An opinion piece by Ben Macintyre entitled ‘Sorry, Scott fans: noble death is so last century’ appeared in The Times (London) on 20 September 2013. In this, Macintyre argued not only that Ernest Shackleton should be explicitly contrasted against his contemporary and rival Robert Falcon Scott, but that Shackleton should be found superior to Scott in virtually every way. It was a dispiriting piece, strongly suggesting that that the media's understanding of Scott has not greatly advanced since the savage, cod-psychological and often unsubstantiated attacks upon Scott's character and reputation in the 1970s–1990s. Sadly, all too often polar history is reduced to a zero-sum game where praise for Shackleton is directly proportional to insults directed at Scott.

Since current media representation of Scott and Shackleton is unjustly skewed, responding is fraught with difficulty. Should one stress Scott's strengths whilst remaining silent on Shackleton's weaknesses, an uncriticised Shackleton would appear by default ‘the better man’. However, should one call for a frank public examination of Shackleton's mistakes to restore perspective and balance, one could be accused of dragging Shackleton down merely to make Scott look good. This is why ‘comparisons are odious’. The establishment of a false binary opposition between two people, with one person's reputation unjustly smeared and the other's largely idealised, means that attempts at correction are practically guaranteed to cause anger and recrimination.

However, if one does nothing to redress this injustice, Macintyre's parting shot is left unchallenged: ‘In the race for recognition, Scott is destined, once again, to finish in second place’. Much as we would prefer to maintain a discreet silence on Shackleton's mistakes, such forbearance is not possible when the media habitually uses an unfairly-burnished Shackleton to attack an unjustly-tarnished Scott. The only possible response is a detailed examination of Macintyre's argument.

Macintyre appears to be arguing, at the start of his article, that he will not be addressing the men's actions per se, but rather the use to which later generations have made of them: ‘The debate, however, is not really about their objective virtues and achievements but about the evolving nature of heroism itself and what exploration means in the modern age’. Unfortunately, in practice Macintyre's linking Scott's stoicism to World War I becomes an unnecessary exercise in smearing Scott's reputation with negative associations: did Scott ask for his stoic endurance to be used in this manner? Is Scott personally responsible for the suffering caused by the war? Similarly, Macintyre observes that ‘the Alliance of Honour, a group dedicated to eradicating the scourge of masturbation, recruited [Scott] as a poster boy’. What exactly does this have to do with Scott himself?

Macintyre also argues that the nation's wartime rejection of Shackleton merely demonstrated a morbid zeitgeist: ‘Britain wanted noble self-sacrifice, not canny survival’. In fact Scott's death was by any standard admirable, showing his resolve to support his ‘sick companions to the last’ (Jones Reference Jones2008: 410) even if in so doing he endangered his own chances of survival. Contrast this selflessness with the context for the war-time rejection of Shackleton. In August 1914 Shackleton offered his personnel and his ship Endurance to the war effort, and was told by the Admiralty to continue. But Shackleton could have sacrificed his plans, just as countless Europeans placed their own plans on hold for the duration. Some of these were Shackleton's own men, who elected to rejoin the colours rather than to proceed south. That Shackleton was criticised after his return in 1917 was hence predictable: a shocked and bereaved public could not be expected to look with admiration on a man who appeared to have dodged the war for two years with his strictly unnecessary polar expedition.

In his article Macintyre uses the phrase ‘canny survival’ with reference to Shackleton's expedition, aligning ‘survival’ with ‘canniness’ (cleverness) and appearing implicitly to argue that a failure to survive indicates a failure of intelligence. Later he praises those on the battlefield who ‘enable others to survive, displaying ingenuity as well as raw courage.’ In this reassuringly simple world-view, the difference between life and death would appear to lie in nothing more than the presence or absence of ‘ingenuity’.

