Endurance, Deluxe Ed: The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told by Alfred Lansing

by Alfred Lansing

  Still there were occasional signs that the Antarctic spring was coming. The sun now shone for nearly ten hours every day, and on September i o, the temperature climbed to 1.9 degrees above zero - the highest reading for seven months. To the men it seemed like a heat wave; they could go aloft with bare heads and hands in reasonable comfort. A week later, Bobbie Clark's biological dredge brought up evidence that the amount of plankton in the water was increasing - a definite sign of the approach of spring.

  In the Antarctic, plankton - tiny one-celled plants and animals - is the basis for all life. The smallest fishes subsist on it, and they in turn become the food of larger fish, which are eaten by squids and seals and penguins, who constitute the food for killer whales, sea leopards, and giant sperm whales. The cycle of life begins with plankton, and when it is present, the other creatures of the Antarctic are never far behind.

  Five days after Clark's report, jock Wordie sighted an emperor penguin and enticed it out of a patch of open water. It was speedily killed. The following day, a female seal was slain.

  But in spite of these encouraging signs, an unmistakable air of apprehension was spreading. October i was getting close. Twice before, in August and September, the first of the month had been the signal for severe pressure, and the men had grown superstitious about it.

  This time the fates miscalculated by one day. The pressure started on September 30, about three o'clock in the afternoon. Altogether it lasted only one terrifying hour.

  The attacker this time, a floe off the port bow, bore in mercilessly beneath the foremast. The decks below shuddered and jumped, and the uprights buckled. Chippy McNeish was down in the Ritz. The giant beams over his head bent `like a piece of cane.' Greenstreet, on deck, was unable to take his eyes off the foremast which looked as if it were `coming out of her with the tremendous jerks it gave.'

  Worsley was aft by the wheel, and when the pressure was past, he wrote in his diary: `She shows almost unconceivable strength ... every moment it seems as though the floe must crush her like a nutshell. All hands are watching and standing by, but to our relief, just as it appears she can stand no more, the huge floe weighing possibly a million tons or more yields to our little ship by cracking across, '/ of a mile, and so relieves the pressure. The behaviour of our ship in the ice has been magnificent. Undoubtedly she is the finest little wooden vessel ever built ...'

  When it was all over the crew went below to find that many of the decks were permanently buckled and all manner of articles had been shaken off the shelves. But the ship was still under them.

  A little of the old optimism began to creep back. The Eudiiraiice might just make it.Three times the ship had come under attack from the ice, and always the pressure had been worse than the time before. But each time the Endurance had fought back and she had won. As the early days of October passed, the ice showed definite signs of opening. Temperatures, too, began to rise. On October io, the thermometer climbed to 9.8 degrees above zero. The floe which had been jammed under the ship's starboard side since July broke free on October 14, and the Endurance lay in a small pool of open water - truly afloat for the first time since she was beset nine months before.

  The officers and scientists could now move back into the wardroom in the deckhouse. The partitions in the Ritz were taken down and the area was reconverted into a hold for stores.

  Shackleton decided on October 16 that the opening tendency of the pack justified getting up steam on the chance that they could force a way through. All hands were put to pumping up the boilers with water. This exhausting three-and-a-half-hour job was hardly finished when a serious leak was discovered in one of the fittings - and the boilers had to be pumped out again so the engineers could make repairs. By the time the job was completed, it was too late to get under way. Early the next afternoon a lead of open water appeared ahead of the ship. There wasn't time to get up steam, so the men set all sails trying to force her into the crack. She wouldn't budge. October 18 dawned a misty, snowy morning. The ahead had disappeared, and the ice was a little closer. Throughout the day the ship felt little nips of pressure, but nothing serious. Then at 4:45 p.m., the floes on either side of the Endurance closed in against her, and kept on closing.

  The Endurance being bowled over by the ice, October 1915

  Every man on board stiffened, as if he himself had been touched. Several raced up the ladders onto deck. In the next instant, the deck seemed to slide away from beneath their feet as the ship rolled suddenly over to port. A sec- ond's pause - then everything movable let go with a rush - wood, kennels, ropes, sledges, stores, dogs, and men cascaded across the deck. James was caught under two boxes of winter clothing onto which a pile-up of dogs descended in whining, howling confusion. Clouds of steam rose from the galley and the wardroom where pots of water were upset onto the fires.

