July 15, 2022 • 33 mins
1910: Two men are racing to be the first to reach the South Pole. Captain Robert Falcon Scott heads a well-financed, technologically-advanced expedition - aiming to reach the pole in the "proper" and heroic way... on foot. Roald Amundsen's effort is more modest, relying on cheap sled dogs to carry him to victory.
Scott - for all his money, for all his fancy equipment, for all his backing from the mighty Royal Navy - is doomed to failure in the icy wastes of Antarctica. Why?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In June nineteen ten, two ships set sail from Europe.
One of them was captained by Robert Falcon Scott of
the British Navy, representing the most powerful empire the world
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had ever seen. The other ship was led by Roald
Amundson of Norway, a small country that had gained its
independence just five years before. Both men had the same goal.
They burned to be the first in history to reach
the South Pole, planting their national flag. This wasn't about
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imperial conquest. The South Pole had no gold, or spices
or slaves. It was all about the symbolism. The age
of exploration was largely over. Most of the world had
been thoroughly mapped, with one big exception the vast interior
of the icy continent of Antarctica. No human feet had
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ever trodden on the Earth's most southerly point. Of course,
the British wanted to be the first to reach it.
Over the centuries, they'd grown used to thinking of themselves
as the greatest explorers in the world. Robert Scott's British
ship carried what one historian called the largest, best equipped
scientific team ever sent to Antarctica. It carried three state
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of the art motorized sleds, along with Siberian dogs and ponies,
and a crew of sixty five. This little army set
sail from London in front of a crowd of the
Empire's finest. The American polar explorer Robert Bartlett was there,
noting that nobody had ever given him such a send off.
(02:07):
There were gold lays and cock hats and dignitaries enough
to run a navy. I couldn't help comparing all this
formality with the shoddy, almost sneering attitude of the American public.
One of Scott's crew was almost overwhelmed by the crowd
of onlookers. The cheers from the many thousands of throats
fairly made the air quiver on that blazing summer afternoon
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rolled Amunson's Norwegian vessel was much smaller. It carried no
motorized sleds or ponies, only dogs and a crew of
just nineteen. It sailed at midnight without ceremony or celebration,
a ghost chip slipping out into the Norwegian Fiords. Nobody
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in Norway was excited about Amunson's bold thrust to beat
the British to the South Pole, and there was a
reason for that. He had told everyone he was heading
to the North Pole instead. It's hard to imagine a
more uneven contest. Scott's expedition was far larger and far
(03:15):
better funded, underwritten by the British Navy and supported by
public and private donations from across the British Empire. There
could be only one winner, and it was already obvious
who it would be. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening
to cautionary tales. Remember the biblical story of David and Goliath.
(04:04):
An Israelite shepherd boy with the humblest weapon imaginable, a sling,
defeats Goliath, the Philistine champion, a fully armed man mountain.
King Saul of the Israelites is against the plan. You
cannot go against this philistine to do battle with him,
for you are a lad. Then he is a man
of war from his youth. But David fights Goliath anyway
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and winds easily. Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath has
some interesting things to say about this fight. Goliath wasn't
quite as fearsome as he seemed. He was at least
six ft nine, but humans aren't built to be that big.
(04:49):
One plausible explanation is that Goliath was suffering from a
medical condition which causes the production of too much growth hormone.
It also often causes double vision. Goliath looked terrifying, but
he may well have had difficulty moving and difficulty focusing.
In the Race to the South Pole, Robert Falcon Scott
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was Goliath, apparently the overwhelming favorite, but in reality in
a hopeless position. Just in case you don't know how
the race unfolds, Scott's mission ends in utter failure. For
more than a century, people have been arguing about why.
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On one side of the argument, to those who say
Scott was terribly unlucky, in particular with the weather. On
the other side, of those who say Scott was an incompetent,
that he chose the wrong methods, took needless risks, and
at critical moments he made the wrong calls. If it
wasn't bad luck or bad judgment, then how else could
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such a well resourced expedition fail. But Goliath didn't lose
because he was unlucky or because he was foolish. He
lost because the apparent underdog was actually in a vastly
superior position all along. We'll explore the causes of Scott's
problems in a moment, but first let's describe the symptoms.
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His expedition was so large that scott ship was overloaded
with men, fuel, motorized sledges, and ponies, and it nearly
sank before reaching Antarctica. Conditions on ship were miserable. The
crew ate their meals from a table directly underneath where
the ponies were being stabled. The yellow substance that dribbled
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down to the cracks in the wooden deck onto their
table was euphemistically called mustard. Things were hardly more comfortable
once Scott arrived in Antarctica. The British went to a
base that Scott and others had established years before on
Ross Island, just off the coast of the Antarctic continent.
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It was further away from the South Pole than where
Amunson made his base camp, and not without its dangers.
One man ventured onto ice flow to photographs some killer
whales and nearly ended up as their lunch. The ship
was within sixty yards and I heard wild shouts. Look out,
run jumpman, jump, run quick. But I could not run.
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It was all I could do to keep my feet
as I leapt from piece to piece of the rocking ice,
with the whales a few yards behind me, snorting and
glowing among the ice blocks. He made it back to safety,
with Captain Scott exclaiming, my God, that was about the
nearest squeak I ever saw. Then came the unloading of
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the ship. It did not go well. We realized that
the ice was getting very rotten, wrote one crewman. But
when a message came back from an anxious Scott the
hurry with the unloading. No one had the courage or
the sense to ignore it. They were unloading one of
the three motorized sledges. The ship party had got the
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sledge down onto the ice, when, with warning Williamson went
through to his thighs. The motor sledge suddenly dipped, the
ice gave way, and she fell with all her weight
vertically on the rope. The rope began cutting through the
thin ice. Man after man was forced to let go.
