When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  Given the late departure from Hobart, there was simply not enough time to do more for Shackleton’s overland party. It was believed—and fervently hoped—that Shackleton would have been similarly delayed on his own start, and not be coming over this same autumn.

  Despite the occasional clash of their towering egos, Mackintosh and Joyce were in general agreement as to the details being worked out as the expedition progressed. When they were not, Mackintosh’s will, and his official and natural position as leader of the party, held sway. In the first depot-laying foray, the captain was anxious to lay in as much as he could, as quickly and as far south as possible in case Shackleton had made an early start and was already on his way.

  Mackintosh wanted to take all the dogs right away, hauling overloaded sledges. Joyce wanted to take only the fittest dogs and use lightly loaded sledges to get the dogs acclimated to hard work after their long sea voyage. He feared the loss of the dogs if they were not correctly handled at this critical time.

  The aftermath of this journey proved Joyce right. Mackintosh, being the nominal leader, had his way, but he was proving ever more ineffectual as the leader of the party. Only four dogs survived to aid in the next season’s depot work.

  Unavoidable circumstances

  Some decisions must be made in the face of unavoidable circumstances. The first big obligation so blithely taken back in London could not be kept exactly as committed. The time had run out before the furthest depots could be placed, and the money had run out too. The decision had long ago been made to winter the ship in the Antarctic, and there were simply no funds to support a return to the warmer climate of Tasmania until the following spring.

  No one thought this was a good idea; the ship might easily become trapped, possibly crushed, or just as likely carried away by the pace of the drifting ice. But the die had been cast. As far as they knew, Shackleton and his men were on their way from the Weddell Sea and starting their walk across the continent. There would be no turning back for Shackleton, as there was no way Mackintosh could warn Shackleton or his team if the Ross Sea Party depots were not laid. It was risky to keep the Aurora in the ice off Cape Evans, tethered to the shore by a web of steel cables, but in the face of all other sacrifices it seemed there was no other option.

  Although it might have been gambling with the fate of the ship and every man in the Ross Sea Party, Mackintosh and the Aurora’s master, J. R. Stenhouse, agreed that it must be done. Previous experience, limited though it was, indicated that the winter ice off Cape Evans could be expected to remain fast until spring. Lying quietly just offshore, the ship would serve as a warehouse for the supplies yet to be landed. With enough steel cables to anchors deep-set in the gravel shore the ship ought to be safe, so most of the necessary gear and supplies were left on board.

  But she was not, although everything had seemed safe and secure, and going according to plan. When the first depot-laying parties set off for the south on January 25, 1915, the Aurora was anchored in open water just offshore. During their absence, the ice froze solid around her.

  Changing plans

  Until, that is, the morning of May 7, 1915 after a severe blizzard, when R.W. Richards stepped outside the hut and looked up to see that the ship was gone. Open water lapped at the previously iced-in beach. The ice had gone out in one vast, solid sheet overnight, taking the Aurora and most of the shore party’s provisions with it.

  The men on shore were marooned for at least a season and possibly more. The tents, the bulk of their provisions, the Primus stoves, the sleeping bags, and everything absolutely necessary to spend months in the field laying more depots had gone with the ship. For all they knew, the ship could have been crushed by the ice and sunk. The hope of rescue was slim; word of their fate might be years getting out.

  They had no way of knowing that the Aurora was still afloat and would remain stuck in the ice for another nine months; she moved slowly northwest with the drifting ice, powerless to escape, with tons of now useless sledging gear and rations neatly stowed in her hold. She, at least, was relatively safe.

  There were ten men stuck on shore now; six of whom were still on their depot journey. They had enough on hand to get by, themselves. But there was nowhere near enough to support the overland journeys required in the spring, to create and stock the depots for Shackleton. Yet a promise had been made. Regardless of circumstances, Mackintosh and his men agreed it must be kept.

  Reunited again in the hut at Cape Evans, they had the winter to figure out a way to keep that promise. First came the inventory. As previously noted, every sailor among them knew well the Admiral Lord Nelson’s admonition, “Do the best you can with what you’ve got.” What did they have? They raided the nearby huts—Shackleton’s 1907 hut at Cape Royds and Scott’s 1901 one at Hut Point—and gathered every item of any value. This included bolts of canvas, balding sleeping bags, battered Primus stoves, worn-out sledges, decade-old biscuits and dried preserved sledging food—everything that could be restored for use in the big push in the spring. Through their ingenuity and perseverance, they were able to develop enough food and supplies to stock a series of depots all the way to the Beardmore Glacier. Amazingly, all was going according to the plans originally made by Shackleton back in England.

  Meeting the promise would still be a massive challenge. It would take a great deal of effort for ten men to take on the work of twice their number, with four dogs standing in for the original nine that survived the voyage down, and with salvaged, damaged and worn equipment scavenged from three previous expeditions.

