When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  Modern life also throws “uncontrolled” decisions at us, such as a car accident, but the majority of these at least have predictable patterns. Laws, values, religious beliefs, societal customs and other support systems help us deal with them. When faced with an uncontrolled event, we often know instinctively when to summon the police, a doctor, a relative, or a religious advisor, and when to handle it ourselves.

  An uncontrollable world

  In contrast, during the heroic age of Antarctic exploration of the early 1900s, even the controlled decisions were met with uncontrollable circumstances. Expeditions were cut off from the world and decision making was done in complete isolation. In an emergency, a call for help traveled only as far as one could shout. There were no lines on these roads, no rule of law and, with no advanced communications equipment, absolutely no means of contacting the outside world.

  Once landed, the expeditions were totally self-sufficient and this is what makes the Antarctic such a unique environment in which to analyse decisions. No emergency rescue could be brought in, and there was no one to call on for impartial advice. Not only because there was no communications equipment, but even if there had been, no one could give useful advice. No one had ever been where they were standing.

  To complicate matters further, nothing was to be found there except snow, ice, and wind. There were no trees to provide wood for fuel, no plants to eat, and no simple way to melt the all-encompassing ice into fresh drinking water. A few species of seals, penguins and other birds had adapted to that environment, but they only lived along the coastlines. On the very first expeditions, explorers couldn’t even raid the stores or huts left by those who had come before.

  The nearest outpost of civilization was thousands of miles away over the frozen and tempestuous ocean. Once they moved away from the shore, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen and Mawson, the expedition leaders in this heroic age, could not call in reserves. Whatever they needed, they had to create from what they had brought with them, or do without. Everything had to be well planned from the start and well executed throughout, but as you will see, sometimes even the most careful preparations could come to naught.

  Polar decision making has another element to contend with that sets it apart. The extreme cold can hamper one’s cognitive ability. It can also be lethal. As little as three minutes of exposure in Antarctic polar conditions can result in frostbite of bare skin. Longer exposure can cause damage so severe that it requires amputation. Unlike an enemy army to be engaged in battle for a period of time, advancing and retreating, the bitter Antarctic cold is ever-present. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for the duration of their time in Antarctica, explorers faced an unrelentingly ruthless, energy-sapping, mind-numbing enemy.

  In this regard, polar exploration is more akin to mountain climbing. Mountain ascents like the early assaults of Everest, can be measured in months or weeks, but early Antarctic expeditions left their exploring and scientific parties to fend for themselves for the better part of a year, and often two or three. This span of time added to the hardship and isolation.

  Each additional year on the ice meant the entire expedition had to survive another polar winter. From April to September the sun may only barely rise above the horizon, and depending upon how far south one was the sun may not rise at all for weeks or months at a time. Temperatures dropped as low as -77ºF (-60.5ºC). With these extremes, it is easy to imagine how men’s tempers could be frayed due to lack of sunlight and warmth. Add multi-day blizzards to the mix, and even a trip from the hut to the latrine could be a perilous journey.

  There are many books about the individual Antarctic expeditions that describe in detail their provisioning, ship and crew selection, and other criteria related to pre-expedition decisions. These are all fascinating topics, as are the many common decisions that were made once the expeditions were under way—routine choices of how far to travel each day, when to pitch the tent, how much food to cook at each meal, and so on. Our focus here, however, is on the extremely difficult decision making, where lives literally hung in the balance.

  What would you have done?

  The next eleven chapters (their titles are listed below) focus on the many polar decisions that the expedition leaders, small groups of explorers, or individual team members made during the heroic age.

  How strong is your will to survive?

  What do you do when luck runs out?

  How well have you prepared?

  Who is in charge?

  Who is on your team?

  Three biscuits and thirty-five miles to go.

  Promises, promises.

  Do you agree all is fair in love, war and polar exploration?

  Will the results be worth the effort?

  All or nothing: When do you take the big risk?

  What is your higher purpose?

  As you read further, imagine yourself in their situations. Would you have made the same or different decisions? Where would you draw the line at risk versus reward? What level of risk would you accept to achieve your goals? And, most important of all, why did you choose to be there in the first place?

  What happened to each of the expeditions will be revealed through the chapters. At the end is a summary of the lessons derived from their decision making that can help with one’s own decision making. After all, you may not be holding onto a rope down an icy, frozen crevasse in the Antarctic in the early 1900s, but sometimes modern life can seem that way.

  With that as a starting point, let’s begin with the one of the toughest decisions of all: How strong is your will to survive, and what would you do if you found yourself in that crevasse?

  Chapter 2

  How Strong Is Your Will To Survive?

  Where does inspiration come from?

  End of the rope.

  Imagine that you have spent years planning one of the most ambitious undertakings in Antarctica. Your goal: map and scientifically explore two thousand miles (3,200 km) of unexplored coast. The year: 1912

  You assemble a first-class team and manage all the challenges of getting the expedition underway, including fundraising, buying a ship, selecting the scientists and other personnel, as well as acquiring the necessary scientific equipment and provisions.

