Roland Huntford
Jon Krakauer - Series Editor
Introduction by Paul Theroux
The Modern Library New York
1999 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Biographical note copyright © 1999 by Random House, Inc
Series introduction copyright © 1999 by Jon Krakauer
Introduction copyright © 1999 by Paul Theroux
Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Roland Huntford
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Random House, Inc, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto
Modern Library and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc
This work was originally published in 1979 under the title Scott and Amundsen This edition published by arrangement with the author
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Huntford, Roland - [Scott and Amundsen]
The last place on earth Scott and Amundsen's race to the South Pole/Roland Huntford p. cm.
Previously published as Scott and Amundsen, 1985 Includes bibliographical references and index
ISBN 0-375-75474-1
1 Scott, Robert Falcon, 1868-1912
2 Amundsen, Roald, 1872-1928
3 Explorers - Great Britain - Biography
4 Explorers – Norway – Biography
5 South Pole
I Title
G875.S35H86 – 1999 – 99 - 41398
Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com
Printed in the United States of America
6 8 9 7 5
Roland Huntford, whose books chronicling the lives of Antarctic and Arctic adventurers have earned him praise as "the best biographer of polar explorers," was born in 1927 and now lives in Cambridge, England. He spent fourteen years as Scandinavian correspondent for the London Observer, during which he was based in both Helsinki and Stockholm. He was then named an Alistair Home Fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford. His first book, The New Totalitarian (1972), offers an astute evaluation of Swedish socialism. The New York Times Book Review described The New Totalitarian as "the first detailed critique and expose of the Social Democratic regime" and deemed it "extraordinarily acute ... a major study by an unsympathetic observer of Swedish social democracy in all its aspects."
Huntford followed The New Totalitarians with Sea of Darkness (1975), a historical novel in which Christopher Columbus sails with a Norwegian expedition to Newfoundland in 1475. "Roland Huntford has taken some things that happened to Columbus, some things that did not happen to Columbus and some things that did not happen at all, and combined them into an entertaining fable of early Columbian seafaring," said The New York Times Book Review. "What holds the book together is the smell of the sea blowing gustily through its pages. The author has an appreciation for ships and sailing that enlivens his account of the young Columbus' real and apocryphal voyages."
Huntford's first biography, Scott and Amundsen (1979), presents the interlocking stories of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen, the two great rivals in the race for the South Pole. "Roland Huntford has at last written the three-dimensional book this immense drama deserves," said The Spectator. "It is a mighty story of two nations and two heroes, who could not contrast more at every point.... We can see how the two expeditions fulfilled a destiny that has been shaping itself for decades." The New Yorker called Scott and Amundsen "a skillful and probing study of the contrasts in character between the Norwegian and the Englishman, out of which comes a new appraisal of Captain Scott." The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Huntford has combed a vast collection of diaries, letters and other material, British and Norwegian. The result is a remarkably vivid picture of the agonies and feuds, as well as joys, of polar exploration ... a fascinating book."
Reissued in 1985 as The Last Place on Earth, the work inspired a PBS miniseries on Masterpiece Theater. "No one can read this stirring book without at least questioning the standard view of Scott as a hero," said The Washington Post Book World. "Roland Huntford has written a book which is at once exciting and sobering," judged The New York Review of Books. "It is not just a retelling, however knowledgeable and purposeful, of an old story. It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking study.... This is an important as well as an absorbing book ... [one] that had to be written." Since Huntford reads the Scandinavian languages as well as French, German, and Italian, The Last Place on Earth is also remarkable for being the only book on the subject in the English language to be based on the original Norwegian sources.
Huntford is also the author of Shackleton (1984), a biography of British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who attempted three expeditions to the South Pole during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Winner of the Nelson Hurst & Marsh Biography Award, the book was hailed by The Spectator as "truly marvelous and marvellously moving... a poignant reminder of how polar exploration thrilled and hypnotized the world that came to an end in 1914." "Huntford's Shackleton is a superb and gripping biography of the brave polar explorer," said Paul Theroux in the Sunday Times (London). "This book contains the best account I have read of the Endurance expedition." The New York Times Book Review agreed: "Events in Shackleton's life cascade like an unending Robert Louis Stevenson novel. A vivid, thorough and rewarding biography of the relentless British adventurer." And The New Yorker noted: "[Shackleton] remains a hero, and it is to Mr. Hunt-ford's credit that he can present all the derogatory facts without obscuring the one essential, and elusive, point - that this was a man whom others could willingly trust with their lives, if not with their wives or wallets.... Mr. Huntford has probably brought him as close to life as is possible on the printed page, and has done justice to the spirit of an Elizabethan buccaneer born into the wrong century."
