The Last Place on Earth (Modern Library Exploration) | Roland Huntford

The Last Place on Earth (Modern Library Exploration) | Roland Huntford | Unbelievably Good

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The Last Place on ...

	The Last Place on Earth (Modern Library Exploration) Roland Huntford Modern Library, 1999 - 640 pages average customer review:based on 77 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

On December 14, 1911, the classical age of polar exploration ended when Norway's Roald Amundsen conquered the South Pole. His competitor for the prize, Britain's Robert Scott, arrived one month later--but died on the return with four of his men only 11 miles from their next cache of supplies. But it was Scott, ironically, who became the legend, Britain's heroic failure, "a monument to sheer ambition and bull-headed persistence. His achievement was to perpetuate the romantic myth of the explorer as martyr, and ... to glorify suffering and self-sacrifice as ends in themselves." The world promptly forgot about Amundsen.

Biographer Ronald Huntford's attempt to restore Amundsen to glory, first published in 1979 under the title Scott and Amundsen, has been thawed as part of the Modern Library Exploration series, captained by Jon Krakauer (of Into Thin Air fame). The Last Place on Earth is a complex and fascinating account of the race for this last great terrestrial goal, and it's pointedly geared toward demythologizing Scott. Though this was the age of the amateur explorer, Amundsen was a professional: he left little to chance, apprenticed with Eskimos, and obsessed over every detail. While Scott clung fast to the British rule of "No skis, no dogs," Amundsen understood that both were vital to survival, and they clearly won him the Pole.

Amundsen in Huntford's view is the "last great Viking" and Scott his bungling opposite: "stupid ... recklessly incompetent," and irresponsible in the extreme--failings that cost him and his teammates their lives. Yet for all of Scott's real or exaggerated faults, he understood far better than Amundsen the power of a well-crafted sentence. Scott's diaries were recovered and widely published, and if the world insisted on lionizing Scott, it was partly because he told a better story. Huntford's bias aside, it's clear that both Scott and Amundsen were valiant and deeply flawed. "Scott ... had set out to be an heroic example. Amundsen merely wanted to be first at the pole. Both had their prayers answered." --Svenja Soldovieri

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A Ripping Good Yarn

I saw a program on PBS about Amundsen and the Northwest Passage and decided I wanted to know more so I bought this book. Much has already been said and thus doesn't need repeating. If you hold to the hero status of Scott then you are apt to be severely disappointed. He does NOT fair well in the cold light of history. Amundsen comes across as someone who was at the peak of his game and was just better at this sort of thing.

One of the best books I've read in a LONG time. Well worth the time spent.

Unbelievably Good

Stellar story that was painstakenly researched. This is the kind of book that inspires one to take a trip to Antarctica - or read everything available about polar exploration. Nansen, Shakleton, Scott and the mighty Amundsen are not just interesting characters - they are Goliaths of exploration who braved the elements with panache and bravery second to none. Excellent read, try to stay warm while doing it.

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Just excellent. Read it to learn the truth.

This book is so good and so changed the hero worship apologist views of Scott that, all by itself, it spawned a whole set of NEW apologist rebuttals. Some of these books just can't accept the truth, and perhaps the only one that deserves a response is the work by Susan Solomon, a meteorologist, who contends that Scott may have made errors, but was basically the victim of "bad weather".

First, it's entirely unsurprising to expect a certain amount of bad weather at the South Pole(!), but the contention is that that the weather was even worse than what should have been expected. Perhaps, but the uncomfortable truth remains that Amundsen and his crew completed the journey (and gained weight on the return from the Pole), while Scott literally froze and starved.

What accounts for the difference?

Aside from much better technique, in all matters large (dogs vs ponies) and small (food that was less prone to cause scurvy), Amundsen did not presume on the weather. He started early---even a little too early with a false start---and was thus finished with the journey when the cold weather came to finish off Scott.

Is this luck on the part of Amundsen or bad judgement by Scott? Deciding that question is a matter of hindsight, but we can compare the record of the two on other matters. In every case, Amundsen allowed generous, even enormous safety factors (for example, literally abandoning food on the return from the pole, while Scott was starving), while Scott cut everything close. In essence, Scott expected all variables, including the weather, to be arranged for his convenience, while Amundsen took a humble and conservative approach since he was venturing into a total unknown.

Scott followed closely, in fact almost exactly, the route that had been pioneered by Shackelton, who came within 90 miles of the pole. This may have encouraged Scott to believe that he knew more of what to expect than was actually the case. Amundsen, in contrast, was blazing a trail on an unknown route with every step. He was forced to include large safety factors because of this.

Was Scott the martinet depicted in this book? This is probably what has provoked such vehement defenses of Scott, but in the larger picture, it doesn't matter. Scott made numerous errors in technique and finally paid the ultimate price for it. Arrogance, incompetence, bad luck, or all of those? Probably all, with only the proportions subject to debate.

