PicoBlog

On December 14th—today if you’re reading this in the United States—Roald Amundsen and four of his men reached the South Pole, the first humans to ever set foot on this several miles thick stack of ice. It’s a feat and a date worth commemorating here at the Pole—I wonder if I should bake some Norwegian treat? Maybe not. I have enough to do and my feelings about Amundsen are complicated.

I’m a reasonable person and I love Norway so, yes, I admire the man who not only claims a “first” at the South Pole, as well as the long-elusive Northwest Passage and possibly even the North Pole! (According to my most recent deep research at the British Library.) Fine, he’s unsurpassed as an explorer. There, I said it. But I don’t care. When it comes to Antarctica and the South Pole itself, my love is with the British.

Actually, I don’t much like Robert Falcon Scott who, by all reports was a bumbling, moody, neurotic Navy man who kept class and rank hierarchies in place even in Antarctica. (Part of Shackleton’s greatness was dispensing with the niceties of rank.) No, as anyone who has read my other entries knows, it’s Cherry and E.O. Wilson I adore, but also Cherry’s comrade, Brydie Bowers. Both Wilson and Bowers died with Scott on return from the Pole. Mostly, I like them for the way Cherry describes them—generous, tough, sardonic and loyal. (The three friends are pictured below.)

While by any objective measure Amundsen was the genius of exploration and Scott the failure, it hasn’t really gone down in history that way. I’m far from alone in my bias for the Brits. Why? Because it’s not the winning that matters, it’s the story and the glory and the ideals they represent that wins the day. Just look at the name of this place—the “Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.” Why? “Amundsen-Scott,” after all, doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue and, unlike the Peary vs. Cook vs. Beard vs. Amundsen (!) controversy over “first” to the North Pole, nobody disputes who made it to the South Pole first.

Having worked here, baking in the “galley” for a good tick over a month now, I’ve concluded that the double name makes a sick kind of sense given the incongruous nature of this place when it comes to science verses operations. Stay with me here—I know that sounds dry. Here's the thing: there’s the story and how it was told and there’s the question of who these men were and what they represented.

Scott and Amundsen existed in entirely different worlds. One was an outsider (although already a formidable explorer); the other was the British establishment’s darling. Crucially, Scott was a high-ranking man in the British Navy with the full backing of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Amundsen, a scrappy, hearty Norwegian with an independent ethos didn’t fit—nor want to fit—into this chummy world shaped by inherited wealth and rigid class distinctions. (Actually, I believe they initially gave Amundsen a pittance when they believed he was headed north.)

Amundsen’s last-minute dash south is the beginning of the larger, excellent story and it’s also the opening of the broader narrative that represents Amundsen as a villain. Read from this perspective—as Cherry and other authors have framed it—the crafty Norwegian forced the British into a race by setting out at the last moment in his tight little ship, the Fram, for the South Pole. He did so right on the heels of Scott’s long-planned expedition, as if determined to steal the prize. Deceiving the press and all but eight of his crew members, Amundsen pulled a most un-sportsman-like feint by pretending to head for the North Pole and then only reporting to Scott (and the global press) his true intentions when he reached Madeira. From there he wired Scott a polite, understated message: “Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctica—Amundsen.”

The British press, as excitable and hungry in 1910 as they are today, feasted on Amundsen’s announcement, spinning it into a duel between the upstart Norwegian and the honorable Brit. According to Edward Larsen’s An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science, the moment Amundsen announced they “began to trumpet ‘a great international polar race.’” The juicy story and the press and public’s interest in it did not wane May, 1913, long after Amundsen’s return to England, when the world learned Scott was not only dead, but had been beaten.

Scott has been accused of being a bungler and he was, in many respects. He and his men “man-hauled,” a very British method of moving supplies across the snow and ice that’s cruelly difficult and inefficient. Scott brought along “motors” and dogs and ponies (!) to help with the hauling but in the end, it was the men who did the real work. In short, his methods were a disaster, his men were frostbitten and the group ran short of food and fuel.

Meanwhile, the Norwegians made it all look easy. Amundsen had learned the value of fur clothing from the Inuit so he and his men were warm and therefore burned fewer calories. He also brought adequate supplies of food and fuel (and a more efficient stove). Crucially, he and his men either rode behind the sleds or skied alongside his well-managed dog teams

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But comparing Amundsen’s “dash for the Pole” to Scott’s expedition ignores the whole history of British exploration up until this point. The emphasis on science that characterized Scott’s journey followed tradition established by the RGS, whose imprimatur gave Scott’s Discovery expedition the legitimacy necessary to raise badly needed funds. (The RGS also generously sponsored Scott with funds from its own coffers.)

