It was a point of
honour not to ca' canny. Men were allowed to do too much, and were told
afterwards that they had done too much; and that is not discipline. They
should not have been allowed to do too much. Until our last year we never
insisted on a regular routine.
Money was scarce: probably Scott could not have obtained the funds for
the expedition if its objective had not been the Pole. There was no lack
of the things which could be bought across the counter from big business
houses--all landing, sledging, and scientific equipment was
first-class--but one of the first and most important items, the ship,
would have sent Columbus on strike, and nearly sent us to the bottom of
the sea.
People talk of the niggardly equipment of Columbus when he sailed west
from the Canaries to try a short-cut to an inhabited continent of
magnificent empires, as he thought; but his three ships were, relatively
to the resources of that time, much better than the one old tramp in
which we sailed for a desert of ice in which the evening and morning are
the year and not the day, and in which not even polar bears and reindeers
can live. Amundsen had the Fram, built for polar exploration _ad hoc_.
Scott had the Discovery. But when one thinks of these Nimrods and Terra
Novas, picked up second-hand in the wooden-ship market, and faked up for
the transport of ponies, dogs, motors, and all the impedimenta of a polar
expedition, to say nothing of the men who have to try and do scientific
work inside them, one feels disposed to clamour for a Polar Factory Act
making it a crime to ship men for the ice in vessels more fit to ply
between London Bridge and Ramsgate.
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