Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition

by Beau Riffenburgh

  It took almost no time for him to make an impression. 'He at once went to the cabin allotted to him,' a shipmate later recalled about when Shackleton joined Tantallon Castle, adding:

  I remember he was not wearing an overcoat and had one or two books under his arm. When I went to his cabin to see how he was assimilating himself, I found him reading - but willing enough to talk. He put down a volume of poems - and said he had been looking at his friend Browning . . . My impression of him then was that he was distinctive and a departure from our usual type of young officer. Later on I found he was several types bound in one volume.

  Shackleton's new position meant more prestige, better pay, and a regular schedule, allowing him to return home every two months. 'I saw a good deal of him . . . between his voyages,' Emily later wrote. 'We lived at Sydenham till 1901 - when we moved to London. My father liked him and was very kind to us both - but there were others who thought the friendship rather a foolish one and it had ups and downs - though he had such a serious feeling for me - and we had books - poetry and small literary aspirations in common.'

  Even if others were dubious about the relationship, Shackleton had no doubts. The story is told that, just back from one of his voyages, he was travelling on the train to see Emily, and in the same carriage were several antique dealers also going to the Dorman house, where an auction was being conducted. The men began to discuss what they were hoping to purchase, one mentioning a grand piano and another Chippendale chairs. Finally, one turned to Shackleton and said, 'What are you going to get out of the old man?' Shackleton looked up solemnly. 'A daughter, I hope.'

  Shortly before the sun rose high enough to cast its pale, golden light on the fissured flanks of Table Mountain, after some three weeks at sea, Tantallon Castle steamed into the harbour at Cape Town. White and his staff promptly disembarked and, after a day of frantic consultation with Sir Alfred Milner about the possibility of Boer commandos invading Natal, they hurriedly caught the evening mail train to East London, from where they would sail to Durban.

  In the ensuing days, as Shackleton began the voyage back to England, White made a crucial blunder that would affect the entire opening stages of the war. General Sir Redvers Buller, commander of the First Army Corps and the officer selected to lead the full expeditionary force to South Africa, had advised White not to advance too far north, but to occupy a defensive position behind the Tugela River. Ignoring this, White proceeded into Natal's rugged northern triangle. It was a mistake of unmitigated proportion. As Rawlinson wrote:

  The Boers are thought to have some 15,000 to 20,000 men on the frontier all told. We have not more than 10,000 at present. Yet they are split up half at Glencoe and half at Ladysmith both of which are too far forward . . . only thing is to hold the line of the Tugela River and withdraw from Glencoe and Ladysmith. The situation . . . which we are going to take up is one which from a military point of view . . . courts disaster for . . . the Boers can . . . surround or annihilate either place in detail. If I were in Sir George White's place I would insist on withdrawing to the Tugela.

  On 11 October, the Boers declared war, and within days they had besieged British forces at Kimberley and Mafeking. By the beginning of November, White had been trapped in Ladysmith.

  Shackleton returned home shortly after to find the British public totally absorbed with the action in southern Africa. 'Our days are spent with reading our papers - ever clamouring for more,' one of Milner's female admirers wrote to the High Commissioner.

  In my lifetime, this state of tension is unique . . . it is no exaggeration to say we are all plunged in gloom . . . I shall never forget last Tuesday in London . . . Picture the newsboys at the corners . . . shouting 'Terrible reverse of British Troops - Loss of 2000.' Imagine the rush for papers . . . Carriages stopped at the corners for papers to be bought - bus conductors rushed with handfuls of pennies as deputation for their passengers . . . People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering . . . no one goes to the theatres - concert rooms are empty - new books fall flat nothing is spoken of save the War.

  Within a month, Shackleton was involved in the effort in a more direct way than his brief brush with Rawlinson. He was promoted to third officer and transferred to Tintagel Castle, which was assigned to transport troops to the Cape Colony. He sailed on 14 December, just as the Boers were administering three successive defeats - at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso - which would jointly go down in British history as 'Black Week'.

