When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  Evans died not long after, having suffered several head wounds during falls on the ice. Captain Oates struggled on, despite ailing and severely frostbitten feet and hands, but eventually, he too succumbed. Oates famously left the tent and never returned in an attempt to give the remaining three a fighting chance at survival.

  Scott, Wilson and Bowers continued on, all in a weakened state. Extreme cold contributed to very poor surface conditions; the snow beneath the sledge runners had become more like sand, slowing down their progress despite Oates’ heroic sacrifice. They went on short rations, and the lack of food further affected the men. Dwindling supplies of cooking oil reduced their ability to have the benefit from the warmth of a hot meal, and they all suffered from varying degrees of frostbite.

  Before starting out from Cape Evans the previous November, Scott had left instructions for a dog sledge team to be sent out from their main base to meet them near One Ton Depot by a specific date, but for reasons that are still being debated today, that did not happen as planned. A prolonged blizzard trapped Scott, Wilson and Bowers in their tent for four more long, cold days.

  Luck had really and truly run out—they died in their sleeping bags, in their tent, eleven miles (18 km) from One Ton Depot. The last entry in Scott’s diary was March 29, 1912.

  A search party discovered the tent six months later.

  Their diaries and last letters to loved ones and expedition sponsors continue to inspire readers even today. They demonstrate a nobleness of purpose and achievement, of teamwork and camaraderie, of scientific endeavor, and a caring for the families they left behind.

  Modern-day explorers, with all the advantages of the latest survival and communications equipment, and full knowledge of nutrition, say that after a hard day’s travel in Antarctica they are so bone weary they can barely pick up a pencil. Yet, from Scott and his small team at the end of their days came some of the most memorable statements and writings in the English language.

  “I am just going outside and may be some time.”—Oates’ immortal words right before leaving the tent for the last time.

  Some of Scott’s last words:

  “Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.”

  “For God’s sake look after our people.”

  While lying in the tent dying, Scott wrote to Birdie Bowers’ mother:

  “I write when we are very near the end of our journey, and I am finishing it in company with two gallant, noble gentlemen. One of these is your son. He has come to be one of my closest and soundest friends, and I appreciate his wonderful upright nature, his ability and energy.

  As the troubles have thickened his dauntless spirit ever shone brighter, and he has remained cheerful, hopeful and indomitable to the end.”

  In modern life we have many ways to face luck running out. The easy ones—giving up, blaming others, cursing the gods—seem never to have occurred to these early Antarctic explorers. They showed us a spirit, a purposefulness, and even a nobility in facing what life threw at them. Despite setback after setback, these men of the heroic age kept their humanity intact.

  How do you face adversity?

  A crushing disappointment

  In 1914 Shackleton still had Antarctic ambitions. The Antarctic had held Shackleton under its spell since his “furthest south” journey with Scott and Wilson on the Discovery Expedition years earlier (1901-1904). His own subsequent Nimrod Expedition (officially called the British Antarctic Expedition, 1907-1909) got even closer, within one hundred geographical miles (185 km) of the South Pole.

  The 1912 announcement of Roald Amundsen’s success in being first to the Pole led Shackleton to concoct a bold, new scheme—to be the first to walk across continental Antarctica by way of the South Pole.

  The plan would require two ships. One, the Endurance, would carry Shackleton, and the small group of men who would traverse the continent with him, to the Weddell Sea side of Antarctica. A second ship, the Aurora, would take another party led by Aeneas Mackintosh to the Ross Sea side. Starting from the previous expedition huts already there, Mackintosh and his men would lay depots along the Barrier toward the South Pole, so Shackleton and his men could pick up food and supplies once they had passed the South Pole and were homeward bound (the map on page 8 illustrates their plan).

  Bad luck came in a number of ways to both parties. Since they had no means of communicating with each other, both parties had to confront head-on the situations they faced without help from the other ship. For this part of the story, we will focus on Shackleton and the Endurance. The fates of Mackintosh, his men, and the Aurora are equally compelling stories with highly memorable lessons about decision making in extreme environments, but we will save that for a later chapter called, Promises, promises: How good are you at keeping yours?

  On the way south to the Antarctic, the Endurance anchored off the whaling port of Grytviken on the sub-Antarctic island of South Georgia. The whalers there warned Shackleton of the early onset of thick ice in the Weddell Sea, but after so much planning—and with World War I already raging—he didn’t want to delay another year.

  The Endurance set sail from South Georgia in December 1914. After an unlucky decision by Shackleton to pass by a possible landing site, rejected because it would have added many additional miles to the men’s journey across the continent, the ship continued further south into the Weddell Sea. There she encountered thicker, more intense pack ice. On January 19, 1915, the Endurance became trapped in the ice, unable to retreat northeast to the first potential landing site, and unable to move forward to find another one.

