When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  Such ambition is not to be taken lightly, so it comes as no surprise that when two or more are fighting for the same elusive goal, unseemly competition may dim the lustre of the prize. The outward veneer of gentlemanly disagreement falls by the wayside, and deeper conflicts may come to light.

  We are familiar with the expression all is fair in love and war. It is easy to understand its sentiment—that in certain circumstances, the rule book can be thrown out. The prize, whether it is a new lover or a military victory, is more important than the rules.

  What makes the question, what is fair? so interesting is that societal rules (i.e., the “rule book”) change over time. Even within the same era, societal mores vary from country to country, and from culture to culture. Context can also change as events unfold—what’s acceptable at one point, might not be acceptable “down the road,” whether that’s measured in distance or time.

  Society is based on a set of rules and ethics prescribing acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Courts of law and written constitutions help to spell out what is right and wrong in most situations, but they cannot cover every eventuality. Ultimately it comes down to an unspoken yet common understanding of what is acceptable. What one person might deem as fair is open to interpretation by all who view it—those whom it directly affects, those whom it peripherally affects, and those looking at it a hundred years later. Some might claim that the bigger the prize, the more the rule book can be ignored. Others would argue the exact opposite.

  In this chapter we lay out four true situations where the explorers of the heroic age may have touched, or gone over, that fine line. What makes these situations stand out is that the men involved in the expeditions seem to have behaved with such remarkable honor and fairness to each other. While the leaders were occasionally rivals, they shared knowledge, and at times even equipment and ships. The Aurora was used by both Mawson and later by Shackleton for the Ross Sea Party. The huts left by Scott and Shackleton, and some of the supplies left ashore by them, were put to good use by later expeditions. Amundsen invited the men of Scott’s Eastern Party to make their shore station in the area of the Bay of Whales. (They graciously declined and moved northward to become the ill-fated Northern Party described in Chapter 11.)

  Experienced leaders gave credit to junior expedition members, senior scientists taught more junior scientists, and people were exceptionally civil to one another despite incredibly trying circumstances. Amazingly, given the duration and challenges of these expeditions, there is surprisingly little history of serious tension among the men. In contrast to other eras of exploration (for example to the Arctic) there were no fistfights, no deliberate sabotage and no attempted murder. Great examples of fairness and generosity, in large measure and in small, were displayed throughout. Among all the men, in all their travails, the reigning spirit was “share and share alike.” Scott's and Shackleton’s support teams took only their fair share of depot supplies and food, even when they were suffering badly due to starvation, exposure and frostbite.

  In deciding where that “fairness” line is and what you might have done in each of these situations, keep in mind the size of the prize: in the early 1900s much of the world had been discovered, and only a few spectacular goals remained to capture the popular imagination. Their attainment would place one’s name in the history books forever; first to the top of Mount Everest; first to the North Pole; first to the South Pole.

  1902-1903: In sickness and in health

  On Scott’s Discovery Expedition, the first of the heroic age, one of the goals was a push south towards the Pole. Scott knew he did not have the resources or experience to actually reach it and get back alive, but with a small team he could achieve a furthest southern point, possibly as far as 85º S, about 350 miles (560 km) from the South Pole. The three-man team—Scott, Dr. Edward Wilson, and Ernest Shackleton—set off in November 1902. Shackleton was the junior member of the team. Prior to departure, signs of his possible ill health—shortness of breath and coughing—had caught the attention of Wilson, but neither he nor Shackleton flagged this weakness to their leader Scott.

  Their journey south was challenging. They were encumbered by heavy loads on the sledges, limited rations, and their collective inexperience in controlling unruly dogs. By the time they reached their furthest southern point on December 31, 1902, at 82º17’ S (about 530 miles or 850 km from the South Pole), Shackleton’s health had deteriorated due to scurvy. On the journey back, he grew weaker and weaker. Wilson thought he might die, but Shackleton’s resilient spirit pulled him through. However, at various points on the return journey, Shackleton had to leave the man-hauling of the heavily-laden sledge—challenging enough for a three-man team—to just Scott and Wilson. At times he was so weak and near death, he had to be placed on top of the sledge, adding his own weight to it while the other two pulled it forward. (This situation has shocking similarities to the Crean, Evans and Lashly survival story told in Chapter 7.)

