by Tod Olson
Worsley had already reminded McNish of his duties, but the carpenter insisted that he didn’t have any. He had signed on as a sailor, he said. Now that the ship was gone, he had no obligation to follow anyone’s rules but his own.
Shackleton immediately put that idea to rest. He told McNish firmly that he was committing mutiny by disobeying orders. In a polar expedition, the crew was bound to follow orders at sea or on land. McNish was being paid until the expedition ended, and until then he would obey the expedition’s leader and its officers. If he chose not to he would be “legally punished.” It was a threat that did not need to be explained. Under British law, mutineers could be shot to death by their commanders.
When Shackleton finished his lecture, he decided not to demand an answer right away. He let the carpenter go off and stew for a while. In the meantime he gathered the rest of the crew and told them exactly what he had told McNish. If pessimism could spread through an expedition like a contagious disease, Shackleton believed, rebellion could do the same. And if the crew refused to follow orders, the consequences could be fatal to them all.
A couple of tense hours passed, and no one stepped up to join McNish’s revolt. Finally, the carpenter had no choice but to get back in his harness and pull.
The next day, he got what he wanted anyway. Shackleton and Hurley scouted the ice ahead. They found it soft, unstable, and scarred with pressure ridges. Shackleton wanted desperately to keep the men moving, but the terrain was too risky. He returned to the tents and announced they would make camp.
Once again, they were back to Plan B: wait and watch.
Shackleton called their new home “Patience Camp.” But at this point, patience was wearing thin.
For his part, Shackleton had already put the failed march behind him. He acted as though the new plan—do nothing until the ice freed them—was better than the old. And until now, his unshakeable confidence had held the crew together.
But after the third change in plans, McNish wasn’t the only one losing faith in Shackleton. “The Boss at any rate has changed his mind yet once again,” the geologist Wordie wrote their first night in Patience Camp. “He now intends waiting for leads, and just as firmly believes he will get them, as he did a week ago that the ice would be fit for sledging the boats at the rate of ten miles a day.”
To the men it now seemed likely they would have to winter on the ice, and they began to watch the hunting trips with great anticipation. To make it through a winter, they needed seal and penguin meat put away by the ton. But Shackleton didn’t seem to feel the urgency. In early January 1916, Lees came back to camp after shooting three seals. The Boss wouldn’t dispatch a sled to pick up the carcasses. They had a month’s supply of meat now, he said. The ice was soft, and he didn’t want to risk the trip.
Lionel Greenstreet fumed. Nothing so far, he reflected, had turned out the way Shackleton predicted. “His sublime optimism all the way through,” the first officer wrote, “is to my mind absolute foolishness.”
By January 13, word got around that Shackleton had made a decision to kill at least some of the dogs. Every day for four days, hunting parties had scoured the ice without spotting a seal. Their meat supply was dwindling, and it took one seal a day just to feed the dogs. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time, since they couldn’t take the dogs on the lifeboats. But when they heard about the Boss’s decision, it still came as a shock.
The next day, Wild, Marston, McIlroy, and Crean harnessed their teams and led them about a quarter mile away from camp. Macklin and McIlroy guided the dogs one by one behind a hill of snow, where Wild waited with a revolver. The dogs went willingly, their tails wagging, no idea what lay in store.
Wild had never in his life had a job as miserable as this one.
Back at camp, the men could hear the shots ring out across the ice, a grim reminder of just how desperate their lives had become.
For four days, the wind blew in a gale from the southeast. By January 21 they had drifted 74 miles north, and Shackleton was feeling good again. “Lees and Worsley are the only pessimistic ones in the camp,” he crowed, “but this strong wind even made Lees suggest larger steaks.”
Then, as if nature had chosen sides in the running battle between the Boss and his storekeeper, the wind died.
Worse, the seals vanished. Hurley thought they had migrated south for the summer; McNish thought they had gone north. Either way, a critical source of food was gone.
