 82oS—ferrying some 1 1⁄2 tons of supplies to within 480 miles of the Pole.
Over in McMurdo Sound, things were not going quite as smoothly. Scott, by his own admission, carelessly hurried the unloading of the Terra Nova; in the process, one of the motorized sleds broke through the ice and sank in 600 feet of water.
More misadventure awaited the Britons on their depot-laying journeys. The horses floundered frequently in the deep snow, became weak, and, in one instance, were attacked and wounded by Scott’s unruly dogs. Later, Scott himself was left dangling in a crevasse while team members rushed off to separate their fighting dog teams. Of the eight horses used for the depot runs, only two survived.
Intending to establish a food depot at 80oS, Scott instead had to stop short because of weakening horses and leave the one-ton supply at 79o28 1⁄2 S. One of Scott’s team members urged him to take the four strongest horses and cover the remaining 14 miles to the intended target; Scott refused and turned back.
Scott had meanwhile sent the Terra Nova to drop off another team for a separate research tour. The purpose of this Antarctic expedition wasn’t just the pursuit of the Pole, he reasoned; it was also to gather scientific data.
Along the way, this second party happened to sail into the Bay of Whales and discover the Fram. Soon, Amundsen himself was journeying to the Terra Nova for lunch—driving his dogs up next to the ship, stopping them all immediately with one whistle, then leaving them there without chaperone while he came aboard to dine. The Britons were surprised and impressed. Amundsen even offered to give Scott’s crew some dogs, as he apparently had plenty.
When the sun sank in April for the long Antarctic winter, Amundsen’s crewmen began finding innovative new ways to increase their chances of Pole success. First, they dug downwards into the hard, blue ice and managed to excavate an underground village of workshops and storage spaces. Outside, temperatures swirled at 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit; in the underground workshops, the air was a comparatively balmy 3 degrees above.
Next, the Norwegians began tinkering with the weight of their sleds, slimming them down from 165 pounds—the status quo—to a sleek and still functional 48 pounds. They also sewed new tents for the Pole journey, each weighing nine pounds fewer than the ones that had been brought from Norway.
At Scott’s camp, the winter days were spent listening to lectures on rocks and weather, since the expedition had the dual purpose of scientific research. The men also preferred to spend their time playing soccer and attending birthday parties. Among the activities the crew did not pursue were ski lessons (there was only one expert skier in the bunch), dog-driving lessons (only one expert dog driver, too), or navigation courses.
THE PURSUIT
After a false start in September, Amundsen’s team departed for the Pole on Oct. 20, 1911. The five men were on skis, and though they could have skied twice as fast, Amundsen felt that the high altitude called for restraint. So they measured off 20 miles each day, covered the distance in just five hours and spent the remainder of the day resting. At systematic points along the way, the Norwegians shot a number of dogs and used their meat to feed those that remained.
Early in the trip, Amundsen’s men spotted a small cairn, or landmark, that they had built with snow blocks the previous April. This proved that such cairns could be reliably visible, and so the team proceeded to build 150 more cairns all along their journey south. They used more than 9,000 blocks of snow to construct the six-foot beacons, and each one contained a written record of the distance and bearing to the next cairn.
About the same time that Amundsen was departing base camp for his Pole journey, Scott was delivering some unfortunate news to his own team. The British expedition was out of money, and each man had to be asked to forego his salary. What’s more, the team couldn’t depart for the Pole until at least Nov. 1, because it was clear the horses wouldn’t survive the cold if they left any earlier. It was beginning to occur to Scott, and all of them, that the Norwegians might be better positioned for this historic run.
“I don’t know what to think of Amundsen’s chances,” Scott wrote to his wife. “If he gets to the Pole it must be before we do, as he is bound to travel fast with dogs, and pretty certain to start early. On this account I decided at a very early date to act exactly as I should have done had he not existed. Any attempt to race must have wrecked my plan . . .”
