exploration's last great prize

[rone]

I remember reading, as a kid, a dramatization of the British Antarctic Expedition, which was effectively a race to reach the South Pole for the first time between Robert Falcon Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen.  The story was told from Scott's perspective and it was somewhat tragic.  Thinking upon it now, it seems like the heroic tragedy of the failure of Scott's expedition outshines Amundsen's accomplishment, which might be a result of better British PR, or perhaps just the cultural proximity of our nations (i recall also the story of Robert Peary being the first to reach the North Pole, and of course Peary was American, except it turned out upon later determination that he missed).

I discovered I Like Trains (né iLiKETRAiNS) on Pandora (although i can't pinpoint on what station; easy guess would be Sigur Rós), and i happened to come across a video one particular song of theirs, "Terra Nova", and it was only upon viewing the video that i realized that it is a reference to the Scott expedition, which turns the song from merely gloomy into harrowing.  I didn't expect that the video, which starts out with an almost cheap feeling with obvious models, would provoke such feeling.

How could I have led these men
To their demise and they just follow?
Exploration's last great prize
It wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

Great God, this is an awful place
I do not think that we can hope
For any better things now

Oh, the end, cannot be far
It cannot be far, I cannot wait
Exploration's last great prize
A saving grace, it wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

Comments

Roald Amundsen knew what he was doing

[mouseworks.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen

I think since he did the things in a way that made sense, having learned from Inuit and polar residents of Norway what worked and what didn't work, his choices (dogs and skis, not ponies and man-hauling when the ponies died) made his expedition more technical. The advantage of dogs over ponies was that he could feed the weaker dogs to the stronger ones, and food for dogs is less bulky than hay and grain for horses. Also dogs were better adapted to the cold than even Manchurian ponies.

Scott wrote better and died tragically. Amundsen died in an air plane crash in the Arctic, but that doesn't have the grace before death that Scott's journal displayed.

And Amundsen was sneaky.