When Your Life Depends on It

by Brad Borkan

  One of the challenges Wild and his men encountered was discovering how severely Queen Mary Land was beset with strong winds, which hampered their work. The winds were actually even stronger in Mawson’s base at Cape Denison, where they were near-constant hurricane force.

  Unlike the other expeditions of the era, Mawson and Wild had some rudimentary early radio communication equipment. The intention was that Cape Denison would at least be able to receive some Morse code radio communication from Wild and his team. However, the strong winds destroyed Wild’s radio mast and Mawson’s team at Cape Denison were unable to erect their mast to its full height, thus limiting its range. Despite the advantages of technology, as well as excellent planning and preparation, Wild and his team were as cut off from all communication with their ship and companions as any previous expeditions had been.

  They had supplies, but only enough to last for the duration of their planned stay. If the ship could not return, they would have been even more severely challenged than the Northern Party by a dangerous shortage of food and fuel. While they would have been more comfortable in their hut than Campbell’s and Priestley’s Northern Party were in their ice cave, the distance and difficult terrain between the two sites meant that Wild and his men could never have survived the long journey overland back to Cape Denison. Fortunately, the Aurora successfully returned to pick them up on time.

  This is another example of a big risk that paid off with everyone surviving. Even if you would have taken the six-week, two-hundred-mile drop-off, would you have taken the bigger risk of a one year, fifteen-hundred-mile drop-off?

  “These are men!” 5

  The last “all or nothing” risk to consider is one of the most famous in the history of exploration. In Chapter 3 we saw how Shackleton skillfully reframed the goal of his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition from being the first to walk from one side of Antarctica to the other, to one of bringing all of the twenty-eight men from the Endurance home alive after the ship was crushed by the ice. In Chapter 6 we saw how Frank Wild maintained order and hope when he and twenty-one other men from the Endurance were left on Elephant Island awaiting rescue.

  Now we come to the next and final section of that story. After the ice floes they were camped upon broke up, Shackleton and his men spent six days traveling in the three Endurance lifeboats, some nights camping on ice floes, until that was deemed too dangerous. With a great deal of difficulty, a tremendous amount of skill, and a bit of luck, they successfully navigated the icy waters and landed—frozen, exhausted and starving—on a small uninhabited island called Elephant Island. Named for the huge seals that live there, this rocky island was far from the path of any whaler or other ship.

  Shackleton and Worsley determined the only practicable plan for rescue was to sail the largest of the lifeboats to the whaling stations at South Georgia. It was a plan born of desperation. The likelihood of its success was small, but the consequences of failure to summon help were enormous. No one in the world knew that the Endurance had been shattered, that they were now stranded on this desolate shore. No one would come looking for them. Far from any shipping channel, they likely would not be found before all had succumbed to starvation.

  They would sail in the James Caird. Henry “Chips” McNish, the highly skilled ship’s carpenter, had previously built up the sides and reinforced the keel of the James Caird using wood from the wrecked Endurance. He caulked the seams between the wooden planks of the boat with lamp wick, and then sealed them with the expedition artist’s oil paints, and decked her over with Venesta plywood and canvas. But the James Caird was only twenty-two-and-a-half-feet long; South Georgia was eight hundred miles (1300 km) away across the most treacherous seas in the world. Waves could easily be forty- to fifty- feet high and rogue waves caused by heavy storms and winds could be much higher.

  The boat’s crew would consist of Shackleton, Worsley, Crean, McNish, McCarthy and Vincent. Against the advice of some of his men, Shackleton insisted that the James Caird be heavily loaded with ballast to keep it low in the water. Even with all these preparations, it remained a very small vessel sailing in very rough seas, manned by men who had already been weakened by exposure and poor rations from their experience of already spending more than 187 days on the ice.

  One could argue that at almost every juncture of the James Caird sea journey, the six men encountered bad luck. When they were launching the James Caird, the swell increased and many of the men got soaked to the waist. Then she almost capsized near the shore and also came close to smashing into the rocks. Vincent and McNish ended up getting thrown into the water. With no change of clothing, it was unlikely any of them would dry out for days, or possibly for the entire two-week journey.