Huntford's most recent book, Nansen: The Explorer as Hero (1998), recounts the life of Fridtjof Nansen, the pioneering Norwegian who very nearly reached the North Pole in 1895. "A dozen years in the making, this massively researched biography is a superb achievement," said the Evening Standard. "It combines shrewd psychological analysis with outstanding Arctic set-pieces involving man's struggle with snowdrift, ice-floe, polar bears, scurvy and gnawing hunger. And, always towering above the narrative, is Nansen, the tortured driven soul, a second Faust.... Nansen here finds a peerless biographer." The Sunday Times (London) called Huntford "a superb biographer," and The Sunday Telegraph deemed Nansen "an exemplary biography: massively researched, lucidly written, and perfectly capturing the blend of arrogance and innocence of its inspiring but infuriating hero." Writing in the Guardian, Paul Theroux concluded: "Nansen is hugely satisfying... a wonderful biography of the greatest polar explorer by the best biographer of polar explorers."
Jon Krakauer
Why should we be interested in the jottings of explorers and adventurers? This question was first posed to me twenty-four years ago by a skeptical dean of Hampshire College upon receipt of my proposal for a senior thesis with the dubious title "Tombstones and the Moose's Tooth: Two Expeditions and Some Meandering Thoughts on Climbing Mountains." I couldn't really blame the guardians of the school's academic standards for thinking I was trying to bamboozle them, but in fact I wasn't. Hoping to convince Dean Turlington of my scholarly intent, I brandished an excerpt from The Adventurer, by Paul Zweig:
The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories, about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men... It could be argued... that the narrative art itself arose from the need to tell an adventure; that man risking his life in perilous encounters constitutes the original definition of what is worth talking about.
Zweig's eloquence carried the day, bumping me one step closer to a diploma. His words also do much to explain the profusion of titles about harrowing outdoor pursuits in bookstores these days. But even as the literature of adventure has lately enjoyed something of a popular revival, several classics of the genre have inexplicably remained out of print. The new Modern Library Exploration series is intended to rectify some of these oversights.
The four books we have selected to launch the series span four centuries of adventuring, providing a look at the shifting rationales given by explorers over the ages in response to the inevitable question: Why on earth would anyone willingly subject himself to such unthinkable hazards and hardships?
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, by the incomparable prose stylist Francis Parkman, recounts the astonishing journeys of Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, as he crisscrossed the wilds of seventeenth-century America in hopes of discovering a navigable waterway to the orient. La Salle did it, ostensibly at least, to claim new lands for King Louis XIV and to get rich. He succeeded on both counts - his explorations of the Mississippi Basin delivered the vast Louisiana Territory into the control of the French crown - but at no small personal cost: In 1687, after spending twenty of his forty-three years in the hostile wilderness of the New World, La Salle was shot in the head by mutinous members of his own party, stripped naked, and left in the woods to be eaten by scavenging animals.
Farthest North is a first-person narrative by the visionary Norse explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who in 1893 set sail from Norway with a crew of twelve in a wooden ship christened the Fram, hoping to discover the North Pole. Nansen's brilliant plan, derided as crazy by most of his peers, was to allow the Fram to become frozen into the treacherous pack ice of the Arctic Ocean, and then let prevailing currents carry the icebound ship north across the pole. Two years into the expedition, alas, and still more than 400 miles from his objective, Nansen realized that the drifting ice was not going to take the Fram all the way to the pole. Unfazed, he departed from the ship with a single companion and provisions for 100 days, determined to cover the remainder of the distance by dogsled, with no prospect of reuniting with the Fram for the return journey. The going was slow, perilous, and exhausting, but they got to within 261 statute miles of the pole before giving up and beginning a desperate, yearlong trudge back to civilization.
Unlike La Salle, Nansen couldn't plausibly defend his passion for exploration by claiming to do it for utilitarian ends. The North Pole was an exceedingly recondite goal, a geographical abstraction surrounded by an expanse of frozen sea that was of no apparent use to anybody. Nansen most often proffered what had by then become the justification de rigueur for jaunts to the ends of the earth - almighty science - but it didn't really wash.
Robert Falcon Scott, Nansen's contemporary, also relied on the scientific rationale to justify his risky exploits, and it rang just as hollow.
The Last Place on Earth, by English historian Roland Huntford, is the definitive, utterly riveting account of the race for the South Pole, which Scott lost to Nansen's protégé, Roald Amundsen, in 1911 - and which cost Scott his life, as well. In death, Scott was mythologized as the preeminent tragic hero in the history of the British Empire, but Huntford's book - lauded by The New York Times as "one of the great debunking biographies" - portrays him as an inept bungler unworthy of such deification. Huntford also reveals that while Scott was marching toward his demise in Antarctica, his wife, Kathleen, was consummating an affair with his rival's mentor, Nansen, in a Berlin hotel room.
