Camp Gagnon - The Man That Survived Antarctica for 47 Days

Episode Date: October 28, 2022

Tim Jarvis has re-enacted two of the harshest Antarctic expeditions ever, choosing to do them in the original clothing & gear used a century ago.Like Douglas Mawson, he pulled a sled alone across the Antarctic for 300 miles. And like Ernest Shackleton, he led a small team in a row boat for 2 weeks in the most dangerous polar ocean in the world. This is his story. Welcome to camp.The Man That Survived Antarctica for 47 DaysMy name is Mark Gagnon and I do a podcast called Flagrant with Andr...

What was the darkest day? We lost three of our guys to very bad feet, frostbite, that sort of stuff, trench foot, where your toes are just totally swollen and distended, you can't do anything. It was just a really dark time, because again, people are looking at you saying, okay, now what? Tim Jarvis has reenacted two of the harshest Antarctic expeditions ever, choosing to do them in the original clothing, but the same exact gear used a century ago.

Like Douglas Mosson, he pulled a sled alone across the Antarctic for 300 miles. And like Ernest Shackleton, he led a small team in a rowboat for two weeks in the most dangerous polar ocean in the world. This is his story. Tim Jarvis, thank you so much for being here. Nice to be here. This is very exciting. I know yesterday you were speaking to some of the brightest minds in America at Yale, and now you're talking to me. So things have gone terribly wrong for you in the last 24 hours.

You mean you're not one of the brightest minds? No, no, I don't think I am. I don't think. But hopefully after this conversation, maybe I'll be a little more. I'll manage my expectations. That's all right. That's right. Yeah, maybe I'll be a little bit more enlightened.

But I found your story. I thought, I think you are fascinating. A researcher, scientist, conservationist, and an adventurer, an explorer, which seems like a crazy title to give someone, an adventurer. But you are as true to that definition as possible. And you have a cool accent. I love that. I've been practicing in the car coming down here. Yeah, this is, I'm just, I'm blown away by you.

And also, you're six foot four? Five. Okay. All right, six foot five. When I'm stoop, I'm six four. For no reason. The pressures of life. Why are you so tall?

This seems absurd for an adventurer. This seems like a detriment. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure. In the jeans. Yeah, I guess. Pressure of life is compressing me, pushing me down. Now, there's a famous adventurer who you replicated his journey, Sir Douglas Mawson.

Yes. Also six-five. Yes, yes, that's right. Could you tell me a little bit about Douglas Mawson's journey and then I want to know about your reenactment of that journey. What is his story? Well, you know, I'm from UK originally and I moved to Australia and I moved to a town called Adelaide where Mawson, as it happens, is from. He's long since dead, but that's where he's from. And I got there and I'd been into the polar stuff for a long, long time and someone said, hey, you're the same sort of side. You remind me

of Mawson. You're the same sort of size as Mawson, same height as Mawson. You're a scientist from the UK who's moved to Adelaide like he had done. And he had done an experience. where both his colleagues died. The first one fell in a crevasse in Antarctica and he went down the hole with the dog team and the biggest sled which contained 80% of the food. So once that guy was gone, Mawson and the surviving guy had 320 miles to go to get back to camp with only 20% of the food they needed to do it. Their original mission was to traverse Antarctica, correct? Their original mission was to traverse a particular bit of Antarctica that he was really interested in. It was near the South magnetic pole.

Right. Because the thing that people need to know is that the South geographic pole, 90 South and the South magnetic pole, where your compass gets drawn, where the southern bit of your compass gets drawn to, I know we're near one another. In fact, they're about a thousand miles apart. Is that really? Yeah, they're a long, long way apart. I don't realize it.

Yeah, so he was trying to get to the source of magnetism. That's what he was really interested in. And this is around 19... This is around 1913. 1913. So just before First World War. Right. But once that first guy had died, this 300.

120 miles suddenly on only 20% of the food you need to survive look really daunting and sure enough halfway home the second guy died of what morson described as fever so he wasn't sure basically this is murts right mertz exactly right zavian mertz Swiss cross-country ski champion doctor you know he was a very very cool sort of guy very accomplished guy um but he died horribly in morson's arms you know it soiled his pants he just he just he was hallucinating he was in convulsions and you know, it was pretty traumatic for Mawson. And then Mawson was the sole survivor of the trip. But everyone said, look, surely, given the state Mawson was in,

did he need to maybe cannibalize Mertz after his death? And so my idea was very simple. Do it the same as Mawson had said he'd done it. But in my case, I traveled with this increasingly nervous Russian guy who had the need arisen. I might have needed to, you know, take a bit of his thigh or something like that. Anyway, I can report that he's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He had some nice legs, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're a bit bony, you know. But I lost 75 pounds in the effort of just trying to do it with the same calories as Mawson. Right. So talk to me about that. So break that down. So you got to the true edge of Antarctica, which...

Yes, yeah. I'm right on the coast of Antarctica at this stage in a very, very heavily crevassed area full of big glaciers and it's dangerous terrain. And, you know, the temperature. just fluctuate between in Celsius terms, minus 15, minus 20 degrees. So it's actually very similar to Fahrenheit. When you get below zero to that amount, it's roughly the same kind of number.

Right. And then all the way up to sort of quite warm temperatures is sort of, you know, five degrees above. Very warm. Very warm. So you're very warm. Sforching almost. Yeah, that's right.

But I mean, the problem is it makes everything wet. So I'd rather have cold all the time, because as soon as stuff gets wet. Right. I would find that I would sleep in my reindeer skin sleeping bag and he would get soaking wet during the course of the night. So I'm sleeping on the snow, right? Because Mawson had lost most of his stuff.

So I copied what he didn't have. To the inch. Yeah, absolutely everything. All the equipment. Leather boots, hobnail boots. Yeah, what does that look like? So what do you have with you? What are you wearing?

So look, back in the day, they used to wear cotton smocks, literally, about maybe twice the thickness of your, of a shirt that someone would wear to the office. You know, nothing really, just enough to keep the wind off. Right. And the main emphasis is on breathability, because Antarctica is the driest, windiest place of the world. So you need the clothes to breathe, but keep the wind out. You're not worried about waterproofing because it's the driest continent in the world also.

