by The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
“Playing a game of wait almost wearies one’s patience,” Hurley wrote, with uncharacteristic impatience; he was normally as resilient to their circumstances as any member of the expedition. To pass the time, the men took walks around the perimeter of their floe, read, played bridge, and lay in their sleeping bags. McNish ostentatiously recaulked the damaged boats, using seal blood. Their predicament was now analyzed as it had not been before.
“The Boss at any rate has changed his mind yet once again,” wrote Wordie dryly. “He now intends waiting for leads, and just as firmly believes he will get them, as he did a week ago that the ice would be fit for sledging the boats at the rate of ten miles a day.” Shackleton himself was preoccupied and moody, and not at all amenable to well-intentioned suggestions. Lees was openly frantic over the state of their supplies, and daily roamed off on unauthorized seal hunts across the rotting ice; Worsley was eventually put in charge of “minding” him. Green-street’s suggestion that every seal and penguin that approached the camp should be killed and stored was met with impatience by Shackleton.
Sue’s Pups—the Ikeys
At first the dogs had been merely sledging animals; but as the long months on the ice progressed they became companions, providing the men with their chief diversion. Hurley devotes an entire chapter to “Sledge Dog Pals” in his book Argonauts of the South.
“ ‘Oh,’ he said,” according to Greenstreet, “ ‘You’re a bloody pessimist. That would put the wind up the fo’c’sle crowd, they’d think we were never going to get out.’ “ But food had become a real worry; seals had been scarce, and supplies of meat and blubber were dwindling.
On January 14, the teams of Wild, Crean, McIlroy, and Marston were shot, twenty-seven dogs in all. No more use was envisioned for them, and the food they consumed had become too valuable; their “dog pemmican” would become a staple of the men’s diet.
“This duty fell upon me & was the worst job I ever had in my life,” Wild reported. “I have known many men I would rather shoot than the worst of the dogs.” This necessity upset all the men.
“One of the saddest events since we left Home,” as McNish recorded. The same evening, Hurley and Macklin were authorized to make a dangerous run with their teams to Ocean Camp. With some difficulty, they returned with 900 pounds of stores the following day. This was the last run for Hurley’s team.
“Wild shot my team during the afternoon,” Hurley wrote, then bade farewell to his favorite dog. “Hail to thee old leader Shakespeare, I shall ever remember thee—fearless, faithful & diligent.”
Hussey and Samson
The smallest member of the expedition and one of the biggest dogs.
At last, on January 21, after a month of maddening calm, a blizzard from the southwest blew them across the Antarctic Circle into familiar waters. They were now within 150 miles of Snow Hill Island, although very much to its east. Shackleton celebrated the occasion by issuing each man an extra bannock. Nevertheless, an excursion made some days later by Wordie and Worsley to a nearby berg revealed that the long-awaited breakup was nowhere in sight.
“Ice almost everywhere,” Wordie reported, after having climbed the berg for a lookout position. Because seals were scarce, their stores of blubber were now dwindling. To conserve fuel, Shackleton cut down the daily ration of hot drinks to a single cup of tea in the morning.
At the end of January, the vagaries of the pack rotated their old Ocean Camp to within less than six miles—and ironically, in a more desirable westerly position than they themselves now held. On February 2, Shackleton authorized the retrieval of the third boat that had been left behind, the Stancomb Wills.
“It has taken a long time to persuade the Boss to this move,” Wordie noted, “and I doubt if he would have done it, had it not been for the general feeling in camp.” No one believed that the two boats alone could have contained the whole company. Shackleton had resisted authorizing the trip, being morbidly afraid of losing men to unnecessary accidents. But with all three boats safe in camp, everyone was in better spirits, the sailors in particular—although this was generally thought to be as much because of the big bundle of salvaged items they had secreted into their tent as to the arrival of the Stancomb Wills.
Time continued to drag on. Shackleton ordered the refuse pile of old seal bones, flippers, and discarded bits and pieces picked over for blubber. “The seal question” was getting very serious; they were now running short of not only blubber for fuel, but meat for food.
