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

by Alfred Lansing

  The note was very simply a message to posterity, explaining to those who might cone after what had happened to Shackleton and his men in 1915. Shackleton had purposely refrained from leaving the note until after the party had left Ocean Camp for fear that the men might find it and interpret it as a sign that their leader was not sure they would survive.

  Worsley returned to camp in time for breakfast, and they resumed the journey at 8 p.m. But toward eleven o'clock, after they had made nearly a mile and a half, their way was blocked by a number of large cracks and bits of broken ice. The party pitched the tents at midnight and turned in. Most of the men were soaked through - from the water in which they lay, and from their own sweat. And none of them had a change of clothes except for socks and mittens, so they were forced to crawl into their sleeping bags wearing their soggy garments.

  Shackleton went out with a three-man party early the following morning but could find no safe route for the boats. A long, dismal day was spent waiting to see what the ice might do. Just after supper they saw the ice begin to close, but it was not until 3 a.m. the next morning that they were able to get on the trail again.

  The pitiful little line of march straggled across the floes in the pale halflight, with Shackleton in the lead, prospecting for the best route. Behind him were the seven sledges pulled by the dogs, keeping a healthy distance apart to avoid a fight between two teams. Next came a small sledge loaded with the blubber stove and cooking gear. It was pulled by Green and Orde-Lees, whose faces from being so close to the stove each day were black with blubber soot. At the rear of the column seventeen men under Worsley's command dragged the boats.

  Even at 3 a.m., the coldest time of the day, the surface of the ice was treacherous. A crust had frozen over the rotting, saturated floes, and on top of this there was a layer of snow The surface had a deceptively sturdy appearance, and at each step, it would seem capable of supporting a man. But just as he shifted his entire weight to that foot, he would burst through the crust with a jarring shock into the numbing water underneath. It was usually knee-deep, sometimes more.

  A sledge, packed and ready for the march

  Most of the men wore heavy Burberry-Durox boots - ankle-high leather boots with gaberdine uppers reaching to the knee - designed for marching on hard ice. But as the party struggled over the slushy floes, those boots continually filled with water. In the soaked state, each weighed about 7 pounds. It was an exhausting exertion at every step to lift one foot and then the other out of 2-foot holes full of snowy slush.

  Of all the party, the worst off were the men pulling the boats. The shock they suffered at every step was greatly increased by their burden. They could take only about 200 to 300 yards of such punishment at a time. So they would abandon that boat and walk slowly back for the second, trying to catch their breath along the way. Frequently, they would find that the sledge runners under the second boat had frozen into the ice. There was nothing to do but slip into the traces, and then, with Worsley counting, `One, two three ... go!' they would make three or four violent, concerted lunges until the runners broke free.

  At eight o'clock, after five hours on the trail, Shackleton signaled for a halt. They had covered a miserable half mile. After an hour's rest, they struggled on until noon. The tents were pitched and supper was issued: cold seal steak and tea - nothing more.

  On this same night exactly one year before, after a festive dinner on board the Efidilrance, Greenstreet had written in his diary: `Here endeth another Christmas Day. I wonder how and under what circumstances our next one will be spent.' That night he failed even to mention what day it was. And Shackleton recorded briefly all that really needed to be said: `Curious Christmas. Thoughts of home.'

  The men were up at midnight, and resumed the march at i a.m. But at five o'clock, after four hours of all-out effort, the column stopped before a line of high pressure ridges and broad leads of water. While the rest of the party waited, Shackleton went out with Wild to look for a more passable route. The two men returned at eight-thirty with news that a half-mile beyond the area of pressure ridges was a floe 2V2 miles in diameter, from which they had seen more level floes to the NNW. But they decided to wait until night before pressing on.

  Most of the men turned in about noon and slept fitfully in the wet until they were called at 8 p.m. After breakfast, all hands went out along the route that Shackleton and Wild had found. They set to work breaking through the pressure ridges and building a sort of causeway 7 to 8 feet wide at the summit for the boats.

  This done, the dog drivers harnessed their teams while Worsley's seventeen boat haulers slipped into their traces, and everyone set off behind Shackleton. At 1:3o a.m., they reached the edge of the big floe discovered the day before. The party camped there long enough to have some tea and a lump of bannock, and then started out again about two o'clock.

  Within an hour they had reached the opposite side of the floe, where they encountered another area of high pressure ridges. Never had the going been worse, especially for the men pulling the boats. After two hours of struggling they had covered less than a thousand yards.

  McNeish suddenly turned onWorsley and refused to go on.Worsley gave him a direct order to resume his position guiding the rear of the sledge. McNeish refused.

  He argued that legally he was under no obligation to follow orders since the ship had gone down, and therefore the articles he had signed to serve on board her had been terminated, and he was free to obey or not, as he chose. It was the `sea lawyer' in him coming out.