In the final title of the series, Starlight and Storm, the dashing French mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat recalls his ascents of the six great north faces of the Alps, including the notorious Eiger Nordwand, during the years following World War II. An incorrigible romantic, he describes his climbs in luminous, mesmerizing prose that is likely to inspire even dedicated flat-landers to pick up an ice ax and light out for the great ranges. And how does Rebuffat reconcile the sport's matchless pleasures with its potentially lethal consequences? He resorts to bald-faced denial: "The real mountaineer," he insists, "does not like taking risks," and shuns danger like the plague. Although he acknowledges that in certain unavoidable situations "a thrill runs through him," he quickly (and unconvincingly) avows that it is "much too unpleasant a thrill for him to seek it out or to enjoy it."
If none of the extraordinary people featured in these chronicles adequately answers the nagging question - Why? - perhaps it is simply because adventurers, on the whole, are congenitally averse to leading examined lives. "If you have to ask," they like to mumble by way of dodging their inquisitors, "you just wouldn't understand." Rest assured, however, that the convolutions of the adventurous psyche are richly illuminated in these four compelling volumes, however enigmatic the protagonists may have remained to themselves.
Paul Theroux
What most people know of the conquest of the South Pole is that Captain Scott got there and then died heroically on the return journey; that when the Polar party lay tent-bound and apparently doomed, Captain Oates unselfishly said, "I am just going outside and may be some time," and took himself out to die, so that his comrades might live; that Scott represented self-sacrifice and endurance, and glorious failure, the personification of the British ideal of plucky defeat. Scott's expedition was essentially scientific; he was beset by bad weather. Roald Amundsen is a sort of afterthought:
Oh, yes, the dour Norwegian actually got to the Pole and planted his flag first, but that's a detail; he was very lucky and a little devious. So much for the Pole.
Mr. Huntford proves all of this wrong, and much more, to boot. Thus, the kerfuffle.
It is a measure of the power of this book that when it first appeared in Britain, it caused an uproar; and a few years later, a television series that was adapted from it created a flurry of angry letters to newspapers and a great deal of public discussion in which the book was rubbished and its author condemned - even vilified in some quarters for suggesting that Fridtjof Nansen was engaged in a sexual affair with Kathleen Scott while her husband lay freezing in his tent. But what had Mr. Huntford actually done? He had written a riveting account of two expeditions intending simultaneously to achieve the South Pole. His book is well documented, soberly and sometimes wryly written, much of it is thrilling, some of it as dramatic as exploration can possibly be, and to my mind few things are more dramatic.
But the Polar quest was not just exploration, a journey of discovery. It was indeed (although Scott tried to deny it) an unambiguous race to be the first at the South Pole. National pride was at stake - Norwegian and British; two different philosophies of travel and discovery - skis versus trudging, dogs versus ponies, canvas and rubberized cloth versus fur anoraks and Eskimo boots; two cultures - Norse equality ("a little republic" of explorers) versus the severe British class system; and two sorts of leadership, more particularly, two different and distinct personalities - Roald Amundsen's versus Captain Scott's.
The great surprise in the book is that Amundsen is not a moody, sullen Scandinavian, but rather a shrewd, passionate, approachable, thoroughly rational man, who tended to understate his exploits, while Scott - quite the reverse of the British stereotype - was depressive, unfathomable, aloof, self-pitying, and prone to exaggerate his vicissitudes. Their personalities determined the mood of each expedition: Amundsen's was spirited and cohesive, Scott's was confused and demoralized. Amundsen was charismatic and focused on his objective; Scott was insecure, dark, panicky, humorless, an enigma to his men, unprepared, and a bungler, but in the spirit of a large-scale bungler, always self-dramatizing.
Mr. Huntford's judgments are unsparing: "It was Scott who suited the sermons - He was a suitable hero for a nation in decline." Amundsen had made the conquest of the Pole "into something between an art and a sport. Scott had turned Polar exploration into an affair of heroism for heroism's sake." Mrs. Oates, who was privy to a running commentary on the Scott expedition through her son's letters home - Oates was throughout a remarkable witness - called Scott the "murderer" of her son. As for Oates' opinion, "I dislike Scott intensely," he wrote in Antarctica.
