When Your Life Depends on It Read online

  Extreme decision making

  When Your Life

  Depends

  On It

  Lessons from the Antarctic

  By Brad Borkan and David Hirzel

  Copyright © Brad Borkan, David Hirzel 2017

  Brad Borkan and David Hirzel have asserted their moral right to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with UK and US copyright law.

  All rights reserved.

  Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the authors.

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-945312-07-6

  MOBI ISBN: 978-1-945312-08-3

  Terra Nova Press

  P. O. Box 1808

  Pacifica CA 94044

  Cover photograph from the

  Scott Polar Research Institute.

  Dedication

  Although we grew up on opposite coasts of the United States, and ultimately settled on different continents, we realized we had the same sentiment regarding how to dedicate this book:

  To Brad’s parents,

  Jean and Harold Borkan

  and

  To David’s parents,

  Edwin F. and Doris Hirzel

  By example they taught us to consider carefully, choose wisely, and follow through with decisions large and small. We hope we have passed this on to future generations.

  We hope this book encourages you to read more about these remarkable adventures. See our Recommended Reading List at the back of the book, and our website www.extreme-decisions.com, for links to books and videos we think you might enjoy.

  To improve readability, we have kept footnotes to a minimum.

  The map and the tables at the back of the book will be a helpful reference in understanding each expedition's time scales, leaders, ships, huts, key locations, major journeys and personnel.

  All distances are in statute miles (5,280 feet), unless otherwise noted. Temperatures are shown in Fahrenheit, which was commonly used during the 1900s.

  Contents

  Map of Expeditions

  Locations in the Antarctic region

  Foreword by Dr. David M. Wilson

  Antarctic historian, grand-nephew of Antarctic explorer and scientist, Dr. Edward Wilson.

  It’s Your Call

  1 When Your Life Depends On It

  Decision making in extreme environments. It’s not like crossing the street.

  2 How Strong Is Your Will To Survive?

  Where does inspiration come from?

  3 What Do You Do When Luck Runs Out?

  Crushing disappointments and the durability of the human spirit.

  4 How Well Have You Prepared?

  The art of knowing your needs before they arise.

  5 Who Is In Charge?

  The surprising importance of the deputy leader

  6 Who Is On Your Team?

  Choosing the best from the best available

  7 Three Biscuits And Thirty-five Miles To Go

  Would you do it?

  8 Promises, Promises

  How good are you at keeping yours?

  9 Do You Agree All Is Fair In Love, War And Polar Exploration?

  Discovery or victory: the double face of polar exploration.

  10 Will The Results Be Worth The Effort?

  Going the distance to find out

  11 All Or Nothing: When Do You Take The Big Risk?

  Sometimes you just have to plunge ahead.

  12 What Is Your Higher Purpose?

  Why go?

  Postscript: Improving Your Decision Making

  Seven lessons from the Antarctic

  Tables

  Ships and huts; Key people; Some of the many highly effective teams.

  Appendix I

  Authors’ note on the expeditions of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration.

  Appendix II

  Additional information about Antarctic places and phrases used in this book.

  Appendix III

  Recommended reading

  Acknowledgements

  Notes about the photographs

  About the authors

  Map of Expeditions

  This map shows the relative locations of sites in Antarctica and the paths of the six Antarctic heroic age expeditions cited in this book. Scale is only approximate. A larger version of the map can be found on our website: www.extreme-decisions.com.

  Foreword

  By Dr. David M. Wilson

  My great uncle may be known to the world as Dr. Edward Wilson, Antarctic explorer and scientist—a gifted artist; friend of Sir Ernest Shackleton; Chief of Scientific Staff to Captain Robert Scott; and in every respect a pivotal figure in what has become known as the heroic age of Antarctic Exploration. To me, however, he was simply family.

  Great-uncle Ted. That’s how I knew him when I was growing up in the Wilson household. My grandfather’s beloved older brother. I never met my great-uncle—he died in Antarctica on the return from the South Pole in 1912, years before I was born—but I knew my grandfather and remember how he talked of his brother.

  Edward Wilson, one of ten children, was born in Cheltenham in the southwest of England, and was a man who loved the natural world and liked nothing better than to explore it. His accomplishments were many. On the Discovery Expedition he was part of the three-man team that reached the furthest south in 1902. On the Terra Nova Expedition in 1911, he led the Winter Journey in search of penguin eggs, and later was a member of the five-man Polar Party, reaching the South Pole on January 18, 1912.

