by The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition
“Oh if I only had my cameras,” he wrote elsewhere, referring to his lost professional gear. All his surviving glass plates and cinematographic film, stored in their hermetically sealed cannisters, had been cached in a snow hole, along with the ship’s log, the expedition’s scientific records, and his photograph album.
Winter had set in. May is the southern hemisphere’s equivalent of November, and by midmonth the gravel beach was hidden beneath a layer of ice, and an ice foot extended on both sides of the spit. Everything was covered with snow. The temperatures on Elephant Island, situated above the Antarctic Circle, were not so severe as those the men had encountered on the floes—11° Fahrenheit was considered low— but because they were constantly wet and exposed to gales approaching 80 miles an hour, they often felt colder.
The men were by no means starving, but they were always hungry, and the unrelenting monotony of the virtually carnivorous diet was wearing on their minds as well as their bodies. From time to time, Wild doled out rations of special treats remaining from the eclectic stores they still carried with them. The last of a pearl barley pudding with jam, for example, made a great impression on the company. Lees was horrified at this extravagance, and recorded that it should have been spread over several days, instead of being devoured at one sitting. But Hurley’s reaction justifies this indulgence:
“Fine Barley pudding for lunch,” he wrote. “The remnants also of jam. The meal gave us great pleasure, inasmuch as we have not had a full cereal meal for two & 1?months.” The almost forgotten sensation of being satisfied at the end of a meal, together with the sense of an “occasion,” appears to have done wonders for morale, and in a sense made the meal go farther.
The days grew shorter, with sunlight only from nine in the morning until three in the afternoon. Wild’s “Lash up and stow” now served only as a wake-up call, for with the men spending up to seventeen hours a day in their bags, there was no need to stow them. The longer darkness made it harder to read, and the few available diversions were circumscribed yet more.
“Everyone spent the day rotting in their bags with blubber and tobacco smoke,”
Elephant Island
“I make this entry on the highest point of our Camping Spit.… The weather is delightful: bright warm sunshine & dead calm. Cape Wild is a narrow neck of land jutting out from the mainland some 220 to 250 yards.…The ocean termination is a precipitous rocky bluff ranging to about 20 feet in height which is guarded oceanwise by a rocky islet that presents a flat jagged face 300 feet in height, called the Gnomon.…I secure photographs. ( Hurley, diary)
Greenstreet wrote bluntly. “So passes another goddam rotten day.” In addition to various nautical books and copies of Walter Scott and Browning, five volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica had been saved from the Endurance library. The most entertainment per page was afforded by Marston’s Penny Cookbook, which inspired many imaginary meals.
Bartering with food became the principle pastime. Lees in particular was a demon for this, his propensity for saving odds and ends and his access to the stores ensuring that he always had a small stock of goods with which to negotiate.
“McLeod exchanged a cake of nut-food with Blackborrow for seven half penguin steaks payable at the rate of half a steak daily at breakfast time,” wrote Lees. “Wild exchanged his penguin steak last night for one biscuit with Stephenson. The other day the latter asked me if I would give him a cake of nut-food for all his lump sugar due i.e. at the rate of six lumps per week, and Holness did likewise.”
As the hours of darkness increased, the singsongs to the accompaniment of Hussey’s banjo played a more important role. While the wind raged outside, the men lay in their bags, still dressed in their perpetually wet clothing, and sang heartily all the familiar songs that evoked cozy, secure times gone by aboard the Endurance. Sea chanties —”Captain Stormalong,” “A Sailor’s Alphabet”— were always favorites, especially when rendered in Wild’s fine bass, or by Marston, who had the best voice of anyone in the company. Inventing new songs, or improvising new words to familiar tunes, a genre at which Hussey was a master, allowed the men to let off steam by taking jabs at one another without causing offense:
When faces turn pale ‘neath the soot and the grime,
When eyes start in terror as if caught in some crime,
When we beg on our knees to be let off this time,
Then you know that Kerr’s threatened to sing.