  Any young man of Shackleton's temperament would have been caught up in the patriotic fervour that swept Britain as the old century faded, the great outburst that banished differences between political parties and social classes, and welded the British people into a united front, ready to sacrifice for the Empire. Would he not have been as thrilled as the rest of the country when, only two days after his return home, Buller's forces relieved Ladysmith?

  Soon Shackleton was again heading south, Tintagel Castle departing on another trooping voyage on the very day that the merger of the competing mail lines resulted in the registration of the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Company. Aboard were 1,200 men from the South Staffordshire Regiment, the Middlesex Regiment (Duke of Cambridge's Own), the Somerset Light Infantry, The Queen's, and a host of other units, including Lovat's Scouts, a volunteer corps of game-keepers, deer-stalkers and gillies. One of the senior officers was Captain Sir W.G. Barttelot, the brother of Edmund Barttelot of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. When Stanley divided his party far up the Congo River in the strange, unexplored Ituri Forest in the heart of Africa, he left Edmund Barttelot in charge of what became called the 'Rear Column'. But when Stanley returned, he discovered that Barttelot had gone mad and then been murdered. The brother aboard Tintagel Castle was also soon to be killed in action, but his presence on the ship might well have kept Shackleton thinking about an explorer's life.

  Somewhere on the way south, Shackleton and the ship's surgeon, William McLean, decided to produce a small book commemorating the trip. It would turn out to be a wonderful little memoire de voyage, giving a detailed description of the ship, short biographies of various officers, menus from special dinners, a selection of poetry, and much more. In a brief article about the ceremony for crossing the equator, Shackleton showed an early talent for writing, as well as a typically British bias:

  An unexpected visitor now appeared in the person of Kriiger, who had been discovered by a soldier concealed in a wash-house, the last place in which any one would have looked for him . . . He appeared ill at ease, for he feared that water, with which he was little acquainted, would soon be liberally applied to him.

  The little book also gave the roll of every regiment aboard and provided information about the regular speed of the ship (13% knots); the washhouses, which could accommodate thirty-six men at a time; and the regular rifle, revolver and Maxim gun practice on the back deck. It was ultimately published with the title O.H.M.S. An Illustrated Record of the Voyage of S.S. 'Tintagel Castle'.

  While in South Africa, elated by his first literary effort, Shackleton tried to give it mass appeal. Also in Cape Town was an unrivalled advocate of the British Empire - Rudyard Kipling. An Indian-born journalist whose star had blazed forth while Shackleton was at Dulwich, Kipling had achieved, with both poetry and short stories, a rare combination of critical acclaim and popular support. Beneath Kipling's thinking and writing was a rock-ribbed evangelical belief. To him, imperialism was the incarnation of the missionary spirit, for the British race had the duty to rule the 'lesser breeds' or - as he coined a phrase in an address to the Americans, then involved in the Philippines - to take up 'the White Man's Burden'.

  Knowing the drawing power of Kipling's name, Shackleton wrote to invite him to contribute a poem to the book. The next morning, to his surprise, he looked at his old ship on the other side of the wharf, and saw the instantly recognisable Kipling in his shabby grey suit and gold-rimmed glasses. Shackleton crossed to Tantallon Castle to speak to the author, who was awaiting the
ship's departure but said that if Shackleton sent him the proof of the book, he would do his best.

  The poem never appeared, but one can only wonder about the impression that the explosive energy and personal magnetism of the young officer had on Kipling, a man who could see deep into the imperial soul. Later that year Kipling completed his novel Kim, which he had been working on irregularly for seven years, and in it appeared passages that leapt out as being inspired by Shackleton.

  When Shackleton arrived home at the end of May, he had missed by two weeks one of the most extravagant, hysterical, jingoistic outpourings of emotion in British history. 'It is good to be an Englishman,' wrote F.D. Baillie, the war correspondent for The Morning Post, who was actually at the relief of Mafeking, which set off the euphoric displays. 'These foreigners start too quick and finish quicker. They are good men but we are better, and have proved so for several hundred years.'

