South Pole Race: David and Goliath on Ice
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In June 1910, two ships set sail from Europe. One of them was captained by Robert Falcon Scott of the British Navy, representing the most powerful empire the world had ever seen. The other ship was led by Roald Amundsen of Norway, a small country that had gained its independence just five years before.

Both men had the same goal. They burned to be the first in history to reach the South Pole, planting their national flag. This wasn't about imperial conquest. The South Pole had no gold or spices. Or slaves. It was all about the symbolism. The age of exploration was largely over. Most of the world had been thoroughly mapped, with one big exception.

the vast interior of the icy continent of Antarctica. No human feet had ever trodden on the Earth's most southerly point. Of course, the British wanted to be the first to reach it. Over the centuries, they'd grown used to thinking of themselves as the greatest explorers in the world.

Robert Scott's British ship carried what one historian called the largest, best-equipped scientific team ever sent to Antarctica. It carried three state-of-the-art motorised sleds, along with Siberian dogs and ponies, and a crew of 65. This little army set sail from London in front of a crowd of the empire's finest.

The American polar explorer Robert Bartlett was there, noting that nobody had ever given him such a send-off. There were gold lace and cock hats and dignitaries enough to run a navy. I couldn't help comparing all this formality with the shoddy, almost sneering attitude of the American public. One of Scott's crew was almost overwhelmed by the crowd of onlookers.

The cheers from the many thousands of throats fairly made the air quiver on that blazing summer afternoon. Roald Amundsen's Norwegian vessel was much smaller. It carried no motorised sleds or ponies, only dogs and a crew of just 19. It sailed at midnight, without ceremony or celebration, a ghost ship slipping out into the Norwegian fjords.

Nobody in Norway was excited about Amundsen's bold thrust to beat the British to the South Pole, and there was a reason for that. He had told everyone he was heading to the North Pole instead. It's hard to imagine a more uneven contest. Scott's expedition was far larger and far better funded, underwritten by the British Navy and supported by public and private donations from across the British Empire.

There could be only one winner, and it was already obvious who it would be. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Remember the biblical story of David and Goliath?

An Israelite shepherd boy with the humblest weapon imaginable, a sling, defeats Goliath, the Philistine champion, a fully armed man mountain. King Saul of the Israelites is against the plan. You cannot go against this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a lad and he is a man of war from his youth. But David fights Goliath anyway and wins easily.

Malcolm Gladwell's book, David and Goliath, has some interesting things to say about this fight. Goliath wasn't quite as fearsome as he seemed. He was at least six foot nine, but humans aren't built to be that big. One plausible explanation is that Goliath was suffering from a medical condition which causes the production of too much growth hormone. It also often causes double vision.

Goliath looked terrifying, but he may well have had difficulty moving and difficulty focusing. In the race to the South Pole, Robert Falcon Scott was Goliath. Apparently the overwhelming favourite, but in reality, in a hopeless position. Just in case you don't know how the race unfolds, Scott's mission ends in utter failure. For more than a century, people have been arguing about why.

On one side of the argument are those who say Scott was terribly unlucky, in particular with the weather. On the other side are those who say Scott was an incompetent, that he chose the wrong methods, took needless risks, and at critical moments he made the wrong calls. If it wasn't bad luck or bad judgment, then how else could such a well-resourced expedition fail? But Goliath didn't lose because he was unlucky or because he was foolish.

He lost because the apparent underdog was actually in a vastly superior position all along. We'll explore the causes of Scott's problems in a moment. But first, let's describe the symptoms. His expedition was so large that Scott's ship was overloaded with men, fuel, motorised sledges and ponies, and it nearly sank before reaching Antarctica.

Conditions on ship were miserable. The crew ate their meals from a table directly underneath, where the ponies were being stabled. The yellow substance that dribbled down through the cracks in the wooden deck onto their table was euphemistically called mustard. Things were hardly more comfortable once Scott arrived in Antarctica.

