Shackleton's Heroes
Page 14
13 Apr: I am thinking of this time next year – Home Sweet Home, all that life’s worth living & hoping for.34
15 Apr: Hayward and I went for a short stroll feeling lack after our lengthy period of inaction. A grand sunset, the sun diffusing to the NW, the reflected rays cast a shadow of gold in the Bay here, the heights were all bathed in gold, twinkling ice crystals made the place appear like some fairy bower instead of being what we experience it. We can look round and see a perfect kaleidoscope of changing scenery, wonderful. No one could write a description of what we see.
Do so hope the sea will freeze over and release us.35
Their day-to-day routine at Discovery hut revolved around killing seals. Richards tells us the killing of seals was the main activity for the men at Hut Point because they provided blubber for fuel and lighting, and meat for eating. If the weather was reasonable they would go out before breakfast and walk by a crack in the ice looking for them. At that time of the year it was dark and practically the only area they could find seals was near a break in the sea-ice, near the edge of the shore. They would search for seals before breakfast, then before lunch and again after their midday meal. Richards recalled that each session might involve 5 or 6 miles of walking, so they would do between 20 and 30 miles a day, on some days ‘without finding a single thing’. At times their supplies of blubber for fuel were very low but they never managed to quite run out.
Richards remembered in specific detail how the seals were killed. The seals were completely harmless and they would just put up their nose ready to be hit. The men used an iron-shod pick handle to give them ‘a smack on the nose’ which would stun them and then their throats were cut, resulting in ‘two great gushes coming out from the arteries’. Straight away they would run a slit right up the body of the seal so they could put their hands inside to warm them otherwise the hand would ‘go’; that is, freeze. They had to use their bare hands with a sealing knife because with mitts on it was too dangerous, the knife could slip and cut their hands badly. But they could only hold the seal knife in their hand for a minute or two before their hand would start to freeze. Richards says the knife was just ‘like cold metal and your hand would stick to that’.
If they were just taking the blubber off the seals they would run long slits down the body and with a cargo hook pull up the blubber in a strip, right down the body, just easing it with the knife as they went. It would be a strip 6 feet long, or longer. They would lay the strip out on the ice and leave it there where it would freeze like a plank. They would usually come out the next day, load the frozen planks onto a sledge and back at the hut they would cut it up with an axe. When they wanted food from the seal they would take flesh from the middle section of the body, the waist.36
Mackintosh made extensive diary notes in April on the seal-killing. We learn of his dilemma; the immorality of killing seals versus his survival instincts, but he cannot finish his notes without yet another comment on the filthy conditions. Wild wrote the notes on seals, and tobacco, later in the year.
All the men smoked, usually pipes, but a major problem now arose – their tobacco supplies had ran out – so they tried to improvise and make their own. Wild’s tobacco making (‘Hut Point Mixture’) did not impress Richards, who remembered it as ‘a villainous concoction’ which everyone tried but only Wild ended up smoking. He tells us that those who smoked it found they were forever spitting out saliva and phlegm and they could always trail Wild over the sea-ice by the ‘black gobs’ that marked his track.37
Mackintosh:
6 Apr: We are rather up against it as our store of blubber for the stove is nearly done, also our candles, for the latter we have rigged up kind of lamps out of empty corned-beef tins, but running out of blubber is rather serious, as seals to enable us to get a further supply have not yet shown up.
The worst job here is to get the fire going; sometimes while the blubber lasts, it flames fiercely, but more often it gets low, then down we get on our knees, a piece of blubber is placed in the opening, then a flame is applied and after gentle manipulation which requires much patience we can get it going, but every 10 minutes we have to keep it poked up or some more blubber is applied. This is one of the aids¶ we have to get an addition of dirt, soot and grime on to ourselves.38
15 Apr: To our joy we found seals lying on the ice which remains in the Bay along the edge of the Gap. We did not waste the opportunity, going out with the available knives to do our butchery.
