Revisionist History - Tim Harford Cools Us Down This Summer

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

We’ll be back in September with new episodes of Revisionist History. In the meantime, I got to sit down with my good friend and host of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford. We discuss his recent trilogy about the epic race between two explorers to the South Pole and all the challenges they encounter along the way. We draw parallels between the 1920s explorers and Silicon Valley startups, and of course, who of the two explorers we’d prefer to have dinner with. Enjoy!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. Meanwhile, I hope you're staying cool. And to help you with that challenge, I have a little something that will plunge you into a world of freezing cold. It's an epic tale that comes by way of my good friend and fellow Pushkinite, Tim Harford. Over at his podcast, Cautionary Tales, he has a fantastic trilogy about Antarctica and a treacherous race between two explorers chasing one another across the frigid

wastes of the world's least hospitable continent. There are blizzards, dogs, frostbite, scurvy, and epic mistakes. Fortunately, the whole point of Cautionary Tales is to learn from other people's mistakes. The bigger the mistake, the more you can learn. After I listened to this series, I had to call Tim. Literally, 100% of that was new to me. 100%! It was so great, I was like, this is fantastic! Who knew all this crazy stuff? Okay, before we get to more of my conversation with Tim,

you should probably hear a taste of this crazy stuff. So let's listen to some of his first Antarctica story, and then follow up with my chance to ask Tim all the burning, or freezing as the case may be, questions. Here's Tim with Cautionary Tales. In June 1910, two ships set sail from Europe. One of them was captained by Robert Falcon Scott of the British Navy, representing the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

The other ship was led by Roald Amundsen of Norway, a small country that had gained its independence just five years before. Both men had the same goal. They burned to be the first in history to reach the South Pole, planting their national flag. This wasn't about imperial conquest. The South Pole had no gold or spices. Or slaves. It was all about the symbolism. The age of exploration was largely over. Most of the world had been thoroughly mapped, with one big exception. The vast interior of the icy continent of Antarctica.

No human feet had ever trodden on the Earth's most southerly point. Of course, the British wanted to be the first to reach it. Over the centuries, they'd grown used to thinking of themselves as the greatest explorers in the world. Robert Scott's British ship carried what one historian called the largest, best-equipped scientific team ever sent to Antarctica. It carried three state-of-the-art motorised sleds, along with Siberian dogs and ponies, and a crew of 65. This little army set sail from London in front of a crowd of the empire's finest. The American polar explorer Robert Bartlett was there, noting that nobody had ever given him such a send-off. There were gold lace and cock hats and dignitaries enough to run a navy.

I couldn't help comparing all this formality with the shoddy, almost sneering attitude of the American public. One of Scott's crew was almost overwhelmed by the crowd of onlookers. The cheers from the many thousands of throats fairly made the air quiver on that blazing summer afternoon. Roald Amundsen's Norwegian vessel was much smaller. It carried no motorised sleds or ponies, only dogs and a crew of just 19. It sailed at midnight, without ceremony or celebration.

A ghost ship slipping out into the Norwegian fjords. Nobody in Norway was excited about Amundsen's bold thrust to beat the British to the South Pole, and there was a reason for that. He had told everyone he was heading to the North Pole instead. It's hard to imagine a more uneven contest. Scott's expedition was far larger and far better funded, underwritten by the British Navy and supported by public and private donations from across the British Empire. There could be only one winner, and it was already obvious who it would be. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. Remember the biblical story of David and Goliath.

An Israelite shepherd boy with the humblest weapon imaginable, a sling, defeats Goliath, the Philistine champion, a fully armed man mountain. King Saul of the Israelites is against the plan. You cannot go against this Philistine to do battle with him, for you are a lad, and he is a man of war from his youth. But David fights Goliath anyway, and wins. Easily. Malcolm Gladwell's book, David and Goliath, has some interesting things to say about this fight. Goliath wasn't quite as fearsome as he seemed. He was at least six foot nine, but humans aren't built to be that big.