Far from being a belittler or having an ax to grind about the phlegmatic British (for he has written elsewhere with justified admiration of Shackleton), Mr. Huntford merely points out that Britain took Scott as a necessary hero; it is not the British character that is being assailed in this book. Mr. Huntford demonstrates that, all along, Scott was the problem. Though he knew little of actual command (and was unsuited to it), Scott was ambitious, seeking advancement, even glory, in the Royal Navy. He was a manipulator, and he knew how to find patrons, which he did in Sir Clements Markham, a wonderful sly subsidiary character in the narrative - vindictive, pompous, queenly, attracted to Scott more for Scott's being strangely epicene. This femininity in Scott's personality was remarked upon by one of Scott's own men, Apsley Cherry-Garrard - the youngest in the expedition - in his masterpiece of Polar exploration, The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry-Garrard also mentioned how Amundsen had been underrated as "a blunt Norwegian sailor" rather than "an explorer of the markedly intellectual type," sagacious and weather-wise. And Scott, Cherry-Garrard wrote, was easily reduced to tears.
The weather has always been regarded as the determining factor in Amundsen's success and Scott's failure. Yet it offered little advantage: Conditions were pretty much the same for both expeditions. The fact was that Amundsen was far better prepared, and Scott left no margin of safety for food, fuel, or weather. In a journey of four months Scott had not allowed for four days' bad weather. Parallel diary entries in a given period show Amundsen hearty and bucked up as he skis through fog, and just behind him Scott's diary shows him fatigued, depressed, complaining, slogging along. Mr. Huntford sees this not as a difference in style but in approach:
Scott... expected the elements to be ordered for his benefit, and was resentful each rime he found they were not. This was a manifestation of the spiritual pride that was Scott's fatal flaw. The difference between the two rivals is expressed in the way each called on the Deity. Scott did so only to complain when things went wrong; Amundsen, to give thanks for good fortune. In any case, Scott was an agnostic and believed in science; Amundsen was a Nature-worshipper. For that reason alone, Amundsen found it easier to accept the caprice of blizzard and storm. He and his companions were in tune with their surroundings; they were spared the angst that tormented Scott and, through him, pervaded the British expedition.
The Norwegian expedition, though vastly underfunded, were all of them skiers, had a better diet, simpler but more sensible gear, and the bond of friendship. Skis were a mere novelty to the non-skier Scott, whose class-ridden expedition had plenty of money and patrons. He had planned to depend upon ponies and motorized sledges, but when these proved useless he was forced to haul sledges by hand. In the base camp, long before Scott's party set out for the Pole, one of Scott's men - significantly, it was the one Norwegian, Tryggve Gran - wrote, "Our party is divided, and we are like an army that is defeated, disappointed and inconsolable."
Amundsen had heart and compassion but could also be an odd fish in his way. He had a prejudice against doctors. He wouldn't take one on an expedition. "He believed that a doctor," Mr. Huntford writes, "because of his priest-like role, meant divided command." On the other hand his men were master navigators. Only one of Scott's men could navigate and he was not taken on the Polar party, though at the last moment Scott decided to take an extra man, which meant that rations would inevitably be short.
The long shadow over this quest for the Pole was cast by the towering figure of Nansen who, Mr. Huntford wrote, was canoodling with Kathleen Scott, who was in her way just as formidable a person. The loan of Nansen's ship, the unsinkable, the uncrackable Fram, was an immense benefit to Amundsen; Scott's creaky Terra Nova was no match for it, and indeed the Fram ultimately had the distinction of sailing both farthest north and farthest south. The Fram was crucial, for Amundsen needed a seaworthy and powerful purpose-built, expedition-tested ship. His mission was secret, he left home much later than Scott, and had almost no patronage. Yet in almost every instance, Amundsen makes the right, most astute judgment and Scott the wrong, most ill-informed one, which is why this book seems to me so valuable, for it is a book about myth-making and heroism and self-deception, the ingredients of nationalism.
This book was a sensation when it first appeared, and now rereading it twenty years later I still find it an engrossing and instructive narrative, with vivid characterization and a mass of useful detail. When you finish it you know much more about human nature, for it is more than a book about the South Pole. It is about two explorers, two cultures, and about the nature of exploration itself, which is to me a counterpart to the creative impulse, requiring mental toughness, imagination, courage, and a leap of faith. Most of all, this book about a race, which was the last great expedition that ended the Age of Discovery, is a study in leadership.
Paul Theroux's most recent book is Sir Vidia's Shadow. His new book of travel writings, Fresh-Air Fiend, will be published in the spring of 2000.
To my wife
It is more important to provide material for a true
verdict than to gloss over disturbing facts so that
individual reputations may be preserved.
Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the preface to History of the First World War
When this book first appeared, it was greeted in ...
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