It really is murder killing these innocent harmless brutes who roll their eyes and start with fright when they see you, the only sign of objection they show you is to open their mouths and perhaps a swish with the tail. They try to reach back to their ice holes which are close, but we think of it in rather an obscene way so as to make the crime more satisfactory to our consciences, for after all it’s a case of survival of the fittest. If we don’t keep warm we should probably freeze, hence we take a large club, bang the poor old seal on the tip of the nose, then while he is unconscious his throat is cut, so it’s done as mercifully as possible.
At first I detested the job, especially when the seals looked beseechingly at me in their large eyes, but after starving in the tent I am afraid the tender instincts, if any, in us soon vanish. Now most of us can go out without turning a hair, kill and skin seals without any trouble or feelings of reluctance. Although this appears brutal, it means our only method of procuring fuel and food, but the butchery is by no means an easy task for the temperature is below zero and a ‘nipping’ breeze blowing, while we keep our hands while skinning well under the folds of the blubber, once we expose them to the cold air we would have frostbite.
While one of us skins the other holds the ‘flinch’ (as we call the hide) back. In this manner we accounted for 5 – what a mess we have left, the clear white snow bespattered with blood, a regular battlefield.
The trouble of this though is that we are unable to clean ourselves and the clothes are getting ‘blubbier’ and ‘blubbier’. Of course our hands get washed in the seal’s blood, so they can remain clean.39
Here is Wild’s take on seal-killing:
Gaze & Hayward were the seal hunters but when they found any Joyce & I used to go and help them. We were burning seal blubber all this time you know so it took quite a lot of seals to keep us going.
It was a weird sight to see us killing & skinning seals by candle light. It was no joke especially if there was a little breeze on. Sometimes with a Burberry helmet on, we would make a terrific blow at a seal’s head and what with the light & the helmet would miss it and nearly fall on top of it. They look very savage too opening their mouths & showing their teeth.
We used to have rides on them sometimes; you have to look out they don’t roll on top of you because they weigh anything from 700lbs to 20 cwt.
While skinning seals you have to keep dipping your hands into them to keep them from getting frozen.40
Joyce:
What an oasis in the wilderness if only a case of tobacco had been landed. A pipe of this soothing weed makes all the world akin. Various substitutes were tried with varying degrees of satisfaction to the consumer. We failed however to top the high water mark.
Tea was attempted, also coffee. I tried some dried mixed vegetables but was speedily requested to cease. Then the inventive genius of Wild asserted itself.41
Wild explains:
When we finished our tobacco at Hut Point we tried all sorts of things to smoke such as tea, coffee, sawdust, senna grass, different kinds of dirt scudding about, etc. We found a mixture of tea, coffee & sawdust to be the best substitute so we called it Hut Point mixture.42
April 1915 – the four men at Cape Evans
While Mackintosh, Joyce, Hayward and Richards (with Cope and Jack) waited at Hut Point for the sea-ice to freeze, Spencer-Smith and Richards remained at Cape Evans. The Aurora was anchored by the Cape Evans hut as the intention was to freeze the ship in over the winter months, most of the men lived on the ship. However, Spencer
-Smith and Richards (and Stevens and Gaze) all worked and slept on shore, carrying out scientific work and killing seals for food and fuel. Very little in the way of stores or equipment was landed with these men and the view generally held then, both by the shore party and those on the ship, was that the ship was reasonably safe. The ship was tied up to the shore only 30–40 yards from the gravel beach by the hut and the sea-ice was usually firm so people would walk freely on it. Parties would come ashore from the ship and those on shore would go onto the ship over the sea-ice, just as a matter of routine.43 44
Spencer-Smith seemed to enjoy life at Cape Evans. He, Richards, Stevens and Gaze slept and worked at the hut and they ate some meals and enjoyed the entertainment on board the ship.
Spencer-Smith:
4 Mar: This stay in the Hut is becoming noteworthy for a series of pleasant dreams of home, Woodbridge, Cambridge, Edinburgh. I had the best sleep of the trip last night: thoroughly warm and comfy all night, the sleep being taken in two hour periods, with half-hours of lazy thought in between.45
6 Mar: More reading.
John of Gerisau (Oxenham)
City of Beautiful Nonesense [sic] (E.T.T.)
