by Brad Borkan
Rivalries all involved Scott
One of the common denominators of all four “all’s fair in love and war” situations is that they all involved Scott. Was this because of Scott’s personality, or the fact that he led the first heroic age expedition and became the man to beat? His 1901-1904 Discovery Expedition set the framework of how an expedition could combine geological, meteorological, oceanographic, and other scientific pursuits with the adventure and excitement of geographical discovery.
Did the expedition leaders get too close to that unique point where “all is fair in love and war?” Would you have done any differently? In your own personal and business life, have you gotten too close to the line sometimes?
* * *
The next chapter describes one of the most intriguing life and death decisions ever made on a heroic age expedition. Would you make the decision to achieve your goal, knowing full well that once you reached it, you were certain to die before getting back to civilization?
Chapter 10
Will The Results Be Worth The Effort?
Going the distance to find out.
Setting the goal.
Humans possess an awareness of the future and it is this awareness that enables us to plan. We are goal-driven, social animals, and we can individually and collectively plan today what we desire our future to be.
All of us have something in our lives that remains undone, something that we see for our own futures, to which we aspire, and to which we assign some part of each day’s endeavor. The goal might be lofty or it might be mundane, but it lies before us, yet to be accomplished. Perhaps it is at the limit of our ability, just out of reach.
Having set that goal, the next task is to go for it—set out on the path we believe will take us there—and go the distance.
Shackleton’s plans
Let us go back in time, to journey with Ernest Shackleton towards the South Pole in 1908. Over a hundred years ago, he knew that the South Pole of the Earth had yet to be discovered—that is, visited in the flesh—and that he would be the one to do it. That goal became his life’s aim, to which he then directed all of his energies.
Now, this is a grand goal, one that takes a great deal of ambition to conceive, and a great deal of personal and collective effort to accomplish. After all the planning and preparation, the ocean voyages, and landing on the icebound shores of Antarctica, only then—or so it may seem—did the real work of discovery begin. Still ahead lay the months of trudging many hundreds of miles over vast tracts of ice and snow, all to plant the nation’s flag on a featureless plain on a point identified only by navigational coordinates.
It was a patriotic goal of considerable importance, one that would greatly enhance national pride, while also achieving scientific results and the geographic discovery of this last unknown place, and what was to be found there. But more importantly, for Shackleton it was a personal goal. It was what induced him to risk his fortune, his reputation, and his life, in what he envisioned as a shared victory.
But the most powerful force driving his efforts to take the Pole with his Nimrod Expedition was an unyielding personal ambition. The sting of having been invalided home (described in Chapter 9), after his breakdown during the southern advance of Scott’s Discovery Expedition, was almost more than he could bear. Following his quick recovery from the ravages of exposure and scurvy, he immediately set about planning and bringing together his own Antarctic expedition, subject to no one’s control but his own.
This time, come what may, he was bound to take the South Pole at last, as much for himself and his wounded pride as for the British flag under which his expedition sailed.
The Nimrod Expedition: 1907-1909
Shackleton’s years of planning finally took shape in the form of his ship the Nimrod and her long voyage from England to Antarctica. After a fruitless search for a landing place near King Edward VII Land, he and his men landed their stores and set up camp on Ross Island at a rocky point of land named Cape Royds. The landing place was not ideal for the task at hand. The thirty miles (48 km) of sea ice blocking the ship’s path to Hut Point—another thirty miles farther south—would have to remain in place until the following spring. Without this transitory ice highway, the ponies, and the expedition, would remain stuck at Cape Royds, unable to move. As the Discovery had found, the fickle ways of the sea ice could neither be predicted, nor overcome by force or wishful thinking.
On October 29, 1908, Shackleton was poised for a start. He set off with three additional men (Jameson Adams, Eric Marshall, and Frank Wild) on what he knew would be a historic journey. They carried with them 784 pounds of provisions, drawn by the four remaining ponies on four eleven-foot sledges, enough for ninety-one days of hard traveling to get them to the South Pole and back. If they could maintain an average speed of nineteen miles (30 km) per day—over the known level of the Barrier and the unknown beyond—they would reach the mythical spot itself. A separate party including Douglas Mawson, Edgeworth David and Alistair Mackay, would head west to discover the South Magnetic Pole. Later in the expedition, seven men would ascend the shoulders of the volcano Mount Erebus to reach its smoking summit. But the real goal of the expedition was the South Pole itself.
The polar journey started without a hitch. The route south from Hut Point was already familiar to Shackleton. He had traversed 320 miles (515 km) of it out and then back again with Scott and Wilson in 1902, with Scott as the leader on the Discovery Expedition. This time, in 1908, Shackleton himself was in charge. If all went well, he would return from this a hero to the nation, redeemed in the eyes of all, especially his own.
One by one the ponies weakened and were shot and butchered. Their meat was cached, in supply depots along with other provisions, guaranteeing supplies for the journey home months later. On November 26 the explorers passed the southernmost point ever reached by man—82º17’ S, where Scott’s southern advance had turned back. The way forward now was entirely new. Whatever lay beyond was Shackleton’s to discover.
