Be like Shackleton- not like Scott

Be like Shackleton - not like Scott ( May 20th)May 20, 2025

Like many British schoolboys in the 70s and 80s I grew up with a mythologised version of Scott of the Antarctic.  Here was the plucky British hero who epitomized the can do never say die spirit immortalised even further by his famous companion Oates’s iconic and selfless line of ‘Im just going outside and may be some time.’ Like Clive of India or Rhodes of Africa his name was even coupled with a continent. Here was the man and the legend! So imagine my shock when I later learnt what an utter incompetent liability he was.

 There was always an insinuation that Amundsen who succeeded in being first to reach the South Pole, without dying and causing the death of all his men, had somehow behaved in a non gentlemanly way – almost as if he had cheated. Nothing I discovered could be further from the truth. If ever there was a story showcasing the phrase of “By failing to prepare you prepare to fail”  then Scott could not have done a better job of exemplifying this.

He brought new untested sleds with him to carry all his gear. Unfortunately when he got there he discovered that they sank through the ice. He also brought ponies. The first problem was the obvious issue that ponies have a large amount of weight supported by four small sharp pointed feet which is the exact opposite of what you need in the snow and ice. The second issue was that when they sweat it causes the hair covering their bodies to freeze. He had little experience in travelling by dog sled or working with huskies. Compare that to Amundsen. He lived with Eskimos to better understand how they survived in the snow. He practiced cooking and eating whale meat. He knew that with dog sleds you need to kill the weaker ones as food for the stronger ones so that they  survive and he practiced extensively using dog sleds and working with huskies.

 Unsurprisingly, with hindsight, with all this preparation and specific knowledge gathering he made it to the Pole first and returned without losing any of his men. Scott died along with all of his men that he had taken to the South Pole.

 Another famous explorer at the time was Ernest Shackleton. Although not initially recognized for what effectively was a heroic failure he is now widely regarded as a truly outstanding leader.

After his ship got trapped in the ice the crew camped on an ice floe for months while drifting north until April 7, 1916 when they saw Elephant Island.  Two days later, the ice they were living on split and sank, forcing them into tiny rowing boats. They then rowed across the South Atlantic for six days to the island, where they set foot on land for the first time in 497 days.

After nine days on the island, realising they would die as no help was coming, Shackleton decided with five others set off in a lifeboat to get help. They rowed and sailed cross 800 miles of the world’s most brutal ocean  in the middle of winter beset by storms and freezing waves, racked with hunger and exhaustion, finally arriving at the whaling station at South Georgia. Unfortunately, they had arrived on the wrong side of the island and in between them and the whaling station was an enormous, almost sheer, mountain that had never been climbed before.

Starving and exhausted, after the 800-mile ocean crossing as well as everything else in the 18 months prior, equipped only with some rope, an adze ( a small axe like tool), and a hammer, Shackleton and two crew members managed to climb up and over the mountain and down to the whaling station on the other side.

This mountain was not climbed again until almost a hundred years later by a team of fit and well-trained climbers using specialist equipment – they only just managed it then and described it as one of the world’s most technically difficult climbs.

 Having got to the whaling station, Shackleton didn’t rest but commandeered a boat to get back to Elephant Island and rescue his men. The first boat failed to break through the ice, so he found another boat, which also failed.  Then he found a third, which eventually got through the ice to rescue the remaining crew members on Aug. 30 1916,  630 days ( almost twenty months) since their ship first got stuck. All 27 men were rescued. Despite all the hunger, exhaustion, bitter cold and extreme challenges, he didn’t lose a single man.

I cannot fathom how exhausted he must have been when they reached South Georgia, only to find an enormous never-climbed mountain between him and help.  Yet, armed with no equipment except an adze, he literally cut his way into the mountain and up and over it.  His thinking was that there was no other way to get help and rescue his men, so it just had to be done.

While I would never compare a bootstrapper’s  challenges of a to anything like the life and death scenarios Shackleton and his 27 men faced, there are applicable lessons to be learned and inspiration to be taken from his grit, resilience, and his perseverance in the face of what must have seemed insurmountable odds and finally in his attitude that  no one else was going to do it, so it was down to him to.

As a bootstrapping founder you will constantly find yourselves in unique, new and unusual situations. If you can prepare as much as possible in advance, unlike Scott, and show the resilience, determination and grit of Shackleton you stand a good chance of succeeding.

The other advantage that Amundsen had was he knew about the 20 mile march- next week’s blog….