Caroline Alexander

by The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

  They continued to work the pumps throughout the night and morning. October 27 dawned clear and bright, but with a temperature of –8.5°. The ice had not ceased to roar, but the men were now too tired to notice. The pumps were being worked faster and faster, and someone was actually singing a chanty to their beat. The pressure increased throughout the day and at 4 p.m., reached its height. With a blow, the ship was knocked stern up, while a moving floe ripped away her rudder and sternpost; then the floe relaxed, and the beaten Endurance sank a little in the water. The decks began to break upward, and as the keel was ripped out, the water poured in.

  It was all up. At 5 p.m., Shackleton gave the order to abandon ship. The dogs were evacuated down canvas chutes, and the supplies that had been readied were lowered to the ice. Shackleton, standing on the quivering deck, looked down the engine-room skylight to see the engines dropping sideways as the stays and plates gave way.

  “Everything has come too quickly to make us pause to regret,” wrote Wordie. “That will come in the future.” The men were numbed by fatigue and the suddenness with which the end had come. None of the diaries evinces much concern for personal safety; all emotion was expended on the death of the ship. From her first entrance into the pack, they had cheered her fighting spirit; “noble,” “gallant,” “brave,” “our stout little ship”— these had been the proud words with which they had characterized her. It was her maiden journey—she was, in Hurley’s words, “a bride of the sea.”

  “It is hard to write what I feel,” wrote Shackleton. “To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home. … Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career.”

  Before departing for good, Hurley had taken one last look around their old quarters in the Ritz, already a foot deep in water. The sound of beams splintering in the darkness was alarming, and he abruptly left. But of all sights and sounds, it was the clock still ticking comfortably in the cozy wardroom as the water rose that perhaps most unnerved him.

  Shackleton was the last to leave. He hoisted the blue ensign, and the men on the ice gave three hearty cheers. By a cruel accident, the ship’s emergency light had switched on, and as its circuit was intermittently broken, the Endurance seemed to all hands to bid them a final, sad, flickering farewell.

  The wreck of the Endurance

  “The floes are in a state of agitation throughout the day, and in consequence, I had the cinema trained on the ship the whole time. I secured the unique film of the mast collapsing. Toward evening, as though conscious of having achieved its purpose, the floes were quiescent again.” ( Hurley, diary)

  The wreck of the Endurance

  “Awful calamity that has overtaken the ship that has been our home for over 12 months.…We are homeless & adrift on the sea ice.” ( Hurley, diary)

  Shackleton’s caption for this photograph in South was “The End.”

  Patience Camp

  For the Crew of the Endurance From Alexandra, May 31, 1914

  May the Lord help you to do your duty & guide you through all dangers by land and sea.

  “May you see the Works of the Lord & all His wonders in the Deep.”

  —INSCRIPTION IN SHIP BIBLE

  PRESENTED BY QUEEN ALEXANDRA

  Assemble on floe: Boss explains situation and we turn in,” wrote Wordie. They had set up camp on what appeared to be a stable floe only some 100 yards from their shattered ship. As far as could be seen in every direction around them, the ice rose in contorted, colossal fragments. The temperature had fallen to –15°. They were 350 miles from the nearest land.

  Each man was issued a sleeping bag and assigned to one of five tents.

  “There was only 18 skin bags & we cast lots for them,” wrote McNish. “I was lucky for the first time in my life for I drew one.” By some piece of subterfuge that did not escape the sailors, most of the officers happened to draw the less desirable Jaeger wool bags.

  “There was some crooked work in the drawing,” Able Seaman Bakewell recorded, “as Sir Ernest, Mr. Wild… Captain Worsley and some of the other officers all drew wool bags. The fine warm fur bags all went to the men under them.”

  Lying on groundsheets that were not waterproof, the men listened to the grind ing and booming of the floes, like distant thunder, travelling through the ice directly under their heads, the sound now unmuffled by their ship’s stout wooden walls. Their linen tents were so thin that the moon could be seen through them. Three times in the night, the floe on which they were camped cracked beneath them. Three times they had to pick up tent, sleeping bag, and groundsheet and pitch them all again.