  Through perseverance and sheer grit, they all made it back safely to the Discovery Hut after ninety-three days of hazardous travel. Shackleton eventually recovered from scurvy, though he still suffered from shortness of breath. Wilson’s health, too, suffered for about a month from the effects of that journey. When Scott was deciding who should go back on the Morning (the Discovery Expedition relief ship) and who should stay in Antarctica for another season, he insisted that Shackleton should be invalided home, despite the man’s keen desire to stay.

  Had you been Shackleton, with such a desperate desire to go south with Scott and Wilson, would you have hidden your symptoms for as long as possible before the southern journey started?

  1907-1908: Is it fair to hold onto a sector of a vast continent?

  Shackleton made the most of his early return to Britain. His lectures about the Discovery Expedition enthused the public. He was already planning an expedition of his own, soon to be named the British Antarctic Expedition, using the Scottish whaler Nimrod with a goal of reaching the South Pole first.

  On his own return to Britain, at the end of the Discovery Expedition, Scott also began working on plans for another expedition also with the goal of being first to the Pole. Scott also planned to conduct further scientific investigation. Always looking forward, he started working with Reginald Skelton (chief engineer on the Discovery Expedition) and others to develop motorized vehicles for travel in the region.

  Scott first leaned of Shackleton’s plan to establish his expedition base at McMurdo Sound, and to re-use Scott’s Discovery Hut on Ross Island, in a newspaper report. Shackleton hadn’t asked Scott for permission to do so, nor had he sought the approval of the Royal Geographical Society. In response, Scott decided to impose a restriction on where Shackleton could land the Nimrod. By laying claim to the Ross Sea/McMurdo Sound sector as his own, he sought to limit Shackleton’s choices for an expedition base. Edward Wilson—who knew both men well from their perilous ninety-three-day journey during Scott’s Discovery Expedition only a few years before—tried to act as an intermediary.

  Could Scott really claim to own the rights to McMurdo Sound simply because his Discovery Expedition had landed there and built a hut? Could he really prevent Shackleton from using the spot as a base when his own second expedition had yet to be fully funded? If you were Wilson, how would you have brokered a peace between the two explorers?

  An exchange of correspondence between Scott, Wilson and Shackleton, helped convince Shackleton that if he did land at McMurdo Sound and make his base there, and his conquest of the Pole was successful, his victory would be tainted because Scott had laid the groundwork.

  Shackleton reluctantly agreed. He decided to take the Nimrod to King Edward VII Land at the far eastern end of the Great Ice Barrier, even though part of the appeal to his financial backers was that he would start from a known location at Hut Point on Ross Island. The route south from there had already been pioneered, revealing a likely path right to the Pole. Once Shackleton acquiesced to Scott’s request
, he had to carefully break this news to his current and potential backers.

  Upon arriving in the Antarctic region, Shackleton and his Nimrod headed for King Edward VII Land. Despite their best efforts, they were unsuccessful in getting the Nimrod to penetrate the sea ice there. The inlet in the ice visited by the Discovery in 1902 had broken away; it was clearly no safe place to winter over. In the end they felt their only choice was to head back to McMurdo Sound and Ross Island. They landed and successfully set up a base at Cape Royds, about eleven miles north (17 km) of Scott’s original base.

  In fairness to Shackleton, his correspondence to his wife during this time reveals how difficult this decision was for him. He had left Tasmania fully intending to honor his agreement to Scott to avoid McMurdo Sound. It might be considered ironic when one considers that Shackleton was a key member of Scott’s original Discovery Expedition that established a base there in the first place. However, at the time claims to territory by explorers was considered fair-play. (A good example was Robert Peary’s claim to the route he was pioneering to the North Pole.)

