The sky was spectacular, a mixture of the indescribable pastels unique to the early morning hours of the polar regions. The lowering sun bathed the taller peaks before him in golden rays, from Horseshoe Mountain in the west, down through the Royal Society Range, to the high, remote ridges of Mount Discovery in the south. In the shadows, McMurdo Sound was a beautiful, deep blue, broken with slowly floating pieces of pure white ice, some the size of a piano, others vastly larger than the ship. Across the water, the western mountains stared down silently, rent by the tumbling, chaotic slopes of the Ferrar Glacier.
He turned around and looked at the godforsaken place below him, called Cape Royds. In a shallow dip, not far from where the shore rose sharply out of the water, was a small structure sitting near a freshwater lake. Around it, food supplies, coal, harnesses for the ponies, and a jumble of other materials were littered about randomly, like so much jetsam. Some were recognisable, most not, covered as they were by a thick rime of ice, which would take weeks to chip off. Behind the hollow were several ridges of rock, giving a modicum of protection to the tiny building sitting atop the volcanic rubble that covered the area. Beyond these, the land rose slowly, inexorably, over a distance of miles, some thirteen thousand feet up to the smoking summit of Mount Erebus.
His gaze wandered up the side of that dominating, unconquered mass, then jerked back to look down at the camp. He had thought he had heard footsteps behind him, but there was nothing there. It was not the first time he had felt that sensation, and Frank Wild, a veteran Antarctic hand, had told him about men getting panic-stricken and rushing back to base when left alone on the ice. He had already experienced the strange noises himself, and the footsteps that did not actually exist. Wild had said that when you went inland the noises stopped, but then you were even more oppressed by the intimidating silence.
An overwhelming sense of quiet would certainly not be a problem near the hut. Scattered about the rugged landscape, particularly to the west of the lake, was a rookery of hundreds of Adelie penguins. They moved to and fro constantly, squawking at each other and at the skuas, their natural enemies. They took no notice of the time or of whether their newly arrived neighbours from the north were trying to sleep. And worse than the noise was the overpowering stench.
Not that any of this seemed to bother the men at the moment. Despite the ship's departure just hours before, only a few remained awake after a day of humping five tons of coal to the shore. A pair stood just outside the strange apparition that was their new home, with voluminous overclothes, bizarre headwear set atop faces that had not been shaved in days, and a pipe in the mouth of each. The hut was inhabitable, but there was a huge amount of work still to do, both inside and out. And this on the heels of what had surely been one of the most uncomfortable fortnights and some of the hardest labour that any free men had ever experienced.
It had taken weeks of seemingly endless toil to haul all of their materials off the ship, sometimes slogging for more than eighteen consecutive hours. They had been fortunate at the beginning, when they had been able to dock next to ice thick enough to pull sledges across. But then, as the natural wharf broke up, the ship had retreated to a safe distance. They were compelled to launch boats and pull heavily at the oars for more than half a mile across the ice-dotted sound before reaching a wide belt of dense, floating ice. Thence followed the nightmare of trying to navigate through the ice floes: turning their oars into poles and nudging the craft forward, simultaneously trying to keep the heavy ice from crushing them. Once the shore was reached, the stores were either hauled up by a jerry-built derrick or, more frequently, by sheer grit, determination and human muscle. The result was total exhaustion: one night Douglas Mawson fell asleep on the ship, his long legs on top of an engine, the piston moving them with its rhythmic up-and-down stroke, but he was too tired to do anything but dream about the curious motion. The same night, Leo Cotton dropped off to sleep while ascending an iron ladder, nearly falling before he was shaken awake.
Then, four days before, with the suddenness so characteristic of the Antarctic, a tempest of Shakespearean proportion had crashed into their small world. The ship had disappeared, blown clear out of the sound by gusts approaching a hundred miles an hour, leaving the men ashore uncertain as to what had happened to her. Those aboard, meanwhile, had no time to consider their stranded comrades - the temperature dropped to —16°, and for three days the gale raged, frozen seas pounding the small vessel. The rudder-well became choked with ice, the top ropes froze into solid bars, and the deck became covered with more than a foot of freezing, sludgy water. Holes had to be broken into the bulwarks to allow the deluge to drain away.
When the storm finally blew out and Nimrod was able to return to Cape Royds, those coming ashore found the hut battered, shaken, and providing little warmth, but still standing. A second, temporary structure, constructed of bales of fodder and wooden planks and used as a cookhouse, had been blown down, killing one of the dogs. The stores kept in containers weighing fifty to sixty pounds each - had been hurled around like paper balls, and were covered by several feet of ice, formed when the water from the sound was flung in sheets for a quarter of a mile inland.
A final day was spent unloading coal, increasing the amount on shore to eighteen tons, enough to get them through the winter - just. Against all odds - including weather, atrocious landing conditions, and human limitations - they had brought 180 tons of equipment ashore. It was an incredible amount, but, now the ship was gone, it looked as if there was almost nothing there. It certainly did not appear to be enough to keep fifteen men alive for a year.
