However, the emphasis would have been considerably stronger at a public school like Dulwich. There, under the firm, forbidding headmaster A.H. Gilkes, a blend of patriotism, duty and reverence for the monarchy were promoted as cardinal elements of life. Students were exposed to the imperial cult and its building blocks of Christian militarism, public school athleticism and military virtues. Textbooks and literature for youth promoted a heroic national history, a quasi-religious approach to the obligations of international power, and an ideological justification for imperial conquest. It was a powerful mixture, as former Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee indicated when he described the youthful thrill of imperialism. In December 1895, Attlee's father, a Gladstonian Liberal and a lawyer, was horrified by the actions culminating in the Jameson Raid, the attempt to lead the English-speaking 'uitlanders' in an armed rebellion against the Boer government of the Transvaal. However, to the young Attlee, born but nine years after Shackleton, 'Dr Jim [Jameson] was a hero . . . On the wall at school hung a great map with large portions of it coloured red. It was an intoxicating vision for a small boy . . . We believed in our great imperial mission.'
Shackleton's time at Dulwich would have helped build his interest in the Empire. The year he entered saw the celebration of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee. The country and Empire were swept with a wave of loyalty of a depth difficult to understand for those who have only experienced the lesser celebrations and memorials revolving around later royals. That same year, Stanley left on the most publicised of African journeys - the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition - with the stated goal of rescuing one of Gordon's lieutenants who was holding out against the forces of the Mahdi far up the Nile. Funded in part by a host of British newspapers, and promoted by financiers who saw a chance to establish a commercial empire along the upper Nile, the expedition received extensive and extremely patriotic propaganda.
Shackleton's horizons undoubtedly were expanded by such adventures in far-away places. He later claimed that, 'I was more or less acquainted from my earliest youth with all the problems of exploration, whether it was in Central Africa, Central Australia, Thibet, the North and South Poles, or New Guinea and Borneo.' It is said that one of his favourite books was the American Charles Francis Hall's Life with the Esquimaux, which told of travels in the high Arctic. And, like many boys his age, Shackleton was caught by the escapism, the release from daily humdrum, of such publications as the Boy's Own Paper. Launched in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society, the BOP, as it was known, had a goal of keeping Britain's new generation of readers away from the sensational 'penny dreadfuls'. It was a lively journal, containing quality juvenile literature, sports, travel and adventure stories, and guides to self-improvement. It attracted such renowned imperial fiction writers as R.M. Ballantyne and W.H.G. Kingston, and two of Shackleton's own favourites, G.A. Henty and Jules Verne. Shackleton so identified with the lonely, mysterious anti-hero of Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that he later adopted the name Nemo for himself, not only in letters to his future wife, but as a pseudonym for his writings.
How much Captain Nemo's way of life influenced Shackleton cannot be known, but what is certain is that the lad decided at an early age that he wanted to go to sea. 'He had no particular hobbies as a boy but anything to do with the sea was his special attraction,' one of his sisters later claimed. It is told how he and three schoolmates spent time they should have been in class in a local wood, smoking, dreaming of life under sail, and reading adventurous sea stories aloud. On one occasion, Shackleton and his chums are supposed to have gone to London Bridge, where they stood in a queue for jobs on a steamliner. The steward was having none of it from lads their age, and packed them back off home.
Shackleton's most intimate companion of the time was Nicetas Petrides, whose family lived on the same street as the Shackletons, and who used to walk to school with Ernest. When Shackleton was fifteen, the two of them and Petrides' younger brother spent a holiday together at St Leonards. When the tide was out, the trio walked far out on to the soft sand, Shackleton going beyond the others. 'He suddenly felt his feet gripped by quicksand and called for our help, as the waves were breaking over him and he could not extricate himself,' Petrides later recalled. 'We . . . formed a chain by holding hands and . . . gradually released him, the quicksand fortunately not being deep. For this we were duly rewarded by him by each being treated to an ice.'
