After he had spoken, he reached under his parka and took out a gold cigarette case and several gold sovereigns and threw them into the snow at his feet.
Then he opened the Bible Queen Alexandra had given them and ripped out the flyleaf and the page containing the Twenty-third Psalm. He also tore out the page from the Book of job with this verse on it:
The Endurance completely destroyed
Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone. And the face of the deep is frozen.
Then he laid the Bible in the snow and walked away.
It was a dramatic gesture, but that was the way Shackleton wanted it. From studying the outcome of past expeditions, he believed that those that burdened themselves with equipment to meet every contingency had fared much worse than those that had sacrificed total preparedness for speed.
As the afternoon wore on, the number of nonessentials dumped in the snow grew steadily. It was an `extraordinary collection of stuff,' James noted. Chronometers, axes, an ophthalmoscope, saws, telescopes, socks, lenses, jerseys, chisels, books, stationery - and a large number of pictures and personal keepsakes. For some men, the two-pound limit on personal gear was relaxed for special reasons. The two surgeons, of course, were permitted a small amount of medical supplies and instruments. The men with diaries were allowed to keep them. And Hussey actually was ordered to take his zither banjo along, even though it weighed 12 pounds. It was lashed in its case under the bow sheets of the whaler to keep it out of the weather.
Setting up Ocean Camp
The journey would begin the next day. On the eve of setting out, Shackleton wrote: `I pray God I can manage to get the whole party safe to civilization.'
October 30 was gray and overcast with a bit of occasional wet snow. The temperature was an uncomfortably warm 15 degrees, which made the surface of the ice soft - far from ideal for sledging.
Blackboro and Mrs Chippy, McNeish's tomcat who had to be shot after the break-up of the Endural,a'
They spent the morning readying the last bit of stores. About eleven-thirty, Shackleton, with Wild, went out to prospect for a route. Before he left, Shackleton ordered the three youngest puppies killed, along with Sirius, an older puppy from an earlier litter, whose only fault was that he had never been broken to harness. McNeish's tomcat, which had mistakenly been named Mrs Chippy before his sex was determined, also was to be destroyed. There was only food for those who could pull their weight.
Tom Crean, tough and practical as ever, took the younger puppies and Mrs Chippy some distance from camp and shot them without a qualm, but it was Macklin's duty to destroy Sirius, and he could hardly face the task. Reluctantly he got a 12-gauge shotgun from Wild's tent; then he led Sirius off toward a distant pressure ridge.When he found a suitable spot he stopped and stood over the little dog. Sirius was an eager, friendly puppy, and he kept jumping up, wagging his tail and trying to lick Macklin's hand. Macklin kept pushing him away until finally he got up nerve enough to put the shotgun to Sirius's neck. He pulled the trigger, but his hand was shaking so he had to reload and fire a second time to finish the puppy off.
The journey was begun about 2 p.m. Shackleton, Wordie, Hussey, and Hudson went ahead with a sledge and an assortment of shovels and mountaineering pickaxes. They tried to guide the main party along a level route, but every few hundred yards it was necessary to cross a pressure ridge. Then they set to work, chopping away at it until they had carved out a miniature mountain pass for the boats. On particularly high ridges, they had to build a ramp of ice and snow up one side and down the other.
The teams came next, pulling sledges loaded with up to goo pounds apiece. The boats, drawn by fifteen men harnessed in traces under Worsley's command, were last. It was killing toil. Because of their weight, the boats sank into the soft surface of the snow. To move them, the men in the traces had to strain forward, at times leaning nearly parallel with the ground, and the whole operation was more like plowing through the snow than sledging.
Shackleton wisely instructed the party to advance in short relays of about a quarter of a mile each. He was fearful that cracks would open up, and if the line of march were stretched out over a long distance the party might be divided. Their progress was slow and arduous, for all hands had to retrace their steps every thousand yards or so. By S p.m., after three hours on the trail, they were i mile from the ship in a direct line, though with detours they had traveled perhaps twice that far. Some of the dog teams, which had gone back time after time to bring up equipment, had probably covered more than lo miles altogether.
Supper was at six o'clock, and the weary men immediately crawled into their sleeping bags. During the night it began to snow heavily, and by dawn there was a mushy 6-inch blanket. The temperature soared to 25 degrees, making the prospects for sledging extremely bad.
In the morning, Shackleton and Worsley found a fairly good route to the west, and the whole party set out at one o'clock. But it was torturously slow going in the deep snow, and most of the men were sweating profusely and beset by thirst within minutes.
Their major efforts were devoted to beating down a path in the snow for the boat sledges. Even so, the fifteen men on the boats felt as if they were hauling their burdens through mud. After a time,Wild and Hurley took their teams back to help. They hitched onto the cutter, and succeeded in getting it moving.
