by Brad Borkan
From their research and experience, Amundsen and his team knew that among sledge dogs, there are natural leaders. But these lead dogs needed to know they were under the control of men, a relationship sometimes reinforced by the brutal lash. While Scott and Shackleton struggled with the few dogs they had brought, Amundsen’s dogs, directed by their skilled human drivers, did their work with cool efficiency and got the expedition to the Pole and back with relative ease. They made it back to their base at Framheim while Scott’s man-haulers were still coming down from the plateau. Amundsen proved that good planning, and being willing to learn from traditional sources, led to a highly successful outcome. Had Scott‘s luck with the motor sledges been better, a different assessment of their value might have resulted, and motorized Antarctic transport may have evolved more quickly in design and use.
By the time Douglas Mawson set out to investigate the two-thousand-mile wide swath of previously unexplored Antarctic coastline south of Australia, he had a wealth of recent data on which to base his choices for diet and transport. His losses were due to an accident and not the overextension of his human resources, and he returned with an impressive body of scientific and geographical results.
How is all this to be paid for? Science and discovery as the sweetener
Exploration might represent freedom to an adventurer, but it was hardly free. Fundraising became the unenviable lot of every explorer, and the other side of each exploration’s adventure. While governments were happy to advance their own prestige, they were not particularly generous at the first approach of an explorer with a plan. They would perhaps provide a little seed money, as a show of interest in expanding the reach of the realm, but it was up to the expedition to raise the rest. Public subscription helped, as did the backing of the geographical societies of the day if there were exciting prospects of discovery. But those in a position to contribute funds expected results, and often involved themselves in the setting of the goals.
Often the advancement of science was a potent sweetener to the plan. Meteorology was important to oceanic commerce. A deeper knowledge of the magnetic poles and global weather patterns could influence faster, safer passages for oceangoing ships. The related fields of gravitational studies and glaciology could yield similar benefits. The search for new land inevitably involved the search for new mineral resources to exploit for profit.
All these stoked the twin fires of curiosity and prestige, and fueled them further with the prospect of material gain. Even so, they were barely enough to get the ship out of the harbor.
All of the expedition leaders had to invest huge amounts of effort to raise the money needed to get the expedition underway. They faced enormous financial obligations and debts—personally guaranteed by the organizer—when expeditions were over and the ships had returned to port. The uncomfortable knowledge of this obligation haunted Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen.
Expect the unexpected: plan accordingly
Perhaps the greatest challenge in undertaking an expedition is: What do we do when things don’t work according to the plan? What do we do when disaster strikes? Not every disaster can be predicted or averted. The more successful Antarctic expeditions were those with the greatest redundancy in supply, transport, and time allowance to address emergencies as they arose. Even the most astute advance planning had to have a backup plan, and the best had a backup for the backup.
Every polar expedition ran into situations that were not accounted for in the preliminary planning. Adversities of weather proved to be greater than could have been imagined. The sea ice in a given year did not behave as it had done in the past, and ships were prevented from reaching shore to pick up stranded parties, or offload crucial supplies. Unseen crevasses suddenly opened and swallowed dogs, sledges, and men, leaving those who survived with no easy means to trek to safety. Sudden frostbite, accident and injury, and the slow debilitation of scurvy weakened the once-hardy men who had so bravely set out on their journey. That so many survived even with these disasters is a tribute to the character of the men who journeyed alongside, or risked all to come in rescue.
Lessons learned
In modern life and business today, you are unlikely to be on an icy, snowy Antarctic coast getting ready to face a polar winter. There are, however, useful lessons from how early Antarctic expeditions were planned and provisioned that can be applied to one’s own endeavors.
Key questions to ask yourself are:
Have you studied in-depth the successes, failures and challenges your predecessors faced?
Have you laid out your plans carefully, using that information?
How good are you at anticipating every possible contingency and ensuring that all the materials are at hand to resolve them, when needed?
What are the key elements you need to ensure survival and success, and do you have them in abundance? How will you improvise if you come up short?
And most importantly,
If, once you have conducted your in-depth study of your predecessors, and you disagree with their method and strategy, are you confident enough to go against the accepted view and take a risk by following your own plan?
Even when every conceivable contingency has been accounted for during the planning of an enterprise great or small, it was often personal character and dedication to duty of the people involved, that led to the achievement of the goal. This raises another key question: Who have you chosen for your team?
As part of their planning, the early explorers had to choose officers, crew, experts, and advisors and transform them into high functioning teams. All of these decisions could—and did—have life or death consequences. This is the subject of our next two chapters.
Chapter 5
Who Is In Charge?
The surprising importance of the deputy leader.
In the heroic age of Antarctic exploration, teams were remarkably successful. A list of some of the many teams can be found in the Tables section on pages 178-183. Part of their success was due to selecting and motivating individual team members and giving them clear goals and appropriate levels of autonomy.
