An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor

by Michael Smith

  At the second peak an even bigger blow awaited the men. The land ahead was just as menacing as the first, possibly worse. To carry on would be highly dangerous and again they faced the grim prospect of retracing their steps to find a safer route through the peaks. Worsley wanted to chance it but Shackleton vetoed the idea. They would have to go back – again. It was a third, bitter blow for the men who had wasted almost the whole day trying to find a pass through the knuckles of mountains.

  The most pressing problem was that they were about 4,500 ft (1,400 m) up and swirling banks of fog were closing in from all sides. In the gathering gloom of twilight, darkness approached and they had no shelter against the sub-zero temperatures of the South Georgia night. Without a tent or sleeping bags, they would probably freeze to death during the night.

  As speedily as possible, the dejected trio began to zigzag down the icy slope and scurried across the snow towards the next pass as the sun began to set behind the snow-topped mountains at their backs. After half an hour of tortuously slow travel, with the light fading fast, they found the soft snowy banks very hard going and it was apparent that it would take many hours of arduous struggle to reach a safer more sheltered spot for nightfall.

  Progress, Shackleton soon realised, was far too slow and the risk of being caught high up the mountain in the rapidly sinking temperatures of the night was growing by the minute. They had to descend much faster.

  The three men huddled together on a ledge which had been hacked from the snow with the aid of McNeish’s adze. As the fog closed in around them, Worsley recalled a brief conversation which summed up their plight. He wrote:

  ‘Crean said, quaintly, “You won’t be able to do much navigating in this, Skipper,” but Shackleton, who was usually amused by his remarks, did not smile. He said tersely, “I don’t like our position at all. We must get out of it somehow; we shall freeze if we wait here until the moon rises”.’5

  The situation was desperate and Shackleton, who normally preferred not to take chances, offered a desperate solution. They would slide down the ice slope.

  Below the men was a precipitous slope and in the gathering gloom they were unable to see what precisely waited them at the bottom. If they crashed into a rock it would mean certain disaster and there was always the possibility that the slope might give way to a yawning crevasse. Only desperate men would contemplate such a risky move.

  For Crean the moment brought back the hair-raising episode four years earlier on the Beardmore Glacier with Evans and Lashly. Then, against his better judgement, they had climbed aboard their sledge and tobogganed down the glacier at speeds of up to 60 mph. Luckily they had survived.

  As then, Crean could see there was little choice. Both he and Worsley agreed with Shackleton, though Worsley admitted it seemed ‘a most impossible project’.

  The 50-ft (16-m) rope was coiled into three circular ‘mats’ and each man sat on the makeshift toboggan. Shackleton sat at the front, then Worsley and Crean at the rear. Worsley wrapped his legs around Shackleton’s waist and his arms around his neck, while Crean did the same to Worsley. They were locked together as one.

  In an instant, Shackleton kicked off and the trio hurtled downhill, the wind whistling past their ears and the snowy landscape becoming a white blur as they rushed along. Crean, at the rear, had great difficulty preventing the adze cutting tool swinging round and slicing into the men as they plummeted downhill. They all clung to each other for dear life as they sped down the slope and Worsley recalled:

  ‘We seemed to shoot into space. For a moment my hair fairly stood on end. Then quite suddenly I felt a glow and knew that I was grinning! I was actually enjoying it. It was most exhilarating. We were shooting down the side of a most precipitous mountain at nearly a mile a minute. I yelled with excitement and found that Shackleton and Crean were yelling too. It seemed ridiculously safe. To hell with the rocks!’6

  The trio’s downward descent began to slow as they reached softer snow and the toboggan suddenly came to an abrupt halt in a bank of snow which mercifully softened the impact of their crash landing. Slightly dazed, disoriented and relieved, the men hauled themselves to their feet and rather solemnly shook hands. A quick inspection found the biggest casualty was their trousers, which were now in rags.

  Their rapid descent had lasted two or three minutes and in the darkness it was unclear how far they had travelled. Shackleton estimated only 900 ft (275 m) while Worsley speculated that they had descended 3,000 ft (900 m). But the madcap scheme had worked. Luck had smiled upon them.

  The heartily relieved trio enjoyed a quick meal and promptly resumed their slog across the soft snow, keeping a watchful eye for hidden crevasses, a constant danger in the gathering darkness. Very soon the moon appeared overhead, casting a ghostly light to help guide them over the treacherous but undeniably beautiful terrain. The scene was ‘majestic’ according to Worsley.

  Today the ‘majestic’ place is called the Crean Glacier in honour of the Irishman who, with Shackleton and Worsley, crossed it first.

  By midnight the men had been on the march for 21 hours, broken only by short rests and a meal every four hours. Now they were about 4,000 ft (1,200 m) high and suddenly began to see the land fall away before them on a downward slope. In the freezing temperatures, the snow would be firmer and the going a little better. At the bottom, they believed, lay Stromness Bay.