The sledge is now resting on the bottom at a
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depth of one hundred and twenty fathoms. It was a
terrifying moment, and an expensive one. Scott had paid about
as much for his three motorized sledges as Amundson had
raised to fund his entire expedition. After months preparing depots
and sheltering from the winter, Scott was ready to make
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his attempt at the South Pole. Despite the loss of
one motor sledge, he still had two more of them,
plus packs of dogs, a team of ponies, and the
time on a tradition of the British Navy donning harnesses
and hauling the sledges by hand with sheer British grit
and endurance. The British had long experience of this man
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hauling of sledges in polar regions. One disastrous expedition to
the Arctic in eighteen seventy five required man hauling. Here's
the conclusion of a survivor. I would confine everyone who
proposed such a thing in a lunatic asylum, burn every
sledge in existence, and destroy the patterns long experience, as
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I say, But the British Navy had not learned from
that long experience. With the luxury of these varied modes
of transport available, Scott chose to try them all. You
might think that would give him flexibility. Instead, it constrained him.
Scott's ponies were poorly adapted to the cold, so he
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decided to start later in the spring. Even then, the
ponies struggled. They traveled slowly, hooves sinking deep into the snow.
Scott decided it would be better for the ponies to
travel at night, when the colder temperatures might mean firmer
conditions under their hoofs. It was miserable. Huge icicles form
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under the ponies noises during the march. Scott's two remaining
motorized sledges broke down early in the expedition. Nobody on
his team had the mechanical expertise to fix them, so
he had to abandon them and man haul the sledges instead.
The man hauled sledges work even slower than the ponies.
Scott's expedition was a patchwork caravan, from which the ponies
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and the dog sleds had to keep stopping to let
the man hauld sledges keep up. The dogs do the
hall march in three hours, and then they have little
else to do for the rest of the day. The
dogs are doing splendidly. When news reached Scott and his
team that Amunson was racing them to the pole, they
correctly surmised that he wouldn't have taken ponies and he
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wouldn't be man hauling any sledges. I must say that
Amondson's chance of having forestalled us looks good. After the losses,
the accidents, the late start, and the slow progress, Scott's
defeat was now just a matter of time. But why
had such a well resourced expedition run into so many problems?
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When formally announcing the project, Captain Scott could hardly have
been clearer about his goals. The main object of the
expedition is to reach the South Pole and to secure
for the British Empire the honor of this achievement. That was,
of course what the crowds cheering in London expected. But
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while Scott told the public that the South Pole was
his focus, he had various other goals in mind. Objective
number two was scientific progress. No expedition ever left our
shores with a more ambitious scientific program, said the expedition's
second in command, while another expedition member explained, we want
the scientific work to make the bagging of the pole
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merely an item in the results. The research program included
work on biology, geology, glaciology, meteorology, measuring the magnetic fields
around the pole, but of course exploration and map making.
The exploration was no small task, with the British Navy
supplying many of the men for the mission. Scott needed
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to be able to argue that he was finding and
laying claim to new territory on behalf of the British Empire.
But these scientific efforts were exhausting. They required Scott's men
to take real risks and expend prodigious energy. One of
the research teams became stranded for an entire winter, surviving
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against extraordinary odds by building a snow cave and killing
the occasional seal or penguin. Another team of three men
were aiming for a curious prize, the egg of an
emperor penguin. This that was hoped might shed light on
the embryology of all primitive birds, including dinosaurs. But to
get the egg, the three unlucky explorers had to make
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a month long journey during the Antarctic winter in total
darkness and temperatures ranging below minus seventy five fahrenheit. All
three men nearly died, one of them absolutely. Cherry Garrard
went on to write the classic book The Worst Journey
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in the world. Nobody argues with his choice of title.
All of these scientific exploits sapped the strength of the team.
The two men who went with Cherry Garrard on the
Worst Journey in the World then set off with Scott
to the South Pole. They must have been shattered before
they started. The sheer complexity of the enterprise also challenge
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Scott's managerial abilities. Every long journey in the Antarctic needed
careful planning, with preparatory journeys to set up depots along
the route stopped with food and fuel. Scott's attention and
manpower were dissipated by the scientific expeditions. By the time
he came to set up his depots for the journey
to the Pole, his supplies were sparse, leaving little margin
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for error if something went wrong, if instruments broke, which
they did, or if food ran low, which it did,
or if depots were hard to find, which they were,
or if vital fuel leaked, which it did. Scott might
have been wiser to focus more attention on the South Pole,
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but he didn't really have a choice. The scientific mission
was regarded as essential by influential patrons, such as the
Royal Geographical Society, they actively opposed a simple dash to
the pole. Scott was apt. He had to tell the
public that the journey was all about the South Pole.
But he also had to please his mentors and funders
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at the Royal Geographical Society. And it gets worse because
those weren't the only two objectives Scott had to balance.