The British went to a base that Scott and others had established years before on Ross Island, just off the coast of the Antarctic continent. It was further away from the South Pole than where Amundsen made his base camp, and not without its dangers. One man ventured onto an ice floe to photograph some killer whales and nearly ended up as their lunch. The ship was within 60 yards and I heard wild shouts, ''Look out! Run! Jump, man, jump! Run, quick!''

He made it back to safety with Captain Scott exclaiming, Then came the unloading of the ship. It did not go well.

We realised that the ice was getting very rotten, wrote one crewman. But when a message came back from an anxious Scott to hurry with the unloading, no one had the courage or the sense to ignore it. They were unloading one of the three motorised sledges. The ship party had got the sledge down onto the ice when, without warning, Williamson went through to his thighs. The motor sledge suddenly dipped, the ice gave way and she fell with all her weight vertically on the rope.

The rope began cutting through the thin ice. Man after man was forced to let go. The sledge is now resting on the bottom at a depth of 120 fathoms. It was a terrifying moment, and an expensive one. Scott had paid about as much for his three motorised sledges as Amundsen had raised to fund his entire expedition.

After months preparing depots and sheltering from the winter, Scott was ready to make his attempt at the South Pole. Despite the loss of one motor sledge, he still had two more of them, plus packs of dogs, a team of ponies, and the time-honoured tradition of the British Navy donning harnesses and hauling the sledges by hand with sheer British grit and endurance.

The British had long experience of this manhauling of sledges in polar regions. One disastrous expedition to the Arctic in 1875 required manhauling. Here's the conclusion of a survivor. I would confine everyone who proposed such a thing in a lunatic asylum, burn every sledge in existence and destroy the patterns. Long experience, as I say.

But the British Navy had not learned from that long experience. With the luxury of these varied modes of transport available, Scott chose to try them all. You might think that would give him flexibility. Instead, it constrained him. Scott's ponies were poorly adapted to the cold, so he decided to start later in the spring. Even then, the ponies struggled. They travelled slowly, hooves sinking deep into the snow.

Scott decided it would be better for the ponies to travel at night when the colder temperatures might mean firmer conditions under their hooves. It was miserable. Huge icicles form under the ponies' noses during the march. Scott's two remaining motorised sledges broke down early in the expedition. Nobody on his team had the mechanical expertise to fix them, so he had to abandon them and manhaul the sledges instead.

The man-hauled sledges worked even slower than the ponies. Scott's expedition was a patchwork caravan in which the ponies and the dog sleds had to keep stopping to let the man-hauled sledges keep up. The dogs do the whole march in three hours and then they have little else to do for the rest of the day. The dogs are doing splendidly.

When news reached Scott and his team that Amundsen was racing them to the pole, they correctly surmised that he wouldn't have taken ponies and he wouldn't be manhauling any sledges. I must say that Amundsen's chance of having forestalled us looks good. After the losses, the accidents, the late start and the slow progress, Scott's defeat was now just a matter of time.

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When formally announcing the project, Captain Scott could hardly have been clearer about his goals. The main object of the expedition is to reach the South Pole and to secure for the British Empire the honour of this achievement.

That was, of course, what the crowds cheering in London expected. But while Scott told the public that the South Pole was his focus, he had various other goals in mind. Objective number two was scientific progress.

"No expedition ever left our shores with a more ambitious scientific programme," said the expedition's second-in-command, while another expedition member explained: "We want the scientific work to make the bagging of the pole merely an item in the results." The research programme included work on biology, geology, glaciology, meteorology, measuring the magnetic fields around the pole, and of course exploration and mapmaking.

The exploration was no small task. With the British Navy supplying many of the men for the mission, Scott needed to be able to argue that he was finding and laying claim to new territory on behalf of the British Empire. But these scientific efforts were exhausting. They required Scott's men to take real risks and expend prodigious energy.

One of the research teams became stranded for an entire winter, surviving against extraordinary odds by building a snow cave and killing the occasional seal or penguin. Another team of three men were aiming for a curious prize, the egg of an emperor penguin.