When Scott’s team finally did depart, ten days later than Amundsen, the remaining two motorized sleds covered less than 50 miles before breaking down. Then the horses began to falter. One had to be shot, and then another, and finally all those that remained. At the foot of the 100-mile-long Beardmore Glacier, the man-hauling began.
Each of the men began by pulling more than 200 pounds through soft snow—a feat that scientists would later equate to pulling a full bathtub through the Sahara desert. On Dec. 13, in steadily worsening conditions, the party pulled for nine hours and advanced just four miles.
On that same day, the Norwegians were some 300 miles further south, and less than 20 miles from the Pole. They arrived there the next day—Dec. 14, 1911. With plenty of fuel and food for men and dogs, Amundsen’s team zipped back to base camp at a solid clip, following the trail of 150 well-marked cairns. They arrived two weeks earlier than expected with all five men “hale and hearty”—actually fitter and stronger, they reported, than when they’d first set foot on the continent.
Up on the Pole plateau, the same could not be said for Scott and his men.
THE MISSED MARK
After more than five weeks of man-hauling their sleds through miserable conditions, the English wearily arrived at the South Pole on Jan. 16, 1912—to find a tent pitched there, topped by a Norwegian flag, with a letter inside from Amundsen welcoming Scott to the South Pole.
Some 900 man-hauling miles now separated Scott’s despondent followers from their base camp. The men became increasingly weaker and colder, and Scott began to suspect that they were not getting enough nutrition. Amundsen had learned the benefits of a high-fat diet from his research with the Inuit, but most of Scott’s provisions were not particularly high in fat. With the physical exertion of their man-hauling, Scott’s men were steadily dropping body weight and thus the insulation from their own fat, making them even more susceptible to the cold.
To make matters worse, a lack of fuel was leaving them unable to fully cook their food. Time after time, the team arrived at depots to find that the kerosene stores had all or partially evaporated in the extreme cold. Scott had observed this same phenomenon on earlier Antarctic expeditions, but had neglected to fix the storage seals that might have remedied the situation.
Fatigue led to frequent falls and injuries. A wrong turn caused them to wander lost for days. They had difficulty finding key food depots; the only marker they’d left had been at the one-ton depot at 79o28 1⁄2 S.
Since they weren’t making it to the depots in a timely fashion, Scott decided to reduce rations; that only weakened the men further. Though they were in a gravely weakened state, the men continued hauling 30 pounds of scientific rock samples on their sleds. All were suffering from frostbite and some from gangrene. One man died after several days of slow, wild-eyed hauling. Another went for a walk in his socks one evening and never returned.
More than two months after Amundsen’s crew had returned safely to base camp, and more than three weeks after news of the Norwegians’ conquest had reached the world, Scott and his remaining two companions were still trying to negotiate their way home. On March 29, they found themselves pinned down by a blizzard just eleven miles from the large depot that might have been their salvation. It was the same depot that was supposed to be located at 80oS. But because it was actually 14 miles short of that mark, Scott and his men never reached it.
In one of his final journal entries, Scott wrote that the expedition’s failure was no one’s fault: “Every detail of our food supplies, clothing and depots . . . worked out to perfection.” The journal was discovered alongside the frozen, dead bodies of Scott and his two mates, some eight months later.
It would be another 14 years before Amundsen passed away. He died not endeavoring to bring his own team safely home, but while trying to rescue other explorers who had crashed their airplane in the Arctic.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Two men.
Two leaders.
Both bravely bent on a heroic destination.
One of the leaders: characterized by excellent foresight, scrupulous and efficient planning, innovative thinking, attention to every detail. The other: good-natured by all accounts, grandiose in his scope . . . and lacking in foresight, planning, innovation, and consideration of critical details.
One leader: swiftly, singularly, and safely to the objective. The other: scattered, overburdened, and late in arriving at the objective.
One leader: dead at the scene, if gallantly so. His team: gone down with him.
The other leader: shepherding his team safely through, and spending his remaining days rescuing others.
Conclusion:
Near the end of the world, leadership matters.
