Adventure’s Kin?

Maybe the unfinished story of balloonist Steve Fossett--routinely described now as “American adventurer”--will turn out to be epic, the kind that captivates through the ages. The suggestion was floated recently by the oddly smitten world news media, after Fossett’s record-setting solo flight around the world. An Australian newspaper, for instance, hailed the 58-year-old Chicago millionaire for following “in the tradition of the great explorers from Marco Polo to Ernest Shackleton.”

We’ll let the Marco Polo reference go, but we wonder if Shackleton, the storied polar explorer, isn’t worth another look. He is the subject of an exhibition billed as the most comprehensive of its kind, “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Peruse it and you get a sense of a classic modern adventurer who expands the concept of human potential.

If you read his press, it sounds as if Fossett has secured his place in the same league. Last week in New Zealand, Fossett again was being hailed as Mr. Adventure by journalists tracking his efforts to break the world gliding altitude record by co-piloting a sailplane above 49,007 feet. And you have to give him credit for landing the Bud Light Spirit of Freedom balloon in the Australian outback July 4, after a 13-day journey. Fossett had made five previous unsuccessful attempts to circumnavigate the globe in a hot-air and helium-filled balloon.

So how does that kind of persistence stack up against Shackleton’s? Consider the story of Shackleton and his 27-member crew, told through 150 striking black-and-white photographs and other displays on exhibit in Los Angeles through Sept. 2.

Their journey began in August 1914 aboard the Endurance, which set sail from England, bound for Antarctica. When the wooden ship was only a day’s sail from the continent, a treacherous ice pack closed in. Blocks of ice twisted the deck timbers, wrenched the sternpost, rolled her on one side and then later splintered the 144-foot-long ship into pieces.

Ten months after the Endurance sank in November 1915, Shackleton--with provisions long gone, with minimal gear and equipment--managed to get the entire crew home alive.

We turned to Ann Muscat, the cheerful curator of the Shackleton exhibit in Los Angeles. Muscat also is a biologist who made two research trips to the Antarctic in the 1980s, diving under 7 feet of ice to study the underwater food chain. She was diplomatic on the Fossett-Shackleton question. “At first I thought, oh no, they’re very different,” she said, before reading up a bit on Fossett. “Then I thought, they’re not as different as we might think, probably. The biggest difference is what we know about the world today and what people knew about the world then.”

Both men appear to be driven by the same kind of fire, Muscat surmised, “to seek the unknown. The sense of being part of something that’s bigger than yourself.”

The drama of Shackleton’s story, of course, was heightened by the catastrophic loss of his ship just off the world’s coldest continent in largely untouched territory. Shackleton, at age 40, had set out with a team of scientists and others (including one stowaway) to become the first to traverse the Antarctic by foot and claim the last great polar prize for Britain. His tale has been immortalized through movies, books, poetry and other means including a novel narrated by the ship’s cat. Eighty-four years after the Endurance expedition began, entire management seminars are devoted to his leadership.

On the other hand, Fossett’s journey on the adventure landscape is simply different, his place in history unknown (Though his round-the-world gondola is to be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum). So far, Fossett has set seven world records in speed sailing, swum the English Channel and competed in the Iditarod--an impressive check list, no doubt, for a pudgy investments company president. His balloon expedition, though, cinched his reputation as the adventurer of our day.

At one point, Fossett had to climb out of his gondola, which was about the size of a closet, and extinguish a small fire caused by a loose hose. In the thin air, five to six miles above sea level, Fossett had to breathe through an oxygen mask. Outside temperatures plunged to 50 degrees below zero, though a pair of heaters inside the gondola kept temperatures between 40 and 70 degrees.

Last month, the Waikato Times newspaper in New Zealand proclaimed that Fossett had pushed himself “to the very edge of human endurance”--a place that apparently includes a Global Positioning Satellite navigation tool, satellite telephone, high-frequency radio, laptop computer, full-length bunk and sleeping bag, macadamia nuts, backup chase plane and ground crew with two meteorologists.

By comparison, Shackleton’s navigator had only a few tools and a sextant, the hand-held instrument that uses the position of the sun to plot a ship’s position. The crew had no communications equipment. After the Endurance made its last stop at a whaling station in December 1914, no one heard from the men for nearly two years.

Their saga was documented through the work of ship photographer Frank Hurley, who, as the Endurance crumpled, dived into freezing waters to save his glass-plate negatives. The Los Angeles exhibition includes the most extensive showing of his work ever, with photographs that captured the crew’s daily lives and spirits.

There are pictures of the men romping with their huskies, which later had to be shot and eaten when food stocks ran out. Pictures of the cook in a white chef’s hat, skinning a penguin for dinner.

Perhaps the most haunting portrait in the exhibition is a ghostly image of the Endurance, sails down, stranded in a sea of white against the black sky. Hurley, shooting from an ice floe, caught a sense of how grand it once was, with its three masts, made of oak and Norwegian mountain fir. “The ship caught at night--just the eerie nature of it and thinking of what it’s like to be somewhere that’s dark all the time. This brings to mind, what does it do to your psyche?” Muscat said.

Last winter, Muscat led a museum tour to the Antarctic peninsula and South Georgia island in the South Atlantic Ocean. The tour included a stop at Shackleton’s grave on the island, where he died in 1922 of a heart attack on another expedition. Muscat also took the group to a small island where Shackleton and his crew were forced to make camp.

From Elephant Island, Shackleton and five volunteers left to seek help, riding a tiny lifeboat through an ice storm and eventually making their way to a whaling village, 800 miles away.

One of Hurley’s pictures depicts a black spot on the gray horizon--Shackleton on a borrowed trawler, plowing through the ice pack, returning for the rescue of his men. The men are photographed from behind, hats off, gloved hands up in triumphant waves or salutes.

Muscat pointed out another picture showing the glowing face of five young crew members huddled around a stove, before the shipwreck. She is intrigued by the crew, their dynamics, how they survived the Antarctic winter, when temperatures dropped to minus-30 degrees Fahrenheit, excluding the windchill.

“I love this one against the fire,” she said, “to look in their faces and imagine what they might be thinking and feeling and to see the camaraderie. It’s just a wonderful glimpse into something that you usually have to imagine in your mind, and then you don’t really get a true sense of it.”

Her eyes fell on a photograph of Shackleton’s quarters, filled with books and a typewriter. “I like looking at Shackleton’s cabin and seeing how neat and tidy it is and wondering how that’s a reflection of who he is .... “

And what about Fossett’s story? Will generations scrutinize the photographs of his expeditions in the same way, peering into the eyes of his crew? “Oh, it’s hard to say,” she demurred with a grin. “I couldn’t even begin to predict.”