We've had some places no snowfall for 150,000 years. So it's like, you know, very, very dry. So you're not expecting to get wet. So you're wearing that, you wear woolens underneath. and you wear leather boots and you know with just little hobnails almost like a golf

stud on the base of it just to give you some grip and you had to get these custom manufactured they don't make this anymore everything made from scratch a lot of research to basically rebuild all the gear for the trip

and in fact what I did was there's an English actor called Kenneth Branner who'd been in a show about Shackleton and they had borrowed one of Morson's outfits from a museum and copied it for the Shackleton show, a modern show they made, like a drama program. I then borrowed some of those outfits to use for my real life Morrison expedition. So everything

went full circle. That's a huge compliment to the costume artist. It is. That they created something that was close enough that you're like, yeah, I'm going to take this to an expedition. Yeah, a Halloween costume. Although it performs pretty badly, I have to say, I mean, you know, it's, it's, uh, You know, it is what it is. It's just not up to the task of really the extreme conditions. And you're trekking across this stretch of Antarctica with just a sled. Just a sled, same weight, wooden sled, copied from the original of the museum, which came back only because Morson made it. Everyone else died, but he made it.

So I copied the sled exactly. I copied all the clothing, ate the same kind of food. Only thing I didn't do is eat people. And the idea was to see whether it could be done with the food that he said he had. the need to eat. Did you eat dogs? I ate the equivalent of dog meat. That was the thing.

I couldn't eat dogs, so I ate kangaroo. Oh, really? And kangaroo meat is very similar to dog meat and that it's just pure protein. There's no fat. Interesting. So I actually had a nutritionist to really look carefully at that. So I didn't want any kind of cheating. Right.

You take stuff that's got a bit more calories and people are going to say, aha. And that makes a big difference. Makes a big difference. And did you prepare it the same? Because I know that Mosson would boil it and they would kind of add some things to it to try to make it almost like stewy. Did you do things somewhere? Yeah, yeah. They make stuff called Hoosh, which is basically a pot of boiling up everything you've got. You put a bit of whiskey and you put tea, you put sugar, you put congealed animal fat, you put a bit of dog meat and

off you go. It's not great, but when your body needs it, it's good. Yeah. And it's okay. You didn't eat any of the liver though, right? Didn't need any the liver. The idea was to have a control experiment because they ate dogs and the idea was to see if I did everything else, same, eating only a fraction of the amount of food you need to really survive in those places, because you've got to imagine that you're putting out more calories than a Torda France rider on a daily basis, about 10,000 calories. You're burning just with the effort of pulling a sled and the cold. And then I'm only eating 2,000 calories.

So you're burning maybe 30 miles, bars worth of energy a day, and you're consuming about four. Yeah, you're at a deficit. So you're at a deficit big time. I mean, I'd finish my food by 10 a. Oh, wow. And I had to wait until the next day to have the next small amount of food. And it's really hard when you try to go to sleep at night in a wet reindeer skin sleeping bag. Yeah.

On the surface of the snow with all the cold coming through, on your own with, you know, these incredible blizzards with these wind speeds, threatening to tear apart the fabric of this old tent. Yeah. Some nights I'd have to sit up and just push my back against the fabric of the tent. tend to stop the blizzards just tearing the whole thing to pieces because if the tent goes you've you know you've had it did anyone try to talk talk you out of this well it's too late once you're there that's the trouble it's like a parachute jump it's one moment of stupidity and the rest is kind of gravity you know but this is this is this is this is stupidity when you're planning it getting

a costume what are you trying to say yeah no I mean I think you know the difficulty with this kind of stuff is that your reputation is everything so if you say you're going to do something I like to follow through on what I say I'm going to do. And as soon as you start pulling the pin because things get a bit tough, then your reputation becomes tarnished and sort of game over. So you've got to see it through. That's what's interesting about you and Mawson and Shackleton, comparing you to them.

They were in a time and place where they didn't really have a choice. Mawson was in the situation where he was a researcher and used the best equipment of his time. And once Mertz died, he had no choice. choice but to go back. And what's interesting about you is that you had a choice, but you chose to persevere through that, which I think is significant. It's true. You know, there are a couple of things. They used to call them iron men in wooden boats. They travel in wooden boats for their iron men. I always like that. But yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, one of the big psychological problems with doing an old expedition as a modern person is you know that all this other equipment exists that

would make things a hell of a lot easier, like a GPS, cortex, Mars, bars. Yeah. Stop using your everyday life. Flashlights, things like that. Yeah, anything to make life easier, but you're deliberately depriving yourself, whereas those guys just use, like you said, state of the art stuff. It may have been brutal, but at least... Psychologically, they didn't think, oh, I wish I could just have my cell phone. That's right.

You had the pleasure of modernity that then was taken away. That's right. And those modern comforts and everything. It does make it difficult. Look, psychologically, it's not something I really anticipated until I got down there. and then suddenly that weighs really heavy on your mind. But you know the thing about humans is that we're so adaptable, and this is kind of both our strength and our weakness, I think.

But we're so adaptable that after about a week you start to become that person, particularly when I used to look at John, his real name is Ebgeny, by the way, but I would look at him, and as the beard started to appear, and he started to get more emaciated, and the clothes started to get more dirty and wrong. ragged, he started to become those people I'd seen in those early images. And you derive a strength from seeing them. You think, well, we need to live up to the uniforms we're wearing. And it becomes almost like a kind of badge of honor. It's really quite something. So talk to me about like the

first week. So you're on the ice. You're walking. You feel pretty good, I imagine, because you've been training up into this point. Yeah. What point does it start to feel like, oh, this is really challenging. This is really difficult. Well, to be honest, it was challenging right from the outset, because, I mean, Yes, we were sort of relatively fresh, but at that stage in the expedition, Mawson and Mertz still had a few dogs left. So even though the dogs were weak, they'd lost the big dog team down the hole, but they still have five or six dogs left in the smaller dog team. And so those dogs continued to pull until they could pull no more,

and then they fed the weakest to the strongest. But even up to about 10 days in, they, you know, they were only just, they killed the last dog, ginger, the poor old ginger got, you know, got the chop and then was eaten by Mawson and Mertz. who consumed everything. Pores, ears, you know, all the awful, you know, liver, kidney, brain, they consumed everything. That was the most interesting part. That's why I brought up liver before. Yeah. It's because Mawson was a great leader, it seemed like, from the text. And he was with Mertz, and Mertz is in this tent and he's dying and he's shriveled and he's just choosing not to walk. And he's,

I guess, enduring some type of psychosis. And he is having a hard time eating. So Mawson, in his charity says, hey, let me give you the better parts of the dog and like the liver, things that are really nutritious and nutrient dense and how many like the paws and the brain and things like that. Yeah. And that potentially could have spelled error for the mission. Can you explain on that? Yeah. More than I think thought he was doing the right thing by feeding Mertz the offals, so the liver,

the kidneys, things like that because they were softer, more palatable because the dogs by this stage were just skin and bones. So he thought, you know, let's not give him the stringy bad stuff. let's give him the really rich stuff. Maybe he'll come good. And, of course, inadvertently, he was poisoning him. Because had he, you know, this is where you go back to some of the Norwegian explorers, polar explorers.