As an explorer Shackleton had considerable resilience and energy, was well-liked by the majority of his comrades and was capable of acts of impressive courage and charity. One thinks of the day he, though hungry himself, gave his own precious biscuit ration to an ill Frank Wild on the Nimrod expedition. Wild later wrote that ‘All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me’ (Butler Reference Butler2011: 114). However, Macintyre should be aware that Shackleton did not always display ‘canniness’ when it came to survival. If survival were his main aim, Shackleton should have turned Endurance back to South America when first made aware that conditions in the Weddell Sea were unsuitable. For example in Shackleton's memoir it is noted that ‘the whalers emphasized the difficulty of getting through the ice in the neighbourhood of the South Sandwich Group’ (Shackleton Reference Shackleton2002: 1). After all, the Swedish expedition ship Antarctic had been trapped and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea in 1902–1903, and the German Wilhelm Filchner's Deutschland was trapped for nine months in 1912. However, Shackleton disregarded these precedents, and other warnings, and took the gamble of sailing south. On their route Endurance's navigator, Frank Worsley, noted a bay on the Barrier coast where the ship could have safely landed and hence avoided being caught in the pack-ice. Shackleton, though also aware of this bay, elected to sail further into the pack-ice to aim for Filchner's Vahsel Bay, to establish a base that was substantially farther south (Shackleton Reference Shackleton2002: 29–30; Wilson Reference Wilson2008: 79). However, as we know, this resulted in Endurance being trapped and ultimately crushed.

Furthermore, ‘canny survival’ would have been for Shackleton to ensure that his trans-continental expedition was realistic and well-equipped in the first place. Polar writer Robert Burton has pointed out, in his 2013 lecture ‘What if Shackleton had landed: would he have got across Antarctica?’ that Shackleton faced problems with his plans and equipment, and that his optimistic schedule for the crossing did not take into account potential problems with the weather, surface conditions and unforeseen geographical hazards (Burton, personal communication, 21 May 2014). We would note that Shackleton sadly underestimated the necessity of hiring professionals to handle the vital aspect of the transport. Although his plan depended on teams of sled dogs, he hired two British army officers with no polar experience as his dog-drivers. When they returned to their regiments upon the outbreak of war (Fisher and Fisher Reference Fisher and Fisher1957: 314) Shackleton had no replacements or alternatives and sailed nonetheless. His plan was apparently to drive teams of sled dogs at least part of the way across the Antarctic continent, much of it at that time terra incognita, despite not bringing a single trained dog-driver aboard Endurance.

Consider also the role of Shackleton's supporting Ross Sea party, which landed simultaneously on the McMurdo Sound coast, the other side of Antarctica, and which was charged with the mission of laying food depots which would support Shackleton's polar party on their trans-continental trek. Shackleton's strategy was for Endurance to land at Vahsel Bay and for his own polar party to cross approximately 720 geographical miles (828 statute miles) of terra incognita to reach the South Pole, then to continue onwards for the same distance to finish at the McMurdo coast. After having reached the pole itself, Shackleton's polar party would continue, descending the Beardmore Glacier to find the food depots laid in advance on the Great Ice Barrier by the Ross Sea party. In the words of one Ross Sea party member, Shackleton and his polar party ‘would be utterly dependent on our food depots for their survival’ (Richards Reference Richards2003: 17).

The Ross Sea party was led by Aeneas Mackintosh, a veteran of Shackleton's 1907–1909 Nimrod expedition: they were underfunded and underequipped (even having to appeal for donated goods in Australia (Tyler-Lewis Reference Tyler-Lewis2007: 47–48)), and their lack of polar knowledge, especially with regard to diet, led to some of them developing scurvy. One member, Arnold Spencer-Smith, became seriously ill with it on 21 January 1916, five weeks into the depot-laying journey on the Barrier. Had their role in proceedings been optional, these men could have turned back for base at this point; however, their belief that the survival of Shackleton's polar party depended entirely on their efforts led them southwards to finish their task. Spencer-Smith was hence kept out on the Barrier too long, and died of scurvy on the evening of 9 March during the journey back to base.