  “A terrible night,” wrote James, “with the ship outline dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her… seeming like the cries of a living creature.”

  Shackleton himself did not return to his tent, but paced the ice, listening to the pressure and staring at the light in his ship. “Like a lamp in a cottage window, it braved the night,” he wrote, “until in the early morning the Endurance received a particularly violent squeeze. There was a sound of rending beams and the light disappeared.”

  Dump Camp. The morning after the disaster to the ship

  “A terrible night with the ship outline dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her…like the cries of a living creature” ( James, diary). The men passed the first three nights on the ice here before attempting to march to land 364 miles away.

  In the chill dawn, Shackleton was joined by Hurley and Wild in salvaging tins of petrol from the wreck. Erecting a makeshift galley, they prepared warm milk and took it to the men in their tents, “surprised and a trifle chagrined,” as Shackleton recorded dryly, “at the matter-of-fact manner in which some of the men accepted this contribution to their comfort. They did not quite understand what work we had done for them in the early dawn, and I heard Wild say, ‘If any of you gentlemen would like your boots cleaned just put them outside!’ “

  After breakfast, Shackleton again summoned the men and informed them that in a few days they would begin a march towards Snow Hill or Robertson Island, some 200 miles to the northwest.

  “As always with him what had happened had happened,” Macklin wrote. “It was in the past and he looked to the future.… [W]ithout emotion, melodrama or excitement [he] said ‘ship and stores have gone—so now we’ll go home.’ “

  The planned march required the men to drag with them basic supplies as well as two of the three lifeboats. Every hand had been issued new winter gear and a pound of tobacco. Beyond this, each was limited to two pounds of personal possessions. A few exceptions were made. Shackleton allowed Hussey to take his banjo, on the premise that it would supply the men with “vital mental tonic.”

  By way of example, before the assembled men, Shackleton discarded a handful of gold sovereigns and his gold watch on the ice, followed by his silver brushes and dressing cases. He then took the Bible that had been presented to the ship before departure by Queen Alexandra. Ripping out the flyleaf and a few other pages, he lay the Bible on the ice. The pages he retained were those of the Twenty-third Psalm and these verses from Job:

  Out of whose womb came the ice?

  And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?

  The waters are hid as with a stone

  And the face of the deep is frozen.

  A pile of discarded dress uniforms, scientific equipment, books, watches, cooking utensils, ropes, tools, flags, sextants, chronometers, diaries, and blankets grew as the men dumped all nonessential personal effects. McNish was busy fitting the boats to sledges, while others sorted rations, stored their gear, and sewed pockets on their clothing for precious possessions like spoons, knives, toilet paper, and toothbrushes.

  There were no disturbances over the next two nights, and on October 30 the men awoke to a raw, snowy morning. Everything was ready for the start of the march, and at 1:15 p.m. a “pioneering party” consisting of Shackleton,
Hudson, Hurley, and Wordie got under way. Shackleton shouted, “Now we start for Robertson Island, boys!” and everyone cheered. The job of this advance guard was to attempt to break down the hummocks, ice blocks, and pressure ridges over which the boats and dogsledges would travel.

  At 2:55 p.m., Crean shot three of his puppies and Mrs. Chippy, who had come to be known as the ship’s mascot. It was left to Macklin to put down his dog Sirius, who had never been broken to harness. Sirius, ever friendly, jumped up to lick Macklin’s hand, which was shaking so much that he required two shots to finish the job. The sound of the shots ringing out over the ice cast a pall over an already gloomy day.

  At 3 p.m., the rest of the procession set out. From the pathfinding party at the head to the fifteen man-hauling the large lifeboat in the rear, the unwieldy column stretched for as much as a mile. Seven dog teams relayed back and forth with smaller loads.

  At 6 p.m., the party halted for the night. They had travelled just under a mile.