  More was about to be demanded of them than anyone had anticipated. All the men ashore had joined the expedition with a good idea of what would be expected, and had accepted their positions and hazardous duty pay based on that understanding. Now they needed to do so much more work, at a greater personal risk. Looking at this from a cost-benefit ratio perspective, that ratio must now be recast in a different light. A sense of ultimate adventure and the reward of being part of a noble and heroic undertaking had now become overshadowed by the formidable task of moving tons of supplies hundreds of miles with far too few resources to sustain the effort.

  At what point would lesser men have thrown in the towel, and accepted that they could not fulfil their promise? No one in the hut that winter fully appreciated the sacrifices that would have to be made to keep their promise, but surely they must have had an inkling of the difficulty.

  A promise made is a promise kept

  The fulfilment of their promise was the result of a series of conscious decisions made on the spot: what must be done, how can it be done with the resources at hand, who will be the ones to go out onto the trail, and when will they begin? Such decisions are identical to those that are made countless times, in the everyday lives of countless people and in ongoing business decisions that in the end result in profit or loss, success or failure. We have an idea of what we must do, and an inventory of what is at hand to do it.

  There was never a discussion of facing up to the reality of the situation, and reneging on their promise. The commitment to others was too great to ignore, but there were additional forces at work. They must work together to do their level best to get the job done, or bear the weight of guilt for not having tried hard enough. There were also obligations to the expedition and to the sacrifices great and small of every man involved, as well as to the higher purpose of exploration and discovery. Each man looked deep into his own heart and found his own answers. They were remarkably united in purpose.

  After careful consideration over the course of that first winter, it became clear that everyone must pull his own weight equally to get the job done. The stores must be advanced in successive relays, by three-man teams. The distances were such that no single team could take a load for the whole distance; no fewer than three teams would be needed. Nine out of the ten men must be away in the field; the last must be content to wait behind, alone for upwards of four months, while the others completed the work. The sheer braver
y of what they planned is still admired, more than a hundred years after the event.

  Anything less than total unity of purpose would have doomed this plan, its participants, and the lives of those coming overland relying on its completion. The psychological factor of apparently unanimous and unconditional support cannot be underestimated. More than a matter of mere group-think, it can play a defining role in group decisionmaking no matter what the era or import of the decision. Not one of these ten men would want to be forever known as the shirker who declined to take on his equal share of the effort and the risk to fulfil the promise.

  In an interesting contrast, one might ask how a modern team would have coped. Would contemporary values of diversity of thought have led to insurmountable conflicts, and in the end, a failure to carry out the mission’s vital goal?

  Best balance of skills

  Their plan was that the nine fittest men would take on the sledging job, leaving Alexander Stevens alone in the hut to keep the meteorological records at Cape Evans. Three teams of three men each would take to the field as early as possible to sledge the depot supplies overland four hundred miles (644 km) to the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. With so few men, and the bare minimum of sledging equipment and supplies for themselves, the plan would be extremely dangerous. The breakdown of any one of the three Primus stoves would doom the men in that tent to a cold death on the Barrier. If one man succumbed to frostbite or scurvy, the others in his team would have to decide whether to carry on, or retreat to save their own lives at the expense of Shackleton and his team, who would search in vain for depots that were never laid.

  By the time spring arrived, each was ready to risk all to do his part. Whatever reservations any one of them had felt about the upcoming campaign were now submerged beneath the group decision to do their utmost to lay the depots. In early spring—too early, in the bitterly cold September of 1915—all the available resources were gathered at Hut Point, and the long process of conveying two thousand pounds of food and fuel over the Barrier began. Each three-man team would drag a heavy load forward over the Barrier, then go back for another. The three teams leapfrogged each other in parallel routes, sometimes in company, but more often isolated and on their own.

  The three teams were chosen as far as practicable to have the best balance of skills—polar experience, physical durability, and leadership capacity—but there was not much to choose from. Ninety percent of the staff on hand must be pressed into duty regardless of their skills. Each team’s tasks within the overall regime of the depot-laying was much the same: follow the schedule as best you can, do the work assigned to you, and get back safely at the end of it.

  Once departed from the hut, each team was entirely on their own. The decisions once made collectively by a group of ten must now be made separately by the men in the three isolated tents. There was an unwavering commitment to the overall task—to lay the depots where they were expected to be found.

  To those doing it, the work seemed endless; day after day of slow walking in harness, hauling along a heavily-weighted sledge through a dismal and often obscured landscape of ice. The four dogs remaining were of little real help. Frostbite and snow blindness were a constant risk and caused unending misery. Under duress, the unity was collapsing; disharmony split the parties. Mackintosh forged ahead, leaving Joyce in charge of five other men hauling a staggering load amounting to 232 pounds each.

  When their Primus stove broke down, one of the three-man parties was sent back to their base, leaving the other six men to fulfil the promise. Farther out on the Barrier, one of those men, stricken by scurvy, gave out a hundred miles (160 km) short of the Beardmore Glacier. This sick man, Padre Arnold Spencer-Smith, suggested to the others that they ought to leave him behind and continue on to the Beardmore without him. He could stay in one of the two tents, and the other five men would have to crowd into a tent designed for three. It was an awkward plan, but they all agreed to it. Here again was proof that these men considered that a promise made would be a promise kept, regardless of the personal sacrifice. This commitment had become much more than the fulfilment of a contract. It was a matter of honor.

