The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

by Caroline Alexander

  Although Shackleton had dreamt his whole life of achieving success in ordinary, civilian circumstances, he seemed to understand that he would never do so.

  “Sometimes I think I am no good at anything but being away in the wilds just with men,” Shackleton had written to his wife in 1919. He would be remembered not so much for his own accomplishment—the 1909 expedition that attained the farthest South—as for what he was capable of drawing out of others.

  “Shackleton's popularity among those he led was due to the fact that he was not the sort of man who could do only big and spectacular things,” Worsley wrote. “When occasion demanded he would attend personally to the smallest details.… Sometimes it would appear to the thoughtless that his care amounted almost to fussiness, and it was only afterwards that we understood the supreme importance of his ceaseless watchfulness.” Behind every calculated word and gesture lay the single-minded determination to do what was best for his men. At the core of Shackleton's gift for leadership in crisis was an adamantine conviction that quite ordinary individuals were capable of heroic feats if the circumstances required; the weak and the strong could and must survive together. The mystique that Shackleton acquired as a leader may partly be attributed to the fact that he elicited from his men strength and endurance they had never imagined they possessed; he ennobled them.

  Shackleton did not attain the recognition accorded to Scott. England had room for only one great polar explorer in its pantheon, and coming after the First World War, the memory of the doomed, tragic youthful hero who had died in bringing honor to his country was better suited to the national mood of mourning.

  Shackleton nonetheless achieved an unexpected place in the collective imagination. His account of the mysterious presence that had guided him, Worsley, and Crean across South Georgia haunted T. S. Eliot, who evoked it in The Waste Land:

  Who is the third who walks always beside you?

  When I count, there are only you and I together

  But when I look ahead up the white road

  There is always another one walking beside you.

  The James Caird, the most tangible relic of his endeavors, eventually made her way to Shackleton's old school, Dulwich College, where she still resides.

  After Shackleton's death, the Quest doggedly continued under the command of Frank Wild. At the end of this somewhat meandering journey, Wild took the ship to within sight of Elephant Island, although he did not land.

  “Few of us thought when we left it last that it would ever be our fate to see it again,” Macklin wrote. “Ah what memories what memories!— they rush to one like a great flood & bring tears to ones eyes, & as I sit & try to write a great rush of feeling comes over me & I find I cannot express myself or what I feel. Once more I see the little boat, Frankie Wild's hut, dark & dirty, but a snug little shelter all the same. Once more I see the old faces & hear the old voices—old friends scattered everywhere. But to express all I feel is impossible.”

  Although the world to which Shackleton and his men returned was indeed greatly changed from the one they had left behind, it must be allowed that the “old age,” and its skills and values, were in decline even as the Endurance departed from London in 1914. When Shackleton had been in Buenos Aires, looking for replacements for his crew, he had been especially pleased to find Bakewell, whose years of experience in sailing vessels was becoming an increasingly rare commodity in an age when steam travel was slowly claiming the seas. Shackleton's entrepreneurial method of financing his expedition was itself indicative of a new order, one in which energetic, ambitious men would seek to force their own opportunity, with or without the kind of patronage that had blessed Scott. The Endurance had never been intended for heroic endeavor, but was originally built as a tourist vessel to convey wealthy clients on polar safaris to the Arctic; this was why she had been such a comfortable, well-equipped little vessel. Likewise, in this increasingly sophisticated age, photo and story rights for whatever adventure might transpire had been sold well in advance; that a book would be the outcome of their experience was never completely out of the crew's mind, and at critical junctures Shackleton had made sure that the diarists and Hurley preserved their work.

  “With a boat …we could reach the seals we occasionally see out on the floes,” Lees had written, in June 1916, while they were on Elephant Island. “But if we had everything we wanted we should have no privations to write about and that would be a serious loss to the ‘book.' Privations make a book sell like anything.”

