Lost in the Antarctic: The Doomed Voyage of the Endurance

by Tod Olson

  Worsley stood in the bow through the whole process like a rodeo rider on a bull, the ship bucking under his feet. “It’s a splendid sensation,” he crowed to his diary. Alexander Macklin, one of the doctors on board, was convinced that the Skipper went out of his way to find hunks of ice to smash. “Worsley specialized in ramming,” he said.

  It might have been great fun to Worsley, but Lees was not impressed. The storekeeper sat below, trying to write in his diary. Every time the ship hit a slab of ice, it jerked the book from under his pen. The grinding outside the walls sounded like thunder. He was sure the hull was about to cave in.

  They fought their way south, sometimes skirting the ice and sometimes blasting their way through. In open water, the Endurance could cover 200 miles a day. In the pack, she made 33 miles one day, 53 the next, 18 after that. The next day the ship lost 6 miles, drifting backward with the ice.

  On December 18, they plowed through seas that looked to Lees like “one great solid desert snowfield.” He worried they were burning through their coal supply trying to make headway. The following day they gave up, anchored the ship to a floe, and drifted with the ice.

  The men decided to make the most of the delay. They were so far south at this point that the sun, at the height of the summer, never set. Even at midnight it hovered just above the horizon, giving off a strange dim glow. In the midnight sun, the crew turned out onto the ice and planted tall poles in the snow for goals. Then they shed their jackets and played soccer, Antarctic style. The scientists and most of the officers made up one team, with Shackleton in goal. But the seamen refused to go easy on the Boss. They finished with a 2–0 victory.

  The Endurance got under way again on December 21. They had put 700 miles between themselves and the nearest members of the human species. But they had plenty of companions—a constant escort from the creatures that clawed out a living on the ice. Snow petrels and skuas swooped low over the ship, hoping to snatch a bite of meat. Occasionally a blue whale, half the size of the ship, broke the surface of the water, blasting plumes of spray into the air. Killer whales with their ominous triangular fins prowled the edges of the ice, waiting for a seal to make a wrong move.

  Of all the residents of the frozen sea, it was the penguins that provided the best entertainment. They shot out of the water like vaulters from an underwater trampoline. Landing with a thud on their bellies, they skidded to a stop on the ice.

  Sometimes the little Adélie penguins followed the ship from a nearby floe, squawking at the crew. That gave the men a chance to have a little fun with the biologist, Robert Clark, who rarely cracked a smile. They decided the penguins all knew Clark, because whenever the biologist was at the wheel the birds hustled along, screaming “Clark! Clark!” No matter how many times the men told him to answer the penguins, Clark refused to play along.

  For the penguins and the seals, however, the fun and games often stopped in a brutal instant. The men had planned to add to their food supply as they traveled. Usually the hunt was no contest. The penguins knew to avoid sea leopards and killer whales. But most of them had never seen a human being before. They simply stood on the ice and waited for the men to club them to death.

  Sometimes, the world around the Endurance was so strange and beautiful the men could only pause and stare. Worsley felt like they were seeing things no human had ever seen before. Even Lees stopped grumbling to marvel at the scenery.

  Icebergs floated like giant sculptures in the water. Some lay stubby and flat. Others rose from the sea like castles in a fantasyland, spires poking at the sky. The waves beat against the sides of the taller bergs, and spray shot to the top of the cliffs. In places, the water carved hollow caverns into the base of the ice with a great booming sound.

  The scenery, to Hurley, was like whale meat to the dogs. He was a born adventurer who ran away from home at 14. Now, on that rare sunny day when the light gleamed off the ice in just the right way, he would do anything to capture it on film. He’d gather his cameras, climb into the rigging, and edge out onto an icy spar. He perched like a bird, oblivious to the danger and the cold. When the light and the angle were just right, he took his pictures. Worsley could hear him from down below cursing into the wind in triumph when he thought he’d gotten the perfect shot.

