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With no prospect of Discovery arriving before late September and the distant Admiralty immoveable that he would be nothing but a passenger, Shackleton was now becoming desperately anxious for his men. The Chileans again sent out the Yelcho to help him return Emma to Punta Arenas, where it arrived on 14 August with Shackleton again in doubtful health. There, his burning desire to rescue his men before the Royal Navy arrived persuaded both the local naval commander and his superiors in Santiago to allow one last attempt using Yelcho alone. It was a small steel tug of about 150 tons, not in very good repair either structurally or mechanically and certainly not built for ice. Shackleton, Worsley and Crean sailed in it with a crew of Chilean volunteers on 25 August. The commander, Lieutenant Luis Pardo, obligingly allowed Shackleton his head to direct their movements and wisely left the navigation to Worsley.
This time there was no ice as they approached Elephant Island, only fog, through which Shackleton was allowed to close the land at some risk during the night of 29 August, increasingly anxious that wind and current might bring the ice back in. Worsley’s navigation was again excellent but they nearly missed Cape Wild by approaching from the unfamiliar western side rather than the east. That was quickly resolved and at 1pm on 30th they were lying off the spit in conditions almost alarmingly calm. Shackleton went
This small diamond-shaped medallion belonged to Dr Macklin, who had remained on Elephant Island. It commemorates their rescue by the Chilean naval tug Yelcho, in Shackleton’s fourth attempt on 30 August 1916. off in a boat and found an excited and emotional party all well on shore where they had almost given up hope. He superstitiously refused to land at all and insisted on immediate evacuation.
Wild had long made the party live in a state of readiness to move at short notice. Within an hour everyone was embarked, the remains of the camp and Endurance’s last two boats were abandoned and Yelcho headed fast for the open sea before its luck could turn. On 3 September 1916 they made a triumphant entry into Punta Arenas, cheered by Chileans and members of the English, German and Austrian communities alike, the war notwithstanding. With his thoughts now turning to how the world would react to his epic of survival snatched from the jaws of failure, and the story to be made of it, Shackleton had of course ensured they did not arrive without advance fanfare.
8 VOYAGES’ END
By Jeremy Michell and Pieter van der Merwe
Anton Omelchenko, dwarfed by the enormous size of the Barne Glacier, Antarctica. The sheer scale of the landscape presented challenges for polar photographers, who resorted to placing crew in their photographs to provide a sense of scale. Photograph by Herbert Ponting, December 1911.
The race to the South Pole in the years before the First World War involved more people, of many nationalities, than have appeared in this brief account of the three names that dominate British perception of it.
Scott, like Nelson, has been assured immortality in the British pantheon by the manner of his death. The fact that it occurred in what was popularly seen as a close-run if unsuccessful contest for a national goal made him a British Imperial hero. Since then, and also like Nelson, the passing of Empire itself has prompted reconsiderations that have inevitably questioned his competence, if not his tragic status.
Historical perspective, of course, makes it easy to criticise Scott. It does him greater justice to recognise that, far more than Amundsen or Shackleton, he was a conventional product of his background – English, Naval, Victorian – and to a degree, a casualty of its limitations as well as any personal factors. Had he been different, as Amundsen was – both as a Norwegian and in cast of mind – and Shackleton too as an unconventional, romantic adventurer, neither Markham nor his committee-men would have backed him. On the scientific front, his expeditions achieved wide and important results but he did not have the outlook, skills or competitive focus by which Amundsen beat him to the Pole, or the natural leadership gifts by which Shackleton achieved more in defeat than his practical failings and improvisations probably deserved.
One aspect of Scott, which should at least be noted, is the question of how far his temperament – introspective, sensitive and with both charm and notable literary gifts – may have been incompatible with the career he chose, or at least with the extreme circumstances into which it led him. There has been no scope to do more than hint at this here but, if such a contradiction has any substance, it would deepen both the nature of Scott’s tragedy and the respect due to the bravery with which he met his death.
