The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

by Caroline Alexander

  Shackleton had much to tell both his men and the outside world. But the letter he dashed off to his wife on landing again in Punta Arenas stated only the essentials.

  “I have done it. Damn the Admiralty.… Not a life lost and we have been through Hell.”

  The Yelcho, triumphant. This photograph capturing the little tug's return to port was taken by a

  Mr. Vega, who was, according to Hurley, the town's leading photographer.

  “3rd September Sunday. Beautiful sunrise, with fine mist effects over the hills & distant mts. surrounding Punta Arenas. Shortly after 7 a.m. Sir E. rowed ashore & telephoned our arrival on to Punta Arenas, so that the populace might roll up and greet us after church, we being due to arrive at 12 noon. The Yelcho was bedecked with flags.…On nearing the jetty we were deafened by the tooting of whistles & cheering motor craft, which was taken up by the vast gathering on the piers & water-fronts.” ( Hurley, diary)

  “To My Comrades”

  So on the deep and open sea I set

  Forth, with a single ship and that small band

  Of comrades that had never left me yet.

  —DANTE, “VOYA GE OF ULYSSES,” L'Inferno

  “Tell me, when was the war over?” Shackleton had asked Sørlle, on arriving at Stromness Station after crossing South Georgia.

  “The war is not over,” Sørlle had replied. “Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.”

  During their ordeal on the ice, the war had been a frequent topic of conversation, with the men chiefly concerned that they would miss it entirely by the time they got home. Before boarding the Yelcho, Shackleton had taken pains to collect mail that had been waiting for the men at South Georgia, as well as newspapers, to give them some idea of what they had missed in the nearly two years they had been out of touch with the world.

  “ ‘Opinions have changed on all sorts of subjects,' “ Lees reports Shackleton as telling them on the Yelcho. “‘They call it the Roll of Honour now instead of the Casualty List.'”

  “The reader may not realize quite how difficult it was for us to envisage nearly two years of the most stupendous war of history,” wrote Shackleton, in his own book, South. “The locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of Nurse Cavell, the use of poison-gas and liquid fire, the submarine war fare, the Gallipoli campaign, the hundred other incidents of the war, almost stunned us at first.… I suppose our experience was unique. No other civilized men could have been as blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings as we were when we reached Stromness Whaling Station.”

  The war had changed everything—and most of all the heroic ideal. With millions of Europe's young men dead, Britain was not particularly interested in survival sto ries. The news of the Endurance expedition was so extraordinary that it could not fail to fill popular headlines; but Shackleton's official reception was markedly cool. Facetiously describing his arrival in Stanley, in the Falklands, after the failure of the Southern Sky rescue mission, the paper John Bull gave this account.

  “Not a soul in Stanley seemed to care one scrap [about his arrival]! Not a single flag was flown.… An old kelper remarked, ‘ 'E ought ter 'ave been at the war long ago instead of messing about on icebergs.'”

  In Punta Arenas, Shackleton and his men received an almost riotous welcome, with the town's various nationalities—including the Germans, with whom Britain was at war—pouring out with bands and flags to greet them. Shackleton had cannily stopped off in Río Seco, some six miles away, to alert Punta Arenas by telephone of his imminent arrival. The Foreign Office was quick to see publicity value in his popularity, and encouraged Shackleton to call upon those governments that had come to his assistance. And so with a handful of his men, he went to Santiago, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. Pointedly, he paid no visit to the British Falklands.

  The Endurance expedition ended on October 8, 1916, in Buenos Aires, but Shackle-ton still had work to do. The other half of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the Ross Sea depot-laying party on the opposite side of the globe, had gone adrift, literally: The expedition's ship Aurora had come untethered from her mooring and then been prevented from returning to “port” by the pack ice. Another saga of survival—involving one of the most formidable feats of man-hauling sledging in Antarctic exploration—had unfolded on the snow and ice where Shackleton had first won renown as a polar explorer. Three lives had been lost. Shackleton was therefore bound back to the Antarctic to pick up the pieces of his expedition.