  As the sea ice grew thicker and more treacherous, Shackleton tried to keep the men in a good mood. He encouraged the sightseeing and the penguin jokes and the soccer in the snow. Twice before, he’d been close to death and hundreds of miles from safety, and he knew that morale could make all the difference. Men who wanted to work together survived. Men who bickered and held grudges did not.

  Still, progress was slow, and Shackleton felt the strain. By the dawn of the new year they were 480 miles out from South Georgia—less than halfway to Vahsel Bay. During the day, the Boss spent long hours in the crow’s nest at the top of the mast. Standing 60 feet above the deck, he scanned the giant ice puzzle, looking for open water. There had to be a path somewhere out there that would take them to Vahsel Bay.

  Five weeks out from South Georgia, Lees thought Shackleton looked exhausted. “Sir Ernest looks dead tired,” he wrote. “He has been up at night so much lately; and the anxiety of the last few days, to which he never owned, must have pulled him down.”

  On January 10, a sight appeared off the port bow to lift Shackleton’s mood—a giant wall of ice, rising 100 feet from the surface of the sea. They had found their first stretch of open water in weeks, and the Endurance had made use of it. She made 100 miles in 24 hours, and here for the first time loomed the barrier ice that lined the coast of Antarctica.

  All around the continent, masses of ice called glaciers crawl from the high mountains down toward the sea. (For a glacier, 2 inches an hour is a fast pace.) At the coast, these ice giants form the floating cliffs known as barrier ice that the crew now gawked at from the deck.

  They sailed southwest along the barrier, knowing now that Vahsel Bay lay within reach. Just before midnight on January 15, the Endurance pulled into a quiet bay, protected to the south by a 500-foot-high glacier. Even at midnight, the summer sun cast a dim glow around the bay. At the shore, the ice made a perfect landing spot, just 3 feet above the water. Shackleton named the inlet Glacier Bay.

  The Boss conferred with his officers. Worsley thought they should land the shore party while they had the chance and start the overland trek from there. But they were still about 200 miles north of Vahsel Bay. That would add two weeks to the journey, and Shackleton didn’t want to risk it. After all, they had clear seas to the south. They were in the middle of their best run in weeks.

  At noon, three days later, Worsley calculated their position. Vahsel Bay lay just 104 miles away. One more stretch of open water and there would be congratulations to go around. The Boss, no doubt, would break out the fine food and drink. The Weddell Sea had given them all they could handle, but they had fought their way through.

  Lees spent the day sorting through supplies, separating the crates marked “ship” from the crates marked “shore.” When he turned in that night at 9 p.m., he wrote, “Spirits are high all round as we are all eagerly looking forward to the change which landing will mean.”

  On January 19, the morning after Lees started getting ready to land, the entire crew woke to a grim sight. The ice had closed tight against the sides of the ship. Worsley climbed to the crow’s nest, hoping to find a way out. “No water in sight from deck,” he wrote that night, “very little from masthead & dull gloomy pall over the sky since noon.”

  The carpenter, McNish, who wasn’t one to waste words, started keeping track of their progress in his diary.

  “Thursday 21st … we are still fast in the ice …”

  “Friday 22nd still in the same predicament with no signs of any change …”

  “Saturday 23rd still fast …”

  “Sunday 24th still fast & no signs of any opening pressure …”

  “Monday 25th still fast …”

  That’s not to say
the Endurance wasn’t moving. The pack ice in the Weddell Sea swirls clockwise like a giant pinwheel, 1,000 miles across. The ship and her 28 human occupants had become part of the pack, and they drifted with it to the southwest. By February 1, they could almost see their goal. Vahsel Bay was just 59 miles away.

  It might as well have been halfway around the Earth. The ice between the ship and the coast was uneven and riddled with cracks. One man on skis would be hard-pressed to make the trip without plunging into 30-degree water. Hauling tons of supplies by sled was out of the question.

  No one was willing to admit they were stuck for good. But their prospects looked bad. They needed warm temperatures and a stiff south wind to break up the pack. Instead, the wind died completely, and the temperature dropped below zero. By the second week, they ran out of seal meat, and Lees started hoarding the canned food. “I grudge every tin of meat now,” he wrote.