“So there is nothing for it but get into our sleeping bags. And smoke away the hunger,” wrote McNish. “What [Prime Minister] Loyde George calls a luxery for working men.”
Wet weather and driving snow kept the men inside their tents, while the tents themselves were more sodden than ever. The groundsheet of tent No. 5 had been commandeered to make a sail for one of the boats. In its stead, oilskin jackets and trousers, two blankets, and a sea leopard’s skin were now all that lay between the sleeping bags and wet snow. Several of the tents had been rent by gales, and were in any case so thin that a gust of wind outside blew cigarette smoke within.
In early February, Lees was rebuked by Shackleton for making pessimistic statements.
“It is well to record these little sidelights on expeditionary life,” wrote Lees, with no sign of ill feeling. “As they are usually expunged from the published books, or at most left to be read between the lines.” Shackleton had continued to restrict Lees’s seal-hunting excursions, claiming—incorrectly—that enough meat had been laid by to last a month. This restriction alienated even the loyal Worsley, and Shackleton’s optimism was meeting with private cynicism on many fronts.
“His sublime optimism all the way thro being to my mind absolute foolishness,” wrote Greenstreet. “Everything right away thro was going to turn out all right and no notice was taken of things possibly turning out otherwise and here we are.” It is hard to judge Shackleton’s rationale. He could not have been more keenly attuned to the moods of his men, and none of their discontent on this issue could have escaped him. Moreover, he was not one to let his pride prevent him from reversing a bad decision. Rather, Shackleton’s dogged resistance to laying by more than a few weeks’ supply of food was governed by a carefully reasoned ethic. His main concern was always for the morale of the sailors, and none of these men left diaries, so it is impossible to determine their state of mind. From other accounts one gleans suggestions that they were both more despondent and more troublesome than was ever directly stated. The wardroom members—the officers and scientists—had come south with the expectation of wintering on the ice, and of making sledging excursions. Lees’s thoughts at the start of the ill-fated second march are illuminating.
“Were it not for a little natural anxiety as to our ultimate progress I have never been happier in my life than I am now, for is not this kind of existence the ‘real thing,’ the thing I have for years set my heart on. …” He had set his heart on a tasteof the man-hauling epics of Scott’s heroic age, and it was precisely for such an experience that many of the men had joined Shackleton. But not the sailors. Their lives centered on their ships, and their ship had been lost. And while they too had come south with Shackleton for adventure, sagas of man-hauling stoicism were not in their frames of reference. They did not wish to entertain the possibility of spending another winter on the ice; they wanted to take to the boats. Shackleton’s prime objective was to keep his men unified—and this may have necessitated some apparently illogical decisions.
Towards the end of February, the sudden appearance of a flock of little Adélie penguins came as a boon to the hungry men. Three hundred were taken. Their flesh served as food, their skins as fuel for the galley stove. The temperatures had started to fall, and the men complained of feeling cold even in their bags.
“I have had no sleep for the last to nights with the cold,” wrote McNish. Shackle-ton visited the tents in turn, settling in each to spin yarns, recite poetry, or play bridge.
“The foo
d now is pretty well all meat,” Greenstreet wrote. “Seal steaks, stewed seal, penguin steaks, stewed penguin, penguin liver.… The cocoa has been finished for some time and the tea is very nearly done.… Flour also is very nearly finished.” With Lees and Green, the cook, Shackleton fretted over the daily menu, conspiring with them ways to make it more satisfying. Seals and penguins permitting, “special occasions” were celebrated to break the monotony.
“In honour of Leap Year Day & the escape of some of our batchelors from the Fair Sex, we have 3 full meals with a hot beverage to each,” Worsley wrote on February 29, “and so we all feel well fed & happy tonight.”
The drift of the pack was once again averaging two miles per day. By early March they were only seventy miles from Paulet Island. Snow Hill Island already lay behind them.
