by Chris Turney
The findings were all well and good, but Shackleton knew his backers would demand more. He had to get close to the pole if he was to return in glory and pay off his considerable debts. Food supplies were now dangerously low. Non-essential equipment was jettisoned and meals were cut back to eke out a longer trip.
After some 1350 kilometres of backbreaking sledging Shackleton realised they could not make it to the pole. Standing on an ocean of ice more than three thousand metres above sea level, the four men could not take much more. Temperatures averaging -30°C, exhaustion, hunger, altitude sickness and the possibility of scurvy were all taking their toll. By 4 January three of the men were so cold that the clinical thermometer was not even registering a body temperature. They were close to death.
Enough was enough. They decided to make a dash to the furthest possible southerly point and then head home. ‘Our last day outwards,’ Shackleton later wrote:
We have shot our bolt and the tale is latitude 88° 23’ South, longitude 162° East…At 4 a.m. started south, with the Queen’s Union Jack, a brass cylinder containing stamps and documents to place at the furthest south point, camera, glasses and compass. At 9 a.m. we were in 88° 23’ South, half running and half walking over a surface much hardened by the recent blizzard. It was strange for us to go along without the nightmare of a sledge dragging behind us. We hoisted her Majesty’s flag and the other Union Jack afterwards, and took possession of the Plateau in the name of his Majesty [Edward VII]. While the Union Jack blew out stiffly in the icy gale that cut us to the bone, we looked south with our powerful glasses, but could see nothing but the dead white snow plain.
They could go no further. A mere ninety-seven nautical miles—equivalent to 180 kilometres—short of their goal, Shackleton turned his small group around and headed back, having set a new furthest-south record. ‘Our food lies ahead,’ he wrote ‘and death stalks us from behind.’
‘And thus we went along,’ Shackleton later recounted in a recording made of his exploits, ‘and thus we returned, having done a work that has resulted with great advantage to science, and for the first time returning without the loss of a single human life.’ Their journey back to the Nimrod was a close-run thing. Food supplies had been stretched to the limit; the men fell back on Forced March tablets, made from a cocaine base, to sustain them.
Hollow-eyed, with blistered skin and acute frostbite, Shackleton arrived at the Ross Sea base on 28 February 1909. The next day the Nimrod returned to search for bodies and instead found the men alive. Shackleton remarked to his long-suffering wife, ‘I thought, dear, that you would rather have a live ass than a dead lion.’
Shackleton’s return to Britain in 1909 generated huge excitement. The expedition members were heroes, though the party had not have achieved its main goal of reaching the South Geographic Pole. Shackleton’s newspaper sponsor, the Daily Mail, heralded the adventurer’s achievements. The tales of endurance and near death guaranteed newspaper sales, and Shackleton’s fame: he was knighted that same year; learned men courted his opinion; and Madame Tussauds even made a wax model of the explorer, which stayed on display until 1963. ‘We could pass the eight Dreadnoughts if we were sure of the eight Shackletons,’ the novelist Sir Conan Doyle observed.
Leonard Darwin, Sir Clements Markham’s replacement as president of the Royal Geographical Society, hosted a celebratory dinner to honour Shackleton’s return to Britain, proclaiming: ‘it had been the policy of the RGS not to reward mere record breaking or racing to either Pole; because there was no reason to suppose that any especial scientific interest attached to that particular spot on the earth’s surface…The feat performed by Mr. Shackleton would for ever remain notable even if examined in the coldest light of geographical science; for he had succeeded in penetrating for over 400 miles into hitherto absolutely unknown land.’
With Shackleton’s discovery that the ranges of Victoria Land continued southeast for hundreds of kilometres, a vast new mountain chain was suddenly added to the world’s maps. Coal had been found in the rock faces surrounding the Beardmore Glacier. And, excitingly for scientists, there was what Priestley later described as a ‘discovery’ of fossils that showed the ‘human hazard the Antarctic scientist has to fear’.
