Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  After a few days, during which they advanced only a few miles, Shackleton changed his mind. It would be better, he decided, to camp on the floe where they were – Ocean Camp, they called it – and wait for the ice to melt before taking to the boats. More supplies were retrieved from the Endurance, along with their third boat, and brought to Ocean Camp. For a month the Endurance remained visible, drifting north behind them. Finally, on 21 November, they saw its funnel tilt forwards. The stern rose in the air and then the whole ship crumpled into the sea. Some were glad to see it go, for it had long been, in Frank Hurley’s words, ‘an object of depression to all who turned their eyes in that direction.’ Shackleton was distressed. It had been his command, and even in its decrepitude it had been a token of security. When it vanished, so did their last reminder of more optimistic times. ‘I cannot write about it,’ he recorded.

  The Weddell Sea is shaped like an open hand, the fingers being Queen Maud Land and the thumb the Antarctic Peninsula. Ice collects within its grasp, but, unlike the ice of the Ross Shelf, which is anchored to the mainland by glaciers, the Weddell pack is in constant motion, rotated by the currents that flow past its mouth. It is best approached along the coast, where the ice tears free from the mainland and is at its loosest. Shackleton, however, had driven the Endurance into the centre of the Weddell Sea. Now he was trapped in its circle. In a way this was fortunate: the pack was carrying him north to open seas. In another way it was not: if he wanted to reach Paulet Island he would have to be on the outer, most hazardous rim of the pack and to judge precisely the right moment for his departure.

  From camp to camp the Endurance men moved that winter across the Weddell Sea, readjusting their position as the pack drove north. The staleness of camp life, combined with inevitable clashes of personality, produced little squabbles that threatened to become major arguments. At every potential breach of discipline, however, Shackleton exerted his powerful personality. Singlehandedly he maintained morale, at one point speaking so convincingly of a future expedition to the Arctic that the men forgot their travails. He insisted so vehemently that they would be home by Christmas that most people believed him – and those who didn’t dared not draw attention to the lie. Come Christmas, however, they were still in the Weddell Sea, and some of the men became so sick of hauling – they were then midway between camps – that Shackleton had to quell a nascent mutiny.

  Life was little better for the Aurora party. The previous season’s exertion had killed most of the dogs, and Mackintosh now displayed the bleeding gums and swollen joints of scurvy. It was Joyce, therefore, who became the expedition’s effective leader, as he, Mackintosh and three others – assisted by the four remaining dogs – trudged over the Beardmore to lay, at 83° S, on 21 January, the last of the food caches. They had been joined at the outset by Spencer-Smith, but had been forced to leave him in a tent because he too had scurvy. In honesty, they would have liked to have left Mackintosh behind as well, not only because his absence would have made their progress faster, but because he could have kept the crippled chaplain company. But Mackintosh, refusing to acknowledge his condition or relinquish his nominal responsibility, had insisted he accompany them.

  The return journey was a marvel of endurance and self-discipline. When they reached Spencer-Smith’s tent the chaplain was too weak to walk and had to be put on a sledge. As Joyce and the others hauled resolutely Mackintosh could hardly keep pace. Soon they were all showing signs of scurvy. Their supplies were low, but they dared not take too much from the depots they had laid because, as they knew, Shackleton would need the food more desperately than they. ‘Poor dogs & selves,’ Joyce wrote on 15 February, ‘practically done up ... it seems we are pulling over 300 Ibs per man instead of about 130 Ibs. I suppose we are getting a bit shaken up & want some fresh meat.’ A week later, having been trapped in their tents for five days by a blizzard, they were almost out of food. Like Scott – about whom they spoke often, and remnants of whose trek they had met along the way – they were about ten miles from their next depot; indeed, they were not that far from his grave. Lest they suffer the same fate, Joyce and two of the healthiest men went into the storm to fetch supplies from the cache. The first day they covered a couple of hundred yards before having to turn back. ‘Conditions were impossible,’ wrote one man. ‘Wind was of hurricane force and extremely gusty making it difficult to retain our feet. We could only see a few yards and even the sky was no different in appearance to anywhere else. There seemed to be no up or down.’

