BOOK NOTE - The Last Place on Earth - Roland Huntford

 All stories are stories of adventure.

In the dawn of time, when the first adventurer left his tribe’s campfire and dared to wander beyond its glow, he brought back a story. Paul Zweig’s book The Adventurer calls this the source of storytelling itself.

Man risking his life in perilous encounters constitutes the original definition of what was worth talking about.

Roland Huntford’s The Last Place on Earth is one such book about adventure. It is a biography of two men, told through the lens of their grand journey to the South Pole at the beginning of the 20th century. In chronicling Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen's journeys —one ending in death and failure, the other in success that is almost clinical—the book takes us through a world on the brink of the modern era. A world without plastics, vitamins, or germ theory—this was adventure before comfort.

By the late 1890s, most of the world had been mapped. The last unconquered frontier was Antarctica, and at its heart, the South Pole. British explorers like Scott and Shackleton made attempts. But it was the Norwegian Roald Amundsen who won the race, reaching the Pole in 1911.

What drew me to this book was a reference to leadership. Greg McKeown in Effortless talks about consistency over intensity. He compares Amundsen—whose team succeeded—to Scott, whose team did not survive, on this leadership dynamic.

The key difference was in their approach. Amundsen was consistent. His team did 15-mile treks daily, regardless of weather, making steady progress without exhaustion. Scott’s team on the other hand was erratic. Some days they pushed too hard heroically, but on other days they completely stalled from exhaustion and poor planning. That emotional, unscientific style cost them the race—and their lives.

But this book offers so much more lessons for modern leaders. Lessons on preparedness, risk-taking, empowering autonomy, learning from the best, trying new methods, but also valuing cultural knowledge and the underrated value of good humour.

It took me over 4 years to finish reading it. Slowly. For the joy of it. For the story of an adventure from the last great expedition of the Age of Discovery.

The book chronicles the personal journeys of Scott and Amundsen—from their roots to their eventual race to the South Pole.

Scott was emblematic of a declining Britain. By the 1870s, the race of giants that defined the glory of Queen Victoria’s reign was coming to an end. Dickens died in 1870, Darwin’s last major work was published in 1871, and Livingstone died in 1873. Scott, born in 1868, was steeped in a world where that glory was slipping away—a hero for a nation in decline. It is because of this, and Scott’s temperament, that the author argues he made the expedition to the Pole an affair of heroism for heroism’s sake. Amundsen, by contrast, was a cool and calculated Norwegian who turned the conquest of the Pole into something between an art and a sport.

This led to remarkable differences in their motivations and approaches.

Scott, with civilizational pride behind him, expected the elements to align in his favor—and grew resentful when they did not. Amundsen, on the other hand, had the Viking respect for nature and prepared for the worst. When conditions favored him, he responded with gratitude, not entitlement.

Amundsen learned from failure. When his first sledging journey under his command failed spectacularly, he noted in his diary that they had “harvested experience.” Scott, more driven by passion, failed time and again to learn from experience—his ambition clouding his judgment.

Amundsen had a good read of people. Early in his apprenticeship journeys, he realized that under stress, passivity dissolved into apathy—and in extreme conditions, apathy was fatal. He developed ways to identify those prone to such weaknesses and removed them from the team before it was too late. Scott, meanwhile, was more swayed by flattery than by character. His choice of companions for the final push to the Pole reflected personal preference more than competence.

Amundsen had the humility to learn from anyone. He studied how to live under polar conditions from the indigenous Eskimos. He believed no civilization held a monopoly on wisdom—and that so-called primitive people had much to teach the modern man. From them, he learned how to dress in a way that avoided sweat (a deadly hazard in the cold) and how to effectively use dogs for sledging. Scott, rooted in Royal Navy traditions and ceremonies, resisted such learning. His reluctance to adopt key innovations in clothing, and his disdain for dog sledding, proved fatal for his team.

Scott carried the trappings of status as a Royal Navy officer but lacked true connection with his men. Beneath the mask of a gentleman officer, he smouldered with ambition, yet failed to truly move or inspire his followers. Locked into a command-and-control mindset, he couldn’t bring out the best in his team. Amundsen, by contrast, was quietly confident and inspired confidence in others. He preferred trust over control, noting that when “you let everybody have the feeling of being independent within their own sphere, there arises a spontaneous and voluntary discipline, which is worth far more than compulsion.”

This is not to say Amundsen was perfect. But he demonstrated the best traits of leadership where it mattered most.

When Amundsen finally reached the South Pole, there is a poignant passage. He experiences not jubilation, but something closer to emptiness:

Amundsen had learned what the Duke of Wellington had meant when, in the moment of victory, he wrote that ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ Such, then, was the attainment of the South Pole: a muted feast; a thing of paradox, of classic detachment; of disappointment almost.

And yet, it is Scott’s ill-fated expedition that lives on in popular memory. Amundsen, almost too perfect in his accomplishments, is largely forgotten.

That, perhaps, is the final lesson in leadership: success demands both science and art. The science of preparation and execution. And the art—not just of living the moment—but of making it live in others.