This week I'm tackling a topic that's been on my mind for quite some time: Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition. Shackleton was really a huge failure. Almost everything this man did failed. He failed to reach the South Pole first. He failed to cross the continent of Antarctica. He failed in many business endeavors, tobacco, stamp collecting, a Hungarian mining venture. He failed miserably in politics. He spent most of his life in debt and died penniless in 1922. And yet, the story I’m about to tell you while, yes, an epic failure in many ways, is also one of the greatest success stories of all time. Because, turns out, failure and success are not mutually exclusive and sometimes you must fail in order to truly succeed. Let’s fix that.
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Transcript of Shackleton's voice recording:
“Main results of the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907, under my command, are as follows. We reached the point within 97 geographical miles of the South Pole. The only thing that stopped us from reaching the actual point was the lack of 50 pounds of food. Another party reached, for the first time, the South magnetic pole; another party reached the summit of a great active volcano, Mount Erebus. We made many interesting geological and scientific discoveries and had many narrow escapes throughout the whole time. A typical narrow escape was when we were going up the great glacier towards the Pole. We were marching along, three of us harnessed to one sledge, in very bad light. Our last pony was being led by another man with 3,500 pounds of stores. All of a sudden we heard a shout of “Help!” coming from the man behind. We looked around and saw him supporting himself by his elbows on the edge of a cavern. There was no sign of the pony, and the sledge was jammed with its bow in the crevasse. We rushed back and helped the man out, and then hauled the sledge out. Then we laid down to have a look but nothing but a black gulf lay below. The pony may have fallen 1,000 or 1500 feet. Anyhow, he’s gone. What had happened was this: We, the first three, with our weight distributed, crossed in safety in the bad light the bridge over an unseen cavern. The weight of the pony following it was too much. It crashed through, but the swingle tree of the sledge snapped, and that saved the sledge. The man leading the pony said that he just felt a rushing sort of wind, the rope was torn out of his hands, he flung himself forward, and thus escaped. After this we four men had 1,000 pounds to pull and we were unable to pull the whole load at once, so we had to relay. That is, we hauled half our load for a mile, then we walked back a mile, and then we hauled the other half up. So for every mile we gained to the south, we had to cover three to do it. And slowly we arose up the largest and the longest glacier in the world, some days spending 12 hours doing 3 miles. Other times spending nearly half the day hauling the sledge up by means of the alpine rope. And thus we went along, and thus, we returned, having done a work that has resulted without, in great advantage to science, and for the first time returning without the loss of a single human life. And throughout all this, I was helped by a party of men who were regardless of themselves and only thinking of the good of the expedition. I, Ernest Shackleton, have today, March the 30th, dictated this in record.”
Sources - find at https://youtu.be/PDUblXbiRzw
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