by The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
Tom Crean returned to Anascaul, where he had been born; he married, opened a pub called the South Pole Inn, and raised a family.
“We had a hot time of it the last 12 months,” wrote Crean to an old shipmate from the Terra Nova, succinctly summarizing the months on the floes, the two boat journeys, and the crossing of South Georgia. “And I must say the Boss is a splendid gentleman and I done my duty towards him to the end.”
He led an organized, disciplined life, working in the pub and in his garden, and each evening taking a walk down to the sea in Dingle Bay with his dogs Fido and Toby, named after the pups he had lost in the Antarctic. He was said by those who knew him to have admired Scott but loved Shackleton. He died of a perforated appendix in 1938, and was buried just outside Anascaul.
Worsley spent the greater part of his life trying to recapture the thrill and daring of the Endurance expedition. During the war, while captain of a mystery ship, he sank a German submarine, for which he received a Distinguished Service Order. He then joined Shackleton in Russia, and stayed on after the war fighting the Bolsheviks, which won him a second Distinguished Service Order. After the Quest, he was coleader of an Arctic expedition, and appears to have spent a fair amount of time attempting to re-create the experience aboard the Endurance by almost deliberately getting stuck in the ice. In 1934, he went treasure hunting in the Pacific, something he and Shackleton had promised each other they would do together. In the Second World War, he was given command of a merchant ship but was sacked when it was discovered that he was nearly seventy years old. He died of lung cancer in 1943, just short of seventy-one.
His duties to the expedition completed, Hurley was appointed official photographer and awarded the honorary rank of captain with the Australian Imperial Force. Within days of signing up he was covering the struggle at Ypres. His photographs clearly show that he got close to the action, and some are small masterpieces of stark, muddy misery. His Paget slides from this period are some of the very few known color images of the First World War. A distinction was made by his superiors between historical and propaganda shots, and Hurley chose to furnish the latter. It was during this period that his passion for composites became excessive; glorious, mournful skyscapes, exploding shells, puffs of ominous smoke, clouds of primitive planes like dragonflies—all are liberally imposed upon his original images.
After the war, he continued his demanding pace, making photographic expeditions to Papua New Guinea and Tasmania, and in the Second World War he was sent to Palestine. He married a beautiful young Spanish-French opera singer ten days after meeting her, and they had three children, to whom he was a loving but stern father. Following the Second World War, he created a great number of photographic books intended to promote the various regions of Australia. He travelled indefatigably to produce these, and all are competent; but it is difficult, indeed, to reconcile the perky, picture-postcard images with the bold, elegant, and at times emotionally momentous photographs of the Endurance expedition. At the end of his life, he produced several books on Australian and Tasmanian wildflowers.
At the age of seventy-six, still on assignment, still lugging his heavy camera gear, Hurley came home from a day’s work and mentioned to his wife that he felt ill. So unusual was it for him to make such a complaint that the family was instantly put on alert. Wrapping himself in his dressing gown, he took to his favorite chair and refused to budge. A doctor was summoned, but Hurley curtly motioned him away. He was still sitting in his chair the following morning, grimly, tenaciously, and silently waging his war with imminent death. Around noon of the same day, January 16, 1962, he finally passed away.
In 1970, the three surviving members of the expedition were invited to attend the ceremony for the commissioning of the HMS Endurance. A photograph shows them, three elderly men, sitting in folding chairs, under the Union Jack.
Walter How, able seaman on the Endurance, returned to his home in London, after service in the Merchant Navy. He had intended to join the Quest, but at the last moment chose to remain with his father, who had become ill. Although his sight was failing, owing in part to a land-mine accident during the war, How became an amateur painter and builder of ships in bottles; his detailed models and sketches of the Endurance betray that her lines were etched upon his memory. He was also one of the most loyal alumni of the expedition, going to great lengths to try to stay in touch with all hands. He died at the age of eighty-seven, in 1972.
Greenstreet Illustrating breath icicles
“Some of his jokes & stories are decidedly humourous & after all one cannot exactly expect to keep up drawing-room standard in a mixed assembly such as ours.” ( Lees, diary)
Green, the cook, had written a letter to his parents when he signed on with Shackleton in Buenos Aires in 1914, but the ship carrying his message was torpedoed, so that no one knew where he was. On return to civilization in 1916, he, like others of the crew, had to find his own way home—officers and scientists returned on a liner—and eventually got a passage as a “distressed British seaman.” Back in England, he discovered that his parents had cashed in his life insurance policy and that his girlfriend had married. He moved to Hull to be with his mates, the unsympathetic trawlerhands. After the war, he continued his career as a ship’s cook, and also gave lantern slide lectures on the expedition. Excerpts from an interview suggest that these lectures may have contained erroneous, eccentric details (all food lost when the Endurance was tilted on her side! dogs disembarked to lighten the ship!). During a tour of duty in New Zealand, he gave his lecture in Wellington, where he met McNish, who had been let out of hospital for the occasion. When Green saw McNish in the audience, he invited him up to the stand, where the carpenter took the lecture over and “gave the boat journey.” Green died in 1974, at the age of eighty-six, of peritonitis.