  With no sailing to keep them occupied, the men started to get restless. On Saturday nights, Shackleton let the crew gather in the wardroom, sing, and drink a toast to “sweethearts and wives.” The second Saturday in the ice, McNish drank more than his share and got into a fight in the forecastle.

  A few days later, Lees and McNish were battling over Lees’s beloved storeroom. McNish thought Lees spent all his time fussing around and never did any useful work. So as soon as Lees got everything organized just right, McNish would come looking for something and leave the room a mess. “He has an exceptionally offensive manner and it is very hard to be patient with him,” Lees huffed.

  Shackleton had picked crew members he thought would get along with each other. But McNish was the one man he didn’t trust.

  Every day, while the crew tried to keep busy, Shackleton and Worsley climbed the mast to scan for open leads. The light and the endless expanse of white often played tricks on their eyes. Clouds looked like icebergs and icebergs dangled upside down from the sky. Worst of all, if the angle of light was just right, a streak of open water appeared in the distance. If they squinted long enough they realized it was just an illusion.

  On February 5 the ice shifted and the ship settled into open water with a sharp jolt. Everyone rushed on deck to see if they’d been liberated, but they were stuck in a small pool, surrounded by ice. That night, the water around them froze solid again.

  On Valentine’s Day, Shackleton called all hands together. The winds had been blowing again from the southwest. The pack seemed to be loosening. From the masthead, open water appeared a third of a mile off—and this time, it wasn’t a mirage. They were going to make one final attempt to get free.

  The crew climbed onto the floe to battle the ice. Two dozen men hacked away near the bow of the ship with pickaxes, giant ice saws, and 10-foot-tall iron poles. They carved the ice into blocks and hauled them aside. It was exhausting work, but eventually, they gave the Endurance 10 feet of open water.

  With Lees at the wheel, Worsley rammed a thick, lumpy section of the pack again and again. The men moved ahead and worked on the young ice beyond the lump.

  All day they chipped and sawed and hauled with the temperature hovering around 10 degrees. By midnight, the men were soaked and chilled to the bone. They had opened a hole the size of half a tennis court.

  By 4 p.m. the next day, a day and a half of labor had moved the ship 200 yards. Between the Endurance and the open water lay 400 more yards of 10-foot-thick ice. And the water was freezing up as fast as they could clear it.

  Shackleton called off the effort.

  The order came as no surprise. It would have been hard to find a single person on board who thought they had a chance in the first place. “Puny mortals striving frantically against the mighty forces of nature,” Lees wrote. “The laughing stock of the Gods; only a handful of us contending against all that ice.”

  But gone for the moment were the restlessness and the petty squabbles. “I never saw such unanimous cooperation and intensity of purpose,” Lees concluded. And that was probably the point to begin with. Shackleton knew that grumbling started when there was nothing to do. He also knew that in the months ahead, these men were going to need to work together. This was a training session.

  That night, the sun dipped below the horizon for the first time in three and a half months. The days would shorten fast. In April or May the sun would vanish for several more long, dark months. Winter was on its way, and the crew of the Endurance would spend it trapped in the ice.

  On February 24, Shackleton ordered an end to normal ship duties. He put all hands to work storing seal meat and moving supplies out of the cargo hold below. With a little work, the hold, sheltered from the wind and the cold, would become their winter quarters. “Today … we practically cease being a ship & become a winter station,” Worsley recorded.

  For now, they had food. They could melt snow and ice for drinking water. Maybe in a few months the ice would loosen. Maybe the giant rotating pack would carry them far enough north to find open water. Then they could resupply in South America and try to make their way back to Vahsel Bay.

  In the meantime the ship would be their only shelter from temperatures cold enough to freeze tears on a man’s face. But who could say for sure how long it would survive?

  “We will have to wait Gods will to get out,” McNish wrote. “Temperature +2.”

  Isolated from the world and trapped for the winter, the men felt a gloom settle over the ship. “A wave of depression seemed to come over everybody on board,” wrote James Wordie, the geologist. “It was soon noticed that it was best not to get in the Boss’s way.”

