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

by Alfred Lansing

  A forbidding-looking place, certainly, but that only made it seem the more pitiful. It was the refuge of twenty-two men who, at that very moment, were camped on a precarious, storm-washed spit of beach, as helpless and isolated from the outside world as if they were on another planet. Their plight was known only to the six men in this ridiculously little boat, whose responsibility now was to prove that all the laws of chance were wrong - and return with help. It was a staggering trust.

  As the darkness deepened, ten thousand stars pricked through the blueblack sky, and the little wisp of a pennant that fluttered from the Caird's mainmast described an irregular circle across the sparkling heavens as the boat rolled before the quartering sea.

  The two men sat side by side, Worsley steering and Shackleton huddled close up against him. The southerly wind was cold and the sea was picking up. Their primary concern was ice, and Shackleton and Worsley kept a sharp lookout. They passed an occasional lump early in the evening, but by ten o'clock the sea appeared to be clear.

  From time to time Shackleton rolled cigarettes for both of them, and they spoke of many things. It was obvious that the burden of responsibility Shackleton had borne for sixteen months had nibbled away somewhat at his enormous self-confidence. He wanted to talk and to be assured that he had acted wisely.

  He confided to Worsley that the decision to separate the party had been a desperately difficult one, and he abhorred having to make it. But somebody had to go for help, and this was not the sort of responsibility which could be delegated to another person.

  As for the journey itself, he seemed strangely doubtful, and he asked Worsley's opinion of their chances.Worsley replied that he was sure that they would make it, but it was evident that Shackleton was far from convinced.

  The truth was that he felt rather out of his element. He had proved himself on land. He had demonstrated there beyond all doubt his ability to pit his matchless tenacity against the elements - and win. But the sea is a different sort of enemy. Unlike the land, where courage and the simple will to endure can often see a man through, the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which man never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated.

  It gave Shackleton a feeling of uneasiness. He now faced an adversary so formidable that his own strength was nothing in comparison, and he did not enjoy being in a position where boldness and determination count for almost nothing, and in which victory is measured only in survival.

  But more than anything he was dreadfully tired, and he wanted simply for the journey to be over, and as quickly as possible. If only they could make Cape Horn, he said to Worsley, they would cut one-third off the distance they had to go. He knew it was impossible, but he asked Worsley whether he thought the southeast wind just might hold long enough for them to do so.Worsley looked at him sympathetically and shook his head. Not a chance, he replied.

  Just before six o'clock, the first light of dawn crept across the sky and as it grew brighter, both men relaxed. Now if they came upon any ice, at least they could see it.

  Shackleton waited until seven o'clock and then he called the other men. Crean rigged the Primus, and after a considerable amount of trouble getting it to light and keeping the hooch pot in place, they finally had breakfast.

  When they had finished, Shackleton announced that the watches would begin, four hours on and four hours off. Shackleton said he would take the first trick with Crean and McNeish, and Worsley would have the other with Vincent and McCarthy.

  Chapter Two

  To classify the dangers they faced in order of magnitude would have been impossible, but of the known threats, the greatest undoubtedly was ice - especially at night. One single collision with an unseen fragment could have ended the journey in a moment. Thus Shackleton's plan was to get north with all possible speed before turning east toward South Georgia.

  And for the next two days they were lucky. The wind held steady out of the southwest - much of the time almost at gale force. By noon on April 26, they had logged a total of i 2 8 miles from Elephant Island without encountering a sign of ice.

  However, those two days were an ordeal during which they were introduced, one at a time, to the endless miseries which constituted life on board the boat. Always and for ever there was the water - the all-pervading, inescapable water. Sometimes it was just a shower of spray thrown up from the bow and flung astern by the wind, which caused no real suffering except to the man at the helm. Much worse were the quieter, solid seas dipped up by the bow that poured aft and sloshed into the cockpit. And worst of all were the occasions when the boat plunged down just as a wave broke. Then green, foaming water rolled across the decking, splashed into the cockpit and drained down into the boat in icy streams through a score of openings in the canvas decking, as rain might pour through the roof of some dilapidated shack. Within twenty-four hours after leaving Elephant Island, the decking had begun to sag so that there were a dozen pockets to hold the water.

  The man at the helm, of course, suffered the most, and each of them took his turn at the yoke lines for an hour and twenty minutes during each watch. But the other two nien on duty were better off only by comparison. When they weren't bailing or tending the sails or shifting ballast by moving the rocks in the bottom, they spent their time trying to avoid the streams coming from above. It was of little use, though. Invariably they wound up huddled over with the water pouring off their backs.

  All of them were dressed more or less the same way - heavy wool underwear, woolen trousers, a thick, loose sweater, with a pair of light gabardine Burberry overalls on the outside. Their heads were covered with knitted, woolen helmets and Burberry outer helmets, tucked in at the neck. On their feet they wore two pairs of socks, a pair of ankle-high felt boots and finneskoes - reindeer-skin boots with the hair side out, though every trace of hair had long since worn off, leaving them bald and limp. There was not a set of oilskins on board.