  It was a note echoed around the country and the Empire. It was the sound of patriotism, an honest-to-God love of Britain, right or wrong. It may seem arrogant now, but one must remember how steady men's convictions were in the late years of Victoria's reign. It was not simply a case of toasting the Queen at dinner or humming Rule Britannia as the Earl of Rosebery, Prime Minister in 1894-95, did to fight off depression or ennui. Britons had an unquestioning love of country and monarch, and a willingness to sacrifice, to fight, even to die for them. At that moment, it made being a soldier a most noble profession.

  There were factors other than patriotism that drew men to soldiering in late Victorian Britain, among them the call to adventure and the discovery of exotic, far-away places. Another was that it was a way to become a hero and to gain all that went with that status. Whether from noble background or baseborn, a soldier had a chance to attain the twin deities of fame and fortune.

  Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and its end, the reputation of the military in Britain had been totally transformed. In the reign of George III, the army had consisted of those who had been impressed or had nowhere else to turn and had been willing to sign up for the minimum twenty-one-year enlistment. They had been flogged and maltreated by their officers, billeted upon the people, and used to quell civil unrest. Yet by the end of Victoria's reign, Lords Wolseley, Roberts and Kitchener were among the greatest heroes of the Empire, and the common solider, 'Tommy Atkins', had even surpassed Jack Tar in the hearts of the British public.

  This change in public perception began in the Crimean War, when the gruesome conditions faced both on the battlefield and in the hospitals - and reported home for the first time - made the soldier an object of sympathy and concern. The Indian Mutiny saw a continued metamorphosis, as those in the ranks became heroic saviours of the besieged and the avengers of British honour. The Mutiny also helped generate the hero-worship so characteristic of late-nineteenth-century imperialism. Service to Empire, Christian militarism, chivalric nobility and Cromwellian fervour formed a potent elixir to the need for heroes, and Sir Henry Havelock in particular evolved in the public imagination into much more than a victorious general. The man whose statue still adorns Trafalgar Square became an evangelical knight, a defender of the faith as well as the Empire, and the scenes of his triumph and martyrdom, Cawnpore and Lucknow, were recorded in the collective imperial consciousness.

  This form of Hero of Empire reached its apogee in one man believed to be fearless, incorruptible, and committed unto death: General Charles Gordon. A passionate Christian fundamentalist who shunned society because it interfered with his spiritual life, Gordon became a Victorian hero for his role in putting down the Tai-Ping rebellion, for suppressing the slave trade in the Sudan, and for what was seen as extending Christianity and western morality into the dark regions. His death at Khartoum elevated him from heroic to mythic status, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier writing that he was 'the nearest approach to that one Man, Jesus Christ, of any man that ever lived'.

  After the death of Gordon - whom Wolseley called 'God's friend' army recruiting increased dramatically whenever his name was used. However, despite the power of the Gordon myth and the broad appeal of the military, Shackleton never evinced a desire to become a soldier, even when his younger brother Frank went to southern Africa with the Royal Irish Fusiliers. It is likely that, at one level or another, he already had another imperial occupation in mind.

  The concept of conquest is usually one closely related to military force. In 1890, however, former French Prime Minister Jules Ferry was thinking of something else when he stated, 'An irresistible movement is bearing the great nations of Europe towards the conquest of fresh territories. It is a huge steeplechase into the unknown . . . whole continents are being annexed.'

  It was this 'forward policy' that had exponentially expanded the size of the British Empire in previous decades. To some, national prestige had become correlated with sheer dimensions in a perverse reversion to medieval thinking, when land had conferred prominence and power. To others, including Lord Salisbury, such simplistic ideas were crude, but there was no denying that when new regions were coloured pink on the map, there was a swelling of the chests of the British public.

