Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Shackleton watched over his subordinates like a broody hen, quietly assessing each man's emo-
tional state. If someone was weakening physically he would order extra hot milk all round, without
revealing who needed it, so that the man would not carry the invalid's burden. When Frank Wild
had lost sensation in his hands, Shackleton tried to force him to take his gloves. Wild refused. 'If
you don't', said Shackleton, 'I'll throw them into the sea.'
His leadership skills had been learned in the hard school of the merchant navy, not the rigid and
hermetic world of the Royal Navy, and back at home he didn't fit in polar circles because he wasn't
a Navy man. Throughout his life he flitted from scheme to scheme, even standing at one time as
a Unionist MP for Dundee. He wasn't perfect, as a man or as an expedition leader. He drank too
much, smoked too much and had affairs with other people's wives. That's why so many people like
him. He's like the rest of us. Hurley noted in his diary, 'Sir Ernest's humour in the morning before
breakfast is very erratic.' During one of the attempts to get the men off Elephant Island, Worsley
recorded that Shackleton 'was human enough . . . to become irritable with me', and he treated the
gale which blew up as if it were Worsley's fault. The latter responds heroically: 'I didn't mind; I
was glad that he should have some little outlet for his misery.'
Before setting out on the first great sledging journey, with Scott and Wilson, not only had Shack-
leton never put up a tent before, he had never slept in a sleeping bag. Yet his men were devoted
to him. Frank Wild, who took over as leader of the
Quest
expedition after Shackleton's death, said
this at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on 13 November 1922: 'I am in the unique
position of having served with
all
the British Antarctic explorers of repute since my first voyage
with the
Discovery
and of having an intimate first-hand knowledge of their work in the field. My
opinion is that for qualities of leadership, ability to organise, courage in the face of danger, and
resource in the overcoming of difficulties, Shackleton stands foremost, and must be ranked as the
first explorer of his age.' Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who went south with Scott,' made a comparison
which has been hijacked and rearranged by almost every explorer ever since: 'For a joint scientific
and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash
to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of
it, give me Shackleton every time.' The finest decision ever made in the Antarctic belongs to the
Boss. It was when he decided, during the
Nimrod
expedition, to turn back just ninety-seven miles
from the Pole.
Although Shackleton knew that the Southern Ocean was 'pitiless almost to weakness', he was
an indefatigable optimist, and his power to inspire hope and courage amid seemingly desperate
misery has scarcely been equalled in the rich history of human endeavour. 'It is in these circum-
stances,' Hurley wrote, 'stripped of the veneers of civilisation, that one sees the real man . . . A
born poet, through all his oppressions he could see glory and beauty in the stern forces which had
reduced us to destitution . . .'
On another expedition a colleague noted in his diary that for Shackleton 'Antarctica did not ex-
ist. It was the inner, not the outer world that engrossed him.' To the Boss, the continent represented
much more than a landmass. 'I have ideals,' he said, 'and far away in my own white south I open
my arms to the romance of it all.' Yes boys, we will be home again, he wrote:
