Caroline Alexander

by The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition

  “One of the anxieties in my mind was the possibility that we would be driven by the current through the eighty-mile gap between Clarence Island and Prince George Island [as it was then called] into the open Atlantic,” wrote Shackleton. By noon, the squalls had slackened, and when a lane of open water appeared, the boats rushed into it. They had set out late in the day; with dusk falling at 5 p.m., few hours of light remained for sailing, and come nightfall they were still amid the loose pack. As before, a suitable floe was found for a camp, and Green and his blubber stove were disembarked. But it quickly became apparent that the floe could not serve them through the night, and Shackleton reluctantly determined that they would have to sleep in the boats.

  Several hours of desultory rowing brought them under the lee of a heavy old floe, where the boats were moored alongside one another for the night.

  “Constant rain and snow squalls blotted out the stars and soaked us through,” Into the Boats Shackleton wrote. “Occasionally the ghostly shadows of silver, snow, and fulmar petrels flashed close to us, and all around we could hear the killers blowing, their short, sharp hisses sounding like sudden escapes of steam.” A school of killer whales had languidly drifted around the boats, their sleek, sinister black forms surrounding them on every side for the duration of the long night. Of all the memories the men would carry with them, this—the slow, measured rising of the white-throated whales in the dark waters around their boats—remained one of the most terrible and abiding. In their long months on the ice, the men had borne abundant witness to the great beasts’ ice-shattering power. Whether they would attack humans, no one really knew. For the men, these were prodigies of the deep, mysterious and evil, possessed of chilling reptilian eyes that betrayed disconcerting mammalian intelligence. Seasick and sleepless, the men bumped and jostled endlessly amid the ice and whales. It was this night that began to break the will of many.

  Regarding his companions in the cold dawn that followed, Shackleton noted simply that “the strain was beginning to tell.” He promised a hot breakfast, and the men manned the oars to seek out a suitable floe, their frozen Burberry suits crackling and shedding shards of ice as they pulled. At eight o’clock, the “galley” was landed on a floe; by nine o’clock they were under way again. Around them, basking in the welcome sunshine, hundreds of seals lounged comfortably on floes flushed pink by the sunrise.

  They had been travelling roughly northwest since the day they left Patience Camp. Now, under hazy sunshine, Worsley balanced himself against the mast of the Dudley Docker to take the first noon observation the weather had allowed. Expectations were high as to the miles gained. But the results were worse than anyone would have dreamed possible.

  “A terrible disappt.,” wrote Worsley in his diary. Not a single mile had been gained. Instead, they had drifted back to the southeast—thirty miles east of their position at Patience Camp and eleven miles south. A strong easterly current concealed by the heavy swell, combined with a tortuous navigation through sinuous lanes, had obscured all sense of direction.

  Shackleton tried to downplay the bad news, saying only that they had not “done as well as expected.” It was three in the afternoon, and dusk came at five. King George and Deception islands, to the west, were now out of reach. Elephant Island, to the north, the closest land, lay outside the pack, in high seas; behind them to the southwest, Hope Bay, on the tip of the Palmer Peninsula, was 130 miles away in water that was for the moment clear. After consulting with Worsley and Wild, Shackleton opted to take advantage of the northwest wind and turn the boats back towards Hope Bay.

  By nightfall, they found themselves amid loose, fragmented ice in a choppy sea. The weather was becoming colder and wetter, and as on the previous night, no floe could be found large enough to establish a camp. Eventually, the boats were tethered one behind the other and moored to the lee side of a large chunk of ice.

  At nine o’clock, a shift in the wind blew back the clouds, revealing a bright moon but also driving the boats against the jagged floe. Hastily, the painter of the lead boat, the James Caird, was cut, and with no other mooring available, the three small vessels drifted through the night in a sea of brash ice. The temperature had dropped, and new pancakes of ice had formed on the water’s surface.

  Shivering together in each other’s arms, some of the men tried to snatch minutes of sleep; many preferred to row or fend off the chunks of ice that sped their way— anything to keep their cold arms moving.

