Survivor: The Autobiography
Page 1
Jon E. Lewis is a historian and writer, whose books on history and military history are sold worldwide. He is also editor of many The Mammoth Book of anthologies, including the bestselling On the Edge.
Jon holds graduate and postgraduate degrees in history, and his work has appeared in New Statesman, the Independent, Time Out and the Guardian. He lives in Herefordshire with his partner and children.
Praise for Jon E. Lewis's previous books:
‘A triumph.’
Saul David, author of Victoria’s Army
‘This thoughtful compilation . . . [is] almost unbearably moving.’
Guardian
‘Compelling Tommy’s-eye view of war.’
Daily Telegraph
‘What a book. Five stars.’
Daily Express
Also in the Autobiography series, by Jon E. Lewis
Ancient Rome: the Autobiography
England: the Autobiography
London: the Autobiography
SAS: the Autobiography
Spitfire: the Autobiography
World War II: the Autobiography
The Autobiography of the British Soldier
(as John Lewis-Stempel)
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK as
The Mammoth Book of Endurance & Adventure
by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2000
This edition published by Robinson, 2011
Copyright © J. Lewis-Stempel, 2000 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of J. Lewis-Stempel to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-84901-818-0
eISBN: 978-1-84901-950-7
Printed and bound in the UK
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CONTENTS
Introduction
The Poles
Sir Douglas Mawson Last Man Walking
Richard Evelyn Byrd The Blow
Salomon Andrée Adrift on the Ice
Sir Ernest Shackleton 88° South
Sir John Franklin The March to Fort Enterprise
W. Elmer Ekblaw Thin Ice
Robert Falcon Scott The End
Mountains
Walter Bonatti Death Zone
Sebastian Snow Cotopaxi
Ed Drummond Mirror, Mirror
Sir Edmund Hillary The Long Grind
Maurice Herzog Extreme Danger
A. J. Barrington Dog Days
Meriwether Lewis & William Clark Across the Great Divide
Sir Laurens Van der Post Deluge
Oceans & Rivers
Sir Ernest Shackleton The Boat Journey
Thor Heyerdahl The Reef
Alain Bombard Atlantic Ordeal
John Blashford-Snell The Cataracts of the Zaïre
Sir Ranulph Fiennes Race Against Time
Charles Waterton Riding a Guianese Cayman
Theodore Roosevelt River of Doubt
Steven Callahan Holed
John Ridgway & Chay Blyth Storm
Under the Ground
Norbert Casteret The Abyss
Jacques-Yves Cousteau Rapture
Deserts
Sven Hedin Dying of Thirst
Bertram Thomas Crossing the Empty Quarter
William John Wills Slow Death at Cooper’s Creek
Nick Danziger The Crossing
Nikolai Nikhailovich Przhevalski The Sands of the Gobi
Ernest Giles Escape from the Outback
Peter Fleming The Pitiless Sun
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Prisoners of the Sand
Jungles
Henry Savage Landor Amazonia Extremis
Colonel Jim Corbett Man-Eater
The Air
Charles A. Lindbergh The Spirit of St Louis
Sources & Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
‘. . . in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had “suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.” We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.’
Sir Ernest Shackleton
Mankind has always been an adventurer. No sooner was he out of his African cradle, than he was questing to see what lay over the next horizon, along the next bend of the river. And there has probably always been an audience for his tales. It is easy enough to conjure up a scene of Early Adventurer entertaining his tribal band around the campfire; certainly the earliest recorded exploration, that of Harkhuf to the land of Yam in around 2300 BC, dates back almost to the invention of writing itself.
Today’s modern audience, however, is more clamorous for adventure than its predecessors. The reasons are not hard to find. In a world made cosy by a cornucopia of consumer conveniences, people are endlessly trapped in humdrum routines and a surfeit of safety. Few of us would protest against it but all of us know that we have lost sight of something: human mettle, spirit in adversity, the ability to live dangerously. Those who have dared go outside the confines of civilization to pit themselves against Nature remind us of what it is we are made of; their travails, to borrow the phrase of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, enabling us to see ‘the naked soul of man’. They may thrill us, but more importantly they illuminate us. We need them to do what they do.
Shackleton reminds us that the adventurer has other fascinations. In cynical times with very few heroes, he retains an heroic cast. And few were more heroic than Shackleton. As an explorer he was a failure, as a hero he was everything. A true believer in duty and service, he escaped Antarctica and then went back to rescue those in his charge. The ‘boss’ brought every man back safely. It’s small wonder then that Shackleton is a curriculum item in business schools for those wanting to learn leadership skills.