Despite such an experience with reality, Shackleton's head remained firmly in the clouds - or the waves. As a result, he did not 'care tuppence about lessons' at Dulwich, although he did finish second out of eighteen in English History and Literature in 1889. His reports regularly pointed out that his low marks were due to a deficiency of interest rather than a lack of ability. 'I never learned much geography at school,' Shackleton later recalled in The Captain, a competitor to Boy's Own Paper founded by the press baron George Newnes. 'My first voyage taught me more geography than I should have learned had I remained at school to the age of eighty. School geography consisted in my time . . . in names of towns, lists of capes and bays and islands.'
Shackleton's father wanted his son to follow him into medicine. Ernest was equally determined to experience the romance - and hardships - of the sea. One of Dr Shackleton's happy attributes was his love and support for his children, and he eventually gave his blessing for a trial at sea. He couldn't afford to send his son to Britannia, the Royal Navy training ship, so instead they turned to the merchant marine. 'My father thought to cure me of my predilection for the sea by letting me go in the most primitive manner possible,' Shackleton recalled later, 'as a "boy" on board a sailing ship at a shilling a month!'
It might not sound an ideal situation to the modern mind, but in those heroic days of empire, there was both honour and excitement in such a venture, which could include visiting the empty, desolate regions of the world. There were many distant places where all but Britons feared to tread or sail, and Ernest Shackleton was going to seek them out.
3
LIFE AT SEA, LOVE ON LAND
Like many young lads in the late nineteenth century, Shackleton had probably acquired a romantic vision of life at sea. Once aboard ship, it did not take long for him to be disabused of any Utopian conception.
In April 1890 Shackleton travelled to Liverpool to join the three-masted, full-rigged sailing ship Hoghton Tower. The appointment had been orchestrated by his father's cousin, the Reverend G.W. Woosnam, superintendent of the Mersey Mission to Seamen. Through contacts with the North Western Shipping Company, Woosnam arranged for Shackleton to make a voyage on which, although with the status of Boy, he would receive the uniform, accommodation and training of an Apprentice.
Shackleton had never been the ideal student at Dulwich, although in his final term his reports had greatly improved. However, when he joined Hoghton Tower, he quickly found himself considered an odd nut because of his superior education and his strange habits of reading and quoting poetry.
'When he wasn't on duty on the deck he was stowed away in his cabin, with books,' recalled a shipmate years later. 'And the other lads used to say "Old Shack's busy with his books" . . . he could quote poetry and read history. I think he was a bit of a lecturer. He certainly was well schooled.'
It was, of course, a matter of perspective. According to Shackleton, it was the sea that
taught me things - and that is what Dulwich, with all its good points had not done . . . I learned more of literature in a year at sea than I did in half a dozen years at school. I seemed to get at the heart of it then, to see its meaning, to understand its message, and in some degree to catch its spirit.
The sea was a school in other ways as well, and, as the ship headed for Valparaiso on his first voyage, Shackleton had to learn the ropes literally, as there were more than 200 in the rigging of Hoghton Tower, each with its own name and function, and to mistake one for another could be disastrous. He was exposed to the harshness and boredom of a life on the ocean: scrubbing decks, manning a watch
, sleeping in the wet, and beginning to grasp the principles of sailing ships, a breed even then near the end of its day.
'I can tell you Nic that it is pretty hard work, and dirty work too,' he wrote to Petrides, continuing:
It is a queer life and a risky one; you carry your life in your hand whenever you go aloft, in bad weather; how would you like to be 150 feet up in the air; hanging on with one hand to a rope while with the other you try and get the sail in frozen stiff with sleet and snow; and there is the ship rocking pitching and rolling about like a live creature.
Fortunately, Shackleton had a bit of time to adjust before the ship became so wild. But after a calm voyage to South America, they ran into a series of gales while trying to round Cape Horn in the depth of winter. 'It was one continuous blizzard all the way,' he recalled later, 'one wild whirl of stinging sleet and snow, and we were in constant peril of colliding with icebergs or even of foundering in the huge seas.' Members of the crew were injured, and the sails and spars were damaged. Even after they reached the Pacific, the gales continued, and it was more than two months before they finally anchored at Valparaiso. From there, they proceeded up the coast to Iquique (Chile), a miserable, stinking backwater where for six weeks they discharged a cargo of hay and brought aboard a load of nitrates. It was hard, unpleasant labour, as there were no quays, but Shackleton learned the valuable lesson of safely transporting cargo in boats between ship and shore.