The overall health of the party was not as good as it had been at Patience Camp. As Lees noted, any of the men would have preferred the dry cold of the floes to the humid cold of Elephant Island. A number of cases of septic wounds and other minor complaints were registered, and Rickinson, while more or less recovered from his heart ailment, was suffering from saltwater boils that would not heal. Hudson was still “done up” and had developed a huge, painful abscess on his left buttock. Green-street was also suffering from frostbite, although not as seriously as Blackborow.
Blackborow’s condition had become so grave that Macklin and McIlroy, who were closely monitoring him, had braced themselves for the possibility of having to amputate his feet. By June, his right foot seemed to be on the mend, but the toes of the left foot had become gangrenous and needed to be removed. Requiring a temperature high enough to vaporize their scant supply of chloroform, they waited for the first mild day to perform the operation.
On June 15, all hands except for Wild, Hurley, How, and other invalids were sent outside while the Snuggery was converted into an operating theater. A platform of food boxes covered with blankets served as an operating table, and Hurley stoked the bogie stove with penguin skins, eventually raising the temperature to 79°. The few surgical instruments were boiled in the hoosh pot. Macklin and McIlroy stripped to their undershirts, the cleanest layer of clothing they possessed. While Macklin administered the anaesthetic, McIlroy performed the surgery. Hudson averted his face; Hurley, characteristically unsqueamish, found it fascinating, as did Greenstreet, who was lying nearby recovering from rheumatism.
“Blackborow had an operation on his toes today,” wrote Greenstreet, who was suffering from frostbite and rheumatism, “having all the toes of his left foot taken off about 1?4 ? stumps being left. I was one of the few who watched the operation and it was most interesting. The poor beggar behaved splendidly.”
Wild, who lent a hand in the operation, showed no revulsion as McIlroy slit and peeled back the skin of Blackborow’s foot.
“He is a hard case,” Macklin wrote.
When the operation was completed, the rest of the party were called in again, while Blackborow slept off the chloroform. He was a great favorite of all hands, and his cheerfulness both before and after the ordeal was much admired. Lees was impressed by his fortitude too, but the operation had caused him personal concern.
“Practically the whole of the available anaesthetic was used up,” he wrote, “so that if I have to have my leg off, not that there is anything whatever the matter with it at present.… I shall have to have it done without anaesthetic.”
His consternation inspired Hussey to write new verses:
When the Doctors dance round with joy on their faces,
And sharpen up knives and take saws from their cases,
When Mack spits on his hands and Mick hoists up his braces,
Then you know that the Colonel’s gone sick.
The addition of several small windowpanes, made of a chronometer case and piece of celluloid that Hurley had stashed in the pages of a book, cast murky new light inside the hut, reawakening the men to the general squalor of the conditions in which they lived. Grease, blubber smoke and soot, reindeer hairs, seal and penguin blood, melting guano were embedded into every crack and fiber of the hut and their few possessions. Scraps of meat dropped in the darkness festered unseen on the floor. At night a two-gallon petrol can was used as a urinal, so as to spare the men a long, stumbling journey past a row of sleeping bags, out into the icy night. Wild’s rule was that the
man who filled the can to within two inches of capacity was responsible for taking it outside and emptying it; but all hands became adept at gauging the volume remaining in the can by the noise it made as it got filled. If it sounded as if the two-inch limit was nearly reached, a man would wait in his bag for someone whose need was more urgent to precede him.
Midwinter Day, June 22, was celebrated as it had been on Endurance with a feast, songs, and facetious sketches, all performed by the men from their sleeping bags. Like Shackleton, Wild took care to punctuate the monotonous existence with any excuse for an “occasion.” Toasts were drunk to the King, the Returning Sun, and the Boss and Crew of the Caird with a new concoction consisting of Clark’s 90 percent methylated spirit (a preservative for specimens), sugar, water, and ginger (a tin of which, thought to contain pepper, had been brought along by mistake). This “Gut Rot 1916” became greatly popular, especially with Wild himself. The toast to “Sweethearts and Wives” was still drunk on Saturdays.
