Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition

by Beau Riffenburgh

  They had hoped for good weather, because the overloaded Nimrod had only three feet six inches of free board. It was not encouraging, therefore, when, within an hour of reaching the open sea, they were swamped by high waves, and water poured into the scupper holes. They were sailing into the angriest gale any of them had ever experienced. Worse yet, it would last for ten days, during which they would be doused, buffeted and battered in a manner previously unimaginable to even the career mariners. T have never seen such large seas in the whole of my seagoing career,' Arthur Harbord, the auxiliary second mate, wrote, 'one moment we can see the keel of "Koonya" and the next we cannot see the truck.'

  Such violent movements led Captain Evans to signal for Nimrod to let out another thirty fathoms of cable. With her decades old windlass, this was no easy task. But the only thing worse than braving the conditions on deck was being inside. The majority of the shore party were crammed into the converted aft hold, to which they gave the mysterious name 'Oyster Alley'. It was a room that was only fifteen feet by eight and was, according to Priestley:

  a place that under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't put ten dogs in, much less 15 of the shore-party. It can be compared with no place on earth and is more like my idea of Hell than anything I have ever imagined. . .There are no portholes that will open, the ventilation is pre-historic, and on two successive nights we have had to have all doors shut owing to seas being continually taken fair over the weather side of the stern. Every blanket in the place is wet through with salt water and the smell is almost insufferable.

  Crowding was faced throughout the ship. The captain's cabin was shared by England, Shackleton and Murray. David moved in with Dr Michell, the ship's surgeon, bringing along a quarter of a ton of instruments and books. And the tiny wardroom had to serve as the dining area for twenty-two men.

  Conditions deteriorated further on the following days, leading Shackleton to institute a revolving watch over the ponies. Five stalls were located on the port side of the ship, and five to starboard, with the fore hatch between, an area that, with self-deprecating humour, became known as the Cavalry Club. It was here that Buckley earned undying respect, laughing throughout his two-hour watches and then joining the regular sessions at the hand-pumps, which were started after water began to fill the holds.

  The scientific staff received the added bonus of making meteorological observations. These included hourly readings of the barometer, dry and wet bulb, and maximum and minimum thermometers, as well as measuring the temperature of the seawater. 'It is not pleasant to be waked up at four by having a notebook shoved into your hand and being informed that . . . a gale is blowing from the south west,' Priestley recorded. He added that one was

  immediately met by a wave in your face, another meets you as you are going up the ladder . . . [and] another lays hold of you . . . and does its best to hurl you over the side while you are hauling up the canvas bucket of sea water to take its temperature. Then you go into the wardroom and sit down in your wet clothes until the next hour comes round.

  On 5 January the barometer dropped still further and Koonya was signalled with a request to pour oil over the rough water. Never the less, Nimrod continued to roll uncontrollably, and that evening one of the ponies, Doctor, was pitched on to his back. Despite continued efforts to get him to stand, nothing worked, and the next morning Shackleton ordered the dreadfully weakened creature shot. The next day Zulu also fell, but after knocking away the partition between stalls they were able to get him up again. The ponies - key to the entire operation - now became the moment-to-moment concern of the shore party. 'They have not slept since leaving Lyttelton, so one can imagine what game little beasts they are, and it's no wonder we are all so interested for their welfare,' wrote Mackintosh on 7 January, the second consecutive day the storm had reached hurricane proportions. 'So, if there are any prayers tonight, let a bit of them go towards our Siberian ponies, and for finer weather.'

  The prayers were not answered. The next morning gigantic seas were running, and one particularly huge wave destroyed part of the starboard bulwarks and a small house on the upper deck. One of the dogs was drowned on its chain. 'Always wet without any hope getting dry again,' Marshall, the surgeon, recorded. 'Have not taken my clothes off since I came aboard.'