  Such clothing was intended for wear in intense, dry cold - not on board a pitching, spray-drenched boat. Here it had an almost wicklike action, soaking up every icy drop until the saturation point was reached, then maintained.

  The best that could be done was to live with this trial by water, as they had on the trip to Elephant Island - to sit as still as possible after each soaking so as to avoid contact with the newly drenched area of clothing. But to sit motionless in a 22-foot boat in a heavy sea can be difficult indeed.

  The boat had to be pumped out at fairly frequent intervals, usually two or three times each watch, and the job required two men - one to operate the plunger while the other held the icy brass cylinder down into the water in the bottom of the boat. Even with mittens, the hands of the elan gripping the cylinder would go numb within the space of five minutes, and they would trade places.

  Nor was the discomfort on board limited to the men on watch.They realized from the very beginning that even sleeping had a special brand of unpleasantness all its own. The sleeping bags were located in the bow, nominally the driest part of the boat. To reach them involved a tortuous crawl on hands and knees over the rocks in the bottom. The closer a elan got to the bow, the more restricted the space became, until finally he had to get down on his belly and slither forward, insinuating himself between the underside of the seats and the ballast.

  When at last he had reached the bow, there was the job of getting into his bag, then finally the problem of going to sleep. Fatigue helped, of course, but even so, the action of the boat in the bow was more violent than anywhere else. At times they were heaved bodily upwards, only to fall down onto the rocks again, or perhaps to be slammed from beneath as the boat was pitched aloft by a new wave. The Caird had been equipped with six sleeping bags so that each man might have his own. But Shackleton soon suggested that they share three bags and use the others as mattresses, to protect them from the rocks. Everyone quickly agreed.

  They discovered, too, that under the deck
ing there was not quite enough room to sit upright. For the first couple of meals they tried to eat half bent over, with their chins pressed down against their chests. But this position greatly interfered with swallowing, and the only thing to do was to stretch out on the rocks in the bottom.

  But no matter what position they assumed - sitting, reclining, or lying in their sleeping bags - the struggle against the motion of the boat was ceaseless. The 2,000 pounds of ballast in the bottom gave the Caird a particularly vicious action, and she jerked upright after every wave. Worsley thought she was over-ballasted and he urged Shackleton to throw some of the rocks overboard. But Shackleton took a characteristically cautious view of the matter. The only way to see if Worsley was right was to dump the ballast - and then it would be gone for ever. It was better, Shackleton felt, to put up with the wicked motion of the boat than to risk being light.

  They had sailed from Elephant Island in rather high spirits, knowing that they were embarked at last for civilization. As McNeish had recorded -'wet through, but happy through it all.'

  But after two days of uninterrupted misery, their cheeriness had worn away. And by noon on April 26, after Worsley had fixed the position at 128 miles from Elephant Island, the ordeal to which they were committed had become altogether too real. There was only the consolation that they were making progress - at the agonizingly slow rate of about i mile every half hour or so.

  The actual position on April 26 was 59°46' South, 52° 18' West, and it put the Caird a scant 14 miles north of the both parallel of latitude. Thus they had just crept over the line separating the `Raving Fifties' from the `Screaming Sixties,' so called because of the weather that prevails there.

  This, then, was the Drake Passage, the most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe - and rightly so. Here nature has been given a proving ground on which to demonstrate what she can do if left alone. The results are impressive.

  It begins with the wind. There is an immense area of persistent low pressure in the vicinity of the Antarctic Circle, approximately 67° South latitude. It acts as a giant sump into which high pressure from farther north continually drains, accompanied by almost ceaseless, gale-force, westerly winds. In the prosaic, studiously understated language of the U.S. Navy's Sailin
  `They are often of hurricane intensity and with gust velocities sometimes attaining to 150 to 200 miles per hour. Winds of such violence are not known elsewhere, save perhaps within a tropical cyclone.'

  Also in these latitudes, as nowhere else on earth, the sea girdles the globe, uninterrupted by any mass of land. Here, since the beginning of time, the winds have mercilessly driven the seas clockwise around the earth to return again to their birthplace where they reinforce themselves or one another.

  The waves thus produced have become legendary among seafaring men. They are called Cape Horn Rollers or `graybeards.' Their length has been estimated from crest to crest to exceed a mile, and the terrified reports of some mariners have placed their height at 200 feet, though scientists doubt that they very often exceed 80 or 9o feet. How fast they travel is largely a matter of speculation, but many sailormen have claimed their speed occasionally reaches 55 miles an hour. Thirty knots is probably a more accurate figure.

  Charles Darwin, on first seeing these waves breaking on Tierra del Fuego in 18 3 3, wrote in his diary: `The sight ... is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.'

