An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor by Michael Smith

by a slight accident when he fell and damaged a hamstring.

    Nor was there any real progress made in mastering the teams of dogs who had been taken south with the express purpose of pulling the party’s supplies as far as possible and saving the terrible toil of man-hauling sledges. As we have stated, dogs were to become the key method of travel across the ice, most notably by Amundsen, the finest of all polar explorers. But Scott, taking a lead from Markham’s antiquated methods, was already warming to the laborious and monotonous task of man-hauling sledges.

    Man-hauling, the system of placing groups of men in harness and dragging heavy sledges on foot across the ice, is probably the most physically demanding form of travel anywhere on earth. The painfully slow, back-breaking work of hauling an 800-lb (360-kg) sledge over uneven and broken ground strewn with hidden crevasses is an exhausting exercise. But it becomes a debilitating ordeal in temperatures of –40 °F(–40 °C) and in the face of biting winds and a swirling blizzard.

    The principal strain is taken on the waist but when the sledge became stuck fast, it requires a succession of heavy jerks to jolt the dead weight out of its imprisonment. On soft snow, the physical exertion is immense, reminiscent of pulling a dead weight across sand. It was one area of activity where class and rank did not matter, with officers and men in the same harness engaged in the same exhausting struggle, each man desperate to pull his weight.

    The system also demanded that the haulers had to be well fed to compensate for the heavy work. But there were no seals, penguins or birds to yield fresh meat for hungry men once they left the shore-side base, so the long-distance travelling parties had to carry every ounce of food with them on any long journey.

    Man-hauling over a long distance, therefore, became a vicious circle for the men, involving a life-or-death equation of weight versus distance. The farther they travelled, the more food they had to drag and the more food they had to haul, the weaker they became and the less they travelled. It became a delicate balancing act to measure the amount of food against the prospective distance to be travelled.

    Although explorers developed a system of leaving depots of food brought out by supporting parties, it meant that man-hauling parties could only travel as far as the supplies of food they could carry on sledges weighing 700 or 800 lb. Each person in a typical four-man team was regularly pulling the equivalent weight of 200 lb (90 kg) a head across soft snow, occasionally sinking up to their midriffs and constantly battered by bitter, bone-chilling winds. Even worse was the fear that the fragile ice might crack, sending a man crashing to his death down a crevasse to a concealed abyss below.

    However, successive expeditions underestimated the need to refuel the men with adequate amounts of food, and with the understanding of diets and vitamins still in its infancy, they also failed to ensure that the men ate the correct types of food.In addition, the men rarely consumed enough liquid because ice had to be melted in the primus stove to produce drinking water. But the precious fuel had to be carefully rationed to cook hot meals, which meant they rarely bothered to stop, pitch a tent and rig up the primus simply for a mug of tea.

    Man-haulers during this era were plagued by the intense cold, frost bite, blizzards, hurricane-force winds, snow blindness, life threatening crevasses and one final indignity – they were always thirsty and hungry.

    The British, influenced by Markham, took special pride in the ability to cope with hardship, the test of real men pitted against the worst the elements could throw at them. Men battled against each other in silent resolution to ensure that their own piece of the harness did not slack. They gloried in the hardship and seemed unable or unwilling to adapt to more modern, less arduous methods of