For now, the men still had meat, but their supply of blubber for the stove was running painfully low. They had to shut down one of the galley fires, and that meant no hot milk at lunch. Drinking water had to be rationed since they couldn’t afford the fuel to melt enough ice. The men started packing snow into cans and tucking them into their sleeping bags at night so they would have water by morning.
The sad crew of 28 men, stranded on the ice, were competitors in a race. But unlike any race they had ever witnessed, they had no influence on the outcome. On one side stood their food supply, on the other the ice. If the ice vanished before their food, they had a chance at victory.
Everything depended on the wind, and they became obsessed with each gust. They pestered Hussey, the meteorologist, for predictions, but he had nothing to tell them. Without help from science, they fell back on superstition. Mention the wind and you had to touch wood. The 7th of every month would bring good luck and gusts from the south, but beware the 13th.
On February 19, an army of little Adélie penguins appeared on the floe. The men turned out like medieval warriors with oars, pickaxes, and whatever else they could find for weapons. They surrounded the birds and slaughtered more than 300 of them. Most of the men could not have imagined themselves killing like this just a year ago. Now, hunger had hardened them. “The result was very satisfactory,” Hurley wrote.
But the Adélie slaughter hardly meant a life of luxury for the hunters. Burning 20 penguin skins a day, they had fuel for 15 days. And the meat—two or three pounds per bird—wouldn’t feed 28 men for long. McNish sat with his diary that night and grumbled about their meager provisions. They celebrated the butchery with “stewed penguin heart, liver, eyes, tongues, toes and God knows what else,” he wrote. “I don’t think any of us will have nightmares from over-eating.”
March dawned cold, damp, and calm. Winter was bearing down again, and the weather ruled the daily routine. The hardship was relentless. When they relieved themselves in the snow, they wiped themselves with ice. Their eyes teared constantly in the wind. The tears froze into icicles at the tip of the nose, and when they swiped the ice away, pieces of skin came off with it. To wash with water meant risking frostbite. It had been four months since anyone had taken a bath, and no one had a change of clothes left.
The only relief from the cold was to crawl inside a sleeping bag and stay there—and that’s what most of the men did, from six at night to eight in the morning. The boredom grew nearly intolerable. The only topic of conversation that drew any interest at all was the wind. Every other subject had been covered a hundred times over. “The monotony of life here is getting on our nerves,” Greenstreet wrote. “Nothing to do, nowhere to walk, no change in surrounding, food or anything. God send us open water soon or we shall go balmy.”
Stuffed into tents together 14 hours a day, the men did what they could to keep from strangling one another. The doctor Macklin lay down one night with his tentmates next to him and blasted each one of them in his diary. He was sick of Clark, who sniffed all the time. Lees, who was back in the tent now, snored “abominably.” When he wasn’t snoring, he did nothing but “argue and chatter” with Worsley about trivial things. “At times like this,” Macklin complained, “with Clark sniff-sniffing into my ear, my only relief is to take up my diary and write.”
On March 9, an extended blizzard finally let up, and the men emerged from the tents to enjoy their first time outside in three days. Captain Worsley went off on skis to look for a seal that had been left on the ice two weeks earlier. On
his way back, he paused on a fragment of young ice. Beneath his feet he felt a swaying movement he hadn’t felt in a year. As a sea captain, he knew the feeling well: It was the slow, rhythmic swelling of the sea. And if the swells were once again making their way through the ice, open water couldn’t be far away.
Worsley hurried back to share his discovery. Everyone turned out on the ice and stared for hours into the slushy pools around the camp. They measured the height of the swells and the time between them. With a few calculations from the physicist James, they figured they were 20 to 30 miles from open water.
It was a welcome sight, this distant echo of the open ocean. But it also raised another fear. If the swells increased, they would bend and warp the floes. Eventually, the ice would give in and crumble under their feet. If that happened before open leads formed in the pack, they would be in deep trouble. The pack would be too fragmented to camp on and too tight to navigate. They would have no choice but to launch the lifeboats into a minefield of jagged ice.