  In the space of five seconds, the Endurance was heeled over 20 degrees to port - and she continued to fall off. Worsley rushed to the lee rail and watched as plank after plank disappeared under the ice. Greenstreet stood nearby, ready to jump.

  The floe to starboard had got a grip on the bulge of her hull and was simply rolling her over. At 3 o degrees to port she slowed, then stopped with her bulwarks resting on the ice and the lifeboats nearly touching. Said Worsley: `She seemed to say to the grinding, hungry pack, "You may smash me but I'm damned if I'll go over another inch for you; I'll see you melting in Hell first." '

  The moment the Endurance came to rest, Shackleton ordered the fires extinguished; then everyone went systematically about the job of restoring order. They lashed down everything that was loose and nailed small strips of wood to the deck to give the dogs a foothold. About seven o'clock the work on deck was finished and the men went below - to behold a scene in which every hanging article looked as if it were caught in a high wind. Curtains, pictures, clothing, and cooking utensils all hung out from the starboard bulkhead.

  Green managed to prepare a supper while the rest of the crew nailed more battens to the decks below The meal was eaten with most of them sitting on the deck, one above another, holding their plates in their laps. `We look like we're sitting in a grandstand,' James remarked.

  About eight o'clock, the floes under the Endiirance drew apart, and the ship quickly righted herself.The crew was set to chopping away the ice from around the rudder. They finished about 1 o p.m. A ration of grog was issued, and then they began pumping up the boilers again. At one o'clock in the morning all hands except the watch turned in - bone tired.

  October 19 was a day free from pressure, and there was very little activity of any sort. A killer whale surfaced in the lane of open water alongside the ship and cruised with graceful arrogance up and down for a time. The last barometer reading of the day was 28.96, the lowest since the disastrous blizzard in July.

  Again on October 20 there was little change in the pack. Nevertheless, everything was made ready to get under way whenever an opening appeared. The engines were turned over slowly and found to be in good order. Regular four-hour sea watches were set. The twenty-first and the twenty-second similarly were days of watchful waiting; the only change in the pack was that it appeared to close slightly. The temperature dropped from 1 o above zero to -14 degrees. Late on the twenty-second, the wind swung around 18o degrees from southwest to northeast. McNeish wrote in his diary that night:'... very quiet, but there looks as if there was going to be a bit of pressure.'

  Shackleton leaning over the side of the Endurance

  Chapter Eight

  It was slow to arrive. October 23 dragged by uneventfully, except that the pack was working somewhat under the influence of the northeast wind.

  When, at 6:45 p.m. on October 24, the pressure did arrive, it wasted no time. There had been pressure in the past, but nothing like this. It moved through the pack like a sluggish shock wave, making the entire surface of the ice into a chaos of churning, tumbling destruction. Macklin watched it briefly, then turned away in disbelief. `The whole sensation,' he recorded, `was of
something colossal, of something in nature too big to grasp.'

  Effortlessly, the ice jostled and badgered the ship until she was pinned up against two floes, fore and aft on the starboard side, and kneed in the center on the other.

  A heavy mass of ice ground across her stern, tearing the sternpost partly away from the starboard planking. Water poured in. McNeish was sent to check and reported back that it was rising rapidly in the fore`vard hold. Rickinson said the same of the engine room.

  The small portable Downton pump was rigged and steam was raised to operate the engine-room bilge pumps. They were going by 8 p.m., but they failed to hold the water in check. All hands that could be spared were put on the primary hand pumps alongside the mainmast. But after several minutes of pumping, no water had come up. The intakes were obviously frozen.

  Worsley took Hudson and Greenstreet with him down into the bunkers. Working in almost total darkness and icy cold, they dug and squirmed their way down to the keel through the wet, slimy coal into which the blubber from threescore seals had been dumped. The sounds of the tormented ship were deafeningly close. They poured bucket after bucket of boiling water into the frozen pipe. One of the men played the flame of a blowtorch on the stubborn fittings while the other two pounded to loosen the clogged intakes. Finally, after an hour's work, the pumps broke loose.