Eric Marshall, a Nimrod veteran, stated in a private letter of 1952 that Shackleton ‘could never pick up the depots which cost 3 lives to lay’ (Marshall Reference Marshall and Kendall1952). Since Shackleton's trans-continental endeavour never materialised, we will never know this for sure: whilst it is too harsh to state that picking up the depots would have been impossible, a closer look shows the grounds for Marshall's cynicism. The Ross Sea party's depots were laid every 60 geographical miles (69 statute miles), with the only connection between them a line of snow-cairns built at half-hourly stops on the route (Richards Reference Richards2003: 22). Though Roald Amundsen's South Pole memoir (published in English in 1912) describes how at times his men set a line of black ski-flags for guidance, and even found that they possessed insufficient flags for the task (Amundsen Reference Amundsen1912: 218–219, 382), the Ross Sea party in 1915 did not follow Amundsen's advice and reserved their flags to mark the depots 69 miles apart. With snow cairns as the only external indication of the route, a single instance of sustained poor visibility, or of faulty navigation from either party, would have resulted in Shackleton's polar party's missing the depots laid for them.

As Marshall's remark indicates, Spencer-Smith's was not the only death in the Ross Sea party. In May 1916, Mackintosh's misjudgement in crossing unstable sea-ice led to his death and that of his colleague Victor Hayward. Thus the generally-accepted public belief that Shackleton ‘never lost a man’ is a myth: he lost three. Whilst Shackleton did write of the Endurance crew's experience ‘Not a life lost and we have been through Hell’ in a letter dated 3 September 1916 (Shackleton Reference Shackleton1916), that was before he learned, on 10 January 1917, of the hellish conditions the Ross Sea party had endured. Once Shackleton knew the truth, he wrote frankly in a letter dated 22 January 1917, ‘Three of my men will never come home again’ (Shackleton Reference Shackleton1917).

Polar historians have, on the whole, drawn a veil of charity over the sketchy nature of Shackleton's expedition planning. Unfortunately, a double standard has emerged in popular culture as a result: Shackleton's mistakes are habitually overlooked, whilst Scott is simultaneously attacked for a plan that we now know could, and should, have resulted in his polar party's rescue by dog teams. So let us compare Scott and Shackleton, when the odds against them were greatest, and ask which of them had, in theory, the better chance of ‘canny survival’.

Scott, March 1912: Scott and his three remaining companions (Petty Officer Evans having died two weeks earlier) are man-hauling back from the pole across the Great Ice Barrier. On 2 March they are 245 geographical miles (282 statute miles) from base, following a recently laid trail. Though their progress is presently hampered by the injured Captain Oates, Scott had left written instructions (dated October 1911) that the dog teams were to come out to meet the polar party around 1 March 1912, intercepting them en route. The polar party are on the correct route and enjoy conditions of good visibility (present until 10 March 1912). Though the dog teams arrived back at base later than scheduled, the animals are still strong and able to go south again. All that is necessary, for the polar party to be rescued, is for the men at base to follow Scott's orders.

Shackleton, April 1916: After waiting for over three months on ice-floes in the Weddell Sea and subsequently navigating their boats across open water, Shackleton and his men are now stranded on the remote Elephant Island. No ships pass along this route, so it will be necessary for James Caird, one of their three remaining boats, to sail to South Georgia. For this six men will have to navigate 800 nautical miles (920 statute miles) across the ocean. The navigation will have to be so precise that the boat will not bypass the island of South Georgia. The 22-foot boat will have to be strong and watertight enough to withstand the journey. No-one on Earth knows where Shackleton and his men are, or even if they are still alive. If James Caird is lost, the men on Elephant Island will never get home.