As he left the rise and plodded down through the concrete-hard mixture of ice and scoria towards the hut, Raymond Priestley wondered what lay ahead. It was not unnatural to realise, now that their contact with the outside world had been cut, that what had seemed a great adventure was suddenly a frighteningly dangerous operation. After all, a dozen of them had never even been to the Antarctic before. It was only Wild and Ernest Joyce who had. And, of course, The Boss: the entire plan was his. There was going to be camaraderie, science, and geographical exploration. Personally, Priestley was most interested in the science, but he knew The Boss was planning on going home to fame and fortune. In the next year, he would bag the South Pole for the British Empire. Then everybody would know the name Ernest Shackleton.
1
A RACE FOR LIFE
One can only assume that most of the new inhabitants of Cape Royds had an unusual combination of ebullience and trepidation that night in February 1908. The only men on a mysterious continent larger than Europe or Australia, they had been abandoned by their ship farther south than anyone in history. Help would not be forthcoming until the next year. In fact, if Nimrod did not return safely to New Zealand, the rest of the world would not even know where they were. They were truly on their own, as isolated as if they were on the far side of the moon.
While most of the party undoubtedly concentrated on what was to come in the ensuing days and weeks, one of them must also have cast his mind back five years to the last time he had lived in the shadow of Mount Erebus. Then, Ernest Shackleton had been only a junior officer - and an outsider in many respects - on what was essentially a Royal Navy expedition. Now, he was in charge of his own mission, and determined to overcome the challenges that had defeated that earlier party.
In recent days, 'although a trifle worried . . . [with] good cause to be so', as Æneas Mackintosh had noted, Shackleton had 'managed in a wonderful way to disguise the fact for he was always to be seen with a cheery countenance: & some good joke to set us all laughing.'
Yet nagging in some corner of the leader's mind was the knowledge that the last time he had tested himself in the far south, he had been, in the Biblical phrase then popular, weighed in the balances and found wanting. His body had let down his drive, his determination, his will. Although he was motivated by a desire for fame and fortune - as were most explorers - and the need for a challenge, at a more basic leve
l he had to prove himself, to gain redemption in his own eyes and those of the world.
It had been the final day of December 1902 when three men - Robert Falcon Scott, Edward Wilson, and Shackleton - faced north and started their long way back. Theirs had been a bitter journey, one that started in hope and high expectation, but that, after two months of nearly intolerable hardships and struggle, had come to grief, facing reality in the white wastes of the Great Ice Barrier.
The three forlorn figures, in the midst of an ice field the size of France, did not look to be in either the physical or mental condition to complete a gruelling journey. They were worn down from intense labour, and had not received the necessary food for such strenuous efforts for two months. More than a week before, two of them had been diagnosed as suffering from scurvy, a mysterious, wasting disease that no one truly understood (but that since has been proven to be caused by a deficiency of vitamin C). Yet they were lucky compared to their dogs, which had been systematically, if unintentionally, starved and worked to death.
The trek across the colossal desert of ice had been planned as the showpiece of the British National Antarctic Expedition, the first major, truly British expedition to the Antarctic in six decades. Although Scott the leader of both the expedition and the party making the southern journey - had publicly avoided referring to specific geographic goals, it would be naive not to think that the three men had hoped to make a vast indentation into the unknown and, with luck, to reach the South Pole. Certainly other expedition members engaged in wild speculation about attaining the Pole.
But a rapid start to the south soon slowed disappointingly to a crawl. From the beginning, Scott, the surgeon Wilson and Shackleton, who was the third officer of the expedition ship Discovery, suffered from inexperience in numerous aspects of polar travel. Chief among these was a lack of knowledge regarding the dogs they had brought to pull the sledges. There was no trained dog-handler on the expedition, so no one truly understood the nineteen animals' dietary needs, the best methods for harnessing them, the speed at which they naturally moved, or the optimum means of driving them. The men were also only painfully learning the relationship between skiing and hauling sledges. None of them had totally mastered the finer technical points of skiing, and they did not have ski-wax or ski-skins to help grip the snow on slopes. The lessons would slowly be learned, but, for the time being, it often seemed as profitable to carry the skis on the sledges as to use them.
Any hopes for a truly impressive southern record were laid to rest in the second half of November 1902, when the support party that had initially accompanied the men turned back. The overwhelming weight of the remaining equipment and supplies meant the dogs were being asked to pull twice the weight they should have been trying to move, and, when that proved impossible, forced the men to begin relaying. The loads were divided in half, the first part moved forward, and then they returned for the second portion, requiring them to travel three miles for every one actually gained southwards.
On 5 December a calculation indicated that they had been using too much fuel, so they cut back from three to two cooked meals a day. The problem was compounded the following day when Spud, one of the dogs, got into the seal meat and ate a full week's worth of their provisions. The daily food ration was consequently cut, and each man received a meagre midday meal of a small piece of seal meat, one and a half biscuits, and eight lumps of sugar. Even more significant, the loss of the ability to cook at midday meant they were no longer able to melt snow for water, and the men became increasingly dehydrated.
