NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: HMS Bounty
From: Robert Eno
Date: 2004 May 18, 21:47 -0400
From: Robert Eno
Date: 2004 May 18, 21:47 -0400
Hello Doug, To carry on this interesting conversation: > Wasn't Sir Ernest a member(2nd or 3rd in command)of a previous Antarctic > Expedition?I can't remember who with but believe it to be true. Shackleton was on one of Scott's expeditions. Been a while since I've read this stuff so I can't conjure it up on spec and I'm too lazy to walk the ten feet to my library to look it up. In any event, Scott and Shackleton did not get along and had a falling out early on. Their leaderships styles were very different; Scott being the toffee-nosed English Upperclassman and Shackleton being the more egalitarian Irishman. They were bound to clash. Having said that, Shackleton had his own demons (most polar explorers did) but I won't get into the details.... Doug wrote: > Reading accounts of Scott's run to the S. pole and the team's feelings when > they reached it and found Admunson was there and gone were heart renching.As > were the accounts of his team's slow death going back to base camp.There is > a person who made all the wrong choises for the right reasons and payed > dearly for it. > An interesting topic. With all due respect to Scott, he didn't belong there. If you read the history and if you know anything about polar exploration, Scott was an amateur. He was bound to get himself into trouble. He refused to learn how to ski and refused to learn how to drive dogs; despite being strongly advised to do this by Nansen. Instead he took ponies to do the hauling and when they died, his men had to haul the heavy loads. If you want to experience agony of the highest order, try manhauling a heavy load over ice and snow. It is brutal, nasty work. Scott did, however, have the foresight to experiment with motorized transportation although this did not pan out. That wasn't Scott's fault. Vehicles simply weren't that well developed at the time. For navigation, Scott took theodolites which are cumbersome, unwieldy and difficult to set up under polar conditions. Contrast Scott to Amundsen. The latter was a professional. A true professional. He approached the South Pole trip like a well run military campaign. For transport, he used dogs and skis. All of his men were expert dog drivers and skiers. Amundsen took sextants and glass artificial horizons for navigation. All of his men could navigate with a sextant. Every single aspect of the trip was planned to the minutest of details. Nothing was left to chance. In reading Amundsen's account, you would think that the Norwegians were on a holiday ski-jaunt. In the end, I too felt bad for Scott, but in the end Scott was the hero and Amundsen was the goat. Amundsen really hit a nerve with the English by beating their man to the pole so there was a great deal of animosity towards him. At one dinner held, ostensibly in Amundsen's honour, one of the English dignitaries held up a toast: "three cheers for the dogs". Amundsen was very bitter about his treatment and described these feelings in his book: "My Life as an Explorer". Amundsen was very thin-skinned and took things to heart. I strongly recommend "Amundsen and Scott" by Roland Huntford. There are some great descriptions of the navigation techniques of each. Well worth the read. Robert