  “Occasionally from an almost clear sky came snow-showers,” wrote Shackleton, “falling silently on the sea and laying a thin shroud of white over our bodies and our boats.” Lees, in the Dudley Docker, had appropriated the only complete set of oilskins, which he adamantly refused to share. As his snoring indicated, he for one found sleep possible.

  When a foggy dawn at last put an end to the night, the crew discovered that the boats were sheathed in ice, inside and out. The temperature in the night had dropped to –7°. As the ice was hacked off with axes, lumps were distributed for the men to eat.

  “Most of the men were now looking seriously worn and strained,” Shackleton wrote. “Their lips were cracked and their eyes and eyelids showed red in their salt-encrusted faces.… Obviously, we must make land quickly, and I decided to run for Elephant Island.”

  The wind had shifted again, blowing now from the southeast. Shackleton’s decision to change course again and, at any cost, make for the nearest land was determined by the realization that he was now racing for the very lives of many of his men. He could no longer afford the luxury of caution. As the boats ran before the wind for Elephant Island, a man in the bow of each attempted to fend away lumps of brash while they plunged precariously down leads in the thin new ice. The wind grew stronger, and the boats made their way once again to the edge of the pack, and by noon had crashed into deep sapphire waters. With the sun out, the wind favorable and strong, they raced towards their destination.

  By four in the afternoon, the wind had increased to a gale that blew surging waves into the boats, compounding the men’s misery. The Stancomb Wills alone had not had her gunwales raised, and water poured in over stores and men. From the James Caird, Shackleton, sensing a need to lift morale if only in some small way, distributed extra food to all hands. A number, overcome with seasickness, could not take advan tage of this bonus; many were suffering from dysentery from uncooked dog pemmican, and were forced to relieve themselves over the side of the surging boats, balancing on the gunwales.

  Shackleton’s order that the boats stay in hailing distance of one another became increasingly difficult to obey. The Stancomb Wills was knee-deep in water, and Holness, one of the trawlerhands who previously made his living braving the icy north Atlantic, covered his face and wept with sheer terror and misery. Worsley, drawing abreast of the James Caird, suggested to Shackleton that they run through the night; but Shackleton, wary as ever of splitting his party, and afraid they might even overrun the island in the darkness, gave the order to lay to. It was a hard decision to make.

  “I doubted if all the men would survive that night,” he stated simply. On top of all else, they had no water. Usually, ice was taken on board at each “campsite,” but the hasty departure from the veering floe the night before had made this impossible. Tormented by the salt spray flung continually in their faces, the men’s mouths were swollen and their lips bloody. Frozen raw seal meat provided the only relief.

  Sea anchors, made of canvas and oars lashed together, were flung overboard, and there began the third night in the boats. Through all the demanding days and all the long and terrible hours of darkness, the helmsmen—Wild and McNish, Hudson and Crean, Worsley and Greenstreet—had remained immovable at their posts as waves crashed over them, as their clothes froze upon them, as the wind and spray stung their tired faces.

  The wind subsided in the night, and at dawn the sleepless men beheld the glorious mauve sunrise that flashed on the eastern horizon; and only thirty miles directly ahead lay Clarence Island
, its snow-clad peak glowing in the dawn. Later, in full daylight, Elephant Island appeared, exactly on the bearings that Worsley had calculated, in Shackleton’s words, “with two days’ dead reckoning while following a devious course through the pack-ice and after drifting during two nights at the mercy of wind and waves.” Elephant Island was the less precipitous of the two; additionally, it lay to windward, ensuring that if the boats missed their first attempted landfall, they would have Clarence Island as alternative to their lee.

  The night had taken its toll.

  “At least half of the party were insane,” according to Wild, “fortunately not violent, simply helpless and hopeless.” The Stancomb Wills drew abreast of the Caird to report that Hudson had collapsed after seventy-two hours at the helm, and Blackborow reported that “there was something wrong” with his feet. Continual immersion in salt water had caused the eruption of painful boils on many men; their bodies were badly chafed, and their mouths throbbed with thirst. As the wind died they took to the oars, a task made painful by the blisters on their hands. By three in the afternoon, the boats were only ten miles from land, the harsh glaciers and icy mountains of Elephant Island now discernable in fine detail. At this point, the men encountered a strong tidal current that held the boats at bay. After a solid hour of rowing at the pitch of their strength, they were not so much as a mile closer to the island.

