The Path to Leadership
When Ernest Shackleton was at the zenith of his popularity as an explorer, he was invited back to his boys' school, Dulwich College in London, to present some academic honors. That was about as close as he ever got to a Dulwich prize, he joked, to the cheers of the students.
Indeed, Shackleton's early years revealed little promise of the glories to come. An early biographer, Hugh Robert Mill, a friend and mentor of the explorer, joked that the only sign in Shackleton's childhood that he would go to the Antarctic was a class ranking that was decidedly "south of the equator and sometimes perilously near the Pole." At the time of the Dulwich speech, a teacher interviewed by a schoolboy magazine remembered the young Shackleton as "a rolling stone." Students and teachers alike saw the boy as an introvert who was more interested in books than in games but who had a hard time with his studies. "He could do better," was a common refrain in school reports.
One classmate did see a hint of Shackleton in the making. He recalled some forty years after the incident how the young student had beaten up a schoolyard bully who had been picking on a smaller boy. From an early age, Shackleton gravitated to the role of protector, stepping up to the front to insist on fair play.
Ernest Henry Shackleton was a natural as a big brother. He was born on February 15, 1874, in Kilkea, County Kildare, Ireland, the second of ten children. He was a healthy and good-looking boy, with slate blue eyes and dark hair. His family and closest friends saw him as humorous, imaginative, and mischievous. By all accounts, he grew up in a loving home surrounded by attentive females. In addition to his eight sisters, his grandmother and aunts often helped his mother with the children. It is no wonder that many people would later remark on his strong feminine sensibilities. Despite a burly physique; enormous stamina; and a tough, no-nonsense manner, he could be nurturing and gentle, quick to forgive frailties, and generous without seeking thanks in return. One friend called him "a Viking with a mother's heart." Both men and women saw this duality in Shackleton and found it irresistible. Shackleton himself was aware of it: "I am a curious mixture with something feminine in me as well as being a man.... I have committed all sorts of crimes in thought if not always in action and don't worry much about it, yet I hate to see a child suffer, or to be false in any way."
The family home had its own split personality, according to Dr. Alexander Macklin, the physician on two of Shackleton's three independent expeditions. He wrote that Shackleton's Irish mother, Henrietta Gavan, was "warm-hearted and altogether happy-go-lucky." His father Henry, on the other hand, was "a grave, cautious, solid Yorkshire Quaker." A Shackleton ancestor had immigrated to Ireland in the eighteenth century to open a school. Shackleton's father ran a farm and settled his family in the lush land of county Kildare. When Ernest was six years old, the elder Shackleton left farming to study medicine at Trinity College in Dublin. He became a homeopathic doctor, a vocation that provided the family with solid, upper middle-class comforts.
Shackleton learned from his family a broad and sympathetic view of the world that helped shape his evenhanded, democratic leadership style.
Henry Shackleton headed a strict, though apparently not oppressive, household. The Bible was read aloud in the home, and young Ernest, who had flair for the dramatic, led his siblings into the children's temperance movement. They would gather outside pubs, singing songs about the perils of alcohol-a display of youthful activism that suggests the family's religious bearings. Sir Ernest's branch of the Shackletons left the Quaker religion in the late eighteenth century to join the Church of England. It seems, however, that the family maintained some of its Quaker culture. In the late nineteenth century, Quakers were active worldwide in many progressive political movements: abolition, prison reform, education reform, pacifism, women's suffrage, and the temperance movement, which held that alcohol was a chief cause of family violence and poverty.
Throughout his life, Shackleton was described as being ahead of his time in his attitude toward and treatment of his men. He also encouraged his sisters to always express themselves and develop their own careers, and they became impressively self-sufficient women for their day, choosing vocations such as artist, midwife, customs officer, and writer. As an adult, Shackleton would abandon temperance and other religious practices and embrace his share of vices. But he maintained his faith and his moral compass, balancing his contemplative, spiritual side with a practical, humanistic commitment. Later in life, Shackleton's wife wrote a bio-graphical note for Dulwich alumni in which she stated her husband was "interested in social welfare movements." Ultimately, his authority as a leader rested on his genuine regard and respect for the men he led.