  At the Buenos Aires railway station, Shackleton said goodbye to his men who had come to see him off. It was the last time so many members of the expedition—all but Blackborow and Hudson—would be gathered together.

  “We have properly broken up,” Macklin wrote. With few exceptions, most were to be on their way back to Britain. Blackborow was in the hospital in Punta Arenas and was the object of doting attention from the city's female population; Bakewell was staying on.

  “When I joined the expedition, I asked that I might be paid off at Buenos Aires on our return,” wrote Bakewell. “Sir Ernest consented to my wish and now I was at the parting of the way. I had to say good-bye to the finest group of men that it has ever been my good fortune to be with.”

  Hudson—the invalid, the indisposed, he of the “general breakdown”— had already left, eager to take up his commission and be of service to his country. While on Elephant Island, the two doctors had drained his terrible abscess, which had grown to the size of a football, and this operation seemed to have put him on his way to recovery. The detached stupor in which he had reportedly spent most of the time on Elephant Island may have resulted from the fever that would have inevitably accompanied such a deep infection.

  Hurley, having quickly tired of the celebratory receptions, spent long days in a darkroom made available to him by a generous local photographer.

  “All the plates which were exposed on the wreck nearly twelve months ago turned out excellently,” he wrote. “The small Kodak film suffered through the protracted keeping but will be printable.”

  From Punta Arenas, Shackleton telegraphed long articles to the Daily Chronicle in London.

  “Relief of the Marooned Explorers.” “Shackleton Safe.” “Shackleton's Men Rescued.” The stories continued to run well into December.

  Hurley arrived in Liverpool on November 11.

  “The customs occupied considerable time,” he wrote, “especially with the film, which was weighed—a method of estimating the length & charged an import duty of 5d per foot. The entire film netted a customs revenue of 120 pounds.” Travelling to London by train, he went straight to the offices of the Daily Chronicle and handed over the film to Ernest Perris. For the next three months, Hurley worked single-mindedly on the development of his photographs, his motion picture film, lantern slides to be used in lectures, and the preparation of albums of selected images. Dramatic spreads appeared in some of the papers (the Chronicle, the Daily Mail, the Sphere), and he was greatly satisfied with a display of his Paget Colour Plates at the Polytechnic Hall; here, projected on a screen eighteen feet square, the Endurance soared out of the darkness under a luminous yet icy sky, once more to grapple with her fate.

  As early as November 15, Hurley had decided to return to South Georgia to acquire wildlife photographs, hoping to reproduce the ones he had been forced to jettison on the ice. The sojourn in England was pleasant, despite the fact that “London possesses the worst climate I have ever yet experienced, as regards producing colds and sickness.” During this period, he frequently saw James, Wordie, Clark, and Greenstreet.

  The South Georgia trip was successful, and after several weeks of characteristically intense work, Hurley returned to London in June 1917, and handed over another batch of film and plates to Perris. The film, In the Grip of the Polar Pack, was released in 1919, after the war, to much acclaim.

  Why Shackleton had never liked and indeed deeply mistrusted Hurley is not clear; he had taken considerable p
ains to cater to his vanity on the ice, including him in all important counsels. For his part, Hurley expressed his admiration for Shackleton both openly and privately in his diary. Hurley was bombastic, vain, arrogant, high-handed, not easy to get on with—but above all he was eminently capable. Stoves, electrical plants, improvised boat pumps, stone galley walls—many contrivances that had materially benefitted the party throughout the expedition—had been the work of his huge hands. Was this the problem? Did this multitalented, hard as nails, cocksure Aussie strike Shackleton as being the kind of man who might in certain situations have felt himself to be above Shackleton's own authority?

  The film went a long way in paying off the expeditionary debts awaiting Shackle-ton when he at last returned to England in May 1917. After the relief of the Ross Sea party, he made a whirlwind lecture tour across America, which had just entered the war. Now, his immediate concern was to secure some position in the war effort. Although legally exempt from service at age forty-two, and bone-weary, Shackleton knew that service of some kind would be essential to winning support for whatever venture he might undertake in the future. His return to England had received scant attention; there would be no more heroes who were not war heroes.

