RS:
contd... Yes, the burden on any expedition leader is immense. Even with an expedition of modest size like our one there are significant financial and business pressures. For the leader this is additionally tricky because he has to juggle the management of the team and the management of sponsors and business. Egos and expectations have to be managed and the team have to be protected from much of the detail if it’s not to have an impact on morale. Shackleton would have thought carefully about what he could share with his subordinates and what he couldn’t, he put his men first and the expedition second. The legwork and PR involved in raising sponsorship money is immense, critical to the success in being able to do so is being able to put yourself in the sponsor’s shoes. Many explorers don't understand that just because they think something is fascinating and interesting doesn’t mean that the rest of the world will agree and if they don’t then your idea might simply not be financially viable.
BB:
Moving on, and I suspect I know the answer to this question but why have you chosen a Shackleton expedition to complete/emulate?
RS:
(Laughs). People often think that I was inspired to become a polar explorer by my accident. This couldn’t be further from the truth. From a very early age I became obsessed with Shackleton, growing up in the 1970s and 80s as a schoolboy was when the first of the great books about the heroic polar exploration age came out and we, as boys, devoured them. All boys love a good adventure and here was Peary, Amundsen, Captain Scott and Shackleton. We were brought up on this stuff, on books of these cool guys doing cool stuff. Shackleton wrote something in South his book on the Endurance expedition and this came back to me as I lay on the hospital bed for those interminable weeks:“Difficulties are just things to overcome.”
The stubbornness of Shackleton influenced me and I got angry and stubborn with the situation but the ambition to emulate him with a polar expedition was a long held aspiration and certainly from my childhood. I’d always had plans to redo the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition, to cross Antarctica on foot. But life and contracts kept getting in the way, I’d say “right, I’ll plan for 18 months’ time and then I’d get an offer of work and end up taking the contract. If anything I might say the accident helped me to realise my ambition, yes I’m not doing the transantarctic journey but I can at least finish off his furthest south. The accident forced me to stop, to take a look at what I wanted to do and to think but the ambition was always there. Some journalists and others find this very difficult to comprehend, for some reason Some I speak to seem to want me to say that the accident changed my life, some sort of life affirming moment that gave me a vision of the expedition. This simply isn’t the case, yes, the accident incapacitated me for months and took years to recover from but the ambition and the explorer was always there. The ‘zest for life’ was always there. People often express amazement at how I don’t seem to have a problem with fire, I have no issue with it, I’m happy to light the BBQ, I still annoy my family by playing with the candles and tea lights on restaurant tables as I once did as a boy. People seem to expect me to have some traumatic issue with fire. They are looking for the ‘survivor story’ the life changing moment.
"Difficulties are just things to overcome"
Shackleton
94.