  Many of the Endurance crew did very well in their post-expedition life, but others did not adjust to the loss of the old order that had been swept away by the war. The lives of the men who had participated in one of the greatest survival stories in expeditionary history took very different courses.

  In February 1918, the London Telegraph ran a half-column story under the heading “Antarctic Expedition: The Polar Medal.” There followed a list of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition members and a brief account of their ordeal. One of the awards was already posthumous; four months after landing the James Caird on South Georgia Island—three weeks after arriving in England—Tim McCarthy was killed at his gun in the Channel. Not much later, Alf Cheetham, who was said to have crossed the Antarctic Circle more times than any of the other men, would be drowned when his minesweeper was torpedoed by a German submarine off the River Humber, a few weeks before Armistice.

  Strikingly, four names are missing from the roster: Shackleton had not recommended Stephenson and Holness for the medal, nor two members of the James Caird crew, Vincent and McNish. Vincent's collapse and McNish's brief rebellion had cost them dearly. Because there was never a formal award ceremony, the majority of the expedition members did not learn for many years that some of their companions had been excluded.

  Macklin, who had come to be very close to Shackleton, was shaken when he did learn. He wrote to one of Shackleton's biographers:

  Of all men in the party no-one more deserved recognition than the old carpenter.… He was not only a skilled carpenter but a very knowledgeable seaman. All the work he did was first class… and his efforts to save the crushed Endurance, standing most of the time in icy water, deserved all praise.… Chippy had an unfortunate manner … and he did not hesitate to give backchat to anyone with whom he did not agree, including Shackleton, who I do not think minded very much, and particularly to Worsley for whose erratic temperament and wild actions he had no admiration at all, and did not hesitate to let him know. Worsley as a result disliked Chippy—it was mutual antipathy which led to the incident on the floe. I think Worsley may have influenced Shackleton in this respect in the later stages of the expedition when they were so much together. I would regard the withholding of the Polar Medal from McNeish as a grave injustice. I think too that the withholding of the medal from the three trawlermen was a bit hard. They were perhaps not very endearing characters but they never let the expedition down.

  After coming home to England, McNish returned to sea. Throughout his diary, he had addressed affectionate asides to his “Loved One” and daughter; but this unknown woman from Cathcart, Scotland, does not seem to have remained in his life. He retired and lived with his son and his family for some years before one day announcing that he was going to New Zealand.

  “And what are you thinking of, a man of your age?” his daughter-in-law remonstrated. “Don't worry, lass, I've got a job there,” said Chippy. A few days later, a horse-drawn cart arrived to take his old sea chest, and that was the last his family saw or heard of him.

  McNish complained that his bones ached permanently after the James Caird journey. Ill health and drink left him unable to work, and eventually he became destitute. To the seamen of the Wellington docks, however, the carpenter of the James Caird was a hero, and the watchman turned a blind eye whenever the old man crawled into a wharf shed at night to sleep under a tarpaulin. A monthly collection was taken up by the wharf brotherhood for him and others down on their luck, and on this he maintaine
d himself until a place was found for him, two years before his death, in Wellington's Ohiro rest home.

  At the end of his life, McNish was filled with bitterness towards Shackleton—not for withholding the Polar Medal, nor for his general abandonment, but because Shackleton had killed his cat. People who knew him in his last years recall how he managed to work into every conversation the death of Mrs. Chippy. Alone, broken, with his heroism an abstract dream, Chippy McNish's thoughts turned to his one true mate, who he had boasted to a fellow seaman “had been such a special pet that she was known as Mrs. Chippy to the whole expedition.”

  McNish died in 1930, and for a pauper received an uncommon funeral. His pallbearers were drawn from a Royal Navy ship, and the New Zealand Army supplied a gun carriage to carry his coffin. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Karori Cemetery, over which, in 1957, the New Zealand Antarctic Society erected a headstone. McNish left only a single possession of any value—the diary he had kept on the Endurance.