  Months passed. Thirty of his men from both the Weddell and Ross Sea parties were actively in service, and still Shackleton could find no commission. He was drinking and restless, spending little time at home; in London, he could often be found in the company of his American mistress, Rosalind Chetwynd. Eventually, through the intervention of Sir Edward Carson, former First Lord of the Admiralty (and former legal defense for the Marquis of Queensberry in the libel suit brought against him by Oscar Wilde), Shackleton was sent on a propaganda mission to South America. His vague assignment was to raise morale, promote the British war effort, and report on the propaganda efforts already in place.

  He left for Buenos Aires in October 1917, and was back in London in April 1918. He had still not had the satisfaction of being in uniform. Once again, he embarked on rounds of dead-end interviews, attempting to obtain a proper commission. A series of various small commissions eventually landed him in Spitsbergen and finally in Murmansk, Russia, where his official title was “staff officer in charge of Arctic Transport.” At least he was with some old companions. At his request, Frank Wild had been released from duties in Archangel to be his assistant. McIlroy, who had been gravely wounded in Ypres, had been invalided out of the army. Hussey was there and later Macklin, who had been in France. Also sent to this polar outpost were a few of Scott's old men, who remained unsympathetic, if not hostile, to Shackleton. That Scott and his men had died of scurvy was still officially denied, as it implied mismanagement; the men of the Endurance had been in the ice for nearly two years without a sign of this disease, thanks to Shackleton's insistence, from the first days of the Endurance's entrapment in the ice, on the consumption of fresh meat.

  When the war ended, Shackleton was adrift again. While still in New Zealand, he had dictated the most critical parts of South to Edward Saunders, the collaborator on his first book. In 1919, South was at last published, written by Saunders and drawing from Shackleton's extensive dictation and the diaries of the expedition members. Given this method of composition, the account is remarkably accurate. Names and dates are sometimes muddled and so, occasionally, is the order of events (such as on the James Caird journey). It downplays a number of episodes but omits surprisingly few. There is no mention of McNish's rebellion, for example. Shackleton dedicated the book “To My Comrades.”

  The book was critically acclaimed and sold well. Shackleton, however, received no royalties from it. The executors of one of his expedition's benefactors, Sir Robert Lucas-Tooth, who had died in 1915, hounded him for repayment. By way of settlement, Shackleton handed over all rights to South, his only asset.

  J. A. McIlroy

  Worldly and debonair, McIlroy had travelled widely in the East before joining the Endurance as ship's surgeon.

  At the end of the war, Shackleton was characteristically broke, in not particularly good health and at loose ends. He was now rarely with his wife, for whom he nonetheless continued to express devotion, and lived mainly in the Mayfair flat of his mistress. Against his every inclination, financial necessity compelled him to hit the lecture circuit, telling the story of the thwarted Endurance expedition, now years past, to half-filled halls, while behind him, Hurley's luminous lantern slides evoked haunting memories. In preparing these slides, Hurley had perfected an ingenious method of composite image making, whereby photographs of wildlife were superimposed upon stretches of empty ice, for example, or any number of scenes were set against spectacularly back-lit clouds—his trademark. The purpose of the photographs had always been commercial, and Hurley seems to have had no compunction about this kind of manipulation.

  In 1920, Shackleton suddenly announced a yearning to return to polar regions— whether north or south did not seem to matter. One last time, he hustled his way around London, seeking sponsorship, until eventually an old school chum from Dulwich, John Quiller Rowett, came to his aid, agreeing to underwrite the entire ill-defined enterprise.

  Animated as he had not been in years, Shackleton sent word to old Endurance hands that he was headed south once again. McIlroy and Wild came from Nyasaland, in southern Africa, where they had been farming cotton; Green returned as cook.

  Hussey came with his banjo, as well as Macklin, who had become one of Shackleton's closest friends. McLeod, the old shellback from Nimrod days, returned, as well as Kerr; Worsley was to be skipper.