Objective number three was to break new technological ground. That's
why Scott was taking those three expensive motorized sleds, a
decision that infuriated some members of his team. One of them,
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Captain Oates, wrote three motors at three thousand pounds each,
nineteen ponies at five pounds each, thirty two dogs at
thirty shillings each. If Scott fails to get to the pole,
he jolly well deserves it. Remember that one of those
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sledges crashed through the ice and instantly sank to the
bottom of the ocean, while the others didn't last long
in the brutal conditions. Defenders of Scott say that his
experiments these vehicles were an essential part of learning how
to make a weatherproof snowmobile, thus laying the foundations for
Antarctic exploration in the future. True, but the motorized sledge
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cost a huge amount of money, weighed down the ship,
distracted Scott, and weren't much help. Whilst Scott invested huge
amounts in untested technology, Amundsen simply bought a hundred sledge
dogs for the price of a single motorized sledge he
could have bought two thousand. Alongside the demands of scientific
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exploration and technological testing, there was yet another goal, this
one insidious and often unspoken. The British expected that reaching
the South Pole should be a display of courage and endurance.
Nowadays this is a commonplace. Adventurers climb Everest without oxygenal
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sales solo around the world, just to demonstrate that such
things can be done. Back in nineteen eleven, was the
goal to reach the South Pole by any means available?
Or was it to reach the South Pole the hard way?
The British Empire spanned the globe but suffered a creeping
insecurity that young British chaps were going soft and weak.
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Scott knew that he was expected to demonstrate that the
British were still the fittest of all, and so he vacillated.
Sometimes he focused on the Pole by any means, At
other times he was keen to do it the right way,
and that meant not relying on dogs. Scott wrote, in
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my mind, 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 hardship, dangers,
and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days
and weeks of hard physical neighbor succeed in solving some
problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the
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conquest is more nobly and splendidly one. Scott's justifications were
all over the place. Sometimes he seemed to argue that
dogs wouldn't be useful in mountainous terrain. At other times
he was squeamish about what using dogs involved. That is,
shooting the poor creatures as you went along and feeding
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the corpses to the other dogs not especially noble or splendid.
But it's clear that he also felt that wealth using
dogs was sort of cheating. Critics of Scott say that
this is a man who simply couldn't make up his mind,
but there was a reason for his ambivalence. At this point,
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I'd like to introduce you to Sir Clement Markham Sir
Clements was the model of a British gentleman. Portraits of
him show a man in starchy formal wear, dark tie,
dark waistcoat, dark jacket, with tails, huge pork chop, side
burns and a disdainful expression as though the portrait photographer
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had just noisily broken wind. Not a man to cross.
Sir Clements was the leading light of the influential Royal
Geographical Society. He had held top positions at the Society
for decades, from where he pushed buttons and pulled strings,
bending the society to his will and focusing the British
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elite on the goal of polar exploration. Sir Clements Markham
was Scott's mentor, godfather to Scott's son named Peter Markham Scott.
Sir Clements Markham had plucked Scott from obscurity and could
break his career just as easily. Sir Clements demanded success,
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but he also wanted things down his way. First to
the pole, of course, but science should not be sacrificed.
And from his warm, comfortable desk in London, Sir Clements
had strong views about how things should be done. No ski,
no dogs, dozens hundreds of books have been written about
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the problems that Scott faced in reaching the South Pole.
All those problems start with the decision not to rely
on dogs. There's a way to do these things, agreed
the British establishment, just as the Philistines agreed that a
fight between champions should be done with physical strength, thick
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armor and sharp blades. With a champion like Goliath, David
begged to differ. He thought it would be easier to
use a sling, and in much the same spirit Rolled
Amundson thought it would be easier to use dogs. And
if actually trying to get to the pole as easily
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and quickly as possible, not carry out trials of new
motorized sledges, not prove a point about human endurance by
hauling sledges by hand, but just win well. Then the
decision to use dogs is as utterly obvious as David's
decision to use a sling. Pony hoofs sank in the snow.
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Dog paused. Didn't ponies needed a shelter each night, painstakingly
built for them by tired men. Dogs simply dug their
own dems. Ponies had to drag their own had Dogs
could eat penguins and seals, canned food, or even each other.
And the dog sleds were so much faster than ponies
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or men. With progress so slow, it didn't take long
for Scott to become angry and despondent. Some of his
men resented this, others shrugged it off. I quite understand
his feelings. Bad day like this makes him fear our
beasts are going to fail us. Scott soon started to
realize that he was beaten, just as Goliath might have
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known he was beaten as soon as he heard David
Sling start to were But Scott's problems shouldn't have come
as a surprise to anyone. Cautionary tales will be back
after this break. It's tempting to say that if Scott
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had been a more capable leader, he would simply have
made better choices, keeping Mission Creep on a tight leash
and deploying his superior resources efficiently by investing more in
dogs and stocking more and better depots. Perhaps, but Scott
was by no means the first polar explorer to uggle
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with an over resourced but unfocused expedition. In two thousand
and one, a paper was published in the prestigious Journal
of Political economy by an economist, Dame Jonathan Karpoff. Kharpov
studied expeditions in the Arctic, all earlier than the Antarctic
Race between Scott and Amundson. He began by observing that
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from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, there
were nearly one hundred expeditions trying to make progress exploring
inside the Arctic Circle, for example, aiming to reach the
North Pole, or seeking the Northwest Passage, a sea route
from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canadian waters that
held out the promise of transforming global trade. Of all
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these expeditions, just over half were private expeditions, and the
rest were publicly funded. Kharpoff wanted to know who did
a better job, the publicly funded expeditions or the privately
funded ones. The public funded expeditions were, says Karpoff, much
better financed than private expeditions. They typically had twice as
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many ships and four times as many crew, but just
as with Captain Scott, the extra resources didn't seem to
help much. In fact, it didn't help at all. The
most famous of the public expeditions was led by the
British Navy Captain Saint John Franklin, who sought the Northwest
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Passage in eighteen forty five. It was a disaster. Franklin's
two ships were trapped in the sea ice, and the
survivors eventually tried to walk south to safety. There were
dark rumors of cannibalism, but it's impossible to say if
those rumors are true because every man died of exposure
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and starvation. Nearly half a century later came in expeditions
sponsored by the US government and led by Lieutenant Adolphus Green.