  To give you an idea of what he and his companions endured in the name of science, discovery and exploration, envision this scene from the Winter Journey:

  Great-uncle Ted and his two colleagues were lying inside a small, uninsulated rock-sided shelter in the middle of an Antarctic winter, listening to the screaming wind of a blizzard as it raged outside. Suddenly their tent, pitched nearby, blew away; followed a short time later by the roof of their shelter. They were left exposed to the full ferocity of the icy tumult. Death stared them in the face. It was my great uncle’s 39th birthday.

  Without shelter they might not survive the night; without a tent, they would surely not survive the trip back. Why even embark on such a life threatening journey in the coldest, darkest part of the year? How did they live to tell the tale and what exactly did they discover? And importantly, what lessons can we learn from this remarkable team that can help with our modern day lives?

  This book is a page-turner with true stories that will sear you to the depth of your soul. It brings to life a time when ordinary people faced extraordinary challenges as they pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge against powerful forces in a hostile environment. The stories and the decision making lessons derived from them will stay with you for the rest of your life.

  A treasure trove of epic adventures from the six major Antarctic expeditions from the heroic era, this book has a central focus on the life and death decisions the men made on the ice. My great-uncle Ted was on two of those expeditions. It is only when you realise that all of the people in these stories are normal human beings like you and me that the enormity of what they achieved will astonish you.

  The message of this book is clear. You can also rise to the challenges in your life with similar courage. We all have it within us. The stories may be from over a hundred years ago, but the lessons in how to set and achieve goals, face challenges and counter adversity and risk, with teamwork, leadership, sheer grit, and t
he determination to never ever give up no matter how bad things get are timeless.

  Their accomplishments were achieved by flesh and blood, like yours and mine, and so set a benchmark for our lives today. After reading this book you have every chance of making better decisions in your personal and business life. Challenges, adversity and risk? You can learn to take them in your stride just as my great-uncle did.

  Dr. David M. Wilson

  United Kingdom

  January 2017

  Antarctic historian and author of The Lost Photographs of Captain Scott: Unseen Images from the Legendary Antarctic Expedition and Cheltenham in Antarctica: The Life of Edward Wilson as well as other books on the heroic age.

  It’s Your Call

  Antartica—the early 1900s.

  The only communication is as far as you can shout.

  You and your two companions are nearing the end of a fifteen-hundred-mile trek to a nameless spot on the South Polar Plateau.

  To say conditions are harsh would be an understatement. Temperatures can get so low that you risk frostbite even when bundled in your reindeer-hide sleeping bags. The jagged, frozen landscape provides constant challenges, including the danger of crevasses cracking open unexpectedly beneath your feet, plunging you into their depths. At times you have been on the verge of starvation.

  Your presence here today is the result of countless decisions great and small made along the way. Right now you are faced with a decision greater than any that came before. One of your companions has fallen so ill with scurvy he can no longer walk.

  Seventy miles of dangerous terrain lie ahead before you reach the safety of your base camp, and you will have to drag him on the sledge, adding an almost unbearable weight to that of your ice-encrusted tent and the last remnants of food keeping you alive.

  The reality of the situation is grim. You must maintain a steady pace each day, regardless of the weather, to reach the next depot of supplies before those on hand run out. Your daily distances have fallen off, and continue to fall. The sick man, already perilously near death, is unlikely to survive the remainder of the journey.

  With his extra weight further reducing your daily mileage, neither will you and your other companion. You all know the fate that lies ahead. The sick man tells the two of you to leave him here on the Barrier and march on ahead with the sledge and supplies, to save yourselves while you can. The three of you have developed a close camaraderie during your long walk; leaving him to perish on the ice is inconceivable. The obvious, ethical, human decision: to shoulder your burden and do your best.

  The situation is not so straightforward. You are seamen and the sick man is your commanding officer. He has commanded you to leave him behind. The one thing that has been repeatedly drilled into you throughout your entire working life is this: there is no occasion on which you can refuse to comply with the order of an officer.

  To obey means the two of you have at least a chance at survival; to refuse is mutiny, and certain death for all three of you.

  The choice is now yours—it’s your call.

  How will you decide?

  * * *

  This was a real event faced by real people. They did have to make this call. Their decision and the outcome may surprise you. You will find the rest of the story later in this book.

  Chapter 1

  When Your Life Depends On It

  Decision making in extreme environments.

  It’s not like crossing the street.

  People make decisions every day, but not like those made by polar explorers in the early 1900s. Yet, there is much that we can learn from their extraordinary stories that can help us make better decisions in our own modern lives.

  The early Antarctic explorers were not perfect decision makers. However they were exceptionally good at facing the reality of every situation, taking choices as they arose, and even if they did not make an ideal decision, making the very best of whatever situation they found themselves in.

