Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  On the same day, the seventeenth since he had left Elephant Island, Shackleton completed his boat journey. When Worsley sighted South Georgia on 8 May they were jubilant. But the shore was so rugged and inhospitable that it took another two days, skirting in a rough figure of eight, before they landed, in cold, drizzling rain, on a beach in King Haakon Bay on the southern coast of the island. Thirstily, they drank the glacial water that poured from the hills above. It could only be a temporary stop, for the beach was surrounded on all sides by cliffs, so after two days they sailed for a better berth at the mouth of the bay. Taking stock, they had good reason to be proud of themselves: they had covered 700 miles in foul weather; they had reached their goal with ten days’ rations remaining; they had landed at a spot where there was water, wildlife and, when they up-ended the boat, shelter. Their feet were frostbitten, but they had survived the journey without death or serious injury. It was a magnificent accomplishment, flawed only by one very important detail: they were on the wrong side of the island.

  To reach the whaling stations on the north-east coast they had two options: to sail round South Georgia or to take a short-cut overland. The first was impractical, for even if the crew could be persuaded to leave the relative luxury of their camp neither they nor the James Caird were in any condition to undertake a journey of some 130 miles. The second option was hardly more attractive: South Georgia’s mountainous interior was unknown and unmapped; nobody had penetrated further than a mile inland; and received opinion held the crags and glaciers to be insurmountable. They had neither the clothes nor the equipment for mountaineering, and some of them were too weak to contemplate walking, let alone climbing, any distance. But, according to Worsley’s calculations, the station of Husvik in Stromness Bay was only 17 miles from their present position. Given the right weather, and assuming they encountered nothing too difficult, a small party of the fittest might be able to cross South Georgia in a day or two.

  Shackleton left with Worsley and Crean in the early hours of Friday 19 May, beneath a full moon, strung about with ropes and provisions – Crean had constructed a sledge from driftwood, but it was abandoned as being too unwieldy – and with screws from the James Caird driven through the soles of their boots to act as crampons. For alpenstocks they had lengths of the boat’s strakes; and for an ice-axe they took the last item from McNeish’s toolbox, an adze. Within two hours they had climbed 2,500 feet – a fair time by any standard, miraculous given their state – and were face to face with South Georgia’s mountains. ‘High peaks, impassable cliffs, steep snow slopes, and sharply descending glaciers were prominent features in all directions,’ Shackleton wrote. They roped up and marched on. To and fro they went, taking wrong turnings, retracing their steps, cutting their way up and down ice slopes with the adze. At 11.00 a.m. they broached a crest, only to be faced by a precipice of 1,500 feet. They skirted around it, and an hour later made their way across a bergschrund a mile and a half long and 1,000 feet deep – ‘two battleships could have been hidden in it’, Worsley recorded in awe – before climbing an ice slope of 45 degrees to a 4,500-foot pass from which, at last, they could see the north coast. Before they could reach it, however, they first had to climb down another slope and then up a ridge of 2,000 feet. By now fog was beginning to creep over the peaks behind them. They had no tent, no sleeping bags, and were wearing the same threadbare clothes in which they had left the Endurance. ‘It was of the utmost importance for us to get down... before dark,’ Shackleton recorded. Recklessly, they coiled their ropes into bucket-sledges and slid down the hill. ‘We seemed to shoot into space,’ Worsley wrote. ‘For a moment my hair fairly stood on end. Then quite suddenly I was grinning! I was actually enjoying it... I yelled with excitement, and found that Shackleton and Crean were yelling too.’ In two or three minutes they descended 900 feet* to land in a pile of soft snow. Behind them, grey fingers of fog crept over the ridge on which they had been standing.

  On they went, over snowfields and down glaciers, laughing and congratulating themselves, until, in the early morning of 20 May, the sea was beneath them. But it was not Stromness Bay. Somewhere they had taken a wrong turning. ‘Wearily and mechanically’, they retraced their steps. As lack of sleep, dehydration and sheer exhaustion took their toll, the trek assumed a hallucinatory quality. They misjudged distances, mistook one glacier for another and, for a while, could not remember whether their party numbered three or four. When, having stumbled down yet another hill, towards yet another bay, they heard at 6.30 a.m. a steam-whistle, at first they thought it was a dream. Might it, however, be the Husvik whalers’ wake-up alarm? If so, there would be another blast in half an hour. At 7.00 the whistle sounded again. This time there could be no mistake: they were within reach of safety. ‘It was a moment hard to describe,’ Shackleton wrote. ‘Pain and ache, boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things, and there remained only the perfect contentment that comes of work accomplished.’