  By the end of February, it became clear that the ship would remain in place at the mercy of the ice through the Antarctic winter, from April at least until September. With good luck, by spring, the ice would break up and they would be able to navigate their way out. However, such luck was not with them. The shifting winter ice slowly crushed the ship, and by October the ship was irreparably damaged and would never sail again.

  Imagine yourself in Shackleton’s place. You watch the heartbreaking slow drift of your ship toward the north with the movement of the pack ice. The Endurance is being crushed, and with it the dreams of your expedition southward. You are haunted by the spectre of financial ruin—without an expedition story to tell, there will be no way to raise money to pay back creditors. You hope beyond hope that the ship, which represents home for you and your men, will somehow survive—but you know deep down that it won’t.

  You also know that Mackintosh and his party on the Ross Sea side of the continent will take terrible risks to lay their depots in vain, and that you and the men you are responsible for may slowly die in this polar region, never having reached your goal. These same men are looking to you for inspiration, but each one knows there is no way out. In all likelihood, you are all doomed to a cold and painful death by exposure, madness, and starvation.

  The ship was, indeed, crushed by the ice; all the men, tons of supplies, and three lifeboats were landed on the floating ice, safe there for a while. The wreck of the Endurance, held up by the ice, remained a constant reminder of all that had failed. Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, was taking motion pictures of the wreck, half-submerged, at the exact moment the main mast snapped. This moving image captures that moment when their luck really did run out. Watching that flickering image more than a hundred years after the event evokes sadness, as one imagines what they all must have been thinking, standing on the ice, hearing the sickening crunch of the wood, watching the stout mast break in two like matchwood.

  A new goal

  Shackleton was an astute leader. He understood that his men were deeply discouraged at a time when they would need all their strength to survive. He had to give them a new purpose. If he couldn’t achieve his goal of being the first to traverse the continent, what could he achieve? He re-framed his goal, his men’s goals, and the expedition’s goal
into a single focus: to use all the means at their disposal to get home alive.

  They were now camped on the ice, adrift on a large ice floe, nowhere near open water. The nearest known land was a few uninhabited islands, cold and forbidding, hundreds of miles away. The boats proved too heavy to drag across the ice for such a long distance. The men would have to wait out the northward drift until the ice broke up beneath them, then take to the boats and head for one of the uninhabited islands.

  From that point, the nearest inhabited land that was practicable to reach given winds and current, was still eight hundred miles (1,300 km) away in South Georgia where they had started. Getting there would involve traveling across the world’s roughest seas with waves up to fifty feet high. And the biggest lifeboat was only twenty-two-and-a-half-feet long.

  The story of what happened to Shackleton and his men, and the decision lessons derived from their experiences, are covered in Chapters 6 and 10. However, the turning point, at the time that the Endurance broke up, was Shackleton instilling in his men the belief that if they worked together they could actually achieve the seemingly impossible.

  Lessons for a modern age

  Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen and Mawson stories run throughout this book. They truly made heroic decisions in the face of real adversity. They set goals. They took risks. And when faced with extreme adversity, they all found ways to endure, to achieve a measure of success, each in his own way.

  Leaders like Shackleton and Scott faced head-on the worst of their experiences with a noble spirit. Scott’s and Oates’ dying phrases are lessons in humanity still taught a hundred years later in schools across the United Kingdom. Shackleton’s bad luck led to his greatest legacy.

  The feeling that luck has run out is often more perception than reality. How do some find a strong survival instinct at both an individual and a team level? What happened to Shackleton’s men after the Endurance was crushed? We will explore these in subsequent chapters.

  When facing a run of bad luck in your business or personal life, with situations that seem out of your control, can you do what Shackleton did—re-frame your own approach to bad luck? After all, the next best outcome might even turn out better than your original goal.

  * * *

  Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen and Mawson all distinguished themselves in the field when the expeditions were underway, but their exceptional pre-expedition planning can sometimes be overlooked. Can you imagine how challenging it would be, in the age before computers and instant communication, to plan a multi-year expedition to a region that has no natural resources? It all comes down to knowing your needs before they arise. Not an easy task in any era—especially when your life may depend on it.

  Chapter 4

  How Well Have You Prepared?

  The art of knowing your needs before they arise.

  It’s hard to imagine that one of the smallest, lightest objects imaginable—an ordinary match—could spell the difference between life and death, or success and failure, on a multi-year Antarctic expedition. But even small items like matches require planning. How many matches will be needed? How will they be kept dry enough to strike when a flame is a desperate need, without which the men of a field party may be doomed? Will the matches even strike, in the bitterest of cold?

  What about the medicine chest—will medicines maintain full potency in their vials, once subjected to the extreme low temperatures? Opinions varied greatly in the early 1900s. What about snow goggles, navigational instruments, and flags to identify depots left on the ice—how many and what style? How much of anything is too much, how many are too many, and how many are not enough?