  In the early hours of 26 February they attained the depot, so exhausted that it took them two hours to cover the last three-quarters of a mile and an hour more to pitch their tent – a process that was normally a matter of five minutes. Then, after a short rest, they loaded their sledge and started back. They reached the others on 29 February, the twelfth day of the storm and the sixth since they had had a decent meal. Once again the party started for Hut Point. Within a week Mackintosh was so enfeebled that the haulers left him in a tent, promising to come back when they themselves had reached safety and were stronger. Two days later Spencer-Smith died. He had maintained a glorious optimism right to the end – on 1 March, when Mount Erebus was in sight, he had written, ‘it is homely to see the old place once again’ – but he was too scorbutic to last the distance. One of his haulers wrote an irritable epitaph: ‘We have pulled him helpless for 40 days, over a distance of 300 miles.’

  Joyce and his men reached Hut Point on 11 March, gorged themselves on seal meat that they had laid down the previous year, then set forth to retrieve Mackintosh. By 18 March the company was safely home. During their depot-laying journeys they had covered more miles than any Antarctic sledgers to date and, in Joyce’s words, ‘[had] suffered hardships that I did not think was possible for man to exist under the same conditions. I think the irony of fate was poor Smith going under a day before we arrived in.’ Now, at Hut Point, they faced further months of discomfort before the sea froze and they could cross to Cape Evans, where life was slightly better and food more plentiful. But even when – or if – they reached Cape Evans there was no certainty that they would ever leave it, for the Aurora had vanished. Joyce wrote resignedly: ‘As there is no news of the ship, & we cannot see her, we surmise she has gone down with all hands.’

  Beyond the horizon, the Aurora was still afloat, in ice-free seas, but it was in poor shape: its rudder had been damaged, its anchors had been lost and its fuel was low. Less than a week after Joyce’s final return to Hut Point the ship was steaming back to New Zealand. An Australian radio station picked up a transmission to that effect on 24 March, bringing the world its first news of the Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition. As the press interrupted its coverage of the Western Front to speculate on events in Antarctica, Churchill frothed with indignation. Currently in Flanders, he found it hard to see beyond the slaughter that surrounded him. ‘Fancy that ridiculous Shackleton & his South Pole – at the crash of the world,’ he wrote to his wife. When the papers began to agitate for a rescue mission – assuming, wrongly, that Shackleton must have completed his journey – Churchill put the expedition in what he saw as its proper context: ‘When all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all their impoverished & broken hearted homes have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, & every charitable subscription is closed, then & not until then wd I concern myself with those penguins. I suppose, however, something will have to be done.’

  Yes, something had to be done. But however Churchill puffed and ranted, Shackleton was the only man capable of doing it. At the beginning of March the Endurance survivors were alive and healthy, thanks to a diet of penguin and seal that had prevented their contracting scurvy. But they were still in the Weddell pack – after his brush with mutiny, Shackleton had decided that waiting rather than hauling was the best policy; he called their present site Patience Camp – and the ice was too dangerous for them to sail for Paulet Island, now less than 100 miles distant. On 27 March the northward drift carri
ed them within sight of land: it was just 40 miles away, but the ice was too loose for sledging, too tight for sailing. The next day it was gone. They had now been at the mercy of the pack for six months and 2,000 miles. Their food was coming to an end, they had not washed since October, and for toothpaste had been using an improvised mix of snow and soot. The urgency of reaching land was overwhelming. They had missed their window, and once winter set in they would either be in seas so stormy that their boats would likely sink, or be heading towards Antarctica as the Weddell Sea drew them back into its clasp.

