Why had he suddenly rejected Shackleton's claim? Was he unhappy that a man tied to neither the Royal Navy nor the RGS had shattered the mark established on 'his' Discovery Expedition? Was he influenced by Scott, who dined with him near the time of that letter? According to Markham, Scott did not believe in the latitudes, and four days after his letter to Keltie, Markham had written to Scott, 'This is magnificent Daily Mail geography, and I am trying hard to swallow it, but I have not yet quite succeeded.' There is no certain answer. Nor is there evidence that Markham ever confronted Shackleton with his suspicions - that would have been too open, too candid, for Markham's temperament. After all, according to Debenham, 'He was fond of implying things.'
And it was perhaps Markham's letter - full of such implication - that led Keltie to make a cautious enquiry to Shackleton:
I suppose you made pretty sure what latitude you reached . . . I do not know you said anything about the instruments you had with you, and of course the difficulty of taking any observations under the conditions must have been fearfully trying, but still, I have no doubt you established your latitude to your complete satisfaction.
It was intended to be gently phrased, but Shackleton was nobody's fool. 'K. is tumbling over himself at the present time as regards the expedition,' he wrote to Mill. 'His first wire was a very guarded one, the second was the opposite. Even now he asks me if I can be sure of my latitude, as if I had not taken all possible means in my power to ascertain the exact position . . . in many things we have underestimated the results.'
By the time he wrote that letter, Shackleton was completing his triumphant tour across Australia. He had left New Zealand on a gesture that typified his generosity as much as his impetuosity, and had endeared him to the people of Wellington. A public lecture at the city hall had garnered £300, which was much needed for the expedition funds. Within a moment of receiving the payment, it was gone again, Shackleton having donated it to local charities. He did the same thing several times in Australia. These were not calculated plans, but honest gestures of goodwill to people who had enthusiastically taken him to their hearts, and for whom Shackleton felt equal affection. They were made for the best possible of reasons, but would never the less come back to haunt him.
As in New Zealand, Shackleton received an emotional welcome in Australia, although more tempered because the Australians - members of a new nation longing for their own heroes - had given their hearts to David and Mawson. In fact, David had been one of the first members of the expedition to leave Christchurch, returning on 30 March to Sydney, where he had been feted at numerous events, students turning up in their hundreds each time to honour their beloved 'Prof.
Many of the others scattered soon thereafter. Wild caught a ship for England to help run the expedition office and give full details to Emily. Brocklehurst began a leisurely travel programme. Mawson returned to Adelaide via Sydney, where he received acclaim second only to David, who commented: 'Just as Shackleton was the general leader . . . Mawson was the real leader and was the soul of our expedition to the magnetic pole. We really have in him an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, astonishing indifference to frost.' And Nimrod herself sailed first to Sydney for more repairs and then left on the long passage home. Not surprisingly, it was planned as a voyage of discovery.
John King Davis had only been employed as first officer because England's initial choice had not panned out. But when Evans signed off in Lyttelton, Davis found himself, at the age of only twenty-five, promoted to master and assigned to take the suddenly famous ship home. He was not to follow an ordinary passenger route, but a remarkable itinerary of more than 5,000 miles in high southern latitudes in midwinter, when most ships gave the area a wide berth.
At the time, the Admiralty charts showed a number of islands or sets of islands in the sub-Antarctic area of the South Pacific as being of doubtful existence. Four of these - the Royal Company Islands, Emerald Island, the Nimrod Islands and Dougherty Island - had been reported by early navigators but never seen since. Davis' instructions were to locate and land on these islands if they existed, determine their exact positions and describe their main features. If the islands did not exist, deep-sea soundings were to be taken where they had been reported. In addition, meteorological observations were to be taken every two hours throughout the voyage.
It would not be easy. The short hours of daylight combined with regularly cloudy skies made it not uncommon for forty-eight hours to pass between instances of the sun showing her face. The heavy seas and hurricane-force winds of the far south made soundings extremely difficult. And bergy bits and growlers - fragments of glacier ice smaller than icebergs and often almost hidden beneath the waves - were a constant source of danger, particularly as lack of light made them difficult to spot at a safe distance.