This, it was hoped, might shed light on the embryology of all primitive birds, including dinosaurs. But to get the egg, the three unlucky explorers had to make a month-long journey during the Antarctic winter, in total darkness, and temperatures ranging below minus 75 Fahrenheit.

All three men nearly died. One of them, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, went on to write the classic book, The Worst Journey in the World. Nobody argues with his choice of title. All of these scientific exploits sapped the strength of the team. The two men who went with Cherry-Garrard on The Worst Journey in the World then set off with Scott to the South Pole. They must have been shattered before they started.

The sheer complexity of the enterprise also challenged Scott's managerial abilities.

Every long journey in the Antarctic needed careful planning, with preparatory journeys to set up depots along the route, stocked with food and fuel. Scott's attention and manpower were dissipated by the scientific expeditions. By the time he came to set up his depots for the journey to the pole, his supplies were sparse, leaving little margin for error if something went wrong, if instruments broke, which they did, or if food ran low, which it did.

or if depots were hard to find, which they were, or if vital fuel leaked, which it did. Scott might have been wiser to focus more attention on the South Pole, but he didn't really have a choice. The scientific mission was regarded as essential by influential patrons such as the Royal Geographical Society. They actively opposed a simple dash to the pole. Scott was trapped.

He had to tell the public that the journey was all about the South Pole, but he also had to please his mentors and funders at the Royal Geographical Society. And it gets worse because those weren't the only two objectives Scott had to balance.

Objective number three was to break new technological ground. That's why Scott was taking those three expensive motorised sleds, a decision that infuriated some members of his team. One of them, Captain Oates, wrote... Three motors at £3,000 each. 19 ponies at £5 each. 32 dogs at 30 shillings each.

If Scott fails to get to the pole, he jolly well deserves it. Remember that one of those sledges crashed through the ice and instantly sank to the bottom of the ocean, while the others didn't last long in the brutal conditions. Defenders of Scott say that his experiments with these vehicles were an essential part of learning how to make a weatherproof snowmobile, thus laying the foundations for Antarctic exploration in the future.

True. But the motorised sleds cost a huge amount of money, weighed down the ship, distracted Scott, and weren't much help. While Scott invested huge amounts in untested technology, Amundsen simply bought 100 sledge dogs. For the price of a single motorised sledge, he could have bought 2,000. Alongside the demands of scientific exploration and technological testing, there was yet another goal.

This one insidious and often unspoken. The British expected that reaching the South Pole should be a display of courage and endurance. Nowadays, this is a commonplace. Adventurers climb Everest without oxygen or sail solo around the world just to demonstrate that such things can be done. But back in 1911, was the goal to reach the South Pole by any means available?

Or was it to reach the South Pole the hard way? The British Empire spanned the globe, but suffered a creeping insecurity that young British chaps were going soft and weak. Scott knew that he was expected to demonstrate that the British were still the fittest of all. And so he vacillated. Sometimes he focused on the Pole by any means. At other times, he was keen to do it the right way.

And that meant not relying on dogs. Scott wrote: "In my mind, no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realized when a party of men go forth to face hardship, dangers and difficulties with their own unaided efforts."

and by days and weeks of hard physical labor, succeed in solving some problem of the great unknown. Surely in this case, the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won.

Scott's justifications were all over the place. Sometimes he seemed to argue that dogs wouldn't be useful in mountainous terrain. At other times he was squeamish about what using dogs involved, that is, shooting the poor creatures as you went along and feeding the corpses to the other dogs. Not especially noble or splendid. But it's clear that he also felt that, well, using dogs was sort of cheating.

Critics of Scott say that this is a man who simply couldn't make up his mind. But there was a reason for his ambivalence. At this point, I'd like to introduce you to Sir Clements Markham.

