The Explorers

by Martin Dugard

  Franklin was fifty-nine at the time of his departure, and a veteran of three other Arctic expeditions. Despite his experience, the British Admiralty offered six other men the job before finally settling on him to lead this expedition. The two ships under his command were known as “bomb” vessels, based on the military armament of heavy mortars they carried in wartime. To withstand the vibration of firing these big guns, the hulls were designed for extra sturdiness, which made them perfect for polar exploration. Both HMS Erebus and TerrorXII had already seen service in an 1840 expedition to the Antarctic.

  Whatever concerns the Admiralty might have held about Franklin proved tragically correct. Erebus and Terror were soon lost in the Arctic, and to this day have not been found. It is known that they were trapped in winter ice and that Franklin and his men were forced to abandon the vessels and live on King William Island—named for the same William IV who established the RGS gold medal and provided its royal charter. It was an enormous landfall, the sixty-first biggest island in the world. It fell roughly halfway in the middle of the 1,000 uncharted miles Franklin needed to explore, and is home to immense populations of caribou. Inuit Eskimo tribes have long inhabited the region.

  It was September 1846 when Franklin’s ships became hopelessly stuck. Clearly there was no longer an expedition at this point, because the trapped vessels would have been slowly crushed by the ice’s incremental pressure. Both Erebus and Terror possessed ship’s boats that could have been rigged with sails for a journey back through the relatively placid inland waters in summertime. Franklin chose not to do so, despite the rather obvious fact that no British sailor had ever sailed this way before, and thus rescue was highly unlikely unless it was self-initiated.

  An entire winter and spring passed. This could not have been a pleasant waiting period. In addition to the crew’s anxieties, King William Island is what is known as a polar semidesert. It is almost completely flat. Night lasts three or four months in winter. Day lasts just as long in summer. There are less than 6 inches of precipitation a year, the ground is perpetually frozen in a thick layer of permafrost, and the temperature doesn’t rise above freezing for more than two months. More often, it remains more than 50 degrees below zero. There are few trees, but an abundance of moss and lichens. As sparse as the land can be, the sea is equally abundant, filled with walrus, narwhal, and beluga.

  And polar bears.

  The crews of both ships certainly would have seen these fierce predators as they sailed deeper into the Northwest Passage. Equally at home on land and sea, the polar bear has a bite force of 1,200 pounds per square inch (200 pounds more than a lion or a Bengal tiger, but only a third of saltwater crocodiles or hippopotamuses), can run 25 miles per hour, swim for hours in Arctic waters, and considers any living source of meat to be food—including man.

  Whatever the reason, Franklin did nothing. By the time spring had turned to summer, he was dead. If it was his timid behavior that prevented his crew from seeking rescue, this might have been the perfect opportunity to do something bold. The men had spent nine months there, certainly long enough for someone to dream up a risky though ingenious plan to seek help. They also knew that the window of opportunity was small: the seas along King William Island are ice-free for only two months every summer. Time was of the essence.

  And still they did nothing.

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  The men of Terror and Erebus waited another full year before attempting a walk back to civilization. There are no signs that they shot and ate caribou, or that they attempted to work with the Inuit to find a way out. Despite the severity of their circumstances and the cold, hard fact that no one was coming to rescue them,XIII the lizard brain in Franklin and his men chose to exercise caution and die miserably rather than concoct some daring plan to get back to civilization.

  Every single man perished, whether from scurvy, tuberculosis, lead poisoning, or starvation. Worst of all, the crew grew so desperate for food that the survivors began eating the dead bodies of their shipmates. This meant that dying men knew their bodies wouldn’t be properly buried, but ravaged by their friends. What an awful way to go to the grave.

  This is what happens when the lizard brain takes control of an expedition.

  Seventy years later, another British polar expedition would also see their ship crushed by winter ice, but with very different results.

  “Men wanted for hazardous journey,” read the advertisement placed by Anglo-Irish explorer Ernest Shackleton, “small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.”XIV

  There are many who doubt this famous advertisement actually existed, or that five thousand men and three women responded, as is so often stated. But the fact remains that when Ernest Shackleton set off on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1914, this veteran polar explorer was among the most famous men of his day. So great was his fame, and so enthralled were the British people by his expeditions, that he was given special permission to proceed with his voyage in August, despite the outbreak of what would be World War I just five days earlier. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, who well understood the galvanizing manner in which great human achievement could rally a nation, personally gave Shackleton the final go-ahead.

  Shackleton was a hard-drinking, charismatic man of the world. Bored by school in his youth, he shipped out as a sailor’s apprentice at age sixteen and within eight years had risen to the rank of master mariner, qualified to command any British vessel on the high seas. But in 1901, at age twenty-seven, he sought a new form of adventure and secured a position with an expedition shipping out to explore the South Pole. The National Antarctic Expedition was the brainchild of RGS president Sir Clements Markham, a former naval officer who served on the 1851 search for the Franklin Expedition.XV It would be the first British expedition to Antarctica since the 1839–43 voyage of Sir James Clark Ross, who charted great portions of its coast and named two great volcanoes after his ships of exploration: Mount Erebus and Mount Terror—the same Erebus and Terror that Franklin would doom to polar ice five years later.