If Ernest Shackleton had anything in common with his father it was that they both pursued their interests with great passion. The edler Shackleton relished domesticity, never more content than when poring over scientific texts at his last family home in Sydenham, in London. He lived there for thirty-two years, tending to his medical practice, his family, and a meticulously kept rose garden. Ernest, by contrast, loved poetry and the sea. He was to become famously incapable of staying put, going to the ends of the earth to seek adventure. What he definitely didn't want was to follow his father's wish that he become a doctor.
Ernest was ten years old when his family moved to England. His spoken English forever retained traces of his Irish roots and so he was always identified, for better or for worse, as an outsider. His Anglo-Irish culture helped shape his independent mindset, giving him a healthy disregard for custom, clan, and class.
In England, Shackleton was sent to school for the first time. He was eleven years old. Until then, his father had educated him and his siblings at home. From the start, Shackleton showed a certain discomfort in a formal classroom setting, and wasn't destined to stay long in it. His first school was Fir Lodge in Croydon, south of London. Shackleton's classmates teased the newcomer, goading him and another Irish boy to fight each other on St. Patrick's Day. The boys gave him the nickname "Micky," and he adopted it for life, signing his name as such in letters to his wife and close friends.
When he was thirteen years old, Shackleton was sent to Dulwich College, a solid boys' school attended mostly by day students who were the children of professionals. He was seen as immature and inattentive to schoolwork, so was often placed with students a year younger. One teacher reported that the young Shackleton "wants waking up." Another predicted, "He has not yet fully exerted himself." a schoolmaster who met Shackleton after he had become a famous explorer confessed, "We never discovered you when you were at Dulwich."
"No," Shackleton replied sympathetically, "but I had not then discovered myself."
Shackleton complained the school didn't make things interesting. Geography was "names of towns, lists of capes and bays and islands," he said. Worse, it took great poets and writers and made them dull by "the dissection, the parsing" of their work. Shackleton seemed a typically moody teen, but he was never disruptive or rebellious. Instead, he plotted an escape. He announced at fifteen years of age that he was going to leave home for life on the seas. "I wanted to be free," he wrote later. "I wanted to escape from a routine which didn't at all agree with my nature and which, therefore, was doing no good to my character. Some boys take to school like ducks to water; for some boys, whether they take to it or not, the discipline is good; but for a few rough spirits the system is chafing, not good, and the sooner they are pitched into the world, the better. I was one of those."
The decision greatly pained Henry Shackleton but he didn't stand in his son's way. Rather, he used family connections to help him secure a decent cabin-boy position. Shackleton's mother, an unconventional woman who had her own subscription to the schoolboy publication Boys Own Paper, encouraged him to pursue his dreams so he would have no regrets later.
Shackleton joined the merchant marine, learning the rugged, freewheeling, commercial culture of the service. Shackleton gave notice to the school but finished the 1890 spring term while waiting for his position to be settled. Once he had fixed on a goal and purpose, he at least was motivated to apply himself. He began to excel as a student, shooting up to fifth place in a class of thirty-one boys. It was the awakening his teacher had said he needed. After finishing the term, he traveled to Liverpool and joined the crew of the sailing ship Hoghton Tower.
Once his choice was made, Shackleton saw his commitments through to the end.
Shackleton was homesick and unhappy for most of the first four years of his apprenticeship at sea. He had left the protective bosom of his religious, largely female household and had thrown himself into the hard-boiled sailor's world. Initially, he was under no contractual obligation to stay, but he refused to quit. He was determined to complete the difficult apprenticeship and launch a career. "I don't think I ever formulated any definite idea as to what all this rough work was leading up to," he said, "but I dreamed prodigiously about big things ahead, big things in the nature of adventure."
The work was rougher than anything Shackleton had daydreamed about at his desk at school. He swabbed decks, polished brass, and did backbreaking work loading and unloading cargo. Biographer H. R. Mill described one assignment to pick up a shipment of rice from India and bring it to Mauritius: "a horrible job, for every one of the 2,600 bags, each weighing 170 pounds, that were to be loaded each day, had to be passed along the deck from hand to hand." The rough sacks tore at Shackleton's hands and so bruised them that the boy apologized in letters home that his writing was so brief and in such poor penmanship. "That such a system of loading cargo could exist even on sailing ships in the last decade of the Victorian age, so renowned for its mechanical achievements, is not a little surprising," Mill said.