July brought warmer, wetter weather. The great glacier at the head of the inlet was dropping enormous chunks of ice, which cracked off with the noise of a rifle shot and sent up huge waves upon impact with the water below. A more serious problem, however, was the accumulation of melted snow and ice—and penguin guano—on the hut floor.
“Thaw water having risen to the uncomfortable extent of rendering the shingly floor a sludgy mess, we set about the smelly occupation of bailing out and reshingling,” wrote Hurley. “By means of a “sumphole” some 80 gallons of cesspit odorous liquid was removed.” This unpleasant process was to be repeated throughout the month.
Ice Stalactites
“July 5, 1916: Pleasant calm day though dull. During the morning go walking with Wild. We visit a neighboring cavern in the glacier which was adorned with a magnificence of icicles. Fine shawlike stalactites covered the walls & the roof was adorned with a finish of curiously carved and footlike stalactites.” ( Hurley, diary)
Adding to the general edginess was the fact that the tobacco supply of all but the most frugal and self-disciplined had given out.
“Holness, one of the sailors, sits up in the cold every night after everyone else has turned in gazing intently at Wild & McIlroy in the hopes that one of them will give him the unsmokeable part of a toilet-paper cigarette,” wrote Lees. This crisis elicited a hitherto undetected inventiveness amongst the sailors. With the dedication of laboratory scientists, they methodically tested every combustible fiber as a possible tobacco substitute. Great hopes were pinned on a scheme devised by Bakewell, who collected the pipes of the entire company and boiled them in the hoosh pot together with sennegrass, which was used to insulate their finnesko boots; his theory was that residual nicotine would imbue the grass with its flavor.
“A strong aroma as of a prairie fire pervades the atmosphere,” wrote Hurley. The experiment was a failure, but Bakewell at least was philosophical. “Had we had plenty to eat and to smoke, our minds would have been on our real peril,” he wrote, “which would have been very dangerous to the morale of the camp.”
Smoking was not the only pleasure of which the crew were deprived. Wild had put a halt to the food bartering after Lees managed to garner many weeks’ supplies of sugar from the improvident sailors; invoking the opinion of the doctors, Wild informed Lees that the carbohydrate element he had so assiduously procured was necessary for the welfare of the men. Toasts with methylated spirits had become markedly more frequent in July, but this supply too was dwindling, as were, more importantly, the biscuit and precious Nutfood. The powdered milk was gone. Soon there would be only penguin or seal to look forward to for every meal. But the monotony and unhealthfulness of the diet were not all that were becoming wearisome; also taking a toll was the unending need for slaughter.
“About 30 Gentoo Penguins came ashore & I am pleased the weather was too bad to slay them,” wrote Hurley. “We are heartily sick of being compelled to kill every bird that comes ashore for food.”
August 13 was so bright and so mild that a general spring cleaning was undertaken and sleeping bags and groundcloths were spread out to dry. Blackborow was carried out to enjoy the sun; he had spent every day of the four months they had been on Elephant Island inside his bag, without complaint. The fine weather continued, and several of the men collected limpets and seaweed from low tidal pools; boiled in seawater, they provided a welcome novelty to their diet.
The weather continued to fluctuate erratically, with more fine brilliant days followed by a northeast blizzard that dumped heavy snow, forming drifts up to four feet high around the hut. On August 19, the pack was so dense that no water at all was visible from the lookout bluff. The expectant atmosphere with which the month had opened now gave way to a mood of increasing anxiety; August had always been the very latest month speculated for a possible rescue.
“All are becoming anxious for the safety of the Caird as allowing a fair margin of time for contingencies, [a ship] should have made her appearance by now,” wrote Hurley. “The weather is wretched. A stagnant calm of air & ocean alike, the latter obscured by heavy pack & a dense wet mist hangs like a pall over land & sea. The silence is extremely oppressive.”
Now for the first time the possibility of Shackleton’s not returning was openly discussed; more ominously, Wild had quietly issued an order that all cordwood and nails were to be hoarded—in the event that a boat journey had to be made to Deception Island.