On March 7, a blizzard arose, the heaviest snowfall since they had entered the ice. Too cold to read or play cards, the men lay in the tents, huddled in bags that had frozen as stiff as sheet iron. Two days later, digging out sledges and gear from the four feet of drift that had fallen, a curious motion was detected in the pack: the swell of the ocean beneath them. The following day, Shackleton organized drills to practice loading the boats, so as to be ready at a moment’s notice in the event their floe broke under them.
The ice parted some days later, but then quickly closed again. Still they drifted north, moving farther and farther up the Palmer Peninsula. They were drawing abreast of Paulet Island.
March 21 marked the first day of winter. The hours of light shrank each day as the weather grew colder. On the morning of March 23, Shackleton sighted land to the west. “There has been a lot of doubt in the skipper’s part,” wrote McNish, with sardonic satisfaction. “As he never saw it first. After being on the look out this last 2 months & reporting so many bergs as being land he is feeling quite sick over it being seen by any one else.” But it was true land—the jagged, snow-covered ridges of Joinville Island, the first land the men had seen in sixteen months.
“If the ice opens we could land in a day,” Hurley wrote. But the ice didn’t open. Still the pack held, too loose to cross on foot, too close to sail, and still it drifted north. Day by day, Shackleton silently watched as his worst fears were realized. They were approaching the very farthest tip of the Palmer Peninsula; soon there would be no more land ahead.
On March 30, the last of the dogs were shot, and the younger ones eaten. There were no expressions of regret this time, only grim acceptance of the necessity and pleasure at the unexpected tastiness of their meat. Several big seals were also killed, and the men had their first good feed in two weeks. The sledging rations were still held, relatively untouched, in reserve.
“Such a life ages one,” Hurley noted in his diary. That same night, March 31, their floe was riven by a crack that separated the men from the boats. Shackleton set all hands on “watch and watch”—half the camp on duty at all times—but the ice held throughout the rest of the night. Days of heavy wind followed, and the men lay in their bags with nothing to do but talk, while the floe bumped under them. Lees became seasick.
Worsley’s sightings indicated that the floe was travelling faster than the wind was blowing it; evidently the disintegrating pack was now in the grip of strong currents. At dawn on April 7, daylight revealed the precipitous snow-streaked mountains of Clarence Island; later in the day, the sharp peaks of Elephant Island showed just west of north. With almost bewildering speed, the drift now carried them directly north towards the islands. It then veered alarmingly to the west, beyond striking range of either island; then swerved east again, bringing the two islands directly ahead. Every day saw new contingencies and necessitated new plans. Wildlife became abundant, with gulls, petrels, and terns overhead, and whales blowing in the leads.
On the evening of April 8, the ice cracked once again, right under the James Caird. Pitching like a ship at sea, the floe broke down to a triangle measuring some 90 by 100 by 120 yards.
“I felt that the time for launching the boats was near at hand,” wrote Shackleton. After breakfast on April 9, camp was struck, and the boats prepared. The men ate a last good meal while standing at the ready.
At 1 p.m., Shackleton gave the long-awaited order to launch the boats. Positions had been designated months before: The James Caird, the large whaler, was commanded by Shackleton and Wild, and on board were Clark, Hurley, Hussey, James, Wordie, McNish, Green, Vincent, and McCarthy. In the Dudley Docker, under the command of Worsley, were Greenstreet, Kerr, Lees, Macklin, Cheetham, Marston, McLeod, and Holness. And in the smallest and least seaworthy boat, the Stancomb Wills, Rickinson, McIlroy, How, Bakewell, Blackborow, and Stephenson were under the command of Hudson and Crean.
At 1:30 p.m., the boats pushed off. There was a heavy swell, and the lanes of open water zigzagged erratically between the lurching floes.
“Our first day in the water was one of the coldest and most dangerous of the expedition,” wrote Bakewell. “The ice was running riot. It was a hard race to keep our boats in the open leads.… [W]e had many narrow escapes from being crushed when the larger masses of the pack would come together.”
The men had been trapped in the ice for fifteen months. But their real ordeal had just begun.