  On 9 January the storm reached its climax, 'blowing a living gale with a sea like a mountain', according to AB Sidney Riches. It was no better on Koonya, where J.G. Rutherford, the second engineer, recorded that it 'was the worst day I have ever experienced, terrific squalls and mountainous seas sweeping everything before them. The Nimrod was continually swept with solid water from stem to stern, all her crew had orders to keep off the deck as much as possible.' The ship was in serious danger of capsizing, listing fifty degrees one way and then jolting just as far the other. Priestley was almost lost when, having gone to the round house at the stern, he 'was catapulted clean out of it by a following wave', which Brocklehurst never the less thought 'a wonderful sight, waves like great mountains, masses of green water ever so much higher than the ship, & ever rushing towards us.'

  But it was the last great tempest of their passage. By noon the next day it was fair and clear, and the men began to dry out. On 14 January, icebergs were seen, and the following morning, in the distance, a band of ice. Koonya had towed Nimrod 1,400 nautical miles, all the way to the Antarctic Circle, and now, with no protection from ice for his steel ship, it was time for Evans to turn tail.

  Despite a heavy swell, a boat carried England and Buckley, the latter returning home, to Koonya. It had been planned that a series of boat journeys would ferry fresh water to Nimrod, as well as eight tons of coal and the carcasses of twenty sheep that had been killed and skinned the previous day. The conditions of the sea made this impossible, so a line was passed between ships with ten sheep attached to it. After these had safely arrived, an effort was made to transfer over the second half, but as the wind and sea picked up, the line was carried away. All plans for the further conveyance of provisions were terminated, and England returned to Nimrod.

  At 1.00 p.m., Evans cut the hawser connecting the ships, and, while Koonya steamed north, the crew of Nimrod commenced six hours of hard toil at the primitive windlass, hauling up what had increased to 140 fathoms of cable. 'Not more than one skipper in 100 would have hung on to us as Evans has done,' Marshall had written at the height of the gale. Evans had indeed performed magnificently, and his reward was a safe return home. With him went the post from the expedition. Among these letters were two that would convert Shackleton's helter-skelter scientific effort into a serious research programme.

  'I felt in my bones somehow that he would not be content to put his nose into the place for a week or two and not stay,' David's brother commented when the professor's decision to remain in the Antarctic became public knowledge. 'Well, it is just like him.' It certainly was. If there was anything that David loved as much as his students, it was fieldwork, and he and his wife had spent much of their early life together living under canvas in remote areas. It could hardly have been an overwhelming surprise, therefore, when letters arrived for the Senate and Chancellor of the University of Sydney requesting a leave of absence due to 'the great scientific importance of the work to be done in Antarctica, and (if I can manage to do some of it well) the gain to the reputation of science at our University.' The request was approved, but it did not really matter, of course. The letters had been sent back with Koonya while David, far out of touch with the world, proceeded with his fait accompli.

  It has ever since been a matter of conjecture as to whether it was while aboard Nimrod or before he left Australia that David had decided to stay in the Antarctic. David claimed that Shackleton made him the offer several days before Koonya returned north, but he would have had to say that to keep up appearances. Whenever it was, and whether Shackleton convinced David to stay, or David persuaded Shackleton to let him, neither would have needed to work too hard at it. The man who could, according to Shackleton, 'charm a b
ird off a bough' would not only secure scientific and intellectual credibility for the expedition, he would have a grand time doing it. Both sides were winners.

  Not that it seemed that way to everyone. On n January, the day after Shackleton first wrote to Emily that David was staying, Marshall bitterly recorded, 'Had a short talk with S., who means to keep Prof. David on ice & also useless swine Mawson. Great pity must make most of bad job. No doubt S. under David thumb who will take all the credit for scientific results.' Marshall - condescending, judgemental, and intransigent - had taken an immediate dislike to Mawson, who had been the most seasick man aboard ship. 'Mawson is useless & objectionable, lacking in guts & manners,' he had written several days earlier. 'Could leave him behind without a regret.' Seeing himself as the logical second-in-command - a position, in fact, he felt Shackleton had promised - Marshall resented the 'intrusion' of David, who had the credibility, respect and charm that he so patently lacked.