That death, however, and the rationalisation of pointless sacrifices in the Great War so soon afterwards, put Scott beyond immediate criticism. Neither Amundsen nor Shackleton were so lucky. Nothing that either did afterwards matched, in the former’s case, winning the race to the South Pole and, in the latter’s, his escape from it. Both had to live with anticlimax.
Although various delays and the war intervened, Amundsen continued to explore. He built a new ice ship, the Maud, in which from July 1918 he began a seven-year attempt to accomplish his drift across the Arctic Ocean. Thanks to the vagaries of wind and current, however, Maud only succeeded in traversing its edges, through the North-East Passage (the second ship to do so), and Amundsen did not complete the full voyage himself.
During the war, aged 50, he had learned to fly and, despite personal bankruptcy and other difficulties, he began a series of attempts to cross the North Pole by air in 1923. In 1925 he and his companions were nearly stranded after one of their two planes was damaged in a forced landing on the Arctic pack. The following year, however, Amundsen and the Italian Primo Nobile succeeded in flying over the North Pole from Spitzbergen to Alaska in the Italian-built airship Norge. The flight restored Amundsen’s flagging reputation and public popularity but he then quarrelled with Nobile and others, and his last years were increasingly isolated and occupied with efforts to clear his debts. He was eventually successful but, unfortunately, the bitter tone of his autobiography did little to help his public image when it appeared in 1927.
In 1928 Nobile made another flight to the Pole in the airship Italia but disappeared on the return. As a matter of honour, Amundsen rapidly became involved in the ill-coordinated rescue attempts, his name inducing the French government to provide a Latham flying-boat and crew for the purpose. With his pilot companion Leif Dietrichson and the French crew of four under Captain René Guilbaud, Amundsen took off from Tromsø on 18 June 1928. They were never seen again. Wreckage found in the sea months later suggested they had made a forced landing and subsequently perished in circumstances that can only be imagined. For Amundsen it was a tragic but perhaps fitting end. Nobile was rescued by others.
Maud, named after the Queen of Norway, was built in 1916 to Amundsen’s design to complete a north-polar drift. However, the expedition completed the North-East Passage instead.
The flight of the airship Norge across the Arctic in 1926 meant that Amundsen and Wisting became the only men to have seen both the North and South Poles to that date.
The seven surviving men from the Ross Sea party, Andrew Jack, Alexander Stevens, Ritchie Richards, Harry Ernest Wild, Irvine Gaze, Ernest Joyce and John Cope, are pictured along with (at far right) Shackleton and Captain John King Davis of the Aurora. The whole group suffered enormous privations when Aurora broke loose in a gale. However, their successful completion of depot laying for Shackleton reflected their determination not to fail.
Shackleton (shown right on board Quest) was no longer well by the time of the Quest project but his sudden death on 5 January 1922 was a shock. Frank Wild, who had accompanied him on every Antarctic expedition, called it ‘a staggering blow’.
Shackleton and his crew were welcomed as heroes in South America in 1916. They finally parted at Buenos Aires and Shackleton made his way to join Aurora in New Zealand for the rescue of the Ross Sea party. They returned to Wellington on 9 February 1917, again to a considerable welcome. Shackleton’s return to England in May, after lecturing in America, was notably quiet by comparison. He was al
ready actively seeking a role in the war, aware of a degree of criticism for being so long absent from it; ‘messing about on icebergs’, in one reported phrase.
Initially he was unsuccessful, but between October 1917 and the spring of 1918 he was sent on a British propaganda mission to South America. In July 1918, after his return, Shackleton was gazetted temporary major in the army and became involved in a semi-commercial expedition to establish a British presence in Spitsbergen, in which Wild and McIlroy were also employed (the latter now invalided from the army through wounds suffered at Ypres). In August at Tromsø, however, he was taken ill with what McIlroy thought was a heart attack but, as usual, he resisted investigation.