They were trying to get as close to the North
Pole as they could, and they did set a record,
but they became cut off from their relief ship, and
almost everybody on the expedition starved to death. You might
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wonder if publicly funded or publicly supported expeditions suffered greater
losses because they were attempting more ambitious goals. If so,
they did not achieve them. The major goals of the
era were to find traces of Franklin's lost expedition, to
find and navigate the Northwest Passage, and to reach the
North Pole. Jonathan Karpoff reckons that five expeditions could claim
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a share in achieving those goals. Four of them were
privately funded. Karpoff concludes that public expeditions had more money,
larger teams, and more and larger ships, but they suffered
a higher death rate and they lost more of those ships.
They were four times more likely to suffer from scurvy,
and while the public expeditions were running up most of
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the costs, the private expeditions were ticking off most of
the major achievements. The Northwest Passage was finally navigated in
nineteen oh five by a tiny, scrappy, privately funded expedition
led by a bold Norwegian adventurer by the name of
rold Amundson. So why did the larger, richer public expeditions
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fail so often? Jonathan Kharpoff points to a range of problems.
They were slow to learn the lessons of experience regarding clothes, diet, shelter,
and transport. They were more hierarchical, They were poorly prepared,
They suffered from interference and second guessing from bureaucrats back
home who would never go on the expedition itself, and
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a related problem. While the private explorers were completely focused
on success because that's how you get the book deal
and the lecture tour, the leaders of the public expeditions
were trying not only to succeed, to succeed while operating
in a manner that kept their superiors happy. Scott knew
the feeling all his problems were the result of the
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contradictory constraints that surrounded him. He had to do important
scientific work and be first to the pole, and do
it the British way. In his writing, you can see
him squirming to resolve these contradictions, but he can't. In
a letter written to the expedition's treasurer, he explains that
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he would have done things differently if he'd known there'd
be a race with Amundson. I never realized that there
was any object in haste this season, or I should
have brought more dogs as Amondson has done, but then adds,
I'm not a great believer in dog transport beyond a
certain point. Scott wasn't the only person to be inconsistent.
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Writing after a decade of hindsight, Scott's fellow explorer, absolutely
Cherry Garrard, explains, we were primary a great scientific expedition
with the poll as our bait for public support, though
it was not more important than any other acre of
the plateau. Yet almost in the same breath, he notes
that when Amunson beat Scott to the pole, Scott's journey
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was literally laid waste. That was the shock that staggered them.
There we have it. The South Pole was no big
deal at all, just a publicity stunt, and failing to
each at first was a staggering shock. Even today, supporters
of Captain Scott justify his actions in ways that suggest
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the same ambivalence, praising him for his pioneering work on
motorized sleds, then with barely a pause, also praising him
for setting himself a physical challenge, just as a twenty
first century adventurer would do. Isn't there an inconsistency here?
Of course there is. Whenever Scott tried to focus on
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a goal, it swam before his eyes like Goliath. He
was overburdened and seeing double. Scott's final agonized push for
the pole involved five men dragging their sledges by hand,
mile by painful mile. When they reached their destination, their
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worst fears were realized. Norwegian flags were flying and greeting
the Norwegians themselves were long gone. It is a terrible disappointment,
and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Great God,
this is an awful place. Amunson's team had left a
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tempt from which the flags were flying. Inside the tempt,
Scott found a letter from Amundson to King Harkun of Norway,
with a cover note requesting that Scott deliver the letter,
thus proving that both Amuson and Scott had reached their goal.
Scott also found that Amunson had left him some spare equipment,
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a courtesy from one explorer to another. Scott searched through
the supplies, hoping above all to find one thing a
can of fuel. His own fuel cans were leaking, so
they were running short. Without fuel, there was no way
to make drinking water or defrost frozen food. He found
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sleeping backs, mittens, a sextant, but no can of fuel.
That was a blow. Scott's exhausted team turned around. They
had reached the South Pole, but if they were to
make it back to base camp, their journey was only
half done. We have turned up back now on the
goal of our ambition and must face eight hundred miles
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of solid dragging, and goodbye to most of the day dreams.
And as the eight hundred miles of solid dragging began,
Scott and his team started to wander whether they would
make it at all. Scott had been defeated, but there's
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more to learn from this cautionary tale. When news reached
Scott's family of Amunson's victory, two year old Peter Markham,
Scott turned to his mother, Kathleen Scott, and asked her
a question, Mummy, is Amunson a good man? Next episode
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will search for an answer. For a list of sources
plea see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written
(32:16):
by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by
Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow,
Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
(32:39):
Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori,
Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Danielle Lakhan,
and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
and review, Tell a friend, tell two friends, and if
(33:02):
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Pushkin. In June nineteen ten, two ships set sail from Europe.
One of them was captained by Robert Falcon Scott of
the British Navy, representing the most powerful empire the world
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had ever seen. The other ship was led by Roald
Amundson of Norway, a small country that had gained its
independence just five years before. Both men had the same goal.
