ANTARCTIC ADVENTURE AND RESEARCH 



level. The two motor sledges were not very successful 

 in transporting stores, and unfortunately Scott placed 

 little reliance on dog sledging. As in the case of 

 Shackleton's journey, ponies pulled most of the load to 

 the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, but south of latitude 

 83° the sledges were hauled by men. Various support- 

 ing parties turned back before the Pole was reached. 

 Thus Day's party turned near 81°; Meares and the 

 dogs reached the Beardmore ; Atkinson and three 

 others went back from 85° S. at the top of the Beard- 

 more on December 21st. By the end of the year the 

 two remaining parties had reached 87° S., and on 

 January 4th Lieutenant Evans, with Lashley and 

 Crean, turned back when they were one hundred and 

 forty-five miles from the Pole. Evans nearly died of 

 scurvy on this journey, but was saved by the gallantry 

 of his two companions, who dragged him many miles 

 on the sledge to safety. By January 8th the polar party 

 had beaten Shackleton's record, but very difficult sur- 

 faces made the last one hundred miles a terrible ordeal. 

 Sometimes it would take nearly five hours to pull six 

 miles with a fairly light sledge, for they had depoted 

 almost all their food by now. On January i6th they 

 found the cairn and flag of the Norwegian party and 

 so knew that they had been forestalled by four weeks. 

 On January 17th they made their sixty-ninth camp at 

 the Pole on the high plateau some ten thousand feet 

 above the sea with a midsummei temperature of 

 —22° F. Scott writes in his diary, *'We built a cairn, 

 put up the Union Jack and took a photograph — migh'ty 

 cold work, all of it." (See Figure 6.) 



56 