  McNeish commenced to build a cofferdam 1 o feet forward of the sternpost to seal off the after section of the ship and hold back the water. Between fifteen-minute spells at the pumps, some of the crew helped him calk the cofferdam with strips of torn blankets. Others went over the side with picks and ice-saws to cut lines of weakness in the attacking floes. But as soon as each trench was dug, the ice crumpled along it, then bore in again.

  All night long they kept at it ... fifteen minutes on the pumps, fifteen minutes off, then over the side or back to the engine room. Though they were lean and hard after a year's tough work on the ship and on the sledges, ten hours at the pumps and saws left even the strongest so exhausted they stumbled as they walked. At dawn, Shackleton ordered an hour's rest, and Green ladled out a bowl of porridge for each man.Then it was time to begin again. Toward mid-morning, Shackleton sent the dog drivers over the side to ready their teams and sledges in case of an immediate abandonment. Worsley took a party of seamen and cleared the boats for lowering.

  Most of them had stopped watching the pack in their struggle to save the ship. It had settled down some, but it was behaving strangely. Pressure ridges of a height never before seen rose between the floes, and the compression was fantastic, as if the pack had been shoved up against some solid barrier over the horizon.

  The men worked at the pumps and at building the cofferdam through the day and evening. About midnight, after twenty-eight hours of ceaseless work, McNeish finished his job, at least as well as it could be finished. But it only slowed the flow of water, and the pumps had to be kept going. Each spell was an agony of effort, and when it was finished, the nien staggered to their bunks or slumped into a corner. It took perhaps ten minutes for their exhausted muscles to loosen enough to let them sleep. Then just as they dozed off, they were prodded up for their next turn.

  Toward evening, the pressure increased again. The floe along the port side ground against the ship, warping her along her entire length, and wringing animal-like screams from her as the ice sought to break her back. At 9 p.m., Shackleton instructed Worsley to lower the boats and to get all essential gear and provisions onto the floe to starboard, which seemed the least likely to break up.

  Late in the evening, the men on deck saw a band of about ten emperor penguins; they waddled slowly up toward the ship, then stopped a short distance away. Emperors, singly or in pairs, were a common sight, but nobody had ever seen so large a group before. The penguins stood for a moment watching the tortured ship, then raised their heads and uttered a series of weird, mournful, dirgelike cries. It was all the more eerie because none of the men - not even the Antarctic veterans among them - had ever before heard penguins voice anything except the most elemental, croaking sorts of noises.

  The sailors stopped what they were doing, and old Toni McLeod turned to Macklin. `Do you hear that?' he asked. `We'll none of us get back to our homes again.'

  Macklin noticed Shackleton bite his lip.

  About midnight the movement of the ice partly closed the wound in the stern, and the flow of water decreased. But still the hand pumps had to be manned to keep the water from gaining. They stayed at it all night, working with closed eyes, like dead men attached to some evil contrivance which would not let them rest.

  It was no better at dawn, or at noon. About four o'clock the pressure reached new heights. The decks buckled and the beams broke; the stern was thrown upward 20 feet, and the rudder and sternpost were torn out of her. The water ran forward and froze, weighting her down in the bow, so that the ice climbed up her sides forward, inundating her under the sheer weight of it. Still they pumped. But at five o'clock they knew it was time to give up. She was done, and nobody needed to tell them.

  Shackleton nodded to Wild, and Wild went forward along the quaking deck to see whether anybody was in the forecastle. He found How and Bakewell trying to sleep after a turn at the pumps. He put his head inside.

  `She's going, boys,' he said. `I think it's time to get off.'

  OPPOSITE The wreck of the L ndlnrancc

  Chapter One

  `May the Lord help you to do your duty & guide you through all the dangers by land and sea.

  `May you see the Works of the Lord & all His Wonders in the deep.'