By default, the majority of the eyewitness accounts collected in this book are by those who survived their personal tests of endurance, from Douglas Mawson struggling alone through an Antarctic blizzard to Charles Lindberg’s fight against exhaustion aboard the Spirit of St Louis. They lived to bring home the tale. Sometimes, however, the records of the doomed have outlasted their authors, such as the harrowing last diaries found besides the corpse of R. F. Scott in Antarctica – the great white laboratory of endurance – and those of W. J. Wills in the desolate outback of Cooper’s Creek. These diaries, aside from chronicling hardship and perseverance almost beyond imagination, also give a salutary lesson: Nature is not easily beaten.
If the public needs its adventurers, there remains the thundering question of what motivates the adventurer. Over time, the necessities of food, shelter, uninhabited land, trade, warfare and imperial ambition have all whipped adventurers across the unknown. So too, the chance for the big prize, fame and glory (there’s nothing new about the lust for celebrity). In the centuries following the Enlightenment, adventure has frequently been dressed as the pursuit of knowledge, with expeditions to the ends, heights and depths of the world tasked with some scientific or geographical purpose. And yet, a
s the following pages secretly testify, the real why? Stimulating the modern adventurer is the exploration of an entirely different objective – the self in extremis. The proof of this is childishly easy, for almost all exploration in the last hundred years has, strictly speaking, been unnecessary, neither opening up new trade routes nor tracts of land to the touch of ‘civilization’. The relationship between audience and adventurer, then, is purely symbiotic: the public desires adventurers so that they can vicariously experience their own ‘naked soul’; fortuitously for the self-same public, some brave enough – or maybe foolish enough – men and women still feel a desire to test themselves to the limits.
It goes without saying that such a test should be a true endurance, one of mind and body. Endurance is usually conceived as sustained endeavour over time, but the meaning can be stretched to the maintenance of nerve and physical control over mere minutes of dangerous difficulty. Certainly, I have taken such licence in this book. Ekblaw’s sledge ride over wafer-thin ice, Nick Danziger’s gun-running jeep journey over the Afghan border, Charles Waterton’s wrestle with a Guianese Cayman come to mind.
One of the necessary by-products of adventure is that it takes the adventurer – and thus the reader – to the last faraway places, where Nature still lives in unsullied magnificence (and deadly power). If this book is a chronicle of first-hand adventure, it is not least an anthology of white-knuckled travel writing. Sometimes, too, it is the travel writing of the highest art, such as Salomon Andrée’s death-march diary across the Arctic, almost painterly in its depiction of the ice pack as a ‘Magnificent Venetian landscape with canals between lofty hummock edges on both sides, water-square with ice-fountain and stairs down to the canals. Divine.’
The various terrains and elements of Nature have also served as the organizing principle of this book, from The Poles to The Air, via Mountains, Oceans and Rivers, Under the Ground, Deserts, and Jungles. This is a mere anthologist’s contrivance.
None is more intrinsically perilous than another, they are all simply different. And all offer long odds for the adventurer determined upon the ultimate game of Man v Nature.
Jon E. Lewis, 2000
The Poles
Australian geologist and Antarctic explorer. In September 1912 he set off with Dr Xavier Mertz, a Swiss mountaineer, and Lieutenant B.E.S. Ninnis, a British army officer, to explore King George V Land.
14 December 1912 When next I looked back, it was in response to the anxious gaze of Mertz who had turned round and halted in his tracks. Behind me nothing met the eye except my own sledge tracks running back in the distance. Where were Ninnis and his sledge?
I hastened back along the trail thinking that a rise in the ground obscured the view. There was no such good fortune, however, for I came to a gaping hole in the surface about eleven feet wide. The lid of the crevasse that had caused me so little thought had broken in; two sledge tracks led up to it on the far side – only one continued beyond.
Frantically waving to Mertz to bring up my sledge, upon which there was some alpine rope, I leaned over and shouted into the dark depths below. No sound came back but the moaning of a dog, caught on a shelf just visible one hundred and fifty feet below. The poor creature appeared to have a broken back, for it was attempting to sit up with the front part of its body, while the hinder portion lay limp. Another dog lay motionless by its side. Close by was what appeared in the gloom to be the remains of the tent and a canvas food tank containing a fortnight’s supply.
We broke back the edge of the hard snow lid and, secured by a rope, took turns leaning over, calling into the darkness in the hope that our companion might be still alive. For three hours we called unceasingly but no answering sound came back. The dog had ceased to moan and lay without a movement. A chill draught rose out of the abyss. We felt that there was no hope.
It was difficult to realize that Ninnis, who was a young giant in build, so jovial and so real but a few minutes before, should thus have vanished without even a sound. It seemed so incredible that we half expected, on turning round, to find him standing there.
Why had the first sledge escaped? It seemed that I had been fortunate, as my sledge had crossed diagonally, with a greater chance of breaking the lid. The sledges were within thirty pounds of the same weight. The explanation appeared to be that Ninnis had walked by the side of his sledge, whereas I had crossed it sitting on the sledge. The whole weight of a man’s body bearing on his foot is a formidable load, and no doubt was sufficient to smash the arch of the roof.
