The Mammoth Book of Losers

by Karl Shaw

  In 1901, at the age of thirty-one, he was given command of the ship Discovery for an expedition to the Antarctic. The highlight of the expedition was a three-month march across the polar ice by Scott and two shipmates including Ernest Shackleton. They travelled further south than anyone had ever done before and Scott returned home a national hero.

  Having caught the exploring bug, he immediately began planning a new expedition. This time he was reaching for the most coveted prize in the modern age of exploration – the South Pole. Scott spent years struggling to raise funds for the trip, before finally departing on the whaling ship Terra Nova from Cardiff, Wales, in June 1910. In typically amateurish fashion, at this point not even all the money required to fund the expedition had been raised. The remainder was to be appealed for by means of a whip-round in ports of call along the way. Scott was stunned to find a telegram waiting for him in Melbourne: “Beg leave to inform. Fram11 heading south. Amundsen.” Scott now had a new challenge he hadn’t bargained for – he was in a race to the Pole.

  The Norwegian Roald Amundsen was already a highly experienced Arctic explorer, having been the first to travel the Northwest Passage in his ship Gjoa in 1903–06. He was trying for the North Pole in 1809 when rival American explorers, Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, announced within weeks of each other that they had beaten him to it. Robbed of the North Pole, Amundsen simply decided to go for the South Pole instead.

  Scott’s expedition should have taken precedence, but Amundsen wasn’t going to be trumped again. He sailed from Oslo on 3 June 1910 with the professed intent of sticking to his old plan to sail the Fram round Cape Horn and back north to Alaska and the easier route to the North Pole. It was only when he reached Madeira, while Scott was on his way to Australia, that Amundsen revealed his true intentions.

  Amundsen planned his expedition down to the very last detail. For his team, he hand-picked accomplished skiers and taught them tips and techniques learned from the Inuit. He took sledges and 100 well-trained dogs to pull them. By using the dogs instead of men to haul the sleds, Amundsen’s team could rest and regain their strength without risking the rations. He spent endless amounts of time fine-tuning his equipment. He invented and tested special boots, and used a type of Inuit clothing to keep warm and dry instead of the usual heavy winter clothing. He took seal meat to ward off scurvy and used innovations such as the thermos flask so that they didn’t have to stop and set up camp just to prepare something to eat. Cleverly (or deviously, depending on you choose to look at it), Amundsen had also concealed his plans until the last minute to wrong-foot Scott.

  The Norwegians sledged to the South Pole in double-quick time, reaching it on 15 December 1911, a month before Scott, before returning safely to their base camp, eating their dogs as they went. Amundsen’s attention to detail had been so great that they made his expedition seem no more dangerous than an extended field trip. It was efficient, well prepared and focused solely on the goal of getting to his destination and back.

  But this was not the British way of doing things. Although Scott was already an Antarctic veteran, he ignored some of the basic lessons of polar exploration. His first mistake was not taking enough food because he thought he and his party could survive ‘indefinitely’ on seals and penguins. He discovered too late that seals disappeared as soon as bad weather set in and penguins were summer visitors. As a result, his men had a deficit of 3,000 calories a day and each man had lost 25 kg of body weight by the time they reached the North Pole.

  He was also unprepared for extreme temperatures, dressing his team in the best Jaeger wool. This was fine for underwear but completely useless as an outer covering because it allowed the wind to penetrate and gathered snow. His team had faulty goggles or no goggles at all and suffered from painful snow-blindness – actual burning of their corneas.

  Just as important as having the right clothing is knowing where you are going. Instead of the lightweight sextant that Amundsen used, Scott took a heavy, cumbersome theodolite, and only one navigator, having dismissed an offer to have the man trained to read latitudes.

  Whereas the Norwegian had banked entirely on sleds hauled by huskies, Scott decided on a complex strategy that involved horses, motor sleds and man-hauling, clanking along with a fully tooled-up scientific expedition, taking with him all sorts of heavy equipment, including three particularly useless motorized sledges. The sledges had been invented for the trip, but Scott decided to leave the man who had built and designed them behind at the last-minute. One fell through the ice and the other two stopped working in the cold.