Cardinal’s Snuffbox (Harland)
Hound of Heaven (Thompson)
The last fascinates me more every time that I read it – every stage in the flight is so real, and so true to my own experience. S.Luke 24.44 ‘All things … concerning me.’
Also 45 and 46 and the story of the two Emmaus id.13 et seqq.
It suddenly struck me tonight that I have always spoken and thought too lightly of O.T. history and prophecy. We know little of individual’s hop[e]s & fears but the aims of the prophets in arousing the national consciousness of God’s personal working in Israel’s affairs is clear.
The instinct of man, especially in contact with supreme joy or sorrow, love and death, cries out ‘It must be so!’ And the meaning of the coming of the Blessed Lord is simply this – that it is God’s answer (revelation) to man’s cry: ‘It is so’.46
23 Mar: It is very cold but nice to be on one’s own and a good sleeping bag makes up for much else. Stevens and I have the corner formerly occupied by Evans and Wilson:|| nice and private and next to the dark room: plenty of shelving too. Our books and beds make it look furnished and I have mother’s photo too.47
12 Mar: A great singsong after dinner tonight, gramophone first, and then piano: all sorts of songs, solos and chorus – ‘The Wearing of the Green’, ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘Three Fishers’, ‘Old Folks at Home’, ‘Little Grey Home’, ‘Where my caravan has rested’, etc.48
1 May: Several visits & there was much tobacco & talk around the fire. I went on board about 5.30 to fetch a plum-duff presented by the cook, who seems rather better, and stayed to have yarn aft – all in good spirits.
By invitation went over again about 8 and played for a singing aft. Hymns first of all. ‘Lead Kindly Night’ – ‘Nearer My God to Thee’, ‘Eternal Father’, ‘Adeste Fidelis’, ‘The Church’s One Foundation’, ‘Old 100th’, ‘Rock of Ages’ and many other old favourites, in which everyone joined.
Then we had some songs, mainly by Sten. and I did not come ashore until 10. Had a cup of cocoa with Irvine** and turned in at 11 for a short sleep, tired but happy.49
The loss of the Aurora
Then the most serious of calamities occurred – the Aurora was carried out to sea. Richards tells us that she was tied up close to the shore, with her bows to the sea and with seven steel hawsers attached to bollards in the stern attached to two huge anchors which were iced into the shore. Holes had been dug for the anchors and water poured in, which became like concrete. From time to time ice formed around the ship but the wind blows and the tide took this ice out into the bay. Every now and again the men would equalise the tensions on the hawsers on the stern and they all thought the Aurora was quite safe for the winter.50
6 May 1915
Richards clearly remembered the night of 6 May 1915. In his book The Ross Sea Shore Party and in interviews he tells us that the breakaway of the ship came suddenly and unexpectedly. That afternoon the wind had begun to freshen, and by midnight a moderate blizzard was blowing. It was his turn to take midnight and 4 a.m. meteorological readings; however, Spencer-Smith offered to take the midnight ones and Richards tells us he gladly accepted the offer. Richards was up at three o’clock and he went outside to find nothing more than a moderate blizzard blowing, with snow drift about 20 to 30 feet high. The night was fairly clear – it was a moonlight night. He left the door of the hut and as he looked to his right down to the beach he knew he should have been able to see the tops of the masts of the ship above the snow drift. But there was nothing there. He walked the twenty or so yards down to the water’s edge to find the anchor there in the sand but with the hawsers and the cables broken. The second anchor was further down the beach also with its cables snapped.