Huntford wrote this book to give proper credit to the man who quietly planned and brilliantly excecuted the expedition that succeeded. Scott may have had "bad weather" or "bad luck" but he also had poor execution of a bad plan and he presumed too much.

Read the book. It's excellent, and you can then judge for yourself.

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Scott, Huntford and the Decline of the British Empire

Someone who is not British, when encountering this book or the magnificent television series which was based on it, may not understand the "historical baggage" that weighed on Huntford's attitude towards the two protagonists of the story, Scott and Amundsen. Britain has a long history of having an intelligentsia that is either jingoistic/chauvinistic on the one hand, or self-hating on the other. With the break-up of the British Empire in the post-Second World War period, the self-hating sector grew in size, and Huntford seems to be part of it. The tragic failure of Scott's expedition to the South Pole in 1911/1912 has been viewed through the prisms of this historical baggage to this day.
Huntford points out that Britain started going into relative economicand political decline, as compared particularly to the young upstart Germans and Americans as early as 1870, the time when Scott was born. The incompetence of the British Army in the Boer War made it popular already by the beginning of the 20th century to say that the "British race was decadent" and Scott himself referred to this when canvassing support for his British Antarctic Expedition by saying the effort to explore the Antarctic would prove that this accusation was not true.
The failure of Scott's expedition was then held up by official state organs as a "glorious failure" which would serve as an example of suffering and sacrifice in which to inspire the British people, particularly the young. The start of the First World War just 2 1/2 years later with millions of young men "going over the top" into the face of slaughter by gas, machine guns and artillery made Scott's story even more relevant and potentially inspiring.
Decades later, Scott was still viewed as a great man and explorer who was the victim of "bad luck", as compared to his competitor Amundsen and it was considered vaguely "unfair" for Amundsen to have even have attempted to go for the South Pole at the same time as Scott. I myself recall seeing Scott's diary in the British Museum where it was treated something like a holy relic.
It was this distorted view of Scott that Huntford attempted to correct in writing this book and to give Amundsen the credit he was due and which he was not allowed to enjoy in his lifetime due to Scott getting most of the publicity as a result of his "glorious failure" which attracted more attention due to its dramatic nature.
The problem is that Huntford seems to have a lot of anger in him, directed not only at Scott, but at those forces in Britain who, in his view, cynically promoted the idea that Scott should be viewed as a great man and hero who was "unlucky" and "treated unfairly" and viewed Amundsen as something of a pirate. In my opinion, he goes too far and resorts to petty attacks on Scott and his wife.
Having said this, I still think the book is outstanding and his comparison of Scott's and Amundsen's methods and leadership ability are essentially correct, and that Scott really was not fit to lead such an expedition. The fact that some of those critical of Huntford point out that some of Scott's men, such as Edgar Evans and others who came to the Terra Nova expedition after having been with him on the earlier Discovery mission seem to have been very loyal to him does not prove that he was a good leader. The British who served under him simply might not have known anything about how polar exploration was really supposed to be conducted.
I really appreciated Huntford's description of the technical matters that Amundsen excelled in such as his choice of skis, food, fuel containers, packing boxes, sledges, clothing and the such point the way to the different outcomes for the two expeditions. Scott simply did not invest the effort in really trying to understand life in such a harsh environment, and could not cope with things like scurvey, the leakage of fuel from their containers, designing packing boxes that could be opened without untying them from their sledges as did Amundsen, even simplifying methods for doing the complicated calculations for determining latitude so close to the pole, again, as Amundsen did. Amundsen even thought of putting marker flags not just on the supply depots he made, but he also put marker flags several miles on each side of them in case visibility was poor and they were off course. Scott didn't do this and there were numerous panicked rushes wasting much time energy just to find them. These "little things" when added to the big policy issues such as whether to use motor sledges, dogs, ponies or simple, brutal man hauling determined what would be the outcomes of the two groups. Finally, there was the leadership qualities of the men. Scott came out of the Royal Navy which had a harsh system of imposing discipline and he used it on the people on his team, thinking of them as being "officers" or "lower deck"-types. Amundsen, although demanding loyalty from his men, did not lord his position over them and was willing to consider their views, particuarly in difficult situations.
Of course, Amundsen made mistakes, and I believe Huntford tends to downplay the panicked return from the too-early start for the pole in early spring. Had men died there, Amundsen would have been considered a goat, but he narrowly got away with it, in spite of Hjalmar Johansen (whom he never wanted to bring along in the first place) exploding and questioning Amundsen's leadership abilities in front of the other men. However, Amundsen was able to neutralize Johansen's threat and he escaped any negative fallout from this potentially fatal mistake.
In the end, Amundsen was a victim of making his immense achievement look too easy, just like NASA did with the Moon landings some 60 years ago. Technical brilliance leading to safe journeys in dangerous environments apparently don't capture the imagination of the public and interest evaporates quickly. Many people prefer drama and close-calls or outright disaster instead. Huntford's book, in spite of its flaws, draws our attention to the real qualities of these men instead of the propaganda.

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