President's Column

Abstract

Mitchell reviews several expedition books, including: (1) Shackleton by Roland Huntford; (2) The Nation by Apsley Cherry-Garrard; and (3) The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford.

President's Column

Windy, cold, desolate, frequent sleet, ice, and snowstorms-South Georgia is a miserable place in winter. Of course, I don't mean the Georgia I call home, where Georgia Southern University nestles snugly in Statesboro, an hour's drive from Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean, and where, as I write this in December, the temperature has reached 76 degrees. The South Georgia that boasts the hellish winter is South Georgia Island, a remote British territory lying near the Antarctic Circle, at latitude 54° south. What little I know about it comes from its role in the story of Sir Ernest Shackle ton's Endurance expedition of 1914-16. As recounted in several books, including Roland Huntford's Shackleton, this incredible adventure came to a successful conclusion due to Shackelton's extraordinary leadership.1 Whenever I am asked what books about leadership I might recommend, I skip over the usual catalog of biographies, autobiographies, and profiles of football coaches and captains of industry. The best books on leadership that I know, from the standpoint of providing both worthy models and gripping entertainment, recount the early twentieth-century Antarctic exploits of Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Falcon Scott.

Shackleton and his team of twenty-seven men planned to be the first expedition to cross the Antarctic, but before they could even set up their base camp on the continent, their ship was trapped in pack ice. They hoped to ride out the winter and continue their journey when the ship could break free during the warmer spring and summer seasons. Instead, the ice crushed and sank their ship, Endurance. Shackleton and his men removed supplies, personal possessions, and three twenty-foot lifeboats. They pitched five flimsy tents on what had become an ice floe heading away from the Antarctic, slowly dissipating.

After four months on the ice floe, the surrounding pack ice had finally broken up enough that the men could take to their boats and steer a 100-mile course to Elephant Island, one of the most remote and godforsaken lumps of rock in the entire Atlantic Ocean. Far from any shipping lanes and whaling waters, Elephant Island was not a location anyone would think to investigate in the event a rescue party was sent for the Endurance expedition. But it was the first land the men had been on in 497 days, and its glacier-covered terrain was home to enough seals and birds that Shackleton knew there would be food to maintain the main party while he and a select five-man crew set out in one of the lifeboats for their only hope of survival-South Georgia Island, more than 800 miles away.

The story of their 17-day voyage in some of the worst sailing conditions imaginable is both inspiring and appalling. Yet in their tiny vessel they survived a tidal wave and a hurricane that sank a 500-ton steamer, killing all hands on board. Despite endless fog and similar impediments to visibility, and despite having only a sextant and compass for navigation, they successfully found a tiny island that amounted to a speck in a haystack. Unfortunately, they could only safely land on the uninhabited part of the island, so Shackleton and two men had to walk across the interior of South Georgia Island to reach the whaling station on the other side. This meant traveling about 20 miles as the crow flies, but the hike meant scaling several mountain ranges more than 6,000 feet high, or finding safe passages between them. No one had ever explored the interior of South Georgia Island, so in addition to having no mountaineering gear, they had no reliable map. Yet somehow these three exhausted, frostbitten, starving men found a route to the whaling station in 36 hours, and the rescue missions for the other expedition members began immediately. When it was all over, not a single one of the 28 men lost their lives during the expedition.

I have read the story of Shackleton's expedition several times, and one of the many things I find remarkable is the way in which he was able to maintain morale and discipline through this surrealistically nightmarish ordeal. As Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a member of Robert Scott's fateful and fatal South Pole expedition, wrote after learning about the Endurance team's achievement, "I know why it is that every man who has served under Shackleton swears by him."2 In spite of the horrifying challenges they had faced, when Shackleton mounted another expedition in 1921 about half of his Endurance team flocked to rejoin him.

Unfortunately, Cherry-Garrard's experience with Scott's leadership contrasted painfully with the reports of Shackelton's men. Another Huntford book, The Last Place on Earth (originally published as Scott and Amundsen), recounts in great detail the preparations made by the teams who hoped to be the first to reach the South Pole, and by the time the reader reaches the narrative of the actual assaults on the pole, the eventual outcome appears as inevitable as a Greek tragedy.3 As Shackleton was a master leader in emergency conditions, Amundsen was the consummate planner, ensuring as much as humanly possible that emergency conditions would not overwhelm him and his men, even in the Antarctic. On the other hand, while Robert Scott had more courage and strength in his little finger than I have in my whole body, it is beyond distressing to read about the planning and execution failures attributable to his leadership that led to the deaths of Scott and his four comrades during their desperate and disorganized return from the South Pole.

Careful preparation and planning, the importance of maintaining strong interpersonal relationships within a team during emergencies-these and a hundred other leadership lessons are found in these stirring adventures. I am keen to know whether LAMA members can recommend similar books in which leadership is modeled as part of an entertaining story, whether true or fiction. If you have such a recommendation, go to http://blogs.ala.org/ LAandM.php and share it with the rest of us!

References

References

1. Huntford, Roland, Shackelton (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1986).

2. Cherry-Garrard, Apsley, "The Boss," The Nation (December 13, 1919), 397-98.

3. Huntford, Roland, The Last Place on Earth (New York: Atheneum, 1985).