The Last Place on Earth

When I visited Copenhagen in my teens—on the same trip where I visited Kronborg castle—I was staying north of the city, and had to ride my bike down the coast road to get into the city center. I kept passing the statue of Knud Rasmussen, the Danish explorer famous for his expeditions to Greenland.

The statue drew my eye every time I rode by, forwards and backwards, its simplicity calling to me. I responded to the figure outfitted for heavy weather, looking out to sea. I did not need to dismount and try to make out the Danish words carved on its plinth to understand the romantic notions of exploration it was trying to convey.

Not knowing much about Rasmussen at the time, the figure mingled in my mind with the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. Child of public television that I was, I had inhaled the Masterpiece Theater series The Last Place on Earth, about the rivalry between Amundsen and Captain Scott as they both attempted to reach the South Pole in the years before World War One. The series asked and at least attempted to answer the question of why Amundsen succeeded where Scott failed.

The answer in visual shorthand, evident in the first few minutes of Episode One, is that Amundsen learned from the Inuit people about how to cope with extreme conditions before setting off, whereas Scott seemed to spend most of his time faffing about in fancy London drawing rooms trying to raise money. The contrast in the introduction of the two could not have been greater: Amundsen in furs sitting in an igloo versus Scott in polished military dress being summoned into an inner sanctum at the Admiralty. As soon as you see Scott, you understand that British hubris has to be the culprit. All that pomp has to be a distraction from Scott’s core undertaking.

The dramatic irony hovering over the scenes make some of them unbearable, especially on a rewatch. For me, one of the hardest to sit through was the brief episode of Scott practicing with a tank-like machine as it pulls along several of his men on skis. You know that none of these zippy new technological solutions are going to work. They will not solve the very basic problems facing the expedition. Any deviation from the most direct approach to the unyielding polar environment is bound to end in failure. And failure, there, means death.

The Norwegian, Amundsen, starts out closer to the problem of the poles, since stretches of his own country reach to the Arctic circle. He also brings a humility to bear in closing the remaining gap. As fitting for a resident of a smaller, less powerful country, his profile starts out lower than Scott’s. He also actively avoids the limelight, at one point walking in the opposite direction from where press and photographers camp out waiting for him. He only seeks publicity where he absolutely needs it, to make the expedition a reality.

In writing this series of newsletters, I have sometimes stretched the idea of what constitutes a crime. I always start with one in mind. Even the film I wrote about last week, based on the memoir about Isak Dinesen, hints at attempted murder. Here, I keep wondering whether Scott’s disastrous expedition veers into criminal negligence. Other polar or arctic expeditions, such as the Wrangel Island fiasco, were so poorly planned that they could only have resulted in disaster. Is this the case with Scott?

A deeper contrast between Amundsen and Scott reveals itself as the series goes along, in that confidence comes more naturally to Amundsen, probably because it is based on tested and proven work. He therefore wears it more easily and tempers it where necessary, in a way Scott cannot. Scott is fundamentally insecure, and so convinced he has to prove himself that it makes him unsteady in his judgment. As depicted in the series, his wife Kathleen Bruce Scott seems a little unhinged in her pursuit of vicarious greatness, thwarted as she is by social restrictions in becoming great in her own right. So the two are a pair in the ways they are trying to achieve, their ambition overweening rather than simple and forthright.

Scott’s defects reflect the society that made him. He is incapable of seeing the true task in front of him. His notion of progress make him rely too much on unworkable contraptions. His ideas about the nobility of animals was too impractical for someone who needed to eat fresh meat daily to avoid scurvy. At every turn, his culture and upbringing impede him.

The story of Scott and Amundsen, as told, is one of the most quietly devastating indictments of British imperial culture there is.