We Failed, and We Lived
Some success looks, from the outside, exactly like defeat
We reached the whaling station on the eleventh day, three men in , more dead than alive.
The station master did not me, though we had dined together before the expedition sailed.
I told him my name, and he stood a long moment in silence, and then he wept.
He had believed us dead for over a year, as had the newspapers, and the governments, and the world.
I asked at once for a ship, and for the men I had left upon the island.
It took three attempts and four months to break through the ice and bring them off.
But we brought them off, every one, and not a single man of the expedition was lost.
I want to set that fact down plainly, because it is the only I truly claim.
We did not reach the pole; we did not cross the continent; we planted no flag on any summit.
By every I had set for myself when we sailed, the expedition was a complete failure.
The maps I meant to draw were never drawn, and the name I meant to make was nearly forgotten.
And yet I have come to believe that we succeeded at the only thing that finally mattered.
When I planned the voyage, I thought that meant arriving first at some point on the ice.
I understand now that it meant bringing twenty-eight frightened men home to the people who loved them.
The I had chased was a thin thing, drawn in confident ink upon an empty chart.
The thing we actually accomplished was heavier, and quieter, and will earn no at all.
There is a kind of success that looks, from the outside, exactly like .
We failed, and we lived, and I have slowly learned to see the second half as the greater.
The men who dragged Docherty, who gave up their clothes, who laughed in the freezing spray, taught me this.
is not the planting of a flag; it is the refusal to let go of a rope.
It is the daily, decision to carry what you have sworn to carry, all the way home.
I have been offered medals for a journey in which I achieved nothing that I set out to achieve.
I accept them on behalf of the men, who achieved the only thing worth achieving down there.
When people ask me about the pole, I tell them, honestly, that I never saw it.
When they ask whether the expedition was a success, I no longer know how to answer .
So I tell them the truth, which takes longer: we failed at what we wanted, and succeeded at what we needed.
The compass had failed us early, and in failing it taught us where we were truly .
We were , all along, not for the pole, but for one another, and for home.