  Vincent became the skipper of a trawler, and died of pneumonia in his bunk on a date unknown. A single material record of his later life is known; an unexpectedly gracious letter that he wrote to Hudson's mother, assuring her that her son— whom he had last seen utterly incapacitated by exposure and frostbite on Elephant Island—was doing very well and had never failed to pull his weight. Holness also went back to the trawlers and was washed overboard in a storm. Stephenson died of cancer in a hospital in Hull.

  Tom McLeod settled in Canada, fishing for two years off Bell's Island. He never married, claiming he “never had enough money to buy a house in which to put a wife.” Unbeknownst to Shackleton, McLeod had secretly retrieved the Bible that the Boss had deposited on the ice after the breakup of the Endurance, believing it would be bad luck to leave it. He presented it to the family who looked after him in Punta Arenas, and they in turn presented it many years later to the Royal Geographical Society—where it remains, the pages torn from the Book of Job still missing. McLeod died at the age of eighty-seven, in a rest home in Canada.

  Blackborow arrived back in Wales in late December, several months after his companions, and received a festive, enthusiastic welcome from his whole street. He volunteered for the navy, but was rejected on medical grounds, and so returned to sea until the end of the war, when he joined his father working at the Newport docks. He was often invited to speak about his experience, but was reluctant to do so and spoke instead of his companions. Although he wore a block shoe on his damaged foot, he never mentioned it, and had assiduously trained himself to walk without a limp. He stayed in touch with his old mates Bakewell and How; to this day, the descendents of these men have kept up correspondence. Blackborow died in 1949, at the age of fifty-four, of a heart condition and chronic bronchitis.

  Bakewell stayed on in South America, sheep farming in Patagonia for a year; his subsequent occupations included merchant seaman, railroad switchman, and farmer. He settled in Dukes, Michigan, in 1945, where he worked as a dairy farmer and raised his daughter. In 1964, he was invited to England to attend the fiftieth anniversary of the departure of the expedition. His Michigan neighbors never knew of his adventures —since it was a British expedition, he figured they wouldn't be interested. He died at the age of eighty-one, in 1969.

  After serving in the Royal Navy during the war, Rickinson became a naval architect and consulting engineer, and died in 1945. Kerr continued with the Merchant Service until his retirement. Hussey, whose heart, perhaps, had never been in his meteorological duties, became a medical doctor after serving in two world wars. During his lifetime he lectured frequently on the expedition. Although married he had no children, but before his death handed over his lecture notes and lantern slides to a young man he had chosen as his heir, with the injunction “to keep alive the story of the Endurance.“

  Marston collaborated with Hurley on a number of painted/photographic composites. In 1925, he joined an organization established to regenerate and support rural industries. He died in 1940, at the age of fifty-eight, of coronary thrombosis.

  Hudson, after serving on mystery, or “Q,” ships during the war, joined the British India Navigation Society. His health had been permanently impaired by the boat journey, frostbite having maimed his hands and caused necrosis of the bone of the lower back. At the time of his death he was a commodore of convoys in the Royal Naval Reserve, during the Second World War. He had returned from a Russian convoy when he was asked to take another mission to Gibraltar. He could have refused, but did not, and he was killed on his return trip.

  After serving on a minesweeper during the war, Clark eventually took up an appointment at a fishery research station near Aberdeen, writing research papers on herring larvae and haddock investigations. He was locally renowned for his football and cricket prowess. He died in Aberdeen in 1950, at the age of sixty-eight.

  In 1937, James immigrated to South Africa, where he took up the Chair of Physics at the University of Cape Town, eventually becoming vice-chancellor. During his tenure, he spoke out publically for the right to admit non-European students to the university. He died in 1964, aged seventy-three.

  Wordie, later Sir James Wordie, became a highly distinguished geologist, president of the Royal Geographical Society, and the master of St. John's College, Cambridge. His expedition work in the Arctic received numerous awards, and he was responsible for inspiring a number of the next generation of polar explorers. He died in 1962, like his friend James at the age of seventy-three.