  Markham’s expedition would launch the careers of many famous explorers, among them Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, with whom Shackleton had a curt and acrimonious relationship. But although the journey would be a highly publicized success for all involved, it would be the making of Shackleton for a very different reason. He became gravely ill during a push south toward the pole with Scott and scientist Edward Wilson. All the men suffered from scurvy, frostbite, and snow blindness, but Shackleton was hit hardest. “Shackleton has been anything but up to the mark,” wrote Wilson at one point, “and today he is decidedly worse, very short winded and coughing constantly, with more serious symptoms that need not be detailed here but which are of no small consequence one hundred and sixty miles from the ship.”

  Shackleton was sent home to convalesce. Scott made matters worse by writing critically about Shackleton’s physical shortcomings in his book about the expedition. Shackleton considered his failure a disgrace, and pushed himself to ensure that such humiliation never happened to him again. However, his failures mounted. Back home in England, he suffered financial setbacks and ran unsuccessfully for political office. A second and successful Antarctic expedition from 1907 to 1909 made him a national hero. But even though his party went farther south than any previous expedition, they were forced to turn around 112 miles from the pole, which had become his generation’s version of finding the source of the Nile. This Holy Grail of exploration would be reached by Swedish explorer Roald Amundsen in December 1911. Amundsen had also been the first man to traverse the Northwest Passage. And with American explorer Robert Peary appearing to have reached the North Pole in 1909,XVI there seemed to be nothing for a great polar explorer like Shackleton to conquer.

  So he devised something harder: a journey from one side of Antarctica to the other. The Imperial T
rans-Antarctic Expedition would be a logistical as well as a physical challenge that would require one ship to drop his men off, and another to wait for them on the far side. Resupply depots would be set up at vital junctures along the coast. But while the expedition set sail to great fanfare, things soon went horribly wrong. Endurance, Shackleton’s vessel, became frozen in pack ice in January 1915. After ten long months of drifting within the ice, she began taking on water. Shackleton ordered Endurance abandoned. She was crushed by ice and sank a month later.

  By this time, Shackleton and his men were camped on an ice floe. He hoped that the ice would drift toward the solid ground of a small island. When this failed to occur, he shifted his base to another ice floe. Finally, after six months of living atop floating ice, Shackleton ordered his men into lifeboats, and they paddled to the safety of a place called Elephant Island, nearly 400 miles from where Endurance rested at the bottom of the sea.

  But they were still stuck. There is neither flora nor fauna on Elephant Island, a grim and mountainous place where winds can reach 100 miles per hour. The chances of a ship randomly sailing past and spotting them were almost nonexistent. If Shackleton couldn’t figure out a solution, he and his men would surely suffer the same fate as the Franklin Expedition.

  History doesn’t document Shackleton’s thought process, so it is impossible to say how he found a solution to this impossible problem. Research into the life of Leonardo da Vinci, who was renowned for creative risk-taking, suggests that his process involved a series of seven questions: (1) What is the problem? (2) When does it need to be solved? (3) Who would benefit most from this problem being solved? (4) How can I motivate myself to solve this problem? (5) Where haven’t I looked for answers? (6) Why is solving this problem important? And (7) What if this turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me?

  On the surface, those questions seem a bit lengthy. But imagine the breadth of da Vinci’s creative genius, and realize that it would not take days or even hours to mull his decision. Imagine those questions being asked within a split second, as his brain went to work on a creative solution.

  But that was da Vinci’s method. Each of us has a different process. Maybe an individual leaves out a question or two. Maybe their brain works in such a way that it presents itself as an abstract concept or a theory. But we all indulge in creative problem solving. This is the link between da Vinci and Neil Armstrong; Thomas Edison and Lawrence of Arabia. Either way, the focus of the process is one clear and concise sentence bouncing around the inside of our cranium’s interior walls again and again and again until a solution is found: get it done.

  Get it done.

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  Shackleton came up with a bold and audacious plan. He would sail a small boat 800 nautical miles across the Southern OceanXVII to South Georgia Island,XVIII where whaling ships would help his men reach safety. Shackleton ordered his expedition’s carpenters to transform the 22-foot lifeboat by strengthening the keel, raising the gunwales, and building a small covered deck out of wood and canvas, then making it watertight (almost) with paint and seal blood.

  In effect, Shackleton was using the acquired wisdom of the nautical age to transform an ordinary wooden lifeboat into a craft resembling a cross between a caravel and curragh—though smaller by almost half than Brendan’s vessel. Despite the fact that it had been fifteen years since he left the seafaring world behind, he was subconsciously combing his mind for nuggets of wisdom that would help him succeed. Shackleton was preparing to brave monstrous seas and freezing hurricane-force winds on a journey through waters charted by Captain Cook. And he hoped—this is the most powerful word of all here, describing every breathtaking instant that would ensue—to combine all this knowledge to sail a distance greater than that from London to Africa. Shackleton was so sure of this hope that he refused to pack supplies for more than four weeks.