A key element was the expedition leader. Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen and Mawson all had characteristics of excellent leaders. They set goals, assembled first-rate teams, and each of their expeditions achieved a variety of successes, all in very challenging circumstances. One area that warrants more attention in both Antarctic literature and business management literature is how absolutely crucial the role of the deputy leader is.
The able lieutenant
In military parlance, “lieutenant” is a position of rank within the hierarchy of who gives the orders, and who follows them. The lieutenant in the navy, and the first mate on a merchant ship, answers to the captain, speaks to the men for him, and sees to it that his wishes are carried out. The position is one of secondary leadership, and it requires an intuitive grasp of when to follow orders, and when to give them, often on a moment’s notice. In modern business parlance the captain is the CEO (chief executive officer) and the lieutenant is the COO (chief operating officer).
When the going gets tough—really tough—you want someone like Frank Wild on your team. Someone who, at the very start of the enterprise, when no one really knows any more than anyone else, steps into the breach and takes control of the situation. When the early-returning members of the first real foray of Scott’s 1901 Discovery Expedition into the polar hinterlands met with disaster, one man kept his head. That man was Frank Wild.
An Able Seaman in the Royal Navy when selected for the Discovery, Wild had developed the resourcefulness and independence of thought that would serve him well in Antarctic expeditions yet to come. He was one of the twelve men who set off from the newly settled winter quarters on March 4, 1902 to update the relief mail post at Cape Crozier. Twelve days out, when it became obvious that the party must be split to allow some of the faltering men to return, nine of them turned for home under the leadership of Lt. Michael Barne.
A blizzard s
truck that party. Lost in the blinding drift, they became separated. Blundering onward in the hopes of better success, they were caught instead on a slippery slope of ice that ended with a drop into the sea. One by one they lost their footing and slid downward. One man, George Vince, went over the edge to his death. Frank Wild, a few feet above that dangerous, icy cliff edge, gathered the survivors around and led them back up to a safer location. Then he went onward through the still-raging blizzard, until he reached the ship and summoned help.
Had Wild not made that decision to immediately assume a leadership role, more men would have died. Possibly so many, that the success of Scott’s first expedition would have been questioned, and the heroic age of polar exploration might never have occurred.
Wild had no more knowledge than anyone else of which way to turn, but he did have this: an enduring quality of self-composure and self-confidence that did not flinch in the face of disaster. This unique quality shone through again and again during the five expeditions in which he took part during the heroic age. With every one he grew in experience and stature.
Shackleton, when planning his 1907 assault on the South Pole on the Nimrod Expedition, wanted this man. On that expedition Wild was a key player, one of the three chosen by “the Boss” to man-haul with Shackleton up the Beardmore Glacier to within one hundred geographical miles (185 km) of the Pole. He had so proven himself as a valuable lieutenant, that in 1913 Mawson chose him to lead the six-man party that explored the limits of the western coast of Queen Mary Land. (Both stories are told in later chapters.) Having delivered notable results to that expedition, Wild was the obvious choice for the role of second-in-command of Shackleton’s 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, also known as the Endurance Expedition.
The true meaning of endurance
In Chapter 3, What Do You Do When Luck Runs Out? we described the events that led to Shackleton’s abandonment of his goal to be the first to trek across continental Antarctica. We now continue the story because it perfectly illustrates the importance of an able lieutenant like Frank Wild being free to make decisions on his own.
As the Endurance was being crushed by the ice in the Weddell Sea, Shackleton and his men decamped to the ice. First they settled on an ice floe they called Ocean Camp and later transferred to another floe named Patience Camp. These floating ice pans were adrift in the pack ice and slowly moving northward, while at the same time breaking apart. The lack of safety and any visible way to travel for rescue played on some men’s minds more than others. They had already been stuck on the ship in the ice for ten months, and now they were about to spend another six months camping on ice floes.
When the Patience Camp ice floe had drifted to the open sea and was on the verge of disintegrating in the slightly warmer water, they packed themselves into three small open-top lifeboats, the Stancomb Wills, the Dudley Docker, and the James Caird. The men’s diaries tell the full story of that six-day, incredibly dangerous boat journey. Weather was poor; the overloaded boats lay low in the water. The men were constantly wet, food was scarce, sleep was non-existent, and morale was at a low ebb. Some of the men began to succumb to exposure, and there was no way to restore their vitality. During the first day’s travel the boats were in constant risk of being crushed by moving pieces of ice. The boats were of differing design and sailing ability; the challenge of keeping them all together added to the stress. Should either of the two smaller boats become separated from the others during the dark of night, the men in them were doomed.
Each boat was a team and the three teams had to work hard to stay connected. Some men rose to the challenge better than others. By the time they reached Elephant Island—a desolate, uninhabited rock very far from any whaling or shipping routes—some of the twenty-eight men were half-crazed from fear and exposure. One had suffered a mild heart attack, and Perce Blackborow’s feet were so severely frostbitten, he could not stand on this welcome solid ground.