  The list of serious challenges they encountered during their voyage was nearly endless: very rough seas that often nearly swamped the boat; reindeer sleeping bags that moulted and shed fur continuously, clogging the pump and getting into their food; and constantly damp and always uncomfortable clothing. One of their two barrels of drinking water became contaminated with salt water, so that by the end of the journey they were constantly and dangerously thirsty. Ice continually formed on the surfaces of the boat, requiring them to go out on the slippery deck in rough seas to chip it away. The boat was incredibly small and horribly uncomfortable for six men, and the pitching of the boat and the rock ballast denied them sleep.

  They hit gale force winds and storms and encountered such constantly cloudy skies that during the whole voyage, Worsley was only able to take four navigational sun sightings to confirm their course to South Georgia. On the eleventh day of the journey, Shackleton thought he saw a break in the weather, revealing some clear skies. What he was actually seeing was the crest of a rogue wave, so high above them that Shackleton in all his years at sea had never seen a wave so large. For a terrifying minute, it seemed that the James Caird must certainly break up or be swamped, and they would surely all die. Remarkably, the boat and the men survived.

  Once they did eventually reach South Georgia, they were kept offshore another day-and-a-half by a raging hurricane, before finally landing in the isolated shelter of King Haakon Bay on the wrong side of South Georgia. The only inhabited sections of the island were the whaling stations on the opposite side. Given the perilous sea journey they had just completed, the only way to reach one of them was overland, across the uncharted, unexplored mountains and glaciers of the interior.

  After several days’ rest, they decided on a course of action. With McNish and Vincent too weak to make the journey, Shackleton left McCarthy to look after them. The plan was that Shackleton, Crean and Worsley would hike across the mountains to the Stromness whaling station. With no sleeping bags or tent, no map, no climbing equipment except a large coil of rope and a carpenter’s adze, and with screws twisted through the soles of their boots to act as crampons (one can only imagine how uncomfortable that would be as the screws worked loose against the inner boot soles), a cooker, and little food, this was yet another awe-inspiring polar decision to do or die trying.

  No one had ever done this journey before, even with adequate climbing equipment. The distance to go was not great (they estimated about twenty miles or 32 km), but they knew the way would be blocked by mountains reaching possibly as high as six thousand feet, laced with glaciers and sudden drops. The journey was uncharted, the mountain passes unknown, and the Antarctic winter was about to begin.

  After several attempts to find a way up and down through the mountains, the three men reached a point where they had to make a desperate decision. They were getting weaker and could no longer afford the energy to backtrack once again to find a route through. They were at the top of a mountain pass and decided the only way down was to use the coil of rope like a toboggan and, with one man sitting behind another, slide down the mountain. They had no idea what lay at the bottom. If it was a snow bank, they would probably survive. If rocks or ice, they would be killed or severely injured; in this environment, it amounted to the s
ame thing.

  In a very rare instance of real good luck, it was snow—and they survived their exhilarating slide down the mountain. The three men continued hiking but could not stop to sleep. With no shelter or sleeping bags, sleeping on the bare snow in the mountains could easily result in death from exposure. At one point Shackleton let the other two men take a short nap. He woke them after five minutes, telling them that they had slept for half an hour. They eventually descended out of the mountains into the whaling station. They had hiked almost non-stop for more than thirty-six hours.

  The whalers sent out a boat and quickly rescued McCarthy, McNish and Vincent, and recovered the James Caird. Shackleton’s new quest was now to reach the twenty-two men still marooned on Elephant Island. Two great obstacles lay in his path—the sea ice, and the Great War then raging, limiting the availability of ships. It took Shackleton four attempts on four different ships before he reached Elephant Island on the Chilean steam tug Yelcho. Thanks to Frank Wild’s leadership, Shackleton found all twenty-two men alive—128 days after leaving them behind and embarking on the James Caird.