  Cheered by their discovery, the men stopped for a meal, lit the primus and talked optimistically about reaching their goal. Shackleton recalled:

  ‘Worsley and Crean sang their old songs when the primus was going merrily. Laughter was in our hearts, though not in our parched and cracked lips.’7

  Within half an hour they were back on the march and once again confronted with utter dejection. They found themselves embroiled in a mass of dangerous crevasses which meant they were travelling across a glacier. But there is no glacier at Stromness. The disappointment, Shackleton remembered, was ‘severe’.

  Not for the first time, the increasingly tired men had to turn around and retrace their steps in the snow. For two weary hours they plodded back where they had been and at 5 a.m., with dawn approaching, they stopped for a breather. They had been on the march without sleep for 26 hours and badly needed a far longer rest.

  It is also likely that they were suffering from dehydration because they did not have enough spare fuel to melt snow for drinking water. Lack of adequate fluid intake in the cold, dry Antarctic environment is a constant threat and today doctors recommend drinking at least a gallon of water every day. In 1916, on the freezing South Georgia landscape, Crean, Worsley and Shackleton were drinking only a fraction of the necessary water intake.

  As they huddled together for warmth behind a protective rock, Crean and Worsley succumbed to the growing fatigue and instantly dropped off to sleep. Shackleton was also on the brink of dozing off when he realised that sleep would be fatal. They would freeze to death in the open. After five minutes he woke his two comrades telling them they had slept for half an hour. It was a bare-faced lie that saved their lives.

  Ahead lay another steep climb of about 1,000 ft (300 m). The men were understandably apprehensive at what they would find at the summit. At around 6 a.m. they reached the peak just as the dawn was beginning to shed light on the day. For a change, what they saw was highly promising. There were no threatening precipices or impassable cliffs, just a comfortable-looking slope down to a valley. Beyond the valley they could pick out the high hills which, they remembered, surrounded the whaling stations at Stromness and Husvick. Their goal was in sight.

  Shackleton ordered a warming meal of hoosh to galvanise the men for the final leg of their journey. As Crean prepared the food, Shackleton went ahead to survey the terrain. It was about 6.30 a.m., the curtain of darkness was being slowly lifted and Shackleton suddenly thought he heard a noise in the distance. It sounded faintly like a whistle but he could not be sure and he was aware that intense fatigue can play tricks on the mind. However, he a
ssured himself that 6.30 a.m. was the time when the men at the whaling stations were woken up for work, probably by the sound of a factory whistle blowing.

  Breakfast was gulped down and the men gathered around Worsley’s chronometer and stared silently as the hands moved round to 7 a.m. – the moment the whistle at Stromness would definitely ring out again to summon the men to work. The tension was unbearable as the seconds ticked by.

  Right on time at seven O’clock they heard the toot of the far-off steam whistle. The men looked at each other, smiled and shook hands. It was the first sound from civilisation they had heard for almost eighteen months.

  Worsley began to yell and Shackleton said it was a moment which was ‘hard to describe’. He recalled that all the pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things.

  The journey to safety was far from over though, and the men had to compose themselves quickly and grasp the reality of the situation. They were in the advanced stages of exhaustion, thirsty and they had to cross more unknown snow fields to reach Stromness.

  The empty primus, which had provided vital hot food at regular intervals over the past hours, was dumped and they gathered together the last scraps of food. Each man was down to one last sledging ration and a single biscuit.

  Although the men were fairly well fed on their overland trek, fatigue was taking over. They had not slept for nearly 30 hours and their steps became a weary plod as they frequently sank deep into the soft snow. Each step was a test of their resolve. At the back of their minds was the constant fear that the weather, which had been so kind, might take a vicious turn for the worst. They were in no condition to fight back.

  Soon they came across a steep gradient of blue ice which threatened to halt their immediate passage. Crean and Worsley lowered Shackleton down the full length of the 50-ft (15-m) rope, cutting steps with the adze as he moved down. There he cut a small platform and the others climbed slowly down. Then the process was repeated over and over again as they slowly and purposefully lowered themselves down the sharp gradient.

  Worsley said the slope was nearly as perpendicular as a church steeple and they were terrified that the weather might suddenly deteriorate. Exposed as they were on the cliff face, they would probably not have survived. But, despite the gnawing fear of a sudden break in the weather, it took two painful hours for the severely drained men to slowly descend a mere 500 ft (150 m).

  At the bottom of the gradient, the ground led easily to the valley. Slowly they moved across to the welcome flatter ground and soon began another climb up yet another ice slope. It was about 3,000 ft (1,000 m) to the top and the going was terribly heavy.

  The danger was ever present, even when they came across a piece of flat, firm ground which made the going somewhat easier. It turned out to be another frozen lake and suddenly Crean broke through into freezing water. He sank up to his waist, the final indignity for a man who had already endured so much. But Worsley recalled:

  ‘Crean was a bit cold, but otherwise none the worse for his ducking.’8

  They had no dry clothes to give their dripping colleague and all they could do was to plod on, hoping that continuous movement would warm Crean’s body and that the chilly wind might dry his clothes. By 1.30 p.m. in the afternoon they had managed to clamber up the ridge and gazed down on the wondrous sight below – in front of them, about 2,500 ft (760 m) below, was the Stromness Whaling Station.