  After serving as a medical officer in the war—for which he received a number of decorations, including the Military Cross—Macklin settled in Aberdeen. He eventually became head of Student Health Services at the University of Aberdeen, and remained in close contact with Clark. Macklin became one of the most important “historians” of both the Endurance expedition and Shackleton's later life. He died in 1967, aged seventy-seven. McIlroy joined the Orient Line after the war, and was aboard a vessel torpedoed in World War II. He endured a second open-boat journey before being rescued by the Vichy and taken to a camp in Sudan. He died in his eighties, a bachelor, but reportedly with girlfriends to the end.

  Lees, while still in Punta Arenas, obtained a position in the Royal Flying Corps, with Shackleton's aid. Here, he took up the cause of acquiring parachutes for pilots, an innovation that was resisted by senior officers on the grounds that the possibility of bailing out would undermine a pilot's fighting spirit. To showcase parachutes' effectiveness, Lees parachuted off Tower Bridge, an event that was covered by the London newspapers. He later married a Japanese woman and settled in Japan and then New Zealand, working as a spy during the Second World War, an occupation eminently suited to his busybody, secretive nature. Lees may have been the most despised individual during the actual expedition, but it is impossible to dislike him posthumously. Without his busy, anxious chatter and compulsive candor, the record of the expedition would be much the poorer. Lees died at age seventy-nine in a mental hospital, the cause of death noted on his death certificate as “broncho-pneumonia—24 hours. Cardio-vascular degeneration. Senility?” Evidently, even the attending doctors could not quite get a handle on him. He was buried in the ex-servicemen's section of the Karori Cemetery—the same little patch of earth in which McNish was laid. The two men had loathed each other.

  After the Quest expedition, Frank Wild settled in South Africa, where four years of drought and floods ruined his cotton farming. Drink, however, was the ultimate cause of his ruination; his ominous zeal in adopting the “Gut Rot” toasts on Elephant Island had always been a source of amusement to his companions. A newspaper journalist discovered Wild working as a bartender for £4 a month in a Zulu village at the head of a mine. “Teddy” Evans, whose life Crean had saved on Scott's last expedition, hearing word of the plight of a man whom he regarded as a shipmate and great polar explorer, assisted him in obtaining a pension; but the boon came too late, and Wild died only months afterward, in 1939.

  Tom Crean returned to Anascaul, where h
e had been born; he married, opened a pub called the South Pole Inn, and raised a family.

  “We had a hot time of it the last 12 months,” wrote Crean to an old shipmate from the Terra Nova, succinctly summarizing the months on the floes, the two boat journeys, and the crossing of South Georgia. “And I must say the Boss is a splendid gentleman and I done my duty towards him to the end.”

  He led an organized, disciplined life, working in the pub and in his garden, and each evening taking a walk down to the sea in Dingle Bay with his dogs Fido and Toby, named after the pups he had lost in the Antarctic. He was said by those who knew him to have admired Scott but loved Shackleton. He died of a perforated appendix in 1938, and was buried just outside Anascaul.

  Worsley spent the greater part of his life trying to recapture the thrill and daring of the Endurance expedition. During the war, while captain of a mystery ship, he sank a German submarine, for which he received a Distinguished Service Order. He then joined Shackleton in Russia, and stayed on after the war fighting the Bolsheviks, which won him a second Distinguished Service Order. After the Quest, he was coleader of an Arctic expedition, and appears to have spent a fair amount of time attempting to re-create the experience aboard the Endurance by almost deliberately getting stuck in the ice. In 1934, he went treasure hunting in the Pacific, something he and Shackleton had promised each other they would do together. In the Second World War, he was given command of a merchant ship but was sacked when it was discovered that he was nearly seventy years old. He died of lung cancer in 1943, just short of seventy-one.