Doomed eternal youth
Christopher Booker
Scott and Amundsen Roland Huntford (Hodder £13.95) The oldest story known to man is a Quest the Sumerian epic which tells how Gilgamesh set out to the end of the world in search of the secret of immortality. For thousands of years the Quest theme has continued to grip the human imagination, in stories such as the Odyssey, the Holy Grail, the Divine Comedy, Pilgrim's Progress, which were as much reflections of an inner journey as an outer one. But in the 19th century a strange thing began to happen to literary Quests. They became purely 'externalised'. Heroes like Captain Ahab, pursuing his Great White Whale, or Verne's astronauts seeking to 'conquer' the Moon, were seen as engaged not so much on some great voyage of inner development as simply pitting themselves defiantly against nature. And the uncanny thing is how such stories came to end, not on a note of gldrious spiritual fulfilment, but in disaster and frustration Ahab going to his suicidal death, Verne's lunarnauts left circling helplessly round the moon.
Of course the same thing has been happening in real life as Western man has more and more in the past two centuries projected the goal of the Quest into his conquest of the physical world, the source of the Nile, the Poles, Everest, the Moon. And just as in the novels, there has hung over these externalised quests a shadow, often amounting almost to a death wish. It is remarkable how many of the great explorers, from Captain Cook onwards, have died ' h eroically'. For the 19th century, Sir John Franklin, who died in 1845 with his 128 men while trying to discover the North West Passage. was a paradigm of the 'doomed hero', just as Whymper, or Malory and Irvine were later. But none so completely filled the bill as that explorer whose reputation began to burgeon from the moment of his death in 1912, Robert Falcon Scott.
For more than 60 years, the story of 'Scott of the Antarctic' has been one of our great national legends. There has always been something mysteriously twodimensional, plaster-saintly about this hero who not only failed to be first to the Pole, but failed to return fitting in only too well with our national love of the gallant loser, the plucky amateur. Who was this other fellow Amundsen, the professional who was boring enough to get there first and return safely? We scarcely know nor care. Perhaps the reason why the legend has become so embalmed is that we were not being told the full story? Well, now it has been done and in 600 wonderfully researched pages, Roland Huntford has at last written the three-dimensional book this immense drama deserves blowing like a Polar gale through the musty air of a too-long enclosed national sanctuary.
It is a mighty story of two nations and two heroes, who could not contrast more at every point. On the one hand was the little, newly-nationalistic Norway of Grieg and Ibsen, producing in the 1890s a new Norse hero in Nansen, the man who overnight became world famous by skiing and drifting his way (in the From )across the Arctic ice. Coming to manhood in these same years was the young Amundsen, born to be at home amid snow and ice, preparing himself to succeed the 'old king' Nansen as his country's next hero. In 1906 Amundsen himself, after a succession of Arctic and Antarctic voyages as whaler and sealer, hit the world's headlines as the first man to , force the North West Passage, after an astonishing three-year journey during which he had lived with Stone Age Eskimos, and learned almost everything there was to know about survival in Polar conditions how to handle dogs, the value of fresh food in avoiding scurvy, how to build igloos, how reindeer fur worn loose around the skin was the best protection against cold, above all how to lead men. In his mid-thirties, Amundsen was as wellprepared as any man could be for an assault on one of the Poles, the goal he had set himselfand when, in 1909, the North Pole fell to Cook or Peart, he simply switched his ambition to the South.
Scott, on the other hand, was born into the richest, most powerful nation on earth at just the moment, in 1868, when that power was about to wane. Son of a dominating mother and a weak father, the young Scott was just the type who would have trouble in relating to his own masculinity,a day-dreaming hero longing to prove himself without being prepared to develop the necessary attributes. His career as a young naval officer was not particularly glorious until, in 1899, an elderly homosexual, Sir Clements Markham, determined to supply his country with heroes in the jingoistic wake of the Diamond Jubilee, singled out Scott to lead an expedition to the Antarctic. The Discovery expedition of 1902 got further south than ever before, but for many of those present, including Shackleton, it showed up all Scott's weaknesses as a leader his recklessness, his indecisiveness, his failure to appreciate the value of dogs or the problems of scurvy. It was only in 1905, when Scott published a carefully re-written, self-glorifying version of his diaries, that he began to make a reputation (thus incurring the lasting disrespect of Shackleton, who four years later was to get within 97 miles of the Pole.) Scott returned to naval command, where he came badly out of a lesser version of the CamperdownVictoria incident, but became something of a social lion, continued to be a favourite of Sir Clements Markham and married a dominating, pushing wife Kathleen, who between them ensured that Scott (rather than Shackleton or anyone else) was given the task of heading the great national assault on the Pole in 1911. Having so brilliantly prepared his groundwork, Mr Huntford is now in a position to show us the gripping denouement, switching from Amundsen to Scott in such a way that we can see how the two expeditions fulfilled a destiny that had been shaping itself for decades. While Amundsen, the true leader, was preparing the right clothing, food, equipment, navigational aids, down to the last detail, Scott dithered, playing with the idea of motorised sledges, having failed to learn any of the lessons about dogs, skis and the need for fresh food he should have taken from the near-failure of the Discovery expedition. When the race for the Pole finally started, Amundsen and his hand-picked team (including a worldchampion skier) were so meticulously prepared that they made the journey (by ti route, over a 13,000 foot mountain range. in fact much tougher than that taken by Scott) seem almost effortless. Scott, on the other hand. hopelessly ill, prepared, obsessed with the self; dramatising masochism of 'man-hauling (against proper use of skis and clop), seemed doomed from the start. Everything that could go wrong did so, almost to the uponcinotnwschi eo rues o dn ee aftehe I swSi scho .t t Bwya s tdhrei v time nmbey ah reached the Pole, to find Amundsen 's -, h sages in a tent below the Norwegian fia is 6, chances of getting home alive were already slim. He had completely lost the respect of Oates — and everything he did from then on, in those last nightmarish weeks (like picking ,up a sledgefull of useless geological specimens) seemed almost wilfully to ensure disaster — until the final days in the tent when, as he and his scurvy-ridden companions prepared to die, he scribbled those heroically martyred last messages to his countrymen which were the seeds of the Scott legend.
Those critics who suggest that Mr Huntford has gone out of his way to heighten the contrast between the two men, to the point of saying almost nothing bad about Amundsen and nothing.good about Scott are right. Amundsen himself, for all his strength of character and powers of leadership, was still a somewhat grim, Ibsenesque Romantic hero, with the hint of self-destructiveness that implies. Indeed he was eventually to vanish on a reckless, forlorn flight to save an Italian aviator lost on the Arctic ice, almost as if he had nothing left to live for but glorious immolation. But this book is no Strachey—style, flash debunking job, as some recent comments might imply. Above all, hurtful though it may be to many, one feels that Mr Huntford has at last shown Scott plain. The figure of the doomed puer aeternus, friend of J. M. Barrie, who emerges from these pages, is only too convincing. The piaster saint has been smashed for ever.
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