Sir Clements was the model of a British gentleman. Portraits of him show a man in starchy formal wear, dark tie, dark waistcoat, dark jacket with tails, huge pork chop sideburns and a disdainful expression as though the portrait photographer had just noisily broken wind. Not a man to cross.

Sir Clements was the leading light of the influential Royal Geographical Society. He'd held top positions at the Society for decades, from where he pushed buttons and pulled strings, bending the Society to his will and focusing the British elite on the goal of polar exploration. Sir Clements Markham was Scott's mentor, godfather to Scott's son, named Peter Markham Scott,

Sir Clements Markham had plucked Scott from obscurity and could break his career just as easily. Sir Clements demanded success, but he also wanted things done his way. First to the Pole, of course, but science should not be sacrificed. And from his warm, comfortable desk in London, Sir Clements had strong views about how things should be done. No ski, no dogs.

Dozens, hundreds of books have been written about the problems that Scott faced in reaching the South Pole. All those problems start with the decision not to rely on dogs. "There's a way to do these things," agreed the British establishment. Just as the Philistines agreed that a fight between champions should be done with physical strength, thick armour and sharp blades, with a champion like Goliath, David begged to differ.

He thought it would be easier to use a sling. And, in much the same spirit, Roald Amundsen thought it would be easier to use dogs. And if you're actually trying to get to the pole as easily and quickly as possible, not carry out trials of new motorised sledges, not prove a point about human endurance by hauling sledges by hand, but just win...

Well, then the decision to use dogs is as utterly obvious as David's decision to use a sling. Pony hooves sank in the snow. Dog paws didn't. Ponies needed a shelter each night, painstakingly built for them by tired men. Dogs simply dug their own dens. Ponies had to drag their own hay. Dogs could eat penguins and seals, canned food or even each other.

And the dog sleds were so much faster than ponies or men. With progress so slow, it didn't take long for Scott to become angry and despondent. Some of his men resented this. Others shrugged it off. I quite understand his feelings. A bad day like this makes him fear our beasts are going to fail us. Scott soon started to realise that he was beaten.

Just as Goliath might have known he was beaten as soon as he heard David's sling start to whir. But Scott's problems shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone. Cautionary Tales will be back after this break.

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It's tempting to say that if Scott had been a more capable leader, he would simply have made better choices, keeping mission creep on a tight leash and deploying his superior resources efficiently by investing more in dogs and stocking more and better depots. Perhaps. But Scott was by no means the first polar explorer to struggle with an over-resourced but unfocused expedition.

In 2001, a paper was published in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy by an economist named Jonathan Karpoff. Karpoff studied expeditions in the Arctic, all earlier than the Antarctic race between Scott and Amundsen. He began by observing that from the early 19th to the early 20th century, there were nearly 100 expeditions trying to make progress exploring inside the Arctic Circle.

For example, aiming to reach the North Pole, or seeking the Northwest Passage, a sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific through Canadian waters that held out the promise of transforming global trade. Of all these expeditions, just over half were private expeditions and the rest were publicly funded. Karpov wanted to know, who did a better job? The publicly funded expeditions or the privately funded ones?

The publicly funded expeditions were, says Karpoff, much better financed than private expeditions. They typically had twice as many ships and four times as many crew. But just as with Captain Scott, the extra resources didn't seem to help much. In fact, they didn't help at all. The most famous of the public expeditions was led by the British Navy captain, Sir John Franklin, who saw the Northwest Passage in 1845. It was a disaster.

Franklin's two ships were trapped in the sea ice and the survivors eventually tried to walk south to safety. There were dark rumours of cannibalism, but it's impossible to say if those rumours are true because every man died of exposure and starvation. Nearly half a century later came an expedition sponsored by the US government and led by Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley.

They were trying to get as close to the North Pole as they could, and they did set a record. But they became cut off from their relief ship, and almost everybody on the expedition starved to death. You might wonder if publicly funded or publicly supported expeditions suffered greater losses because they were attempting more ambitious goals. If so, they did not achieve them.