  A question of leadership

  Another formidable strain on the decision process arose on the Barrier hundreds of miles from home, when the nominal leader of the combined parties, Aeneas Mackintosh, weakened by scurvy, informally handed over the leadership role to Ernest Joyce. For all his experience as a veteran of the Antarctic, Joyce had no inherent capacity for leadership. He was, as he had always been, one of the men and not an officer. He was a sailor who was used to receiving and following orders, not giving them.

  Now the others were looking to him for leadership, for a natural capacity to judge not only the nature of the weather and sledging equipment, but also that of the men he was now expected to lead. He was sadly lacking. Still, a void must be filled, and Joyce, with Richards’ support and the compliance of Mackintosh and the other two, was the man to fill it.

  Thankfully, raw experience in the field would be enough to see all the men back to the hut. All but the Padre who waited for them, alone on the ice, ten thousand miles (16,000 km) from home. Too weakened by scurvy by the time they picked him up on the way back, he died long before they reached home. Months in the field without fresh food will do that to a body. On the journey back, both Mackintosh and Victor Hayward also became too weak to walk. The other three men willingly dragged their near-lifeless bodies on the sledges the last miles to Hut Point.

  It was late in the Antarctic autumn, but the sea surface between the Discovery Hut and Cape Evans had not yet frozen. The survivors would have to lay up, surviving on cached frozen seal meat until the sea froze and they could walk across to the much better supplied hut at Cape Evans. Thin weak ice would appear, only to drift away again before it became firm enough to support the weight of a man. The weakened men recovered from the scurvy on their diet of relatively fresh food, and were soon fit enough to consider walking over to Cape Evans as soon as the ice would allow.

  Mackintosh, ever headstrong, was anxious to be off. As the officially designated leader, there was no one who could overrule his decisions. He convinced Hayward to join him in the last leg of the depot journey, home to Cape Evans. Joyce, Richards, and Ernest Wild stayed on at the hut, heeding the wisdom of Joyce to wait until the ice was stronger before starting out. The next day Joyce, Richards and Wild followed the footsteps of their companions out to where they abruptly ended at the edge of the fast ice.

  In this sad footnote to the heroic commitment of the Ross Sea Party, two more men were dead, this time due to the ill-considered advice of a man accustomed to the role of leadership but not always able to make the best decisions. There are lessons to be taken here. Ironically these were the two men who had been most stricken by scurvy, but were dragged back to safety by Joyce, Richards and Wild, and could have lived to proudly tell the tale of how they had kept their promise to Shackleton.

  Keeping the faith

  As noted earlier, the Aurora did not sink. Encased in ice, she drifted for nine months until that ice broke up and freed her. Damaged from exposure, she eventually made it to New Zealand. The fates of the ten men left marooned at Cape Evans, and of Shackleton, remained for a time unknown to the outside world.

  The Endurance had been crushed in the ice of the Weddell Sea, but in the end all twenty-eight of her men survived. Their stories can be found in Chapters 3, 5 and 11. After the rescue of his men on Elephant Island, Shackleton himself was no longer in charge of his own expedition. He made it to New Zealand in time to board the Aurora, which had safely landed and was now refitted for the relief journey south. She sailed on December 20, 1916. Seven of the ten men of the Ross Sea Party were picked up and lived to come home and tell the tale. The depots that they laid with such great commitment and at such tremendous personal sacrifice remained covered with snow. They had kept their promise to Shackleton.

  In looking back at what the Ross Sea Party achieved, it is al
l the more remarkable to note that when Mackintosh and his men were assembling the provisions and laying the depots for Shackleton’s team, despite their own highly limited rations, Mackintosh and his men had at no time dipped into the rations and supplies reserved for Shackleton.

  Were their efforts wasted? Those depots, the end result of decisions made to honor a commitment, are an illumination of a higher purpose—that when we have made a promise, we can do everything within our power to keep it. The depots remain to this day—unused on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica—a testament to this principle.

  By comparison, many of the promises made in our modern lives seem so easy. Would you make the sacrifices to fulfil a promise, the way Mackintosh and his men did? Even if you did, how would you feel upon learning that the depots were laid completely in vain, as Shackleton and his men never even started their march across Antarctica?

  In the next chapter, called, Do You Agree All Is Fair In Love, War And Polar Exploration? we’ll explore other types of decisions and promises, especially those made between the expedition leaders themselves. As for how Mackintosh’s men felt about their great effort in laying the depots that were never to be used, we’ll let them answer that in Chapter 12, What Is Your Greater Purpose?

  Chapter 9

  Do You Agree All Is Fair In Love, War And Polar Exploration?

  Discovery or victory: the double face of polar exploration.

  The grand goals set forth for any expedition are not for the weak of constitution or the faint of heart. The successful leaders of the heroic age had more than just youth, health and a clear goal in mind. They all had ambition, coupled with a very strong sense of personal destiny. Each of them felt that it was his obligation to find his rightful place in history by bringing his discoveries home to a grateful nation.