  They could see ships, buildings and, thankfully, the tiny figures of men hurrying about their work. Instinctively the three men began yelling and waving but their voices were lost in the wind and, of course, no one was looking in their direction. No one in their right mind would have expected men to be approaching Stromness from the interior of South Georgia. Only desperate men would have contemplated travelling from the interior of South Georgia.

  They began to descend, hopefully for the last time. The slope was steep and soon they found themselves tramping along in a stream of very cold running water which rose to their knees and chilled them further. To their dismay, the stream came to a sudden halt and the bitterly cold water tumbled over the edge in a cascading little waterfall.

  Shivering with the cold and on the point of exhaustion, the men stared in disbelief. The waterfall poured down about 30 ft (10 m) below and on either side there were impossibly steep rocks and cliffs. For a brief moment they contemplated doing what they had done so many times in the past day and a half and retrace their steps.

  But the shivering, hungry, thirsty men were in no condition to make another uphill climb and more importantly it was now nearing 3 p.m., with darkness approaching and temperatures set to drop sharply as the sun disappeared. The three men had now been out in the open without sleep for 36 hours, their food was all gone and they had no means of melting ice for drinking water. A night in the open would probably be fatal.

  Shackleton said it was ‘scarcely thinkable’ to retrace their steps. The only option was to climb down through the waterfall.

  Hurriedly they found a suitable boulder and fixed the rope as firmly as possible. According to Shackleton, Crean, the heaviest of the three, went first. Slowly and cautiously Shackleton and Worsley lowered the Irishman through the bitterly cold running water. He disappeared altogether in the flowing torrent of water and came out gasping for air as his feet finally touched the rocks 30 ft (10 m) below.

  All three endured their own cold shower as they climbed down through the waterfall. But they were unable to release the rope, which therefore remained behind lashed to the boulder as a memento of their remarkable journey.

  Once on the bottom the men were barely a mile from the whaling station. Despite the freezing cold, intense fatigue and growing thirst, their spirits were lifted by the prospect. The end was in sight.

  They faced one last hazard before they completed their momentous journey. The eight, 2-inch (5-cm) brass screws which McNeish had fixed in the soles of their boots at Peggoty Camp, had been worn away by the constant scrapes with rocks and packed ice in the past 36 hours. By now they were flush against the soles and without the extra grip, each of the men suffered some heavy falls on the glassy ice which shook them badly. Crean took a painful tumble and fell onto the blade of the carpenter’s adze, narrowly avoiding a dangerous cut. Undeterred they picked him up and plodded on.

  By now, as the end of the amazing journey approached, they began to ponder what people would make of the three ragamuffins who had come back from the dead. Worsley, in particular, became concerned that there might be women at Stromness who would be shocked at the appalling state of the three men.

  The weary, bedraggled men were indeed a ghastly-looking sight. They had not washed for three months, their hair hung down onto their shoulders and their beards were matted with soot and blubber. Their haggard faces, which were blackened with grease, had been ravaged by a combination of frostbite, wind and exposure. They gave off a disgusting smell and their clothes, which they had worn for over a year, were wet and ragged. They had been on the march almost without a break for 36 hours and had probably covered around 40 miles (64 km) on their trek. Worsley said they were a ‘terrible looking trio of scarecrows’.

  After leaving South Georgia eighteen months earlier with 28 fit men and a fully stocked ship, Crean, Worsley and Shackleton were returning to civilisation with just the clothes they stood up in.

  They could not have imagined the welcome awaiting them as they turned the corner and walked slowly towards some outbuildings of the whaling station. The first humans they saw were two boys, aged about ten or twelve. They took one look at the ‘scarecrows’ and fled in terror. Soon after they entered a building and found an old man who, like the young boys, turned on his heels and hurried away in alarm.

  They moved onto the quay where they found a man called Matthias Anderson, who looked as though he was in charge of something or other. Shackleton, in a weak reedy voice, asked to see Anton Anderson, the station manager at Stromness.


  It was 20 May 1916, and apart from their Endurance colleagues, some 532 days since they had last spoken to another human. Matthias Anderson shook his head and said Anton had left and been replaced by Thoralf Sorlle. By coincidence, Shackleton knew Sorlle.

  Anderson was suspicious of the sight before him, but went into an office and told Sorlle that there were ‘three funny looking men outside’ who claimed to have walked across the island from the interior. As a precaution, Anderson asked the trio to remain outside while he spoke to Sorlle.

  After a moment Sorlle, a tall imposing man with a large moustache, emerged from the building and stared in utter disbelief at the three unkempt wrecks of humanity who stood before him. He did not recognise them.

  In fact, they were unrecognisable. But Sorlle knew Shackleton well and had entertained the party at South Georgia before the departure south. However Endurance had been out of touch for over 18 months and it was assumed all hands were lost. Shackleton recalled the first conversation: