When it comes to surviving a catastrophe, humanity’s biggest flaw might well be ourselves, with most of us failing to make the right choices to save our lives.
That’s what Dr John Leach, a survival psychologist at the Extreme Environmental Medicine and Science Group at the University of Portsmouth, will be telling Seán today at 2.45pm, explaining the crippling fear that takes over when faced with disaster.
You can listen in live here: http://www.newstalk.com/player/
Surviving perilous events requires luck, reaction and rational thought. Or lots and lots of practice – just like Captain Robert “Bob” Abram Bartlett got.
Captain Barlett’s life as an Arctic explorer was filled with so many adventures and brushes with disaster that it’s too much to catalogue them all in a single entry; but suffice it to say, if you were boarding a ship and saw him making his way up the gangplank, it probably would have been best to just turn around and make it back to land – he was shipwrecked no fewer than 12 times.
Perhaps his greatest known disaster was the voyage of the Karluk, when he was filling in as captain on the Arctic adventure while the actual one was off hunting. The boat became stuck on ice on August 13th, 1913, drifting aimlessly around the freezing water westwards for months. In January 1914, the ice breeched the hull, tearing a hole into the side of the ship.
But Bartlett showed that clear-headedness can save lives, having already ordered his men to climb onto the ice and build igloos, filling them with the last of the ship’s supplies.
As the Karluk was plunged into the icy water, Bartlett stayed on board, playing records. Legend had it he played Chopin’s Funeral March, stepping off the deck, just as the ship went under.
In their new community, known as Shipwreck Camp, the crew lived for a few more months, before setting out on a 100-mile walk to Wrangel Island, just off the Russian mainland. From there he and an Inuit named Kataktovik made a 700-mile trek by dogsled to civilisation, before making the journey back to his stranded crew.
So the next time you find yourself stranded in Arctic ice all of a sudden, just ask yourself what Barlett would do?