Lionel Greenstreet’s war service had begun in Buenos Aires, when he took command of a tug returning to Britain. During the Second World War, he served on rescue tugs in the Atlantic. He retired to Devon, although he still kept up his London Club. He retained his somewhat breezy, caustic sense of humor to the end. He was mistakenly reported as dead in 1964, and took great pleasure in informing the newspapers that his obituary was premature. He died in March 1979, at the age of eighty-nine, having been the last of the Endurance survivors. While it is not difficult to conjure up the long-past events of the expedition, it bankrupts the imagination to try to conceive that a man who sailed with Shackleton in the barquentine Endurance would live to see others walk upon the moon.
In Hurley’s photographic record of the Endurance, perhaps the single most memorable and representative image depicts a line of ragged men standing on the beach of Elephant Island, wildly cheering as the lifeboat from the Yelcho heaves into view; Hurley called it “The Rescue.” When published by Worsley in his memoir, Endurance, however, this same scene is entitled “The Departure of the James Caird from Elephant Island.” The original film negative, in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society, shows that the Caird has been violently scratched out, leaving the supply boat—the Stancomb Wills—and her waving crew as they make their way back to land. The explanation for Hurley’s action is simple: An appropriately climactic photographic ending to the story was needed for the lectures.
Hurley’s predilection for “fiddling” with his images was usually harmless, but in this case, he committed a grave indiscretion, for the original, irretrievable image was the greater. In it, he captured both sides of this impossible story, the razor’s edge of its endeavor—success and failure in the balance, the momentous departure and the patient bravery of those left behind to wait, their hands raised boldly in a determined, resigned, and courageous farewell.
“The Departure of the James Caird from Elephant Island.”
Haircutting tournament
“No dogs out today as it is to dark crew ice ship we all had our hair cut to the scalp & then had our photograph taken after in the Ritz we do look a lot of convicts & we are not much short of that
life at present.” (McNish, diary)
Acknowledgments
The number of institutions and individuals who have helped me on this book is very great. I would first like to acknowledge the American Museum of Natural History for their collaboration on both this book and the exhibition that it accompanies. The exhibition, Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Expedition, will display virtually all the Frank Hurley photographs to survive the expedition, as well as all known surviving objects—including, courtesy of Dulwich College, the James Caird. The exhibition was made possible by a major gift from Mr. and Mrs. Joseph F. Cullman III. For this and for their enthusiasm and interest, I am more grateful than I can say.
Grateful thanks are also due to Ellen V. Futter, the museum’s president, and Anne Sidaman-Eristoff, its chairman, for their support of the exhibition. I would like to give particular thanks to Dr. Craig Morris, dean of science, and Maron L. Waxman, associate director for special publishing, as well as to my colleagues David Harvey, director of exhibitions, Joel Sweimler, exhibition coordinator, Ross MacPhee, curator of mammalogy, and Cynthia Woodward, for their hard work and enthusiasm. My good friend Jenny Lawrence, editor at Natural History, acted as adviser and sounding board at early stages of both the book and the exhibition. Rose Wadsworth, coordinator of travelling exhibits, provided early guidance as well. Also to be thanked are Maria Yakimov, registrar, and Pat Dandonoli, executive director for institutional planning and media production, and designer Paul De Pass, who worked with the Exhibition Department.
The majority of the photographs were printed courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society, London, directly from Frank Hurley’s surviving glass plate and film negatives. Since its foundation in 1830, the Royal Geographical Society has organized and financed numerous expeditions of discovery, and was indeed a contributor to Shackleton’s 1914?16 expedition on the Endurance. The society’s photographic holdings are priceless and legendary, and yet among even these the Hurley collection holds a certain pride of place. Much gratitude is owed to Dr. Rita Gardner, the society’s president, as well as to Nigel de N. Winser, deputy director of the society; the latter was receptive and encouraging when the exhibition was merely a figment of my imagination. Particular thanks are owed to Joanna Scadden, picture library manager, for overseeing the complicated photographic printing process. Dr. A. F. Tatham, keeper of the society’s archives, was helpful in providing documents and various items— including the Bible Shackleton thought he had left behind on the ice!
Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, provided the second part of the Hurley collection, allowing prints to be made from their album of unique and less well known Hurley photographs. I am grateful to the institute’s helpful staff and would like to thank in particular Dr. Robert Headland, archivist and curator of the institute’s remarkable collection of documents, photographs, and manuscripts. In the course of my visits to the institute, Dr. Headland steered me through the many diaries and other papers, and was always unstinting in his advice and comments. I am also particularly grateful to Philippa Smith, picture library manager, for her cheerful and efficient help in obtaining prints and odds and ends of research. The diaries of Sir Ernest Shackleton, Reginald James, Lionel Greenstreet (on microfilm), Thomas Orde-Lees, and Frank Worsley were read at Scott Polar Research Institute, as were the correspondence of many of these men, the papers of Shackleton’s biographers Margery and James Fisher, and Lees’s unpublished memoir, “Beset by Berg and Floe.” I also read here Worsley’s typescript memoirs of the two boat journeys and the crossing of South Georgia. All quotations from these works are made with the kind permission of the institute.