  By the first week of April they were well past Paulet Island and their floe was breaking up. On the 9th Shackleton ordered the boats to be launched. To the north was a desolate outcrop of rock and ice, a distant relation of the South Shetlands, to which their maps gave the name Elephant Island. He hoped they might be able to make Graham Land, on the peninsula, but failing that Elephant Island was their last chance. They were not yet free of the pack, so they had to row rather than sail, hampered constantly by the vagrant movements of the ice. Now it tightened, forcing them to drag their three boats onto a floe, now it split beneath them. One night, as Shackleton prowled the camp, kept awake by ‘an intangible feeling of uneasiness’, he saw a tent stretch as the floe separated beneath it. ‘I rushed forward, helped some men to come out from under the canvas ... The crack had widened to about 4 feet and ... I saw a whitish object floating in the water. It was a sleeping bag with a man inside. I was able to grasp it, and, with a heave, lifted man and bag on the floe. A few seconds later the ice-edges came together again with tremendous force.’

  As ice and currents swept them beyond reach of Graham Land, they were forced, as Shackleton had anticipated, to head for Elephant Island, unexplored since American sealers had first discovered it in 1830. They beached on 11 April, after a week in which they had not slept for four consecutive days. ‘Most of us,’ a crew-member wrote, ‘hardly knew whether to laugh or cry ... We took childish joy in looking at the black rocks & picking up the stones, for we had stepped on no land since Dec. 51914.’ Their euphoria soon vanished as they realized they were not much better off than before. They had a better chance of shooting wildlife, but that was all. Their position, on a spit of gravel, was damp and exposed. Winter was not far off. They were no nearer salvation, had no shelter, no means of communication and no hope of being rescued. Even if a ship had been sent after them – they had no idea if it had; in fact it had not – why should its captain bother with Elephant Island when there were other, more likely places to search? After all their travails on the pack, it seemed they were doomed at best to another winter, at worst to starvation. One of the officers, the navigator Frank Worsley, tried to console Shackleton, saying that whatever their fate, they would be grateful for his superhuman efforts on their behalf. The response was gruff. ‘Superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results.’ Worsley was surprised. ‘My view was that we were all grown men, going of our own free will on this expedition, and that it was up to us to bear whatever was coming to us. Not so Shackleton. His idea was that we had trusted him, that we had placed ourselves in his hands, and that should anything happen to us he was morally responsible.’

  Shackleton already had a result in mind: a journey on one of their boats to find help. Wilhelmina Bay was out of the question: the winds and currents were in the wrong direction. Cape Horn was a possibility, as were the Falkland Islands, both of them being relatively close. But once again the winds in that latitude were wrong. His best bet was the permanently manned whaling stations of South Georgia, 700 miles away over seas that were famously bad but ran where he wanted to go. ‘The hazards,’ he wrote, ‘were obvious, but I calculated that at worst this venture would add nothing to the risks of the men left on the island.’ It took more than a week to fit their largest boat, the James Caird, with watertight decking for ocean travel – a process that involved partially dismantling the other two vessels – and on 24 April it sailed for South Georgia. With him Shackleton took five men: Worsley, Vincent the bosun, McNeish the carpenter, McCarthy a seaman and, at the last moment, Crean, the second-officer of the Endurance.

  It was a journey of inconceivable discomfort. The James Caird was just 22 feet long and, once the stores had been stowed, there was room for only three men at a time to sleep beneath the decking, switching with their companions above at four-hour intervals. Not that being below was any great privilege, however, for the boat leaked and had to be regularly bailed, mostly by hand but, when the level subsided, with a homemade pump. Their clothes – which they had been wearing for seven months – were designed for the dry cold of Antarctica rather than the constant, salt-water showers of sea travel. Their reindeer sleeping bags moulted, shedding damp hairs into the men’s noses, mouths and food, and two of them began to rot, filling the boat with such a nauseating stench that they had to be thrown overboard. The boulders they had taken aboard as ballast had to be shifted to trim the boat and to gain access to the pump – which, like everything else, became clogged with reindeer hair. ‘The moving of the boulders was weary and painful work,’ Shackleton later recorded. ‘We came to know every one of the stones by sight and touch, and I still have vivid memories of their angular peculiarities even today ... As weights to be moved about in cramped quarters they were simply appalling. They spared no portion of our poor bodies.’ As they toiled, their wet clothes rubbed the insides of their thighs raw. Conversely, when they did not move, the cold, waterlogged, restricted conditions impeded their circulation, and turned their feet into puffy masses of white flesh. On the tenth night Worsley was so hunched after a stint at the tiller that he had to be massaged straight before he could fit in his sleeping bag.