One plausible explanation is that Goliath was suffering from a medical condition which causes the production of too much growth hormone. It also often causes double vision. Goliath looked terrifying, but he may well have had difficulty moving and difficulty focusing. In the race to the South Pole, Robert Falcon Scott was Goliath. Apparently the overwhelming favourite, but in reality, in a hopeless position. Just in case you don't know how the race unfolds,

Scott's mission ends in utter failure. For more than a century, people have been arguing about why. On one side of the argument are those who say Scott was terribly unlucky, in particular with the weather. On the other side are those who say Scott was an incompetent, that he chose the wrong methods, took needless risks, and at critical moments he made the wrong calls. If it wasn't bad luck or bad judgment,

then how else could such a well-resourced expedition fail? But Goliath didn't lose because he was unlucky or because he was foolish. He lost because the apparent underdog was actually in a vastly superior position all along. We'll explore the causes of Scott's problems in a moment. But first, let's describe the symptoms. His expedition was so large that Scott's ship was overloaded with men, fuel, motorised sledges and ponies, and it nearly sank before reaching Antarctica.

Conditions on ship were miserable. The crew ate their meals from a table directly underneath where the ponies were being stabled. The yellow substance that dribbled down through the cracks in the wooden deck onto their table was euphemistically called mustard. Things were hardly more comfortable once Scott arrived in Antarctica. The British went to a base that Scott and others had established years before, on Ross Island, just off the coast of the Antarctic continent. It was further away from the South Pole than where Amundsen made his base camp, and not without its dangers.

One man ventured onto an ice floe to photograph some killer whales, and nearly ended up as their lunch. The ship was within 60 yards, and I heard wild shouts of, look out, run, jump man, jump, run, quick. But I could not run. It was all I could do to keep my feet as I leapt from piece to piece of the rocking ice, with the whales a few yards behind me, snorting and blowing among the ice blocks. He made it back to safety, with Captain Scott exclaiming, My God! That was about the nearest squeak I ever saw! Then came the unloading of the ship.

It did not go well. We realised that the ice was getting very rotten, wrote one crewman. But when a message came back from an anxious Scott to hurry with the unloading, no one had the courage or the sense to ignore it. They were unloading one of the three motorised sledges. The ship party had got the sledge down onto the ice when, without warning, Williamson went through to his thighs. The motor sledge suddenly dipped, the ice gave way, and she fell with all her weight vertically on the rope.

The rope began cutting through the thin ice. Man after man was forced to let go. The sledge is now resting on the bottom at a depth of 120 fathoms. It was a terrifying moment, and an expensive one. Scott had paid about as much for his three motorised sledges as Amundsen had raised to fund his entire expedition. After months preparing depots and sheltering from the winter, Scott was ready to make his attempt at the South Pole.

Despite the loss of one motor sledge, he still had two more of them, plus packs of dogs, a team of ponies, and the time-honoured tradition of the British Navy, donning harnesses and hauling the sledges by hand with sheer British grit and endurance. The British had long experience of this man-hauling of sledges in polar regions. One disastrous expedition to the Arctic in 1875 required manhauling. Here's the conclusion of a survivor.

I would confine everyone who proposed such a thing in a lunatic asylum, burn every sledge in existence and destroy the patterns. Long experience, as I say. But the British Navy had not learned from that long experience. With the luxury of these varied modes of transport available, Scott chose to try them all. You might think that would give him flexibility. Instead, it constrained him.

