What Does Starvation Do To A Man Before It Kills Him?

[00:00:00]The only saving grace for Shackleton was that at least at first, food was not an immediate concern. The Endurance had been well [music] provisioned, bacon, rice, canned meats, other preserved stores, including supplies intended to prevent scurvy, [music] which is a horrific disease caused by vitamin C deficiency that had killed thousands of sailors across centuries of exploration.

[00:00:20]>> [music] >> And most importantly, of course, there was rum and lots of it. But if the ship were crushed by the ice, as Shackleton already understood, those stores would be lost, almost all of them, beneath the sea.

[00:00:30]>> [music] >> From that point forward, survival would depend on what could be taken from the environment itself, penguins, [music] seals, seabirds when available. And when those inevitably ran out, there remained only one last resource, the sled dogs.

[00:00:43]By early 1916, with food supplies exhausted [music] and the men on the edge of starvation, each of the dogs would be taken away behind the ice, out of sight of the others, and killed for food. It was done quietly, without ceremony, [music] and those who carried it out later described it as the worst moment of the entire expedition. But standing on the Endurance in 1915, looking out across the pack [music] ice stretching to every horizon, Ernest Shackleton could not have been entirely surprised. He knew exactly what he was getting himself into. This was Shackleton's third expedition >> [music] >> to the frozen south. His first came in 1901, when at the age of 27, he joined a team led by the [music] Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott in an attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. [music] They made it to the continent and set out over land, traveling on foot and with sled dogs.

[00:01:33]But the expedition was poorly planned.

[00:01:34]They didn't bring enough food, >> [music] >> nor the right kind of food, and they didn't yet understand how to manage a team of sled dogs in polar conditions.

[00:01:42]They pushed farther south than anyone before them, but eventually >> [music] >> had to turn back.

[00:01:47]And by that point, Shackleton himself had fallen ill with scurvy. He had progressed past the early stage of the disease marked by severe fatigue and joint pain. He was entering a more dire phase when hair begins to fall out and the skin develops dark, putrid splotches. Later stages are even ghastlier. The gums deteriorate and bleed, teeth fall out, you cough up blood, old wounds begin to reopen as the body loses its ability to maintain connective tissue. And in its final form, scurvy becomes a systemic [music] collapse in the whole body. Organs fail, internal bleeding, the body slowly breaking down and eating itself [music] from the inside out. Well, Shackleton was ultimately sent home before it reached that point, but it was a fate that had defined centuries of maritime exploration. During the age of sail from roughly the 1500s to the 1800s, it's estimated that as many as half of all sailors on long ocean voyages died in this way. Any sailor setting out on a long expedition understood, at least implicitly, that the odds of survival were far from certain.

[00:02:48]And that the cost [music] of failure would be an agonizing, nightmarish death. And still, they went. Shackleton survived the ordeal, but the expedition failed. They had made it farther south than anyone before them, >> [music] >> but not far enough. Robert Falcon Scott would continue the pursuit of the pole.

[00:03:03]Eventually, he made [music] it there in 1912.

[00:03:07]Along with a small team of four men, Scott reached the South Pole only to discover that Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian explorer, had already been there and [music] planted his flag weeks earlier.

[00:03:17]Defeated, Scott and his men turned for home, and none of them survived the return journey. [music] Amundsen himself, by the way, years earlier had already been the first to successfully navigate the Northwest [music] Passage, a route through the Arctic that had defeated explorers for centuries. After reaching the South Pole, he would continue to push into polar [music] exploration more broadly, eventually becoming the first person to fly across the Arctic by air.

[00:03:38]In 1928, [music] at the age of 55, he set out in a seaplane as part of a rescue mission for a fellow explorer who had become stranded [music] near the Arctic, and he never returned.