Returning to England by ship, Frank Wild—Shackleton’s right-hand man—had struck up a conversation with a young woman who enthusiastically listened to his stories of adventure. Keen to give her a keepsake, Wild offered a piece of rock, some limestone collected on the surface of the Beardmore Glacier thrust up from deep below ‘with intriguing little marks almost like Egyptian hieroglyphics’. Priestley, evidently not immune to eavesdropping, became concerned. He stopped the exchange and dashed to his cabin, returning with a piece of granite covered in red garnets. ‘Give her this, it’s much prettier,’ Priestley said, ‘and you can tell her it came from the furthest south if you like.’
Cross-sections of the original rock were made in Sydney and it was found to be full of tiny fossils of Archaeocyathus, an ancestor of sponges and corals. It was the only unambiguous fossil the expedition had collected, and it showed that the Antarctic limestone deep below the ice was Cambrian in age—proof that the new continent held rocks containing evidence of some of the earliest life on Earth, some half a billion years ago. David and Priestley’s account of the geology of southern Victoria Land remained the authoritative account for many years afterwards.
Alongside this, Mawson’s important magnetic measurements seemed to prove that the South Magnetic Pole was not moving eastward, as Scott’s expedition had suggested—it was travelling in a northwesterly direction. David, in particular, was keen to celebrate the young man’s achievements: ‘Mawson was the real leader who was the soul of our expedition to the Magnetic Pole. We really have in him an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, astonishing indifference to frost.’
In the first six months of his return, Shackleton lectured 123 times and travelled 32,000 kilometres across two continents. He was a natural speaker, and the latest technology allowed him to bring Antarctica a little bit closer to those who came to listen. Unlike Africa and Asia before it, Antarctica was being explored by westerners when photographs could be taken relatively cheaply and reliably. The public was blitzed with intimate portrayals of the journey into this new world.
Shackleton took camera work in Antarctica—first undertaken on Borchgrevink’s expedition at the turn of the century—to the next level. Photography might be the handmaiden of science, as the Victorians had quickly realised, but Shackleton was canny enough to realise that images of Antarctic wildlife would be a hit with ordinary people. Here was the marriage of entertainment and science, in a display of unfamiliar landscapes and creatures. The wildlife shots were so popular that they almost muscled the expedition’s exploits out of newspaper reports.
Other team members joined the lecture circuit, desperately trying to raise the funds to cover the expedition’s debt. David was not overly keen about charging Australians to hear his talks on Antarctica, but he realised that if his geological work was to be published he would have to do so. He soon ran into a common problem in dealing with Shackleton. In his desire to raise funds Shackleton had sold the film rights in Australia to a distributor, who cried foul when he found out that the Prof was giving talks at the same time. In the end David agreed to delay his appearances until the film had done the rounds.
Others were less happy. Scott seethed over Shackleton’s decision to base himself in McMurdo Sound, but kept his views largely to himself and even joined in some of the many celebrations. He wrote a glowing report for the Daily Mail, remarking that ‘the really brilliant part appears to have been accomplished by the men themselves dragging their loads.’ Ultimately, Shackleton had failed to reach the pole, justifying Scott’s return south if he could arrange it.
Markham let his feelings get the better of him and was stand-offish. His early enthusiasm for Shackleton disappeared and he would commonly refer to him as ‘that ungratef
ul cad’ in conversation. He felt Shackleton had deliberately tried to take what by right was Scott’s, using a base he had agreed to avoid. ‘I cannot look with any complacency at Shackleton’s expedition,’ he recorded in his journal. ‘Beginning with a breach of faith, his main objects were to forestall his old commander and to reach the pole. He succeeded in the first rather discreditable object, and failed in the second. But the way in which he pushed onwards from 6 Dec to Jan 9 showed extraordinary pluck and resolution, though very poor management… Altogether, while recognizing the remarkable character of his journey, I am not lost in admiration of his character. Disloyal—unfaithful—underhand. While expressing appreciation of his journey, especially of his discovery of coal, I shall not be over-demonstrative.’