Rebuilding morale after a downturn is challenging in many organizations today. The challenge of rebuilding morale after experiencing more than four hundred days of isolation and still no source of rescue would be monumental.
The first point of landing was extremely hazardous, and no place to plan on staying. There was no visible source of food, and the watermarks on the rocks indicated the beach would be submerged at the highest tides. Frank Wild and a few of the stronger men immediately took one of the boats back out to sea and searched for several miles further along the coast to find a more hospitable site. Once identified, they returned, and the following day led all the men, boats and supplies safely ashore to this new location.
Good luck and bad luck attended the move, as it had the entire course of the expedition. The final camp was given the name Cape Wild—Cape Bloody Wild, some called it. The entire coast was covered in the most awful smelling guano, and the wind was so fierce at times it was hard to stand up. The good luck was that it was a secure landing area, above the reach of the highest tides, with easy access to seals and penguins for food. Seal blubber could be used as fuel for the stove.
Team survival
Shackleton knew that nothing rebuilds morale faster than hard teamwork to take everyone’s mind off their still dire situation. He quickly concocted a plan to have McNish, the carpenter, build up the sides of the James Caird, the largest of the boats, and cover the deck, preparing it for another arduous voyage. Shackleton and five others would sail the James Caird eight hundred nautical miles (1,300 km), across the roughest seas in the world, to a whaling station on South Georgia. To keep the suspense, we’ll save the story of that boat journey for a later chapter.
The intriguing part of the story from a team and leadership perspective concerns the question: how were the twenty-two men left behind on Elephant Island going to bind together and survive? Months of uncertainty lay ahead, even if the James Caird survived the journey and Shackleton was able to arrange for a rescue. It was far more likely that the twenty-two-and-a-half-foot boat and all her crew would be lost at sea, and the marooned men left to their own devices to survive and escape. They were left now with only the two smaller boats, neither of them at this stage suitable for any further ocean voyaging. Their only hope, if Shackleton did not survive, was to be found accidentally by a passing ship or to extract themselves in summer to a seasonal whaling station. Every man knew the possibility of this was extremely remote, and winter was coming on.
Team survival is based on many factors. One of these is belief in their leader. Shackleton, Wild, Worsley, Crean, Hurley, and a few others proved their merit as leaders over and over during the four hundred days of entrapment on the ice. They proved it again on the previous six days on the risky boat journey to Elephant Island.
In Chapter 6 we ask the question Who’s On Your Team? to get at the heart of team building. For the daring boat voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia, Shackleton logically chose the very best sailors. He left no doubt among those staying behind that he had not compromised in choosing the very best men to make the voyage, and that he had every intention of winning through and bringing a relief ship as soon as he could.
He appointed Frank Wild in charge of the twenty-two men who must remain on Elephant Island to await their fates. Wild was well-liked by the men, and an accomplished polar explorer. Shackleton left written and verbal instructions on what to do if he did not make it back to rescue them. This included some forward-thinking details on arranging a sale of the expedition photographs which Hurley had previously retrieved by diving into the icy water of the slowly sinking Endurance, and who should write the expedition book and give fundraising lectures to pay back creditors.
Shackleton also did something incredibly clever. He got them all vested in the belief he would succeed. Prior to leaving Patience Camp he insisted all the men discard all unnecessary personal items, keeping only diaries and a few small tokens and possessions. Shackleton famously discarded gold coins, his gold watch, and the expedition Bible. The good book was surreptit
iously retrieved by seaman MacLeod. Each of the men kept his own small good luck tokens and other highly-prized mementos of home or loved ones. Just prior to leaving on the James Caird, Shackleton asked each of the men remaining behind to give him one special item to take with him. Now each man had a personal, vested interest in believing that his good luck token, whatever that might be, would help assure a safe and successful voyage. Orde Lees’ memento was to give back to Shackleton the gold watch that he had discarded days before.
“Lash up and stow”
As soon as the James Caird sailed out of sight, Frank Wild instituted a set of routines. He understood that structured time, leadership and belief that rescue might be possible would help to keep the men working as a team. They gathered together enough rocks to build two four-foot-high walls, nineteen feet apart—the foundation for a primitive hut with the two upturned boats for a roof, and sailcloth walls. There was to be no standing up in this hovel, and barely enough room to spread the sleeping bags. With no change of clothing, and the reeking guano beneath their bags, the situation would have strained anyone’s temper. They had already been together for so long, one could easily imagine that every story had been told, and every song had been sung. Cliques, temperaments, and personality clashes would already have been long established.
Every morning, Wild would say, “Lash up and stow; the Boss may come today.” It wasn’t a simple wake-up call. It was an order to pack up their sleeping bags and kits, so their very small makeshift hut could be used as a seating area during the day. It was also a double-edged instruction implying that Shackleton—“the Boss”—would never let them down, and that they in turn should not let him down by being anything other than the brave, true men he would expect to find upon his return.