  Once stationed in Antarctica, you divide your twenty-four men into eight sets of three-man teams to explore different regions. There is a clear deadline when the ship will return to Antarctica to pick you and your men up the following year. If you have not made it back to the base camp in time, the ship will depart without you; it will be too dangerous for the ship and crew to wait around for you. Doing so risks everyone on the ship having to stay through another very dark, very cold, very depressing Antarctic winter, and adds to the risk of the ship becoming iced in and crushed.

  Your own three-man team is highly accomplished. Xavier Mertz is a 29-year-old Swiss ski champion, and Belgrave Ninnis is a 25-year-old British soldier from the Royal Fusiliers. Your own experience already includes a thousand-mile Antarctic sledge journey. On an earlier expedition, a team had reached the South Magnetic Pole. Now your objective is to locate that elusive point again, this time from another direction, mapping the interior of the continent along the way.

  The gear for the three of you, on this seven-hundred-mile roundtrip, is divided between two sledges, but not equally. When crossing fields of concealed crevasses, where the greatest danger lies, one sledge is always pulled at a safe distance behind the first. That second sledge contains the items most important for survival—the only tent, most of the food, and the food for the sledge dogs.

  But bad luck does happen, even when the planning is good. Two hundred miles (321 km) out along the trail, Ninnis, leading the dogs of the second sledge, must not have seen your warning signal. When you and Mertz stop and look behind, you see to your complete horror that Ninnis, the dogs, and the sledge are gone. Only a hole through a thin snow lid reveals what must have happened. The crevasse is hundreds of feet deep, and they have all plunged i
nto its silent depths.

  You and Mertz look at each other. You are stranded. No one knows the tragedy that has befallen you, or the struggle you are about to face on your crippled expedition, as you turn for home.

  You will have to recover from the death of your companion, and improvise a way back to your base at Commonwealth Bay, the most windswept part of Antarctica. It is going to be a long tough march. With only a cloth oversheet propped up on ski poles for a makeshift tent, no ground cloth between your sleeping bags and the snow, and with much of your food and most of your sledge dogs lost in the crevasse, you begin the long overland trek back to safety. Now it is day after day of walking, camping, walking, and camping. Progress is slow; food must be carefully rationed. You and Mertz will have to feed on the meat of each dog as it dies.

  The dog livers that you relish for their concentrated nutrition bear a hidden menace—lethally high amounts of vitamin A. While still one hundred miles (160 km) out from base camp, Mertz succumbs to the ordeal, and loses his mental capacities. You tie him onto the sledge and drag him forward, but you too are weakened. Your progress is so slow; the two of you may never get back alive. Two days later, Mertz dies. Your meagre supply of food will last only a little longer, but now you can cover more ground in each day’s march. At the back of your mind, traveling as fast as you are able, you are still likely to miss reaching the coast in time to catch the ship home. The timing is incredibly tight.

  You pull yourself together and continue onward. After a few more days of travel on your own, in your weary, starving, and dilapidated state, you fall down a crevasse. The only thing saving you from certain death is the rope of your harness, still attached to your sledge. In a rare bit of good luck, the sledge is wedged in place on the surface, but you are dangling between the blue walls of ice, literally at the end of your rope. There is only one way out—climb up that rope, hand-over-hand. Anticipating a fall like this, you had previously tied knots along the length of the rope, but you are too far from the ice walls to get a foothold to help you get a start.

  Think back to your school days. Climbing hand-over-hand on a fourteen-foot rope in a warm gymnasium wearing lightweight clothing was difficult. Really difficult. Now imagine doing this in Antarctic winter clothing made in the 1900s. There was no lightweight thinsulate then. Your clothing is soaked from sweat and snow, and you are wearing heavy gloves and heavy boots. And before you envision climbing that rope, think about your two comrades who have died. Add to that these images: even if you make it up the rope, you still have to haul yourself up over the icy rim of the crevasse; if you succeed in that, you still have almost no food. You are physically falling apart due to poor nutrition and the devastating poison of vitamin A. You may not make it to the base camp in time to get the ship. Why not just give up?

  One more try

  With all the strength you can summon, you climb hand-over-hand up the rope to the crumbling rim. Success!

  Well, not quite. As you try to climb over the edge of the crevasse, the ice crumbles away. You fall back down into the crevasse, saved once again by your fourteen-foot rope harness. Now what? With no strength left, do you give up and die? Cut the rope? Unclip the harness? Cry? Curse?

  Douglas Mawson could have done any of these things. Instead, he did something different. He remembered a poem.

  Just have one more try

  It’s dead easy to die,

  It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.1

  1 “The Quitter” by Robert Service was first published in book form in his collection Rhymes of a Rolling Stone in 1912. Robert Service was a British-Canadian poet, 1874-1958.