If you, reader, knew nothing of the eventual outcome, which explorer would you pick as having a greater chance of ‘survival’? Certainly Scott. He has a contingency plan; he has left behind him written orders for the dog teams to come south at the right time to meet the polar party. By contrast, Shackleton and his men can rely on no-one but themselves and have no safety margin whatsoever. If planning and statistical probability were the only guides to the eventual outcome, then Scott emerges as the explorer whose thorough preparation should have ensured his survival.

However, life does not always work out according to logic. Scott and his men, sadly, died: Shackleton and his men, thankfully, survived. Since human nature hates to be wrong-footed, modern audiences have often engaged in a collective post-rationalisation exercise to argue that the eventual outcome, of Scott's demise and Shackleton's survival, was not only predictable but inevitable. In reality, it was neither. The difference between Scott and Shackleton lies not in each man's merit (for both had courage and grit in abundance) but in the intangible quality of luck. Seen plainly, Shackleton's was not ‘canny survival’, but lucky survival. After Endurance’s initial loss, Shackleton's successive waves of good fortune verged on the miraculous; by contrast, Scott suffered appalling bad fortune, in which every strand of his rescue plan failed due to circumstances beyond his control. Both Scott and Shackleton made decisions that had negative consequences, but the difference between Shackleton's survival and Scott's death lay in the presence or absence of luck which would mitigate those consequences.

However, in an age which demands ‘rational’ explanations even for the vagaries of fate, efforts are sometimes made to present Shackleton as possessing the better character of the two men, as if he were somehow more morally deserving of success. Macintyre informs us not only that Shackleton was ‘better company’ than Scott (how could he know this?), but that he was ‘the better writer’. One has to ask whether Macintyre has actually read Scott's Terra Nova unexpurgated expedition journals (Jones Reference Jones2008) or Shackleton's South or The heart of the Antarctic. Scott's prose was strong, incisive and often memorable, his journals only lightly edited posthumously in 1913 to remove critical comments and preserve his colleagues’ reputations. By contrast Shackleton's two published polar narratives were collaborations with New Zealand ghost-writer Edward Saunders, in solid but undistinguished prose: indeed the published prose cannot always be said to be entirely Shackleton's and Saunders’ own work. Here follows one of the extended passages often quoted to demonstrate Shackleton's literary talent:

Much of this is lifted from a single stanza in Robert W. Service's 1907 poem ‘The call of the wild’:

Shackleton's and Saunders’ appropriation of Service's key concepts and phrasing is evident. Of course standards of citation were not as strict then as now, but this exercise should reveal the hazards of praising Shackleton's gift for prose.

But Macintyre goes further in stating that, of both men, Shackleton was the ‘more humane soul’. Does Scott's long-term care and financial support for his widowed mother and unmarried sisters count for nothing in Macintyre's balance? The Scott family's precarious financial situation, and Scott's pressing need to provide a secure income for them, are what spurred him to leave a successful naval career (Lewis and May Reference Lewis and May2013) to pursue Antarctic exploration in the first place. As Scott's mother wrote to him in 1908, before his marriage, ‘You have carried the burden of the family since 1894, it is time now for you to think of yourself and your future’ (Gwynn Reference Gwynn1939: 106–107). Macintyre should recall Scott's refusal to leave his sick men behind on the homeward trek from the Pole. He would also do well to revisit Scott's last letters asking for financial provision to be made for the bereaved families. In that tent, freezing and fully aware that he was facing death, Scott famously concentrated on the needs of others. The man whose last recorded words were ‘For God's sake look after our people’ can certainly be considered a ‘humane soul’.

