by wayno » Wed 26 Feb, 2014 4:57 am
amundsen had spent a lot of time living with the Inuit and learning from them. he was basically wearing their design of clothing and using a modified version of their dog sleds. he saved on resources by living in snow caves the winter before his antarctic crossing. during the winter he further refined the design of his clothes and sleds...
scott had a team of dogs as part of the wider antarctic expedition, he was depicted in a TV series as reprimanding the sled dog driver from going too fast and driving the dogs too hard when he was left behind on an earlier trip in the antarctic and never thought further about including them.
he had tried motorised tractors which were still far to unreliable. and tried ponies which couldnt cope in the cold...
at the last minute he added an extra person to the south pole attempt , that person didnt have ski's so had to walk, slowing them down.
scott was military through and through, didnt seem big on listening to other peoples opinions, he gave orders and didnt expect discussion over them.. he was a product of his training, he ran the expedition as he would have carried out his job as a naval officer. focused on following established practices thoroughly while paying some attention to new untested technology and try and use them without testing them thoroughly in advance. compared to amundsen who was quite happy to live like a native and abandon any preconceived notions about how to conduct himself in the wilderness.. so to some extent he was a thorough military professional... but the decisions he took eventually sealed his team to their fate in the conditions they encountered, they wasted a lot of time and energy looking for rock samples as per their original plan, possibly this may have been the tipping point that doomed them to their fate, but they could also have abandoned the expedition at any time, although scott was a very duty bound man, and abandoning may hot have sat well with him at all. he did his utmost to complete the trip but underestimated the toll it would take... i think his later diary entries revealed a bit about how the conditions were far worse than he expected to encounter. how many of todays explorers would persist under such conditions if they were completely isolated from the outside world with the gear of the time...
from the land of the long white clouds...