About 4 p.m., having covered only a scant three-quarters of a mile, the party arrived at a thick, level floe. Since there wasn't another suitable camping place within sight, Shackleton decided they would spend the night where they were. Almost as fast as the tents were pitched, they were soaked inside. It was impossible to crawl into them without bringing in quantities of wet, clinging snow.
Macklin commented: `I cannot help feeling sorry for Worsley at the mouth of our tent, for he gets the wet brought in by everybody.'
Worsley, however, was far from distressed. He wrote in his diary that same night: `The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas ... and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.'
Shackleton was pleased by the general cheeriness of the nien. `Many look on this as a spree,' he recorded. `It is better so.'
He also observed: `This floe really strong. Will sleep tonight.'
The floe was indeed a giant, more than a half mile in diameter and made up of ice io feet thick, with S feet of snow on top of that. It was probably more than two years old, Worsley estimated.
Its sturdiness was very much on Shackleton's mind the following morning when he went out with Wild and Worsley to look for a route. They saw tumbled confusion to the west, `a sea of pressure,' Shackleton declared, `impossible to advance.' The boats and sledges would not last io miles over such a surface.
On the way back to camp, Shackleton came to a decision. When he arrived he called all hands together. He told the men that they had made less than a mile a day, and that the route ahead appeared to get progressively worse. Their advance, he said, hardly merited the effort it required. And since they were not likely to find a better place to camp, they would stay where they were until the drift of the ice should carry them closer to land.
There was a flicker of disappointment on several faces, but Shackleton allowed no time for regrets. He dispatched dog teams back to the original camp, a mile and three-quarters to the rear, to bring up all the food, clothing, and gear possible.
Wild, with six men, was sent back to the ship to salvage anything of value. When they reached the Endurance they discovered that in the past two days the ice had further mutilated her twisted hull. Her bow had been shoved deeper into the ice so that the entire forecastle was submerged and littered with bits of floes. Her rigging was an indescribable tangle of broken masts and snarled tackle which had to be cut away to make it safe to work. Later they hacked a hole in the galley roof and recovered a few cases of stores. But their biggest prize for the day, which required the combined efforts of several d
og teams to get back to camp, was the third boat.
Frank Wild beside the Endurance during her final break-up
For supper that night, Shackleton ordered Green to put some lumps of blubber into the seal meat stew so that the party might get accustomed to eating it. Some of the men, when they saw the rubbery, cod-liver-oilflavored chunks floating around in their `hoosh,' meticulously removed every trace. But the majority were so hungry they were delighted to gobble down every mouthful, blubber included.
Chapter Two
They had been on the ice exactly one week. In seven short days they had gone from the well-ordered, even pleasant existence on board the Didiiraiice to one of primitive discomfort, of unending wet and inescapable cold. A little more than a week before they had slept in their own warm bunks and eaten their meals in the cozy atmosphere around the mess table. Now they were crammed together in overcrowded tents, lying in reindeer or woolen sleeping bags on bare ice, or at best on odd pieces of hard lumber. At mealtimes, they sat in the snow, and each man ate out of an aluminum mug they called a pannican, into which everything was dumped at the same time. For utensils, each had a spoon, a knife - and his fingers.
They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat.
And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: `It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation.'
It was an observation typical of the entire party. There was not a hero among them, at least not in the fictional sense. Still not a single diary reflected anything beyond the matter-of-fact routine of each day's business.
There was only one major change in their general outlook - their attitude toward food. Worsley had this to say: `It is scandalous - all we seem to live for and think of now is food. I have never in my life taken half such a keen interest in food as I do now - and we are all alike ... We are ready to eat anything, especially cooked blubber which none of us would tackle before. Probably living totally in the open and having to rely on food instead of fire for body heat makes us think so much of food ... '
Shackleton and Wild in the foretiround with their crew, at Ocean Camp
They were up at six the following morning, November S, and nearly everyone returned to the ship. Several men attempted some personal salvage operations. Macklin went after a Bible his mother had given him. He crawled through a hole in the slanting deckhouse to reach the passageway leading to his old cabin. In the passageway he had to stand on a handrail above the ice and water, and inch his way down, crouching over. But his progress was halted at the water's edge, some 12 feet short of the cabin. He could see the door, down under the dark, icy water, but he couldn't reach it.
Greenstreet was luckier, and managed to get far enough into his cabin to secure a few books. How and Bakewell, whose quarters in the forecastle were hopelessly submerged, went treasure-hunting elsewhere. Carefully making their way along a passageway below, they passed the door of the compartment Hurley had used as a darkroom. Looking in, they saw the cases containing Hurley's photographic negatives. After hesitating a moment, the two seamen squeezed past the half-jammed door, stepped into the ankledeep water, and grabbed the cases off the shelves. It was a real treasure, and they returned the negatives to Hurley that night.
As a whole, the salvage party worked with abandon, scarcely considering the usefulness of each item removed. And indeed there was very little from the ship that couldn't be used in one way or another. Wood could always serve as fuel for cooking; canvas was useful for ground covers and for patching tents; ropes could be made into sledge harnesses. The men removed the entire wheelhouse as a unit and returned it to camp to serve as a sort of portable storehouse. Lumber, spars, sails, and rigging followed.