On 8 May, Nimrod sailed south from Sydney, with much of its Antarctic crew still aboard, including Arthur Harbord, now promoted to chief officer, Alf Cheetham as third officer, and Harry Dunlop as chief engineer. Ten days later, some 450 miles south of Tasmania, the ship passed directly over the position where the Royal Company Islands had been reported to lie by a Spanish ship in 1776. Despite the poor visibility, it was clear that there were no islands in the vicinity.
Davis now headed toward Macquarie Island, where he had been instructed to collect local flora and fauna. He found it had not been properly positioned on the Admiralty chart. More surprising was meeting a solitary man who the previous summer had established a hut there. A fifty-one-year-old Irishman named William McKibben, he had been left to collect the oil of elephant seals. He had a small, scrupulously clean hut with two rooms, each with a stove, and was so well stocked that he pulled out a fresh loaf of brown bread and a recently baked pie when Davis visited. Despite offers of a free trip home, McKibben stayed on with his dogs. Two years later, when Davis returned as part of another expedition, he was told by new residents that McKibben had been taken home but had never forgotten the young captain of Nimrod, whom he insisted was named Captain Jaeger, because that name had appeared in the Jaeger socks Davis had given him.
Nimrod sailed south from Macquarie, on 31 May passing over the supposed position of Emerald Island, which had first been reported in 1821. A little more than a week later, to their disappointment, they proved the Nimrod Islands, named in 1828, did not exist either. And a week after that the existence of Dougherty Island was disproved, taking the name of the captain who in 1841 had designated it after himself off the map. By the end of the month they were approaching Cape Horn, and the remainder of the voyage was little more than what most of the men had experienced at one time or another. On 24 August they sighted the Bishop's Rock Light, and by the next afternoon they were in Falmouth, the entire journey now consigned to memory, like some slowly fading dream.
Conversely, Shackleton's dream had been played out to its full during his waking moments, as he moved from one honour to another. He had left Australia on India, the same ship that had brought him out a year and a half before. With him were Adams, Armytage and Mackintosh, each, according to a fellow passenger, 'full of fun and high spirits . . . quite unspoiled, entering into the usual ship's amusements, playing with the children, yarning with the ship's company.'
All was not totally high jinks aboard, however. Hoping that his book about the expedition would produce a large payout, Shackleton worked regularly on it with Edward Saunders, a former reporter for the Lyttelton Times. At the recommendation of New Zealand's Prime Minister, Shackleton had hired Saunders as his secretary in order to complete the book hastily while there was still widespread excitement.
At Port Said, they transferred to the mail packet Isis, commanded, in a remarkable twist of fate, by Albert Armitage, his old colleague from Discovery. 'I heard all about his travels at first hand,' Armitage wrote. 'I also noticed a great change in him. He was no longer so dreamy; he was full of a restless, nervous energy and ideas for another journey.'
Disembarking at Brindisi, Italy, S
hackleton took the fast train toward England, and arrived quietly in Dover on 12 June. It was a Saturday, and his official return was to be in two days. In the interim, he spent the weekend with Emily, after having been apart for almost two years. It was, she hoped, the final homecoming he had promised so often. 'I just want to tell you now darling Heart how much I love you how much I have missed you all this time and how I long to see you and our little ones again,' he had written from Sydney. 'Never again my beloved will there be such a separation as there has been never again will you and I have this long parting that takes so much out of our lives.'
Shackleton honestly meant what he said, but his later actions and her continuing dubiety (although accompanied by her support throughout) were proof that he did not know himself as well as Emily did. In a sense, it was only two days later, on 14 June, that she again lost him - this time to the rapacious British public.