They burned to be the first in history to reach
the South Pole, planting their national flag. This wasn't about
(01:00):
imperial conquest. The South Pole had no gold, or spices
or slaves. It was all about the symbolism. The age
of exploration was largely over. Most of the world had
been thoroughly mapped, with one big exception the vast interior
of the icy continent of Antarctica. No human feet had
(01:25):
ever trodden on the Earth's most southerly point. Of course,
the British wanted to be the first to reach it.
Over the centuries, they'd grown used to thinking of themselves
as the greatest explorers in the world. Robert Scott's British
ship carried what one historian called the largest, best equipped
scientific team ever sent to Antarctica. It carried three state
(01:47):
of the art motorized sleds, along with Siberian dogs and ponies,
and a crew of sixty five. This little army set
sail from London in front of a crowd of the
Empire's finest. The American polar explorer Robert Bartlett was there,
noting that nobody had ever given him such a send off.
(02:07):
There were gold lays and cock hats and dignitaries enough
to run a navy. I couldn't help comparing all this
formality with the shoddy, almost sneering attitude of the American public.
One of Scott's crew was almost overwhelmed by the crowd
of onlookers. The cheers from the many thousands of throats
fairly made the air quiver on that blazing summer afternoon
(02:32):
rolled Amunson's Norwegian vessel was much smaller. It carried no
motorized sleds or ponies, only dogs and a crew of
just nineteen. It sailed at midnight without ceremony or celebration,
a ghost chip slipping out into the Norwegian Fiords. Nobody
(02:54):
in Norway was excited about Amunson's bold thrust to beat
the British to the South Pole, and there was a
reason for that. He had told everyone he was heading
to the North Pole instead. It's hard to imagine a
more uneven contest. Scott's expedition was far larger and far
(03:15):
better funded, underwritten by the British Navy and supported by
public and private donations from across the British Empire. There
could be only one winner, and it was already obvious
who it would be. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening
to cautionary tales. Remember the biblical story of David and Goliath.
(04:04):
An Israelite shepherd boy with the humblest weapon imaginable, a sling,
defeats Goliath, the Philistine champion, a fully armed man mountain.
King Saul of the Israelites is against the plan. You
cannot go against this philistine to do battle with him,
for you are a lad. Then he is a man
of war from his youth. But David fights Goliath anyway
(04:28):
and winds easily. Malcolm Gladwell's book David and Goliath has
some interesting things to say about this fight. Goliath wasn't
quite as fearsome as he seemed. He was at least
six ft nine, but humans aren't built to be that big.
(04:49):
One plausible explanation is that Goliath was suffering from a
medical condition which causes the production of too much growth hormone.
It also often causes double vision. Goliath looked terrifying, but
he may well have had difficulty moving and difficulty focusing.
In the Race to the South Pole, Robert Falcon Scott
(05:13):
was Goliath, apparently the overwhelming favorite, but in reality in
a hopeless position. Just in case you don't know how
the race unfolds, Scott's mission ends in utter failure. For
more than a century, people have been arguing about why.
(05:35):
On one side of the argument, to those who say
Scott was terribly unlucky, in particular with the weather. On
the other side, of those who say Scott was an incompetent,
that he chose the wrong methods, took needless risks, and
at critical moments he made the wrong calls. If it
wasn't bad luck or bad judgment, then how else could
(05:56):
such a well resourced expedition fail. But Goliath didn't lose
because he was unlucky or because he was foolish. He
lost because the apparent underdog was actually in a vastly
superior position all along. We'll explore the causes of Scott's
problems in a moment, but first let's describe the symptoms.
(06:18):
His expedition was so large that scott ship was overloaded
with men, fuel, motorized sledges, and ponies, and it nearly
sank before reaching Antarctica. Conditions on ship were miserable. The
crew ate their meals from a table directly underneath where
the ponies were being stabled. The yellow substance that dribbled
(06:40):
down to the cracks in the wooden deck onto their
table was euphemistically called mustard. Things were hardly more comfortable
once Scott arrived in Antarctica. The British went to a
base that Scott and others had established years before on
Ross Island, just off the coast of the Antarctic continent.
(07:00):
It was further away from the South Pole than where
Amunson made his base camp, and not without its dangers.
One man ventured onto ice flow to photographs some killer
whales and nearly ended up as their lunch. The ship
was within sixty yards and I heard wild shouts. Look out,
run jumpman, jump, run quick. But I could not run.
(07:24):
It was all I could do to keep my feet
as I leapt from piece to piece of the rocking ice,
with the whales a few yards behind me, snorting and
glowing among the ice blocks. He made it back to safety,
with Captain Scott exclaiming, my God, that was about the
nearest squeak I ever saw. Then came the unloading of
(07:46):
the ship. It did not go well. We realized that
the ice was getting very rotten, wrote one crewman. But
when a message came back from an anxious Scott the
hurry with the unloading. No one had the courage or
the sense to ignore it. They were unloading one of
the three motorized sledges. The ship party had got the
(08:07):
sledge down onto the ice, when, with warning Williamson went
through to his thighs. The motor sledge suddenly dipped, the
ice gave way, and she fell with all her weight
vertically on the rope. The rope began cutting through the
thin ice. Man after man was forced to let go.