  At five o’clock, lowering skies to the northwest darkened, and shortly afterward a storm broke. There would be no landfall after all, but another night in the pitching boats.

  “We were in the midst of confused lumpy seas which running…from two directions were far more dangerous for small boats than the straight running waves of a heavy gale in open seas,” Worsley wrote. “The boats could never settle down, and to steer became a work of art.”

  Now all three boats were bailed continuously; in the belabored Stancomb Wills, four of the eight men were completely incapacitated: McIlroy, How, and Bakewell bailed through the night for their lives and those of their shipmates, while Crean held the tiller. In the James Caird, McNish relieved Wild at the helm, but briefly fell asleep, exhausted. Wild, unshaken, unchanged, took over again, “his steel-blue eyes,” as Shackleton recorded with affectionate pride, looking “out to the day ahead.” In the Docker, around midnight, Cheetham heard the boat’s back cracking, and all hands scurried to shift their stores. Huddled under the canvas of one of the tents, Green-street managed to light a match so that Worsley could glimpse his tiny compass. Later, some of the crew noticed that Worsley himself did not seem to hear them anymore, that his head was sinking on his chest. When at last he was persuaded to surrender the helm to Greenstreet, he was so stiff from hunching over the tiller that he could not unbend, and his rigid muscles had to be massaged before he could lie straight on the bottom of the boat: He had not slept for more than ninety hours.

  “It was,” wrote Shackleton, “a stern night.” The James Caird had taken the limping Stancomb Wills in tow, though at times the latter was lost to sight, vanishing into the deep trough of the swell, then reemerging from the black sea, tossed on the crest of a wave. The survival of the Wills, the least sound of the boats, depended upon her keeping contact with the Caird, and throughout the night Shackleton sat with his hand on her painter, as it grew heavy with ice. He must have been very near exhaustion.

  “Practically ever since we had first started Sir Ernest had been standing erect day and night on the stern-counter of the Caird,“ Lees wrote. “How he stood the incessant vigil and exposure is marvelous.” Shackleton had not slept since leaving Patience Camp.

  A sudden heavy squall of snow hid the boats from one another, and when it cleared, the Dudley Docker was gone; she had vanished into the darkness and the racing sea. For Shackleton, this was perhaps the worst moment of the journey.

  When the dawn came at last, the air was so thick with mist that the men aboard the Caird and the Wills were under the cliffs of Elephant Island before they saw them. Anxiously, they followed the precipitous coastline until at 9 a.m. they sighted a narrow beach at the northwest end of the island, beyond a fringe of surf-beaten rocks.

  “I decided we must face the hazards of this unattractive landing-place,” wrote Shackleton. “Two days and nights without drink or hot food had played havoc with most of the men.” His own throat and tongue were so swollen he could only whisper, and his orders were passed along by either Wild or Hurley. Shackleton boarded the Wills to take her through first, and as he did so the Dudley Docker hove in sight.

  “This,” wrote Shackleton, “took a great load off my mind.”

  The Wills was carefully positioned at an opening in the reef, then shot through on the top of waves to the rough stony beach beyond. Shackleton gave the word that Blackborow, as the youngest member of the expedition, should have the honor of being the first to land; but Blackborow sat motionless.

  “In order to avoid delay I helped him, perhaps a little roughly, over the side of the boat,” wrote Shackleton. “He promptly sat down in the surf and did not move. Then I suddenly realized what I had forgotten, that both his feet were frost-bitten badly.”

  The Docker followed the Wills, and then the James Caird, too heavy to land, was unloaded in tedious relays before being taken through the reef and beached beside the other boats.

  The men staggered onto land. With his Vest Pocket Kodak camera in hand, Hurley bounded out to record the landing of the boats and the first meal on Elephant Island.