  In the all is fair in love and war world, Scott seemed entitled to make his claim, and clearly Shackleton understood that. In a gentleman’s game of exploration, however, he could not make that claim indefinitely. They finally agreed to a three-year window of ownership. The debate continues even a hundred years later. Whose side would you have been on?

  There were, however, even greater rivalries emerging in Antarctica …

  1910-1912: Street-fighting lessons in polar exploration

  One of the first lessons street fighters learn is that there are no rules. If one waits in a gentlemanly manner for a bell to sound, the other fighter will have already thrown the first punch. A successful street fighter ignores all rules, believing instead that “all is fair in love, war and street fighting” and, without announcement, floors his opponent before the fight has begun.

  Roald Amundsen was a polar explorer who approached expeditions with the mind-set of a street fighter. He looked for every angle to get an advantage. That might mean living and dressing like the Canadian Netsilik Inuit people, right down to the fur underwear. Or it might mean learning the best skills from the most experienced people he could find, like the famed Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and Olav Bjaaland, one of Norway’s best skiers. Prior to his assault on the South Pole, Amundsen had already achieved fame for leading the first successful navigation of the Northwest Passage in 1903 on board the Gjøa.

  Amundsen was obsessive about finding the best of everything he required for his expeditions: the right mixture of pemmican to aid digestion, the best skis, boots and bindings, and the best wood for crates to be used on the sledges. When existing equipment, such as snow goggles, failed to meet his exacting standards, he designed new versions himself. Most importantly, he took the time to learn the intricacies of dog sledging. He knew from bitter experience that man-hauling was a highly debilitating means of transport. Dog sledging was a far superior way to travel on snow and ice for long distances. His reputation and experience earned Nansen’s respect, and gained him the right to use Nansen’s famous ship, the Fram.

  In early 1909, the North Pole had yet to be discovered. Amundsen was planning another Arctic voyage with the aim of claiming that discovery for himself. His plans were usurped later that year when Peary and Cook both announced their competing claims to having reached the North Pole. Amundsen knew that Scott was planning another attempt on the South Pole, after Shackleton’s 1907 Nimrod Expedition had tried, and failed, to reach it. (Chapter 10, Will The Results Be Worth The Effort? tells the saga of that attempt.)

  Keeping his plans secret from his own crew and even from Nansen, Amundsen diverted his ship and its provisions from the Arctic to Antarctica and “challenged” Scott to a race to the South Pole. Scott had no plans for a race. He was on a methodical course of scientific discovery—attempting to reach the South Pole was just one element of his multi-year expedition. With no apparent rivals, he had no reason to pre-empt valuable scientific work to get a head start on the Pole.

  Amundsen informed Scott of his intentions through a rather cryptic telegram sent from Madeira that he knew Scott would not receive until arriving in Melbourne, just prior to sailing to Antarctica. It simply said, “Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic.—Amundsen.”

  There are fascinating comparisons to be made between the leadership styles of Amundsen and Scott, as well as contrasts between preferred modes of transport on the snow and ice. Amundsen believed dogs would be superior to Scott’s untried and potentially unreliable motor transports, and his Siberian ponies. The animals required large amounts of fodder to be carried on the sledges, and on particularly cold and windy evenings after a hard day of sledging, the men had to expend valuable additional energy building snow walls to shelter them. (The ponies had the unfortunate habit of sometimes kicking the walls over in the middle of the night, forcing the men to get up to rebuild them.) In contrast, Amundsen’s dogs all had thick fur coats and were comfortable sleeping directly on the snow. Being carnivores, they could be fed from the dead carcasses of the other dogs, as some dogs weakened and died.

  Despite Amundsen’s telegram, Scott stuck to his timetable and maintained his scientific exploration. He allowed three of his more important men, Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard, to go on a perilous winter journey to retrieve emperor penguin eggs, with the goal of verifying an important scientific theory that the embryos would reveal the missing link between reptilian dinosaurs and birds. Their story is told in Chapter 12, What Is Your Higher Purpose? The great danger, risks and hardships of a mid-winter excursion meant that these three men would have only three months to recover from this “worst journey in the world” before setting out with Scott on the final assault on the Pole. Surely, had Scott really been in a race, he would have made sure that his best men were fully rested through the exceptionally cold and dark winter months for a strong start on the Pole as soon as spring came. Isn’t that what you would have done?

