Robert Peary
Explorers’ narratives only get you so close to the truth. They are — like all memoirs — public documents, manuscripts that are written to be read by others. Yet they sometimes reveal things unawares. For example, Robert Peary’s 1910 book, The North Pole, is not a source you would consult to figure out if Peary really made it to the North Pole in 1909. But the book reveals much about Peary’s view of the North Pole quest and his ideals of leadership (or, to be more accurate, Peary’s views as channeled through his ghostwriter). Describing the final push across the polar pack ice in April 1909, Peary states:
This was the time for which I had reserved all my energies, the time for which I had worked for twenty-two years, for which I had lived the simple life and trained myself as for a race. In spite of my years, I felt fit for the demands of the coming days and was eager to be on the trail. As for my party, my equipment, and my supplies, they were perfect beyond my most sanguine dreams of earlier years. My party might be regarded as an ideal which had now come to realization-as loyal and responsive to my will as the fingers of my right hand. [Peary, North Pole, 270-271]
Peary’s view of his expedition “as for a race” is telling. Seeing the North Pole as the finish line in a contest rather than a region to be investigated, Peary tended to look at other explorers as rival contestants rather than colleagues or collaborators.
Peary’s view of his team as “fingers” is also revealing. It shows that Peary thought of leadership as a something dictated from the top. Teams should not exhibit independence or creative judgment, any more than fingers should challenge the mind that directs them.
While Peary’s attitudes were common among explorers, they were not universal. Alexander von Humboldt used his expedition narrative to give voice to peoples often omitted in travel literature, in particular, the Spanish and indigenous Americans who made his researches possible.
Charles Darwin
Explorer-scientists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace had good reason to feel competitive: both arrived at the theory of natural selection independently. Yet while Darwin learned of Wallace’s discovery with a certain amount of gloom, he co-reported Wallace’s work with his own. Wallace, for his part, upheld the priority of Darwin’s claim. Both men remained on good terms.
Is it your field of work that determines your approach to your peers and employees? Or other factors — class, family, work culture, personality? As I worked on my dissertation, I remember looking warily at works that approached my topic too closely. While some of these works ultimately proved helpful, they seemed dangerous at first: objects just below the waterline which might force me to change course, or worse, send my thesis to the bottom.
Yet graduate school was also a time of generous acts. We grad students kept an eye out for one another: writing down citations for each other, photocopying sources, drinking beer, listening to bad practice speeches.
Now I’m fortunate to belong to a community of generous peers: people I seek out for advice, to read early drafts, recommend books, or suggest lines of thought. These are not the only ways to approach life in the Academy – I know of a few Pearys in the field – but fortunately I see them only at some distance, marking out territory and planting flags.
Time to Eat the Dogs 
You just made me realixe what a similarity exists between explorers and researchers! Some focus on the journey, others on the goal. While I am definately ambitious and sensitive of being “overtaken” (I’m far from saintly), I have really come to loathe the 100%-goal-focused researchers. They have no real love or care for the discipline even if they are at times brilliant. They are in fact quite prepared, even willing, to take everyone down with them if they are not given the exalted position they demand. I have seen entire departments being destroyed from within by people like this. In my eyes this is true evil.
I wonder if there is a way to evaluate people by the way they travel. I once trekked the Annapurna in Nepal, which was the most amazing experience of my life. Unfortunately one of my companions was a german woman completely focused on covering as much ground as possible in a day. Instead of marvelling at the sights and meeting the people she was trying to break a record or something. People like that are from a different planet…
How do YOU travel!?