  As the 'New Imperialism' became closely intertwined with geographical expansion, explorers began to occupy a more significant place in the pantheon of empire - after all, what was exploration but the initial stage of the imperial process? By the beginning of the twentieth century, explorers were perceived by the public in much the same way as the military: brave heroes expanding or maintaining empire, bringing Christianity and civilisation to benighted peoples, and triumphing in the struggle against nature. The two professions were fused together in the public mind when, in his classic book Small Wars, Charles Callwell wrote that, 'it is perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of small wars . . . that they are in the main campaigns against nature.'

  The struggle against nature was a driving force in nineteenth-century Britain, brought about not only by the Victorians' constant striving for progress, but by a new perception of man's relation to, and dominion over, the world. A variety of causes - the technological successes of the Industrial Revolution, a resurgence of the Biblical notion of man as a force above nature, and the popularisation of Darwinian theory - led to the intellectual triumph of what was known as 'the conquest of the world'.

  Man's role as conqueror of the world was a persistent theme in numerous facets of life, including technology, medicine, and science. But in geography, the desire for knowledge, combined with the attitude that not only could everything be known, but that it should be, made it a sufficient reason to go somewhere merely because no one had been there before. By late in the century, filling in the white spaces on the map, and thereby proving man's dominion over nature, had become a virtual obsession. As the American explorer Anthony Fiala summed up:

  Beyond the geographical and scientific value of the discovery of the North Pole, and the solving of questions of popular curiosity, another reason exists to explain the ceaseless effort to reach that mystic point: The Spirit of the Age will never be satisfied until the command given to Adam in the beginning - the command to subdue the earth - has been obeyed, and the ends of the earth have revealed their secrets.

  Another essential Victorian belief was how exemplary lives could illustrate social and spiritual objectives and provide moral touchstones. The prime example of this was David Livingstone, considered a deliverer of Christian virtues to the heathen, an explorer who opened the way for trade and white expansion, and a saintly medical man who endowed his activities with such a striking righteousness that his moral force was reflected upon all who followed him.

  Many later explorers proclaimed themselves inspired by Livingstone, and, as he did, combined religious zeal, desire for the conquest of the world and belief in the expansion of Empire. Explorers were also lured to unknown areas such as the polar regions and the centre of Africa by their beauty and perceived purity, their challenges to one's manhood or their capacity for allowing physical and
spiritual freedom in areas so unlike the rapidly industrialising west. As Joseph Thomson, the explorer of Kenya, stated: 'I am doomed to be a wanderer. I am not an empire-builder. I am not a missionary. I am not truly a scientist. I merely want to return to Africa to continue my wanderings.'

  However, many explorers were driven by the same reasons as those joining the army: the chance for fame and fortune. Explorers were looked upon as among the noblest of the land. Their names were known to all classes, their lectures were presented to standing-room-only crowds, and their books exerted an extraordinary power over people's minds. Not that the public truly wanted to know about the day-to-day difficulties and realities of exploration: the romance, adventure and thrills were why they went to lectures and bought books.

  Exploration also provided opportunities attainable by anyone. The possibility of instant fame - such as that of John Hanning Speke or Henry Morton Stanley - or remarkable fortune was never far from the thoughts of an explorer. Nor, indeed, had it ever been, as Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher or the other great Elizabethan freebooters would have admitted. Loot was such a basic part of exploration - and of imperialism - that the Liberal statesman John Morley once exclaimed, 'All this Empire-building! Why the whole thing is tainted with the spirit of the hunt for gold.'

  Upon his return from his second voyage on Tintagel Castle, Shackleton was as interested in fame and fortune as the next man. He could not have believed that he was on the road to El Dorado, however, when for the next several months he was assigned to serve with the transport ships fitting out to take soldiers to southern Africa. He helped with the stowing of equipment and the embarkation of troops going off to honour and glory, but he must have felt he was doing little to gain those himself.