The prints appearing in both this book and the exhibition were all produced by Barbara and Michael Gray, of Fox Talbot Museum. I am very grateful to them for both their superb work and for the information they supplied me about Hurley’s photographic methods.
The Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, furnished microfilms of Frank Hurley’s diary and Frank Wild’s Memoirs, the originals of which are in their collection. It is also from their collection that Hurley’s photograph of John Vincent (originally in Paget color) is reproduced. I am also extremely grateful to Tim Lovell-Smith of the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, New Zealand, for the loan of microfilm copies of the diaries of Frank Worsley (made courtesy of Scott Polar Research Institute), Henry McNish, and Thomas Orde-Lees, the originals of which are in their collection. One volume of Orde-Lees diary is in the possession of Dartmouth College Special Collections. Quotations from the diaries cited were made with the kind permission of these libraries.
Above all, I am grateful to the families of the expedition members and a number of independent scholars. No project I have ever worked on has elicited such generous and unconditional offers of assistance. Diaries and documents that had been safeguarded for many years were made available to me with no strings attached. Others shared the fruits of many years’ private labor, or the contents of unpublished works in progress; not one individual ever asked for so much as a printed credit. Without the information and source material provided by these families and scholars it would not have been possible to write this book.
Alexandra Shackleton, the granddaughter of the great explorer, was very generous with her time and family possessions, as well as very entertaining to be with.
Peter Wordie and Mrs. Alison Stancer provided me with a hitherto unseen copy of their father’s diary, a fascinating and very precise document that I drew on heavily. They were also extremely forthcoming with other papers and items of interest.
Mrs. Elizabeth Rajala made available the unpublished autobiography of her father, William Bakewell, along with other papers and photographs.
The entire Blackborow family—son, grandson, and great-granddaughter, as well as, incredibly, sister and brother, of Shackleton’s stowaway—gave me a warm welcome and provided much information about Perce Blackborow.
Thomas McNeish not only provided information and records about his grandfather, but was also, with his wife, Jessie, a hospitable host of a very enjoyable visit to their home. Isabel and Donald Laws, and Iris Johnstone from other branches of McNish’s family, became indefatigable sleuths of that highly interesting if mysterious subject, “Chippy” McNish.
Dr. Richard Hudson graciously received me at his home to see the sextant his father had loaned to Worsley for navigating the Caird, and also let me peruse the numerous papers his father had left.
The Macklin family was generous in their offer to let me use the diary of their father, as well as his voluminous correspondence and related papers. I was also fortunate to have discussed certain members of the crew with the late Jean Macklin, Dr. Alexander Macklin’s wife.
Mrs. Doris Warren kindly sent me copies of papers and photographs pertaining to her father, Walter How.
Mrs. Toni Mooy-Hurley and Adélie Hurley were generous with vivid reminiscences about their father, Frank Hurley, and for their permission to quote from his diaries and use his photographs.
Julian Ayer very kindly allowed me access to his grandfather Thomas Orde-Lees’s photographic negatives, and filled me in on aspects of his grandfather’s history.
I am very grateful to Father Gerard O’Brien for information about his grandfather Tom Crean, and to Crean’s godson, John Knightly, for information about the great explorer. The Kerry County Council kindly provided me with copies of documents pertaining to Crean.
Richard Greenstreet gave me biographical material pertaining to his uncle: The quotations from Lionel Greenstreet’s diary and correspondence are made with his kind permission.
Roy Cockram provided me with wonderful biographical and anecdotal material about Charles Green, his uncle.
I am grateful to Roland Huntford, both for information and advice given in person at a very early stage of my “discovery” of Shackleton, and for his magisterial works on Scott, Amundsen, and Shackleton. Two other distinguished Antarctic historians, Ann Shir
ley and Margaret Slythe, were very helpful in directing me to people and sources.
I am more grateful than I can say to Margot Morrell for the generous gift of her transcripts of the diaries of Hurley and Orde-Lees. Shane Murphy shared the fruits of his many years’ close study of Hurley’s Endurance collection, which is to be published under the title According to Hoyle.
Maureen Mahood shared with me her careful work on the men who remained on Elephant Island, to be published in a work entitled Counting the Days. The documents, photographs, and many references she generously forwarded to me proved invaluable.
Leif Mills provided me with much biographical material about Frank Wild, which will be published in a forthcoming book entitled Wild. John Bell Thomson, author of Shackleton’s Captain: A Biography of Frank Worsley (Hazard Press, 1998), gave me a wealth of material about Worsley; his recent book is the only comprehensive account of the legendary navigator.
I am grateful to Geoffrey Selley and Ralph Gullett for information about Leonard Hussey—and for the stanzas from Hussey’s facetious poem.
Mary DeLashmit, of the Holderness Free Library, supplied me with countless books and microfilms through interlibrary loan services; I do not know how I would have managed without her efficient help.
Harding Dunnett, chairman of the James Caird Society, Dulwich, England, was my guiding angel. His encyclopedic and precise memory saved me weeks of time on many occasions. I am especially grateful for my visit with him to see the Caird, on display at Dulwich College, which was a deeply moving experience.