You know, Norway is up near in the Arctic. And they used to talk to the indigenous people and they really knew you just don't eat the awful of any animal, polar bear, you know, dog. You just don't do it because they contain toxic levels of vitamins for people. So it's vitamin A toxicity is what he got. And livers contain a lot of that. So he thought he was doing the right thing as she was killing Mertz. Oh, that's wild.

So you are on your journey, your expedition. And about how long are you traversing the Arctic with a sled or the Antarctic with a sled? So, I mean, look, I've done many trips down there, but that particular one was 47 days. It took me before I sort of fell over the finish line at the end, having continued, continued on with John for 24 days. So the idea was that we'd either cover the same distance as Mawson and Mertz had covered before Mertz died or taken the same amount of time that they were together, which is 23, 24 days.

And then John would be extracted regardless by a medical team. And then I'd be left on my own for the next, you know, month and just see how I fared basically. I didn't turn up to the end point. They'd assume that something was wrong. It was kind of, you know, it was challenging. Yeah. And I'm curious. So there's two components of this that are obviously fascinating, the physical and the mental.

So I guess first, the physical. You're losing weight every single day, working at a deficit. Are you... About two pounds a day, you're losing, yeah, weight. Two pounds a day. Two pounds a day, yeah. And are you getting injured? Like, how are you keeping your body fresh?

Like, what is the strategy for that? You're just not. I mean, as I say, I mean, you really rely on two things. you know, food and rest to make any kind of recovery down there. And, you know, the food was just woefully inadequate. I'm sort of 7,000 calories in deficit a day. So it's 22 miles bars worth of energy a day in deficit for what I actually need. And then, you know, lying in the sleeping bag where you can normally regenerate in a modern expedition

because you've got mats underneath, you're stopping the cold coming through. No. I'm in a wet reindeer skin sleeping bag. No recharging. And the difficulty is that thing gets wet because my body heat escapes. melts the snow beneath me, makes it wet. When I get out of that in the morning, roll it up, put it on the sled, and pull it around in minus 20.

It freezes solid. So to get into it in the end of the evening, you're just cracking it to get it open to unroll it, and then it's frozen. And then you get into a frozen thing, and then your body heat obviously warms it up, and then you're wet again, and then the cycle repeats itself. So you're just either freezing or worse.

You're just going downhill, you know, quickly. Right. Quickly. And the first half of the, of the, expedition. How does that compare it to the second half physically? So look the second half was essentially, it was in two halves. So John was there for the first half and I was on my own for the second. So, you know, once he'd gone, suddenly all the problems, all the judgments you've got to make about whether the terrain is too crevassed to travel a particular route, whether you think the tent's going to

withstand the next blizzard, injuries you have, equipment failing, just a bit of humor in the evening and just having a good old chat about something, suddenly you haven't got anyone to share that with, and then you're in a world of pain just on your own. And that actually is psychologically very challenging, and it actually felt like he died because suddenly there was this space where he had been, and now you're on your own in the Antarctic.

It's pretty unforgiving as a place. I imagine that moment when I read Mawson's account that he's in this tent holding Mertz, and then Mertz passes away, the feeling of having another human being with you to then silence. and the wind, you're the only person to hear it. You are completely alone.

It's just you and your own thoughts. It's right. You know, like many of the critics who'd said, look, one of the main arguments was used for the fact that Mawson may have needed to eat Mertz to make it, the calories his body, dead body gave actually got Morson through. One of the things was, apart from the amount of food he needed, was the fact that he stayed for a couple of days with Mertz at that point when he died. Right.

And people said, this is him coming to terms of the decision to take some of his flesh. I personally think, you know, you've been through everything with this guy. And, you know, and it's a very lonely place. It's a brutal place, really lonely. And, you know, even a dead body provides some sense of companionship. I mean, it sounds strange. And I just felt that he was just coming to terms of the fact that he was going to leave his friend behind and sort of walk away. And that's tough, tough to do.

Yeah. Now, talk me through the psychological aspect. So are you meditating throughout this? Like what is happening internally? Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, expeditions are all about managing real extremes of mood mentally. And, you know, the trouble with an expedition where you're on a starvation ration is your blood sugar levels are low. You're extremely cold.

You're completely exhausted. And it's very difficult to remain focused and remain positive. You kind of go from sometimes appreciating the enormity of what you're doing and really kind of kind of getting off on that. Other times you're very kind of goal focused. You think if I can just get to the end of this next hour, I can, you know, reuse that tea bag one more time and see if I can get anything out of it. Other times you think about, you know, friendships you've had with people that have now no longer part of your life and you go off on this kind of great, you know, journey in your mind. Other times you kind of, you know, you just think of things and you intellectually kind of

analyze them. Other times you think, look, I'm just a guy at the bottom of the planet spinning around at 20,000 miles an hour, going around a relatively insignificant star, somewhere on the outer arm of a fairly insignificant galaxy, somewhere in the universe, and you just get really esoteric about it all. So I guess that's kind of meditative in some way. Right. And, you know, you come back with a different appreciation for life. You spend so much time on your own and so much time worried about dying that you actually come back and really live life more fully actually as a result are you thinking about your girlfriend wife anything like that is there well yeah i mean she was my girlfriend at the time and then i thought well you know i think we

should take this further you know because you're there and and and uh all the important things in life you know assume a far greater you know place and and you see perspective and i thought i'll ask get to marry me when I get back if I can make it through this thing. And did you? I did. Oh, wow. I did. I don't know how you bring that up. I don't know if you're like, hey, compared to the Antarctic wasteland, you're not too bad. Yeah, that's right. You know, relatively speaking, you're good compared to the terrible stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So you just landed and how quickly after you ended the expeditions you proposed? Well, you know, I got to the end of this thing in 47 days and I was in very poor shape, of course. And you were already on one knee. Like, that's perfect.