The sledge is now resting on the bottom at a
(08:29):
depth of one hundred and twenty fathoms. It was a
terrifying moment, and an expensive one. Scott had paid about
as much for his three motorized sledges as Amundson had
raised to fund his entire expedition. After months preparing depots
and sheltering from the winter, Scott was ready to make
(08:50):
his attempt at the South Pole. Despite the loss of
one motor sledge, he still had two more of them,
plus packs of dogs, a team of ponies, and the
time on a tradition of the British Navy donning harnesses
and hauling the sledges by hand with sheer British grit
and endurance. The British had long experience of this man
(09:13):
hauling of sledges in polar regions. One disastrous expedition to
the Arctic in eighteen seventy five required man hauling. Here's
the conclusion of a survivor. I would confine everyone who
proposed such a thing in a lunatic asylum, burn every
sledge in existence, and destroy the patterns long experience, as
(09:35):
I say, But the British Navy had not learned from
that long experience. With the luxury of these varied modes
of transport available, Scott chose to try them all. You
might think that would give him flexibility. Instead, it constrained him.
Scott's ponies were poorly adapted to the cold, so he
(09:56):
decided to start later in the spring. Even then, the
ponies struggled. They traveled slowly, hooves sinking deep into the snow.
Scott decided it would be better for the ponies to
travel at night, when the colder temperatures might mean firmer
conditions under their hoofs. It was miserable. Huge icicles form
(10:18):
under the ponies noises during the march. Scott's two remaining
motorized sledges broke down early in the expedition. Nobody on
his team had the mechanical expertise to fix them, so
he had to abandon them and man haul the sledges instead.
The man hauled sledges work even slower than the ponies.
Scott's expedition was a patchwork caravan, from which the ponies
(10:41):
and the dog sleds had to keep stopping to let
the man hauld sledges keep up. The dogs do the
hall march in three hours, and then they have little
else to do for the rest of the day. The
dogs are doing splendidly. When news reached Scott and his
team that Amunson was racing them to the pole, they
correctly surmised that he wouldn't have taken ponies and he
(11:01):
wouldn't be man hauling any sledges. I must say that
Amondson's chance of having forestalled us looks good. After the losses,
the accidents, the late start, and the slow progress, Scott's
defeat was now just a matter of time. But why
had such a well resourced expedition run into so many problems?
(11:35):
When formally announcing the project, Captain Scott could hardly have
been clearer about his goals. The main object of the
expedition is to reach the South Pole and to secure
for the British Empire the honor of this achievement. That was,
of course what the crowds cheering in London expected. But
(11:55):
while Scott told the public that the South Pole was
his focus, he had various other goals in mind. Objective
number two was scientific progress. No expedition ever left our
shores with a more ambitious scientific program, said the expedition's
second in command, while another expedition member explained, we want
the scientific work to make the bagging of the pole
(12:18):
merely an item in the results. The research program included
work on biology, geology, glaciology, meteorology, measuring the magnetic fields
around the pole, but of course exploration and map making.
The exploration was no small task, with the British Navy
supplying many of the men for the mission. Scott needed
(12:39):
to be able to argue that he was finding and
laying claim to new territory on behalf of the British Empire.
But these scientific efforts were exhausting. They required Scott's men
to take real risks and expend prodigious energy. One of
the research teams became stranded for an entire winter, surviving
(13:00):
against extraordinary odds by building a snow cave and killing
the occasional seal or penguin. Another team of three men
were aiming for a curious prize, the egg of an
emperor penguin. This that was hoped might shed light on
the embryology of all primitive birds, including dinosaurs. But to
get the egg, the three unlucky explorers had to make
(13:23):
a month long journey during the Antarctic winter in total
darkness and temperatures ranging below minus seventy five fahrenheit. All
three men nearly died, one of them absolutely. Cherry Garrard
went on to write the classic book The Worst Journey
(13:43):
in the world. Nobody argues with his choice of title.
All of these scientific exploits sapped the strength of the team.
The two men who went with Cherry Garrard on the
Worst Journey in the World then set off with Scott
to the South Pole. They must have been shattered before
they started. The sheer complexity of the enterprise also challenge
(14:09):
Scott's managerial abilities. Every long journey in the Antarctic needed
careful planning, with preparatory journeys to set up depots along
the route stopped with food and fuel. Scott's attention and
manpower were dissipated by the scientific expeditions. By the time
he came to set up his depots for the journey
to the Pole, his supplies were sparse, leaving little margin
(14:33):
for error if something went wrong, if instruments broke, which
they did, or if food ran low, which it did,
or if depots were hard to find, which they were,
or if vital fuel leaked, which it did. Scott might
have been wiser to focus more attention on the South Pole,
(14:54):
but he didn't really have a choice. The scientific mission
was regarded as essential by influential patrons, such as the
Royal Geographical Society, they actively opposed a simple dash to
the pole. Scott was apt. He had to tell the
public that the journey was all about the South Pole.
But he also had to please his mentors and funders
(15:16):
at the Royal Geographical Society. And it gets worse because
those weren't the only two objectives Scott had to balance.
Objective number three was to break new technological ground. That's
why Scott was taking those three expensive motorized sleds, a
decision that infuriated some members of his team. One of them,
(15:37):
Captain Oates, wrote three motors at three thousand pounds each,
nineteen ponies at five pounds each, thirty two dogs at
thirty shillings each. If Scott fails to get to the pole,
he jolly well deserves it. Remember that one of those
(15:57):
sledges crashed through the ice and instantly sank to the
bottom of the ocean, while the others didn't last long
in the brutal conditions. Defenders of Scott say that his
experiments these vehicles were an essential part of learning how
to make a weatherproof snowmobile, thus laying the foundations for
Antarctic exploration in the future. True, but the motorized sledge
(16:21):
cost a huge amount of money, weighed down the ship,
distracted Scott, and weren't much help. Whilst Scott invested huge
amounts in untested technology, Amundsen simply bought a hundred sledge
dogs for the price of a single motorized sledge he
could have bought two thousand. Alongside the demands of scientific
(16:43):
exploration and technological testing, there was yet another goal, this
one insidious and often unspoken. The British expected that reaching
the South Pole should be a display of courage and endurance.
