The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Polar Opposites- Shifting Fame
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Polar Opposites, Shifting Fame
Full Text (849 words)Antarctic Destinies
By Stephanie Barczewski
Continuum, 390 pages, $26.95
IN 1912, Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole only to discover that he had been beaten to the Antarctic prize five weeks earlier by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott turned around and began a perilous journey back to base camp. He never made it. He and his four teammates died after two months of heartbreaking toil. The diaries they left behind recounted their struggle in harrowing detail.
Two years later, Ernest Shackleton led an expedition to Antarctica with the aim of exploring the continent much further than before. His ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice, and Shackleton led his crew to the relative safety of nearby Elephant Island. Despairing of rescue, he and a handful of men set sail in a lifeboat to cross 800 miles of the rough seas, making for South Georgia Island, east of the Falklands. After an epic 16-day journey, Shackleton and his men reached the island, then hiked to a whaling station and arranged to rescue their 22 stranded shipmates. Not a single life was lost.
The two expeditions, with their dramatically different outcomes, are classics of polar exploration. Yet as Stephanie Barczewski observes in "Antarctic Destinies," the meaning of the tales -- along with their moral lessons and cultural appeal -- has shifted over the course of a century. "In 1912," she writes, "many people saw Scott as a hero. Today, many people see him as a bumbling idiot whose incompetence resulted in his own death as well as the deaths of his four companions. In 1916, many people saw Shackleton as admirable on some level but not quite trustworthy. . . . Today, many people see him as one of the greatest leaders in human history." Her book attempts to show, as she puts it, "the malleability of heroism."
At first, Scott was revered in death as the embodiment of British manliness. "Had we lived," he wrote in one of his diary's final entries, "I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale." Scott was adduced as an exemplar of hardihood, endurance, courage and plenty else besides. No cause seemed too hopeless to hitch its wagon to his star. Even the Alliance of Honour, an anti- masturbation group, appropriated Scott's resolve in its pamphleteering.
Shackleton, by contrast, was greeted by more creditors than fans when he returned to England in late 1914. (He had undertaken the expedition only after interesting a host of investors.) And he encountered a public that, far from marveling at his ordeal, appeared to regard as unseemly the very idea of able-bodied men, on the eve of World War I, running off to polar wastes in search of adventure.
It is perhaps not surprising that Scott's reputation has undergone revision, given his team's grisly end and our inclination, in retrospect, to question the rightness of failed decisions. Shackleton's rise in recent years, however, has been puzzlingly meteoric. History long treated him with mild curiosity or indifference. The James Caird -- that plucky lifeboat that traveled so far -- gathered dust for decades at an obscure college in England and was even used as a trash receptacle. But in 1998 The Wall Street Journal noted a surging "Shackleton Mania" and, the next year, New York's American Museum of Natural History hosted an exhibition about the Endurance. An accompanying book became a best seller and publishers unleashed a flood of Shackleton titles, including business and leadership books. Movies and documentaries followed.
Why was Shackleton so suddenly ascendant? Ms. Barczewski notes that his Endurance experience matches three popular genres: man against nature, maritime adventure and polar survival. Shackleton, in short, could be recast as a prototypical action hero for the late 20th century, not least for Americans. The new Shackleton, Ms. Barczewski writes, "combined optimism and pragmatism in a stereotypically American way: he united an eternally sunny outlook and 'can-do' spirit with a hard-headed assessment of the obstacles that must be overcome."
The most exciting, though unoriginal, part of "Antarctic Destinies" traces the oft-told tales of the two expeditions. Longer sections detail various biographical and pop-cultural trends: Ms. Barczewski cites everything from scholarly tomes and magazine articles to Monty Python sketches and Chick Lit to show how the two men have been viewed by each new generation.
As she was finishing her book, Ms. Barczewski saw signs that popular estimations were changing again. Recent researchers have suggested that Scott encountered unusually bad weather; other writers have focused on the fate of the Ross Sea party, a usually forgotten sledging expedition poorly organized by Shackleton as part of the 1914 venture. It resulted in the deaths of three men.
Ms. Barczewski, for her part, prefers not to pick a winner. And who can blame her? Both Scott and Shackleton, she says, were "great men."
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Mr. Ybarra is the author of "Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt."