  Was Amundsen being fair to Scott to pre-announce his intention to also head to Antarctica, or was he goading Scott into a race that Scott was unprepared for? Do you think he was playing games with Scott by sending him that cryptic telegram—which didn’t exactly state his real intention of getting to the Pole first—or would it have been better not to tell Scott at all?

  At least Amundsen hadn’t attempted to land in McMurdo Sound and challenge Scott’s claim to that location. The two expeditions could work independently of each other, each focused on its own goals—Amundsen to reach the Pole first, Scott to reach the Pole first and do the finest scientific work. The outcome is one of the most famous and ironic stories in the history of exploration.

  If you were Amundsen would you have pre-announced your intentions? If you were Scott, and had received Amundsen’s telegram, would you have changed your plans and raced to the Pole?

  1911: A simple message to be returned

  Amundsen and his team arrived at the South Pole on December 14, 1911, more than a month ahead of Scott and his team. Amundsen spent several days marking out the Pole as far as ten miles (16 km) in all directions. Recognizing the controversy surrounding Cook’s and Peary’s disputed claims to the North Pole, Amundsen wanted to be as precise and clear as possible that he had indeed found the exact, most southern spot on the planet, given the potential inaccuracies in their measuring equipment. Upon leaving the South Pole, Amundsen left a tent, a Norwegian flag, some discarded equipment, and one letter for Scott, and another for the King of Norway to be delivered by Scott.

  It was reasonable for Amundsen to go to great lengths to prove that he was first and he had accurately located it. One can assume that Scott would have done the same had he arrived first, as the pinpoint spot of the South Pole was elusive given the navigational equipment of the era. It is also fully understandable why Amundsen would leave a Norwegian flag. Scott was carrying a British flag for the same purpose, to be left flying at the S
outh Pole, proof that he had reached it first.

  However, when the return journey requires many hundreds of miles of sledging across rough terrain, one might think that the letter to the King of Norway that was left for Scott was a way of Amundsen rubbing his victory in Scott’s face. What was fair in those circumstances?

  Was that letter for the King of Norway a psychological game that Amundsen was playing with Scott, in the same way Amundsen’s cryptic telegram announcing his decision to go south was? Or was the letter just recognition that after the dispute over the North Pole, there had to be some secondary proof of goal attainment, and what better way than from the only other human beings who had ever ventured this far in this hostile terrain? Perhaps this was Amundsen’s way of saying that if he and his men did not make it back, (if they fell victim to blizzards, crevasses, scurvy, or any of a myriad of dangers they all faced), that this letter would be indisputable proof that he had achieved his goal and conquered the South Pole in the name of Norway.

  Amundsen’s actions may have been “victory insurance” or a subtle means of damaging the morale of his rival, or both. After all, some people might believe that in an “all is fair in love and war” scenario, it’s not sufficient to win, unless you crush your opponent in the process. What would you have done if you were Amundsen? If you were Scott, would you have kept Amundsen’s letter and delivered it as requested, or would you have been angered by Amundsen’s use of you as a courier from the most desolate place on Earth? Would you have ripped it to pieces and scattered it to the south polar winds? In the end Scott, chose the honorable act—he kept Amundsen’s letter with the intention of delivering it, had he survived.

  There is an interesting and touching footnote to the story of this letter. It was found among Scott’s possessions when the tent containing the remains of Scott, Bowers and Wilson was discovered the following spring. The letter was finally delivered by Lt. Evans, the officer who was saved by Tom Crean’s courageous thirty-five mile “do or die trying” march (described in Chapter 7). Evans brought the letter to the King of Norway in person. On that trip, Lt. Evans met a Norwegian woman, fell in love, and married her. They would not have met had Scott discarded Amundsen’s letter.