Wednesday, March 16, 2005

The File: Smug Athens

89. Athenians: "Then we will not make a long and unconvincing speech, full of fine phrases, to prove that our victory over Persia justifies our empire, or that we are now attacking you because you have wronged us, and we ask you not to expect to convince us by saying that you have not injured us, or that, though a colony of Lacedaemon, you did not join her. Let each of us say what we really think and reach a practical agreement. You know and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength, and that the strong do what they can, and the weak submit."
-- Thucydides, The Melian Dialogue, as excerpted in John Keegan's The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing, pp. 6

9:13:33 PM    comment []

The File: Funny English Chaps

Scott's party, bogged down by a bewildering array of modes of transportation--ponies, such as Shackleton had already proved to be useless, motor sledges that didn't work, and dogs that no one knew how to drive--slogged their way south, adhering closely to Shackleton's route and playing out the now traditional drama of starvation and hardship. Amundsen and his four companions, travelling by ski with a team of fifty-two superbly conditioned and trained dogs, averaged a comfortable fifteen to twenty miles a day in comparison with Scott's ragged ten- to thirteen-mile daily pace. On their homeward run, the Norwegians covered up to thirty miles a day.

"Cannot understand what the English mean when they say that dogs cannot be used here," Amundsen puzzled in his diary. On January 16, 1912, Scott and his debilitated team staggered to 89° south to find the snow crisscrossed with the tracks of Amundsen's party.

"The worst has happened," Scott allowed in his diary. "All the day dreams must go."
-- Caroline Alexander, The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, pp. 8

"One has the feeling that if it had been Shackleton who lost to Amundsen at the pole, he would have met up with the Norwegians on the way back, and they would have all held a big celebratory party," a distinguished polar historian once told me.
-- ibid., pp. 12

Despite the luminescent portrait of Shackleton painted by Alexander, we're forced to wonder why such an obviously talented leader of men set out on his famously interrupted polar expedition by making most of the same mistakes Scott did. Yet more clunky motorized sledges, yet more dogs no one was trained to drive (the deworming pills were even left in Argentina), and a single crewmember with any knowledge of skiing--the slackerly Thomas Orde-Lees, also in charge of the motor sledges. If the Endurance had reached Vahsel Bay, would Scott Part 2 have played out on the ice? One suspects that in spite of it all, Shackleton would have found a way.

12:32:03 AM    comment []