Amundsen Planned to Eat His Dogs. Scott Refused, and It Killed Him.

In the spring of 1911, two parties were camped on opposite edges of the Ross Ice Shelf, some three hundred and fifty nautical miles apart, each preparing to march for a point where no human being had ever stood. Their two leaders never met. From the start they ran on separate clocks, and almost every choice one made had a mirror-image choice in the other camp — the same problem, answered two opposite ways.

The South Pole lay roughly nine hundred miles inland, up a glacier and across a plateau two miles high where the wind ran past forty below. Both teams would have to walk there and walk back, hauling everything they ate. One party was Norwegian, led by Roald Amundsen, a professional explorer who had spent his adult life learning how not to die in cold places. The other was British, led by Robert Falcon Scott, a naval officer who had been to Antarctica before and had come back to finish what he started. The two men had nearly opposite ideas about how the thing should be done, and the gap between those ideas is most of the story.

Two theories of how to cross ice

Amundsen had made the first navigation of the Northwest Passage, a voyage that locked his small ship in the Arctic ice for two winters. He spent that time with the Netsilik Inuit, and he treated their knowledge as a curriculum. He learned to wear fur instead of wool, cut loose so that sweat could escape and not freeze against the skin. He learned to drive dogs and to travel on skis until the motion was second nature.

Scott built on the opposite premise. His expedition, aboard the ship Terra Nova, brought motor sledges, a new technology, and nineteen Siberian ponies — bought sight unseen in Vladivostok by a man who knew dogs, not horses — and intended to rely on men dragging the sledges over the final stretch — man-hauling, which the Royal Navy regarded as the honest, manly way to cross ice. Dogs he kept, but distrusted. He had a Norwegian ski instructor on staff and never made the training compulsory; well into the march he would confide the regret to his diary — “here are my tiresome fellow countrymen too prejudiced to have prepared themselves for the event.”

So the two camps faced the same questions and split on every one. Clothing: fur cut loose, or wool. Locomotion: dogs and skis, or ponies, machines, and men in harness. Skiing: a lifetime’s habit, or an optional lesson most of the British declined.

The animals each man planned for

Amundsen set his base at the Bay of Whales — a hut he called Framheim. His transport was fifty-two dogs and five men who had skied since childhood, among them Olav Bjaaland, a champion. The dogs would pull; the men would ski alongside. And the dogs would do something else, too. Amundsen had decided before he left exactly how many would be shot along the way, where, and in what order, so that the survivors and the men could eat fresh meat as the sledges grew lighter. It was a plan with a body count built into the arithmetic.

In the British camp the machines and the ponies failed before they were even tested at distance. The motor sledges broke down within days. The ponies, hopeless on the ice, sweated into their hides and floundered in soft snow, and one by one they failed. Scott would not solve the problem the way Amundsen had. He would not march toward the Pole on the strength of animals he meant to kill. When his officer Lawrence Oates urged him to drive the ponies hard and lay his main supply cache — One Ton Depot — at its planned position, Scott refused to push the animals to death and placed the depot some thirty-one miles short. It was a humane decision. It would also turn out to be a fatal one.

The road home, marked and unmarked

Amundsen was fanatical about finding his way back. Through the worst stretch of the Barrier he marked the route with snow cairns every few miles, each with a note inside recording its position. At each supply depot he planted a line of dark bamboo flags running at right angles to his path — a fence of markers stretching five miles to either side, so that even if he came back off-course in a whiteout, he would have to cross the line and could not miss the food.

That instinct — assume you will return blind, and make the route impossible to miss — was exactly the one Scott’s short depot lacked. One Ton Depot sat thirty-one miles closer to the Pole than it should have, a gap that meant nothing on the way out and everything on the way back.

The two marches

Amundsen tried first in early September and was driven back when the temperature hit fifty-six below and dogs froze. He waited and started again on the nineteenth of October. His teams made around twenty miles on a good day, then stopped early and rested, sometimes sixteen hours at a stretch, men and dogs recovering instead of grinding themselves down.

They found their own road up to the plateau, a steep glacier Amundsen named the Axel Heiberg, and at the top, at eighty-five degrees and thirty-six minutes south, the bargain came due. The men shot twenty-four of the dogs they had nursed up the mountain, ate some of the meat themselves and fed the rest to the surviving dogs, and cached what remained for the return. They called the place the Butcher’s Shop and went on with eighteen dogs.

On the fourteenth of December 1911 they reached the Pole. They pitched a small tent, named the spot Polheim, and left inside it a letter for Scott to carry out — addressed, in case Amundsen himself did not survive the return, to the King of Norway. Then they turned for home. They got back to Framheim on the twenty-fifth of January, ninety-nine days after setting out. They had lost no one. Several of the men had gained weight.

Scott’s party of five was still climbing toward the same point. They reached the Pole thirty-four days after Amundsen, on the seventeenth of January 1912, having man-hauled the last stretch to a schedule that asked fifteen miles a day of the harnessed teams, on rations that carried barely half the calories the work demanded and almost none of the vitamins. As they neared the spot they saw a black flag tied to a sledge bearer, then sledge tracks, then dog prints, and finally the Norwegian tent. They were not first. They were not even close.

“Great God!” Scott wrote that day. “This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.” Eight hundred miles of walking still lay between them and safety, and now there was nothing waiting at the end of it but the same long haul, run the other way, by men who were already starving.

The walk back

The return killed them slowly and in order. Edgar Evans, the strongest of them at the start, declined first and died near the foot of the glacier. The cold deepened. Oates, his feet ruined by frostbite, became certain he was slowing the others. On the sixteenth of March, most likely his thirty-second birthday, he stood up in the tent, said, “I am just going outside and may be some time,” and walked into the blizzard. They never saw him again.

The last three — Scott, Edward Wilson, and Henry Bowers — pushed on until a blizzard pinned them in their tent on the twenty-first of March. They were eleven miles from One Ton Depot, the cache that would have saved them, sitting thirty-one miles closer to the Pole than it should have been. They had two days’ food and no way to move. Scott kept writing as the others lay still, letters to the families and a message to the public, until the entry of the twenty-ninth of March: “The end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”

A search party found the tent in November, snowed nearly to its peak, with the three men inside in their bags and Scott’s diaries beside him.

What the ice decided

The contrast hardened into legend almost at once, and the legend has been argued over ever since. Scott met genuinely freak weather on the Barrier that spring; Amundsen had luck Scott did not. But the margins that killed Scott’s men were the ones Amundsen had spent years closing in advance — the fur that did not freeze, the skis no one had to be taught, the dogs counted out for slaughter, the depots a man could not walk past in the dark. Amundsen had built his expedition around the assumption that the Antarctic would try to kill him and arranged things so it could not. Scott built his around endurance and good faith.