Speaking broadly, for the RGS exploration, mapping and empire were inextricably linked. The mission’s scientific value wasn’t secondary—it was included in the expedition’s official instructions. As King Edward VII said in his sendoff speech, delivered from Discovery’s deck, “I have often visited ships in order to say farewell when departing on warlike service; but you are starting on a mission of peace, and for the advance of knowledge.”

Meanwhile, Amundsen had no such distractions. He chose a tight team of trusted men for his land and sea party, all of whom were excellent skiers or seamen, physically fit and experienced with dogs. Scott’s much larger team was, as Wilson put it, “shoved together at random.” Heavy on Navy men (with no cold weather experience), the group consisted of trusted friends as well as men from each branch of the military, various scientists and two men without clear qualification but much-needed cash to offer.

Cherry’s account provides ample evidence of active science undertaken en route and once Scott’s party reached Antarctica, with soundings, water samples and the endless recording of winds, temperatures and magnetic measurements, not to mention the collection of diverse birds, fish, sea creatures, penguins, seals, whales and, of course, rocks. (Incredibly, several hundred pounds of rock were weighing down Scott’s sledge on his return from the Pole, no matter that he and his men were perilously tired, cold and hungry, literally near death. The rocks were still on the sledge when Scott and his men’s bodies were discovered.)

Whatever you might say about Scott’s failure, it’s a complicated one. Foremost, the mission entangled science, British identity and the building of empire into what was, perhaps, an incompatible mission. His mixed motives remind me of the U.S. government’s mission at the Pole today and how American goals co-mingle with scientific research under the aegis of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The 19th and early 20th century influence of the RGS’s agenda in promoting British exploration, mapping and commerce throughout Africa, Asia and the Caribbean can’t be overstated. We’re talking about Britain at the height of imperial power. As Larson writes, “Empire drove geography, and geography drove empire.” Mapping the Antarctic, just as mapping great swaths of Africa, meant putting the British stamp on territory even if it did not necessary mean claiming it. Not to take the analogy too far, but the United States government, military and commercial interests are, in turn, all wrapped up in the science occurring at the Pole today.

So, back to that question—why are both men on the masthead, as it were, of the U.S. Pole Station? Because, Scott won in the end and we need his honorable intentions to justify our presence here. We also continue to honor Scott for his stoicism, for the honorable death he and his comrades suffered, and for the sacrifices he and his men made for England and, if you want to be grand about it, for the higher purpose of attaining knowledge for its own sake. (Commemorative RGS Poster.)

I find Scott’s dramatic story—loaded with pathos, odd characters, suffering and heroism—irresistible. To call Scott’s story literary in its rich detail isn’t going too far—but then, the myth and the narrative themselves exist only in writing as the five primary characters who were there to the end never lived to tell their stories other than through their letters and diaries. It doesn’t hurt that Scott had at least two talented men to tell the story for him: E.O Wilson (in his diary and through his incredible drawings and painting) and my friend, Cherry, in his magnificent, now classic, The Worst Journey in the World.

If Scott’s name and its connection to lofty scientific values elevates the American mission at the South Pole, Amundsen, with his deeply practical, meticulously planned mission brings a necessary, slightly grubby, pragmatism. I see both men in the conflicting parts of the U.S. station. On the one hand, this building/organism operates with a kind of go-to attitude that Amundsen would recognize. The Americans have implanted a sizable footprint here on this pristine white glacier and I’m part of that as I take up space, shower, eat, poop, and live in the heated building that, you might argue, has no right to be here at all. The infrastructure supporting the science isn’t elegant, but it gets the job done. Feeding dog meat to dogs isn’t pretty, but it got Amundsen to the Pole and back.

What, it might reasonably be asked, is the use of studying a thing as elusive as a neutrino? The multi-million-dollar IceCube project does precisely that and it can’t exist anywhere else but here, deep beneath the surface in the depths of the deathly dark, clear, cold, profoundly quiet (in every sense) ice. Do we really need one of the largest telescopes in the world to learn about black holes? Even knowing as little as I do about the fascinating, existentially challenging concept of black holes, I’m all for it. (Telescope in the distance.)

All of this is to say that an “ops” or operations worker, it’s easy to forget why I’m here. Did Cherry understand the evolutionary implications of finding a penguin embryo at the right stage of development? Absolutely not. But he made the journey and never complained. I prefer to believe in the ideal and in the humanity of Cherry’s terrific story even knowing, as I do, that those penguin eggs never turned out to worth a damn to science.

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