The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Gary Zukav

The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics says that the cat is in a kind of limbo represented by a wave function which contains the possibility that the cat is dead and also the possibility that the cat is alive. When we look in the box, and not before, one of these possibilities actualizes and the other vanishes. This is known as the collapse of the wave function because the hump in the wave function representing the possibility that did not occur, collapses. It is necessary to look into the box before either possibility can occur. Until then, there is only a wave function.

Scott of the Antarctic

David Crane

They were six days behind schedule, and Scott had already abandoned the idea of stopping in Melbourne, but these faltering spirits were enough to prompt him to break their journey at the 'weird, blighted island' of South Trinidad. The island was sighted on the morning of 13, September, and dropping anchor on its western side, Scott took two small boats and a landing party in on the heavy, shark-infested breakers that smashed up against its rocky shore. It was a dangerous operation, and if it is typical of Scott that he should have first checked that everyone could swim, it was even more so that he should have pushed on even when he found out that they couldn't.

In many ways what we have here in its ur-form is the Scott of modern myth, a man of ambition without direction, of aspirations without vision, of will without conscience, of charm without kindness, of character without centre. It is worth conceding, too, that Mason knew Scott well enough to make the similarities to this grotesque more than mildly discomforting, and yet if he portrayed a pragmatism and complacent ordinariness in Rames which he did not much like, he also recognised the burning, redeeming idealism that his hero is reluctant to admit even to himself. 'She saw something in his face which she had never seen there before,' he wrote of the moment when Cynthia, by now Rames's disillusioned wife, discovers that her rival is not another woman but the old Antarctic charts that her husband has kept like a guilty secret in a locked drawer, 'which she had never thought to see there at all. He wore the look of a man quite caught out of himself. He was as one wrapped in visions and refined by the fires of great longings. It seemed to her that she saw a man whose eyes, brimful of light, looked upon the Holy Grail.

Even at the height of the Raj, however, there can have been few better 'haters' than Birdie Boweres, and fewer still with such a rich portfolio of prejudices. In a perverse kind of way he retained a soft spot for the 'sausage-eaters' for having produced Martin Luther, but that was teh limit of his tolerance. Bowers hated teh half-caste and he hated the native. He hated teh 'heathen darkness' of Islam and the fetishistic, crucifix-worshipping antics of Popery. He hated teh priest-ridden Irish and the idolatrous Spanish and Portuguese. He hated teh Russians and he hated teh 'Maccaroni'. He hated the 'filthy smelly creatures' he found in the Far East and the 'Godless heedlessly happy, licentious, desperately wicked 'froggies'' he found in Paris. 'If ever I could call a dear little kid like that my own,' he wrote home of the offspring of a white father and an Asian mother, 'it would break my heart to feel that she wasn't 'pure'. Thank God we are white & that our parents were pure, & that we were brought up in a country where purity--at least in name--is not at a discount.'*
*This was not the limit of Bowers's oddities. An imperialist who looked with glad eyes on the imminent destruction of the British Empire; a patriot who had no time for his King; a little Englander who saw the Church of England as the 'Daughter of the Harlot'; a naval officer who could salute a Dreadnaught as the instrument of Divine Retribution--contradiction was at the heart of his character.

If there was no name on that telegram that could have more surprised Scott, there was certainly none that could have been more disturbing. In terms of courage or audacity men like Scott and Shackleton were the equals of anyone, but in all the disciplines, skills and attitudes that made the polar traveller, and that were almost second nature to the Norwegian, Amundsen simply belonged to a different league. It is not just that a Scott could not compete on those terms, but rather that there was no way in which he possibly could have done, because skiing as Amundsen and his men could ski was not the skill of a week or a month or even a year, was not something that could be picked up on the job, or learned on an ice floe on the way down to the south. It is unarguable that British expeditions did not help their cause by recruiting from the Irrawaddy and the Indian maidan, but even with the most technically accomplished party that Scott or any other British leader could have put together, there was no chance that any 'race' against as skilled and ruthlessly single-minded an opponent as Amundsen could end in anything but defeat.

The is no 'tomorrow' in the diary, and the next entry is for the fifteenth or sixteenth--'Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping-bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on.' That night Oates was done, and they knew it was the end. 'Should this be found,' Scott wrote in his diary, shifting for the first time from private mode to an invisible and posthumous public, 'I want these facts recorded. Oates's last thoughts were of his Mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not--would not--give up hope till the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning--yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, I am just going outside and may be some time.' He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.

It was not faulty logistics that did for Scott, not lack of food or fuel, not washers, not Meares taking more than his share, not imprecise instructions, not over-rigid instructions, not arrogance, nor stupidity, not the fifth man, not scurvy, but the weather. It is obvious that if he had marked his depots more clearly on the Barrier and plateau he would have saved himself a world of anxiety, but the miracle of it is that with their depots over-spaced and their line of retreat ill-marked, their food devoid of vitamins and their time on the plateau so much longer than Amundsen's, that Eastern 'slab' that had been so elaborately fashioned for them came within a whisker of not falling.

A First Rate Tragedy

Diana Preston

'It has happened! we have found what we sought! Good God, what a twist of fate.' So the young Norwegian Tryggve Gran recorded a grim discovery on 12 November 1912 by a search-party trekking across the blinding whiteness of Antarctica's Great Ice Barrier. They had found the snow-covered tent containing the bodies of Captain Scott and his two companions, Edward Wilson and 'Birdie' Bowers. They had died just eleven miles from the depot of food and fuel which might have saved them. Of the two other members of the Polar party, Captain Oates and Petty Officer Edgar Evans, there was no sign. However, Scott's diaries and letters, found by his body, recounted their terrible fate. It was a story that would resonate throughout the world and make heroes of them all. 

If you imagine the most snooty, ugly, pompous English woman you can think of, you will be somewhere close to Preston. Her writing makes you want to spit.