He described the experience later in his book, The Heart of the Antarctic.
“As the days wore on and mountain after mountain came into view, grimly majestic, the consciousness of our insignificance seemed to grow upon us. We were but tiny black specks crawling slowly across the white plain, and bending our puny strength to the task of wresting from nature secrets preserved inviolate through all the ages.”
With every step new land came into view and mountain peaks bearing southeast came across their track; it was a range the men knew they would have to cross to reach their goal.
Going the distance
The distance covered so far had not been enough to meet the average required to make it to the Pole and back. One month and three hundred miles (482 km) out, they were already going on short rations to save as much as possible for the furthest south. On December 3, ascending a low peak that Shackleton named Mt. Hope, they first laid eyes on the great glacier that would be their highway south through the mountains and up to the high plateau they knew must be its source. He named this river of ice the Beardmore Glacier, in honor of one of the expedition’s financial backers.
The last of the ponies, Socks, was lost down a crevasse near the glacier’s base, and the four men hitched themselves to the thousand-pound weight of the pony sledges and began that most gruelling of polar tasks, man-hauling. Shackleton’s book recounts the march—day after day of dragging the sledge uphill over hard blue ice riven by crevasses, their distances far short of the necessary average, and already going on short rations with hunger as their constant companion. But each day also had its reward—new land underfoot, continually opening ahead as they slowly advanced southwards, and thousands of feet upwards toward the plateau. As early as December 11, they imagined that plateau, and the head of the glacier, to be just a day or two’s march farther along. Falls and injuries threatened success, and even survival, but there was nothing to be done but bandage the wounds and march along in pain and silence, hoping for t
he best. Shackleton confided their optimism in his diary on December 14: “To-night our hopes are high that we are nearly at the end of the rise and that soon we will reach our longed-for plateau. Then southward indeed! Food is the determining factor with us. We did 7½ miles (12 km) to-day.”
Each day recorded a similar optimism, that the plateau was just ahead, and a similar mention of increasing hunger. “Hunger” to them was just a discomfort to be borne as a part of the work at hand, a minor price to pay for the honor and glory of discovery. No one really thought of it in real terms of the debilitation that was even now sapping their strength, and from which they would never recover on the reduced rations the four had all agreed to. They began leaving short rations in the depots, a dangerous tactic gambling on even greater daily distances on the return journey, and finding ways to “spin out” the food remaining for a greater distance outbound. In doing this, they kept the attainment of the Pole still within reach—barely. Having come so far, they were not about to give up.
Short commons
By December 20 they had reduced their breakfast to one pannikin of hoosh, and their lunch to three biscuits with a pannikin of cocoa. “To-day we did 11 miles 950 yards. (17 km) . . . Still we are getting on; we have only 279 miles (450 km) to go, and then we will have reached the Pole.” At that rate it would take seven more weeks traveling to the Pole and back, clearly an impossible task, yet their optimism remained undiminished.
Christmas Day, the one day they had planned for a feast, in which they would allow themselves a full ration, loomed like a bright beacon ahead on these endless days of hard work. “We are very far away from all the world and home thoughts have been much with us to-day, thoughts interrupted by pitching forward into a hidden crevasse more than once. . . . We are all two degrees subnormal, but fit as can be. It is a fine open-air life and we are getting south.” They could not, or would not, see how weakened they had become on the short rations, far from enough to sustain the high-altitude man-hauling that had become their daily round. On the following day, at an elevation of 9,500 feet, they were on the plateau, and had finally lost sight of the nunatak mountain peaks behind them, the last vestiges of land to the north. “This shortness of food is unpleasant, but if we allow ourselves what, under ordinary circumstances, would be a reasonable amount, we would have to abandon all idea of getting far south.”
Summit fever
It is one thing to make a plan and then commit all resources to its fulfilment. It is quite another to push beyond the physically possible in a futile attempt to achieve the impossible.
The term “summit fever” will be familiar to those who have followed the history of recent expeditions to the summit of Mt. Everest in Nepal. In two words it encapsulates the very broad notion of completion of a long-sought goal in the face of overwhelming obstacles, just below the summit of the mountain. That real geographical place represents for many the metaphysical summit of a life’s ambition, an accomplishment available only to the few, and at great financial and personal expense.
After months of striving, weather conditions may preclude a summit attempt. The sheer numbers of people massed at that base camp, who must use a single trail to reach the peak and then return, may not all make it up and back during the very brief window of time that will be available. As some recent expeditions have shown, to do so is both foolhardy and, for some, deadly. But those who have chosen this goal, when they have reached the highest base camp before that elusive summit, often will not be denied their conquest.