Yeah, it was already, I was already groveling and it's been that way ever since. So the You know, so I'm at a low ebb. And in Mawson's case, he missed his ship home, by the way, when he survived. That's the craziest part of the story. Would you mind explaining that? Yeah. So he gets to the end. He decides to rest at a little cache of food about a day out from the hut where he thinks

there may just be people who are there to meet him from the expedition team. And he thinks, I'll just sit this out. This is another reason that the people who said he must have cannibalized Merz gave. They were saying, look, this is him coming to the service of the expedition. fact that he's going to meet his other colleagues and he's not going to be able to look him in the eye and they're going to see that he committed this terrible sin. But actually he was just so exhausted, I think, that he just stopped to eat this case of food. It's reasonable.

And in so doing, you know, 24 hours elapses. Meanwhile, the ship leaves. So his voyage home goes in that, in that 24-hour period that he chose to rest, which is kind of disastrous. And as he gets to the hut, he sees the steam on the horizon and the ship sailing away. Now, looking at it, subsequently, it's probably saved his life because he was just so completely knackered that, you know, he had no opportunity to, you know, he wouldn't have made the, through a, through a rough journey in a sailboat across the southern ocean, you know. And he spent, you know, a month just getting back to some sort of normality in the, in the

heart. And I went through a not dissimilar thing. I mean, I arrived at a base, ultimately, and I had about four weeks there just resting and trying to recuperate. And before I two got on ship and it was a two-week journey to get back to. And what does that recuperation process look like? Civilisation. You start eating normally. You're getting a lot of rest. But, you know, it's a bit like someone who's really thirsty, who sort of comes out of the desert.

You know, you can't just give them a glass of water or something. You've got to just allow them to really slowly bring themselves back around. And so I had to just start, I had to continue eating more or less the same sort of stuff, but just in slightly bigger quantities build myself up over three or four weeks. Now, can you tell me about the 24 hours of reaching basically the finish line? Like, what is happening to you psychologically at that point? Your body's probably at its worst. Mentally, are you at your worst?

Yeah, you know, I mean, the thing with expeditions is you get so good at breaking down the total into small pieces that actually, funnily enough, you know, even when you get to the last day, it doesn't feel like you just think, you know, close but no cigar, you know, 46 days, 47 days doesn't make any difference. I've still got to keep it all together. You're looking for crevasses. You're looking to make sure you keep going. And I knew in my mind that we had one experiment to do right at the very end of the expedition,

which was for me to deliberately climb into a crevests and see if I could get myself out on the rope hand over hand like Morseen did. This is like just an experiment we did because he had fallen in and he got himself out hand over hand. Many people said happy he did that. The sled, I guess, trapped him in the cross. on the top of the crevasse and it was just lucky and he managed to he'd fallen in a few times before and so the rope that was attached to his waist

that he used to pull the sled he'd made knots in so that in the event he did fall in and the sled kind of acted like an anchor he could he could climb up the knotted rope and that's exactly what happened so I did the same thing so I knew that was coming and I just put all my energy into just trying

to get out and then just fell on a heap at the end you know and you don't even you don't even celebrate you're just too too tired you're just please you're not doing it again because I had no rest days for 47 days so I mean the next day you just you just sleep and yeah you know are you spiritual you know I'm not a kind of denominational denominational denominational religious kind of persons I don't have any particular faith per se but I've had some pretty interesting experiences where you know I've really felt that there was something else there

you know and in my mind altered state i even over you know you you've got the thrumming of the guidelines of the tent in a blizzard and you hear voices and i i heard the footfalls of a person walking outside the tent things like that when i was there and you just wonder you know what that is you know could be just your state of mind but is it something else or is it something within you that sort of emerges when you put yourself in this state of duress, I don't know. Right. So you finished that expedition and you get some public acclaim. A lot of people are really excited both for you completing this but also completing it with

period specific gear. Yeah, that's right. Which is remarkable at the time. Yeah, not least of all the Mawson family. They were very happy. It was a big media thing in Australia because Mawson is kind of, he was on the old $100 bill. He was a famous kind of guy. Yeah. And so a book came out, a film came out. And he's vindicated. He's not a, he's not a cannibal. Which in my opinion, I'm like, even if he was a cannibal, like, who really cares? I wouldn't have judged him. And it wasn't my central thing. I just wanted to honor him, but it became about the cannibalism angle for the media, you know, and that's the way it was.

But yeah, I was happy. The family were happy. And, you know, I didn't ever claim I'd done exactly what he did because, of course, he was down in Antarctica for a lot longer than me. Sure. Doing stuff before that accident and before that 47-day trip. But, you know, all was good. and then I um you could have just called the quits you could have gone researching gone to environmentalism just focused on that yeah probably would have been a little easier not in my personality that's the trouble

um someone reaches out to you someone very interesting so yeah so i got a call from uh alexandra shackleton who is sir owner shackleton's granddaughter the honorable alexander shackleton i should say and she said you know congratulations great achievement now I've got another challenge for you, and that began seven-year process of retracing the journey of Shackleton. And now I've done lots of expeditions. I've only done two the old way. One was Mawson, and now I was embarking on this Shackleton expedition. Now, Sir Ernest Shackleton is how I became aware of you in the first place.

I had read Endurance. Yes. I actually talked about it on the podcast. Yeah. Wonderful book. Yeah. It's just an amazing book. More importantly, just an amazing story.

Yes. And I became enamored with Shackleton both as like a man and as a leader. And I guess for me personally, I'm 26. I sometimes have a hard time like sort of grasping what masculinity means. And like I sometimes like wrestle with what those terms are and like how to really situate myself like as a leader and who can I look to. And Shackleton became one of those people for me. I really admired him so much. And I just thought he was an amazing person.

