by Richard Farr
A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people.
If the story of Shackleton’s grandiosely-branded Imperial Antarctic Expedition is not familiar, I recommend Alfred Lansing’s spare and compelling Endurance, followed by Caroline Alexander’s more detailed The Endurance, which is also graced with expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s original pictures. In summary: Amundsen having “beaten” Scott in a “race to the Pole” (see note), Shackleton — also beaten — decided that a transit across Antarctica might be the next big headline. His “exceptionally strong wooden ship” left England in the last days of 1914; the following month at 77°S it became trapped in pack ice. Held fast for eight more months and slowly drifting north, it was crushed at last. Shackleton and his men, unable to reach land, began a desperate fight against cold and starvation culminating in the legendary journey of the lifeboat James Caird across 800 miles of ocean to South Georgia. “The Boss” then organized the rescue of his remaining men from Elephant Island.
In 2022 an expedition using remotely operated submersibles located the wreck, perfectly preserved under 3,000 meters of cold Weddell Sea. One of the expedition members, Jukka Tuhkuri, wondered exactly why it had been crushed — a good question that few had bothered to ask because the answer seemed obvious. (“Wooden ship! Pack ice!”) On examination, a different answer was equally obvious: by 1914 shipwrights knew a great deal about constructing wooden ships so that they would not be crushed by Antarctic conditions; unfortunately Endurance was not one of them. Its hull had been designed for the entirely different sea conditions of the polar north.
So to the punchline: the record shows that Shackleton knew this. Had the sainted explorer taken the wrong ship, known he was doing so, and covered it up? Was he not the perfectly wise, honest and resolute leader after all? A chink in the myth perhaps?
Some of the recent reporting seems to toy with this delicious prospect. Outside magazine ran a piece with the tendentious title Did Shackleton Know His Ship Was Doomed? A New Study Suggests So. (Rubbish, obviously.) Other sources hint at issues about Shackleton’s honesty; according to the New York Times:
The Endurance was ill equipped for its mission, a flaw that Shackleton was aware of long before he launched to Antarctica…. While Shackleton wrote in his book South: A Memoir of the Endurance Voyage that it was insurmountable ice floes that doomed his ship, the study suggests that he knew otherwise…. Shackleton may have known that the ship wasn’t ideal for the voyage. But he was restless at home, and struggling with financial debt and a failing marriage.
Largely forgotten now is that to people of an earlier generation Shackleton was “known” to be something of a chancer; this new revelation would have fit the narrative well. It was his friend and rival Scott who stood out as both the greater explorer and the noble hero par excellence. Only in the wake of Roland Huntford’s sacred-cow-slaughtering Scott and Amundsen (1979) did Scott’s reputation go into dizzying decline. You could have cut the smug satisfaction with a knife once people “knew” that Scott had been revealed as a dangerously incompetent leader and an awful man besides.
Not long after Huntford’s takedown became a global bestseller, the publication of Alexander’s book marked not just a change of focus but the beginning of a kind of collective global Shacklemania — hagiographic books and exhibitions, corporate leadership seminars, you name it. At the height of this period I published a book on one aspect of Scott’s 1911 expedition, and I found myself spending a lot of time trying to talk people down from their warm, cozy, self-serving simplifications about both men. But at book readings and other events my attempts to unpick some of the myths about Shackleton’s limitless excellence and Scott’s limitless folly were often met with barely restrained anger. For many people, the cartoon version was just too satisfying to put aside.
It was something of a relief to me that a few skeptical voices, about the comparison with Scott anyway, were starting to be heard. Most notable perhaps was Ranulph Fiennes’ biography (Captain Scott — see note), which picked up Huntford’s reputational machete and turns it on Huntford himself, starting with the memorably acid epigraph, To the memories of the defamed dead.
Stephanie Barczewski’s Antarctic Destinies tells the full fascinating story of how the “truth” about these two rivals has changed over the decades. The most obvious takeaway is that public perception of them not only reversed by almost a perfect 180 degrees between about 1920 and 2010 but that it did so almost wholly without reference to new facts. Scott was a suitable hero and Shackleton a suitable villain for one generation; for another generation, the opposite.
The new story about Endurance made me see that I was as tempted by shadenfreude as anyone. Heartily sick of hearing people who knew nothing about anything bang on (and on and on) about Shackleton, I found delight in the prospect of new evidence that might burst the bubble. Maybe we could blame him for the loss of the ship; that would be something!
Unfortunately, or fortunately, it’s not so simple.