They worked until nearly five o'clock, and then returned to camp, bringing one final load with them. As they trudged along beside the sledges, Hurley spotted a large Weddell seal about a thousand yards off to the right. He had no gun with which to kill it, so he took a piece of wood and approached the seal cautiously. When he was close enough, he stunned the animal with his club. Then he brained it with a mountaineer's pickaxe. Two other seals were killed in this fashion on the way back to camp.
But the amount of stores thus far salvaged from the ship was disappointingly small. Most of the provisions were below decks in what had been the Ritz. To get at them would require tearing the deck away, and it was more than a foot thick in places and nearly 3 feet underwater. But it was imperative that the stores be obtained, so the next day McNeish was put in charge, and after hours of work with ice chisels and various rigs of tackle the party wrenched and pried a hole through the deck.
Almost immediately, stores began to float up, beginning with a barrel of walnuts. Other supplies were grappled to the surface - a case of sugar, a boxful of baking soda. By the end of the day, nearly 3!/2 tons of flour, rice, sugar, barley, lentils, vegetables, and jam had been rescued and sledged back to camp. It was an extremely rewarding haul, and the whole party was jubilant. Green prepared them a treat of curried seal for supper in celebration. But after the first bite, most of the men could hardly swallow more. Green had put in easily three times too much curry. `I had to eat it to satisfy my hunger,' Macklin later wrote in his diary, `but now my mouth is like a limekiln and I am almost parched with thirst.'
Salvage work had to be suspended on the afternoon of November 6, when a southerly blizzard came up and drove the men into their tents. It was their first blizzard on the ice. The tents shook and rattled with the force of the gale, while the men huddled inside, cold and cramped. The only cheering thought was that the gale was driving them north - toward civilization, so infinitely far away.
Shackleton took the opportunity to meet with Wild, Worsley, and Hurley to evaluate their food situation. They now had some 4'/ tons of stores, not counting the concentrated sledging ration which was to have been used by the six-man transcontinental party, and which Shackleton intended to save for emergencies. They reckoned their food supplies would last three months at full rations. And since they were sure to get increasing numbers of seals and penguins, they decided it was safe to go on full rations for the next two months.
This would carry them into January, the midpoint of the Antarctic summer. By that time, Shackleton was sure, they would know what fate lay in store for them. Then the ultimate decision would have to be made while there was still time to act before the onslaught of winter.
Everything depended on the drift of the pack. The ice might continue to go generally northwest, carrying them toward the Palmer Peninsula, possibly as far as the South Orkney Islands, some Soo-odd miles to the north. Or the drift might be arrested for some reason, and they would remain more or less in the same spot. Finally, the pack might veer northeast or even east, carrying them away from land.
Whatever happened, January would mark the point of no return. If the drift was toward land, they should have enough open water by then to launch the boats and make for the most promising spot. It seemed reasonable, in theory at least. If the pack were to stop moving, that fact would be apparent by January. Then, rather than spend the winter camped on the ice, the party would abandon their boats except for a small punt the carpenter had built, and make a dash for the nearest land, using the punt to ferry across any open water they ran into. It would be a risky business, but better than wintering on the ice.
The third prospect was grim indeed. If the pack drifted northeast or east and if they were unable to launch the boats, they would have to spend the winter adrift on the floes, somehow surviving the polar night with its paralyzing cold and violent storms. If this were to happen, they would know by January. And there would st
ill be time to lay in meat to see them through. But nobody even cared to think much about such a possibility.
Chapter Three
The presence of Frank Hurley at this high-level meeting about the food situation had special significance. He was invited, not because of his Antarctic experience - there were several others, such as Alf Cheetham or Tom Crean, who were much more knowledgeable - but because Shackleton did not want to antagonize him. The incident revealed one of Shackleton's basic traits.
Though he was virtually fearless in the physical sense, he suffered an almost pathological dread of losing control of the situation. In part, this attitude grew out of a consuming sense of responsibility. He felt he had gotten them into their situation, and it was his responsibility to get them out. As a consequence, he was intensely watchful for potential troublemakers who might nibble away at the unity of the group. Shackleton felt that if dissension arose, the party as a whole might not put forth that added ounce of energy which could mean, at a time of crisis, the difference between survival and defeat. Thus he was prepared to go to almost any length to keep the party close-knit and under his control.
Though Hurley was a skilled photographer and an excellent worker, he was also the sort of man who responded best to flattery, who frequently needed to be jollied along and made to feel important. Shackleton sensed this need - he may even have overestimated it - and he was afraid that unless he catered to it, Hurley might feel slighted and possibly spread discontent among the others.
Endurance, Deluxe Ed: The Greatest Adventure Story Ever Told by Alfred Lansing Page 8