Even the war did not stop Shackleton. He managed to put the whole expedition together in seven months and, when it was announced, he had already recruited Frank Wild, his most loyal Nimrod follower, as his second-in-command and George Marston, the artist on Nimrod. A host of volunteers presented themselves and the crew of 27 that finally assembled included some hardened Antarctic veterans such as the third officer Alfred Cheetham, who had been on Morning, Nimrod and Terra Nova, and Tom Crean on both Terra Nova and Discovery. The academics, including Reginald James the physicist, James Wordie the geologist, Leonard Hussey the meteorologist and Robert Clarke the biologist, were all newcomers, as was the New Zealander Frank Worsley, who was to be the captain of Shackleton’s ship, Endurance. Worsley was to prove a gifted navigator and boat handler. The other important antipodean was the photographer Frank Hurley, with whom Shackleton already had a business partnership. Intrepid, practically ingenious and professionally gifted, he had just been south with Mawson. Even though most of his images were to be lost in Endurance, what he saved makes Shackleton’s expedition the most strikingly recorded of the period. There were also two doctors, Alexander Macklin and James McIroy, both Ulstermen with an adventurous streak, and several hard-case seamen, notably George Vincent (who was disrated as bosun for his bullying manner) and Harry McNeish, an expert shipwright and carpenter but mutinously difficult. It was once more a disparate crew, which only Shackleton’s personality and the sterling reliability of Wild – a pillar of strength to all, including ‘the Boss’ – could hold together.
Endurance heeled over by ice pressure under her starboard side in October 1915. Shackleton later wrote that ‘Hurley ... descended to the floe and took some photographs of the ship in her unusual position.’
Endurance herself was a new and untried wooden auxiliary barquentine of 300 tons, initially built in Norway for ‘arctic tourism’, though this scheme collapsed. Shackleton bought her advantageously as well as Mawson’s Aurora (already in Tasmania), to take the depot party to the Ross Sea. Aurora was to be commanded by Aeneas Mackintosh, previously second mate of Nimrod.
At her own request the widowed Queen Alexandra visited Endurance in London just before it sailed on 1 August 1914. Austria had already declared war on Serbia and within days the dominoes of European alliances had fallen, bringing Germany, Russia, France and Britain into the conflict. Shackleton’s two army men and his original first officer went off to fight but when the Admiralty declined his formal offer of both ship and crew for war service, the ship made good on its departure under Worsley’s command, with mixed feelings among all concerned. The dogs, 69 in all, were collected at Buenos Aires where Hurley and Shackleton both joined by steamer. Shortly after leaving, Shackleton had one of his mysterious bouts of illness, which were to become more frequent during the venture. They also found a stowaway, Percy Blackborrow, who had been brought on board there by confederates in the crew who feared they were short-handed. Shackleton first bawled him out but then engaged him as steward. He proved a valuable addition and was to have the dubious distinction of surviving an operation to remove frostbitten toes, in appalling conditions on Elephant Island. Endurance then headed south for the unknown south-eastern shore of the Weddell Sea via the staging post of Grytviken, the Norwegian-run whaling station on South Georgia. They sailed from there on 5 December 1914.
The Weddell Sea, as far south as the Filchner ice-edge, is an open bight some 1,530km (950 miles) deep on the western side where it is enclosed by the Antarctic Peninsula and about 800km (500 miles) to the east, at which point it is more than 1,930km (1,200 miles) across. South Georgia is 2,415km (1,500 miles) due north of Vahsel Bay and Shackleton’s route took him eastwards, passing through the South Sandwich Islands before entering the pack ice on 11 December in latitude 50° 28’ south.