The major goals of the era were to find traces of Franklin's lost expedition, to find and navigate the Northwest Passage, and to reach the North Pole. Jonathan Karpoff reckons that five expeditions could claim a share in achieving those goals. Four of them were privately funded.

Karpov concludes that public expeditions had more money, larger teams and more on larger ships, but they suffered a higher death rate and they lost more of those ships. They were four times more likely to suffer from scurvy. And while the public expeditions were running up most of the costs, the private expeditions were ticking off most of the major achievements.

The Northwest Passage was finally navigated in 1905 by a tiny, scrappy, privately funded expedition led by a bold Norwegian adventurer by the name of Roald Amundsen. So why did the larger, richer public expeditions fail so often?

Jonathan Karpoff points to a range of problems. They were slow to learn the lessons of experience regarding clothes, diet, shelter and transport. They were more hierarchical. They were poorly prepared. They suffered from interference and second-guessing from bureaucrats back home, who would never go on the expedition itself.

And a related problem, while the private explorers were completely focused on success, because that's how you get the book deal and the lecture tour, the leaders of the public expeditions were trying not only to succeed, but to succeed while operating in a manner that kept their superiors happy. Scott knew the feeling.

All his problems were the result of the contradictory constraints that surrounded him. He had to do important scientific work, and be first to the poll, and do it the British way. In his writing, you can see him squirming to resolve these contradictions.

but he can't. In a letter written to the expedition's treasurer, he explains that he would have done things differently if he'd known there'd be a race with Amundsen. "I never realised that there was any object in haste this season, or I should have brought more dogs as Amundsen has done." But then adds: "I'm not a great believer in dog transport beyond a certain point." Scott wasn't the only person to be inconsistent.

Writing after a decade of hindsight, Scott's fellow explorer, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, explains, 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. Yet, almost in the same breath, he notes that when Amundsen beat Scott to the pole, Scott's journey was literally laid waste. That was the shock that staggered them.

There we have it. The South Pole was no big deal at all, just a publicity stunt. And failing to reach it first was a staggering shock. Even today, supporters of Captain Scott justify his actions in ways that suggest the same ambivalence. Praising him for his pioneering work on motorised sleds, then with barely a pause, also praising him for setting himself a physical challenge just as a 21st century adventurer would do.

Isn't there an inconsistency here? Of course there is. Whenever Scott tried to focus on a goal, it swam before his eyes. Like Goliath, he was overburdened and seeing double. Scott's final agonised push for the pole involved five men dragging their sledges by hand, mile by painful mile. When they reached their destination, their worst fears were realised.

Norwegian flags were flying in greeting. The Norwegians themselves were long gone. It is a terrible disappointment and I am very sorry for my loyal companions. Great God, this is an awful place. Amundsen's team had left a tent from which the flags were flying. Inside the tent, Scott found a letter from Amundsen to King Harkun of Norway.

with a cover note requesting that Scott deliver the letter, thus proving that both Amundsen and Scott had reached their goal. Scott also found that Amundsen had left him some spare equipment, a courtesy from one explorer to another. Scott searched through the supplies, hoping above all to find one thing, a can of fuel. His own fuel cans were leaking, so they were running short.

Without fuel, there was no way to make drinking water or defrost frozen food. He found sleeping bags, mittens, a sextant, but no can of fuel. That was a blow. Scott's exhausted team turned around. They'd reached the South Pole, but if they were to make it back to base camp, their journey was only half done. We have turned our back now on the goal of our ambition...

"I must face our 800 miles of solid dragging and goodbye to most of the daydreams." And as the 800 miles of solid dragging began, Scott and his team started to wonder whether they would make it at all. Scott had been defeated, but there's more to learn from this cautionary tale.

When news reached Scott's family of Amundsen's victory, two-year-old Peter Markham Scott turned to his mother, Kathleen Scott, and asked her a question. Mummy, is Amundsen a good man? Next episode, we'll search for an answer. For a list of sources, please see timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Julia Barton, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Royston Berserve,

Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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