A fatal passion
A failed Antarctic expedition becomes a study in leadership and compassion
In 2015, 55-year-old British explorer Henry Worsley set out to do something no person had ever accomplished — to trek alone across Antarctica — the coldest, windiest, highest, driest continent.
After 71 days enduring whiteouts, ice slopes, below freezing temperatures and unseen crevasses, Worsley completed about 800 of the 900-nautical-mile journey. Exhaustion forced him to end his journey. He called in a rescue plane on his satellite phone. He didn’t have the energy to brush his teeth.
Worsley was flown out. The next day he was on another flight to a hospital in Punta Arenas, Chile, where he was rushed into surgery. He was suffering from bacterial peritonitis, an infection of the abdomen’s lining that, if it spread to the bloodstream, could cause septic shock.
Days later Worsley died.
Worsley’s life and his obsession with Antarctica are the subjects of David Grann’s “keepsake” of a book “The White Darkness.” Obsession and endurance are wrapped around other qualities Grann brings out about Worsley, an admired military commander-cum-polar explorer. Qualities of honor, of will, of sacrifice, of leadership and of love, a man’s love for his family.
Worsley’s shortened solo trek was the third of his three Antarctic journeys.
His first and third expeditions honored the memory of the British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Shackleton had failed to achieve his goals to be the first person to reach the South Pole or to be the first person to cross Antarctica.
But in those attempts he rescued his men from sure death, earning an international reputation as an explorer and a leader.
Shackleton was Worsley’s hero. And Worsley happened to be related to one of Shackleton’s men. In 2008 Worsley and two other descendants of Shackleton’s men made it to the South Pole to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Shackleton’s unsuccessful polar attempt.
“We’ve made it!” Worsley yelled to his mates after verifying the coordinates of the pole, Grann wrote. Reading Worsley’s journal, Grann noted that “all they could see was barren ice — their grail was no more than a geographical data point.”
Worsley’s second Antarctic trek was in 2012. He launched an expedition with a partner, Louis Rudd, to mark the centennial of the South Pole race that pitted Roald Amundsen against Robert Scott.
(Rudd and Colin O’Brady are attempting separate solo crossings of Antarctica, according to a recent New York Times report.)
Grann said he’d always been interested in polar explorers, “those who ventured into the most brutal environment in the world. I’m someone who hates the cold. I’d rather be in the living room by a fire.”
An earlier Grann book, “The Lost City of Z,” looked into the disappearance of Percy Fawcett, who in 1925 led an expedition to locate a lost, ancient civilization in the Amazon jungle.
Grann found parallels between Fawcett and Worsley. “Certainly the questing aspect, this wanderlust. The story of setting out into unfamiliar realms. Both were worldly, both were British and both very artistic. Both were in the military,” Grann said in a phone interview.
“But Worsley was very patient and modeled his leadership on Shackleton. … If I were holed up in an expedition, I’d rather be with Worsley. He had compassion and patience. Fawcett was contemptuous of anyone who slowed him down. … He might leave you behind.”
Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker, also wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon — The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” a National Book Award finalist.