If Macintyre insists that we assess the ‘humaneness’ of Shackleton's ‘soul’ relative to Scott’s, would he take Shackleton's irregular personal life (his failure to pay many of his debts, his alleged marital infidelities) into consideration? Regardless, harsh condemnation of Shackleton is always absent from accounts of his human weaknesses: one applauds this mature and forgiving attitude, so different from the hypercritical stance evident in certain biographical accounts of Scott. More importantly, Shackleton was capable of displaying some surprising professional pettiness. After Endurance’s destruction, the ship's carpenter Harry McNish refused on one occasion to go forward during the men's slog over the ice-floes. However, McNish compensated for this disobedience when, on Elephant Island, he prepared James Caird for her journey to South Georgia. It was McNish's exceptional carpentry which enabled the boat to survive the storms at sea: moreover, once the boat had landed safely on South Georgia, McNish further assisted the final three-man relief team (Shackleton, Worsley and Crean) in their hike across the island's central mountain range by fashioning essential studs for their boot-soles from James Caird's brass screws. Shackleton had led his men into this crisis: McNish, and the excellent navigator Worsley, were the men whose irreplaceable specialisms did the most to get the Endurance crew safely home again. Given that McNish's efforts had ensured his and his men's survival, Shackleton really should have forgiven McNish his previous noncompliance. Sadly, he did not: upon returning to civilisation he barred four of the Endurance crew, one of them McNish, from receiving Polar Medals for their service on his expedition.

Nonetheless, in popular culture there appears to be a general attitude of ‘Scott died, Shackleton survived, and you can't argue with success!’ Which, of course, is nonsense. Of course one can argue with ‘success’: it practically becomes a duty to do so whenever ‘success’ is lazily equated with ‘moral deserving’. Celebrating ‘survival’ as a virtue in and of itself often entails the distasteful ‘just world fallacy’, the belief that those who meet a premature death must have somehow asked for it. We all know real life is not so simple. Let us not make a habit of attacking those, famous or obscure, who met a premature death whilst in the pursuit of difficult and dangerous goals. Let us not imply that the difference between death and survival lies in ‘ingenuity’ and nothing else.

Much as we would all like to believe that we always make our own luck and control our own destinies (and is anyone ever completely immune from such magical thinking?), we must never ignore the fact that sometimes a person's continued survival may be out of their own hands. In the worst-case scenario, someone's survival may rest purely on the willingness and ability of others to come to the rescue. In April 1916 the 22 men Shackleton left behind on Elephant Island could not save themselves: only with the help of Luis Pardo of Yelcho could Shackleton eventually return to rescue them in time. Likewise, on Shackleton's earlier Nimrod expedition, his polar party's return from his farthest south of 88° 23′ S in 1909 was a narrow escape from disaster: after these men had man-hauled their sledges on their return journey for over 600 geographical miles, Shackleton and Frank Wild had to march the final 33 miles back to base to save not only their own lives but also those of their weakened companions Marshall and Jameson Boyd Adams, whom they had had to leave behind in a tent out on the Ice Barrier.

These men needed rescue, and they received help in time. Scott was not so fortunate. During his difficult return from the pole, Scott initially must have thanked his lucky stars that he had had the foresight to leave behind him at base a written contingency plan which would see his polar party met by dog teams coming south to intercept them. Now we know the truth of the matter, and that it is no fault of Scott's that those dog teams never came (May Reference May2012; May and Airriess Reference May and Airriess2014), posterity should refrain from attacking Scott for the crime of not having been rescued.

Similarly, it is clear that Shackleton, for all his positive qualities, was not, in his polar colleague Adams’ words, ‘the greatest leader that ever came on God's Earth bar none’ (Fisher and Fisher Reference Fisher and Fisher1957: 123, 529). We need to acknowledge frankly that a leader's ‘rugged optimism’ and ‘charisma’ cannot always compensate for oversights in planning. However, this commentary is intended simply as a mild corrective to the notion that Shackleton never made any serious mistakes. We hope that no opportunistic commentator will ever subject Shackleton's every move to mean-spirited criticism merely to stir up controversy. Such sustained modern exercises in negativity and fault-finding do not provide the world with any genuine new insights: all they do is create a superior and uncharitable attitude in their readers, and it is an attitude which has soured certain polar commentary for far too long.