This is what he had been trying to avoid for as long as possible by keeping east, but it was an appalling year in terms of the northerly limit of the summer pack. For ice in the Weddell Sea forms and lasts irrespective of season, moving in a slow clockwise motion driven by a prevailing current and south-easterly wind within the western confinement of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ships caught in it are trapped for a long time and risk being crushed in a vast mill as the ice splits and grinds its way under increasing pressure west and northwards up the peninsular coasts of Palmer and Graham Land. This was to be the delayed fate of Endurance when, on 19 January 1915, she finished her long eastward arc and stuck fast in the pack ice in latitude 76° 30’ south, with the peaks above Vahsel Bay in sight but some 97km (60 miles) further on and to the east. The ice itself carried her further south to 76° 58’ on 21 February but then, locked immovably in the floe, she had been swept past the Bay and begun the inexorable drift north on an erratic, slow and uncontrollable course. By the middle of March, Shackleton knew his Antarctic crossing was impossible. The best they could hope for – like de Gerlache, Bruce and Filchner before him – was that Endurance would survive the pressures and, perhaps a year later and 1,600km (1,000 miles) further north, escape when the pack broke up. In the meantime, ‘he showed one of his sparks of real greatness’, wrote Macklin: ‘He did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest sign of disappointment; he told us simply and calmly that we must winter in the Pack; explained its dangers and possibilities; never lost his optimism, and prepared for Winter.’
In the meantime, on the Ross Ice Barrier, a now pointless saga of achievement and suffering was also unfolding. Aurora had been fitted out with great difficulty by Mackintosh in Sydney, for the money that Shackleton had promised had not appeared. The ship sailed in ill-equipped confusion with an even more mixed and motley crew of 28 than Endurance and the remainder of Shackleton’s dogs, which had been shipped from England. Of the landing party of nine, only Mackintosh and Ernest Joyce, also from Nimrod, had any sledging experience and the former was to prove sadly inadequate as an expedition leader. They were so poorly prepared and funded that they had to use Scott’s old huts at Cape Evans and Hut Point and had no proper sledging rations. Nonetheless, a party of Mackintosh, Joyce, and Frank Wild’s brother Ernest, who shared many of his sterling qualities, managed to lay a depot at 80° south on 20 February 1915 in preparation for Shackleton’s arrival via the Pole. After a terrible journey, they got back to Cape Evans on 2 June and found Aurora had been blown from its exposed moorings out to sea, leaving them stranded. Mackintosh had followed Shackleton’s instructions to treat the ship as their base, retaining equipment and supplies on board, but (to shorten southward marching distances by nearly 80km/50 miles) not at one of the more northerly and safer positions he intended.
It was a mistake based on inexperience but Shackleton also shared some blame. His orders had been primarily to stop the ship being iced in, like Discovery, at Hut Point but in trying to avoid this he had indirectly ensured its equal entrapment out of reach, in the pack ice of the Ross Sea. The ship would be 1,130km (700 miles) north of Cape Evans when it escaped in March the following year and in a condition that forced it to make for New Zealand directly. The depot-laying party would only see the ship again when it finally returned to rescue them in January 1917, with Shackleton on board. Until then they were entirely on their own with only the stores that Teddy Evans had wisely left for later users at the end of Scott’s second expedition and what they could kill, both for the pot and for fuel in the form of blubber. Fortunately, Evans’s cache included pemmican and other sledging supplies.
In January 1916 they made another gruelling, epic journey with their last few dogs to lay a depot for Shackleton’s still-expected party at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, 580km (360 miles) to the south. Its return leg was strangely parallel to the one that killed Scott in terms of the route, deprivations and conditions, and also a tragedy of wasted life, given that Shackleton would never come. Mackintosh’s command had proved a catalogue of misjudgements. He finally collapsed from scurvy and had to be left alone, with three weeks of food, for later rescue.
Joyce had then already t
aken over and got all but one of the others, weak from malnutrition and exposure, back to Hut Point. The fatality was the Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, the first clergyman in Antarctica. He had developed severe scurvy and was dragged uncomplaining on a sledge for more than 480km (300 miles) before dying of heart failure two days from home. Joyce, Ernest Wild and Richards rapidly rescued Mackintosh but in May he and another member of the Beardmore party, VG Hayward, perversely decided to return to Cape Evans over the sea-ice, before it was entirely safe. They had hardly left when a blizzard set in, the ice broke up and they were not seen again. Shackleton never lost a man, but for the magic to work he had to be there in person.
