On 4 February 1911 Scott and company were locked into the Depot Laying Expedition's routine: night-time marches under the Antarctic moon across somewhat firmer surfaces on the Great Barrier; midnight lunch after five miles; laying camp six at sunrise for a "satisfying supper"; and "dreamless sleep". (Journals, p. 120, Carroll & Graf [1996]). Repeat the next day. In 1911 this is how you get tons of provisions and supplies onto the course you'll take in a polar dash planned to take place a year later.
Scott's campaign against the dogs continues in the day's journal entry. "The dog is almost human in its demand for living interest," Scott remarked. "Yet fatally less than human in its ability to foresee." (Journals, p. 120, Carroll & Graf [1996]). Knowing what we all now know about the successful use others made of dogs in the south, its is getting hard to read all of this antagonism towards dogs with the kind of objectivity Scott meant to give it. He protests too much.
Camp Six came to be called "Corner Camp" and it lies only 30 miles from Hut Point, a little more than 40 miles from the expedition's hut out on Ross Island's Cape Evans.
Scott ended the day's journal entry with the suggestion that a blizzard was coming in. Apsley Cherry-Garrard said that "one summer blizzard is much like another. The temperature, never very low, rises, and you are not cold in the tent. Sometimes a blizzard is a very welcome rest . . . you may sleep dreamlessly nearly all of the time, rousing out for meals." (Apsely Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World, p. 115 [1989]).
Robert Falcon Scott's South Pole @ 100