  Think about that. Bad luck, after bad luck, followed by more bad luck, and this man thinks about . . . a poem? Mawson found an unknown reserve of strength, climbed the rope once again, and this time succeeded. That triumph, however, did not mark the end of his bad luck. After several more days of walking in the heavy snow, he made it to base camp only to find he had missed the return ship by five hours! He’d now have to survive another Antarctic winter with the added bad luck: where they had built their original base camp had turned out to be the windiest place on Earth clocking speeds of more than two hundred miles (321 km) per hour, with gusts so strong they could easily knock over a grown man. There was, however some good luck. Six crew members had stayed behind to search for him. Together, the seven men overwintered, and were rescued ten months later.

  Bad luck happens and sometimes it happens a lot, but what Mawson has shown us is that we all have hidden strengths—physical strength, mental strength, and a real inner toughness, especially once we make a decision: Never give up. Never give in.

  And most importantly of all, Mawson has shown that when luck really does run out, we still have the ability to search for inspiration in those darkest moments—and succeed.

  Where do you seek inspiration? How will you find hidden strength when you need it? In modern life, one may not find oneself down a deep crevasse in a physical sense, but there are plenty of situations that can create a mental or emotional crevasse that one needs to “climb” out of. What would you have done in Mawson’s situation?

  Chapter 3

  What Do You Do When Luck Runs Out?

  Crushing disappointments

  and the durability of the human spirit.

  Luck. In every endeavor, there’s luck. Good luck, bad luck—sometimes occurring at exactly the same time.

  On the second expedition he led, Ernest Shackleton and his men were settled on a large floating ice slab in a temporary home they called Patience Camp. Over time that floe was whittled away to nothing, and the twenty-eight men took to the boats, heading for Elephant Island and camping each night on a nearby floe. Shackleton, sleepless early one morning, was pacing the floe when it suddenly split underneath one of the tents, plunging Ernest Holness, one of the men still in his sleeping bag, into the extremely cold water below. Shackleton reached into the water and pulled Holness and his sleeping bag to safety. In the next instant, the two halves of the floe smashed together with a thud, the solid ice crumbling to powder at the edges, and then just as quickly, parted again. Holness was saved, but he had to walk around for five hours to generate enough heat to dry out his clothing so it didn’t freeze into one solid mass.

  Was it bad luck that Holness was plunged into the icy water, or good luck that Shackleton was on hand to rescue him? The rescuer’s reaction time had to be split second.

  One way or another, luck just happens. It’s present in every situation—work, relationships, when walking or driving or talking with people, and in all locations: at home, on holiday, in the office—and in virtually every field of interaction human beings will ever have. The best planning in the world can still be offset by external forces. We see it every day and in every newspaper: wrong person, wrong place, wrong time, or some combination of those factors.

  Luck played a huge role in the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. Just as in the story of the split ice floe, there were instances of very good luck, and of bad luck so intense, it still burns indelibly into one’s consciousness, even a hundred years after the event.

  Bad luck happened in the heroic age of polar exploration, but something else happened there too. Arising from this bad luck came inspiring stories of how the men coped—how they battled the unexpected and faced the inevitable, conquering their fears and rising to the challenges.

  Bad luck occurring in extreme climates is potentially lethal. What decision points, turning points and personality traits enabled them to face bad luck and not crumple under the pressure? What can we learn from them that can be applied when we face adversity in our own modern lives?

  Luck has really and truly run out

  Robert Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition (1910-1913) had numerous goals building on the scientific, geological and meteorological assessments of Antarctica made during his earlier Discovery Expedition. The Terra Nova goals included new forays into previously unexplored parts of Antarctica, and being the fir
st to reach the South Pole.

  At the time Scott was planning his expedition, Roald Amundsen had not yet announced his plan to divert his Norwegian North Pole expedition southwards in a bid to conquer the South Pole first. (We discuss Amundsen’s decision in the chapter entitled, Do you agree all is fair in love, war and polar exploration?)

  Many of the scientific goals of Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition were achieved. In addition, after a long and arduous struggle, Scott and four others—Edward Wilson, Birdie Bowers, Edgar Evans, and Lawrence “Titus” Oates—did reach the South Pole. Upon arriving at that barren, empty place, they discovered that their rival Amundsen had arrived there over a month before.

  Imagine their disappointment—traveling 850 treacherous miles (1,368 km) on the frozen continent only to find that they had been beaten by a team that had come down for the sole purpose of racing them. It could have been seen as especially disheartening because Scott and his men had focused their efforts on the scientific purposes of their expedition in addition to reaching the Pole. Scott’s journey had taken longer but was scientifically valuable. Amundsen’s goal was just to win.

  Amundsen left a tent at the South Pole. Inside were a few supplies and two letters. The first was for Scott, asking him to deliver the second to the King of Norway as proof that Amundsen had achieved priority. The famous photograph of Scott’s five men from the Terra Nova Expedition at the South Pole gives a sense of both the strain the outward journey took on them, and the conditions of the day.

  The return journey of Scott and his men was even tougher. Edgar Evans had cut his hand much earlier in the trip when they were adjusting the length of one of the sledges. The wound never healed, and he had severe frostbite. Even as the men struggled to survive, science was still a key goal. When the team stopped for a much-needed half-day break, Wilson, ever the keen scientist, found rocks and fossils of interest, thirty pounds of them, to be added to the sledges the men were pulling.