  Almost from the start of the journey, the old carpenter had been growing increasingly disgruntled. And as the days passed, the strain of the work, coupled with the personal discomfort, had slowly eaten away at what was never an optimistic outlook. For the past two days he had been complaining openly. Now he simply refused to continue.

  It was a situation far beyond Worsley's limited abilities as a leader. Had he been a less excitable individual, he might have been able to cope with McNeish. But Worsley himself was almost at the breaking point. He was tired to the marrow of his bones, and he was disgruntled, too. Each day on the march had intensified his feeling that their journey was useless.

  So instead of reacting decisively in the face of McNeish's stubbornness, Worsley impulsively notified Shackleton. This served only to aggravate McNeish's resentment.

  Shackleton hurried back from the head of the column and took McNeish aside and told him `very strongly' what his duty was. McNeish's contention that the loss of the Erditratlcc absolved him of all obligation to obey orders would have been true under ordinary circumstances. The articles signed by the crew are usually terminated automatically if the ship sinks - and their pay stops at the same time. However, a special clause had been inserted in the articles signed by those who sailed aboard the Etidiiraficc, `to perform any duty on board, in the boats, or on the shore as directed by the master and owner' - Shackleton. They were now, by Shackleton's definition, `on shore.'

  Quite apart from the legality of it, McNeish's position was absurd. He couldn't continue as a member of the party without doing his share of the work. And if he were to strike out on his own - even assuming Shackleton would permit such a thing - he would be dead in a week. McNeish's oneman mutiny was simply an unreasoning, exhausted protest, called up by an aging and aching body that demanded rest. Even after Shackleton's talk, he remained obstinate. After a time, Shackleton walked away to let the carpenter come to his senses by himself.

  At 6 a.m., when they set out again to find a good campsite, McNeish was in his assigned position at the stern of the boat sledge. But the incident had worried Shackleton. In case others might feel similarly, Shackleton mustered all hands before they turned in and read aloud the articles they had signed.

  The men slept until eight that night, and they were on the trail an hour later. Though the condition of the ice seemed to get progressively worse, by five-twenty the next morning, after only a one-hour stop for hoosh at 1 a.m., they had covered a gratifying
21/2 miles. But Shackleton was uneasy about the condition of the ice, and after camp had been pitched, he went with Hurley's team to survey what lay ahead. The two men reached a fragment of a berg and climbed it. The view from the top justified Shackleton's fears. He could see 2 miles ahead, and the ice was truly impassable - crisscrossed by leads of open water and the jumbled remains of broken pressure ridges. Moreover, it was dangerously thin. The two men returned to camp about seven o'clock and Shackleton reluctantly announced that they could not go any farther. Most of the men received the news with dismay. Not that they hadn't expected it, but to hear Shackleton himself say that they had been beaten sounded almost unnatural - and a little frightening.

  None of them, however, could possibly have felt their defeat so intensely as Shackleton, to whom the thought of quitting was abhorrent. He wrote in his diary that night, with characteristically peculiar punctuation: `Turned in but could not sleep. Thought the whole matter over & decided to retreat to more secure ice: it is the only safe thing to do ... Am anxious: For so big a party & 2 boats in bad conditions we could do nothing: I do not like retreating but prudence demands this course: Everyone working well except the carpenter: I shall never forget him in this time of strain & stress.'

  The retreat began at seven that night. They made their way back about a quarter mile to a fairly solid floe, and pitched camp. All hands were called early the next morning. Most of the men were sent out to hunt seals while Shackleton and Hurley prospected for a route to the northeast, and Worsley went with Mcllroy's team to look for a way to the south. Neither party found a route that was safe.

  Shackleton had noticed some breaking up of the ice around them. As soon as he returned to camp, he ordered the recall flag hoisted at once to summon the seal-hunting parties. Then once more the party retreated, this time about a half mile to a very flat, heavy floe. Even here they were not safe. A snow-filled crack was discovered in the ice the following morning, so they shifted camp about 150 yards toward the center of the floe in search of fairly stable ice. But there wasn't any to be found.

  Worsley described the situation: `The floes in the neighborhood appear to be saturated by the sea to their surface, so much that on cutting i inch below the surface of a 6 ft thick floe, water almost at once flows into the hole.'

  But what disturbed them most was that they were trapped where they were. Greenstreet explained that `it looks as if we can get no further and we can't get back to Ocean Camp either as the floes have disintegrated considerably since we passed [over] them.'

  The following day was December 31. McNeish wrote: `Hogmanay & a bitter one too, being adrift on the ice instead of enjoying the pleasures of life like most people. But as the saying is, there must be some fools in this world.'