Nowadays this is a commonplace. Adventurers climb Everest without oxygenal
(17:04):
sales solo around the world, just to demonstrate that such
things can be done. Back in nineteen eleven, was the
goal to reach the South Pole by any means available?
Or was it to reach the South Pole the hard way?
The British Empire spanned the globe but suffered a creeping
insecurity that young British chaps were going soft and weak.
(17:28):
Scott knew that he was expected to demonstrate that the
British were still the fittest of all, and so he vacillated.
Sometimes he focused on the Pole by any means, At
other times he was keen to do it the right way,
and that meant not relying on dogs. Scott wrote, in
(17:49):
my mind, 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 hardship, dangers,
and difficulties with their own unaided efforts, and by days
and weeks of hard physical neighbor succeed in solving some
problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case the
(18:12):
conquest is more nobly and splendidly one. Scott's justifications were
all over the place. Sometimes he seemed to argue that
dogs wouldn't be useful in mountainous terrain. At other times
he was squeamish about what using dogs involved. That is,
shooting the poor creatures as you went along and feeding
(18:33):
the corpses to the other dogs not especially noble or splendid.
But it's clear that he also felt that wealth using
dogs was sort of cheating. Critics of Scott say that
this is a man who simply couldn't make up his mind,
but there was a reason for his ambivalence. At this point,
(19:02):
I'd like to introduce you to Sir Clement Markham Sir
Clements was the model of a British gentleman. Portraits of
him show a man in starchy formal wear, dark tie,
dark waistcoat, dark jacket, with tails, huge pork chop, side
burns and a disdainful expression as though the portrait photographer
(19:23):
had just noisily broken wind. Not a man to cross.
Sir Clements was the leading light of the influential Royal
Geographical Society. He had held top positions at the Society
for decades, from where he pushed buttons and pulled strings,
bending the society to his will and focusing the British
(19:45):
elite on the goal of polar exploration. Sir Clements Markham
was Scott's mentor, godfather to Scott's son named Peter Markham Scott.
Sir Clements Markham had plucked Scott from obscurity and could
break his career just as easily. Sir Clements demanded success,
(20:07):
but he also wanted things down his way. First to
the pole, of course, but science should not be sacrificed.
And from his warm, comfortable desk in London, Sir Clements
had strong views about how things should be done. No ski,
no dogs, dozens hundreds of books have been written about
(20:30):
the problems that Scott faced in reaching the South Pole.
All those problems start with the decision not to rely
on dogs. There's a way to do these things, agreed
the British establishment, just as the Philistines agreed that a
fight between champions should be done with physical strength, thick
(20:51):
armor and sharp blades. With a champion like Goliath, David
begged to differ. He thought it would be easier to
use a sling, and in much the same spirit Rolled
Amundson thought it would be easier to use dogs. And
if actually trying to get to the pole as easily
(21:11):
and quickly as possible, not carry out trials of new
motorized sledges, not prove a point about human endurance by
hauling sledges by hand, but just win well. Then the
decision to use dogs is as utterly obvious as David's
decision to use a sling. Pony hoofs sank in the snow.
(21:34):
Dog paused. Didn't ponies needed a shelter each night, painstakingly
built for them by tired men. Dogs simply dug their
own dems. Ponies had to drag their own had Dogs
could eat penguins and seals, canned food, or even each other.
And the dog sleds were so much faster than ponies
(21:55):
or men. With progress so slow, it didn't take long
for Scott to become angry and despondent. Some of his
men resented this, others shrugged it off. I quite understand
his feelings. Bad day like this makes him fear our
beasts are going to fail us. Scott soon started to
realize that he was beaten, just as Goliath might have
(22:19):
known he was beaten as soon as he heard David
Sling start to were But Scott's problems shouldn't have come
as a surprise to anyone. Cautionary tales will be back
after this break. It's tempting to say that if Scott
(22:47):
had been a more capable leader, he would simply have
made better choices, keeping Mission Creep on a tight leash
and deploying his superior resources efficiently by investing more in
dogs and stocking more and better depots. Perhaps, but Scott
was by no means the first polar explorer to uggle
(23:09):
with an over resourced but unfocused expedition. In two thousand
and one, a paper was published in the prestigious Journal
of Political economy by an economist, Dame Jonathan Karpoff. Kharpov
studied expeditions in the Arctic, all earlier than the Antarctic
Race between Scott and Amundson. He began by observing that
(23:31):
from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, there
were nearly one hundred expeditions trying to make progress exploring
inside the Arctic Circle, for example, aiming to reach the
North Pole, or seeking the Northwest Passage, a sea route
from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canadian waters that
held out the promise of transforming global trade. Of all
(23:55):
these expeditions, just over half were private expeditions, and the
rest were publicly funded. Kharpoff wanted to know who did
a better job, the publicly funded expeditions or the privately
funded ones. The public funded expeditions were, says Karpoff, much
better financed than private expeditions. They typically had twice as
(24:16):
many ships and four times as many crew, but just
as with Captain Scott, the extra resources didn't seem to
help much. In fact, it didn't help at all. The
most famous of the public expeditions was led by the
British Navy Captain Saint John Franklin, who sought the Northwest
(24:36):
Passage in eighteen forty five. It was a disaster. Franklin's
two ships were trapped in the sea ice, and the
survivors eventually tried to walk south to safety. There were
dark rumors of cannibalism, but it's impossible to say if
those rumors are true because every man died of exposure
(24:58):
and starvation. Nearly half a century later came in expeditions
sponsored by the US government and led by Lieutenant Adolphus Green.