The vast crowd that awaited Shackleton at Charing Cross Station when his train arrived at 5.00 p.m. that Monday was overwhelming even by the excessive standards of Victorian hero-worship. Not even an appearance by Livingstone or Gordon could have transcended the spirit of the multitude who pushed in for a view of their hero or attracted a greater showing of prominent figures from the geographical world. Major Darwin (president of the RGS), Keltie and Sir George Goldie were there, accompanied by Markham, for whom the glow of such a powerful limelight was too great to miss, despite his not-so-private misgivings. Even the man who wished to attend as little as any in the kingdom could not help but be there. 'I called at 1 Saville Row, on the day of his return, and met Scott there, gloomily discussing with Keltie whether he ought to go,' Mill wrote. 'He did not wish to go, but Scott was always a slave to duty, and we persuaded him that it was his duty to greet his former subordinate.'
It was not a day to miss. The crowd was so massive that after a speech, Shackleton and Emily were unable to reach their carriage for a considerable period. When they did, the calls of the crowd forced him to stand to show himself. After they started what virtually amounted to a royal procession, the carriage, according to legend, was stopped and the horses taken away. Local men formed into teams to pull it into the city. This is almost certainly not true, as no newspaper accounts of the day mention it. But could it simply have been because the press was so filled with its own idolatry for the new Caesar? As The Daily Telegraph expounded:
We cannot make too much of him. In the strict sense of a strong word, he is one of the heroes. . . Let us remember at this moment that in our age, filled with vain babbling about the decadence of the race, he has upheld the old fame of our breed; he has renewed its reputation for physical and mental and moral energy; he has shown that where it exerts itself under fit leadership it is still second to none . . . and at a critical time in the fortunes of all the Britains he has helped to breathe new inspiration and resolve into the British stock throughout the world.
In the weeks before his homecoming Shackleton had already received unstinting praise from the international exploring community, some of the warmest and most heartfelt accolades coming from Nansen and Amundsen. Now, although the RGS maintained a guarded attitude, he overnight became the darling of the London social set. Throughout the summer he was feted and honoured, requested to speak, invited to luncheons, dinners and receptions, in short, entertained - and asked to entertain - in every possible manner. That he never lost his appeal to an audience speaks to a high degree of his wittiness, honesty, lack of sentimentality and a modesty best shown by his constant efforts to introduce the members of his expedition. 'I notice it is "Mr Ernest Shackleton" on the toast list,' he remarked at the Royal Societies Club luncheon the day after his return to London. 'That should be Ernest Shackleton and his comrades - because there are here in this room at the present moment the men who have gone with me through thick and thin, through the stress and difficulty and the joys and sorrows of the last expedition.'
Such statements made him only more appealing to the public, and Shackleton soon found himself a property claimed by any number of individuals and groups wishing to create of him a spokesman for their interests. He was an imperialist, said one, a believer in trade unions, another, a friend to impoverished sailors, a third claimed, and an Irishman, according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle at the Royal Societies luncheon. It has been pointed out that at this time Shackleton did not dispute his Irishness. But nor did he deny virtually any other categorisation. He was attempting to be all things to all men, and there was no one he would refuse. But his real association with Ireland was shown by the fact that when he went to Dublin on a lecture tour the following December, it was the first time he had been there in a quarter of a century. After additional lectures in Cork and Belfast, he did not return. His real feelings were perhaps clarified by the polar explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, who joined The Boss on a later expedition. Shackleton's 'blarney', Wilkins wrote, 'at times was purposely designed and accented because Shackleton, more than any other man I know, realised the influence and depended upon the influence of the spoken word, no matter the integrity.'
In the meantime, Shackleton found himself in a situation where 'it seemed as though nothing but happiness could ever enter life again'. He was the guest of honour at a dinner given by William Heinemann, who was publishing his book. He was the centrepiece of a reception in Park Lane at which the famed Italian operatic soprano Luisa Tetrazzini performed. And shortly after his return he was asked if he would consent to becoming a Younger Brother of the Corporation of Trinity House, the powerful guild controlling lighthouses and licensing maritime pilots. It was reputed to be only the second time in the history of the ancient Corporation that this honour had been extended in such a way, and it had required special approval of the Master of the Corporation, the Prince of Wales.