  Not only did Shackleton succeed, but also upon arriving at South Georgia Island, he and three members of his five-man rescue mission were forced to march thirty-six hours over mountainous terrain to finally reach a whaling station. Imagine the countless number of times he needed to override the lizard brain. Problems ranged from calculating the trough of a wave to estimating compass headings to the preventing of hypothermia and frostbite. And throughout, Shackleton’s leadership needed to be infused with hope. Without it, his men would consider their epic journey a suicide mission instead of something bold, attainable, and worth attempting.

  Shackleton and all his men returned home safely to England, where he received a hero’s welcome. But normal life bored him and he began drinking even more heavily. Six years later, at the age of just forty-seven, he died in bed of a heart attack.

  At his widow’s request, Shackleton’s body was buried on South Georgia Island.

  It lies there still.

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  The themes throughout Shackleton’s exploration career would have been familiar to Burton and Speke: life-threatening adversity, rivalries within an expedition, the futility of being cut off without hope of rescue, and that overwhelming desire to find a way to succeed, if only to be spared public humiliation.

  Indeed, bravery, rancor, and bitterness would become synonymous with their expedition after their journey into Africa. Burton had even begun to sow these seeds after the Somaliland debacle.

  This is why his choice of Speke as a partner on the second African expedition was such a massive surprise.

  Burton, in fact, was terrible to Speke after Somaliland. Burton spread rumors that Speke had been a coward during the attack on the beach, and that Speke retreated in the face of danger. As leader, Burton also had the right to confiscate the journals of all members of his expedition, a practice dating back to nautical exploration. Not only had he incorporated Speke’s notes into his own book about the journey to Harar, but he also edited them in such a way that made Speke come across as an imbecile with no apparent command of putting together coherent sentences. One can only imagine Speke’s embarrassment when First Footsteps in East Africa was published in late 1856.

  It is likely that Speke’s many strengths threatened Burton, and brought on these attacks. Certainly, Burton had no problem ignoring them when planning his new expedition. Speke possessed great physical endurance and a lack of fear. He was a risk-taker and adventure junkie, unsuited to the humdrum of daily British life. Speke was at home in the wilderness and able to navigate with great precision. He wasn’t the sort of man to chatter on endlessly, which could become a source of irritation on a long journey. And finally, Speke needed the redemption as much as Burton. A successful journey would wipe away the smear of cowardice that now followed his name.

  Most important of all, Burton recognized that Speke wouldn’t quit. In reading all those published accounts about Africa while preparing his plan for the RGS, it had become clear to Burton that none of those previous explorers had much nerve. While writing boldly about their adventures in Africa, these authors hadn’t gone very far inland from the coast. Yet Ujiji was 1,000 miles from the Indian Ocean. Burton required a man completely comfortable with leaving the safety of the coast behind.

  Speke was such a man. He had been quite at ease traveling alone into Somaliland, hunting and exploring without fear while Burton made his way to Harar. He not only recovered from his savage stab wounds and temporary blindness, but also had downplayed the memory of their occurrence as he eagerly sought a return to Africa—perhaps to suffer more of the same. A quick study of Burton’s good friends and other potential exploration partners revealed no other man with such courage.

  Of course, Burton could have traveled into Africa alone. But truth be told, Burton’s lizard brain still possessed a slight tug on his emotions. He would never admit as much, but the fiercely independent Burton was terrified of making the journey alone.

  “It would scarcely be wise to stake success upon a single life,” Burton explained to the RGS, explaining his need for a fe
llow explorer, “I should therefore propose as my companion, Captain Speke.”

  Burton’s plan worked. In April 1856, he was granted the funding and permissions to explore the lakes region of central Africa.

  There was just one other thing: he had yet to ask Speke.

  Burton wasn’t concerned in the slightest. Despite the bitterness and rancor and failure that threatened to bubble over and divide them, Burton knew that Speke possessed a powerful passion for Africa.

  Speke, upon receiving the invitation by mail, accepted immediately.

  The most recent European to attempt a similar journey into East Africa was a French naval officer. As bad as Burton and Speke suffered in Somaliland, this Lieutenant Mazan’s fate was far worse. Warriors from the Mzungera tribe had taken him captive, tied him to a tree, and then ignored his screams and pleas for mercy as they cut off his bodily appendages one by one—with his head being the last to go.

  Regardless of such dangers, Jack Speke and Dick Burton were on their way back into the land that nearly killed them, thrilled for the chance to once more risk their lives in the name of discovery.

  “No phantom of the future cast a shadow upon our sunny path,” Burton would write of the moment they began their adventure. “We set out, determined to do or die.”

  In the end, they would accomplish both.

  * * *

  I. A new creation known as the coffeehouse was vital to this era. They sprang up in Britain and quickly became hubs of intellectual debate. The appeal lay in their availability to individuals of all income levels because the cost of participation was a single cup of coffee. This allowed the uneducated to listen in and learn as great ideas were tossed back and forth in a casual setting.

  II. This is a hallmark of all great explorers. The only exceptions to that rule are polar, mountaineering, and space exploration, for which wandering is not an option due to refueling and gravitational concerns.