Dogged by ill fortune

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has done Captain Scott’s memory some service. For the past two decades, since Roland Huntford’s devastating demolition job — Scott bad, Amundsen good — was first published (also by Hodder & Stoughton) in 1979, ‘the world’s greatest explorer’ has dropped quite a few places in the league table. Fiennes may not have succeeded in putting his man back at the top of the first division, but he has certainly written a more dispassionate and balanced account than Huntford ever set out to do.

Yet Fiennes is not entirely objective. A distingushed polar explorer himself, he is, like Scott, a manhauler. He feels instinctively, as Scott’s mentor, Sir Clements Markham, put it, that dragging your own equipment and provisions is ‘the true British way’. Neither Scott nor Shackleton ever understood how to handle sledge dogs, nor did they really want to learn. Their experience with dogs on their first expedition together to the Antarctic persuaded them it should not be repeated.