From the Bookshelf: Captain Scott
I seem to have a deep well of sympathy for the put-upon and belaboured, and at times this extends beyond mere fictional characters to actual historical figures. When I spotted a chance to buy "Captain Scott," a book about Robert Falcon Scott, famous for getting to the South Pole second and dying on the way back, that was an "argument against the conventional view of Scott as second best," I decided to pick it up. Having worked my way through National Geographic articles on modern polar expeditions and tales of the exploration of the Canadian Arctic (which tended to present Scott's British predecessors as poorly equipped and unwilling to learn how it ought to be done) to the Antarctic epic and a certain modern emphasis seeming to suggest Scott was pretty much doomed from the start, the alternative point of view may have appealed to me.
The book was written by Ranulph Fiennes, who has made several modern expeditions to the Antarctic himself. It seems to help him describe just what hauling your own sledge of provisions over the ice is like, and while it doesn't exactly sound like the pleasant of experiences, Fiennes does seem to me to establish that Scott's decisions weren't made based on blithe, unfounded optimism. Too, at times before I seemed to sense an implication in the descriptions of others that the initial modes of transportation that "hadn't worked" for Scott, his "motor sledges" and Siberian ponies, had "let him down"; Fiennes argues from the evidence that they had in fact done as much as had been expected to and planned for. Too, in drawing on the recent work of others (such as Susan Solomon's "The Coldest March"), Fiennes suggests a significant contribution to the "first rate tragedy" was an unexpected and unusual cold snap in the final stages of the journey back.
In seeing how Fiennes points out the mistakes that the first to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen, did make, and the work of the most famous of the attackers of Scott, Roland Huntford, I can wonder if there's a bit of an effort to find things to muddy opinions there. Still, having already read Huntford's book myself, I can conclude that "another perspective" is always interesting, even if it's "counter-countermythologizing."
The book was written by Ranulph Fiennes, who has made several modern expeditions to the Antarctic himself. It seems to help him describe just what hauling your own sledge of provisions over the ice is like, and while it doesn't exactly sound like the pleasant of experiences, Fiennes does seem to me to establish that Scott's decisions weren't made based on blithe, unfounded optimism. Too, at times before I seemed to sense an implication in the descriptions of others that the initial modes of transportation that "hadn't worked" for Scott, his "motor sledges" and Siberian ponies, had "let him down"; Fiennes argues from the evidence that they had in fact done as much as had been expected to and planned for. Too, in drawing on the recent work of others (such as Susan Solomon's "The Coldest March"), Fiennes suggests a significant contribution to the "first rate tragedy" was an unexpected and unusual cold snap in the final stages of the journey back.
In seeing how Fiennes points out the mistakes that the first to the South Pole, Roald Amundsen, did make, and the work of the most famous of the attackers of Scott, Roland Huntford, I can wonder if there's a bit of an effort to find things to muddy opinions there. Still, having already read Huntford's book myself, I can conclude that "another perspective" is always interesting, even if it's "counter-countermythologizing."