On the afternoon of Saturday 8 February Mawson limped down the slope on his makeshift crampons. He had ‘changed’ his soles religiously every night, but they had become too horny and painful to bear, so he had discarded them: as a result the nails of the theodolite planks now dug into his unprotected flesh. He comforted himself that, although it should have left long since, the Aurora might have been delayed by the same blizzard that had imprisoned him in Aladdin’s Cave. He was right: it had been. But the Aurora had left, like him, as soon as the weather cleared. Mawson was 2,000 feet down the slope, a mile and a half from the hut at Cape Denison, when he spotted a plume of smoke at the far edge of Commonwealth Bay. It was the Aurora, and it was moving west.
The captain of the Aurora had not entirely abandoned his explorers. The base hut had supplies for two years, and he had left five men at Cape Denison to wait another Antarctic winter before sledging in search of the party’s remains. It was these five who greeted the greasy figure – weighing less than 100 pounds – that hobbled down the hill that afternoon. Peering into Mawson’s hood they discerned no recognizable features. Their first question was to ask which one he was. ‘What a grand relief!’ Mawson wrote in his diary. ‘To have reached civilisation after what appeared utterly impossible. What a feeling of gratitude to Providence for such a deliverance. I had intended to push on to the utmost in the hope of reaching a point where my remains would be likely to be found by a relief expedition, but I had always hoped against hope for more. Now I had arrived at the goal of my utmost hopes ... I was overcome by a soft and smooth feeling of thanksgiving.’
Once Mawson had been carried to the base hut his first task was to radio the Aurora for assistance. But when the Aurora returned the following day it was met by an 80-mile-per-hour gale that blew the ship backwards into its wake. Throughout the afternoon the Aurora struggled against the wind but never came closer than 15 miles from the shore. ‘Am most anxious to get off,’ Mawson radioed. ‘Hope you can wait a few days longer but cannot command you to do so and give you the option to decide whether or not to remain.’ The Aurora’s captain had little choice. The men at Cape Denison had food to last another winter and could be collected the following spring. Wild’s party would die if they were left where they were. If he battled a gale that might last for a week he would not have enough coal both to retrieve Wild and to steam back to New Zealand. As it was, his fuel was dangerously low. He sailed that night for the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Having a receiver but no transmitter, he was unable to tell them of his decision, so it was only when Mawson’s men woke on the morning of 10 February that they saw the ship had gone. A few hours later the wind fell and Commonwealth Bay assumed a glassy calmness. For Mawson it was the last in a sequence of tantalizing near-misses that had dogged him ever since 29 January. Once again he had just missed the boat.
Mawson’s disease puzzled the expedition’s doctor, Archie McLean, almost as much as it mystified Mawson himself. McLean tried everything, down to constructing an electrical scalp massager to restore his hair, but it did not work. Helpless, all he could do was watch as Mawson lay in his bunk complaining of pains in the side of his head while his bowels gave way. These were the symptoms that had preceded Mertz’s death, but Mawson’s iron constitution prevented him lapsing into delirium. At times, however, he came close: ‘I find my nerves in a serious state,’ he wrote, ‘and from the feeling I have in the base of my head I have suspicion that I may go off my rocker soon!’ He defied the notion that mental weakness might have a bodily cause: ‘Too much writing today has brought this on.’ He sought release in physical activity, cutting one of the hut’s thick roof beams into a cross which he erected in the rocks of Cape Denison and on which he nailed a wooden plaque dedicating it to the memory of Ninnis and Mertz. Mawson was not McLean’s only patient. As the winter wore on, the radio operator, Sidney Jeffryes, broke under the strain of solitude and began transmitting messages in which he told how he was being attacked by a pack of lunatics. He had to be forcibly restrained.