  However, the esteem in which the rest of the expedition members held 'the Prof or 'the Pro', as he was variously known, was underlined by Priestley, whose status was most affected. 'Prof. David is a trump, a brick and any other thing which means the same,' he wrote shortly before finding out David was to stay. 'He does more than his own share of work, he keeps a cheerful face under all circumstances and in fact in every way he is an example to all of us.' When Priestley found that part of his role was being usurped, it did not change his gracious attitude:

  One rumour, or rather more than a rumour for Shackleton told me himself, that I have heard which has pleased me very much is that Prof. David is very likely going to be down with us the whole time. If so, though inevitably a great deal of credit will be lost to me, yet the geology done by the expedition will become vastly more valuable and I am sufficient of a scientist to be glad and very glad that he is likely to stay.

  As Nimrod continued south, David proved to have aesthetic faculties as well as scientific. When they reached the line of ice in the distance, it proved not to be the pack at all, but a vast band of icebergs, unlike anything seen before. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them, up to 150 feet high and two miles long, forming a maze that Nimrod now had to penetrate. He wrote:

  Mere words utterly fail to convey the beauty, grandeur and wonder of that scene . . . Imagine countless huge blocks . . . of pure alabaster or whitest Carrara marble above, shading into exquisite tints of turquoise and sapphire at the water's edge, and changing to a pale emerald green below the water . . . we seemed to have entered the great silent city of the Snow King, the Venice of the South; but never had Venice in her palmiest days . . . one-thousandth part the size of this oceanic ice city, which was 100 miles in width from north to south, and unknown hundreds of miles in length.

  A day was spent dodging and weaving through the massive natural barricade before they suddenly burst into open water, to be confronted with a stiff breeze and thick snowfall. It was the Ross Sea, and, although they would face a second band of icebergs, they were in the process of making the quickest passage yet recorded through the protective barricade.

  They were, however, to the forbidden side of the line of demarcation at i70°W agreed with Scott. Nimrod turned southeast, toward the reaches of the Barrier far from McMurdo Sound. It was there, at what he now called 'Barrier Inlet', that Shackleton had decided to winter. It was an innovative plan, but one fraught with danger. No one before had dared to camp on the ice shelf, and Shackleton was now suggesting it in the aftermath of having pushed through vast icebergs that all agreed must have calved from the Barrier.

  Shackleton's destination was, in fact, Balloon Bight, where he had gone aloft during the Discovery Expedition. Attempting to erase its unpleasant associations, he called his hoped-for landing place by a new name. From there, he wrote to Emily, 'where we are going is only 660 [geographical] miles away and with the equipment we have it ought easily to be done across the "smooth Barrier" '. Had his memory been faithful, however, Shackleton would have remembered that the view he recalled from the balloon - what he now thought of as a 'straight road to the south and no crevasses' - was not a clear, unencumbered plain. Rather it was one that had given Scott, Skelton and him no end of trouble when they had made a short jaunt six years before.

  On 23 January they spied the Barrier, and, as Nimrod cruised east, a mile or two from it, Shackleton's tentative plans were explained to the others. After setting up base, he, Adams, Joyce and Armytage would go due south to lay depots for the next spring's push on the Pole. Meanwhile, Marshall, David, Priestley, Marston, Wild and Mackintosh would take two ponies and journey east to King Edward VII Land. This decision was, as Priestley wrote in his diary,

  bad news as far as geology is concerned for it means a seventy-mile sledge journey before a chance of any rock is met with and also a journey of seventy miles back before the specimens are safe in the hut. That practically means little or no chance of getting specimens to work at during the winter.

  As it turned out, Priestley need not have worried.

  The key to Shackleton's plan was to find Barrier Inlet. This was not easy, because it was only a thin slice in the shelf and they could not go too close to the Barrier in case they were swamped by a calving colossus of ice. As the power of the midday sun changed to the pastels of evening and then the soft hues of a late-night glow, Shackleton and his companions stayed alert on deck. What looked to be a smooth wall of ice from a distance was much different when passed nearby, and simple dark spots became huge caverns. More problematically, the same thin lines could represent the edges of either shallow inlets or deep bays.