  They set and achieved monumental goals in an extreme environment. They did this while encountering jaw-dropping amounts of adversity and risk which they overcame through teamwork, leadership, and sheer grit and determination. It is the example of these explorers’ methods—pragmatic, simple, and, quite literally, down to earth—that can instruct and guide us in our life and business choices.

  Our decisions may not be as world-shaking and dramatic, but using these stories as inspiration, there is much that can be learned from considering their situations and the decisions they made—lessons that can positively influence how we lead our lives today.

  Antarctica was once a vast terra incognita. Its continental nature was only suspected from isolated sightings of a shoreline guarded by wide belts of pack ice, with a perimeter roughly defined by the Antarctic Circle. Once within that pack ice, and landed on that shore, there could be no help expected from the outside world.

  Polar exploration up until the 1920s was largely done overland on foot, before the era of mechanized travel and reliable radio communication. The explorers travelled to the polar regions in wooden ships and were left on shore with a supply of stores and only their own willpower, strength, intelligence and, dare we say, luck to carry through their objectives. Every possible need and circumstance had to be anticipated and preplanned using a limited store of knowledge dating as far back as Captain Cook in the 1700s.

  Some decisions were made before departure from the comfort of their home ports. Others, and certainly the most interesting and compelling ones, had to be made after landing on these desolate shores, and later venturing inland, with a desire for science and discovery, and a quest to be the first to the South Pole.

  These early explorers faced the most awe-inspiring, gut-wrenchingly difficult decisions—often with life or death in the balance—with grace, determination, and even nobility. The results of their decisions were mixed. Some were good; others made dire circumstances even more hazardous. Regardless of the outcome, the stories of how they faced these decisions are unforgettable. The lessons derived from them are as important today as they were one hundred years ago.

  Examples of some of the lessons include:

  1. They met every decision head-on, and made the best of a bad decision.

  2. Large and small teams were led effectively, but as you will see, leadership on the early expeditions adapted to situations as needed. Not every leader succeeded every time and often small teams had either a designated or an unspoken second-in-command who could rise to the challenge when needed.

  3. They sought and found inspiration when needed from a variety of sources.

  4. Despite endless amounts of adversity, they never ever gave up hope, courage, determination and teamwork.

  5. They discovered that sometimes when fate had a way of preventing them from achieving one goal, it also gave opportunities to achieve a different one, which might even become more significant.

  6. Within ourselves we have untapped mental and physical strength—far more than we might think we have.

  7. They proved that when all else fails, bad luck descends, and the end is truly in sight, that we have the capacity within ourselves to act nobly—that when you run out of choices, success might be reframed as simply doing the right thing.

  Life and death decisions in the Antarctic

  This book examines many of the harrowing polar decisions made by the British, Irish, Australian and Norwegian explorers across six major expeditions between 1901 and 1917. These years have come to be known as the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. The expeditions are listed in the table on page 20.

  Their leaders, Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson, were ably seconded by men like Lt. Edward “Teddy” Evans, Frank Wild, Aeneas Mackintosh, Thorvald Nilsen, Edward Wilson, and others too numerous to name here.

  In looking deeper into the polar decisions made on these expeditions, we found that many of them were well thought out, with due consideration for the people involved and
the consequences to be faced. Some were arguably among the most difficult anyone would ever have to make, with life and death consequences for both the individual decision maker himself (all these early polar explorers were men) as well as others on the expeditions.

  The challenge was even greater because the outcome of any decision, right or wrong, would rarely be known instantly, but instead played out over many days in a hostile, frozen terrain. If wrong, recovery would not be as simple as a modern life and death decision like “swerve back into your driving lane.” An incorrect choice could result in prolonged suffering: scurvy, exhaustion, frozen limbs, snow blindness, and a cold painful death by exposure and starvation.

  Our goal in sharing these stories is to help you improve your own decision making and to provide new strategies for dealing with risk and adversity. As will be seen in the expedition stories that run throughout this book, these men set goals, they took risks, and they achieved successes, each in their own way. But most important of all, they made truly heroic decisions in the face of real adversity and, whatever the outcome, accepted the result as simply the next challenge.

  How does this relate to modern life?

  In modern life, we give scant thought to low-probability risk. We step off a curb, ride a bicycle, drive perhaps faster than we should, take a train, and do a myriad of other things with associated dangers.

  This type of risk is minimal for a number of reasons. First, it is familiar. We’ve taken these risks hundreds or thousands of times before, and seen others do the same without consequence. We learn how to make some of the more complex decisions gradually, by using training wheels on a bicycle, for example, or by taking driving lessons. There are built-in decision support systems such as lines on the roads and crossing lights. These are “controlled” decisions, where we determine the action, timing and potential results.