In the past three or so decades Scott has unjustly suffered a loss of reputation due to hostile works of ‘historical revisionism’. Written in intoxicatingly harsh and judgemental language, and relying largely on modern hindsight and carefully edited facts, these books unfortunately tend to provoke violent public excoriation of Scott from their more credulous readers. To give just one example of the misinformation in wide circulation, readers of such works think themselves secure in attacking Scott for bringing Siberian ponies to the Antarctic instead of relying on dogs alone. In reality, Scott had personally experienced failure with dogs in his Discovery Antarctic expedition of 1901–1904; it was Shackleton who first had success with ponies in the Antarctic in his Nimrod expedition, using them to achieve his ‘Farthest South’ of 88° 23′ S on 9 January 1909; and Shackleton's example also inspired Filchner to bring ponies for his own Antarctic expedition of 1911–1912. Thus those who smugly attack Scott for bringing ponies should more properly criticise Shackleton, since it was Shackleton who pioneered the use of ponies for transportation in Antarctica.

Fortunately the recent ‘Scott centenary’ celebrations of 2010–2013 have done much to bring back into the public eye the objective facts about Scott the man: his historical context, his reserved but often warm personality, his intelligence and keen observation, his and his men's courageous decision to slow their own pace to support injured comrades on the return march, and his impressive polar and scientific achievements. Meanwhile, recent polar scholarship has focussed on the factual mistakes within certain ‘revisionist’ studies of Scott, such as unwarranted negative interpretations of neutral or even positive information; unjustified character assassination of Scott and his friends, supporters and family; and crucial contextual and archive evidence being overlooked, misread or misrepresented. Even the existence of Scott's written orders in 1911 for the dog teams to come out to meet his polar party, and the identification of the 1970s error which concealed this from general understanding, only came to the public's attention in 2012 (May Reference May2012). At present the conventional ‘Scott narrative’ is being radically corrected, and the numerous unjust errors made or repeated by previous polar historians should warn the present generation not to be too hasty to rush to a pitiless judgement.

We believe that Macintyre has mistakenly arrived at a negative assessment of Scott due to too great a reliance on modern ‘revisionist accounts’. This is evident from his opening citation of the supposed 1902 Scott-Shackleton argument as cast-iron fact. If this story were true, and Shackleton had been openly rude to his leader Scott, then one must note that Scott still allowed Shackleton to receive a Polar Medal despite this (a more merciful reaction than Shackleton's treatment of McNish after Endurance). However, it is most likely that the incident Macintyre describes never actually happened. The tale is uncorroborated, has no primary evidence basis and originates from Discovery officer Albert Armitage, who recorded it for the first time in a May 1922 memorandum to a Shackleton biographer (Armitage Reference Armitage1922) after all three participants in the incident were dead and unable to confirm or deny the tale. Ranulph Fiennes examines the story, and questions Armitage's reliability, in his Scott biography (Fiennes Reference Fiennes2004: 100–102, 113–114) and fellow Scott biographer David Crane remarks that the story ‘comes with such a doubtful provenance that it is probably best ignored’ (Crane Reference Crane2006: 240). We would strongly urge readers to pause before voicing criticism, to check their received information against primary evidence instead of placing all their trust in secondary materials (especially those which do not clearly cite their original sources), and above all not to perpetuate the ‘devil's game’ of needless discord by indulging in any further facile condemnation of brave pioneers.

In conclusion, Shackleton both made mistakes and achieved feats objectively worthy of admiration. His positive outlook and achievements have proved inspirational for countless people, but he should be seen as he was: he should not be wholly idealised and then used as a weapon with which to attack a misrepresented Scott. Therefore, as the Endurance centenary celebrations begin, we hope to see an end to the media's customary presentation of Shackleton within the erroneous binary opposition of ‘Scott bad, Shackleton good!’ We hope that in 2014–2017 polar enthusiasts will celebrate Shackleton in his own right, recognise his evident merits, acknowledge any errors with realism and a measure of charity, and applaud all the men of Endurance in one of history's greatest stories of survival against the odds.