They were trying to get as close to the North
Pole as they could, and they did set a record,
but they became cut off from their relief ship, and
almost everybody on the expedition starved to death. You might
(25:23):
wonder if publicly funded or publicly supported expeditions suffered greater
losses because they were attempting more ambitious goals. If so,
they did not achieve them. The major goals of the
era were to find traces of Franklin's lost expedition, to
find and navigate the Northwest Passage, and to reach the
North Pole. Jonathan Karpoff reckons that five expeditions could claim
(25:47):
a share in achieving those goals. Four of them were
privately funded. Karpoff concludes that public expeditions had more money,
larger teams, and more and larger ships, but they suffered
a higher death rate and they lost more of those ships.
They were four times more likely to suffer from scurvy,
and while the public expeditions were running up most of
(26:09):
the costs, the private expeditions were ticking off most of
the major achievements. The Northwest Passage was finally navigated in
nineteen oh five by a tiny, scrappy, privately funded expedition
led by a bold Norwegian adventurer by the name of
rold Amundson. So why did the larger, richer public expeditions
(26:35):
fail so often? Jonathan Kharpoff points to a range of problems.
They were slow to learn the lessons of experience regarding clothes, diet, shelter,
and transport. They were more hierarchical, They were poorly prepared,
They suffered from interference and second guessing from bureaucrats back
home who would never go on the expedition itself, and
(26:56):
a related problem. While the private explorers were completely focused
on success because that's how you get the book deal
and the lecture tour, the leaders of the public expeditions
were trying not only to succeed, to succeed while operating
in a manner that kept their superiors happy. Scott knew
the feeling all his problems were the result of the
(27:19):
contradictory constraints that surrounded him. He had to do important
scientific work and be first to the pole, and do
it the British way. In his writing, you can see
him squirming to resolve these contradictions, but he can't. In
a letter written to the expedition's treasurer, he explains that
(27:40):
he would have done things differently if he'd known there'd
be a race with Amundson. I never realized that there
was any object in haste this season, or I should
have brought more dogs as Amondson has done, but then adds,
I'm not a great believer in dog transport beyond a
certain point. Scott wasn't the only person to be inconsistent.
(28:01):
Writing after a decade of hindsight, Scott's fellow explorer, absolutely
Cherry Garrard, explains, we were primary a great scientific expedition
with the poll as our bait for public support, though
it was not more important than any other acre of
the plateau. Yet almost in the same breath, he notes
that when Amunson beat Scott to the pole, Scott's journey
(28:25):
was literally laid waste. That was the shock that staggered them.
There we have it. The South Pole was no big
deal at all, just a publicity stunt, and failing to
each at first was a staggering shock. Even today, supporters
of Captain Scott justify his actions in ways that suggest
(28:46):
the same ambivalence, praising him for his pioneering work on
motorized sleds, then with barely a pause, also praising him
for setting himself a physical challenge, just as a twenty
first century adventurer would do. Isn't there an inconsistency here?
Of course there is. Whenever Scott tried to focus on
(29:06):
a goal, it swam before his eyes like Goliath. He
was overburdened and seeing double. Scott's final agonized push for
the pole involved five men dragging their sledges by hand,
mile by painful mile. When they reached their destination, their
(29:31):
worst fears were realized. Norwegian flags were flying and greeting
the Norwegians themselves were long gone. It is a terrible disappointment,
and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Great God,
this is an awful place. Amunson's team had left a
(29:54):
tempt from which the flags were flying. Inside the tempt,
Scott found a letter from Amundson to King Harkun of Norway,
with a cover note requesting that Scott deliver the letter,
thus proving that both Amuson and Scott had reached their goal.
Scott also found that Amunson had left him some spare equipment,
(30:17):
a courtesy from one explorer to another. Scott searched through
the supplies, hoping above all to find one thing a
can of fuel. His own fuel cans were leaking, so
they were running short. Without fuel, there was no way
to make drinking water or defrost frozen food. He found
(30:39):
sleeping backs, mittens, a sextant, but no can of fuel.
That was a blow. Scott's exhausted team turned around. They
had reached the South Pole, but if they were to
make it back to base camp, their journey was only
half done. We have turned up back now on the
goal of our ambition and must face eight hundred miles
(31:04):
of solid dragging, and goodbye to most of the day dreams.
And as the eight hundred miles of solid dragging began,
Scott and his team started to wander whether they would
make it at all. Scott had been defeated, but there's
(31:29):
more to learn from this cautionary tale. When news reached
Scott's family of Amunson's victory, two year old Peter Markham,
Scott turned to his mother, Kathleen Scott, and asked her
a question, Mummy, is Amunson a good man? Next episode
(31:52):
will search for an answer. For a list of sources
plea see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written
(32:16):
by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by
Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow,
Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also
wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle,
(32:39):
Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori,
Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Danielle Lakhan,
and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.
If you like the show, please remember to share, rate
and review, Tell a friend, tell two friends, and if
(33:02):
you want to hear the show, adds free and listen
to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign up for
Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
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