In mid-December they cached part of their load at what they called Depot B. They could now advance without relaying, but their progress was still maddeningly difficult, slowed by both deep snow and their dismal diet, which made them steadily weaker. With the dogs doing less and less work, the three men pulled their sledges mile after monotonous mile. Each day they thought constantly about food, and of trivial details such as the number of footsteps one made each minute, thereby trying to compute how many more would have to be taken before the next meal.
On 21 December, Wilson told Scott that Shackleton had 'decidedly angry-looking gums', one of the signs of scurvy. Three days later, he noted in his diary that Scott as well as Shackleton suffered from 'suspicious looking gums'. By Boxing Day, Wilson had problems of his own, his left eye so intensely painful that, despite his repeated use of drops of a cocaine solution to dull the throbbing, they had to stop at lunch and camp for the day. Wilson finally gave himself a dose of morphine in order to sleep, while Shackleton experienced the unpleasant duty of killing one of the dogs to provide food for the others. 'Got his heart first time,' he recorded with relief, although that wasn't the end of his miserable task, as 'soft snow so bad for cutting up'.
Several days later, after being confined to camp for much of two days due to fog and bad weather, Scott determined that it was time to head home. They were at 82°i7'S, the farthest south ever reached by men, yet it was a disappointment. Compared with many journeys in the north, their wanderings had taken them an astonishingly short distance in two months. Moreover, their dogs were dying, their own health was precarious, their food was running out, and they still had to recross hundreds of miles.
But the misery and disappointment of all that had gone before was as nothing compared to the suffering of the journey north. On the second day of the trail home - the first of the new year - Spud fell in his trace, too weak to walk. He was placed on a sledge, but that evening, when the three men entered their tent, he was set upon and killed by the other dogs.
'What we have to consider is that we shall soon have no dogs at all and shall have to pull all our food and gear ourselves,' Wilson wrote, noting that, with food supplies dwindling, they must reach Depot B before 17 January. 'And we don't know anything about the snow surface of the Barrier during summer. It may be quite different to what it was on the way south. One must leave a margin for heavy surfaces, bad travelling, and weather, difficulty in picking up depots, and of course the possibility of one of us breaking down.' His cautious words were to prove all too prophetic.
Throughout the next week, the men were driven by the realisation that their chances for survival were slim. They were constantly hungry, a condition that made them feel the cold more intensely. Ironically, the dogs were fed better, as Scott decided that carrying extra dog food served no purpose and began distributing it freely to the seven remaining animals. This did little to prevent their decline, however, and on 7 January Shackleton recorded, 'Did march today without dogs at all. . . [one] dropped behind at lunch may come up in the night. We could not stop to drag him along. All the others walked either ahead or astern of their own sweet will.'
The three men now floundered through the snow, dropping into knee- or waist-deep powder while pulling more than 500 pounds. One day they advanced little more than a mile in three hours before camping. A warm snow in the night had changed the surface completely, so that each time they came to a standstill, they had to break the sledges away with sharp jerks. 'I suppose it is bound to come right, but we have less than a week's provisions and are at least fifty miles from the depot,' Scott wrote calmly, concluding with the great British understatement: 'Consequently the prospect of a daily rate of one mile and a quarter does not smile on us.'
Midday on 10 January a wind picked up from the south, and the party hoisted a sail made from the bottom lining of their tent. But a blinding blizzard soon developed, causing the sledges to go so fast and erratically that the men had to run to keep up and had difficulty steering, having at times to pull forward, at others backward, and yet others to the sides. 'Wilson and I are very much "done",' Scott wrote, 'but Shackleton is a good deal worse, I think.'
The next day a warm gale blew, and the men, wet through from melted snow, struggled over a sticky, slow surface. The snowstorm seemed particularly to affect Shackleton. His companions could hear him gasping and they feared his imminent demise, but he found an inner strength that seemed to derive at least i
n part from the poetry he so dearly loved. 'Tennyson's Ulysses keeps running through my head,' he wrote, perhaps thinking particularly of lines including those that would later be carved in memory of Scott:
. . . that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
But although personally and spiritually encouraging, poetry would not help them discover their depot, and, as they neared the area in which their food and supplies had been cached, they feared they might not find it. The depot was a snow-covered pile marked with a single flag that could only be seen for a couple of miles on a clear day. The ease with which they could miss it - not so apparent when they had built it - was only too obvious now. Equally anxiety-provoking was that their sledgemeter - a bicycle wheel hooked to the rear sledge that measured the distance travelled - had broken, which meant that they could only guess at their proximity to the depot. They could roughly determine their location by use of a theodolite, but this required a clear view of the sun. They expected that the end of the blizzard would allow them a good sun sighting, but their hopes receded when a heavy pall of cloud obliterated everything. 'The food-bag is a mere trifle to lift,' Scott wrote, 'we could finish all that remains in it at one sitting and still rise hungry; the depot cannot be far away, but where is it in this terrible expanse of grey?'
Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition Page 2