  In 2013, the modern explorer Tim Jarvis and his team built an exact replica of the James Caird and re-enacted Shackleton’s boat journey using period clothing, food and navigational equipment. They suffered the same privations, faced the same hazards, and proved just how dreadful was Shackleton’s boat journey, and how heroic was the overland crossing of South Georgia to reach the whaling station.

  Shackleton’s boat journey was a massive roll of the dice; the dangers were tremendous. But they never gave up believing they would survive. Despite all the bad luck, they never gave in. They never said, “We can’t do this.” They believed they could do the impossible, and they actually did.

  When you’ve taken a big risk and bad luck seems to overwhelm you, what do you do? Would you or do you just give up, or do you keep trying? Shackleton's, Crean's and Worsley’s story resonates with so many people around the world. We all encounter bouts of bad luck, but seldom any so challenging as theirs.

  5 Worsley, Frank; Shackleton’s Boat Journey, p. 216. “In the evening the manager [of the Stromness Whaling Station] told Sir Ernest that a number of old captains and sailors wished to speak to and shake hands with him and us [Worsley and Crean]. We went into a large, low room, full of captains and mates and sailors, and hazy with tobacco smoke. Three or four white-haired veterans of the sea came forward; one spoke in Norse and the manager translated. He said that he had been at sea over forty years; that he knew this stormy Southern Ocean intimately, from South Georgia to Cape Horn, from Elephant Island to the South Orkneys, and that never had he heard of such a wonderful feat of daring seamanship as bringing the twenty-two foot open boat from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and then to crown it, tramping across the snow and rocky heights of the interior, and that he felt it an honour to meet and shake hands with Sir Ernest and his comrades. He finished with a dramatic gesture:

  “‘These are men!’

  “All the seamen present then came forward and solemnly shook hands with us in turn.”

  Chapter 12

  What Is Your Higher Purpose

  Why go?

  The question posed in the title of this chapter, “What Is Your Higher Purpose?” is not an idle one. By its very title this chapter seems to want to dignify every action. But not every human endeavor has a higher purpose, nor does it need one. There is nothing specifically ennobling in just having breakfast, or taking the dog for a walk. The vast majority of everyday events, or even momentous ones, are just intrinsic responses to a pressing local need.

  The matter becomes a little more complicated when today’s activities and decisions set in motion a course of consequences unfolding over time, or affecting others. Business and social planning inevitably have a broader reach. The commitment extends into the future, with a shared sense of obligation. Even when such planning involves larger contracts and many people, its fulfilment is a matter of business ethics and common respect for others. It need not be guided by a lofty sense of principle.

  Why did these Antarctic explorers take on such monumental tasks, at such enormous risk and personal privation? Certainly there was little enough financial reward in it. Even after they returned home with geographic and scientific discoveries, the expedition leaders and others spent years lecturing, writing books and fundraising to pay the debts of the past expedition or fund the next one. There must have been something more to their drive.

  This notion of “something more” is borne out time and again in the men’s diaries and reminiscences about their experiences in the Antarctic. A few very basic words, spoken by the seaman Tom Crean, reveal one truth: “It is all for the good of science.” Science—the sum total of all human investigation into the not-yet-known, a pyramid ever-growing with the addition of each new unrecorded bit of data—was one of the guiding lights of polar expeditions during the heroic age. The other was geographical discovery. As long as there was an uncharted shore, or an unvisited place, the lure of that unknown pulled countless men into the harrowing extremes of the Poles, and sometimes did not release them.