Publicly, Markham was more restrained. In The Lands of Silence, published after his death, he wrote: ‘A noteworthy fact was that both on the outward and the return journey the wind had been very greatly in their favour.’ Shackleton was not impressed.
Called ‘the undisputed Lion’ in British gossip magazines, Shackleton set the Antarctic agenda for years to come—and a challenge for others to surpass his feats. In the summer of 1909 The Times remarked on the increasing pace of discovery in the south: ‘In 1900 M. Borchgrevink’s expedition only penetrated about 50 miles further south than Ross in 1841, but two years later Captain Scott covered a further 200 miles, and seven years later again his then lieutenant has achieved another 400 miles, reaching to within 110 miles of the Pole.’ In the Sphere newspaper the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society wrote: ‘We may surely be left to cherish a hope that the Union Jack will be carried across the hundred miles or so which have been left untrodden by Shackleton and planted at…the South Pole.’ The glory of being the first to reach the South Geographic Pole still remained, and more than ninety-seven per cent of the continent awaited discovery.
By the end of 1909 the cost of Shackleton’s expedition was put at almost £45,000—half what the Discovery exploration had cost, and remarkably cheap for what had been achieved. Shackleton’s self-belief was rewarded: the British government granted £20,000 to help pay off outstanding debts. But for anyone else seeking to go the extra 180-odd kilometres in the south, a future expedition would need a far firmer footing than that enjoyed by the optimistic Anglo-Irishman. For Scott to return and finish the job Shackleton had so nearly completed, government support—even from a superpower like Britain—could not be expected.
Prospective expedition leaders and their supporters resorted to cutting exclusive deals with newspapers and book publishers, and undertaking an ambitious, unprecedented series of public talks and private dinners. Shackleton had shown that, even if an expedition was not hugely successful in finding mineral resources, financial backers did have a chance of becoming immortalised in the landscape. Hopeful explorers would travel from one venue to another, often across different countries, lecturing, discussing, being interviewed, pleading with and sometimes cajoling would-be benefactors. Many became exhausted by the race for funding.
Ernest Shackleton had not been the only explorer working towards a pole in 1909. In one heady week during early September, the world learned of two separate American claims to have reached the North Geographic Pole. On 3 September, Dr Frederick Cook, who had been on de Gerlache’s expedition south ten years earlier, returned from overwintering in the Arctic and announced he had reached the pole in April the previous year. Opinion was mixed. When the Manchester Guardian canvassed whaling captains the feeling was of widespread scepticism, with one exclaiming, ‘Keep it out of the papers; it’s a complete hoax,’ while another who had spent over thirty years of his life in the Arctic said it was ‘a really good yarn but obviously of American origin’.
Four days later Commander Robert Peary of the US Navy claimed he too had reached the pole in April of 1909. The Times described it as an ‘annus mirabilis in the history of exploration’. Peary was an Arctic veteran in his early fifties who had made several high-profile attempts to reach the Pole—each a failure, and they had cost him dearly, including the loss of his toes to frostbite. Peary’s expedition of 1909 was widely thought to be his last realistic chance at success.
On the news of this second claim Cook initially cabled the New York Herald: ‘Two records are better than one.’ Peary cried foul and declared his rival, the seasoned Antarctic explorer, a fraud. When challenged, Cook failed to produce detailed navigational records and fled to Europe. Peary reaped the rewards. Regardless of whether the world believed Peary had achieved his goal or not—and it now seems he had not—the matter was closed. As far as explorers looking for financial backers were concerned, the north had been claimed.
The prospect of glory through scientific exploration encouraged people to risk life and limb, and their reputation, in the pursuit of the unknown at the far ends of the Earth. With the great geographic record apparently secured in the north, eyes turned south. The Americans lost no time in building on their success. By the end of 1909 Peary had declared he would be glad to organise an American Antarctic Expedition in 1911, with the Weddell Sea touted as a possible base for an assault on the South Geographic Pole. In total, seven expeditions were announced. In addition to the American effort, teams from Scotland, Britain, Norway, Japan, Germany, and Australia and New Zealand set out their plans to scientifically explore the Antarctic, most stating they wanted to be the first to reach the South Geographic Pole.