  Scott’s decision to rely largely on ponies instead of dogs was arguably his biggest single mistake. The dogs wanted to eat the ponies, while the ponies kept falling through the ice and had to be put down; the man Scott put in charge of the ponies mistrusted the horse-snowshoes that had been specially made for them so he left them at base camp. The few dogs Scott did take were fed dried fish, which made them ill and difficult to handle. He hadn’t learned how to drive them properly and ran his sledges too fast, making it hard for his team to keep up. Ten out of a team of thirteen dogs plunged into a crevasse and, although they were eventually saved, the incident convinced Scott that dogs would never make it to the Pole, so he sent them back to base camp.

  He also packed his sledges badly, forcing the men to pack and unpack them every single day to pitch camp, and failed to seal the fuel canisters properly, despite knowing from previous expeditions that the seams would fail in the sub-zero temperatures. Half the fuel, required for heating men and food, leaked out.

  Scott took men who barely knew how to ski. One of the men he hand-picked to take with him – Lawrence Oates – had one leg an inch shorter than the other due to a bullet wound sustained in the Boer War. As a result, Oates actually limped the 860-mile route taken by Scott’s party to the Pole and part of the way back. Compounding Scott’s difficulties, he and his team were hauling an extra 30 lbs of rock samples, although they could have easily left the samples at one of the cairns along the way to be picked up later.12

  His final misjudgement was taking five people with him on his final push to the Pole, when his supplies had been based on a team of four, effectively condemning his team to death.

  Scott’s five-man crew reached the South Pole on 17 January 1912 and were horrified that the Norwegians had already been and gone. Most gallingly, among the detritus of the abandoned Norwegian camp – flags, sleeping bags, broken instruments – was a letter to King Haakon VII of Norway, together with a request that Scott be kind enough to deliver it when he got back.

  Scott and his party didn’t hang around to dwell on their defeat. The temperature had dropped to -30°C, eight degrees lower than it had been when the Norwegians arrived. They took a few pictures and trudged back towards camp. With 400 miles still to travel, the party’s prospects steadily worsened with the deteriorating weather. One by one, they died of exhaustion, frostbite and starvation. Edgar Evans, the team’s fittest member, was the first to die, weakened by a blow to the head after falling into a crevasse a few days earlier. Laurence Oates was next. Lame from severe frostbite and fearing that he was slowing his companions down, he walked out into the blizzard to his death with the words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”13 He was carrying thirty opium pills but didn’t take them because to have done so would have been a coward’s way out.

  By 22 March, the three remaining men had two days’ food left, but were three days short of their next depot. Then a blizzard struck and stopped them moving on. Despite his deteriorating condition, Scott continued to record their fate in grim detail right to the bitter end. At one point, he seems to have been genuinely puzzled when the blackish, “rotten-looking” nose of one of his colleagues seemed likely to drop off. Scott noted, “To my surprise, he shows signs of losing heart over it.”

  Scott, Wilson and Bowers died in their tent out on the Ross Ice Shelf from a combination of scurvy, exposure and starvation. It was another ten months before th
e tragic news was cabled to London that not only had Scott been beaten to the South Pole by Amundsen, but this man who carried a nation’s hopes on his shoulders had tragically frozen to death in his tent a mere ten miles from safety.

  But nobody puts a gloss on disaster quite like the British (see also The Charge of The Light Brigade). There were tributes in the House of Commons and The Times described their deaths as “‘the noblest tragedy in history”. King George V led a memorial service for Scott and his men and thousands stood outside St Paul’s Cathedral – far more than had turned out for the Titanic dead the year before. For the next fifty years, Britons erected monuments to his name across the country and over £1 million was raised for the dependents of the expedition, and although you can’t be knighted posthumously, his wife was granted the rank of knight widow.

