Monday, 18 December 1911

Scott

A 1965 map of the middle length of the Beardmore Glacier, from aerial photographs taken 1958-1963 by the USGS. [1]

"Scott set a hot pace," wrote Silas Wright. "May I never again be the only long-legged one in such a team. All did their best but I am damn sure I had to provide the extra speed." [2]

Their day's march of fourteen miles got them to 84° 34', 4500 ft. (1372 m) above the Barrier.

"After lunch got on some very rough stuff within a few hundred yards of pressure ridge," Scott wrote. "There seemed no alternative, and we went through with it. Later, the glacier opened out into a broad basin with irregular undulations, and we on to a better surface, but later on again this improvement nearly vanished, so that it has been hard going all day, but we have done a good mileage (over 14 stat.). We are less than five days behind S. now." [3]

"Still sweating horribly on the march and very thirsty at the halts."


Amundsen

In the evening -- switching to night travel, in order to have the sun behind them and avoid glare from the snow -- the Norwegians left the Pole for Framheim. Bjaaland was forerunner for the journey home. "We got away in the most wonderful weather conditions one could possibly desire," he wrote. "-19 deg. [C] must be said to be fine at the South Pole. The dogs, poor devils, have not been over fed at the Pole, yet they are quick and lively." [4] They backtracked to the first Pole camp to pick up their outward trail, and headed off. Fifteen miles out, Amundsen put up another black flag at about the 180th meridian, the approximate British route from the Beardmore.

Amundsen knew that he still had to be first back with the news. Scott, he said to Helmer Hanssen, "will arrive during the next day or two. If I know the British, they won't give up once they've started." [5]

"700 miles will be quite tough," Bjaaland had remarked in his diary the night before, "but I'll manage." [6] The job of forerunner was an unenviable one: he had to set the track and keep the course true, as well as keep ahead of the dogs in order to give them something to follow. He also preferred, as a ski-racer, to be at the back, where he could see the rest of the pack and judge the competition. But in Bjaaland, Amundsen wrote, "we have found a forerunner of class. He sees like nobody else, and he goes like nobody else. Thus he has kept our old spoors Northwards ... although they are very indistinct." [7]


Notes:

[1] United States Geological Survey, "The Cloudmaker" map.
[2] Charles Wright, diary, 18 December, 1911, quoted by David Crane in Scott of the Antarctic (New York : Knopf, c2005), p.473.
[3] R.F. Scott, diary, 18 December, 1911, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition, v.1.
[4] Olav Bjaaland, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495.
[5] Helmer Hanssen, Gjennem Isbaksen, p.96, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495. When Amundsen had arrived in Eagle, Alaska at the end of his Northwest Passage journey in 1906, his telegram conveying the news was leaked to the press, causing him considerable financial loss on a supposedly-exclusive story. The lesson that he took away from this experience, as well as from the Peary/Cook North Pole controversy, was that being first out with the news of an attainment such as this was essentially second only to the attainment itself.
[6] Olav Bjaaland, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.495.
[7] Roald Amundsen, diary, 19 December, 1911, quoted by Roland Huntford in Scott and Amundsen (New York : Putnam, 1980, c1979), p.496.