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. But it was principally by his use of dogs that Amundsen beat Scott to the Pole and survived.
Fiennes never says this in so many words. He acknowledges that the odds were in Amundsen’s favour because his base was 60 miles nearer the Pole and with dogs he was able to start his journey earlier in the season than was Scott with his ponies. He suggests that Scott’s party would have made it back had the weather not been so exceptionally cold on the return journey, had Oates not held them up in the latter stages, had Cherry-Garrard taken the decision to continue beyond One Ton Depot to meet them. But he does not directly address the question: would they have survived had they taken dogs to the Pole and back, and was Scott at fault in dismissing his dogs at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier?
Scott feared the dogs would not manage the crevasses ahead.
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