  Heroic era

  Our stories come from the heroic era of Antarctic exploration, beginning with Scott’s 1901 Discovery Expedition. Even a casual reading of first-hand accounts written during those expeditions will prove that the term “heroic” is fitting. There is an abundance of tales of stoic endurance in the face of appalling hardship, to fulfil what today may seem to be quixotic goals. During Shackleton’s 1907-1909 Nimrod Expedition described in Chapter 10, he and three men reached their absolute limit and knew they had to turn back from their quest to the Pole, yet they pushed onward a few more miles south. Their main goal—that of being first to the Pole—was out of reach, but Shackleton wanted to be certain he had come within one hundred miles of the place. They may have been geographical miles which are somewhat longer than the more conventional statute miles, but just those few more miles even with the term geographical in front of it, somehow made his achievement in 1909 a little more worthy to him.

  Other examples include Edward Wilson’s source of strength and solace—”All will be as it is meant to be”—in a slim volume of poetry he brought on Scott’s south polar journey in 1912, from which he never returned. Charlie Green, the cook on board the doomed Endurance, cooked one last dinner for the men as the ship was in her final stages of being crushed by the ice. That last meal was eaten on board in silence, an important final ritual. At the same time, the Ross Sea Party (see Chapter 8) on the far side of Antarctica, cobbled together food and materials, and at great personal risk and sacrifice laid depots from the Ross Sea to the Beardmore Glacier, rather than renege on a promise made to Shackleton.

  There are too many similar examples to give them all scope in this chapter, but they were all the result of a conscious decision to press on, despite devastating hardship, in pursuit of an ephemeral goal that had more to do with the human spirit than with tangible reward. They all speak to the notion of a “higher purpose”—the idea that a driving force greater than sheer necessity can call forth reserves of energy untapped by everyday existence. Words like “duty” and “integrity” come to mind, but fail to capture the essence of “higher purpose.”

  Science versus discovery

  Douglas Mawson took part in the Nimrod Expedition to try to determine the precise location of the South Magnetic Pole. On October 6, 1908, Mawson, Edgeworth David, and Alistair Mackay left the relative comfort of Shackleton’s Cape Royds Hut for a 1,260-mile roundtrip across Antarctica. These three men were scientists first; explorers second. When they set out on their long journey heading west, then up and across the lofty plateau, geographical discovery was only one of their goals. Their main objective was to locate the one place in the entire Southern Hemisphere where their magnetic dip needle pointed down in a vertical line. There are only two places on Earth where this can happen—the North, and the South, Magnetic Poles.

  By careful measureme
nt, they came to that place on January 16, 1909, three months out from the hut at Cape Royds. They marked it on the chart, and noted the coordinates: 72°25’ S, 155°16’ E. Other than this positive identification of this dip needle, there was absolutely nothing to identify the Pole. It had no greater value than a confirmation of the elevation and appearance of 0º where all meridians converge onto a single point, a mathematical place on the globe, and that was all. Yet this was enough. Having determined the place, the three men turned for home, a cold and cheerless 630-mile slog down glaciers and across sea ice.

  On that day, eight hundred miles (1,300 km) to the south, their expedition mates Ernest Shackleton, Jameson Adams, Eric Marshall, and Frank Wild were camped on another piece of this enormous featureless plateau, in their quest for that other Pole, that abstract place of 90º S. Their goal was not just to locate it, but to be the first men to do so, to “bag” the South Pole and claim it for Great Britain. They had come near enough to know it would be just another point on the empty plain of ice. It would not be reached this time.

  Both parties would have a long struggle to get back to Cape Royds before the Nimrod, waiting offshore to relieve them and carry them home, would have to depart. Shackleton’s goal was vindication after his previous failure to reach the Pole; Mawson’s, to add one more invaluable piece to the growing pyramid of geo-magnetic science. Although their struggles were similar, their real successes were not. Whose name is better remembered today?

  Three penguin eggs

  Two years later, on Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition, Edward Wilson, Birdie Bowers, and Apsley Cherry-Garrard set out on a winter journey from the hut at Cape Evans to collect recently laid eggs of the emperor penguin. These penguins were suspected to have chosen the dead of the Antarctic winter for their egg laying season. To retrieve the early embryo eggs for biological analysis, someone would have to leave the security of the hut and man-haul overland to the breeding colony in the darkest, coldest, most dangerous month of the year—July.