Amazing. And I'm curious, would you mind just breaking down sort of like his original journey and what his original voyage was supposed to be? and what ended up occurring? Yeah, well, you know, Shackleton was around in the heroic era, just like Mawson and Scott and Amundsen, the Norwegian, and in fact, Piri from the States. They were all these heroic era explorers. And actually, Shackleton did four expeditions. His first one, he was with Scott on an expedition to Antarctica.

Is that the Nimrod? Nimrod was Shackleton's second expedition. The first one that he led, but the second expedition that he'd been on after, was on Discovery with Scott. Nimrod was his first one where he tried to get to the South Pole on foot. Turn round. With Marson, I think. Yeah, so Morson was there too, interestingly. But Morseum was on another, often these expeditions had teams that did different things. So Morseum went off again to try, with this fascination with the magnetic pole, off he went on a journey to try and get to that. In fact, he did do it. And Shackleton, meanwhile, went for the geographic South Pole, which is the big one.

Right. And he famously turned around 97. miles from his goal, his life goal. And when he got home, he said to his wife, I thought you'd rather a live donkey than the deadline. But he saved everyone in the course of doing that. Whereas a lesser person might have just plowed on and sacrificed the team in pursuit of his ego, really, which he didn't, which is amazing. He then went down again.

So after that, Scott and Amundsen. reached the South Pole. Scott, of course, died with everyone. Amundsen made it, and that goal had been achieved. So Shackleton went on his famous expedition, which is to try and cross the whole of the continent, one side to the other via the South Pole. And everything went wrong on that trip.

And the survival journey that emerged out of the kind of ashes of that expedition were really a far bigger story than the original goal of crossing Antarctica would have been. Yeah. So I guess in short, and correct me if I'm wrong, any of the details. Him and a crew of 52, 53 men. It was 27 plus him. It was 28 men on that trip. So 27 men, they leave Buenos Aires. They go to Antarctica. They have this wooden ship called the endurance. They get stuck in an ice sheet. And then now they're stranded on an ice sheet for basically

like six months, eight months, something like that. Yeah, they get stuck in the ice. The ice closes in around the hull of the ship, crushes it. And in the end, the only thing holding it up is the fact the ice is packed around it tightly. As soon as the wind changes direction, ice goes apart, down goes ship. And they've been stuck for 10 months on the ship. Right. They then live for another five months on the same ice that had claimed the ship. Which is just insane. In just a series of really precarious camps. One was called ocean camp. One was called patience camp. And, you know, things were looking pretty bleak. And this ice flow is basically breaking in half every couple days.

It's, and they're on it. It's like a mile long. And then it breaks in half. Now it's half a mile. Oh yeah, and it became smaller and smaller and smaller. In the end, it was about the size of a tennis court, and they were just on this thing, 27 of them under three of the upturned lifeboats from the ship, which are these 22-foot keeless rowboats, basically, killer whales in the water, winter approaching, not enough food, you know, what comes next, you know. Yeah, just floating in the ocean, basically, aimlessly. Yeah, and he'd been, meanwhile, Shackleton has got them playing soccer and, you know, doing lectures,

and all the kind of stuff you don't do if you think you're going to die. So he was clever because it made people feel that he had the measure of these conditions and that somehow he was going to get them out of it, you know, because he wasn't panicking. Right. It's just amazing. Yeah. It's incredible leadership. And then they basically float on this ice until they get close to a little island.

And not even close, really, five days out from a little island. That's right. And then they all jump on some boats. Yeah. And they row through a storm in the Antarctic, like the most insane shit. ever and they land on this little island i mean you know it look even though i've done what i've done i still marvel at that trip because i mean you know their hand was forced the ice broke up underneath them one night and so they put the boats in the water like you said five days but i mean these are

keelless rowboats with no deck with mountainous seas the temperature is is freezing the water is freezing literally freezing the only reason it's still liquid is because it's kind of saline yeah otherwise it'd be just totally solid and you know they're hypothermic they're you know they're you know they're hyperthermic they're you know, they just don't have enough food. They have no rest. You know, one guy's bailing constantly with a bucket to stop the whole thing just going under. You know, they can't feel their hands. There's one moment in the book that's so fascinating where they say they would rather be in the water.

Because at this point, the rowboats are full of water. Yeah. And they would rather be in the water because the water is warmer than the air. Yeah, that's right. That's an insane concept to even imagine. Yeah. You know, look, I know what it's like. And it is, it is, you know, it's just.

brutal really, I mean, to make that decision. So they make it basically, and they've been now on ice for, they haven't been on solid ground for over a year. Yeah, 22 months actually. But if you include the journey down from the UK and, you know, it's insane. It's 22 months. And I'm reading the book and they finally make it to land. And I go, oh, thank goodness, it's over. Yeah.

And that's kind of where the story starts. That's right. In a way. And this is where your story starts also. That's right. So what happens for them and what do you recreate? So they get to this island called Elephant Island. named after elephant seals that live there, not the real type, obviously.

And it's just on the way to nowhere. It's just the remote, jagged, fang of rock sticking out of the Southern Ocean. No human population, to this day, it's just too remote, too in hospitable. And, you know, they all celebrate, you know, save themselves as far as they're concerned. Shackleton knows better he thinks we're not going to survive the winter. It's coming fast. Only thing for it is to try and affect some sort of rescue mission. Trouble his nearest place is 900 miles away, 800 nautical miles away across the roughest ocean in the world.

The only vessel they've got is a kind of rowboat, basically. So he takes the five strongest men, puts planks on the most seaworthy of the three rowboats, taking them off the other two boats, and leaves 22 of the guys behind on Elephant Island and gets together with the five strongest, and off he goes across the southern ocean on this perilous rescue mission. insane and basically the stakes are he has all his men on elephant island yeah and he's going on a boat with five other guys and they're they're going out into this uncharted ocean trying to hit a tiny little island of whalers and if they miss the island in either direction they're dead that's about right and all the men that he brought with him that he was supposed to care for are

also dead absolutely yeah that's right he doesn't get through everybody dies basically right and And, you know, even if he misses South Georgia, which is the name of the island he's trying to get to, boat with no keel, which is the kind of vertical thing sticking out of the bottom of the boat on modern yachts, you don't just turn around and have another go. You see it going past in the rear view mirror. You can't turn around and sail back because the winds and currents are pushing you kind of north. Wow. And you can't tack upwind in a boat with no keel, right?