  But while the men sensed Shackleton’s anxiety, the Boss didn’t show it openly. He explained calmly that they would spend the winter in the pack. Then he put the men to work.

  The first task was to build winter quarters—and the crew weren’t the only ones in need. Worsley spent the first week of March supervising a team of doghouse builders out on the ice. The team sawed blocks of ice from the floe and stacked them into round walls for tiny huts. They used boards or sealskin for the roofs. Then they packed snow on top and poured water over the huts to freeze them into place. By March 5, a ring of icy doghouses surrounded the ship. The sailors called their masterpieces “dogloos.”

  While the dogloo builders did their work, McNish built a home belowdecks for most of the officers and the scientists. He made cubicles in the empty hold and put bunks in each one. A table occupied the middle of the room. A potbellied stove stood in the corner. The sailors would stay in the forecastle, where they always slept. Shackleton would sleep in his drafty cabin on the deck.

  Like kids moving into a cabin at camp, Lees, Hurley, Hussey, and the rest set up their quarters. They gave their cubicles names, and Hurley carved little wooden plaques for each one. Pictures of loved ones went up near the bunks. The roommates called their primitive hideaway “the Ritz,” after the most luxurious hotel in London.

  The only thing more important than shelter was food. That became only too clear to the seals and penguins that came to investigate the intruders in their midst. It was Worsley’s job to stand on the masthead with a telescope and binoculars, scanning the ice for life. When he saw movement, he called out directions to a party of hunters through a megaphone.

  Frank Wild often led the hunting parties, pistol in hand. They went out on skis or by dogsled. If everything went according to plan, Wild dispatched his prey with one shot to the head. But sometimes the hunt turned into a brutal slaughter. Lees and Worsley once wounded a seal but ran out of ammunition before they could kill it. They finished the job by clubbing the maimed animal to death with an oar. According to Worsley, “It was an awful bloody business.”

  But the men had a feeling that at any moment the hunters could become the hunted. They had seen killer whales stalk seals or penguins under young ice. When the 10,000-pound predators saw their chance they came rocketing up from below, shattering the ice with their heads. If they aimed well, the blow sent their prey tumbling into the water, and the whales put their 4
-inch-long teeth to work gathering dinner. “More villainous … looking creatures I have never seen,” wrote Hurley after watching a couple of killers come up for a look at the Endurance.

  The men lived in fear that a killer whale might have trouble telling the difference between a seal and a human.

  After dinner on Saturday May 1, the officers of the Endurance said good-bye to the light. The next day, the sun disappeared below the horizon. It wouldn’t make another appearance for three and a half months. For a week or so, the temperature failed to rise above zero. Some mornings the dogs had to be hacked out of the ice because their body heat melted the snow during the night and the water froze around them.

  The Antarctic winter had begun, and the cold wasn’t the only thing to fear. Three and a half months without sunlight could make even the hardiest sailor begin to question his sanity. Anyone who doubted that fact had only to listen to the story of the Belgica. It was a tale that Shackleton knew well, and he didn’t hesitate to tell it to the crew.

  In 1898 the Belgica became the first ship to winter below the Antarctic Circle. During her long, dark days stuck in the ice, a Belgian sailor died. The ship’s officers gave him a burial at sea, sliding his body through a hole in the ice. The image haunted the men—their shipmate disappearing into the frigid waters. In the eerie half-light, they became convinced the dead man’s body was following the ship, drifting beneath the ice. “We are under the spell of the black Antarctic night,” wrote Frederick Cook, an American explorer on board, “and like the world which it darkens, we are cold, cheerless, and inactive.”

  As the dark days dragged on, the men sunk deeper into gloom. They heard the dead sailor’s ghost in the creaks and groans of the Belgica’s timbers. After a while, the ship’s cat seemed to lose its will to live. One day it curled up in a corner and died. With their lone predator gone, rats came out of the woodwork and ran wild. The sailors stuffed cloth in their ears, but the muffled sound of little claws on wood still tormented them through the night. Eventually, two men grew so agitated they had to be restrained.