  “A wretched day,” Lees wrote the following morning. “Snowing hard with a very high temperature & everything wet.” Owing to the snow, they did not set out until the afternoon; after they had travelled only half a mile, the weather thickened, and Shackleton called a halt. On the third day, November 1, sinking at times up to their hips in the wet snow, they covered a quarter of a mile before calling it quits.

  “The condition of the surface is atrocious,” wrote Hurley. “There appears scarcely a square yard of smooth surface which is covered by a labyrinth of hummocks & ridges.” After a conference with his ad hoc advisory committee, consisting of Wild, Worsley, and Hurley, Shackleton acknowledged that further efforts were futile. He announced that they would pitch a new camp and await the breakup of the ice, which would allow them to take the boats into open water. His hope was that the drift of the pack would carry them northwest to within striking distance of Paulet Island, nearly 400 miles distant. Nordenskjöld’s Swedish expedition had built a hut there in 1902, and Shackleton knew it to be stocked with emergency supplies; he himself had helped provision the relief operation for the expedition twelve years earlier. From here, a small overland party would continue west to Graham Land, and make its way to Wilhelmina Bay, where they could expect to meet up with whaling vessels. Meanwhile, the new camp, established on a sturdy floe some twenty feet thick only a mile and a half from the wreck of the Endurance, was christened Ocean Camp.

  Hauling the James Caird

  “We all followed with the heavier boat on the composite sledge. It was terrific work to keep it going. We all did our best but were practically exhausted by the time we reached the new camp, No. 4, barely 3?miles away” (Lees, diary). Loaded, the boats weighed as much as a ton each.

  A distant view of the camp

  When the march was abandoned, Ocean Camp was established on a solid floe roughly a mile and a half from the wreck of the Endurance, which was still visible in the distance; the tip of its broken mast and funnel can just be seen over the horizon to the left of the photograph.

  Throughout the ensuing days, salvage teams ferried back and forth between “Dump Camp,” the site where the Endurance had been abandoned, and their new quarters. Many objects removed from the ship during the disaster had sunk into the snow and become embedded in the ice. Nonetheless, much was retrieved, including part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The entire wheelhouse, now under three feet of water, was removed from the ship’s deck and put to use as a storehouse. McNish hacked an opening through the deck above the old Ritz, disgorging various cases of food, some more useful than others: Containers of sugar and flour floated out to loud cheers, while the appearances of walnuts, onions, and soda carbonate were met with groans.

  It was during this time of precarious digging in the bowels of the wrecked ship that Hurley determined to rescue his negatives.

  “During the day,” he wrote, “I hacked through the thick walls of the refrigerator to retrieve the negatives stored therein. They were located beneath four feet of mushy ice & by stripping to the waist & diving under I hauled them out. Fortunately they are soldered up in double tin linings, so I am hopeful they may not have suffered by their submersion.”

  As the new plan called for eventual recourse to the boats, the weight of personal possessions allowed to each man was still strictly limited. But when Hurley returned with his precious negatives, Shackleton relented.

  “I spend the day with Sir Ernest selecting the finest of my negatives from the year’s collection,” Hurley wrote on November 9. He resoldered 120 and dumped about 400. “This unfortunate reduction is essential, as a drastic cutting down in weight must be effected owing to the very limited space that will be at disposal in boat transport.” The selected negatives included twenty Paget color as well as 100 whole and half glass plates. He also retrieved an album of already developed prints.

  The wreck

  “The wardroom is a pile of broken timber, while as to the fore-hold I did not dare go in lest I should not get out again. … Itwas a sad sight to see the old familiar places broken up.” (Macklin, diary)

  Ocean Camp in Distance

  This was published in South as “Loneliness.”

  “Mind you put your old diary in my bag as it has been kept rather more regularly than mine, I believe,” Shackleton had said to Lees as they abandoned ship. At the back of his mind were the book and story rights he had sold in advance to finance the expedition. Hurley’s photographs would be similarly valuable.

