NEVER AGAIN 



545 



find a second pass over the mountains from the Barrier 

 to the plateau. As it happened, he succeeded, and estab- 

 lished his route as the best way to the Pole until a better is 

 discovered. But he might easily have failed and perished 

 in the attempt; and the combination of reasoning and 

 daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated. 

 All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative 

 whaling captain might have refused to make Scott's ex- 

 periment with motor transport, ponies and man-hauling, 

 and stuck to the dogs ; and to the use of ski in running 

 those dogs ; and it was this quite commonplace choice 

 that sent Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with 

 no abnormal strain on men or dogs, and no great hardship 

 either. He never pulled a mile from start to finish. 



The very ease of the exploit makes it impossible to infer 

 from it that Amundsen's expedition was more highly en- 

 dowed in personal qualities than ours. We did not suffer 

 from too little brains or daring: we may have suffered 

 from too much. We were primarily a great scientific ex- 

 pedition, with the Pole as our bait for public support, 

 though it was not more important than any other acre of 

 the plateau. We followed in the steps of a polar expedi- 

 tion which brought back more results than any of its fore- 

 runners : Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest 

 and most efficient scientific staff that ever left England. 

 We were discursive. We were full of intellectual interests 

 and curiosities of all kinds. We took on the work of two 

 or three expeditions. 



It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a 

 division of energy. Scott wanted to reach the Pole : a 

 dangerous and laborious exploit, but a practicable one. 

 Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin : 

 a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which 

 is none the less impracticable because the three men who 

 achieved it survived by a miracle. These two feats had to 

 be piled one on top of the other. What with the Depot 

 Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were 

 sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and 

 our worst year was still to come. We, the survivors, went 



2 N 