Despite being frozen in, the dog teams were continually exercised. This photograph gives some idea of the heavily broken ice hummocks, this being caused by the continual movement of the ice floes around Endurance. Photograph by Hurley, August 1915.
Both Endurance and Aurora carried wireless equipment, the first exploration ships to do so. Endurance never managed to raise another station from the Weddell Sea but Aurora did finally make contact with Australia after its release from the ice in 1916. The technology that might have changed the course of events was there but was not advanced enough to have done so.
Frozen in
On the Endurance the main enemies were now uncertainty and boredom. Initially the ship was safe and Shackleton took steps to make them as comfortable as possible, moving accommodation to the hold, which was warmer, and transferring the dogs to igloo kennels on the ice. Looking after them and practising with dog teams became one of the main general occupations, as was the care of the various pups that appeared.
Shackleton remained unflinchingly optimistic throughout. Backed especially by the solid and much-liked Wild, he skilfully minimised tensions among a crew that included uneducated seamen, unworldly academics and the oddball Orde-Lees – who used a bicycle on the ice and became something of a butt for jokes, though also a diligent storekeeper and a perceptive observer. People were left to get on with their own work on the ship in scientific observations or dog-minding, but Shackleton insisted on such things as punctuality at meals and maintaining social intercourse and common amusements, helped for example by Hussey, who played the banjo (it was to survive the whole saga, preserved as ‘vital mental tonic’). He could control a degree of horseplay, which he often led; he was tactful, understanding, cheerful and although ‘expert at nothing in particular ... easily master of everything’ according to Orde-Lees. Where Scott’s anxieties had manifested themselves in silence and outbursts of temper, Shackleton – except when crossed on his known likes and dislikes – showed none, and he commanded an extraordinary degree of trust among his very mixed party.
I think Sir Ernest is the real secret of our unanimity. Considering our divergent aims and difference of station it is surprising how few differences of opinion occur.
Thomas Orde-Lees
Their prospects, however, were not good. One of the books on board was Nordenskjöld’s Antarctic, in which Larsen told how his ship had been crushed in 1903 in the area towards which the ice was slowly moving Endurance. By the end of May it was less slow, with the ship and the floe in which it was locked travelling north at about 16km (10 miles) a day, and the ice beginning to work and groan as the pressure against the unseen land to the west built up. By the end of July Endurance had a list to port, a damaged rudder and internal structure and was surrounded by ominous pressure ridges. Between then and October it suffered a series of squeezes as the floe broke up and then closed again around it and though steam was raised in the hope the ship might float clear, it was only used to pump against the growing leaks as the hull damage increased. This and further exhausting hand-pumping did no good. Though strong, Endurance was not of a specifically ice-resistant design like Fram or Discovery. As the crisis came, boats and equipment were hastily transferred to the ice and on the evening of 27 October, after the stern post and part of the keel were wrenched away, Shackleton ordered the ship abandoned. Their position was 69°5’ south, longitude 51°30’ west – more than 800km (500 miles) north of where it had been frozen in. ‘It must have been a moment of bitter disappointment to Shackleton,’ wrote the senior doctor, Macklin, ‘but he showed it neither in word or manner ... without motion, melodrama or excitement [he] said “ship and stores have gone – so now we’ll go home”. I think,’ he continued, ‘it would be difficult to convey just what those words meant to us...’
Hussey, the meteorologist, and James, the physicist, continued to collect scientific data during the winter months. Photograph by Hurley, March–August 1915.