On March 17, they consumed the last of the flour. The cocoa was gone. In a few days, the tea would be gone too. They had almost nothing to eat but meat and fat, and without carbohydrates in their diet, the men were getting weak. “Hunger is now our lot,” Lees wrote. “Not starvation, but real hunger all day long.”
The men started to covet food they wouldn’t have touched a few months before. They drank pure oil rendered from blubber. They no longer had water to wash dishes, so the hoosh arrived with extra texture—penguin feathers or reindeer hair from the sleeping bags. No one seemed to care.
Worsley and Greenstreet started telling Marston, the plumpest of the crew, that he’d be perfect if they had to resort to cannibalism. “We implore him not to get thin and even go so far as to select chops, etc., off him and quarrel about who shall have the tenderest part,” Worsley wrote.
Marston did not appreciate the humor. He did his best to avoid his tormentors when he saw them coming his way.
“Land in sight! Land in sight!” The cry rang out across the camp the morning of March 23. Shackleton had been peering west through the fog when he caught a glimpse of a mountain in the distance. There had been plenty of false alarms in recent weeks, so he called Hurley over, and the photographer agreed. They decided the mountain belonged to Joinville Island, at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. It was the first land they had seen in 14 months, and it couldn’t have been more than 40 miles away.
Hurley could barely contain his excitement: “General rejoicing! If the ice opens we can land in a day.”
But in fact, there was nothing to rejoice about. Joinville Island was uninhabited. And with no open water in sight, it was also unreachable. So was Paulet Island, which lay south of Joinville. Still stuck in the pack, the men were drifting helplessly past the northernmost edge of Antarctica. Another 100 miles north lay the stormy Drake Passage, the vicious stretch of open ocean just below the southern tip of South America. And all that remained between the Drake Passage and the crew were those two tiny, uninhabited specks in the sea: Clarence Island and Elephant Island.
The next day, Lees tilted his head to the sky and gazed at the birds with envy: “A flock of Dominican gulls passed over. Oh! had we but their wings.”
The moment of decision came two weeks later. The swells Worsley noticed had grown into a menace. All around them, their once-stable floe had been wrenched into slabs of ice not more than 100 yards square. “[W]e are in the hands of a Higher Power,” wrote Macklin, “and puny mortals that we are, can do nothing to help ourselves against these colossal forces of nature.”
On April 9, they woke to find a new crack headed straight for the camp. The cry went up: “Lash and stow!” Shackleton ordered the tents struck and the supplies ready to load.
But even with the ground vanishing under their feet, no one wanted to launch. All around them treacherous chunks of ice churned in the current. Cracks opened and closed in an instant. Slabs of ice slapped together with enough force to crush their tiny lifeboats.
At 11 a.m., the pack left them no choice. A crack split the floe right where the tents had been, leaving the crew barely room to stand. They slid the boats awkwardly into the swells. Stumbling to keep their footing, the men hoisted crate after crate into the three boats. Lees knew their rations to the ounce: 24 cases of sledding rations, 13 cases of nut food, 11 cases of biscuits, two 72-pound bags of seal meat, and so on.
When the boats were full, they shoved off into the sea. It was the moment they had been dreaming of for months. But now that it had finally arrived, they felt lost. As hard as life had been on the floe, Shackleton thought, it had given them a sense of security. Now their home had shattered under their feet. They could see the peaks of Clarence Island and Elephant Island 60 miles to the north. But no one knew if they would ever get there.
All afternoon, the three wooden boats bobbed and weaved through the churning ice. Shackleton commanded the Caird, with Wild at the tiller. Worsley piloted the Dudley Docker. Hudson and Crean took charge of the Stancomb Wills.
Shackleton had decided they would head northwest for the South Shetland Islands. At the far western end of the island chain lay a C-shaped spit of land called “Deception Island.” Supposedly, supplies and shelter had been left there for shipwrecked seamen. Whalers also used the island’s bay as a summer way station. If the men were lucky, a stray ship or two might still be sheltering in the harbor.
