548 WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 



could be bought across the counter from big business 

 houses — all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment 

 was first-class — but one of the first and most important 

 items, the ship, would have sent Columbus on strike, and 

 nearly sent us to the bottom of the sea. 



People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus 

 when he sailed west from the Canaries to try a short-cut 

 to an inhabited continent of magnificent empires, as he 

 thought; but his three ships were, relatively to the re- 

 sources of that time, much better than the one old tramp 

 in which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening 

 and morning are the year and not the day, and in which 

 not even polar bears and reindeers can live. Amundsen 

 had the Fram, built for polar exploration ad hoc. Scott had 

 the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and 

 Terra Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship 

 market, and faked up for the transport of ponies, dogs, 

 motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar expedition, to 

 say nothing of the men who have to try and do scien- 

 tific work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a 

 Polar Factory Act making it a crime to ship men for the 

 ice in vessels more fit to ply between London Bridge and 

 Ramsgate. 



And then the begging that is necessary to obtain even 

 this equipment. Shackleton hanging round the doors of 

 rich men ! Scott writing begging letters for months to- 

 gether ! Is the country not ashamed ? 



Modern civilized States should make up their minds to 

 the endowment of research, which includes exploration; 

 and as all States benefit alike by the scientific side of it 

 there is plenty of scope for international arrangement, 

 especially in a region where the mere grabbing of territory 

 is meaningless, and no Foreign Office can trace the frontier 

 between King Edward's Plateau and King Haakon's. The 

 Antarctic continent is still mostly unexplored; but enough 

 is known of it to put any settlement by ordinary pioneer 

 emigration, pilgrim fathers and the like, out of the ques- 

 tion. Ross Island is not a place for a settlement: it is a 

 place for an elaborately equipped scientific station, with a 