I didn't realize that. You can point that way and try and kind of climb out of the lobster pot. But in reality, you're just going to get pushed backwards. Oh, that's crazy. So he had to get there and he had to land where he could. If he'd missed it, the next land is Namibia in Africa about 4,000, 3 and a half, 4,000 miles further on. He only brought rations for four weeks anyway. You know, they're already, they're already in terrible shape.

Right. He lands, but he lands on the wrong side. You know, he lands on the southern side of the island and the whaling stations, they're on the northern side. And in between is a mountain range and no one's ever climbed it. Yeah. And he has no climbing equipment. He has no climbing kind of background. he's got one little length of rope he's made some crampons you know the spikes on the bottom of the boots taking nails out of the packing cases from the boat you know the ship's stores yeah um and you know off they go into the mountains of south georgia which is technical mountaineering with nothing basically no tent yeah so they can't stop if you stop you die yeah's remarkable and he crosses in the time that even reinhold messiner the world's greatest modern mountaineer has been unable to replicate wearing plastic plastic plastic

boots, Cortex jackets, sap phones, GPS, you know, Mars, bars probably, you know. Yeah. And incredible. What's remarkable about that leg of the journey, I guess two legs, right? That's what you did. You recreated that. Yeah. So we rebuilt the boat.

I spent years researching. Rebuilt the boat. Learn to traditionally navigate. So, you know, using a sexton to get an angle to the sun. Yeah. So talk to me about the sexton. This is so remarkable to me. Because I'm thinking like, okay, I'm here on Elephant Island.

I got to get to southern Georgia. Yeah. I'll have my GPS. I'll look at the stars. I know where I'm going, as long as I'm going the right way. That's not really true. No, that's true. I mean, look, a sexton is one of those devices where you look through it and it gives you an angle and you set it and you take an angle to any celestial object.

Moon, sun, stars. The difficulty is southern ocean is you just don't see them. You know, it's foggy, it's claggy. You can't see anything. and you've got to see, if you're going to use the sun, you've got to see the sun when it's at the high point in the sky where you are. There's no point seeing it as low on the horizon. It's got to be at that high point.

So on the occasion, you see it, you've got to kind of look at it, take a bearing, write down the numbers, do the calculations, and then look at it again a couple of minutes later. If it's climbed higher, you've got to then disregard the last reading. And you keep going until it starts to dip, and then you take that one. and you run the numbers and then you work out your latitude. So where you are on the planet, on the horizontal lines, north-south, you know, doesn't tell you where you are east-west.

That's guesswork, all right? That's just, you've got to kind of get, that's dead reckoning. Yeah. And, you know, he has two storms, a hurricane. He's got seas, which are 75 feet from peak of one wave to trough of the next, you know, it's it's brutal stuff boats threatening to capsize the whole time and you know

he makes it he makes it yeah it's remarkable crosses the mountains raises the alarm saves all the men you know it's just uh edmund hillary said it's the greatest survival journey of all time yeah it might be now you were crazy enough to recreate it so talk to me what was the challenge like while you're you know leaving elephant island

basically in your own tiny little topless rowboat what happens to you know in the first week? What's happening psychologically? So, you know, we built a basic deck like he did, but, you know, it leaks a lot. And, you know, we did this voluntarily, right?

So you get in the boat, you push off, you're not sure it's the right thing, but you do it anyway. And once you're, something then switches, as soon as you're 200 yards offshore, you're on Shackleton's journey, there's no going back. So all you've got to do is kind of steal your resolve to just make the first step,

And then the rest is kind of the same journey as his. And you've got no choice. And, you know, I never forget pushing off. And we were not even a day in. And a massive iceberg appears in front of us. And I thought, how the hell are we going to get around that? And I tried to sail downwind of it. Because a little toy master you got with a little sail.

And one of the guys on board who was a very, very good sail of the captain, the captain, because I was the leader of the expedition, Nick, good friend of mine, skipper and he said Christ, don't ever do that again don't go down wind because if you, it's like a city block with apartment buildings on it. If you go downwind of it they block out the wind, the iceberg blocks

out the wind and you're just sitting dead in the water and then the iceberg runs you over so don't do that. You've got to stay up. So you're learning all the time. Oh that's crazy. Learning all the time. So you're getting dumped on with all the time. Water and rain for what, two weeks basically? Yeah, two weeks. Two weeks of big sea state. We had a couple of calm days. The rest were not, you know, and so you've got waves crashing in. You're standing and kind of needy, you know, essentially freezing seawater. Can't feel your toes. You can't feel your hands. Your clothing is totally wet. Your borderline hypothermic. You do an hour on the helm of the boat. Then you bang on the hatch. Next guy comes up. You go down and you spend the next five hours trying to dry your clothes with your body heat. And then you repeat, you know, that's the way it works.

and you're in a seated position sitting on top of rocks, which Shackleton used for Ballast to stop the boat tipping over. We took the same weight of camera batteries because we made a film for Discovery Channel, and then we took a few extra rocks just to make up the weight. And, you know, it's a brutal, scary, unpleasant, harsh environment. Not for everyone. How did you pick the crew?

So that was a process of a few years. You know, and basically I look for people who are sort of selfless. They're prepared to work for one another. They've obviously got to have top skills. So, you know, we had, you know, fantastic round the world sailor, another sailor with seven world records in sailing. My climbing partner, Baz, his former regimental sergeant for the Royal Marines, which is an elite regiment. He's a fantastic mountaineer. Another guy who's a great boat builder and another guy who'd summoned it Everest three times.

And is the UK's former free diving champion, so single breath. diving as deep as you can. He was the camera, the guy who kept the cameras going on board. Pretty qualified crew. Really qualified crew. I probably wouldn't have made it. You never know.

Maybe. It depends. Let's see what skills we got. And, you know, people say, look, is that cheating a bit? Because, you know, they were, you know, is it unfair to stack the deck in your favor with some really good people? And I said, well, who do you reckon the original guys were? There were no kind of Muppets.

They were the best of the best, you know. Right. So we were just trying to live up to, you know, the very high bar that these guys had sent. Yeah. And Shackleton's story is so remarkable to me because he, different than Mawson, feels like a real explorer. Mawson seems to me more like an academic researcher type that became an explorer. Like Shackleton just had a thirst for adventure. And he was really just an amazing leader.