The Aurora returned in mid-December 1913 to find the Cape Denison party in poor shape. Jeffryes was still mad, and was eventually committed to an asylum. Mawson’s hair returned, partially, as did some of his former bulk, but he was not the same confident character who had left Australia in 1911. He was, as one man said, ‘a noticeably chastened man – quieter, humble, and I think very much closer to his God’. Everyone had been affected by two winters in the Antarctic. None of them recovered fully from the experience – particularly Mawson, who rarely spoke of it in later life, and only with difficulty divulged to a few academics the details of his march to Aladdin’s Cave. He was unconcerned that the expedition had been overshadowed by Scott’s disaster: he knew only too well what Scott must have endured.
He led further expeditions to the Antarctic, but never attacked it with the fervour he had shown in 1911. His remarkable accomplishments – the charting of some 2,000 miles of undiscovered coastline, the mapping of mountains, glaciers and craters, the crippling, solitary trek over ice and snow – never received the popular acclaim they were due. Of all the sorties that departed for the Antarctic in that strange, Scott – Titanic era, his was among the most effective, the most productive and yet the most ignored. He devoted the rest of his life to conservation, advocating the cessation of whale-hunting long before it became fashionable. He died in 1958, still pondering the cause of Mertz’s death. He thought it might have been peritonitis.
THE IMPERIAL TRANSANTARCTIC EXPEDITION
Ernest Shackleton (1914–16)
The cataclysmic events of 1911–12 effectively cured the world of its obsession with Antarctica. The Pole had been captured, martyrs and heroes had been made, and the confident, gung-ho attitude of previous years had been replaced by wary respect. For one man, however, the continent could never be conquered until he himself stood at the South Pole. His name was Ernest Henry Shackleton.
A short, thickset man of Anglo-Irish descent, Shackleton had extraordinary physical presence and was an outstanding leader – a man who, according to a contemporary, ‘could look you straight in the eyes and tell you to go to hell if you stood in his path’. He had first visited Antarctica as a member of Scott’s 1901–3 expedition and in 1908 had led his own, hugely successful expedition, during which he forged a route up the Beardmore Glacier and came within 97 miles of the Pole. Other members of his party, among them the Australian Douglas Mawson, charted much new territory and discovered the Magnetic South Pole. For a while Shackleton was the most famous explorer in Britain, if not the world. The widespread belief was that if anyone was going to reach the Pole it would be him. Then came 1912, after which the only names on the public’s lips were Amundsen and Scott. Eclipsed but undaunted, Shackleton came up with a way of re-establishing his preeminence: he would lead a party from one side of the continent to the other via the Pole. Such a journey, he argued, would be of enormous scientific benefit, for while the route south from the Ross Ice Shelf was relatively well documented (mostly by himself) the area beyond was as mysterious as the dark side of the moon. In reality his arguments were a figleaf. All he wanted to do was reach the Pole – as he admitted, it was ‘the last spot of the world that counts as worth the striving for, though ungilded by aught but adventure’.
Winston Churchill, for one, was not fooled. As First Lord of the Admiralty, and one of the first people to whom Shackleton turned for support, he wrote disparagingly: ‘Enough life and money has been spent on this sterile quest. The Pole has already been discovered. What is the use of another expedition?’ Shackleton was not only a man of charisma and determination but an accomplished fundraiser. He took Churchill’s rebuff in his stride, and by 1914 everything was in place for what he dubbed grandiosely – and pointedly – The Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition. Two separate parties would land on Antarctica. One, comprising six men, would sail to the Ross Ice Shelf on Mawson’s old ship, Aurora, from where they would lay a string of food depots to the top of the Beardmore. The other, Shac
kleton’s, would make its way through the Weddell Sea on the Endurance, a 350-ton ship designed expressly for polar service. Once Endurance reached the mainland, a group of three men would explore the coast west to Graham Land, another three would go east to Enderby Land, and two would remain at base. The six-strong polar party, meanwhile, would traverse the continent with dogs and a brace of propeller-driven sledges carrying enough supplies to see them to the first of the Aurora’s caches. From there, Shackleton and his companions would descend the Beardmore and cross the Ross Ice Shelf to complete their victorious, record-breaking trek.