First landing on Elephant Island
April, 15, 1915: Solid land after 497 days on ice and sea. “The Boss, the Skipper, the cook and Hurley went on board the ‘Wills,’ and helped her crew to take her up a small creek in the rocks.… She then made trips to and fro under Tom Crean’s charge.” (Wordie, diary)
Into the Boats
4–10–16
Last night, a night of tension & anxiety—on a par with the night of the ship’s destruction.… Sea & wind increase & have to draw up onto an old isolated floe and pray to God it will remain entire throughout the night. No sleep for 48 Hours, all wet Cold & miserable with a N.E. Blizzard raging … no sight of land & Pray for cessation of these wild conditions.
—FRANK HURLEY, diary
In the gathering dusk of the first night at sea, Shackleton and his men camped on a floe measuring some 200 by 100 feet, which rocked visibly in the ocean swell. Darkness came early, at around 7 p.m., but it was a mild evening, with the temperature around 18°. After a hot meal cooked by Green on the blubber stove, the men retired to their tents.
“Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp,” Shackleton wrote. “I started to walk across the floes in order to warn the watchman to look carefully for cracks, and as I was passing the men’s tent the floe lifted on the crest of a swell and cracked right under my feet.” As Shackleton watched, the crack ran beneath the sailors’ tent and emptied How and Holness, who was still in his bag, into the water. How struggled out, and Shackleton, grasping Holness’s bag, hove it onto the ice before the edges of the floe clamped together again.
There was no more sleep that night. Hudson generously offered dry clothes to Holness, who was grumbling that he had lost his tobacco. Shackleton issued hot milk and Streimer’s Polar Nut Food—a treat from the uncracked sledging rations—to all hands, who huddled around the blubber stove. From the leads of dark water around them, the blowing of the killer whales punctuated the long hours of the night.
When dawn broke at 6 a.m., the men discovered that the floe was surrounded by loose ice. While all hands waited anxiously for an opening to clear, a dangerous swell was growing, crashing the ice fragments together, as Lees noted, “with a force sufficient to smash a moderately sized yacht.”
By the time the boats were launched at 8 a.m., the wind was high and squally, at times reaching gale force. For two hours the men rowed against the heavy swell through a tortuous network of channels and leads, then through “survival ice,” old hummocky floes and brash at the outer margins of the pack. The crew’s all-meat diet had taken a toll, as Lees had predicted. Lacking even minimal carbohydrates over the past months, the men working the oars were soon exhausted.
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p; A light haze had descended upon an otherwise mild day, obscuring their intended landfall, Clarence or Elephant island, now a mere sixty or so miles distant. The overloaded, unwieldy boats did not allow for refinements in navigation. The Stancomb Wills in particular was already cause for grave concern, lacking “the canvas” to keep abreast of her more seaworthy companions. Shackleton had given orders that all three were to stay in hailing distance of one another, but this was not always easily accomplished.
Amid towering icebergs of fantastic shapes, the boats nosed their way closer and closer towards the edge of the ice. But when they finally broke triumphantly through it, they were hit head-on by a high sea unbuffered by the pack; abruptly, Shackleton ordered them back inside. Reluctant to head due north through open, running sea, they now turned their course west, towards King George Island.
At dusk, the boats turned to a circular floe, some twenty yards across, and made camp. Later in the night, the wind rose, dropping snow and rocking their camp with heavy swell. Chunks of the floe broke off in the wind-whipped waves, but Shackle-ton, who had remained up all night with the watchman, McNish, deemed the camp to be in no immediate danger, and let the men sleep—or try to. Hurley’s diary indicates there were no illusions inside the tents about the safety of their position.
By dawn, a huge swell was running under overcast, misty skies that turned to snowy squalls. Heaving undulations of ice swept towards them. Shackleton, Worsley, and Wild took turns climbing to the peak of their rocking berg, searching for a break of open water in the ice, while the men stood by the boats and waited. As the hours passed, their floe, grinding against loose pack, became gradually smaller.