  “Some of the men were reeling about the beach as if they had found an unlimited supply of alcoholic liquor on the desolate island,” Shackleton wrote. His bemused, paternal tone conjures an almost comical scene of readjustment; but the diaries hint darkly at the journey’s actual toll.

  “Many suffered from temporary aberration,” Hurley reported, “walking aimlessly about; others shivering as with palsy.” “Hudson,” McNish states with characteristic directness, “has gone of [f ] his head.”

  Some filled their pockets with stones, or rolled along the shingled beach, burying their faces in the stones and pouring handfuls over them.

  “In the Wills, only two men were fit to do anything,” Wordie recorded. “Some fellows moreover were half crazy: one got an axe and did not stop till he had killed about ten seals.… None of us suffered like this in the Caird.”

  On Elephant Island

  The James Caird, Dudley Docker, and Stancomb Wills safely ashore at Cape Valentine, Elephant Island. The men pull the Caird to higher ground; two figures, one in the distance, can be seen seated to the left of the boat, one of whom is probably Blackborow, crippled by frostbite. Off-loaded supplies can be seen on the beach above the boats.

  On Elephant Island; the first drink and hot food for three and a half days.

  Left to right: Lees, Wordie, Clark, Rickinson (who would later suffer a heart attack), How, Shackleton, Bakewell, Kerr, and Wild.

  They had spent seven fearful days in open boats in the South Atlantic, at the beginning of an Antarctic winter; 170 days drifting on a floe of ice with inadequate food and shelter; and not since December 5, 1914—497 days before—had they set foot on land.

  After meals of seal steaks, the men laid their bags on the solid earth and turned in for the night.

  “I did not sleep much,” Bakewell recalled, “just lay in my damp sleeping bag and relaxed. It was hard for me to realize that I was on good old solid earth once more. I got up several times during the night and joined the others, who were like me, just too happy to sleep. We would gather around the fire, eat and drink a little, have a smoke and talk over some of the past adventures.”

  As they would soon discover, they had arrived on an abnormally fine day. Elephant Island offered salvation, but a grimmer or more hostile piece of land was difficult to conceive. The narrow shingle beach onto which they had drawn the boats offered little protection from high seas, and the morning after landing, Wild set out with Marston, Crean, Vincent, and McCarthy in the Dudley Docker to scout the coast for a be
tter camp. He returned in the evening, after dark, with the news that there was a suitable place seven miles down the north coast. At daybreak on the 17th, the weary men loaded up the boats, leaving many boxes of sledging rations stacked against the rocks. No one had the energy to load them—and this at least ensured an emergency supply of provisions in the event a second boat journey was required. Shortly after they shoved off, another gale arose, threatening to sweep the boats out to sea.

  Elephant Island

  Cape Valentine is thought to have got its name because the sealer-explorer who charted the South Shetlands in the early nineteenth century came through on St. Valentine’s Day. “Scenically, our present environments are some of the grandest I have ever set eyes on. Cliffs that throw their serrated scarps a thousand feet into the skies are interspersed with glaciers that tumble in crevassed cascades down to the sea. Here they present walls of blue ice 100 to 180 feet in height.” (Hurley, diary)

  “Weathered what we call the Castle Rock and finally reached our destination,” wrote Wordie, “more exhausted I think, than by the previous boat journey.”

  The new camp offered a somewhat larger, gravelly beach, but was still foreboding.

  “Such a wild & inhospitable coast I have never beheld,” Hurley wrote upon their arrival, and evoked the “vast headland, black and menacing that rose from a seething surf 1,200 feet above our heads & so sheer as to have the appearance of overhanging.” On the other hand, wildlife was abundant, with seals, gentoo and ringed penguins, and even limpets in the shallow waters, although no sign of the elephant seal from which the island took its name.

  Many of the men were still incapacitated. The most critical were Blackborow with severe frostbite, Hudson with frostbite and a mysterious pain in his lower back, and Rickinson, who was believed to have suffered a heart attack. The others on the sick list were simply “stove in.”