The Last Place on Earth

Roland Huntford

When Nansen said that 'to do everything with human beings causes much work and much suffering' he was denouncing culpable stupidity; but to Sir Clements the squandering of human effort was the expression of an ideal. One aspect of the English romantic movement was to equate suffering with achievement. There was a virtue in doing things the hard way. Contemporary drawings show British bluejackets straining in serried ranks before grotesquely overladen sledges, like soldiers marching into battle; humbly heroic figures overcoming the power of Nature by brute force and sheer grit. Dogs interfered with this vision; they made things seem too easy. That really was their crime.

'Adventure' as the American explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson liked to say, 'is a sign of incompetence'