The Last Place on Earth
Roland Huntford's tragedy of polar explorers Robert F. Scott and Roald Amundsen
This is the fourteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with The Last Place on Earth, Roland Huntford’s magisterial narrative history of the tragic quest to reach the South Pole by the rival expeditions of polar explorers Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
“The poles of the earth had been an obsession of Western man. It could be argued against, but not argued away. Since the obsession was there, it had to be exorcised, and the sooner the better” (3). So begins Roland Huntford’s exhaustive account of the historic race to the South Pole between British explorer Robert F. Scott and his Norwegian rival, Roald Amundsen. The 1911-1912 competition would lead to the deaths of Scott and four of his men, as well as the public spurning of Amundsen’s achievement in reaching the pole first.
The historical example of Scott and Amundsen loomed large in my own writing, the example that inspired my MFA thesis novel. But until I read this book, effectively a double-biography of Scott and Amundsen, I had been unaware of the startling complexities in their tale, wrinkles I have tried to amplify in drawing out the allegories between these real-life mortal enemies and my own dueling characters.
Huntford’s book is a mixture of narrative nonfiction and extensive archival research. For much of its runtime, it performs the difficult challenge of translating boring polar diaries into a readable narrative. Much of that story drags with a long build up and detailed explanations about polar exploration technology, but this drawback comes with the territory. It must be said that Huntford was a master of the polar narrative genre—he also published lengthy biographies of Fridtjof Nansen (Amundsen’s polar mentor and an important figure in international relations) and Ernest Shackleton, whose Antarctic exploits through the bestselling book Endurance are better known. But The Last Place on Earth is a revisionist narrative, and in reintroducing Amundsen through previously untranslated Norwegian accounts, Huntford also performs a hit job on Scott.
Huntford indicates his agenda from the epigraph, a quote from Sir Basil Liddell Hart in the preface to the History of the First World War: “It is more important to provide material for a true verdict than to gloss over disturbing facts so that individual reputations may be preserved.” Huntford’s account reveals that Scott’s final diaries were edited to omit his bitterness toward Amundsen and to hide the mental breakdown of his companion Evans, who died on the journey (546-547). Moreover, Huntford argues Scott’s approach was flawed from the beginning. Whereas Amundsen was methodical, efficient, and unpretentious, Huntford argues that Scott was incompetent, vain, and reckless, leading by emotion and pride rather than a sober evaluation of the realities (xiv-xv). Scott brought ponies to the Antarctic. After the ponies died, Scott advocated for “man-hauling”—i.e., human bearing of sledges (rather than enlist the help of sled dogs, which Amundsen championed, having recognized their potential from visiting Inuit tribes in North America). Scott’s team was reluctant to challenge him, a weakness that proved fatal (379). The tremendous calorie deficit implicit in the man-hauling approach, Huntford argues, was directly the cause of the infamous death of the explorer and his companions in a blizzard just 11 miles from their next supply depot (378-379, 526).
Broad overview aside, I want to hone in on two moments in particular—one, how Huntford describes the bizarre but unremarkable location of the South Pole once it had been reached by both parties, and two, how Huntford treats the public reputations of Scott and Amundsen in the years that followed.
When Amundsen finally arrives at the South Pole, Huntford argues the polar explorer felt a sense of emptiness:
Amundsen had learned what the Duke of Wellington had meant when in the moment of victory he wrote that “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” Such, then, was the attainment of the South Pole; a muted feast; a thing of paradox, of classic detachment; of disappointment almost. It was the antithesis, conceivably deliberate, to Peary at the other end of the earth, two and a half years before: “The Pole at last. The prize of three centuries. My dream and goal for twenty years. Mine at last!” (469)
In quoting the example of Wellington and Robert Peary, Huntford draws on the examples of figures that would have been more immediately familiar to Amundsen. Now, this is the moment the book has been building toward for nearly 500 pages, and Huntford quite dramatically emphasizes the moment’s understatement, the disappointing nature in knowingly attaining a monumental goal and that one’s life will never exceed these heights. In particular, there is something more hollow at the end of this road for Amundsen, who only chose to go for the South Pole after Peary and his own rival (the fraudulent Frederick Cook) both claimed to reach the North Pole (though most today believe neither actually succeeded). And after the North Pole was “discovered,” repetition in the form of imitation could never garner Amundsen the same respect, a reputation further challenged after Scott’s death overshadowed Amundsen’s accomplishment.