Many things were wrong with Shackleton’s plan. For a start, he hoped to reach the coast in November 1914. But the Weddell Sea was notoriously hostile, and he had no certainty of reaching the coast at all, let alone by November – Mawson had not been able to make a landing until January, and that was through relatively straightforward pack ice rather than the rotating gyre of the Weddell Sea. And if he did reach it he intended to start immediately on a 1,800-mile trek that he estimated would take five months. This was stretching the limits. Scott had started in October and had died in January. Mawson had started in November and had been lucky to get back by February. Were March and April 1915 meant to be sunnier for Shackleton than they had been for his predecessors? Moreover, how would Shackleton know whether the Aurora party had laid the caches on which his survival depended? Both ships had radios, but they were primitive and underpowered, quite incapable of transmitting to each other acoss the ice. If the Aurora failed in its task Shackleton would be marching to his death. And then there was scurvy. Scott’s party had contracted the disease, and Mawson had suspected it might have afflicted him. On what grounds did Shackleton expect to remain immune? For all its fanfare, the Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition was a venture that strained the limits of logistical possibility. One can admire Shackleton’s audacity. But the inescapable question remains: what on earth did he think he was doing?
He very nearly did nothing – or, at least, nothing to do with Antarctica. When the Endurance left London on Friday 1 August 1914 war was at hand, and by Monday a general mobilization had been announced. At anchor off Margate, Shackleton wired the Admiralty, volunteering the entire expedition for service. All he asked was that the company be kept together. ‘There were enough trained and experienced men among us to man a destroyer,’ he later wrote. But the Admiralty was sanguine. Given that the forthcoming conflict would be over by Christmas, it seemed silly to disrupt a project that had taken so long to arrange and on which substantial sums had already been spent. Churchill himself was of that opinion. Within the hour a laconic telegram reached Margate: ‘Proceed.’ So Shackleton did.
On Tuesday he met King George V, who handed him a Union Jack to plant at the Pole. Queen Alexandra gave him a Bible, in which she wrote: ‘May the Lord help you to do your duty and guide you through all dangers by land and sea. May you see all the works of the Lord and all his wonders in the deep.’ That midnight, war was declared. Endurance left Plymouth on 8 August and, having touched at Buenos Aires and South Georgia, steamed for the ice on 5 December. Already it was a month behind schedule. It did not cross the Antarctic Circle until 11.00 p.m. on 30 December, by which time Shackleton had abandoned his idea of traversing the continent before April.
The Weddell Sea was harder, icier and stormier than they had imagined. The Endurance had to retreat, wait, divert and, when thwarted by the constantly changing leads, was forced to batter its way through sheets more than three feet deep. They were bedevilled by refraction, a familar foe from expeditions past: ‘From the masthead the mirage is continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud banks look like land, icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to the south is thrown into view, though it is really outside our range of vision. Worst of all is the appearance of open water, caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice cliffs below the horizon.’ On 17 February the sun set, and though the pack reflected enough light to maintain a semblance of normality, winter was at hand. ‘The summer had gone,’ Shackleton lamented. ‘Indeed, the summer had scarcely been with us at all.’ Five days later the ship was fast in the ice, at 77° S, 60 nautical miles from its destination. The temperature was – 10° F. They could see land now and then, but it was beyond their reach. As Shackleton was forced to admit, they would have to endure a season in the ice. ‘This calm weather with intense cold in the summer is surely exceptional. My chief anxiety is the drift. Where will the vagrant winds and currents carry the ship during the long winter months that are ahead of us?’