Shackleton’s initial plan was to march more than 480km (300 miles) across the now heavily broken terrain of the pack to Snow Hill, Nordenskjöld’s old base on the Antarctic Peninsula, where he knew there were supplies, and thence westwards overland to Wilhelmina Bay, known to be frequented by whalers. However, this idea was abandoned, after three days of exhausting dragging only moved two of the boats a couple of miles. Shackleton instead set up what they called ‘Ocean Camp’ on another solid floe to reconsider the options. They also brought up the third boat and returned to salvage more from the now surreally tangled wreck of Endurance. This included Hurley’s photographic negatives, which he rescued from the submerged ship’s refrigerator, before selecting 120 of the best and abandoning the others and most of his equipment. Kept in hermetically sealed cases, these and the film he had shot were to survive all that followed. With the awful possibility of spending another Antarctic winter camped where they were, they had to wait until the ice either broke up or took them close enough to land to make a dash for it without the boats. On 21 November, the distant funnel of Endurance dipped and vanished as the ice gripping it relaxed. It sank rapidly by the head, the floe closing over it as if it had never been.
At Shackleton’s insistence, Hussey’s banjo was saved from the sinking Endurance because it provided ‘mental tonic’ in the form of entertainment and distraction. On Elephant Island the crew made up songs about each other to pass the time.
At Ocean Camp it became a new waiting game, something to which Shackleton was temperamentally ill-suited, and in conditions that could only get worse. Hurley proved ingenious, flooring the tents with salvaged timber, as well as manufacturing a blubber stove out of an ash-chute from the ship and later another portable one for the boats. The drift northwards, however, continued and became more easterly, making the only likely escape one by sea to Paulet Island (where Larsen had found refuge) or, far worse, into the open ocean where the boats were unlikely to survive. At the end of November Shackleton gave these the names of his three most sympathetic sponsors: the largest, the double-ended whaler, became the James Caird, the other two the Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills, after Janet Stancomb-Wills, another of the wealthy and generous ladies who supported him.
Not a life lost and we have been through Hell.
Shackleton to his wife, 3 September 1916
By 21 December they had drifted 225km (140 miles) north of where Endurance went down and were in a plain of hummocked broken ice, mushy under the sun of the Antarctic summer and with leads of water opening up. In an attempt to counter sinking morale, Shackleton decided to attempt another march towards the land, towing two of the boats. By 28 December they had travelled nearly 16km (10 miles) but only after Shackleton crushed an incipient mutiny led by the carpenter McNeish, who refused to continue on the fourth day’s march. The first serious challenge to his authority, this arose partly from personal grievances of McNeish and the fore-mast crew’s traditional belief that, now Endurance had sunk, they would no longer be paid and had no duty to follow orders. Shackleton calmly persuaded them that he had full legal authority over them and that, of course, their pay continued. He took McNeish (whom he never forgave) aside and convinced him that if his insubordination continued he would quite legally be shot.
They were stuck in their new position, which they named ‘Patience Camp’, from New Year’s Eve 1915 until the beg
inning of April 1916. Seals, which had been fairly plentiful, became in short supply mid-January, prompting Shackleton to save what there was for the men by having all except two teams of dogs shot. This was inevitable but it did not help morale, which was now affected by the lack of food and its variety, and the growing fear they would be swept out of reach of land. At the start of February, when ice movement brought the old Ocean Camp within 10km (6 miles), the Stancomb Wills was retrieved and by early March they were about 130km (80 miles) to the east of Paulet Island.
As the open ocean came closer the main fear was that the floe would crack under them or, as nearly happened, be run down by an iceberg driven by wind and current. On 9 March the ice was moving on an ocean swell but though the boats were stowed to get away, the opportunity to do so safely did not come. On 23rd, 139 days after the loss of Endurance, the distant peaks of Joinville Island at the tip of Graham Land were sighted about 64km (40 miles) off, but still Shackleton delayed, rightly fearing the dangers of trying to launch boats in a sea full of heavy ice and unknown currents. By the end of the month they had drifted north, out of the Weddell Sea, into the marches of the Southern Ocean. The floe on which they were camped was now bound to disintegrate, food was increasingly short and the days were shortening towards winter. The Peninsula was out of reach to the south-west and the only land within range to the north was Clarence or Elephant Island, more than 160km (100 miles) away.
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