Shackleton's first week on British soil was highlighted on Friday evening by a dinner at the Savage Club in his honour. Although it was Shackleton who proudly signed his name on the wall in the manner of Nansen and other famous figures so exalted, the focus at one point turned to Brocklehurst. From the presiding chair, Scott stated that Mackintosh had perhaps suffered more than the others because he had lost an eye. Brocklehurst, he noted, was minus a toe, but to have left it in the Antarctic was a great honour. Shackleton leaned over to Scott, who then laughingly told the audience, 'I hear he has brought the toe back in a bottle.' The toe, which was preserved in a jar of spirits, Brocklehurst admitted, was in the process of making the rounds of London hospitals, being examined closely by doctors interested in frostbite. T wish I had it,' he told the Daily Dispatch. 'I can't regain possession of my toe. The doctors want it.'
Ironically, in this hullabaloo the one body that only grudgingly acknowledged the returning conquerors was the Royal Geographical Society. This was undoubtedly in part due to the influence of Markham, who wrote with glee, 'The King is not coming' when he found out that the sovereign would not attend the official RGS tribute to Shackleton and the expedition. But the Society's reluctance also reflected the ungenerous attitude of Keltie and other conservative and self-important Fellows. Shackleton was not the first: they had ostracised other of the world's greatest explorers - including Stanley and Richard Francis Burton - because they were viewed as rough-hewn men without the same accent, manners, or social upbringing (despite Burton having attended Oxford). Shackleton, who challenged their own Captain Scott, fell in the same category, as shown by a small-minded letter to the maker of the gold medal that the Society felt obliged to award him. 'We do not propose to make the Medal so large,' it stated, 'as that which was awarded to Capt. Scott.'
But once again the chance to bask in the glow of Shackleton's aura proved too attractive to miss, and on 28 June 1909 the RGS sponsored a grand event at the Albert Hall. A packed crowd was alternately thrilled, entranced and delighted by Shackleton's lecture, following which the Prince of Wales announced that, 'as a brother sailor, I am proud to hand him this medal'. He thereupon presented Shackleton with the Society's gold medal, emblazoned w
ith the explorer's portrait, and then gave smaller silver replicas to the dozen members of the expedition who had been able to attend.
Two weeks later, Shackleton one-upped even himself, when he and Emily were commanded to come to Buckingham Palace. There they were received by King Edward and Queen Alexandra, and, following Shackleton's story of the expedition, the King bestowed upon him the rank of Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, as he had done to Scott previously.
But honours paid no bills, and of these Shackleton had even more than fine meals. He had hoped to pay off his expedition - and far more - from several sources, but these each now disappointed. From the Daily Mail he had received £2,000, but his book was not yet out - he diligently continued working on it with Saunders - and the planned series of lectures had not yet begun. Moreover, the wild hopes of gaining large sums from the stamps issued by the New Zealand government evaporated when dealers showed little interest. A cynic might have thought the greatest advantage of Shackleton's remarkable social agenda was that he was not home when debt collectors called.
In one fell swoop, however, hobnobbing with the rich and powerful suddenly paid off. In early August Shackleton again found himself at Cowes. But this year he was there at the invitation of Sir Donald Currie, chairman of the Union-Castle Mail Steamship Company, who was only too pleased to invite his former employee to the gala affair. On board Currie's new Armadale Castle, Shackleton met Sir Henry Lucy, the famed political journalist.
Lucy was immediately won over by Shackleton, but even more importantly Emily one evening confided to Lady Lucy about her husband's economic woes. When this information was passed on, Sir Henry was horrified that a man bringing such honour to the country could be left in the lurch financially for it, and he promptly wrote a signed article to the Daily Express about Shackleton's predicament. This was not just any journalistic hack spouting off; when Lucy put his name to an essay it meant something. He had initially become an enormously respected figure through his political articles for The Daily News and the innovative 'London Letters' that were widely reprinted in the provincial press. Then his huge success during a quarter of a century as the parliamentary correspondent for both The Observer and Punch from where much of what he wrote was picked up by newspapers throughout the country - led to his knighthood. Thus, astonishingly quickly, an outcry on behalf of Shackleton rang out from not only the large London dailies but a vast array of regional newspapers. It rapidly became a situation that the government could not ignore.
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