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crevasses, they made excellent progress, and on October 24, the
Norwegians reached the depot at 80°S.
Men and dogs glutted themselves in readiness for the strug-
gle ahead. Having started two months and 6,000 miles behind,
Amundsen was now 150 miles ahead of his rival.
It would be another week before Scott s party even left McMurdo
Sound. Right from the outset the much-heralded motor sledges
gave trouble in the subzero temperatures, and after five days they
had to be abandoned. The ponies, too, with their sharp hooves
were hopelessly ill-suited to polar travel, often plunging belly-deep
into the snow, causing valuable time to be lost as they were dug
out, their flanks encased in sheets of solid ice. At the end of each
stage, the already exhausted men had to rub down and cover the
ponies with blankets, then erect snow walls to protect them from
the wind. Oates, the pony master, urged ruthlessness: drive the
poor beasts till they drop, then slaughter them for food. Scott, an
inveterate animal lover, would have none of it. Squeamish to the
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120 GREAT FEUDS IN HISTORY
point of stupidity, he refused to submit the ponies to any more
hardship than was necessary, oblivious to the deleterious effect
this was having on his men.
By contrast, Amundsen s low-maintenance dogs darted lightly
across the Great Ice Barrier, and at the end of each day bur-
rowed into the snow to keep warm. Nor was there any trace of
sentiment in Amundsen s plan. Even before the expedition
began, he had calculated on what day each superfluous dog
would be slaughtered to provide fresh meat for its companions.
All of which meant that while Amundsen regularly and with-
out wasted effort notched up daily advances of twenty miles,
Scott, even on a good day, rarely managed half that distance.
On November 7 Amundsen departed from his final depot at 82°S,
carrying supplies for a hundred days, enough to last until Feb-
ruary 6, 1912. As always, he erred on the side of safety, carry-
ing ten times more food and fuel per man than his rival had
budgeted, and in the next four days his team hauled a ton of sup-
plies over the awesome ice ridges of the Axel Heiberg Glacier,
up to the Polar Plateau itself, an incredible achievement. With
this obstacle behind them, the five men pressed on toward their
final goal. Not even a succession of blinding fogs was allowed to
hamper their progress: with four skilled navigators in his team,
Amundsen had no fears of getting lost.
Meanwhile, Scott crawled on at a treacle-slow pace. Unlike the
Norwegians, he had only one trained navigator, himself, and his
skills were rusty. Ponderous calculations and frequent mistakes
made for lengthy delays. At the foot of the Beardmore Glacier,
as arranged, Oates killed the last of the ponies. Henceforth, they
would rely on manhauling their sledges, some weighing seven
hundred pounds, all the way to the South Pole and back, a round
trip of a thousand miles.
It was lunacy.
At ten thousand feet up on the Polar Plateau, tortured lungs
struggled to grab sufficient oxygen from the thin air, dulling phys-
ical performance and mental acuity. Creeping past huge, gaping
crevasses, large enough to swallow a skyscraper, the men dragged
their sledges across the rippled pressure ridges, unaware that
because of Scott s calamitous miscalculation of the number of
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Amundsen versus Scott 121
calories necessary to carry out such inhuman physical effort, they
were starving themselves to death with every step.
Malnourished and dispirited, Scott s team had no stomach to
fight the raging blizzards that often trapped them for days in
their tents, while Amundsen, on skis and with dogs, refused to
yield to the elements and pressed on relentlessly. His determi-
nation to beat Scott was all-consuming. Every day the Norwe-
gians pushed a bit farther ahead.
British Morale Sinks
As doubts began to sap British morale, Oates feared the worst.  If
it comes to a race, Amundsen will have a great chance of getting
there as he is a man who has been at this kind of game all his life,
and he has a hard crowd behind him, while we are very young. 19
His teammate, Henry Bowers, was equally concerned.  I must
say that Amundsen s chance of having forestalled us with 120
dogs looks good, 20 though in a later diary entry he vented his
frustration, wondering how the  back-handed, sneaking ruf-
fian 21 was faring.
Very well, was the answer. On December 8, with the sun shin-
ing brightly, Amundsen passed Shackleton s Furthest South
record of 88°23'S, and was within a hundred miles of the Pole.
The dogs were ravenous and wearied, the men had many sores
and frostbitten faces, yet still the party pushed on. Every step
closer to the Pole multiplied Amundsen s foreboding that Scott
had already beaten them. A collective panic began to jangle their
nerves. Bjaaland summed up everyone s fears.  Shall we see the
English flag? God have mercy on us. I don t believe it. 22 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]