Enthusiasms

The Race

Imagine that it’s 1969, and NASA is preparing to put men on the moon. But then, suddenly, the Soviets announce that they, too, are going to the moon, and soon. The race is on.

The Soviets have no scientific pretensions: they’re just going to touch down, plant a flag, and zip off into space again. They’re also going to use a more efficient rocket, which will put them on the moon before the Americans. July 16, 1969, as Apollo 11 launches from the Kennedy Space Center, the Soviets land on the moon. After prancing about and taking some photos, they jet off and are safely back on Earth by July 20, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land, only to find that someone got there before them. To make matters worse, their inferior Lunar Module malfunctions, and their rations turn out not to be particularly nutritious, quickly sapping them of energy. But this is a scientific mission, goddammit, and the Americans aren’t going to leave without some rock samples. They haul the rocks onto their unstable Module and try to leave, but to no avail: the Lunar Module burns up on its way off the moon. Neil and Buzz got there second, and they never got home.

This is basically the story of the race for the South Pole. You’re going to be hearing a lot about it in the next few months, I predict, because on December 14, it’ll be a hundred years since Roald Amundsen and his team stepped on the pole. This article from the Guardian has been making the rounds, and might serve as an early warning of what’s to come. I don’t like the sensationalistic angle: Scott “was a victim of cruel luck – and deception”, while cruel luck and incompetence is more like it. Scott is the hero who lost the race and then lost his life. Some hero, eh? Of course, you can be damn sure that if the Soviets did land on the moon, beating the Americans to the punch, and then Neil Armstrong had died on his way back from there, he would still have been an American hero. It’s only natural that a nation wants its national icons to be heroic.

I happen to be Norwegian, which means that I’ve heard plenty from the other side. In 2007, Norwegian PM Jens Stoltenberg declared that the carbon capture and storage at the Mongstad power plant was “our moon landing”, a totally inappropriate and inaccurate comparison. We had our moon landing. It happened a hundred years ago. In its way, the race for the poles was as fantastic in 1911 as the moon landing was in 1969. Of course, a major difference between the space race and the race for the poles is that the latter doesn’t require the massive infrastructure the former does. This allowed a tiny nation like Norway to go up against a behemoth like the British Empire at its height. For an empire the size and strength of the Soviet Union and the US combined, it must have been a huge embarrassment to be beaten by a tiny little speck on the map that hadn’t even been an independent country until six years ago.

Although Scott is a hero to the British, his role can’t compare to Amundsen’s for Norwegians. In 1911, we were desperate for national symbols. We had just gotten our independence from Sweden in 1905, and promptly imported a king and a queen from the Danish and British royal families, respectively. But for the most part, we lacked heroes we could truly call our own, despite our embrace of a foreign royal family. During the Age of Discovery, we were in no position to do any exploration. By the time we were independent, only the most inhospitable places on Earth were left to be explored: the poles. Luckily, a people that fancies itself to be born with skis on, and whose country stretches far north of the Arctic Circle, does have a few advantages when it comes to arctic exploration.

We got our heroes: Fridtjof Nansen, who almost reached the North Pole in his Fram and later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work in Russia—a prize, it should be mentioned, that is awarded by a committee of Norwegians, although Nansen was more deserving than certain (cough, Obama, cough) recent winners—and Roald Amundsen, who sailed through the Northwest Passage before setting his sights on the South Pole.

The notion of Scott, the tragic hero, is bound up in the story of the mighty British Empire. The notion of Amundsen, the stoic hero, is bound up in the story of the birth of the Norwegian state. As such, any telling of the story and any interpretation of the history will, in some way, tangle with those larger narratives.

I didn’t compare the race for the poles with the space race for nothing. The stakes were greater in the race for the moon, but that’s part of the charm: the Amundsen-Scott race really was five men against five other men, aided only by a few ponies and some dogs, walking, skiing and dog-sledding it to the pole. It’s a different, more primitive, rawer kind of march, which is not to say that reaching the extremes of our planet is more or less amazing than reaching the extremes of our planet’s gravitational influence. Reaching one of these points required more grit, the other, more technology and infrastructural support. One is the triumph of small teams over the elements, the other, the triumph of nations over space.

Exploration is driven by curiosity, but also by ego. There was no scientific reason to go to the pole. Scott, who insisted on the scientific purposes of his mission, was crushed by his defeat in the scientifically immaterial race to first set foot on the pole. Amundsen didn’t have the same scientific pretensions: indeed, he had originally intended to go to the North Pole, until two American explorers claimed to have gone there first. As for curiosity, neither Scott nor Amundsen were likely to see anything at the pole that they hadn’t seen elsewhere in the Arctic and Antarctica: lots of snow and biting cold.

The facts in the case of Scott’s failure are well-known: his choice of team, his decision to use ponies and mechanical sleds rather than dogs, his nutritient-deficient food, his choice to take four companions to the pole on three men’s rations, all in addition to terrible weather. Amundsen, who had learned from the Inuit during his expedition to the Northwest Passage, took dogs, which were more efficient, and which he could feed to each other as the journey wore on (a practice that disgusted Scott). His team also had the benefit of being experienced skiers. And they didn’t catch as bad weather.

The notion that Scott was “the victim of bad luck and deception” smacks of imperialist self-justification—and I do mean that literally: it’s exactly what the mighty British Empire told itself to justify its failure. If Scott had come better prepared and made different choices, better choices, he would have survived despite his bad luck, and despite any deception—in fact, the deception happened before Scott even set his foot in Antarctica.

Of course, just as British commentators are susceptible to buy into their national myths, I am susceptible to mine. It just so happens that, in this instance, reason sides with the Norwegian myths. Although Roald Amundsen wasn’t without flaws—he was an authoritarian leader who refused to take men who questioned his decisions to the pole—he was the guy who got the job done and whose men all lived to tell the tale.

This is an amazing story without tabloid speculation on top.