  Around midnight, while seeking for 'Borchgrevink's Bight', where that party had landed in 1900 a short distance west of Barrier Inlet, Nimrod passed into a broad but sheltered bay. As they followed the indentation of the coast, to port were hundreds of whales, blowing, diving and floating undisturbed; the place was immediately named the Bay of Whales. Meanwhile, to starboard was a large sheet of fast ice, frozen sea ice still attached to the edge of the Barrier; a cursory examination showed it to be impenetrable by ship. Beyond, according to Priestley, the Barrier was 'undulating as convex slopes separated by long or fairly long flat stretches. This looks as if it were probably due either to the proximity of the land or to the fact that the ice has passed over land of a low lying character.'

  What Priestley was describing was Roosevelt Island, an eighty-mile-long ice-covered piece of land that would officially be discovered on Richard E. Byrd's expedition in 1934. Only three miles from the Bay of Whales, Roosevelt Island affects two separate ice systems and helps maintain an instability in the natural ice harbour at the bay. Its influence in January 1908 was far different from what it would be three years later when Roald Amundsen was able to sail directly to the edge of the Barrier and use the site as his base for his dash to the Pole.

  Meanwhile, Shackleton's party continued east, with a detour north around an area of pack ice. But by 7.30 a.m. on 24 January, they had not found anything resembling Barrier Inlet. They lay alongside an ice floe - a medium-sized, flat-topped piece of ice floating on the surface and Shackleton conferred with England. A short while later observations were made to fix their position. Not only were they east of where Barrier Inlet ought to have been, they were at 78°2o'S, in other words, south of where, six years previously, the Barrier had blocked their way. Bits of the ice shelf seemed to have broken off, taking Barrier Inlet with them.

  Shackleton decided to continue east along an open waterway toward King Edward VII Land. Within the hour, however, Nimrod was threatened by a large pack of hummocky ice pressing closer to the Barrier from the north. The ship turned and fled the way it had come, shooting through a gap between the pack and the Barrier with only fifty yards of open water.

  None of Shackleton's options seemed ideal, but, after a conversation with Adams and Marshall, he decided to trace the Barrier edge back to Borchgrevink's Bight, minus the northern detour. Six hours later, they reached the Bay of Whales. What had happened no
w became obvious: the alterations in the Barrier front were but a single dramatic change. When the Barrier had calved, a vast section, including the entire front from Borchgrevink's Bight to beyond Barrier Inlet, had simply floated away, creating the Bay of Whales.

  Shackleton, appalled by the disaster that could have occurred had he set up on the ice and it broken away, determined immediately 'that under no circumstances would I winter on the Barrier, and that wherever we did land we would secure a solid rock foundation for our winter home.'

  But having determined not to build his base on the Barrier, Shackleton now had to decide between two other possibilities: making another attempt on King Edward VII Land or going to McMurdo Sound. He soon was the centre of a small storm, as his men urged different solutions. England, concerned for an overloaded ship, felt the best plan was to go straight to McMurdo. David initially had encouraged Shackleton to push east, but soon began to emphasise the research opportunities in the McMurdo area. Joyce, too, lobbied strongly in favour of their old base.

  Marshall, believing that 'the success of the Expedition depends on the new ground covered', pushed Shackleton the other way. He believed an all-out effort to the east might be successful, as 'up to present time ship has . . . certainly not rubbed an ounce of paint off her sides.' That evening, he grumpily opined that

  S. not going to make another attempt in K.E. Land but. . . says he will go to McMurdo Sound. If this is so he hasn't got the guts of a louse, in spite of what he may say to the world on his return. He has made no attempt to reach K.E. Land. In short he & England funk it. It is useless talking about it. Got very angry when I told him I was sorry he had not made an attempt on K.E. Land. Tried to make me believe that he had done as much as any human being could.