  Their ship, the Quest, was a lumbering former sealer that required repairs in every port of call. No sledging dogs were on board this time, just a single canine pet, named Query. Even as she set out, it was unclear exactly where the Quest was headed or what the purpose of this “expedition” was; plans ranged from circumnavigating the Antarctic continent to looking for Captain Kidd's treasure. It didn't matter. All on board were there to bask in the atmosphere of adventure, or of memories.

  The Quest departed from London on September 17, 1921, seen off by a large, cheering crowd. Film footage from the expedition shows Shackleton as a somewhat stout, middle-aged man wearing suspenders: One could picture him with rolled-up trousers dabbling in the shallows at the beach. All his companions sensed he was not his former self, and Macklin and McIlroy were gravely concerned about his health. In Rio, Shackleton suffered a heart attack but refused to be examined, let alone turn back. He recovered, and the Quest continued south.

  En route, the Quest encountered an unexpected apparition—an old-time five-masted square-rigged ship, the France. Excitedly, Shackleton's men ran their ship close by in order to take photographs. It was, for these veterans of the heroic age, a brush with an all-but-vanished era, and they regarded the vessel wistfully from their own lumbering ship.

  On January 4, after a stormy passage, the Quest arrived in South Georgia. “At last,” wrote Shackleton in his diary, “we came to anchor in Grytviken. How familiar the coast seemed as we passed down: we saw with full interest the places we struggled over after the boat journey.… The old familiar smell of dead whale permeates everything. It is a strange and curious place.… A wonderful evening.

  In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover

  Gem-like above the bay.”

  “The Boss says … quite frankly that he does not know what he will do after S. Georgia,” Macklin had written, only five days earlier.

  In South Georgia Shackleton found a number of the old-stagers still manning the station. He was warmly greeted by Fridthjof Jacobsen, still Grytviken's manager, and the men went ashore and looked over the old haunts where they had passed a month while the Endurance lay at anchor. Enjoying the beautiful weather, they went walking in the hills, then sat and watched the gulls and terns. In the spot where they had exercised the sledging dogs, they now threw sticks for Query.

  At the end of the day, they returned to the ship and had dinner on board. After the meal, Shackle
ton rose and jokingly announced, “To-morrow we'll keep Christmas.” At two in the morning, Macklin was summoned by a whistle to Shackleton's cabin.

  “I noticed that although it was a cold night he had only one blanket, and asked him if he had no others,” wrote Macklin in a revealing passage, which suggests that he had for some time acted as a kind of furtive nurse to the Boss. “He replied that they were in his bottom drawer and he could not be bothered getting them out. I started to do so, but he said, ‘Never mind to-night, I can stand the cold.' However, I went back to my cabin and got a heavy Jaeger blanket from my bunk, which I tucked around him.”

  Macklin sat with him quietly for some minutes, and took the opportunity to suggest that he might take things easy in the future.

  “You are always wanting me to give up something,” replied the Boss. “What do you want me to give up now?” These were Shackleton's last words. A massive heart attack took him suddenly, and he died at 2:50 a.m.; he was only forty-seven years old. Macklin, upon whom fell the task of conducting an autopsy, diagnosed the cause of death as “atheroma of the coronary arteries,” a long-standing condition exacerbated, in Macklin's opinion, by “overstrain during a period of debility.” Macklin had in mind not the more recent ordeal of the Endurance expedition, but the strain of his Farthest South, as far back as 1909.

  Hussey volunteered to accompany Shackleton's body back to England, but in Montevideo, he was intercepted by a message from Shackleton's wife, Emily, requesting that her husband be buried in South Georgia; the thought of his restless spirit closeted in the narrow rank and file of a British cemetery was insupportable. Hussey turned back, and on March 5, Shackleton was laid to rest among the Norwegian whalers who had, perhaps, above all other men on earth best comprehended his achievements. The small band of men who had stuck with him to the end were at his simple funeral. Hussey played Brahms's “Lullaby” on his banjo, then Shackleton's spirit was left alone with the harsh grandeur of the landscape that had forged his greatness.