Bad feet or not, the three were desperate to reach their depot, and within the hour they continued, marching until they were halted by a barranca about 200 yards wide and forty feet deep. With their arms on the verge of giving out, they lowered the sledge to the floor, where, to their joy and relief, they saw numerous Emperor penguins. While Mackay killed and cut up several, Mawson and David walked to the far side to survey a way to the top. The Professor was, according to Mawson, 'now certainly partially demented'. Mackay had again threatened to certify him insane, and David pleadingly asked Mawson to assume leadership of the party. 'He said he would draw it up in writing and get me to sign it,' Mawson wrote. 'I said I did not like it and would think on it . . . he drew out his pocket book and began writing out my authority . . . and asked me to sign it. I again said I did not like the business and stated he had better leave matters as they were until the ship failed to turn up.'
Despite his own frustrations, Mawson had throughout the journey outwardly supported the man whose scholarship, personality and morale had been such a shining example to so many. Although he had put significant complaints in his diary, he was not about to change his conduct now. Whereas Mackay demonstrated that the brutal conditions of the journey had brought out the savage in him and caused him to lose his compassion - proudly writing in his diary, 'I have deposed the Professor' - this was not the case with Mawson. David's former student would continue to rally behind the man who had 'ever been a driving force behind my labours'.
Therefore Mawson abandoned the discussion, and continued his search for a way up the overhanging cliff face. But none existed, and the three were ultimately forced, with heart-breaking effort, to haul the sledge back up the high face that they had descended. It was now 7.00 a.m., and they had been on the move for twenty-three hours. Despite still having to make the final push to the depot, they were unquestionably relieved to have obtained fresh food, ending the threat of starvation. And since they were so near the coast, they felt that they could not help but be seen if Nimrod passed. With these self-assurances, they set up their tent right there and turned in.
As they got into their sleeping bag, each had the same set of questions. Should they wait for the ship or head south to Butter Point, a journey that would force them to leave the coast in places? Since they were several days late in arriving at the depot, would Nimrod try to find them or would she have left them for lost? In fact, as they had not followed Shackleton's instructions, or indeed their own plan left at Depot Island, would anyone even know where they were? Mackay was for heading south, but Mawson and David both knew that the schedule for picking them up was too tight for the ship to come this way more than once. Whatever they did, they told themselves as they dropped off to sleep, they had to keep to the shore so that they didn't miss the ship in her only pass.
They had not been asleep long before an increasing wind picked up the drift from the Drygalski Ice Barrier and blew it toward the north. As the wet snow swirled aimlessly, all sight of their tent and of the flag at the depot disappeared. In the heart of this squall, with nothing but whiteness to the west, Nimrod made her way slowly past their ice cliff and continued her voyage.
20
FORCED MARCH
Perhaps Columbus, 400 and more years earlier, would have truly understood the joy that a vision in the distance brought four men struggling north on 16 January 1909. Never in all their voyages across the oceans of the world had any of them been happier to see land than early that afternoon, when, still on the midst of the frozen watery waste that was the Polar Plateau, the Transantarctic Mountains slowly came into view. 'Saw the land again today after being out of sight for 3 weeks nearly,' Shackleton recorded in a diary entry that, like his others since they had turned about-face, was shorter than previously.
The reality was that they no longer had the energy to make extensive entries. They were physical wrecks - Shackleton's frostbitten heels had cracked open and were suppurating. They had not had enough to eat for months - and two days before had yet again cut back - and the altitude was playing havoc with their systems. Moreover, the temperature seldom rose above — 200 any time of the day and dropped so low at night that the intense cold disturbed their sleep.