From there he was suddenly called home to organise transport aspects of a new military mission to Murmansk. This outlasted the end of the war, becoming ongoing British support for the regional government against the Bolshevik threat. Shackleton extended it into proposing schemes for local economic development, which, had they worked out, would have provided him with a post-war future. Unsurprisingly, his return to England in March 1919 and the withdrawal of British forces later that year saw the whole effort collapse and the area fell to the communists.
His peacetime life again became a search for income, initially by a drudging round of lecturing on the Endurance expedition, from December 1919 to May 1920. As we have seen, this included providing a live commentary to Hurley’s remarkable silent film, In the Grip of the Polar Ice, twice a day at the Philharmonic Hall. Shackleton’s book of the expedition, South (again ghosted by Edward Saunders) appeared to a good reception in December 1919. Shackleton gained nothing by it, having assigned the royalties to the heirs of one of his more unforgiving creditors, and he was never to clear many of his other Endurance debts. By this time his marriage was also one of form rather than substance and he was spending an increasingly rootless existence with his mistress, Rosalind Chetwynd, or otherwise on the move. He was also drinking and smoking too much, and visibly ageing.
The crew of the Quest included a number who had served with Shackleton in the Antarctic before. The ship was not really suitable for the conditions, limiting the expedition’s ability to fulfil its aims.
Early in 1920 he began to say he wanted to see the polar regions again, forming plans for the Canadian Arctic for which he was offered backing by a wealthy former school friend, John Quiller Rowett. When Canadian support proved elusive, Rowett generously agreed to a vague alternative plan to circumnavigate Antarctica and fix the position of various ill-charted islands. In three months, Shackleton put together his last expedition in the 125-ton sealer Quest. For this he surrounded himself with old friends, a number of whom were still owed money from Endurance days: Wild, Worsley, Macklin, McIlroy and Hussey were among them, and new faces too. They sailed from London on 21 September 1921, via Plymouth, Madeira and Rio de Janeiro. Shackleton was now clearly in poor health, increasingly listless, nostalgic and a cause of concern to the doctors. At Rio he had a heart attack but again refused to be properly examined.
On 4 January 1922, a fine day turned into a wonderful evening, and they were welcomed at Grytviken in South Georgia by old Norwegian friends. Shackleton had already confessed that he had no clear plans thereafter and McIlroy later recalled that, on leaving Plymouth, the tolling of a bell-buoy had prompted him to remark, ‘That’s my death knell’. On board Quest in the small hours of the following morning, 5 January, Macklin came to his urgent call and found him in the middle of another heart attack. As he had often done before, the doctor told him he would have to change his ways. ‘“You’re always wanting me to give up things,” said Shackleton, “what is it you want me to give up?” I replied “Chiefly alcohol, Boss, I don’t think it agrees with you.”’
Shackleton’s cabin on board Quest. James Marr, a boy scout on the expedition, wrote of it as his ‘sea-bedroom’ and said it ‘was little better than a glorified packing-case; it measured seven feet by six…’.
It was their last exchange: Shackleton died within minutes, three weeks short of his 48th birthday. With Hussey as escort, his body was sent home for burial but only got as far as Montevideo. There a message was received from Emily, always the forgiving and understanding wife, that her ever-restless husband should remain where his heart lay, in the Southern Ocean. On 5 March 1922, the remote way-station of all his voyages became his final harbour when he was buried on South Georgia, in the Norwegian whalers’ cemetery at Grytviken.
Legacies
The legacies of Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen are still evident today. Interest in the men continues as biographies analyse their personalities, decisions, skills and successes. Over time the reputations of all three have waxed and waned, with some surviving criticism better than others and a few biographers having to rescue reputations. For example, Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s 2003 life of Scott was in response to his own experiences and Roland Huntford’s comparative biography of Scott and Amundsen from 1979, which was controversially harsh on the former. Shackleton’s reputation was long overshadowed by Scott’s but in recent years he has been used to illustrate leadership skills, especially in adversity. At the National Maritime Museum, Shackleton was one of a number of historical figures in the ‘Leading Lives’ educational programme supporting A-Level Business Studies courses. This used his Antarctic leadership style and actions to analyse leadership characteristics for a modern audience. A more recent biography of Amundsen, always a difficult character for the British, casts him in a more complicated light than just an unsporting adventurer who stole Scott’s crown by reaching the South Pole first.