  James recorded: `New Year's Eve, the second in the pack & in much the same latitude. Few people are having a stranger one ...

  Macklin noted: `The last day of 1915 ... tomorrow 1916 begins: I wonder what it will bring forth for us. This time last year we prophesied that just now we would be well across the Continent.'

  Finally, Shackleton wrote: `The last day of the old year: May the new one bring us good fortune, a safe deliverance from this anxious time & all good things to those we love so far away.'

  Chapter One

  Worsley named the place `Mark Time Camp,' but it didn't seem an especially appropriate name. It implied that they had halted only temporarily, and would soon be on the move again. But nobody really believed they would.

  After five days of exhausting struggle, they were suddenly idle. Now there was almost nothing to do, except to think. And there was altogether too much time for that.

  Many of them, it seemed, finally grasped for the first time just how desperate things really were. More correctly, they became aware of their own inadequacy, of how utterly powerless they were. Until the march from Ocean Camp they had nurtured in the backs of their minds the attitude Shackleton strove so unceasingly to imbue them with, a basic faith in themselves - that they could, if need be, pit their strength and their determination against any obstacle - and somehow overcome it.

  But then came the march, a journey which was to carry them nearly 200 miles.Yet after only five days and 9 small miles in a straight line to the northwest, they had been stopped completely, and even forced to retreat. A gale could easily have carried them that far in twenty-four hours. So now they sat in Mark Time Camp, disillusioned and humbly aware of how truly pygmy they were to overcome the forces they faced, regardless of how much strength and determination they put forth. The realization was not so much humiliating as frightening.

  Their ultimate goal was still to get themselves out, but now it was an empty phrase. They wouldn't get themselves out. Only if the pack chose, they might be permitted to escape, but for the present they were powerless; there was no goal, not even the smallest achievable objective to aim for.They were faced with total uncertainty. Their position was if anything worse than it had been. They had abandoned a goodly quantity of stores, along with one of their boats. And while the floe they were camped on was adequate, it was no match for the giant back at Ocean Camp.

  `It is beginning to be an anxious time for us,' Macklin wrote on New Year's Day, `for so far there is not much sign of any opening of the floe, and the broken mushy stuff is quite unnavigable for our boats. If we cannot get away very soon our position will be a very serious one, for if it comes to travelling in the autumn to Paulet by sledge, where will we get food for the dogs and food for ourselves, supposing the depot at Paulet fails us? The seals will have disappeared for the winter, and we may have to undergo some of the trials of Greely.'*

  Many of them made a sincere effort to be cheerful, but without much success. There was little to be cheerful about. The temperature remained just about at the freezing point, so that during the day the surface of the floes became a bog. They had to trudge about through knee-deep slush, and a man would often plunge up to his waist into an unsuspected hole. Their clothes were thus continually soaked, and their only comfort was crawling into the comparatively bearable dampness of their sleeping bags each night.

  The food situation was also far from reassuring. There remained only fifty days' full trail provisions at 2 pounds per man - and the time when they would have looked upon such a supply as ample to see them out of the pack was long since past. They could hope to supplement their stores with seals and penguins, but there was disappointingly little game available - nowhere near as much as they had expected for this time of year. But on January i, it seemed that the New Year might have brought with it a change of luck. Five crabeater seals and an emperor penguin were killed and brought into camp.

  Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle.

  The animal - a sea leopard - sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck.

  After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with OrdeLees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard's head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees's shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker.

  The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped.

  Two dog teams were required to bring the car
cass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about i ,too pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat - and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach - the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard's jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter.

  In his diary that night, Worsley observed: `A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.'

  The hunting parties continued to operate the next day, though the warm, muggy weather kept the surface of the ice soggy. Four crabeater seals were secured and returned to camp. While they were being butchered, Orde-Lees came back from a trip on skis and announced that he had found and killed three more. But Shackleton contended that the party already had a month's supply, and ordered that the slain seals be left where they were.

  Several men found Shackleton's attitude difficult to understand. Greenstreet wrote that he considered it `rather foolish ... as things have not turned out at all as he had estimated up to the present, and it is far the best to be prepared for the possible chance of having to winter here.'

  Greenstreet was right. Like most of the others, he considered the laying in of all possible meat the prudent thing to do, as any ordinary individual might. But Shackleton was not an ordinary individual. He was a man who believed completely in his own invincibility, and to whom defeat was a reflection of personal inadequacy. What might have been an act of reasonable caution to the average person was to Shackleton a detestable admission that failure was a possibility.

  This indomitable self-confidence of Shackleton took the form of optimism. And it worked in two ways: it set men's souls on fire; as Macklin said, just to be in his presence was an experience. It was what made Shackleton so great a leader.