  Poor Amundsen, meanwhile, who not only won the race to the Pole but returned without losing a single man, was largely forgotten. Worse still, he was somehow regarded as a cheat. Indeed, such was the British disdain at Amundsen’s professionalism that Lord Curzon, President of the Royal Geographic Society, sarcastically toasted the Norwegian success with “three cheers for the dogs”. Amundsen resigned from the Society in disgust, noting, “Victory awaits those who have everything in order; people call this luck. Defeat awaits those who fail to make the necessary precautions; this is known as bad luck.”

  Of course, Scott couldn’t respond to this taunt; he and his crew were long dead.

  Most People Lost While Looking for a Lost City

  Travelling without a map in strange lands with unfathomable natural hazards, unknown diseases and possibly murderous indigenous peoples takes suicidal courage and infinite resourcefulness. It also helps if you’re mad. Fortunately, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett had all three of these qualities in abundance.

  Fawcett was born in Torquay in 1867, the son of Captain Edward Boyd Fawcett, renowned Sussex county cricketer, member of the Royal Geographical Society and equerry to the future Edward VII. Fawcett Jnr was known to all as “PHF”, although his wife called him “Puggy”.14 When he was nineteen, he joined the Royal Artillery where he learned the basics of surveying in the hope that it might involve lots of travel, and he subsequently spent several years in Sri Lanka. During this time, he became interested in the Spiritualist movement and may have become a Buddhist.

  Fawcett’s ticket to adventure arrived in 1906 when the Royal Geographical Society invited him to undertake a survey of Bolivia’s frontier with Brazil. The territory between the two countries was rubber-rich, but no one could agree where the exact boundary lay. Fawcett was only too happy to sign up, commencing his lifelong love affair with the Amazon jungle.

  By 1915, Fawcett was back in uniform and was posted to France where he spent eighteen months in the trenches. In 1916, he took up a new post as an artillery corps counter-battery colonel, detailed to suppress German heavy guns. Fawcett’s subordinates were surprised to learn that their new leader was not in the least bit interested in the innovative work being done on the detection of German guns by flash-spotting and sound ranging, He could detect German targets, he informed them, on his Ouija board.

  After the war, Fawcett returned to the uncharted and dangerous Amazon basin several times, surviving in the jungle for years at a time, without contact with the outside world, armed with little more than a machete, a rifle and a compass, often living for days on a handful of nuts, singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “A Bicycle Built for Two” as he tramped through the mosquito-infested hinterland.

  Fawcett wrote up accounts of his journeys in a series of popular books. One of his discoveries, Tabletop Mountain near the Verde River, inspired his friend and fellow loony, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, to use his field reports as the basis for his book, The Lost World.

  No one could fault Fawcett’s bravery, but his stories, describing attacks by cannibals on the Amazon and encounters with vampire bats, giant snakes and a killer spider the size of a dinner plate in a hotel bedroom, raised a few eyebrows back home. This description of the shooting of a monstrous anaconda in Bolivia is typical:

  I sprang for my rifle as the creature began to make its way up the bank and, hardly waiting to aim, smashed a .44 soft-nosed bullet into its spine, ten feet below the wicked head. At once there was a flurry of foam, and several heavy thumps against the boat’s keel, shaking us as though we had run on a snag. We stepped ashore and approached the creature with caution. As far as it was possible to measure, a length of 45 feet lay out of the water and 17 feet lay in the water, making it a total length of 62 feet.

  Fawcett may have trained as surveyor but his measuring skills were suspect; his monstrous snake was at least double the maximum length of any anaconda yet discovered. There were more strange zoological encounters, including the discovery of a breed of dog with two noses.

  All the while he was pestering the Foreign Office and the Royal Geographical Society for money to fund his trips. In 1920, an irritated John Keltie, secretary of the RGS, noted: “Fawcett has a reputation of being difficult to get on with, and has a queer manner in many ways, being a mystic and a spiritualist, but all the same he has an extraordinary power of getting through difficulties that would deter anybody else.”

  Despite his growing reputation as a crackpot, Fawcett was now recognized as the world’s foremost authority on South America and became a recipient of the Gold Medal, the honor bestowed on an explorer by the Royal Geographical Society.