By means of a fishing line we ascertained that it was one hundred and fifty feet sheer to the ledge upon which the remains were seen; on either side the crevasse descended into blackness. It seemed so very far down there and the dogs looked so small that we got out the field-glass to complete the scrutiny of the depths.
All our available rope was tied together but the total length was insufficient to reach the ledge, and any idea of going below to investigate and to secure some of the food had to be abandoned.
Later in the afternoon Mertz and I went on to a higher point in order to obtain a better view of our surroundings and to see if anything helpful lay ahead. In that direction, however, the prospect of reaching the sea, where lay chances of obtaining seal and penguin meat, was hopeless on account of the appalling manner in which the coastal slopes were shattered. At a point two thousand four hundred feet above sea-level and three hundred and fifteen and three-quarter miles eastward from the Hut, a complete set of observations was taken.
We returned to the crevasse to consider what was to be done and prepare for the future. At regular intervals we called down into those dark depths in case our companion might not have been killed outright, and, in the meantime, have become unconscious. There was no reply.
A weight was lowered on the fishing line as far as the dog which had earlier shown some signs of life, but there was no response. All were dead, swallowed up in an instant . . .
At 9 p.m. we stood by the side of the crevasse and I read the burial service. Then Mertz shook me by the hand with a short ‘Thank you!’ and we turned away to harness up the dogs . . .
The night of the 6th [ January 1913] was long and wearisome as I tossed about sleeplessly, mindful that for both of us our chances of reaching succour were now slipping silently and relentlessly away. I was aching to get on, but there could be no question of abandoning my companion whose condition now set the pace.
The morning of 7 January opened with better weather, for there was little wind and no snow falling; even the sun appeared gleaming through the clouds.
In view of the seriousness of the position it had been agreed overnight that at all costs we would go on in the morning, sledge-sailing with Mertz in his bag strapped on the sledge. It was therefore a doubly sad blow that morning to find that my companion was again touched with dysentery and so weak as to be quite helpless. After tucking him into the bag again, I slid into my own in order to kill time and keep warm, for the cold had a new sting about it in those days of want.
At 10 a.m. hearing a rustle from my companion’s bag I rose to find him in a fit. Shortly afterwards he became normal and exchanged a few words, but did not appear to realize that anything out of the way had happened.
The information that this incident conveyed fell upon me like a thunderbolt, for it was certain that my companion was in a very serious state with little hope of any alleviation, for he was already unable to assimilate the meagre foods available.
There was no prospect of proceeding so I settled myself to stand by my stricken comrade and ease his sufferings as far as possible. It would require a miracle to bring him round to a fit travelling condition, but I prayed that it might be granted.
After noon he improved and drank some thick cocoa and soup.
Later in the afternoon he had several more fits and then, becoming delirious, talked incoherently until midnight. Most of that time his strength returned and he struggled to climb out of the sleeping-bag, keeping me very busy tuckin
g him in again. About midnight he appeared to doze off to sleep and with a feeling of relief I slid down into my own bag, not to sleep, though weary enough, but to get warm again and to think matters over. After a couple of hours, having felt no movement, I stretched out my arm and found that my comrade was stiff in death. He had been accepted into ‘the peace that passeth all understanding’.
It was unutterably sad that he should have perished thus, after the splendid work he had accomplished not only on that particular sledging journey but throughout the expedition. No one could have done better. Favoured with a generous and lovable character, he had been a general favourite amongst all the members of the expedition. Now all was over, he had done his duty and passed on. All that remained was his mortal frame which, toggled up in his sleeping-bag, still offered some sense of companionship as I threw myself down for the remainder of the night, revolving in my mind all that lay behind and the chances of the future.
Outside the bowl of chaos was brimming with drift-snow and as I lay in the sleeping-bag beside my dead companion I wondered how, in such conditions, I would manage to break and pitch camp single-handed. There appeared to be little hope of reaching the Hut, still one hundred miles away. It was easy to sleep in the bag, and the weather was cruel outside. But inaction is hard to bear and I braced myself together determined to put up a good fight.
Failing to reach the Hut it would be something done if I managed to get to some prominent point likely to catch the eye of a search-party, where a cairn might be erected and our diaries cached. So I commenced to modify the sledge and camping gear to meet fresh requirements.
The sky remained clouded, but the wind fell off to a calm which lasted several hours. I took the opportunity to set to work on the sledge, sawing it in halves with a pocket tool and discarding the rear section. A mast was made out of one of the rails no longer required, and a spar was cut from the other. Finally, the load was cut down to a minimum by the elimination of all but the barest necessities, the abandoned articles including, sad to relate, all that remained of the exposed photographic films.