Reading Shackleton’s words in the comfort of our modern rooms, we can sympathize with the struggle he faced with his men as they slowly drew nearer to their goal. We can imagine the conversations they must have had beneath the fluttering canvas of their tents; thoughts and debates about the wisdom of pushing forward when they were at such extremes of hunger and deprivation. Whatever their private reservations may have been, their collective decision remained: “Push on!”
We can see, however, what they could not, or would not. They were already at the extreme limit of their physical human endurance, but the goal of their entire endeavor was so close. A few more days of this travail and they could turn for home and the accolades of an adoring nation, a place where their names would forever be in the history books. The foolhardiness of the plan that is so evident to us now, must have seemed to them but a gamble, a bargain at the price of only a few more days’ hunger. “We are only 198 miles (318 km) off our goal now . . . We have only 150 lb. per man to pull, but it is more severe work that the 250 lb. per man up the glacier was,” Shackleton wrote on December 29, adding in a classic understatement, “The Pole is hard to get.” “Only 198 miles—almost four hundred out and back to this desolate point—four more weeks’ man-hauling at the present rate of twelve miles (19 km) a day, with another thousand after that to the safety of the base camp.”
Summit fever. New Year’s Eve found them camped at 86º 54’ S, with three weeks’ food and two week’s biscuits. They had yet to wake up to the fact that what they were asking of themselves was impossible. Had their intellects become so clouded that they did not recognize the folly of clinging to that hopeless goal? “Please God the weather will be fine the next fourteen days,” he wrote two days later. “Then all will be well,” as though having struggled this far; surely luck would see them through. And then “Tomorrow we must risk making a depot on the plateau, and make a dash for it, but even then, if this surface continues, we will be two weeks in carrying it through.”
The reality of their situation finally caught up with them. Shackleton’s words of January 4, 1909, must have been bitter indeed. “The end is in sight.” They would have to give up the idea of reaching the Pole, and settle for some second-best result. “We can only go on for three more days at the most, for we are weakening rapidly.” The hope was now to reach another, less significant coordinate on this vast and featureless plain. “We hope to reach within 100 geographical miles of the Pole; under the circumstances we can expect to do very little more.”
“We have done our best”
After a three-day blizzard they left the sledges behind and made one more outward march to plant the flag at the furthest south ever reached by man to that date, 88º23’ S. They were ninety-seven geographical miles (112 statute miles or 180 km) short of the South Pole. “There is only one thing that lightens the disappointment, and that is the feeling that we have done all we could. It is the forces of nature that have prevented us from going right through. I cannot write more.”
Had that blizzard not stopped them in their tracks, they might have gone onward, most likely beyond the limit of their endurance. As it turned out, the four men barely made it home alive. That 750-mile (1,200 km) return journey is another tale of hardship and starvation, met with inspiring courage and endurance.
This can be taken as a cautionary tale to any who would test their own capacity to the limit beyond which safe recovery might be doubtful, if not impossible. It applies to more than physical endurance in extreme environments. The more dearly held the goal, the harder it is to give up. The immutable laws of nature, the character of human behavior, and the mathematics of profit and loss do not change simply because we hope that our best efforts will make them change.
Even though Shackleton never made it to the South Pole, no one can accuse him of giving up too soon, or “not going the distance.” It was a goal that circumstance and hardship prevented him from ever achieving. The hundreds of miles of hard travel got him close, but for all his effort, still fell short. The additional hundreds of miles of the return trip, on short rations, nearly killed him and his companions. He wrote to his wife, “I thought you would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.” He gave it his all. As an inspiration to others, his work has left behind an immutable legacy.
Others, a few years later, completed that goal for him, again the result of great collective, but also great personal endeavor. In terms of geographical exploration, new goals were envisioned, and then a
chieved. Further exploration of Antarctica, the ongoing study of weather, glaciers and the oceans continues to this day, and increases the understanding of the world we live in. All this is built upon the foundation that Shackleton and others laid in the early 1900s—the ambition of a few men to do something that had yet to be done; to make a plan and reach a place that had always been just out of reach.
“Going the distance” is not a measure of having reached the goal, but of giving one’s all in its pursuit. Shackleton fell short in his dream of reaching the South Pole, but is best remembered for having tried. He knew how to strive for big goals, and also knew when to turn back.
As each of us confronts our own limitations in the pursuit of goals, it is worthwhile to keep in mind these fundamental lessons gleaned from Shackleton’s attempt. Firstly, it is our sense of the future, our ability to shape that future—collectively as well as individually—and our pursuit of long-range goals that define our humanity. Secondly, the shape of that future can be largely of our own choosing, working with what we have and striving for that which is just out of reach. Thirdly, it matters less whether we attain that goal, and more that we have seen a future that does not yet exist, have made a plan, have a goal, and then have done the best we can to attain it. Ultimately, the pursuit of a goal is as important as its attainment, perhaps even more so. Knowing when to turn around or when to pursue a different goal is tantamount to success, or even is success itself.
In looking at your own behavior, would you have had the wisdom to turn back, or would you have pushed yourself to the very end and risked everything?