Not all adventures have to be successfully resolved to become epic. It happened with the so-called Imperial Transantarctic, the expedition that left England in August 1914 under the orders of the explorer Ernest Shackleton with a huge purpose and not suitable for faint hearts: to cross Antarctica, from Vahsel, in the Weddell Sea, to Ross Island, at the other end.
The harsh conditions of the South Pole ended up trapping the Endurance ship in the ice and complicated Shackleton’s plans until he was dragged into a real feat that brought his endurance capacity and that of his companions to the fore. a limit height only achievable between icebergs, glacial temperatures and extreme exhaustion.
The explorer’s deed also served for something that he probably did not even suspect: coining the expression “third man factor or syndrome.” Well known by mountaineers and which is, even today, a fascinating phenomenon.
“Who is the third to walk by your side?”
The phenomenon was described by Shackleton when he recalled the grueling two and a half days during which he advanced – together with Frank Worseley and Tom Cream – towards a whaling station located on the north coast of South Georgia. the group walked 36 long hours among terrible conditions, with hardly any material and dodging death. On his shoulders they also carried the responsibility of having to help the rest of his companions from the ill-fated Imperial Trasantarctic.
Through desolate Antarctica, the three of them wandered alone, Ernest, Frank and Tom, although if anyone had asked them the answer they would have been frozen.
“I know that during that long and stormy march over nameless mountains and glaciers, it often seemed to me that we were four, not three,” the explorer wrote. That common sensation, precise Guardianseized the three men who undertook the journey: the presence of a “fourth” that accompanied them.
Such an expression must have surprised the poet TS Eliot, who later, in 1922, after reading Shackleton’s story, picked up the idea to capture it in his popular poem The Wasteland: “Who is the third one who always walks by your side? When I count, it is only you and me together, but when I look ahead on the white path there is always another walking by your side”.
Eliot’s license, which changed Shackleton’s “fourth” man to a “third” man, was successful and since then we often refer to it as the “third man syndrome”: the sensation of a phantom companion, a presence that somehow mode comforts people who are facing a feeling of limit.
Shackleton was not the only one to describe it. Several years after his death, in 1933, Frank Smythe, a British explorer like him, recounted a similar experience while trying to summit Mount Everest. “All the time I was climbing I just had a strong feeling that I was accompanied by a second person. It was so strong that completely removed all the loneliness I might otherwise have felt,” the explorer wrote in his diary.
So vivid was the sensation that, Smythe explains, at one point in the ascent he reached into his pocket, took out a piece of Kendal Mint Cake, broke it, and turned to offer one of the halves to that companion he felt so close to.
He didn’t see anyone, of course.
You don’t have to go back that far in time. Not that far. The Madrid mountaineer Fernando Garrido wrote in his notebook the sensation that seized him when, at the beginning of 1986, he spent more than two months on the lonely summit of Aconcagua, at almost 7,000 meters, to achieve the altitude survival record.
“Today, like other times, I woke up with the feeling that there was someone outside, next to the store. Has he spent the night there? Why didn’t he call me to let him in? […] —recounted the mountaineer in statements collected by the The Confidential— He’s my brother, my brother Javier! Javi, wake up, come on, wake up! I turn it towards me. He is dead, his head is a skull.”
A good handful of articles and references have been written about the phenomenon, some in media within the reach of Guardian or NPR, and in 2008 the writer John Geiger came to dedicate a monographic book to him, ‘The Third Man Factor: Surviving the Impossible’ after spending five years tracking similar stories.
More complicated than collecting experiences, however, is giving them a plausible explanation. Years ago, during a chat with NPR journalist Guy Raz, Geiger recounted that there are those who turn to spirituality, although he insists that the syndrome can be explained by “a solid science”. “Many skeptics and non-believers have had this experience and attribute it to other causes,” claims the author, who in his volume even includes the case of a 9/11 survivor.
In 2009 Geiger pointed out explanations such as biochemical reactions or simply failures in brain activity. “If we understand that the third man factor is a part of us, like adrenaline is… then we can access it more easily. It’s not a hallucination in the sense that hallucinations are messy. This is a very helpful guide and orderly,” he reflected.
Years ago, researchers Ben Alderson-Day and David Smailes commented on the phenomenon and explained that “strong feelings of presence” do not occur only in dramatic circumstances. Cases have been reported after bereavement, during sleep paralysis or in cases of neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease or brain damage. “The different contexts in those that occur give us some clues about what could be happening”, they settle.
“Understanding more about how and why felt presences occur has the potential to tell us many things about ourselves: how we react under intense mental or physical stress, how we deal with danger and threat, and how we recognize shape and form. position of our own body”.
“One thing it can also do is shed light on other unusual experiences that are difficult to understand,” the experts conclude in their 2015 article: “The third man doesn’t just tell us about our minds or bodies; it offers us a way to help and understand others, as he did with Shackleton”.
The passage of time has not made the phenomenon more fascinating, nor has it diminished its interest for experts, who work for example for know better dangers that lie in wait for climbers beyond glaciers, blizzards or chasms, threats that are in their own head, such as isolated height psychosis.
Images: Mountainarious (Unsplash), Wikipedia/National Library of New Zealand and Inspire Toud (Unsplash)