Scott's ponies were poorly adapted to the cold, so he decided to start later in the spring. Even then, the ponies struggled. They travelled slowly, hooves sinking deep into the snow. Scott decided it would be better for the ponies to travel at night, when the colder temperatures might mean firmer conditions under their hooves. It was miserable. Huge icicles form under the ponies' noses during the march. Scott's two remaining motorised sledges broke down early in the expedition. Nobody on his team had the mechanical expertise to fix them,

so he had to abandon them and manhole the sledges instead. The manhole sledges were even slower than the ponies. Scott's expedition was a patchwork caravan in which the ponies and the dog sleds had to keep stopping to let the manhole sledges keep up. The dogs do the whole march in three hours and then they have little else to do for the rest of the day. The dogs are doing splendidly. When news reached Scott and his team that Amundsen was racing them to the pole, they correctly surmised that he wouldn't have taken ponies and he wouldn't be manhauling any sledges. I must say that Amundsen's chance of having forestalled us looks good. After the losses, the accidents, the late start and the slow progress, Scott's defeat was now just a matter of time. But why had such a well-resourced expedition run into so many problems? Actually, you'll have to subscribe to Cautionary Tales for the answer to that question and so much more.

But first, I got to call up Tim Harford and ask him so many burning questions, or should I say, freezing questions, about what he learned from these Antarctic tales. Here's our conversation. Tim, I've listened to all three of your episodes, and I must say, I liked them very much. I thought it was fascinating. I actually knew none of this. Not at all? I couldn't. Yeah, it was all kind of a blur to me, all of these explorers from long ago. And there were all these dimensions that I didn't understand. But I wanted to start with this contrast between Scott and Amundsen. The complex thing,

and the thing that makes it really fascinating is that Scott is really the innovator, isn't he? Yeah, he sees himself as the scientific innovator. He wants to break ground in terms of exploring, measuring magnetic fields, discovering new aspects of the flora and fungi of Antarctica. There's this crazy side quest they do when they're trying to get a penguin egg, which is described as the worst journey in the world because they have to travel in the Antarctic winter. I mean, it's crazy. He's doing technological innovation. He has these three motorized sleds, which I think partly paved the way for tanks in the first world war.

And people who think that Scott is awesome, emphasize all of this ambition, all of the things he was trying to do. But of course, Amundsen just wanted to use the best possible way to get to the South Pole first. And actually that was innovative in some small ways, the precise design of the sled and the kind of containers that won't leak. But it was basically using techniques that had been used in Greenland by indigenous people for, well, I mean, we don't know how long, a very long time.

This is actually what I loved about the story is that it's so incredibly contemporary because Scott is really the kind of, he's the Silicon Valley startup who gets an enormous amount of venture funding and proceeds to blow it all on a series of ideas and solving problems that aren't problems. And Amundsen is the kind of bootstrap entrepreneur in the middle of the country that no one's paying attention to who's you know forced to use the tried and true the original sin it sounds like is the fact that scott was given everything he wanted everything he wanted plus a lot of baggage he didn't want yeah like all kinds of interference and all kinds

of people telling him they wanted to do this and they wanted to do that and they wanted to achieve all of these great things which means he can't focus. But yeah, he's got far too much. He's got far too much money. He's got far too many people. His ship nearly sinks simply because it's so overladen. There's just so much on it that it's, it's nearly capsized by a, by a storm on the way to the Antarctic. But Amundsen meanwhile is, is not only is no one paying attention to him, he's actively engaging in disinformation. He's lying to, he's even lying to his own crew about where he's going. He's telling people he's going north and he's actually going south. I love the way that you phrase this as he's a Silicon Valley startup. Because for me, I'm thinking he's a British

Navy guy. He's kind of a government man. He's a military man. He's very bureaucratic, but you're seeing a different quality in him and a different problem that he's facing. He's given everything he wants. And then as a result, he has lots of things he doesn't want. Those two things are linked. That's what happens when you get everything you want. It's the careful what you wish for problem, right? The things he don't want are a consequence of getting everything he wants in the beginning. He has so many people who are pitching in to quote unquote help him that he ends up being burdened by all of their expectations,

which is another Silicon Valley kind of conundrum. The venture capitalist gives you $50 million and then has a seat at the table and complicates your vision with all of their sense of where you should be going. The funder, the venture capitalist in this particular case is a guy called Sir Clements Markham, who is just this incredibly British, incredibly intimidating fellow. I've got this portrait of him and it looks to me like the expression on his face is like the photographer has just broken wind and he just looks so unhappy that someone is daring to point a camera at him. And he was just pulling the strings at the Royal Geographical Society in London for decades. He's so tight with Scott and Scott's family that Scott names his son Peter after Sir Clements.