The public perception of Scott and Shackleton, partly informed by such biographies, is neatly summed up in the BBC’s 2002 programme 100 Greatest Britons, in which Shackleton came one ahead of Captain James Cook at 11th, and Scott, one behind Lawrence of Arabia, was 54th. These characters have inspired films like Scott of the Antarctic (1948) with John Mills in the title role, and TV programmes such as Channel 4’s Shackleton (2002), recreating the 1914 Endurance expedition and James Caird boat journey. The use of their own words added to the feel of authenticity and anticipation, giving viewers an opportunity to see into their world. These films and programmes build on the contemporary filming by Ponting and Hurley. When modern expeditions to the South Pole have been broadcast, the audience gets a sense of the stresses that explorers endure in mind and body. The 2013 ‘Walking with the Wounded South Pole Allied Challenge’ saw 21 servicemen with physical or cognitive injuries travel to the Pole with Prince Harry. The expedition members had to deal with extreme conditions as well as their own disabilities. The Antarctic is also becoming more familiar as a result of the increasing number of visually spectacular wildlife programmes on television, which open up the continent like never before. Equally important are the vast number of images and amount of information about Antarctica that can be accessed on the Internet.
Shackleton’s grave in the whaling cemetery on South Georgia. He was buried here at the request of Lady Shackleton, surrounded by the bleak wilderness that played a part in his fame.
The recent anniversaries of the Terra Nova and Fram expeditions (1910/2010) and the more recent Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition with the ‘Shackleton 100’ commemorations (1914/2014) have again raised people’s awareness of the men, their stories and their fellow Antarctic veterans. These events are usually linked with concerted efforts to tell the story through public displays. For instance, the redesigned Oates Gallery at the Gilbert White House, Selborne, opened in 2012 as part of the centenary commemorations of Scott’s polar attempt; and the Royal Geo-graphical Society’s exhibition The Enduring Eye in 2015 used the excetional artistic photography of Frank Hurley to retell the story of the Endurance expedition of 1914–1916 for a new audience. These anniversaries are occasions to focus on acquiring new material to support the personal stories from the polar expeditions. The Scott Polar Research Institute successfully received funding to acquire prints and, later, the negatives taken by Captain Scott duri
ng his last expedition. These show life on the journey south from his perspective.
Shackleton’s love of poetry was reflected in this epitaph. He paraphrased both AC Swinburne and Robert Browning to pay tribute to Macintosh, Spencer-Smith and Hayward, members of the Ross Sea depot-laying party for the Endurance expedition.
While much research has focused on the leaders, biographers are now beginning to focus on the scientists, sailors and adventurers who followed and supported them. These men were also willing to put their own lives at risk for a variety of complicated, and at times personal, reasons. To give a more rounded view of the early years of Antarctic exploration, there is still room for further research on the expedition crews and their experiences. These men, individually sometimes described as either a ‘Scott man’ or a ‘Shackleton man’, were not only often inspired by their leaders, but their exploits have also inspired others to read about them and even visit the Antarctic, to try to understand what the appeal was, or to experience the harshness of the environment first-hand.
Tourism to Antarctica, mainly through specialist cruises, has increased in the last 15 years from 17,543 people (the combined total for those that landed or stayed on board ship) in 2002–2003 to 37,405 in 2013–2014. The peak for this period was in the Antarctic summer of 2007–2008 when 46,069 visited the Antarctic region, of which 33,054 landed on the islands or the continent.1 By contrast, 100 years before, in 1907–1908, only 15 men lived at Cape Royds during Shackleton’s 1907 British Antarctic Expedition. This increased tourism has implications that need careful management in order to reduce its environmental impact and preserve the huts, landscape and seas.