The Aurora was gone. The ice clamping the ship had been swept away from the base of McMurdo Sound by the blizzard, taking the Aurora with it. All Richards could see was open water. He woke his three companions who, like Richards, were naturally very concerned. They thought that, given a day or two of reasonable weather, they might expect to see the Aurora back again. Whatever hopes they had for the return of the ship were shattered when the worst blizzard they had experienced so far raged violently for the next three days. They now doubted whether the ship would return before January the following year.51 52
Richards, Spencer-Smith, Stevens and Gaze were stranded at Cape Evans. Richards recalled they immediately discussed what they had on hand and what they needed to survive, for they were certain that they were marooned until the following January or February. They were wearing their only clothing except for a few extra items in their bags. Apart from a few sledging rations, no stores of food had been landed from the Aurora, but fortunately Scott from his Terra Nova Expedition had left a stockpile of food on a hill to the east of the hut. They estimated they had general stores, flour and similar items to last ten men for two years. They had almost no fuel for the stove but they could rely on seals for fresh meat, and seal blubber for fuel. They had little or no soap for washing, matches were scarce and they had no luxuries in the way of tobacco or spirits.53
There were now four men at the Cape Evans hut, and six others living in quite primitive conditions at Discovery hut, who intended to walk to Cape Evans as soon as it was safe to make the crossing.
Notes
1. Hayward diary, 11 March 1915
2. Ibid., 12 March 1915
3. Ibid., 13 March 1915
4. Ibid., 14 March 1915
5. Ibid., 15 March 1915
6. Ibid., 21 March 1915
7. Ibid., 22 March 1915
8. Joyce field diary, 25 March 1915
9. Hayward diary, 25 March 1915
10. Mackintosh diary, 25 March 1915
11. Joyce field diary, late March 1915
12. Ibid., April 1915
13. Mackintosh diary, 26 March 1915
14. Ibid., 27 March 1915
15. Ibid., 28 March 1915
16. Ibid., 30 March 1915
17. Hayward diary, 30 March 1915
18. Joyce field diary, April 1915
19. Ibid.
20. Mackintosh diary, 27 January 1915
21. Richards, interview with P. Lathlean, 1976
22. Hayward diary, 1 April 1915
23. Ibid., 5 April 1915
24. Ibid., 15 April 1915
25. Ibid., 23 April 1915
26. Ibid., 25 April 1915
27. Ibid., 29 April 1915
28. Mackintosh diary, 1 April 1915
29. Ibid., 4 April 1915
30. Ibid., 7 April 1915
31. Ibid., 8 April 1915
32. Ibid., 11 April 1915
33. Ibid., 12 April 1915
34. Ibid., 13 April 1915
35. Ibid., 15 April 1915
36. Richards, interview with L. Bickel, 1976
37. Richards letter to L. B. Quartermain, 16 April 1963
38. Mackintosh diary, 6 April 1915
39. Ibid., 15 April 1915
40. Wild diary, 28 December 1915
41. Joyce diary transcripts, 1915
42. Wild diary, 28 December 1915
43. Richards, interview with P. Lathlean, 1976
44. Richards, The Ross Sea Shore Party
45. Spencer-Smith diary, 4 March 1915
46. Ibid., 6 March 1915
47. Ibid., 23 March 1915
48. Ibid., 12 March 1915
49. Ibid., 2 May 1915
50. Richards, interview with P. Lathlean, 1976
51. Richards, interview with L. Bickel, 1976
52. Richards, The Ross Sea Shore Party
53. Ibid.
* Outside all their garments ‘Burberry’ was worn, a woven fabric that breathed – an essential in Antarctica with its low humidity and low temperatures – to stop sweat building up, and freezing, on or inside the clothing. The Burberry helmet completely enclosed the head except for the face, which remained uncovered at the bottom of a funnel stiffened by a ring of copper-wire.
† There were only three sleeping bags because Mackintosh, Joyce and Wild had left their sledge with their sleeping bags on the hills around the Barrier in their rush to get to Hut Point.
‡ Ally Soper was a comic strip character from the early 1900s, who sported a large red nose.
§ Uppers are that part of a shoe that does not normally contact the ground.
¶ ‘one of the aids’ – meaning another helpful way to make his life more uncomfortable.