And I'm curious, for you, what was more challenging? the lonely solitude of Mawson's voyage just trekking across the Antarctic or the communal leadership challenge of having to guide, you know, this handful of men. The communal one, definitely. I think, you know, believe me, I had some very, very dark times on the solo trip. But I think when you're with such a high performing team and you're trying to show leadership when often you're not the expert in any of the niche areas that you're, any of the niche situations you're faced with like you know big sea state i mean you're at night in this boat

that's threatening to capsize you're about you know 14 15 inches above the surface of the sea and you've got you know mountains of mountains of water crashing in on you and you can't even see what's going on and you know i'm not the best sailor on the boat i'm probably the second worst sailor on the boat bha's my climbing part and probably being the worst if i could say that i should have brought me you would have been the third legend in every other respect but i mean he and i were probably the worst sailors. And you know, you're trying to show some leadership telling guys how to suck eggs who know far more than you about that stuff. And it's actually, you've got to really be confident in your own skin to be able to give advice to people who know technically more

than you do about particular topics. Right. It's really challenging. Yeah, it's interesting that the leadership component was, would you say it was more lonely than being actually alone? Yes. Why? Yeah. You know, leadership is a lonely place because you have to, you have to present a very confident exterior, as soon as you start down to your ability to pull something off, other people see it in your eyes, they see it in you, and that's a problem. But you have no one else to talk to, and you're on a boat in, you know, closer than you and I are sitting, we've got six guys living in the space the size of a queen-sized double bed, but it's rocks.

Yeah. With, you know, a quarter of an inch of wooden planks between us and the, and certain death in the southern ocean. So you're in this real, real pressure cooker situation. You've got no one to, it's all in your head. Right. And you've got to be outwardly confident. And that's that's far more lonely than being on your own where you can scream and shout and lose it.

And, you know, it doesn't undermine anybody else's confidence in you. Yeah. On your own. What was the darkest day? Well, we had some, we had some dark moments. I mean, I think, I think storms at sea. where we didn't think we were going to make it. They were pretty interesting.

I think when we got to South Georgia, when we realized that three other guys were in such poor shape, they couldn't continue. And that sort of was a problem because we'd intended, there were sort of three sailors, three climbers in the six-person team. And the idea was,

if we got to South Georgia, the three climbers of which Iron One would remain in the old gear. The three sailors, meanwhile, were put on modern stuff, brought in by a yacht that kind of rendezvous with us at the island and two cameramen from Discovery Channel wearing all the modern stuff would be on that yacht.

Anyway, basically it was a really, really complex plan. It all went wrong, just like Shackleton. We lost three of our guys to really bad, had very bad feet, frostbite and that sort of stuff, trench foot, where your toes are just totally swollen and distended and you can't do anything. And that just threw all the planning out the window. Then we had five days of the worst weather.

South Georgia can throw at you. We have, you know, 150, you know, not winds, you know, 85, 85, not 150 kilometers an hour winds, blew away everything, had to shelter in a cave, five days pinned down by the worst weather, you can get gusting up to almost 200 kilometers an hour, you know. Insane. A hundred miles an hour winds. It was just a really dark time because, again, people are looking at you saying, okay now what you tell me what's going to happen you know and why didn't you quit oh you never quit

you just all you need is to summon up the the resolve to take the next step that's all you're got to do you just got to kind of keep if you get to a point where you just can't see your way through it you just retreat back into routine or you you just find a way just just just to stick it out for another 10 minutes and another 10 minutes another 10 minutes another hour yeah and then hopefully you come out the other side and momentum carries you forward. The group camaraderie component I thought was so interesting in reading the book that Shackleton at one point, one of the men, I forget who, was a really qualified banjo player. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.

And at one point, they're basically cutting down all their rations. They're like, hey, what food do we take? What supplies do we take? We're about to go to Elephant Island. What do we do? And one of the guys with the banjo said, yeah, I'll throw the banjo away. And he goes, no, no, no, keep the banjo. He goes, but I can carry three more pounds of food.

He goes, no, no, no. The banjo is more important for the group camaraderie than any amount of food you can carry. It's so important. I mean, you know, what it says to people, apart from the music and that sort of stuff, is it says that, you know, if you've got enough spare capacity to take a musical instrument, you obviously don't think you're going to die, you know. It's like when Shackleton was on the ice after the ship had gone down, you know, you don't play soccer if you think you're just about to die.

Right. And it made people feel that he had the... he had things under control at some level. And if you're sitting there playing a bit of music, it's uplifting, but you also think, hey, you know, we're, everything's okay. You know, it kind of normalizes. It probably zaps you back to home a little too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, takes you away from the place. Yeah, I'm not on an ice flow somewhere in the Antarctic. I'm at a pub. I'm with my friends. Yeah. There's some type of a deeper human component. Very clever. That's Shackleton all over.

Emotional intelligence is the number one thing you had, you know, which is understanding how people, worked. And if I was asked to say what the one take home was, I'd say that he knew that everybody was different in the team. Everyone in the team is an individual. They've all got their own hopes, aspirations, motivations, strengths, weaknesses. You're going to understand who that person is and speak to them in language that really kind of works for them to get them to want to be part of the communal effort to try and achieve the goal, you know? You don't just kind of use a one-size-fits-all approach. Yeah, I've heard similar things.

before it's interesting you say that like I've heard people say in order to lead a man you have to know what leads a man that's right and it's absolutely right and to really know someone at their core is the really the only way that you can you can get them to follow you that's right that's right and I mean look in my role as a you know climate scientist basically it's funny how we don't do that we use kind of guilt and fear to try and move the world forward in terms of dealing with climate change but actually we need to take a leaf out of Shackleton's book and and make the message a little bit more personalized to the audience whose behavior you see to

change, right? You've got to be a bit cleverer with it. Yeah, I think that's a great perspective. Now, I'm curious, I'm not an explorer. I'm not an adventurer, despite how I look today. You do look, you look like, you look ready. I dress for you. I want you. Yeah, it's good. I'm touched. But I, I'm curious, what lessons can I take away from, from these men to become a better leader myself? How can I be a better man myself? And how can I, yeah, basically take components of this to apply to my own personal life? Oh, that's a really good. question. I mean, I think the things that Shackleton stood for are very good. I mean, I think he was selfless, so he always put others first. I mean, he, as I say, he gave up on the goal of

reaching South Pole, even though it was his life's ambition, just so he would save everybody, really. So he was very, very selfless. He was eternally optimistic. And he said, optimism is true moral courage, he said, and he always saw a positive in any situation. So I think it's a very good skill for life. If you have problems, we all have them that come our way, there's two ways of reacting to them. One, we can sort of be broken by them and think, oh, wasn't it bad?