Muggy, wet weather plagued them on the 21st, melting eight inches of new snow which seeped under the boats. Though the men had known that Blackborow’s foot was not healing properly, it now became generally known that the swelling and inflammation indicated osteomyelitis, or infection of the bone.
The weather continued to be warm, and on the 24th, Marston was discovered sunbathing. On the 25th it turned dull and damp, and on the 26th it began to rain again. For all these days, not a breath of wind seemed to stir the ice or water. On the 27th, Wild, anticipating a thaw, set the men digging snow drift away from the hut. The work continued on the 28th, and although it was arduous, most enjoyed the unaccustomed exercise.
August 29 was clear, with a strong wind. “[P]reparations are being pushed along for sending one of our two boats,” wrote Lees. “Wild has it all nicely cut & dried, & has revealed his plans to the favoured few. He and four other members are to go in the Dudley Docker, and will make their way carefully along under the lee of the land from island to island of the South Shetlands … until they reach Deception Island about 250 miles away to our S.W.” According to this plan, the Docker would set out about October 5, in order to catch the whalers who plied the waters around Deception Island.
Simple enough in theory, the plan represented a course of action no one wished to take. The mere thought of another boat journey was daunting enough in the best of circumstances. As it was, the most valuable equipment had left with the Caird, and there now remained only a jib, old tent cloths in lieu of a mainsail, and five oars; even the mast of the Dudley Docker had been used to strengthen the keel of the Caird. Above all, the departure of the Dudley Docker from Elephant Island would be an acknowledgment that somewhere in the broad southern ocean the Caird and all hands had been lost.
August 30 dawned clear and cold. All hands worked at removing snow drift, but stopped at 11 a.m. to take advantage of the low tide and calm sea to catch limpets for the evening meal. At 12:45, most of the men turned in for “hoosh oh,” a lunch of boiled seal’s backbone, while Marston and Hurley remained outside, shelling limpets.
Wild was just serving the meal when the sound of Marston’s running steps was heard outside—undoubtedly he was late for lunch. Moments later, he stuck his head into the hut, panting.
“Wild, there’s a ship,” he said, excitedly. “Shall we light a fire?”
“Before there was time for a reply there was a rush of members tumbling over one another,” Lees reported, “all mixed up with mugs of seal hoosh making a simultaneous dive for the door-hole which was immediately tor
n to shreds.”
Outside, Hurley, ever resourceful, ignited paraffin, blubber, and sennegrass, creating an explosive blaze, but little smoke. It did not matter; the ship was headed for Cape Wild.
“There she lay,” wrote Lees, “barely a mile off, a very little black ship, apparently a steam tug, not at all the wooden polar ice-breaking craft we expected to see.” While they gazed in wonder, Macklin ran to the “flagpole” and hoisted his Burberry jacket as high as the running gear permitted, which was about half-mast. Meanwhile, Hudson and Lees carried Blackborow outside, and arrived in time to see the mystery ship raise, to their bewilderment, the Chilean naval ensign.
About to be rescued after 22 months
August 30, 1916: The Yelcho is in the distance. Three days earlier, Wild had given the order that a mound of solidified snowdrift be removed from around the outside galley, in the event that the sudden warmer temperatures might thaw it and create flooding. The picks and shovels of the men can be seen where they left them. Their few possessions are piled in readiness.
Cheering loudly, the men watched in excitement as the ship drew closer. Anchoring within 500 feet of the shore, the small tug lowered a boat; and in her the men recognized the sturdy, square-set figure of Shackleton, and then Crean.
“I felt jolly near blubbing for a bit & could not speak for several minutes,” wrote Wild.
“Then there was some real live cheers given,” recalled Bakewell. Breathlessly, the men waited as Shackleton approached. When he was in hearing distance they called out in unison, “All well!”
Worsley had been with Shackleton on the deck of the Yelcho when they first spotted the island. Their hearts had sunk when they saw a flag at half-mast, but gazing with painful intensity through his binoculars, Shackleton had made out the twenty-two figures on shore.