Yet they continued to cut into the more than 700 miles separating them from Cape Royds. Two mornings before, a stiff blizzard from the south had greeted them upon waking, but they had simply hitched up the floor cloth as a sail to take advantage of the wind. 'Had we been bound S. instead of N. we should have called this an awful day, and most likely would not have been able to leave our tents,' Wild wrote. 'As it is we have done the best days pulling of the journey.' They had made more than twenty miles, although the wind had caused the sledge to buck and kick like an unbroken pony. The four men had had to run along to keep up with it, using valuable energy braking it so that they did not lose control, and negotiating it around the hard sastrugi that dotted the landscape.
The following days produced more of the same, and although they were pleased with their distances, the exhausting rush was compounded by the loss of their sledgemeter, which snapped off unnoticed. 'This is a serious loss to us for all our Barrier distances are calculated between depots on it,' Shackleton wrote. 'We must now judge distance.'
The seventeenth January was the first of three successive record-setting days, as they dropped more than 500 feet of altitude while gaining twenty-two-and-a-half miles. The next morning saw them at the transition area to the Great Glacier, but, trusting to Providence, they stormed across crevasses large and small, completing twenty-six miles before camping near a large ice fall. 'I have been very unlucky today falling into many crevasses and hurting my shoulder badly,' Shackleton wrote that night. He was too sore and fragile to note that they had all had many close calls, and that one of the runners on the sledge had broken. Never the less, they did have thanks to give, as their lower altitude meant it was not so bitingly cold, and nearing the depot allowed them an increase in food. 'Thicker hoosh & an extra biscuit tonight,' Marshall noted, adding with a rare note of empathy, 'Never will I refuse a hungry man a feed & feed the hungry whenever possible!'
The next day topped them all, as, after about an hour of slogging out of the ice falls, they 'got the sail up and fairly romped along until noon, over neve and hard sastrugi'. Throughout the afternoon their biggest problem was the runaway sledge constantly overtaking them, despite them reefing sail to hold it back. They raced across crevasses at all angles, two men roped ahead of the sledge and two unroped steering at its sides, and they often broke through the covering, the side men carried across only by the sheer momentum of the sledge. When they finally camped only eight miles from the Mount Buckley depot, they had achieved twenty-nine miles. T don't know how S. stands it,' wrote Wild admiringly. 'Both his heels are split in four or five places, his legs are bruised and chafed, and today he has had a violent headache through falls, and yet he gets along as well as anyone.'
There is little doubt that Shackleton, leading by example, was overexerting and taxing his reserves more than was wise. 'The worse he felt, the harder he pulled,' said Adams, who, like Marshall, had concerns about the Boss working so hard he collapsed. His determination continued on the final struggle to the depot. After two hours of descending a snow field, they struck an area of crevassed blue ice, where their finnesko could not purchase a grip. They each had numerous falls, Shackleton two particularly nasty ones. By the time they reached a steep gradient where they had hauled their sledges up by rope on the way south, a gale had picked up. With the constant threat of being blown down the face, they lowered the sledge by a rope, using an ice axe as a bollard. They finally reached the depot at midday, with Shackleton's earlier prediction - 'I expect there will be little in the locker by the time we strike our glacier head depot' - having proved correct: they had but one day's food remaining.
Night brought on a series of squalls, and, while making meteorological observations, Adams was blown over by a gust and threw his logbook towards Shackle
ton. It was carried away by the wind down a slope. 'You must go after it, Bill,' Shackleton calmly advised, 'no good going home without the records.' So Adams and Marshall scooted down the glacier to the edge of a crevasse to recover the little book. Shackleton shortly thereafter turned in, according to Wild, 'completely knocked up'. He did not go to sleep, however, before recording 'bad as the day has been, we have said farewell to that awful Plateau.'
That night, in their relief to be off the Plateau, the seriousness of their situation might not have struck them. It certainly did the next morning. The fine line they had trod with their provisions so far was nothing compared to what faced them going down the Great Glacier. They had taken twelve days to ascend the hundred miles from the lower glacier depot to Mount Buckley. They now had only five days' food at half rations.