It was dangerous work. The crew sometimes encountered weeks of violent storms that shredded the ship's sails, carried off lifeboats, and tossed the men about. During the worst storms, the young boys would be lashed to the ship to prevent them from being washed overboard. Shackleton saw one crewman get swept away in one of a relentless series of storms. Nine were bedridden by accidents then, and Shackleton was nearly crushed by falling tackle. He developed lumbago after spending weeks in wet clothes and a wet bed. Later, he suffered dysentery. Once, when the boys were tied up during rough seas, one of the ship's brutes purposely smashed Shackleton's foot with his heavy boot. Shackleton fell to the ground and sank his teeth into the man's leg-and didn't let go. After that, he was left alone.
Shackleton found much about the crew intolerable. Even allowing for the usual embellishments of a boy's letters home, he complained bitterly to his parents about how much he abhorred the drinking, swearing, and gambling that surrounded him. (He did admit to have picked up smoking.) The ports offered no respite. They were seedy, violent places to the young boy, and Shackleton chose to spend his evenings aboard ship under the stars, finding solace in the beauty of nature. He wrote in one letter: "Many a painter would have given half of what he possessed to have been able to catch the fading tints of the red and golden sunset we had last night.... All I say is, if you wish to see Nature robed in her mantle of might, look at a storm at sea; if you want to see her robed in her mantle of glory, look at a sunset at sea."
On his first assignment, Shackleton worked under a compassionate captain who invited the apprentices to his dinner table and held Sunday sessions of hymn singing in his cabin. The atmosphere was such that Shackleton, to his amazement, could read his Bible without harassment from his shipmates. Some even joined him.
His next captain, however, was far less kind and ran a ship that was less disciplined and demanded harder work. Shackleton's Bible study made him the object of ridicule by the others. Consequently, he began practicing his religion more privately and let his actions speak for his beliefs.
By his third and last apprentice voyage, he was horribly homesick. To allay his misery on the two-year trip, Shackleton wrote hundreds of letters home and demanded hundreds in return-postcards didn't count.
After completing four years of apprenticeship on clipper ships carrying freight, Shackleton began taking exams every two years to advance to higher posts. By the age of twenty, he had secured a job as third officer on an elite passenger liner. By the age of twenty-four, he had earned his master's certificate, qualifying him to serve as captain of any ship in the merchant marine. He had a new reason to chase success: He was in love with Emily Dorman, a cultured Londoner several years his senior. He wanted a respectable career and the financial security to marry her.
As he matured, Shackleton became more confident and more demanding. He wanted better working conditions, more promising work, and colleagues he could respect. He got what he wanted, thanks to a winning combination of hard work, savvy political instincts, and charm. Early in 1899, he joined the prestigious Union Castle Line. Shackleton figured his new employer would put him in the company of more ambitious peers and well-connected passengers. He worked relentlessly to make contacts and ask for introduction to others. He wasted no time finding a mentor either. While serving as fourth officer aboard the Tantallon Castle, Shackleton met-and dazzled-a rich steel maker by the name of Gerald Lysaght. Lysaght was struck by the twenty-five-year-old officer's "unusual character-power and determination" and was convinced that he was destined for great things. For the rest of his life, Shackleton benefited from this patron's financial support of his expeditions.
The force of his personality also had a magnetic effect on his superiors and colleagues. The following year, Shackleton was offered the position of fourth mate on the Tintagel Castle, a large steamer carrying troops to fight in the Boer War between Great Britain and Dutch colonists in South Africa, but convinced the captain to give him third officer's post instead. Shackleton distinguished himself in service on the ship, going far beyond the basic duties required. He had developed an idea of how business should be conducted on a ship and how he would conduct himself. He also started to get a sense of his professional goals.
Shackleton decided to write a book about his experiences, coauthored with the ship's surgeon, Dr. W. McLean. Its unwieldly title tells something of their task: O.H.M.S.: A Record of the Voyage of the Tintagel Ca...
