First let me do full justice to Amundsen. I have not attempted to disguise how we felt towards him when, after leading us to believe that he had equipped the Fram for an Arctic journey, and sailed for the north, he suddenly made his dash for the south. Nothing makes a more unpleasant impression than a feint. But when Scott reached the Pole only to find that Amundsen had been there a month before him, his distress was not that of a schoolboy who has lost a race. I have described what it had cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had still to suffer in returning until death stopped them. Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that 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 Depôt 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 Depôt Journey: if the dogs had not been taken so far and the One Ton Depôt had been laid: if a pony and some extra oil had been depôted on the Barrier: if a four-man party had been taken to the Pole: if I had disobeyed my instructions and gone on from One Ton, killing dogs as necessary: or even if I had just gone on a few miles and left some food and fuel under a flag upon a cairn: if they had been first at the Pole: if it had been any other season but that.... But always the bare fact remains that Scott could not have travelled from McMurdo Sound to the Pole faster than he did except with dogs; all the king's horses and all the king's men could not have done it. Why, then, says the practical man, did we go to McMurdo Sound instead of to the Bay of Whales? Because we gained that continuity of scientific observation which is so important in this work: and because the Sound was the starting-point for continuing the exploration of the only ascertained route to the Pole, via the Beardmore Glacier.
I am afraid it was all inevitable: we were as wise as any one can be before the event. I admit that we, scrupulously economical of our pemmican, were terribly prodigal of our man-power. But we had to be: the draft, whatever it may have been on the whole, was not excessive at any given point; and anyhow we just had to use every man to take every opportunity. There is so much to do, and the opportunities for doing it are so rare. Generally speaking, I don't see how we could have done differently, but I don't want to see it done again; I don't want it to be necessary to do it again. I want to see this country tackle the job, and send enough men to do one thing at a time. They do it in Canada: why not in England too?
But we wasted our man-power in one way which could have been avoided. I have described how every emergency was met by calling for volunteers, and how the volunteers were always forthcoming. Unfortunately volunteering was relied on not only for emergencies, but for a good deal of everyday work that should have been organised as routine; and the inevitable result was that the willing horses were overworked. It was a point of honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never insisted on a regular routine.
Money was scarce: probably Scott could not have obtained the funds for the expedition if its objective had not been the Pole. There was no lack of the things which could be bought across the counter from big business houses—all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment was first-class—but one of the first and most important items, the ship, would have sent Columbus on strike, and nearly sent us to the bottom of the sea.
People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively to the resources of that time, much better than the one old tramp in which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and morning are the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration ad hoc. Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and Ramsgate.