Worse yet, early in the day Shackleton was so weak that he was forced to take himself out of harness. 'Pulse on march thin & thready,' Marshall recorded clinically, 'irregular about 170.' Wild, as usual, saw the matter differently:
Poor S. has been very ill today, the heavy falls he had yesterday have shaken him up badly, and he has had to walk by the sledge. It is not surprising, as for a good six weeks he has been doing far more than his share of work. His stomach is out of order and he has very little appetite and cannot eat his pemmican, which is a serious matter here. M's trace as slack as ever, though only three of us were in harness.
That the surface was relatively hard and they continued to drop in elevation helped, however, and they made more than seventeen miles. Shackleton slowly improved during the next several days and was able to help guide the sledge over the badly broken ice, when respectable distances were attained.
It was just as well that Shackleton was back to normal by 24 January, because the first half of the day was 'a perfect nightmare', travelling over 'huge cracks and crevasses, hills and hollows, ridges and mounds of sharp-edged ice which was all the time playing hell with our sledge.' Coming down an ice fall, the back two feet of the starboard runner was ripped away, and by the end of the day, the once eleven-foot-long sledge was down to seven feet on one side. They went sixteen miles, but it took from 6.45 a.m. until after 9.00 p.m. Despite camping in sight of Mount Hope, they were still more than forty miles from their depot, with food for only two days and biscuits for one. 'Two or three days bad weather now would send us all to the Happy Land,' Wild jotted, 'as one cannot hold out long in this country without food.' But, he added hopefully, Marshall 'has been pulling almost his share today, so I think he must be getting scared about the food.'
They must all have, because the next day was a blue-ribbon pull if ever there were one. With their luck in the form of good weather continuing, they blasted down the glacier twenty-six miles to an altitude of only 2,600 feet, consuming almost all their food on the way. The final crumbs from their food bag served as breakfast on 26 January, although that did not seem a disaster, as they calculated they would reach the depot that afternoon. They calculated wrong, however - and it almost proved their undoing.
Immediately upon leaving camp at 7.00 a.m., they were faced with a series of pressure ridges, between which were undulating waves of soft snow that made pulling the damaged sledge incredibly difficult. Before noon this turned to a maze of crevasses thickly covered with soft snow that had fallen since their outward journey, leading them to lose their bearings, as no features were recognisable. When both lead men on the sledge went into a crevasse at the same time, it forced them to lengthen the harness of one of them, so they would be pulling at different distances from the sledge. The lunch break provided only a cup of tea with the last spoonful of sugar.
By mid-afternoon they were stumbling with hunger and exhaustion through a white plain of snow twelve to eighteen inches deep. Their progress had fallen to less than a mile an hour. A stop for another cup of tea reinforced with the last of the plasmon gave no help, so at 5.30 p.m. Marshall produced a set of 'Forced March' tablets, a cocaine preparation that he had reserved against such a contingency. Designed to 'sustain strength' according to the manufacturers, these tablets helped keep the men moving - albeit slowly. They could hardly drag their feet above the snow. 'Several times I fell into crevasses, as everyone did,' Wild wrote. 'Whilst hanging in the harness I prayed that the rope would break so that I should have a nice long rest.'
Each hour Marshall dosed his party with the 'Forced March' tablets, and each hour they were slightly revived and able to crawl on. At 10.00 p.m. they added a cup of cocoa to their tablet. 'Struggled on,' wrote Marshall, the pain showing even in his scrawls. 'All played out, depot always seeming within reach yet unable to make it. Pace funereal.' By 2.00 a.m., Marshall's wonder-drugs had been finished, and the men were falling asleep on their feet. Then, with all of them sinking up to their knees with every step, Wild collapsed, and they were forced to camp three miles from the depot.
They were on their way again by 9.00 a.m., but at noon Adams collapsed. He was able to continue a short while later, but by 1.00 p.m. the entire party was utterly exhausted and had to stop. They had not had solid food for thirty hours, and their strength and will were virtually broken. 'I cannot describe adequately the mental and physical strain,' Shackleton wrote about what he called 'the hardest and most tiring days we have ever spent in our lives.'
