Page:The Worst Journey in the World volume 2.djvu/351

574 extent which will never be appreciated, by Wilson: in the last expedition by Bowers. I believe that there has never been a finer sledge party than these three men, who combined in themselves initiative, endurance and high ideals to an extraordinary degree. And they could organize: they did organize the Polar Journey and their organization seemed to have failed. Did it fail? Scott said No. "The causes of this disaster are not due to faulty organization, but to misfortune in all risks which had to be undertaken." Nine times out of ten, says the meteorologist, he would have come through: but he struck the tenth. "We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint." No better epitaph has been written.

He decided to use the only route towards the Pole of which the world had any knowledge, that is to go up the Beardmore Glacier, then the only discovered way up through the mountains which divide the polar plateau from the Great Ice Barrier: probably it is the only possible passage for those who travel from McMurdo Sound. The alternative was to winter on the Barrier, as Amundsen did, so many hundred miles away from the coast-line that, in travelling south, the chaos caused in the ice plain by the Beardmore in its outward flow would be avoided. To do so meant the abandonment of a great part of the scientific programme, and Scott was not a man to go south just to reach the Pole. Amundsen knew that Scott was going to McMurdo Sound when he decided to winter in the Bay of Whales: otherwise he might have gone to McMurdo Sound. Probably no man would have refused the knowledge which had already been gained.

I have said that there are those who say that Scott should have relied on ski and dogs. If you read Shackleton's account of his discovery and passage of the Beardmore Glacier you will not be prejudiced in favour of dogs: and as a matter of fact, though we found a much better way up than Shackleton, I do not believe it possible to take dogs up and down, and over the ice disturbances at the junction with the plateau, unless there is ample time to