  And then there was the sea itself. In the first days they spent hours chipping at frozen spray lest the James Caird founder beneath its weight. In the wake of ice and snow came gales and waves so high that when in the valleys their sail flapped idly. On the eleventh day, 5 May, Shackleton saw an awesome spectacle: ‘At midnight I was at the tiller and suddenly noticed a line of clear sky between the south and the southwest. I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realised that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years’ experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days. I shouted, “For God’s sake, hold on! It’s got us!” Then came a moment of suspense that seemed drawn out into hours.’ The James Caird was tossed about like a cork but survived – just. ‘We baled with the energy of men fighting for life, flinging the water over the sides with every receptacle that came to our hands, and after ten minutes of uncertainty we felt the boat renew her life beneath us.’ Possibly the surge had been caused by a massive calving of one of Antarctica’s glaciers. If so, it was a vicious farewell. With dry understatement Shackleton wrote: ‘Earnestly we hoped that never again would we encounter such a wave.’

  In all conditions, and through every setback, Worsley kept them on course for South Georgia. The only navigational aids he possessed were a compass, a well-thumbed book of tables and a sextant that he used on the rare occasions when the sky was clear, hanging on to the boat with one hand while shooting his position with the other. How he did it was a marvel. When the German explorer Arved Fuchs replicated Shackleton’s journey in 2000, he was baffled how anyone could plot a course with such limited equipment, in such heavy seas and in such dire conditions (Worsley made his calculations by candlelight in the dank and wretched space under the decking). Nevertheless, Worsley managed by skill, perseverance and the odd bit of luck to steer them towards South Georgia. They saw its cliffs on 8 May, their fifteenth day in the boat – and the last but one before their water ran out.

  At Hut Point Captain Aeneas Mackintosh was fretting. It had been almost two months since he had been dragged back from the Bea
rdmore expedition and, although not fully recovered, he was strong enough to exercise his old authority. He was tired of the food, the claustrophobic shelter that was barely windproof, and the blubber that supplied their light and fuel, pervading the whole hut with soot and stench. He had never lived in such conditions before, could not stand the thought of being trapped, and wanted to get out – a syndrome common today, even in the comfort of modern research stations, to those who spend any length of time in Antarctica. On 8 May, while the James Caird was on its last run to South Georgia, Mackintosh told Joyce that he was going to walk across McMurdo Sound to Cape Evans. Joyce told him not to – all but ordered him not to: the ice looked firm but could not be relied upon, being too young to resist the winds that might, without warning, pour from the interior; the sky showed every sign of a blizzard; if he waited another two months the company could evacuate in safety together. Mackintosh ignored the advice. That day, accompanied by a fellow convalescent named Hayward, he set out for Cape Evans. Hitherto, neither man had been able to walk two miles unattended. The distance to Cape Evans was 13 miles.

  Joyce gave up: ‘I don’t know why these people are so anxious to risk their lives again, but it seems they are that way inclined.’ Another man was more explicit: ‘As I stood watching the two figures ... disappearing into the gloom of midday, there was a tinge of bitterness in my thoughts at the tremendous effort we had made to get these two men back.’ Thirty minutes after Mackintosh’s and Hayward’s departure a blizzard came on. On 10 May, as soon as the wind abated, Joyce and the remaining two men went in search of them. They followed their footprints for about three miles until brought to a halt by an expanse of water, covered by a film of ice, running north for as far as the eye could see. As Joyce had predicted, part of the bay ice had been blown out to sea; but it was impossible to tell if Mackintosh and Hayward had gone with it or had managed to reach Cape Evans before the break-up. Hoping for the best, they retired to Hut Point. ‘We are quite happy here,’ Joyce wrote, ‘and do not intend to leave until safe.’