e
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 survey a route, if then. "Dogs could certainly have
come up as far as this," I heard Scott say somewhere under the
Cloudmaker, approximately half-way up the glacier, but the best thing you
could do with dogs in pressure such as we all experienced on our way down
would be to drop them into the nearest chasm. If you can avoid such
messes well and good: if not, you must not rely on dogs, and the people
who talk of these things have no knowledge.

If Scott was going up the Beardmore he was probably right not to take
dogs: actually he relied on ponies to the foot of the glacier and
man-haulage on from that point. Because he re