By the time he returned to Liverpool in April 1891, Shackleton had been gone for almost a year. There were certainly aspects of life at sea for which he did not care, and the ship's captain felt the same about the young man, commenting to Reverend Woosnam, 'he is the most pigheaded, obstinate boy I have ever come across'. But the sea still had an undeniable appeal, and Shackleton now needed to make his decision as to whether to return to the security and love of his family or to commit to years of hard, arduous toil.
Had Shackleton been of a sedentary disposition, no doubt his life would have taken a different turn at this stage. However, there was something that constantly drove him to accept the greatest challenges and face the most difficult adventures. To Shackleton, the challenge was the thing, and one has the feeling that he lived in a state of continual conflict, always faithful to the endeavour and the fight, but never fully content with the result. In any case, he selected the difficult path, and he was formally indentured as an apprentice in the merchant marine.
Two months later he sailed again on Hoghton Tower, although under a captain who was a harsher disciplinarian than his predecessor. From Cardiff around Cape Horn to Iquique and back - it was the same trip, only worse. This time the ship's company included no one interested in literature or poetry. Moreover, there was only one sailor with whom he could discuss religion. On his first voyage, he had recorded that he was afraid he would be laughed at when he said his prayers, 'but the first night I took out my Bible to read they all stopped talking and laughing, and now everyone of them reads theirs excepting a Roman Catholic, and he reads his prayer-book.' On the second voyage, he could accomplish no such thing, as the captain gave no spiritual guidance, and the members of the crew were more inclined to drink and use foul language, 'making themselves', Shackleton noted, 'lower than the very beasts'.
At the age of only eighteen, Shackleton was being confronted with a change that would not only influence him, but would profoundly alter the character of British society. Like most members of staunch middle-class families, he had been raised to regularly attend church and habitually read the Bible. Traditional, fundamental Christian teachings had been seriously challenged throughout the nineteenth century by, first, the impact of geological and palaeontological discoveries and their influence on the understanding of the history of the Earth, and, second, the crisis in religious and scientific thought brought about by Darwinian theory. Never the less, until late in her reign, Queen Victoria's Britain remained one of the most religious societies in western civilisation. By the time Shackleton sailed on Hoghton Tower in 1890, this was beginning to change.
Some historians have suggested that to ignore the effect of Britain's particular type of Christianity on day-to-day Victorian life would be to render much of the period's history unintelligible. This is because, ironically, much of the significance of Britain's brand of Christianity which, to use the term in the broad sense, could be called evangelicalism - lay not so much in the spiritual kingdom as in the secular domain. The evangelical belief structure laid a direct emphasis upon the conduct of the individual, because, although it recognised grace and faith as essential, it believed that salvation was a doctrine of works. There were three key elements of this evangelicalism. First was its emphasis on a literal reading of the Bible, which made the British a true 'people of the book'. Second was its unquestioned certainty of an afterlife with rewards and punishments for one's acts on Earth, and, therefore, the acceptance that earthly existence was only important as a preparation for eternal life. And third - the logical progression from the second - that in this life, pleasure, passion, and hedonism should be disregarded in favour of good works, charity, self-help, the enlightenment of the heathen and the most Victorian of concepts: duty.
When considered in this broad manner, the term 'evangelical' did not apply simply to individuals who were members of the Evangelical sect nor to other supporters of low-church principles. Certainly such were included, but perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evangelicalism in the broader sense is how it broke down sectarian barriers and was espoused by men of all creeds. It pervaded the beliefs, writings, and actions of those considered high church, such as Gladstone; of the convert Cardinal Newman; of the self-proclaimed agnostic T.H. Huxley; and of the reborn Glaswegian Congregationalist David Livingstone. Even Disraeli, by birth as far removed from evangelicalism as any major politician of the time, paid deference to it in his political and administrative decisions.