The story about inappropriate hull design has another story behind it. To the shame of wealthy Great Britain, Shackleton in 1914 faced the same problem as Scott in 1911: whether appealing to the wealthy or the general public, to prideful nationalists or the scientifically curious, they had the devil’s own time raising funds. In fact neither man was able to sail with his own ship, initially, because both were stranded in England, threadbare cap in hand, and both encountered a degree of disinterest that’s hard to credit given their later canonizations. Both ended up in what they knew to be grossly inadequate ships, simply because it was what they could afford.
Scott’s situation was worse than Shackleton’s in at least one respect. He has been assiduously misrepresented since as an imperial-age jingo with a flag to wave; such an irresistibly useful figure to feel superior to. In truth he was both much less interested in Polar glory for its own sake than Shackleton and far more ambitious (more so than Amundsen too) for what we might politely call actual exploration. Like many Antarctic figures before and since, both Shackleton and Amundsen had proposed little more than a newsworthy stunt, thrilling enough for sure, with a bit of scientific work thrown in as an afterthought. Scott’s attitude was strikingly different: rightly or wrongly, he showed a deep and persistent interest in, and support for, the fistful of different scientific teams and projects that he managed to stuff into his leaky, foul-smelling old whaler the Terra Nova. It came home without him — but it came home with a rich cargo of knowledge in geography, geology, geomagnetism, meteorology, glaciation, ornithology and zoology.
You can’t read the strange cultural history that Barczewski lays out without seeing its broader implications: we invent our heroes and villains in order to service our own egos. Ironically, it’s especially easy to do this when the real people behind our cartoons are to an unusual degree multifaceted in their characters, their achievements and their failures. They leave so much material on the table that you can build whatever you like out of it. This can prove useful, especially to those of us who would not have survived an hour beside them, hauling a wooden sledge through a blizzard in Antarctica.
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A note on Shacklemania:
“Not one of Shackleton’s men was lost. What a great leader!” Or even “All Scott’s men died because he was incompetent, and not a single one of Shackleton’s did because he was so much better!” Three facts: Five men including Scott died on their return from the Pole. It’s true (and almost miraculous) that every man from the Endurance survived. But Shackleton’s was a two-ship expedition, and it’s hard to resist the conclusion that his decisions about supplies and crew, and his various failures of communication, contributed both to the extraordinary misery endured by the men of the Aurora and to three of them dying.
A note on the “race to the Pole”:
There never was a race to the Pole; the idea was invented after the fact by newspapers. Like everyone else, including Amundsen’s own crew, Scott thought Amundsen was going to the north pole. The Norwegian changed his mind after hearing that Robert Peary had already bagged it, but announced the fact to his crew (on deck) and to Scott (in a telegram) only after he was already on his way south. Scott’s reaction says a lot about his thought process, his goals, his character, and his talent for diplomatic understatement. On February 22, 1911, after learning that Amundsen had made landfall at the Bay of Whales: “The proper, as well as the wiser, course is for us to proceed exactly as if this had not happened.” On October 11: “I decided at a very early date to act exactly as I should have done had he not existed. Any attempt to race must have wrecked my plans, besides which it doesn’t appear the sort of thing one is out for.” Indeed it wasn’t: all the scientific work went ahead as planned, and he continued to treat reaching the Pole as one job among others that had been handed to him. He respected Amundsen and thought he was likely to get to the Pole first. A nice irony of the Polar literature: for its US publication, Fiennes’ Captain Scott was renamed Race to the Pole — presumably because the publishers thought it would attract more buyers — despite the fact that it’s to a large extent a book-length dismantling of that zombie idea.
Which naturally raises another reflection on Shacklemania:
“Scott was an idiot; he took ponies!” The ponies were a mistake — or rather they were, to be fairer to Scott, a risky experiment that he knew was risky and suspected would not work. (He listed several reasons Amundsen would probably get to the Pole before him. One was that Amundsen was relying solely on dogs.) A detail not much recalled is that he took ponies only because Shackleton himself not only took them on the Nimrod expedition but talked them up enthusiastically afterwards, insisting that they were more efficient for large loads than dogs.
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References:
Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (1998).
Barczewski, S. L. Antarctic Destinies: Scott, Shackleton and the changing face of heroism (2007).
Farr, Richard. Emperors of the Ice: A True Story of Disaster and Survival in the Antarctic, 1910-1913 (2008).
Fiennes, Sir Ranulph. Race To The Pole: Tragedy, Heroism, And Scott’s Antarctic Quest (2004), originally Captain Scott, 2003.)
Huntford, Roland. Scott And Amundsen (1979), later reprinted as The Last Place on Earth.
Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (1959).
Scott, Robert F. Journals: Captain Scott’s Last Expedition (Edited By Max Jones, 2005).
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