  In the planning stages, all is speculation. The biggest challenge of all is that those needs that were not anticipated must be fulfilled in the field as they arise. But how do you do this in a land devoid of natural resources?

  The art of knowing your needs before they arise

  Preparation is the key to success. This thought holds true for any endeavor great or small, simple or complex. The compilation of a modern grocery list is not so different from that of equipping an Antarctic expedition—you have to anticipate all the needs that may arise before the next time you can get to the store. The difference between the two is largely in orders of magnitude—many orders of magnitude.

  In filling a grocery list, with a store nearby, one can make good on whatever needs may have been overlooked with another trip to the store. Business planning can be more involved, because it looks much farther into the future. But there is a capacity to fill unanticipated needs as they arise, with resources readily devised or obtained. Antarctic expeditions are different in scope, fulfilment and risk. Every need for thirty or more men to survive in an alien environment for at least a full year, must be thought out to every conceivable end.

  To achieve this, the planning must begin years in advance. Once the expedition has left a civilized harbor area in the Southern Hemisphere and is en route to the Antarctic, there will be no quick trip to the corner store, no easy resupply or rescue. The expedition’s base will be far from shipping lanes; the nearest ports are thousands of miles away. Not only must the advance planning answer every single need for the entire time the expedition is away, it must also include elaborate backup plans in case the original has not performed to expectations.

  All of this has to be achieved within a limited budget. The whole enterprise will have been financed by donations and credit before departure. There will be no cash to pay for anything but the most important requirements, with the hope that the balance of funds will come to hand when needed. It must all be fully repaid when the expedition returns with a positive outcome that can be presented in lecture tours, books, and photographic exhibitions.

  The leaders of all of the heroic age expeditions faced these same challenges. Each had to simultaneously raise funds, obtain a ship, and find crews to man the ships and shore stations. They also needed to purchase a complete supply of ample food, fuel (including small, yet vital items like matches), shelter, and transport for the men who remained at the base and those who would explore further into the continent. Many of these decisions, made long in advance, could have life and death consequences later. These are just a few examples of the myriad of decisions—great and small—and some of them crucial—that needed to be addressed.

  There were thousands of other questions, unanswered because they had yet to be asked. How cold is cold? Edward Wilson and his two companions were woefully unprepared for the -77ºF (-60.5ºC) temperatures they encountered on their Winter Journey in 1911. How will you get drinking water from all this ice? Putting snow into one’s mouth to melt it results in little water, and dangerously lowers one’s body temperature. Fuel for cooking and melting snow is vitally important, yet Scott found to his dismay that fuel loss occurred during months of storage in depots on the ice, most likely due to the cold conditions affecting the solder joints or the metal screw tops which used leather washers. How many ponies and dogs will be needed? How much feed should you bring for them? How many motor sledges (and their spare parts) are too many, or too few? All this had to be decided beforehand, when the expedition was still a glint in the leader’s eye.

  Planning in the days of limited communication

  In the twenty-first century, we are accustomed to instantaneous communication, enabling easy adaptation to changing circumstances. All parties to a plan can know at the same moment when something has been changed, and what needs to be done. Perhaps someone wants to add another food item to a grocery list, or make a change in the route home to accomplish another errand. In business, a change in strategy can be shared and discussed by all the principals in a conference call. The plans evolve as needed, in real time.

  In 1900, when Robert Scott was planning the first of the major British expeditions of the heroic era (the Discovery Expedition), the cable telegraph was the most advanced form of communication; wireless communication had yet to be perfected. Ships at sea had no way of knowing what had tra
nspired ashore during the weeks- or months-long voyages. A change of plan made en route would not be known until the ship had come to port. In the case of the early explorers, selected sites were sometimes chosen as the location for a message post where notes could be left with the expectation of being found by scheduled relief ships.

  At the time of the departure of Scott’s Discovery Expedition, three locations that had been charted originally by James Clark Ross in 1840 were identified as Antarctic message posts. The Discovery erected red painted posts with brass cylinders at these locations: one at Cape Adare, one at Coulman Island, and the last at Cape Crozier. Visible from the sea, these posts contained detailed information as to the expedition’s intentions for the next fields of exploration, or the selection of a wintering site.

  The four essentials

  In 1900, the field of polar exploration was not entirely new. Seafarers had been venturing north into the Arctic ice for centuries. The search for a Northwest Passage above the Americas had captured people’s imagination since the sixteenth century. During Victorian times, this desire stimulated Britain’s Royal Navy to send ship after ship into its icy clutches, to return—if they did at all—having failed in their mission.

  In the 1890s Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen had taken a different tack. He commissioned a ship to be designed to survive in the clutches of the ice pack, and using it, he came home with new knowledge about the sea ice and weather conditions of the far north. The consummate planner, he invented what he needed when it did not already exist—a ship that could not be crushed by the ice, as well as adapting the Primus stove and designing the Nansen cooker, both of which became essential equipment on all subsequent polar expeditions.