And Scott is clearly terrified of him. And he puts Scott where he is and he can put him right back again if he, if he wants to. And Sir Clements who's never been to the Antarctic, who's got no idea what it's like down there, just has these views. Like obviously there should be no dogs. Everybody who knows anything about Arctic exploration knows you should use dogs for any number of reasons I explain in the, in the episodes. But Sir Clements is sitting there in London going, no, no ski, no dogs. And Scott's kind of got to do what he says. It's so funny that any story about English life in this period always boils down to the

stupidity of the British ruling class. Sir Clements is such a familiar figure, this kind of arrogant, pig-headed authority figure who has a kind of abstract notion of the way things ought to be. Yes, absolutely. Which triumphs over the way things actually are. But the interesting thing for me about Amundsen is that he also has these certain bureaucratic constraints. So the king is the patron of his expedition and he's got funding from the Norwegian government and all of this kind of stuff, but he just doesn't care. So he lies to the king.

He lies to parliament. He's borrowed all this money and then he basically runs away. One of the things he's doing going to Antarctica is getting out of reach of his creditors and it's only when they can't impound his ship that he actually tells people exactly what he's doing. So yes, it is partly this kind of this hidebound British bureaucracy, but it is also Scott's deference to it in a way that Amundsen was not interested for a second in any of that.

Yeah. To bring up the second Silicon Valley analogy, there's a little bit of Elizabeth Holmes in Amundsen. It's fake it till you make it kind of thing. Yeah. Except he made it. Yeah, except that he made it. But that idea that for someone who's attempting something incredibly difficult, that it may be necessary at some time to engage in acts of deception at the outset. Or maybe a better way of saying it is that the kind of person who is focused and singular enough to pull off a feat like this is willing to engage in deception, doesn't have any kind of moral qualms. Nothing trumps the goal of reaching the South Pole. Everything else is secondary, including the truth. Yeah. And he doesn't seem to have lost any sleep over that. And I think Amundsen had this very clear vision that it would all be forgiven if he succeeded,

which I suspect that to the extent that Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos had a vision of what was going on, that there's the same thing. They'll forgive me once it all works. Oh, I think she very clearly had that, Tim. I think that's absolutely what's driving the whole train there. I can lie and cheat and deceive because if I pull this off, I'm a hero. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about your personal feelings about the two men. I mean, it's clear you're partial to Amundsen. If you eat a choice between dining with two of them, who's your first choice for dinner tonight? Oh, actually, I think they would both be, well, they'd both be interesting, but they'd be pretty awkward both ways because I think they

both have these huge egos. Amundsen is this anti-hero. I don't really like either of them as people. I'm excited by Amundsen's daring and his willingness to get things done and he makes sacrifices and he succeeds in the end. And Scott just seems like this tragic blunderer. But I'm not sure I'd really want to have dinner with either of them, if I'm honest. Who would you rather? Scott. Yeah. I came away from listening to your episodes liking Amundsen. And I felt very sorry for him because the world doesn't reward him in the way that he ought to have been rewarded.

He's the hero. He made it look too easy. That's the problem. Yeah. He made it look too easy. But Scott would just be fascinating. And he's so British. He's so of that period.

I mean, and you would dine out on Scott's stories for the rest of your life. But if you had dinner with him, get him drunk. He was a brilliant storyteller. The story was of the tragic hero and he was writing the story of the tragic hero who's going to fail all the way along. It's almost like he knew how it was going to end. This was so much fun. Thank you so much. Thank you, Tim. It's a wonderful series.