White Knight
Spectral Warrior con passion
Via Netflix, Artic Passage: Prisoners of the Ice and Artic Survivor. These are two excellent documentaries produced by the wonderful science series on PBS, Nova.
The first deals with the ill-fated and doomed 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin and his crew to find and navigate a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The expedition unfortunately devolved into cannibalism and insanity--a fact for many years denied by the British Admiralty--after Sir John and his crews were trapped in freakish weather which caused their two ships to be ice bound for almost 3 years. Added to this was the fact that they were being poisoned by the solder used in their tins of canned food, and also driven mad by scurvy. They travelled heavy and with all the advanced technology of the 19th Century, which in the end, proved to be their very undoing.
Starkly contrasted with this is the approach taken by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who, some 50 plus years later, tackled the same challenge, using only a re-fitted fishing boat and a much smaller crew {less mouth to feed and care for} and was able to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage with no fatalities. He was then able to reach the South Pole--just ahead of the much maligned Captain Scott--some ten years later. Again there were no fatalities. History well knows what happened to Robert Scott and his crew.
Amundesen proved--beyond a doubt--that traveling light and inuring oneself to a hostile environment--rather than trying to "conquer" it--as the British seemed so intent on doing, was in fact the right way to go about these endeavors.
The expression "less is more" never seemed to be more applicable.
The first deals with the ill-fated and doomed 1845 expedition of Sir John Franklin and his crew to find and navigate a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The expedition unfortunately devolved into cannibalism and insanity--a fact for many years denied by the British Admiralty--after Sir John and his crews were trapped in freakish weather which caused their two ships to be ice bound for almost 3 years. Added to this was the fact that they were being poisoned by the solder used in their tins of canned food, and also driven mad by scurvy. They travelled heavy and with all the advanced technology of the 19th Century, which in the end, proved to be their very undoing.
Starkly contrasted with this is the approach taken by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who, some 50 plus years later, tackled the same challenge, using only a re-fitted fishing boat and a much smaller crew {less mouth to feed and care for} and was able to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage with no fatalities. He was then able to reach the South Pole--just ahead of the much maligned Captain Scott--some ten years later. Again there were no fatalities. History well knows what happened to Robert Scott and his crew.
Amundesen proved--beyond a doubt--that traveling light and inuring oneself to a hostile environment--rather than trying to "conquer" it--as the British seemed so intent on doing, was in fact the right way to go about these endeavors.
The expression "less is more" never seemed to be more applicable.
