Difference between revisions of "Big Trouble in Vladivostok"

From TheSouthPole
Jump to: navigation, search
(Created page with "Kristoffer Nelson-Kilger Captain Scott headed off onto the Ross Ice Shelf many times with ponies. But how did the expedition get these ponies? Karen May and George Lewis cert...")
(No difference)

Revision as of 18:35, 14 January 2020

Kristoffer Nelson-Kilger

Captain Scott headed off onto the Ross Ice Shelf many times with ponies. But how did the expedition get these ponies? Karen May and George Lewis certainly cannot tell us, yet they tried anyway.[1]

They started with a quiet refusal to cite a source, as well as selective quotation of Lt Shackleton. [2]

Modern scholarship judges the dogs’ failure in hindsight as due to poor feeding; however, at the time this gave an impression of dogs’ unreliability to both Scott and Shackleton. In his 1909 memoir The heart of the Antarctic Shackleton states frankly that ‘[d]ogs had not proved satisfactory on the Barrier surface’ (Shackleton 2000: 13) and ‘I placed little reliance on dogs’ (Shackleton 2000: 15). This explains Shackleton’s decision to bring ponies in addition to dogs on his 1907–1909 Nimrod expedition.

Their first sentence does not cite a source. Its source is Sienicki who made this discovery and published it in Appendix A of a pre-print. [3] The rest is a clear-cut case of selective quotation to conceal the fact that Captain Scott could have made himself aware of Lt Shackleton’s results from his dog teams. Here are Lt Shackleton’s original words, with the sections deliberately omitted by May and Lewis marked in italics [4]

Dogs had not proved satisfactory on the Barrier surface, and I had not expected my dogs to do as well as they actually did… I placed little reliance on the dogs, as I have already stated, but I thought it advisable to take some of these animals.

Lt Shackleton went on to document the sterling performance of dogs during the resupplying of depots on the Barrier, [5] a fact which May and Lewis omit. They moved on to a gaffe [6]

Huntford accuses Scott of conflating canine knowledge with equine knowledge in sending Meares: ‘Scott assumed that anyone who knew about dogs was qualified to buy horses’ (Huntford 1979: 324, 2002: 310). Griffiths, following Huntford, gives his fictionalised Scott the dialogue ‘It’s my considered view that a man who knows, really knows, any animal, knows all animals to some extent’ (Griffiths 1986: 72). However, as Huntford cites no evidence, his presentation of Scott’s inner motivation must be considered an unsupported hypothesis. The onusis not on the present writers to ‘find evidence’ that Scott did not think this way. It is self-evident that dogs differ from horses: until Huntford produces the necessary archive evidence to support his statement, we must take it that Scott did not hold such an erroneous belief.

That Meares did possess knowledge of horses can be seen from his Boer war service. On 8 November 1901 Meares joined the 1st Scottish Horse regiment, a cavalry regiment (Scottish Horse, nominal roll), and served with them in South Africa until the war ended inMay 1902 (Mills 2008: 113–114). After only four months Meares was promoted from trooper to lance-corporal (Mills 2008: 114). Since an NCO had to possess the ability to lead his fellow cavalrymen, and make paradestyleinspections of his men and horses to make them ready for the officer’s inspection, Meares’ swift rise in the Scottish Horse indicates that he was familiar with horses.

In addition to his wartime cavalry experience, Meares, somewhat unusually, was a Russian speaker (his spoken Russian was judged first class by the War Office in 1915 (Meares, RNVR service record)) with proclaimed first-hand understanding of the Russian marketplace: his biographer Leif Mills notes that he ‘dabble[d] in fur trading’ in Russia before 1901 (Mills 2008: 113) and that he ‘did some trading in furs’ in Siberia in 1903 (Mills 2008: 114). Thus Scott’s decision to charge Meares with purchasing the expedition’s ponies appears to have been based on Meares’ known background. It would have made perfect sense for Scott to trust a Russian-speaking ex-cavalryman (with first-hand knowledge of trading in Siberia) with the purchase of the ponies.