The race that method won: Amundsen and Scott

For the southern summer of 1911, two parties set out for the same point on Earth: the geographic South Pole. One was led by Roald Amundsen of Norway, the other by Robert Falcon Scott of Britain. Only one came home.

Amundsen had not even meant to go south. He had planned to drift across the Arctic, but on learning the North Pole was claimed he turned his ship Fram around and told almost no one until he reached the ice. He built his base, Framheim, at the Bay of Whales, a full degree of latitude closer to the Pole than Scott's hut at Cape Evans.

The difference between the two expeditions was, in the end, a difference of method. Amundsen travelled on skis behind teams of Greenland dogs, dressed in fur clothing of the kind he had learned to make from the Netsilik during his Northwest Passage years. His depots were laid early and marked widely. He carried little and moved fast.

Scott trusted motor sledges that froze, ponies that foundered in the cold, and finally the men themselves, hauling their own sledges across the plateau. It was brave, and it was punishing.

Amundsen won because he respected the ice enough to prepare for it completely.

Amundsen reached the Pole on 14 December 1911 and was back at Framheim five weeks later with his party's health intact. Scott's men arrived on 17 January 1912 to find the Norwegian tent already standing. All five died on the return: Edgar Evans, then Lawrence Oates, who walked out into a blizzard with the words: I am just going outside and may be some time, and at last Scott, Wilson and Bowers, eleven miles from a depot that would have saved them.

The lesson the Norwegians drew was not triumph but humility. Preparation as a form of seamanship is the inheritance Meridian Polar sails under.