For Robert Falcon Scott, there was only one nation that should finish what Shackleton had started: ‘In whatever measure that remaining distance is computed, it is for England to cover it.’ The scene was set for 1912.
CHAPTER 3
A NEW LAND
Robert Scott and the Terra Nova Expedition, 1910–1913
The highest object that human beings can set before themselves is not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the unknown: it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its boundaries a little further from our little sphere of action.
THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY (1825–1895)
Following Shackleton’s near miss of the South Geographic Pole in 1909, Robert Scott started to put his long-held plans for the south into action. The Antarctic explorer had made private enquiries to the Royal Geographical Society, wanting to know whether it would be sympathetic to his ideas. He did not expect a large amount of money from the RGS, but sought the society’s stamp of approval. Leonard Darwin had advised Scott: ‘if you combine new geographical work, and scientific aims, with an effort to reach higher latitudes, you will have the warm sympathy of the Council in your efforts.’
His standing was high in many quarters. Remembering the fiasco over the election of female fellows, Markham wrote to Lord Curzon in November 1911: ‘He secured for our expedition complete success, which to us was so important. For this we owe him an immense debt of gratitude. It restored our credit to us, lost by the mismanagement of the female trouble.’ Scott’s science program was endorsed with the full backing of the RGS.
Scott held off making a public announcement. He wanted to get as much in place as possible before telling the world he was returning south. But the claim and counter-claim by Cook and Peary in early September 1909 regarding the North Geographic Pole forced his hand.
On 13 September 1909 The Times reported Scott’s intentions: to claim the South Geographic Pole for Britain alongside a string of scientific aims, including geographic discovery, geology, meteorology, magnetism and biology. The expedition would follow Shackleton’s approach of leaving the men south, with the vessel returning north for the southern winter. And the cost? A trifling £40,000—a little less than Shackleton’s efforts. Donations could be sent to ‘36 Victoria Street, London’.
As Scott later explained in the RGS’s journal, three teams would set out from a base in the McMurdo Sound, each with a geologist attached: the Southern Party would strike out for the pole; the Western Party would investigate Victoria Land; and six men would make up an Eastern Party, overwintering s
eparately on or near King Edward VII Land, something Shackleton had attempted and failed to do. The pole was a laudable aim, Scott argued, because it was a spot untrodden by human feet. ‘Its quest becomes an outward visible sign that we are still a nation able and willing to undertake difficult enterprises, still capable of standing in the van of the army of progress.’
The other areas of exploration offered a greater understanding of the Antarctic. Unlike the McMurdo Sound region, for instance, almost nothing was known of the other side of the Great Ice Barrier. King Edward VII Land remained one of the few known places that no one had set foot on. Was it an archipelago of islands, or connected in some way to Victoria Land? Scott resolved to find out.
But, Scott argued, it was the duty of an explorer to do more than just record his movements—he ‘must take every advantage of his unique position and opportunities to study natural phenomena, and to add to the edifice of knowledge those stones which can be quarried only in the regions he visits. Such a result cannot be achieved by a single individual or by a number of individuals trained on similar lines. The occasion calls for special knowledge and special training in many branches.’ The naval officer had learned his lesson from the Discovery expedition: this time there would be a specialist scientific team.
Charles Royds was Scott’s first lieutenant on the previous journey south and, among his many roles, was the expedition’s meteorologist. On returning to Britain he had spoken at the Royal Meteorological Society. ‘I most sincerely regret that I did not go thoroughly into the work before we left England,’ Royds declared with disarming honesty. ‘I left with no fixed idea as to how the observations were to be taken, ignorant, I am sorry to say, of the workings of some of the instruments, and entirely ignorant of what was expected to be done by the authorities at home.’