h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I hope you don't mind me moving this 'sub-topic' over here.

Yes, Johansen did also accompany Amundsen to the South Pole. Amundsen's respect for the survival skills of the Inuit in Arctic conditions was likely also inspired by Nansen who based much of the equipment and supplies for the crossing of the interior of Greenland in 1888 on Inuit clothing, tools and food. He also wrote a book on Inuit culture when he returned. (I looked this stuff up. )

I think Scott's "sin" was not just that he used new and unproven equipment on an expedition that he knew would be more extreme than any undertaken before, he also believed that dying was better than living when you couldn't live 'nobly'. Amundsen would use exhausted sled dogs as food for the remaining canines. Scott's ponies could not, of course, eat their dead fellows, but I seem to recall Scott's men didn't exploit this resource either.

Thank you for the clarification. I've often wondered if Scott was trying to recover his reputation after grounding that cruiser? Maybe "living nobly" was supposed to do that.

His men didn't eat the horses because he thought it was savage to do so. Apparently he also thought it savage to eat any fresh meat because his men developed scurvy from eating canned food and he compelled them to haul heavy sleds on something like 4000 calories a day per man which was inadequate. Consequently, they were slowly starving to death. He also failed to cache his supplies for the return trip properly and so wasted valuable time trying to find them.

On the whole it appears he had a rather romantically impractical view of the task, yet he has rarely been criticized for it.

When the United States Army was pursuing the Nez Perce indians during 1877, they marveled at the indians' apparently magical ability to move hundreds of people and horses over the Lolo Pass without evident forage. The scouts eventually noticed that bark had been stripped from some of the trees and correctly concluded that this was what the indian women were using for horse fodder. That was apparently a novel idea for the American soldiers.

I suspect Scott's ponies would have starved on the Lolo Pass as they did in Antarctica.