NEVER AGAIN

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing.  O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night. 
HERBERT.

I shall inevitably be asked for a word of mature judgment of the expedition of a kind that was impossible when we were all close up to it, and when I was a subaltern of 24, not incapable of judging my elders, but too young to have found out whether my judgment was worth anything.  I now see very plainly that though we achieved a first-rate tragedy, which will never be forgotten just because it was a tragedy, tragedy was not our business.  In the broad perspective opened up by ten years’ distance, I see not one journey to the Pole, but two, in startling contrast one to another.  On the one hand, Amundsen going straight there, getting there first, and returning without the loss of a single man, and without having put any greater strain on himself and his men than was all in the day’s work of polar exploration.  Nothing more business-like could be imagined.  On the other hand, our expedition, running appalling risks, performing prodigies of superhuman endurance, achieving immortal renown, commemorated in august cathedral sermons and by public statues, yet reaching the Pole only to find our terrible journey superfluous, and leaving our best men dead on the ice.  To ignore such a contrast would be ridiculous:  to write a book without accounting for it a waste of time.

First let me do full justice to Amundsen.  I have not attempted to disguise how we felt towards him when, after leading us to believe that he had equipped the Fram for an Arctic journey, and sailed for the north, he suddenly made his dash for the south.  Nothing makes a more unpleasant impression than a feint.  But when Scott reached the Pole only to find that Amundsen had been there a month before him, his distress was not that of a schoolboy who has lost a race.  I have described what it had cost Scott and his four companions to get to the Pole, and what they had still to suffer in returning until death stopped them.  Much of that risk and racking toil had been undertaken that men might learn what the world is like at the spot where the sun does not decline in the heavens, where a man loses his orbit and turns like a joint on a spit, and where his face, however he turns, is always to the North.  The moment Scott saw the Norwegian tent he knew that he had nothing to tell that was not already known.  His achievement was a mere precaution against Amundsen perishing on his way back; and that risk was no greater than his own.  The Polar Journey was literally laid waste:  that was the shock that staggered them.  Well might Bowers be glad to see the last of Norskies’ tracks as their homeward paths diverged.