A Hero for Our Time - The Observer
Sun 11 February 2001
Our new found passion for polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, rather than his hated rival Robert Scott, shows how in our Americanised culture we now demand our heroes to be realists not dreamers, argues historian Lucy Moore
In a few weeks, an amateur explorer will set out to cross South Georgia Island, off the southern tip of Patagonia, tracing the footsteps of Ernest Shackleton in the last stages of his doomed Endurance expedition in 1916. His trip follows that of the three-member Shackleton's Steps team that made the same journey at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, Kenneth Branagh is starring in a £27 million drama about the polar explorer's life currently in production while also underway this spring is a naval expedition that plans to retrace Shackleton's 700-mile sea voyage in an open, 22-foot whaling boat vulnerable to waves 60ft high, from Elephant Island back to civilisation and salvation. And a recent exhibition chronicling the Endurance's voyage was a sell-out success in both America and Britain, which may provide the key to why the undoubted hero is finally emerging from the shadow of his loathed rival, Robert Falcon Scott.
For Shackleton, the caring pragmatist, is a hero for our time, a man who, like millennial Britain, has learned to crave the winning (even when it doesn't), rather than just the playing, of the game. We have become realists taking risks only when success is guaranteed, rather than idealists willing to gamble all on a slender chance, as did Scott, under whom Shackleton served in their first polar expedition in 1902. Later Scott narrowly missed being the first man to the South Pole in 1911-12, when he and his men died in their tent almost within sight of one of their own deposits of supplies, which would have saved them.
Scott's dignified, courageous final diary entry is one of the most moving things ever written, even though one can't escape the awareness that it was his refusal to admit defeat that caused his death. 'I really would be sorry for Scott if I did not know how utterly empty and personal the whole business is with him,' commented an officer who had served under him, on hearing that he had been beaten to the Pole.
In many ways, Scott was a lesser man than Shackleton: weaker, vainer, more prone to despair and quite capable of taking his worries out on his men. In the 1902 expedition, Scott had to be persuaded to turn back from the Pole and, on the return to camp when Shackleton became seriously ill and could not pull his weight (leaving Scott and their companion, Dr Edward Wilson, each to take 500lb loads), Scott could not resist making digs about 'our invalid' and the 'lame duck'. Shackleton, for his part, heard Wilson tell Scott he would not last the night; this, he later recalled, made him determined to pull through. They only just made it back alive.
Both Shackleton and Scott were motivated by their mutual hatred in the years following this attempt at the Pole. Neither were natural explorers: each hoped their polar expeditions would bring them the fame and fortune they desired. But while Scott was unable to transcend his desire for glory, Shackleton turned his defeat (the Endurance never even reached land in the 1914-15 as he approached Antarctica, hoping to be the first British man to reach the Pole and return alive) into victory.
'Men wanted for Hazardous Journey,' began an advertisement Shackleton is said to have run early in 1914. 'Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.'
The expedition turned out to have been more hazardous than anyone could have anticipated. For 18 months, Shackleton and his crew were stranded on the frozen ocean beyond the land mass of Antarctica. They waited nine months for the ice to clear and then watched pack ice crush their ship, and their only apparent means of getting home. As the Endurance sank, they sailed and trekked, often from floe to floe, another several hundred miles to the remote, uninhabited Elephant Island.
There, Shackleton ordered his men to wait while he and four men boarded an open lifeboat they had carried across the ice from the Endurance and set out towards South Georgia Island. They travelled 700 miles across the South Atlantic, the most treacherous seas in the world, with only a chronometer as guide, and only three moments of sunlight in the 15 days they sailed to read it.
It took two days to get the boat ashore, in unknown waters and a howling gale, and then it was another 10 days, and an agonising march across one of the most desolate places on Earth, before they reached the tiny whaling station they were aiming for. This was in May 1916 and that August, when Shackleton sailed up to Elephant Island to rescue his waiting men, he counted the head of each member of his crew and wept for joy to know that none had perished in his absence.
The tragic irony was that many returned to die in the trenches of Northern France. 'As from the dead we came back to find the world gone mad,' said Shackleton. His achievement paled in comparison beside the horrors of the war, and the recognition he sought eluded him. To add insult to injury, Scott, under whose leadership more men died in one season than all the previous Antarctic expeditions put together, was posthumously eulogised by the British as a great romantic hero.
Scott represented for his generation those most noble of British attributes - glorious failure and misguided heroism. By some trick of the collective imagination, Scott's determination to press on to the Pole at the risk of his own and his companions' lives, his insistence that he was not 'chasing' the Norwegian Amundsen who beat him there, and his woeful inefficiency in terms of equipment and technique combined to make him into an icon.
Only a generation in the shadow of the Victorian era, with its glamorisation of mourning and its cult of defeat and loss, could have made Scott their pin-up. It is, after all, Shackleton who deserves our praise. Shackleton, who always shared a tent with the most unpopular member of his crew so that no one else would be annoyed by him; Shackleton, who gave up his boots for another of his men; Shackleton, ever-sensitive to the needs of his men, ready to encourage them on with a kind word, a joke or some preciously hoarded hot milk from his own rations.
'Scott was burdened by moral inhibitions and heroic ideals,' writes Roland Huntford, who has written books about both men, 'Shackleton was free of both.' While Scott has long been hailed as the quintessential British hero - inspiration to many generations of our sportsmen - the growing Shackletonian cult marks a shift in national consciousness, in which failure is no longer mysteriously translated into something laudable.
The Americans have long wondered why the British admire Scott over Shackleton, and perhaps an element of this change is the increasing Americanisation of British culture, as American values of pragmatism and the cult of success take hold over here.
More than that, though, Shackleton's newfound celebrity epitomises the notion that the process is often more important than the goal. Unblinking devotion to an ideal is a burden that sits uneasily on modern shoulders. 'Superhuman effort isn't worth a damn unless it achieves results,' said Shackleton. Scott could not cast off his generation's romanticisation of defeat; Shackleton could, and ended up accomplishing something far greater than he had originally set out to do. He, more than Scott, is a modern British hero. As we watch the progress of the expeditions commemorating Shackleton's achievement, and see Ellen MacArthur finish the Vendee Globe solo round-the-world race, it is good to know that his spirit lives on.
The Observer - 11th February 2001