  The three men descended a sharp incline, cutting footsteps with the adze for thousands of feet until they were almost on top of the beach. ‘The last lap of the journey proved extraordinarily difficult,’ Shackleton wrote. ‘Vainly we searched for a safe, or reasonably safe, way down from the steep ice-clad mountainside. The sole possible pathway seemed to be a channel cut by water running from the upland. Down through icy water we followed the course of this stream.’ It terminated in a cascade that cut through a 30-foot cliff. They could not climb down the cliff and there was no way out to left or right. Retreat being impossible they wrapped one of their ropes round a boulder and lowered themselves into the waterfall itself. At 4.00 p.m., having stumbled over a mile of shale, they reached the whaling station. The first people they encountered were two young boys, who fled at the sight of them.

  Six hours later they had been fed, washed and clothed, and a whaler was steaming to rescue the castaways in King Haakon Bay. ‘We had ceased to be savages,’ Shackleton wrote, ‘and had become civilised men again.’ While they acclimatized themselves to the unaccustomed comfort of sleeping in a bed for the first time in six months, a gale blew up. They had arrived just in time. In Worsley’s opinion, ‘Had we been crossing that night, nothing could have saved us.’ For Shackleton it was the final confirmation that they had survived not by skill or luck but by divine intervention. When his journal was published in 1919 it contained the following passage: ‘When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.”’ Crean confessed to the same impression. ‘One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible,’ Shackleton wrote, ‘but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.’*

  While the men of the King Haakon Bay party were being rescued, Shackleton had already organized a ship and crew to take him to Elephant Island. He sailed aboard the Southern Sky on Tuesday 23 May, taking Crean and Worsley with him. En route he stopped at the South Georgian whaling station of Grytviken, where a wireless operator sent a message to London. Received by the Admiralty on 31 May, it read, ‘Sir Ernest Shackleton arrived today’. It was a welcome diversion for British newspapers which, fed up with the slaughter in Flanders, ran Antarctic headlines for a week, relegating the 100-day-plus battle of Verdun to the side columns.

  Three days into the journey it became clear that the pack was too thick for the Southern Sky to reach Elephant Island. Repairing to the Falklands, Shackleton sought in vain for a strong enough vessel among the ships in Port Stanley. A relie
f ship was being prepared in Britain, but it could not be there before October, which was too late. A flurry of radio messages to South America produced a Uruguayan trawler, Instituto de Pesca No. 1, which arrived in Port Stanley on 10 June. But once again the pack was too thick; the trawler was forced to turn back after three days, with the peaks of Elephant Island tantalizingly visible on the horizon. A second attempt was made with two Chilean ships – the schooner Emma and the steamer Yelcho – but this too failed. A third try with the Emma alone likewise came to nothing. Back in Port Stanley on 8 August, Shackleton learned that the relief ship would now be with him in mid-September. The obvious course, as suggested by the Governor, was to wait for its arrival. Shackleton, however, had had his fill of Port Stanley: ‘The street of that port is about a mile and a half long,’ he wrote. ‘It has the slaughterhouse at one end and the graveyard at the other. The chief distraction is to walk from the slaughterhouse to the graveyard. For a change one may walk from the graveyard to the slaughterhouse ... I could not content myself to wait for six or seven weeks, knowing that six hundred miles away my companions were in dire need.’

  By 14 August he was in Chile, scouring Punta Arenas for a suitable ship. Finding none, he begged the Chilean government to lend him the Yelcho and its crew for one final voyage. It was a steel-hulled vessel ‘quite unsuitable for work in the pack’ (he had previously used it only to tow the Emma through Magellan Strait), but there was a small chance that, if the sea was clear, it could make Elephant Island. Generously, the Chileans acceded to his request, and on 25 August Shackleton steamed south for his fourth stab at the Antarctic pack in two months. This time he was successful. A gale had temporarily blown the ice northwards, leaving the Yelcho with open water. At noon on 30 August it was off Elephant Island.