On the other side of the continent the Aurora party was struggling to lay the depots on which the transcontinental travellers’ survival depended. Their task, hard enough at the best of times, was made even harder by a combination of ill fortune and poor planning. Although they had been provided with the material for a base hut, they had not had time to build it, and were therefore forced to live in Scott’s old quarters at Cape Evans. Similarly, they had insufficient food – no pemmican at all – so had to scrounge what they could from Scott’s left-overs. The Aurora had been blown from the shore and was now sitting in McMurdo Sound, prevented by ice from delivering them the supplies they needed. They had arrived too late to train the dogs for the journey, with the result that they were unfit and unacclimatized. Ernest Joyce, the only man among them who had solid experience of Antarctic travel, had been assured at the outset that he would be in charge of the overland part of the expedition. At the same time, however, Shackleton had given the Aurora’s captain, a one-eyed man named Aeneas Mackintosh, the authority to override him – which he did, insisting that he direct the sledge party. Organizational and personal problems were compounded by evil weather. By 12 February, after less than a fortnight on the Ross Ice Shelf, the depot-layers had advanced a mere 40 miles. That day, trapped in his tent by a blizzard, Mackintosh wrote, ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ One of the group, a chaplain named Spencer-Smith, was already ill from scurvy and frostbite, and was sent back with two others. Mackintosh, Joyce and Ernest Wild – whose brother Frank was on the Endurance – plugged on. The three men reached 80° S on 20 February, constructed cairns to direct Shackleton to their caches, then turned back four days later. They had ten days’ food for the 150 miles it had taken them three weeks to cover. On 25 February, in the middle of yet another gale, Joyce wrote: ‘trekking out of the question ... The blizzard – fury. We are now on half rations. My heart aches for the dogs ... Our sleeping bags are soaked; clothes in a smiliar condition.’ On 25 March they arrived at Hut Point – across the bay from Cape Evans, on Ross Island, so-called because of the hut built by Scott and later used by Shackleton that still stood there – where they waited disconsolately for the sea to freeze, and on 2 June reached Cape Evans and – or so they expected – the safety of the Aurora. But the ship was not there. On 6 May it had been blown from its anchorage and was now beset in the pack. From this disastrous season the only consolation Mackintosh could derive was that Shackleton had surely been unable to start his journey and that next year he would be able to complete the chain of depots to the top of the Beardmore.
On 24 March, the day before Mackintosh reached Hut Point, it had been Empire Day. This holiday, invented ten years previously by the Earl of Meath, was intended to instil in British subjects the notion of a benevolent, all-wise institution that would last for as long as the sun never set on its far-flung domains. It was celebrated on the Aurora and, in the Weddell Sea, on the Endurance. Perhaps both ships’ companies sensed the irony of drinking to a day that the Earl of Meath had meant ‘to be spent by children in exercise of a patriotic and agreeable character’.
Clamped in the ice, Endurance drifted north through the Weddell Sea, threatened constantly by the shifting pack. Although a powerful icebreaker, it was not, like Nanse
n’s Fram, round enough to rise above the floes, and by late October it was so badly squeezed that Shackleton ordered his men onto the ice. ‘Our sadness,’ wrote photographer Frank Hurley, ‘is for the familar scene from which we are being expelled. The clock is ticking on the wall as we take a final leaving of our cosy wardroom.’ They bade farewell to the Endurance at teatime on 27 October. That evening 28 men crawled into their tents. They had 18 reindeer sleeping bags among them and three boats containing 56 days’ food for a journey to nobody was sure where. They could march to their intended destination, Vahsel Bay, which would be the first place a rescue party would search, or they could go overland 450 miles to Wilhelmina Bay, in Graham Land, where whalers occasionally stopped. Shackleton chose the latter, heading first for Paulet Island, where the explorer Nordenskiöld had left a hut and supplies 12 years earlier. From there he intended to cross to Wilhelmina Bay to fetch help. Fitting two of his boats with sledges, he led his men north-west (or, rather, west to counteract the due north drift of the pack) in a column of dogs, sledges and boats that stretched half a mile across the ice. To save weight each man was restricted to two pounds of personal possessions – Shackleton showed the way by flinging a handful of gold sovereigns onto the ice. ‘I pray God,’ he wrote, ‘I can manage to get the whole party to civilisation.’
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