Huntford also carefully underscores the bizarre nature of the South Pole, a moment he exoticizes to dramatic effect:
The day after arrival was, as [Amundsen] put it, “extremely agitated.” The Poles are Looking-Glass world; a graphic illustration of how the ideal, necessarily, means a reduction to absurdity. Familiar concepts break down. There is only one direction; at the North Pole, South; at the South Pole, North. The meridians converge to vanishing point, so that longitude is meaningless, and only latitude remains. Fixing the position of this strange spot is an alien and arduous exercise. (471)
It is without a doubt no human had ever been to the South Pole before Amundsen, and the “breaking down” of geographical abstractions further gives the sense that these explorers are in a place where humans are not meant to tread, and also points out the artifice of longitude and latitude in the first place. Notably, an alien location such as the Antarctic where the strange is the norm (as in the Wonderland works of Lewis Carroll), later served as the ideal location for Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, which appeared twenty four years after the Scott-Amundsen expeditions.
In the book’s conclusion, Huntford accounts for the reasons why Scott become a martyr and Amundsen was forgotten. Not only was Scott a “suitable hero for a nation in decline,” the spin was that Scott “died because his heart was broken by defeat at the Pole; ergo, the fault was not his own, but that of a man who had the impatience to get there first” (543-545). Amundsen, was further cast by newspapers as being merely “lucky” (545). That being said, the insanity of glorifying a bungler at the expense of a professional can be appreciated by modern observers of Fox News’ spin coverage of the Trump Administration.
But the media which supported Scott’s heroism was not an extremist TV station but the most influential voices in British journalism. Scott’s literary-style journals gave them a source to draw from. Amundsen, more reserved in his pride, was incapable of advocating for himself:
The world largely saw the tale through Scott’s eyes. As Scott’s Last Expedition, his diaries were rapidly published and, quite simply, he was a better writer than Amundsen. Amundsen lacked the power of advocacy. He was too much the man of action; like so many of his kind, he squandered his talent on his deeds. Living the moment so intensely, he was denied the surplus energy to convey it to others. “The last of the Vikings” expected his deeds to speak for themselves; they were in any case his art. Scott, by contrast, seemed to have sought experience as a means to other ends; as the path to promotion, the raw material for writing. He appealed to everyman, where Amundsen did not try to counterbalance Scott’s masterly self-justification. His literary talent was his trump. It was as if he had reached out from his buried tent to take revenge. (546)
Huntford insinuates that Scott wrote his journals with the intent to aggrandize his legacy at the expense of Amundsen, which reads as a bit far-fetched. Far more likely was Scott more depressed and overcome with emotion than seeking to specifically shiv Amundsen from beyond the grave. Ironically, in my novel I have positioned Freeley to be more like the historical Amundsen—worse at self-promotion, stubborn to a fault. My Nick Amundsen, however, caters only to public perception, in a dramatic reversal of the historical example.
The Last Place on Earth radically transformed the narrative surrounding Scott and Amundsen. It caused a fury upon publication in 1979 and its adaptation as a 1985 TV series which undercut the Scott legend perpetuated after his death. As a result, Amundsen’s historical perception has been restored somewhat at the expense of Scott, showcasing the see-saw nature of historical memory. As Paul Theroux states in the introduction, “yet in almost every instance, Amundsen makes the right, most astute judgment and Scott the wrong, most ill-informed one, which is why this book seems to me so valuable, for it is a book about myth-making and heroism and self-deception, the ingredients of nationalism” (xvi). In that way this book is a historical parable, a journey where the villain is made a hero and vice versa. It’s a little more subtle than The Dark Knight’s thesis, “you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.”
Works Cited
Huntford, Roland. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole (Modern Library: New York, 1999).