Haven't I been dealt a bad hand? Or you can go, you know what, if I can overcome this, it makes me a better person for having been able to overcome that problem. We used that when we had bad weather. We thought, you know, bad weather, closer to what Shackleton had. Three guys drop out. We didn't say, hey, that's ruined the expedition. and we said, well, he crossed the mountains with three guys

because three of his guys had bad feet after the boat journey and brings us closer to him. So you're always looking for, always looking for sort of positives out of any situation. I think being adaptable is very important in life. Having a why, you know, the rest is detail. You have why you're doing something. Yeah.

The how you do it can change in accordance with the landscape. But if you've got a why, an actual kind of, you know, real, a real purpose-driven kind of goal in life or in business or whatever it is you seeking to do. Yeah. The how can change in accordance with the landscape, you know, and that's really, really important.

Absolutely. And then, that's a great point. And having the right people there with you for the journey, you know. And, you know, Shackleton said, for his perhaps apocryphal advert, looking for people for the big expedition team. He said, men wanted for hazardous journey, months of bitter cold, darkness, low wages, honor and recognition in case of success,

safe return, doubtful. Wow. Right. That was the advert that ran. And you got 3,000 applicants for 27 places. Wow. And, you know, on the one level, you think, well, that's a bit of fun. On the other hand, it was such clever framing because he said, look, if you want to come

and, you know, meet interesting people and go to interesting places, maybe this isn't for you. If you want to come and have a brutal, you know, challenging life experience, at the time you may not enjoy it, but you come out of it a better person, and he got that kind of person who came forward for the journey. So I think that ability to, to, to, you know, challenge your team, be selfless as a person. Don't ask people to do stuff. You're not prepared to do yourself. You know, have those clever kind of psychological games that you can play, understand how people tick. These are all great attributes of a good leader, I think. Yeah. And do you apply these things to your own life outside of your expedition? I really find out.

I do. Yeah, you know, you find you meet, you meet people in a particular situation in my role in climate science or whatever, and you think, I'll ask a few questions and work out kind of what motivates that person where they're out on the spectrum of kind of, you know, believing in the issue, whether they want to act on it, whether they're, you know, opposed to it, you know, and then you speak using kind of language you think's going to really resonate with them to get them to maybe change their position. So you're kind of working. In that way, you break the total down into manageable pieces. If that's a message for expeditions, just like it is for life or dealing with climate change.

Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that's your new why, I guess. Is that fair to say? Yeah, it is. You know, my expeditions now, I mean, I went back, by the way, to South Georgia one more time, a bit like Shackleton. He sadly died when he went back on his fourth expedition. So the third one that he led, he died of a heart attack at the same place. At the scene of his greatest victory, it was very, very, you.

you know, poetic and poetic, you know. His whole life was grand theater on the largest of scales. It's fascinating. He died of a heart attack. The night he arrived at the scene of that victory, you know, it's just totally remarkable. And the fact he went back in the first place, he overcame the greatest survival voyage of all time and then said, I'm not finished. Went back for more. I think he enlisted in like World War I, like fought in the war for a little or something.

He did, he did. You know, it's interesting. They got back. But, you know, he was by that stage, he was 41. Right. And, you know, 41 back in 1914 was like 61. Yeah. So he was deemed to be too old to do active service.

So he did sort of, he did some interesting jobs, but he wasn't firing guns. And so I think he came back feeling dissatisfied with his role in the, in the war, perhaps, and feeling that he still had more to give. And so he went back down in 1922 for one more roll of the dice, you know. And that's where he's buried today. That's where he's buried. And I was down there for 100th anniversary of his death earlier this year. It was a very powerful moment down at the grave.

Yeah, can you tell me about that? Yes, I mean, look, I was invited to come. I was given the opportunity to come. I went on actually two trips south this season that's just gone. So sort of November of last year through to January of this year. First one I was there with Conrad Anker, who's a great legend of mountaineering from here in the US. he's the one he discovered the body of George Mallory on Everest, the guy who may have made it before Hillary,

a remarkable, remarkable guy, both Mallory and Conrad. And then the second voyage I went was specifically to go to see the grave and be there with some other people who had sort of paid to come, I guess. And some of Shackleton's family was there as well, right? Not on this occasion, but I have met his granddaughter at the grave. I met her after our expedition. She happened to be on a ship in Antarctica and we rendezvoused at the grave after our expedition and have this wonderful one hour before

the weather just went to shit where we just couldn't do anything where she arrived, we arrived, we were at the grave, had a moment, both went our separate ways and then the weather went to shit and that was it. It was incredibly powerful. It was incredibly powerful. incredibly powerful those types of like poetic coincidences that occur are so fascinating it's incredible you know even our expedition you know we left on the um anniversary on the date of his on the on the the day and the calendar of of his death and we finished our expedition on his birthday wow if that's not a death to rebirth story i don't know what he is i mean it was really powerful yeah it's remarkable stuff yeah that's amazing

And this entire journey was documented for Discovery Channel. Yes, that's right. Yeah, we did a book with Harper Collins, and we did a PBS Discovery Channel three-part series. That's amazing. Of course, chasing Shackleton in this country, and Shackleton Death or Glory, it's called in Europe. Right.

Yeah, it was good. Well, that's remarkable. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I know you have to fly to London soon. Yeah, my next great challenge. Yeah, exactly. You're middle seat ununited in coach.

Tim Jarvis, thank you so much for spending time with me and sharing these stories with me. This is the coolest thing, just hanging out with an adventure and learning. Come along on the next one. I would love to. I really, it's one of my life's goals to go to Antarctica. I would love to. You should. When the time comes, can I reach out to you?

Sure. Oh, man. I can't wait. I'll see you there. Thank you so much. Thanks.