Shackleton was never as stalwart in his evangelical religious beliefs as two of his future colleagues, Edward Wilson and Eric Marshall. Thus, aboard Hoghton Tower he began to lose some of the youthful fervour that he had possessed when he belonged to the Band of Hope, a children's temperance organisation. This transition was noted by his family. 'I used to get very worried because Ernest didn't go to church,' his sister Kathleen later recalled. 'I won't say it wasn't important, but he didn't need certain parts of the church service . . . He did [go to church] when he got back from sea . . . I remember him going to St Bartholomew Church . . . being very naughty, pretending to be very solemn, and holding his prayer book upside down.'
Shackleton certainly did not make light of the secular evangelical concept of duty, however. Through the decades this had been transformed from William Wilberforce's struggle against slavery or Lord Shaftesbury's championing of the poorer classes to a means of moral self-elevation for the entire Empire. By Shackleton's time, so certain were Britons in the superiority of their faith and civilisation that they believed it to be their duty, however difficult, to help the heathen and bring new lands - populated or not - under British sway. 'In the Empire we have found not merely the key to glory and wealth,' stated the Viceroy of India, George Curzon, 'but the call to duty, and the means of service to mankind.'
Thus, as Shackleton made his third voyage on Hoghton Tower which took more than two years - he felt a profound pride in playing a role in the magnificent heritage of the Empire. Wherever he sailed, there was a reminder of the courage of those who had won the Empire and the indication of how the spread of British rule extended the benefits of justice, trade, legitimate government, evangelicalism and good will. From the Cape of Good Hope they went to Madras, where, amid weeks of working cargo, Shackleton went rhinoceros hunting with the local commissioner. Then, after falling seriously ill with fever while in Mauritius, at their next stop he was nursed back to health by the hospitable people of Newcastle, New South Wales.
That was almost Shackleton's final stop. Midway across the Pacific they were struck by 'a whirlwind - a sudden
gust, thunder and lightning, and before we could even shorten sail . . . we were on our beam ends almost.' The fore-royal mast, top-gallant mast and top-mast came crashing down, landing where Shackleton had been an instant before. Within moments, the main-royal mast and the yard snapped and went overboard, to be used by the sea as a battering ram against the ship. All night the storm raged, threatening to capsize the ship or to knock a hole in it. Finally, with the morning, the storm abated, revealing catastrophic damage. For four days they cleared the wreckage and then, minus masts and sails, they slowly made their way to Talcahuano, Chile, where they learned that the ship sailing from Newcastle with them had disappeared. 'We were loaded with coal', one of Shackleton's shipmates recalled years later. 'Woolton [was a] four-masted ship, also partly laden with coal. . . part cargo of tallow on board. She wasn't as deep in the water as we were . . . She turned over.'
Several months later, having been refitted, Hoghton Tower was again demasted in a gale and had to limp back to Valparaiso. It was not until July 1894 that Shackleton finally returned to Britain, his indenture complete. He soon started to attend a nautical school in London, and in October he passed the examination for second mate.
But even during such a time, when he was at home soaking up the adoration of his sisters and studying for his mate's exam, were the seeds actually being sown for his future in the far south? For who can tell the impact on a man not yet one and twenty years old when, immediately upon him reaching home, the newspapers were full of stories about an expedition departing for adventure and imperial glory, sailing for the frozen seas and unknown lands of the high Arctic.
On the surface, Alfred Harmsworth had many things in common with Shackleton. The eldest son of an English father and Irish mother, he was born near Dublin, but grew up in London after his parents, disquieted by Fenian violence, left Ireland in 1867. Although he was memorable for the lack of promise he showed in the schoolroom, his teachers still found him to be one of their brightest pupils. But whereas the sea caught Shackleton's fancy, Harmsworth had an early fascination with journalism.
Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition Page 5
