VI.

Competing Approaches to Exploration

One of the constant elements in the story of the exploration of both polar regions is the contrast between two essentially different views of how to go about the process of exploration. One approach fought against the natural environment, while the other sought to work within its limitations.

Some European explorers took a pragmatic approach, realizing they could learn life-saving techniques from the Inuit people who had lived successfully in the hostile Arctic environment for millennia. The first Europeans to learn from the Inuit were fur traders, whose interests were in commerce rather than glory. Later, explorers such as Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and John Rae employed Inuit-based survival skills that often eluded their navy-trained contemporaries. The great Scandinavian explorers, fostered in the ascetic Nordic tradition of outdoor activities in a harsh environment, also adapted easily to this pragmatic approach. Toward the end of the 19th century, their American colleagues began to follow suit.

One of the leading exponents of this approach to exploration was the Canadian-born American anthropologist Viljalmur Stefansson. From 1906 to 1918 he traveled thousands of kilometers surveying and mapping in the high Canadian Arctic, studying the Inuit people and living almost exclusively off the land and sea. Although emulating the Inuit life had obvious logical advantages, it also had clear limitations for Europeans who had not grown up in the harsh Arctic environment. Wally Herbert and his team on the British Trans-Arctic Expedition (1968-1969), sledging with dogs that they fed a diet of pemmican, encountered only 3 polar bears, 12 ringed seals, and 20 birds in 5 months on the ice. They felt it “very fortunate that we had not trusted in Stefansson’s theory and relied solely on hunting in order to survive.” Traveling so far from land over the ice, however, they were encountering problems that not even the Inuit would have.

British explorer Scott exemplified the opposite approach to exploration, which was rooted in the tradition of the Royal Navy. Scott firmly believed that one ought to reach the pole on foot and unaided. In this “purist” approach he reflected the Royal Navy’s attitude that using the travel and survival techniques of the Inuit people was somehow cheating, and that the test of character involved in doing things the traditional naval way was more important than a successful outcome—even if it meant the explorers had to endure appalling and completely unnecessary hardships. This attitude had led directly to the deaths of hundreds of explorers during the 19th century, and it contributed to Scott’s own death.

The difference in the two approaches is also evident in the explorers’ attitudes toward using animals. Scott was reluctant to use aids such as sledging dogs, and his inexperience with using them led to disappointing experiences that only strengthened his opinion. Using dogs inevitably meant killing some to feed the others, and Scott regarded this necessity as extremely cruel rather than practical. In contrast, Norwegian explorer Amundsen put sledging dogs “first and last,” valuing and caring for them during their lives and, when the time came, unhesitatingly using them for food to speed the party on its way.

In the end, it was the Inuit-based approach that proved most successful, not only in reaching both poles first, but in doing so with far less hardship and loss of human life. However, the naval tradition, which reached its apotheosis in the Heroic Age expeditions in the Antarctic, provided at least a part of what it set out to do: It tested the character of those involved to the limit, and set examples of courage, determination, and self-sacrifice that still haunt the imagination today.