  The 22 castaways were coming to the end of their strength. For months they had been living under two upturned boats, eking out their rations with whatever wildlife they could shoot. Their lives had devolved into a dreary continuum of food and sleep. Ernest Wild, their commander, did his best to keep them alert: if, for example, the sea was clear when they woke he would have them pack their kit in anticipation of Shackleton’s arrival. When groundwater seeped into their living quarters he had them bail it out and dig drainage channels (before the channels were finished they bailed 410 gallons in 48 hours). But nothing he did could compensate for their sordid living conditions. ‘Our shingle floor will scarcely bear examination by strong light,’ Wild wrote, ‘without causing even us to shudder and express our disapprobation as to its state. Oil mixed with reindeer hair, bits of meat, sennegrass [which they used as insulation in their boots], and penguin feathers form a conglomeration which cements the stones together ... All joints are aching through being compelled to lie on the hard, rubbly floor which forms our bedsteads.’ Many days the wind and snow compelled them to stay indoors, either sleeping ‘in the attic’ or creeping on all fours in a space that was four foot six inches at its highest and made even lower by the damp clothes they draped from their bunk-shelves. ‘From all parts,’ wrote one inmate, ‘there dangles an odd collection of blubbery garments, hung up to dry, through which one crawls, much as a chicken in an incubator.’

  The day of 30 August was like any other. They prepared their gear for evacuation then slumped into routine. ‘We were just assembling for lunch to the call of “Lunch O!”’ wrote Wild, ‘and I was serving out the soup, which was particularly good that day, consisting of boiled seal’s backbone, limpets, and seaweed, when there was another hail from Marston of “Ship O!” Some of the men thought it was “Lunch O!” over again, but when there was another yell from Marston, lunch had no further attractions.’ Shackleton approached on one of the Yelcho’s boats and threw them packets of cigarettes. Within an hour the men, their equipment, the expedition’s logs and its scientific records were aboard. On 2 September the Yelcho docked at Punta Arenas. The police were alerted, the fire alarms were rung, and most of the population – of whom a proportion was, at that time, British – came out in welcome. ‘It was a great reception,’ Shackleton recorded, ‘and with the strain of long, anxious months lifted at last, we were in a mood to enjoy it.’

  Shackleton could not relax fully: he had yet to rescue the Aurora party at McMurdo Sound. He caught a ship to New Zealand, arriving in December 1916. At Wellington he found the government had already outfitted Aurora for a return journey and had placed John King Davis in charge. Davis – who has since been described as ‘arguably the greatest ship’s captain of this age of Antarctic discoveries’ – had been a member of Shackleton’s 1907–9 expedition, had commanded the Aurora on Mawson’s expedition, and was a man whom Shackleton trusted implicitly. Shackleton joined the crew at a nominal one shilling per month as an advisor for overland travel. The Aurora touched Antarctica on 10 January. Shackleton sledged over the ice but saw nothing. Then, as he was returning to the ship, Joyce and his survivors hove into view. They were hustled into the safety of the ship. Of the original ten, only seven remained.

  Spencer-Smith, the chaplain, could be accounted for immediately. But the whereabouts of Mackintosh and Hayward were less certain. When Joyce’s group had reached Cape Evans on 15 July the one-eyed captain was not there. The likelihood was that he and Hayward had been blown out to sea in the storm of 8 May; it was just conceivable, however, that they might have reached land before the break-up. ‘There was no possibility of either man being alive,’ Shackleton wrote. ‘They had been without equipment when the blizzard broke the ice they were crossing. It would have been impossible for them to have survived more than a few days, and eight months had now elapsed without news of them.’ Nevertheless, he felt it his duty to make every effort to retrieve their bodies. A search of the coast produced nothing: ‘There was no sign of... any person having visited the vicinity.’ A laborious trudge inland was similarly fruitless: ‘there was nothing to be seen but blue ice, crevassed, showing no protuberances ... I could see there was not the slightest chance of finding any remains owing to the enormous snow drifts wherever the cliffs were accessible.’ By 16 January he conceded that even had the two men reached land – which he doubted – he would never find their bodies. The Aurora sailed the following day for New Zealand, Shackleton examining the coast for cairns or markers as they went, and on 8 February it reached Wellington.