Now an unexpected man stood forward for the role of hero. While Shackleton watched over Adams and Wild, Marshall set off to bring back food. Within twenty-five minutes he had reached the depot, after escaping three falls into crevasses by hurling himself forward and grasping for the edge as he felt his feet go through. There he collected four pounds of pony meat, cheese, pemmican, biscuits and tobacco. 'By arrangement with Shacks, I took 2 lumps of sugar from depot to help me back,' he wrote. 'Very stimulating effect . . . and if I was asked to choose between the relative merits of "Forced March" or sugar, under similar conditions, I should choose sugar.'
Within the hour Marshall was back at camp, and they were digging into a real meal. 'Good God, how we did enjoy it, and what resolutions we made over it,' Wild wrote. Yet they were still so dreadfully weak that they were forced to put up their tent for a sleep before proceeding the final mile.
Early the next morning they advanced without incident to the depot, where they consumed another large meal, dumped their ski boots, took several photographs and collected geological specimens before heading towards The Gateway. Whilst making their way before a strong breeze, Shackleton was given a last farewell by the cracked blue ice of the glacier. 'I was plunged into a hidden crevasse and hauled out by Wild,' he wrote. 'My harness jerked up under my heart and gave me rather a shake up.' Never the less they reached the Barrier by 3.00 p.m. By the time they camped at the outer edge of a bergschrund (a crevasse formed at the head or end of a glacier), they had made fourteen miles and were only fifty to sixty miles from Grisi Depot. Shackleton's performance had impressed even Marshall, who noted with admiration, 'Sh. has stood it wonderfully. Wild & Adams rather played out.'
Shackleton, meanwhile, having left behind first the Plateau and now the Great Glacier, was already looking ahead to the final stage. 'It is with a feeling of relief that we left the glacier today for the strain has been great,' he wrote. 'We know that except for blizzards and thick weather, which two things can alone prevent us from finding our depots in time, we will be all right.'
As if to put an exclamation point on Shackleton's foresight, the next morning a thick, warm snow began to fall soon after they started. The temperature soared to 320, and the snow melted on the men and their sledge immediately upon landing, making everything miserably damp. Little more than an hour later, with the air so full of snow they could hardly see, a cold wind sprang up, almost instantly dropping the temperature by twenty degrees and freezing solid everything that had been wet. They had no choice but to stop and try to warm up. When conditions did not improve, they were forced to wait out the blizzard, much to the chagrin of Wild, who noted: 'I hope this will not last long, or we shall soon have empt
y tummies again; we cut our lunch down as it was.'
Indeed, lack of food was a potentially fatal affair. Although they had been in desperate need of feeding up when they reached Depot D, given the amount of supplies there they had considerably overeaten. Now they were short again. To make matters worse, by the time the blizzard ended on 30 January, Wild had developed dysentery, and it was all he could do to stagger along. The others had to pull over a fine snow that made traction difficult and their advance painfully slow. Shortly after they started the wind whipped up again, blowing about the snow and blotting out their vision as they passed through a heavily crevassed area where the Great Glacier met the Barrier. But they could wait no longer, and trusting in Providence again became the order of the moment. Remarkably, by the end of a day on which they man-hauled for ten hours to net thirteen miles, they had not met a single crevasse.
On the final day of the month Wild again could only just continue plodding to keep up. The medicine Marshall gave him made him so drowsy that several times he fell asleep on the move. Worse yet, he could eat neither pemmican nor horse meat, and there were not enough biscuits for him to have extra. He was beginning to grow weaker. But that day an event occurred of such significance that Wild underlined every word he wrote about it:
S. privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this; I DO, and BY GOD I shall never forget. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.
The gesture absolutely and utterly sealed their bond. Wild would irrevocably be Shackleton's man for the rest of his life.
Shackleton’s Forgotten Expedition Page 31
