ished in the attempt; and the combination of
reasoning and daring that nerved him to make it can hardly be overrated.
All these things helped him. Yet any rather conservative whaling captain
might have refused to make Scott's experiment with motor transport,
ponies and man-hauling, and stuck to the dogs; and to the use of ski in
running those dogs; and it was this quite commonplace choice that sent
Amundsen so gaily to the Pole and back: with no abnormal strain on men or
dogs, and no great hardship either. He never pulled a mile from start to
finish.

The very ease of the exploit makes it impossible to infer from it that
Amundsen's expedition was more highly endowed in personal qualities than
ours. We did not suffer from too little brains or daring: we may have
suffered from too much. We were primarily a great scientific expedition,
with the Pole as our bait for public support, though it was not more
important than any other acre of the plateau. We followed in the steps of
a polar expedition which brought back more results than any of its
forerunners: Scott's Discovery voyage. We had the largest and most
efficient scientific staff that ever left England. We were discursive. We
were full of intellectual interests and curiosities of all kinds. We took
on the work of two or three expeditions.

It is obvious that there are disadvantages in such a division of energy.
Scott wanted to reach the Pole: a dangerous and laborious exploit, but a
practicable one. Wilson wanted to obtain the egg of the Emperor penguin:
a horribly dangerous and inhumanly exhausting feat which is none the less
impracticable because the three men who achieved it survived by a
miracle. These two feats had to be piled one on top of the other. What
with the Depot Journey and others, in addition to these two, we were
sledged out by the end of our second sledging season, and our worst year
was still to come. We, the survivors, went in search of the dead when
there was a possibly living party waiting in the ice somewhere for us to
succour them. That turned out all right, because when we got back, we
found Campbell's party self-extricated and waiting for us, alive and
well. But suppose they also had perished, what would have been said of
us?

The practical man of the world has plenty of criticism of the way things
were done. He says dogs should have been taken; but he does not show how
they could have been got up and down the Beardmore. He is scandalized
be