  The Imperial TransAntarctic Expedition dissolved in an atmosphere of anticlimax. There was none of the triumphant flag-waving and speech-giving that normally followed an expedition’s return. Instead, the 53 survivors were sucked into the various branches of Britain’s war machine – three of them died, five were wounded, four were decorated for gallantry, many were mentioned in despatches – and it was two years before Shackleton finally embarked on the money-raising that was, traditionally, an explorer’s right. He published his journal, titled simply South; and from December 1919 to May 1920 he lectured twice daily, at the Philharmonic Hall in London’s Great Portland Street, on the horrors and the heroism of his expedition. His talk, accompanied by a film made by Frank Hurley, was surely the most memorable show-and-tell in history. The exploring community was impressed. Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote glowingly (and with perhaps a dig at Scott), ‘I know why it is that every man who has served under Shackleton swears by him. I believe Shackleton has never lost a man: he must have had some doubts as to whether he would save one then. But he did, he saved every one of them.’ Roald Amundsen was unstinting in his praise: ‘Do not let it be said that Shackleton has failed. No man fails who sets an example of high courage, of unbroken resolution, of unshrinking endurance.’ The British public, however, did not share their enthusiasm. South sold well, but not nearly as well as it should have; and most of the time the Philharmonic Hall was filled far below capacity. The truth was, people no longer cared.

  When Shackleton sailed in 1914 explorers were considered heroes; if not for the war he could have achieved the status of men like Nansen, Scott and Amundsen. But in 1919 the very concept of heroism was in disrepute. Eve
ryone in Europe could tell of bravery, of suffering, of good and bad leadership. Davis had warned of this in New Zealand, telling him that ‘he seemed unable to realise, yet, that the war was engrossing the thoughts and emotions of the majority of civilised man and that, consequently, people were apt to be impatient with polar exploration. And, when every man in uniform was either a real, or at least a potential hero, people were also a little impatient of polar explorers in general.’ Shackleton tried to link his expedition to the war. ‘Mackintosh, Hayward, and Spencer-Smith died for their country as surely as any who gave up their lives on the fields of France and Flanders,’ he insisted. The claim was patently false. They had died because of incompetence, bad planning and bad luck – in this respect maybe they did share something with the dead of Flanders – but they had not given their lives for their country: they had given them for the ill-conceived ambition of one man. True, it was only because of Shackleton’s quite remarkable leadership qualities that so many had survived; had another been in charge the entire expedition might have perished. On the other hand, with a different leader they might never have been put in jeopardy. Standing in the half-empty Philharmonic Hall, Hurley’s film flickering on the screen behind him, Shackleton must have been painfully aware that he was a redundant commodity.

  He tried to claw back some stature, proposing first an Arctic expedition (it fell through) and then, more successfully, a circumnavigation of Antarctica. He departed in 1921 aboard the Quest on a voyage that according to one man ‘seemed to have a beginning but, somehow, no end’. His justification was a search for undiscovered sub-Antarctic islands and a possible exploration of the unknown Enderby quadrant. But he had other adventures in mind: he wanted to search Trinidad for Captain Kidd’s buried treasure and investigate the South Pacific for a rumoured lagoon of pearls. His crew, many of whom were veterans of the 1914–16 expedition, were worried: he was less confident, more diffident, than usual; and he was physically weaker. He had suffered for a long time from chest problems, which he refused to have inspected, let alone treated, and when the Quest stopped at Rio de Janeiro he had a massive heart-attack. Broken in health and spirit, he continued towards the Antarctic. ‘The Boss,’ wrote one man, ‘says ... quite frankly that he does not know what he will do after S. Georgia.’ Perhaps Shackleton did not care what he would do. Before leaving he had written to a friend, ‘We ... go into the ice into the life that is mine and I do pray that we will make good, it is my last time’. His heart gave way on 5 January 1922. He was buried at Grytviken, South Georgia, beneath the mountains he had crossed just six years before.