Of course he studied all means...I completely forgot that Captain Scott spent time with and studying the Inuit and chose to emulate their methods of travelling across ice using man hauling while wearing canvas clothing?
Being one inexperienced with dogs doesn't give him a pass for not making them the primary means of travelling on ice. Sure he took a handful of them but Nansen had advised him to use only dogs however Scott knew better than the man who had crossed Greenland and survived being stranded in the high Arctic without any support parties or catched depots to make it out alive. That alone should have been enough to adopt using dogs as religion just as Amundsen did. Late in the game Scott realized dogs were is only hope to make it home which led to the whole muddle of not risking them which itself was another of Scott's critical failures. He should have clearly sent back instructions to turn them around after returning to hut point to meet his party at least at 82d30m south to ensure his party made it. Instead it was ambiguous statements about it not being a rescue thus not critical to his survival.
Your argument is contradictory in more than one way, often simply untrue, and seems to be born from some sort of strong personal or nationalistic bias.
For example, you are either almost entirely lacking in knowledge or lying when you claim "Nansen had more polar experience than all others on earth combined". That is simply not true. There were over
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY polar expeditions
BEFORE Nansen's first one. Some expeditions included over 120 men who experienced at least one winter in the Arctic. Even if the average expedition just 30 men and stayed there for six months there would have been the equivalent of 1800 years of polar experience in the earlier expeditions. Nansen, an outstanding man and brilliant explorer, had four or five years experience.
It's hard to take an argument seriously when it includes claims that are out by a factor of about 360! How on earth could anyone have come up with such an absurd claim?
The other incorrect claims in your posts include the following;
1-
"the British appear to having been loathe to acknowledge the Norwegian's greater experience and that the methods they used were tested and proven in the high arctic and in Greenland."
The point you appear to be trying to make is incorrect. The British had
greater experience in high polar travel than the Norwegians, as noted earlier. The British had repeatedly taken the record for getting close to both poles, which proved that their methods also worked.
Secondly, Scott planned to use dogs from the start. He changed his ideas after actual experience in the Antarctic, which is not the Arctic.
2 -
The closest man had ever got to a pole at the time was by man and pony, in Shackleton's expedition. So why on earth should Scott have discarded the lessons of a man who went closer to the pole, and to the same pole Scott was aiming for, and instead followed a man who did not get as close to a pole and never experienced the mountain ranges of the Antarctic?
3 - You claim that Scott should have followed the advice of Nansen - when as you said yourself, Nansen was
stranded in the high Arctic. The fact that the redoubtable Nansen could get stranded shows how thin the margin between success and failure often was. So, too, was the fact that Amundsen's own success was followed by two failed expeditions, one of which cost him his life.
4- To say that Nansen survived "without any support parties or cached depots" is rather weird when Nansen's survival was arguably because by an incredible stroke of luck he happened to run into a British survey party on the desolate wastes of Franz Joseph Island. Had Nansen not had that bizarre stroke of fortune he was facing an open sea crossing of 150 miles in the Arctic in kayaks.
4- You claimed that Scott didn't study different methods of polar travel. That is simply untrue. He studied dogs, horses, skiing, walking, motor sleds, etc. Clothing is NOT travel.
5 - you repeatedly claim that people should have followed the travelling style of earlier pioneers like Nansen - but Nansen did not do that himself. The design of Fram (to quote from Nansen's own book) "differ(s) essentially from any other previously known vessel...." As noted,
You are saying that Scott should have copied Nansen but also saying that Scott should not have followed Nansen's example of being innovative.
6- Nansen's own Greenland expedition used man-hauled sledges like Scott did. So apparently it's a great idea when Nansen does it and a dumb idea when Scott does it.
7- The Arctic is not the Antarctic. One is all sea ice about three metres thick or less, the other has mountain ranges, glaciers and deep crevasses. Why assume that one is like the other as you apparently do?
The danger of crevasses is one reason why Scott changed his plan and used the dogs as a vital LATER part in his plan. In the first trek, he noted how hard it was to get dogs out when they fall into crevasses. Ponies and men were less of a problem. Crevasses were not a problem in the Arctic because they don't exist in the same way on sea ice.
Not even Nansen knew how dogs would handle the flat Arctic (from his own words "I do not of course know what the staying powers of the dogs may be") but now you are saying that Scott should have known what the staying power of dogs in a DIFFERENT environment, on land not sea, on slopes not flats, and with crevasses not shallow drops, should be. That is just not logical.
9 - since you put yourself in the Huntford camp it may seem that you are happy with believing a man who is obviously biased, as in his passages about Scott's career and Katherine Scott. But closely on point is the fact that Huntford claimed that Scott's reaction to animal suffering was "mawkishly sentimental".
So if Scott can be criticised for "mawkish sentimentality", why not also throw the same abuse at Nansen, who wrote of the way the dogs were treated with phrases like this;
"undeniable cruelty to the poor animals .....one must often look back on it with horror. It makes me shudder even now .......It made one’s heart bleed …those splendid animals, toiling for us without a murmur, as long as they could strain a muscle, never getting any thanks or even so much as a kind word, daily writhing under the lash until the time came when they could do no more and death freed them from their pangs—when I think of how they were left behind, one by one, up there on those desolate ice-fields, which had been witness to their faithfulness and devotion, I have moments of bitter self-reproach."
It's hypocritical (and callous) of Huntford to criticise Scott for being "mawkishly sentimental" when Nansen and Johansen were just as sentimental.....they just weren't the Huntford's target. That is typical of Huntford and it's a damn good reason for staying "out of his camp".
10 - Finally, it's extremely odd that you can blame Scott for not slavishly following the ideas of a successful man in the field (Nansen) when you have yourself criticised the choices of so many leading men in so many other fields on this forum, including saying they should have done things as odd as send an entire invasion convoy to get stuck on coral reefs.
Why should Scott have just followed the established leaders when you don't?