  During Fawcett’s travels in Amazonia, he became fascinated with the possibility of finding a mythical lost city called “Z”. Rumours of a fabulously wealthy South American lost city had abounded in European folklore for centuries. Fawcett had studied ancient legends and historical records, in particular a fragmentary, anonymous document, known as Manuscript 512, written by an early Portuguese explorer, which spoke of a magnificent inland city. Although Fawcett had great admiration for the South American natives, he was an Englishman of his time and endemically racist. He refused to believe that the Amazonian Indians themselves could have created this great city. Fawcett came to the conclusion that “Z” must have been built by people of European ancestry, perhaps the Celts. He was also convinced, based on a combination of serious research, intensive fieldwork, wishful thinking and clairvoyance, that the lost city existed somewhere in the Mato Grosso region. Fawcett approached the Foreign Office again for money to mount an expedition and was again rebuffed. He would have to fund it alone.

  His first attempt was in 1921. He set off from Cuiabá and got as far as the Xingu River, but it ended in failure when he was forced to turn back with an injured leg. Later that year, Fawcett tried again, this time completely alone, travelling west from Bahia in Brazil for three months, but once again he returned in failure.

  In 1925, at the age of fifty-eight, he made his third and final attempt, this time accompanied by his eldest son Jack and his son’s friend Raleigh Rimmell, plus two hired Brazilian porters, two horses, eight mules and two dogs. The last anyone ever heard of the group was as they crossed the Upper Xingu, a south-eastern tributary of the Amazon. Fawcett’s last telegraph, sent on 29 May 1925, assured his wife Nina: “You need have no fear of failure”. The party then simply vanished without trace.

  Before he set off, Fawcett left strict instructions that in the event of his failure to return there should be no risky attempts to follow in his footsteps. To date, over one hundred people have died ignoring his advice. George Miller Dyott, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, was the first to try in 1928, with a mission either to rescue Fawcett or at least find his earthly remains. Months later, Dyott and his men returned from the jungle sick, emaciated and mosquito-bitten. He claimed he had evidence that Aloique, chief of the Nahukwá, had murdered Fawcett, but this proof amounted to nothing more than Aloique’s unreliable testimony. Dyott wrote about his exploits in the book, Man Hunting in the Jungle.

  One of the most famous of at least a dozen separate failed expeditions to discover wha
t happened to Fawcett was told in the book Brazilian Adventure by the journalist Peter Fleming in 1932. The expedition, commanded by an eccentric American colonel called Pringle, was so badly organized that no one had bothered to learn Portuguese or read the news, otherwise they would have known that Brazil was in the middle of a revolution. The group ended up wandering aimlessly and panic-stricken around the Brazilian hinterland, blazing away with their guns at anything that moved. In the same year, Stefan Rattin, a Swiss trapper, emerged from the jungle to claim that the elderly Fawcett was being held captive by Indians. Although his story attracted a great deal of attention from the world’s press, Fawcett’s surviving son Brian was not inclined to believe that his father, who had been bald for some time, was now the old man with long white hair described by Rattin.

  Hopes were raised then dashed again when some human bones discovered in the jungle in 1951 proved on examination not to belong to Fawcett. In 1996, a wealthy banker, James Lynch, and his sixteen-year-old son James Jr, retraced Fawcett’s journey to Fawcett’s last known position, where they were kidnapped by the Kalapalos Indians, whose punishment for trespassing was either death by piranhas or stinging bees. The Indians didn’t release Lynch and his son until after he gave them all his supplies and equipment worth an estimated $30,000.

  In 2005, American journalist David Grann visited the Kalapalo tribe and discovered that there was a local oral history about Fawcett and his party, the first white men the tribe had ever seen. The Kalapolos claimed that Fawcett stayed at their village and then left heading eastward. He was warned not to go that way because they would almost certainly be killed by the “fierce Indians” who occupied that territory – but Fawcett insisted on going anyway. Grann also believed that Fawcett deliberately falsified the coordinates of his route plan, and that previous expeditions had therefore been looking in the wrong place.