Getting there, however, was going to be treacherous. The island was at least 150 miles to the west. In their path lay a minefield of sea ice. If the crew managed to clear the ice, open water might prove even more dangerous. High winds tormented the strait that separated the Antarctic Peninsula from the South Shetlands. Huge swells could easily swamp the 20-foot boats.
For now, they rowed their way through a confusing mix of slush, slabs of pack ice, and jagged hunks of broken bergs called “growlers.” In the waning light they found a solid floe to camp on, about half the size of a football field.
Around 11 p.m., Shackleton was pacing the ice when he felt the floe lift on a swell and crack under the camp. The biggest tent crumpled as the ice beneath it gave way.
Shackleton rushed toward the tangle of canvas and yelled, “Are you alright?”
“There are two in the water!” came the reply.
The crack had opened 4 feet wide, and in the water between the two icy walls, Shackleton saw a white object, bobbing with the swells. He leaned down and grabbed a handful of reindeer skin. With the crack threatening to slam shut again, he heaved a sleeping bag and a struggling man to safety. The man was the young stoker Ernest Holness, who came out sputtering and furious that he’d lost his supply of tobacco to the sea. Seaman Walter How, the other man who had fallen in, had managed to pull himself back to solid ground.
The men spent much of the night huddled around a blubber fire, listening to killer whales blow in the leads. They took turns walking Holness around to keep him warm. The ice on his clothes crinkled as he moved.
In the morning, giant hunks of ice surrounded their little island, slamming together on the swells. They kept a close watch and saw an opening at 8 a.m. The order went out to launch, and once again the men leaned into the oars, staving off lumps of ice as they made their way through crowded channels of water.
After two hours, they emerged into long, rolling swells—not just a lead, but an unbroken expanse of water. For the first time since they left South Georgia 16 months ago, it felt like they had found the open ocean. At first, Lees felt a grand sense of freedom to have left the pack behind.
Then he felt the morning’s hoosh rise in his stomach.
The swells tossed the boats like toys, turning several of the men pale with seasickness. Still, they raised the sails for the first time in a stiff wind and made good time. In the Docker Worsley handed out a lunch of biscuits and uncooked dog pemmican—a dense mix of dried beef, ground beef, and fat. Lees could barely look at the raw meat.
With a wet, cold blizzard beginning
to blow, Shackleton ordered the boats back into the edge of the pack in the late afternoon. They found a low berg, about 20 yards across, and camped for the night.
At dawn, Shackleton, Wild, and Worsley took turns climbing to the crest of their iceberg to look for open water. Giant swells swept through the pack, lifting their little camp 12 feet in the air and then dropping them deep into a trough with a sea of ice rising on either side. Hurley took a turn and saw an “infinity of ice-covered ocean-berg fragments, shattered floes and brash ice, heaving … and grinding, crunching, groaning into an indescribable chaos.”
A couple of the men, sick from the constant motion, vomited onto the ice. Others forgot the danger they were in, entranced by the spectacle around them.
Shackleton, however, did not forget. He watched while their floe disintegrated, hoping desperately to find an opening for the boats. He was convinced that he had finally led the men to their end.
Around noon, he decided they had to take a chance. The ice surrounding the floe loosened enough to get the boats into the water. They loaded up as fast as possible and launched. Lees looked back to see their floe collide with another, obliterating the channel they had just escaped with a “splitting, pulverising crash.” They rowed furiously for a few minutes and cleared the treacherous belt of ice that had nearly ended their journey.
But once again, the hardship was just beginning.
When darkness fell that night they found a floe, anchored the boats, and put the cook ashore to heat some milk. But while they started to unload the tents, the swells rose and the boats bobbed like corks. Shackleton gave the order to cast off before the churning sea dashed the boats against the floe. They would spend the night jammed into their boats, drifting aimlessly in the frozen pack.