  These words were written on the flyleaf of a Bible given to the expedition by Queen Alexandra of Britain. Shackleton carried the Bible in his hand as he left the Eiidiiraiice and walked slowly across the ice toward the campsite.

  The others hardly noticed his arrival. They were busy crawling in and out of the tents, trying, numbly, to create some degree of comfort with what energy remained in them. Some arranged pieces of lumber to keep themselves off the snow-covered ice. Others spread pieces of canvas as groundcovers. But there was not enough flooring for everybody and several men had to lie directly on the bare snow. It made little difference. Sleep was all that mattered. And they slept - most of them embracing their nearest tentmates to keep from freezing.

  OPPOsITF The wreck of the Enclnrance

  Shackleton did not even try to sleep. He paced continually around the floe. The pressure was still intense, and several times the campsite sustained a violent shock.The dark outline of the Eiidiiratice 200 yards away rose against the clear night sky. About i a.m., as Shackleton walked back and forth, there was a jolt; then a thin ribbonlike crack snaked across the floe among the tents. Almost immediately it began to widen. Shackleton hurried from tent to tent, waking the exhausted sleepers. It required an hour's tricky work in the dark to transfer the camp to the larger half of the floe.

  Thereafter all was quiet in the camp, though just before dawn there was a loud report from the E,idi,rance. Her bowsprit and jib boom had broken and dropped onto the ice. For the rest of the night, Shackleton could hear the ghostly rhythm of the chain from the martingale boom being slowly dragged back and forth by the movement of the ship.

  When morning came, the weather was dull and overcast, but the temperature had climbed to 6 above zero. The men turned out stiff and cold from sleeping on the ice. It took a very long time for them to wake up. Shackleton did not press them, and after a time they turned to the job of sorting out equipment and stowing it securely on the sledges. It was a quiet time, and very few orders were given. Everyone understood his job and went about it without having to be told.

  The plan, as they all knew, was to march toward Paulet Island, 346 miles to the northwest, where the stores left in 1902 should still be. The distance was farther than from New York City to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and they would be dragging two of their three boats with them, since it was assumed that they would eventually run into open water.

  `Dump camp', the
morning after abandoning ship

  McNeish and McLeod began mounting the whaler and one of the cutters onto sledges. The boats with their sledges would weigh more than a ton apiece, and nobody had any delusions that it would be easy to drag them over the chaotic surface of the ice, with its pressure ridges occasionally two stories high.

  Nevertheless, there was a remarkable absence of discouragement. All the men were in a state of dazed fatigue, and nobody paused to reflect on the terrible consequences of losing their ship. Nor were they upset by the fact that they were now camped on a piece of ice perhaps 6 feet thick. It was a haven compared with the nightmare of labor and uncertainty of the last few days on the Endurance. It was quite enough to be alive - and they were merely doing what they had to do to stay that way.

  There was even a trace of mild exhilaration in their attitude. At least, they had a clear-cut task ahead of them. The nine months of indecision, of speculation about what might happen, of aimless drifting with the pack were over. Now they simply had to get themselves out, however appallingly difficult that might be.

  Periodically throughout the day, little groups of men made pilgrimages back to the derelict that had been their ship. But she was no longer a ship. She was not even afloat, really. She was a torn, twisted framework of wood. The ice, in its frenzy to wreck her, had driven through her sides and remained there, supporting the broken hull. She would remain on the surface only as long as the pressure lasted.

  On one trip, a group of men ran the Blue Ensign up to the forward yardarm, the only rigging still standing.When the Endurance went, she would at least go with her colors flying.

  The work of packing the sledges continued the next day, and in the afternoon Shackleton called all hands together into the center of the circle of tents. His face was grave. He explained it was imperative that all weight be reduced to the barest minimum. Each man, he said, would be allowed the clothes on his back, plus two pairs of mittens, six pairs of socks, two pairs of boots, a sleeping bag, a pound of tobacco - and two pounds of personal gear. Speaking with the utmost conviction, Shackleton pointed out that no article was of any value when weighed against their ultimate survival, and he exhorted them to be ruthless in ridding themselves of every unnecessary ounce, regardless of its value.