The whole difference between Amundsen’s dash to the South Pole—a picnic as he characterized it, and actually that relatively as antarctic trips go—and Scott’s heroic struggle and tragic finish may be expressed in four letters, dogs.
This is said not in a spirit of criticism, but of sorrowful fact. Amundsen and his men, when they made camp at the end of each march, were tired in every bone, as is every member of every serious polar sledge-party; for handling a sledge is like handling a breaking-up plow in new land. But the dogs had done the major part of the work, and the men still had a reserve of physical and nerve force left. When Scott’s ponies failed him, he and his men dragged their hearts out pulling the sledges, and when they made camp at the end of a march they were all in. When finally, within eleven miles of their depot of supplies, the blizzard caught them at the physical dead center, there was not an ounce of reserve force left in the entire party to permit reaching the depot. And so they died. Ah, the pity of it!
When dogs as tractive force are compared with men, then the results are startling, as the following instances will show.
The winter quarters of the Alert of the British Arctic Expedition of 1875–76, and of the Roosevelt in the two expeditions of 1905–06 and 1908–09 were essentially the same, Cape Sheridan on the north shore of Grant Land. Northwest along the coast were Capes Joseph Henry, Hecla, and Columbia. The British parties, using man power for dragging sledges, were five and more days going to Cape Henry in various trips. My parties, using dogs, went regularly to Cape Hecla beyond Cape Henry in two marches, and returned in one.
Aldrich, in one of the principal spring sledge-journeys of the expedition, was twenty-seven days to Cape Columbia. My parties, with loaded sledges, made it regularly in four marches, returning in two. Bartlett, on one occasion in the autumn work, came back the entire distance in one march. My North Pole party, after reaching land and resting and feeding men and dogs for two days at Cape Columbia, made the journey to Sheridan in two marches.
Even when compared with the journey of Lockwood and Brainerd from Conger to Lockwood Island, using southern Greenland dogs and driver, the journey of MacMillan and Borup along the same coast from Cape Sheridan to Cape Morris Jesup is instructive. Lockwood and Brainerd were twenty-five marches from Conger to Lockwood Island and sixteen marches on the return.
MacMillan and Borup went from Cape Sheridan (nearly the same distance as Conger) to Cape Jesup forty miles beyond Lockwood Island, in much less time and on the return covered the distance in eight marches averaging thirty-four miles per march.
In 1911 I was in London with Scott for two weeks before his expedition started for the South Pole, was on his ship, the Terra Nova, the day she steamed out of the London docks, and I talked dogs and dogs with him, but without results. Possibly it was too late for him to make any change. I have repeatedly talked dogs to Shackleton, and before his last expedition urged upon him the desirability of dogs, dogs, and yet more dogs.
I was met by the statement that dogs could not be driven in the driving snow that sweeps along the surface of the antarctic ice-cap. But for my experience in my earlier expeditions across the Greenland ice-cap, where identical conditions are encountered, I might have accepted this. In my Greenland work members of my parties drove their dogs day after day in a low, blinding drift of snow sweeping along the surface of the ice-cap with the steadiness of a stream of water.
I was interested very recently to hear Shackleton in San Francisco, in the first public lecture given after his return from his last antarctic expedition, express unreservedly his conversion to a belief in dogs.