many expeditions despatched to search for the missing Franklin expedition. Among McClintock's admirers on that expedition was a 21-year-old midshipman, Clements Markham. Markham’s obsession Based on his experiences with McClintock and his love for naval traditions, Markham, future President of the Royal Geographical Society, became a fervent believer in the principle that manhauling was the purest form of polar travel. Markham became the driving force behind British Antarctic exploration endeavours in the early 20th century, and was the mentor of Robert Falcon Scott, to whom his thinking and drive were transferred. After his unhappy experiences with dogs in the Antarctic on the Discovery Expedition, 1901–04 Scott wrote, in his account of the expedition: "In my mind no journey ever made with dogs can approach the height of that fine conception which is realised when a party of men go forth to face hardships, dangers, and difficulties with their own unaided efforts […] Surely in this case the conquest is more nobly and splendidly won." Scott and Shackleton An aversion to the use of dogs pervaded all the British expeditions during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (including those led by Ernest Shackleton). This was baffling to the great Norwegian explorers Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen. To them manhauling was "futile toil", to be avoided at all costs. Edward Wilson, however, on the fatal southern journey during Scott's 1910–1913 Terra Nova Expedition expressed a profound relief, as the pole-bound party began its ascent of the Beardmore Glacier after the last of the ponies had been shot: "Thank God the horses are now done with, and we begin the heavier work ourselves", he wrote. His companion Lawrence Oates thought differently but kept his counsel. Later, when the Pole had been attained and Amundsen's prior arrival discovered, Oates privately castigated “our wretched manhauling” as a cause of his party's defeat. Some conclusions Some chroniclers have suggested that excessive reliance on manhauling may have cost the lives of Scott's polar party. Each man pulling a sledge was burning around 6,000 calories a day, and consuming rations producing only 4,500 calories. Max Jones concludes that they were slowly starving to death. Much earlier, an expedition account by James Gordon Hayes had highlighted two principal causes of Scott's disaster: dietary deficiencies and the decision to rely on men instead of dogs. In 1997, in another history of the expedition, Michael de-la-Noy concludes: “…the whole expedition had