  Ocean Camp

  Lumber salvaged from the Endurance, foreground, is used to build the new galley. “Half the members went off with dog sledges to the ship & all day long relays of wood, ropes & a few odd provisions were arriving at the camp.” (Lees, diary)

  Three tons of salvaged provisions were eventually carried back to Ocean Camp on dogsledges and stored in the former wheelhouse, now nicknamed “the rabbit hutch.” The new camp gained shape. In the center stood the galley, built of sails and spars and containing a stove that Hurley had constructed with a chisel from the ship’s ash chute. Nearby stood the line of three domed and two pole tents, close to which the dogs were pegged out in their teams. A platform of deck planking and spars served as a lookout, over which were flown the flags of the King and the Royal Clyde Yacht Club.

  A routine was established. At 8:30 a.m., breakfast was served consisting of fried seal, lumps of baked dough called “bannocks,” and tea. Each tent appointed a mess-man, whose job was to bring meals from the galley to the tent. After breakfast, parties went out scouting for seals or did chores around the camp until lunch, at 1 p.m. Afternoons were spent as one chose, generally reading, darning, or walking. At 5:30, penguin stew (“hoosh”) was served with cocoa, and immediately afterward the crew settled into their sleeping bags. Hour watches were set throughout the night, to guard against dogs “coming adrift” or to warn the camp of a sudden breakup of the floe.

  Ocean Camp

  The long canvas structure is the galley, made of sails and spars, abutting the ship’s salvaged wheelhouse, which was used as a storeroom.

  Ocean Camp

  Shackleton and Wild stand in the left foreground; Bakewell’s Winchester .30-.30 carbine (a “saddle gun” purchased in Montana) is propped beside Wild. The wood-slatted rear of the storehouse is beyond to the right. Hurley’s camera equipment is in cases to the left of Shackleton. The sailors are mostly to the right.

  Ocean Camp

  “It is beyond conception, even to us, that we are dwelling on a colossal ice raft, with but five feet of ice separating us from 2,000 fathoms of ocean, & drifting along under the caprices of wind & tides, to heaven knows where.” (Hurley, diary)

  The sledging rations originally intended for the continental crossing had been among the first articles evacuated from the ship before the breakup, and were now scrupulously reserved for the boat journey, which was projected to be only a month or two away. Estimates of how long the rest of the salvaged food could last varied from personality to personality: Accordi
ng to Hurley, there was “now sufficient food in the camp augmented with seals and penguins, to last the party nine months.” Lees’s practiced calculations, nearer the mark, did not extend much beyond 100 days. Shackleton allocated a pound of food per man per day, a diet that was uncomfortably frugal, but far from starvation. The men’s main criticism at this point concerned the monotony of the fare.

  Shackleton’s tent assignments were characteristically astute.

  “He collected with him the ones he thought wouldn’t mix with the others. … They were not so easy to get on with, the ones he had in his tent with him—they were quite a mixed bag,” according to Greenstreet. With Shackleton in tent No. 1 were Hurley, Hudson, and James; James had proved to be fair game for teasing and baiting, and his inclusion was for his own good. Hurley was included because his vanity was flattered by being with “the Boss.” Shackleton was very wary of Hurley, whose undoubted competence and somewhat glamorous professional background had won him a following early in the expedition. In terms of mental and physical toughness, Hurley was up with Wild and Crean—but he lacked their unquestionable loyalty. Consequently, Shackleton took pains to “consult” with Hurley, and to include him in all conferences of any importance.

  Wild, Wordie, McIlroy, and McNish shared tent No. 2, Shackleton placing the dour carpenter squarely in the midst of men he regarded as “solid,” under Wild’s eye. Tent No. 3, a large domed construction, held the eight men from the fo’c’sle, How, Bakewell, McCarthy, McLeod, Vincent, Holness, Stephenson, and Green—who would have expected to remain together. Crean had charge of the generally unproblematic tent No. 4 with Hussey, Marston, and Cheetham; and Worsley was in charge of tent No. 5, the other large tent, with Greenstreet, Lees, Clark, Kerr, Rickinson, Macklin, and Blackborow.