  As viewed from the Caird, the sight of these rollers constituted ample reason for such thoughts. In the rare moments when the sun shone, they were cobalt blue, which gave them the appearance of being immensely deep - as indeed they were. But most of the time the sky was overcast, and then the whole surface of the sea turned a somber, lifeless gray.

  There was no sound to the relentless advance of these cliffs of water except the hiss of their foaming brows when they rose to such a height or charged forward so fast that they lost their balance and their crests tumbled to the force of gravity.

  Once every ninety seconds or less the Caird's sail would go slack as one of these gigantic waves loomed astern, possibly 50 feet above her, and threatening, surely, to bury her under a hundred million tons of water. But then, by some phenomenon of buoyancy, she was lifted higher and higher up the face of the onrushing swell until she found herself, rather unexpectedly, caught in the turmoil of foam at the summit and hurtling forward.

  Over and over again, a thousand times each day, this drama was reenacted. Before long, to the men on board the Caird, it lost all elements of awesomeness and they found it routine and commonplace instead, as a group of people may become inured to the perils of living in the shadow of an active volcano.

  Only very occasionally did they think about South Georgia. It was so remote, so Utopian that it was almost depressing to contemplate. No man could have endured with just that to keep him going.

  Instead, life was reckoned in periods of a few hours, or possibly only a few minutes - an endless succession of trials leading to deliverance from the particular hell of the moment. When a man was awakened to go on watch, the focal point of his existence became that time, four hours away, when he could slither back into the cold, wet rockiness of the sleeping bag he was now leaving. And within each watch there were a number of subdivisions: the time at the helm - eighty eonic minutes, during which a man was forced to expose himself to the full wickedness of the spray and the cold; the ordeal of pumping, and the awful task of shifting ballast; and the lesser trials which lasted perhaps two minutes - like the interval after each numbing spray struck until a man's clothes warned enough so that he could move once more.

  Again and again the cycle was repeated until the body and the mind arrived at a state of numbness in which the frenzied antics of the boat, the perpetual cold and wet came to be accepted almost as normal.

  On April 27, three days out from Elephant Island, their luck turned bad. About noon a raw and penetrating mistlike rain began to fall, and the wind slowly started to move around toward the north - dead ahead.

  They were now perhaps 15o miles north of Elephant Island and still well within the zone where they might encounter ice.Thus they could not afford to be blown a single mile to the south. Shackleton and Worsley spent several minutes discussing the possibilities and finally decided there was no choice but to hold the Caird up into the wind as best they could.

  And so the struggle began, swinging from one tack to the other and taking a wearisome pounding in the process. It was all the more unpleasant because they were simply absorbing punishment while doing nothing more than holding their own. But about i i p.m., to their great relief, the wind eased down and moved into the northwest. By the time Worsley's watch took over at midnight they were able to resume the course to the northeast.

  At dawn on April 28, only a light northwest breeze was blowing; actually, it was the best weather they'd had since leaving Elephant Island, four days before. But there were dangerous signs of deterioration, both among the men and in their equipment. Shackleton noticed with apprehension that the familiar pains of the sciatica he had suffered at Ocean Camp were coming back. And all of the men were bothered by an increasing sensation of discomfort in their feet and legs - a feeling of tightness.

  About mid-morning, McNeish suddenly sat down in the center of the cockpit and peeled off his boots. His legs, ankles, and feet were puffy and dead white, apparently from lack of exercise and being continually soaked. When Shackleton saw the condition of McNeish's feet, he suggested that the other men remove their footgear - and they were all the same. Vincent was in far the worst condition, apparently suffering from rheumatism. Shackleton looked in the medicine chest and gave him the only remedy which seemed likely to help - a small bottle of witch hazel.

  The damage to Worsley's navigational books by the constant soaking was an even more serious problem. The destruction of these books could mean losing the way across this forsaken waste of ocean. And though every effort
was made to protect them, they had to be taken out whenever a sight was taken.

  Both covers of the logarithm book were soggy, and the wet was beginning to spread to the inside pages.The Nautical Alrriaiiac, with its tables of sun and star positions, was in even worse shape. It was printed on cheaper paper and was fast approaching a state of pulpiness. Its pages had to be carefully peeled apart to separate them.

  In the matter of taking sights, Worsley at first tried bracing himself inside the cockpit. But it was no good. To remain upright was difficult enough; to get an accurate reading was impossible. He found that it was best to kneel on the helmsman's seat, with Vincent and McCarthy holding him around the waist.

  Early in the afternoon of April 28, the relatively good weather from the northwest came to an end as the wind slowly moved to the west and began to freshen. By dusk it had inched to the SSW and risen almost to gale force. Night came on and an overcast blotted out the stars. The only way to steer was by watching the pennant on the mainmast blown out before the wind and holding to a course which kept it pointed just off the port bow.

  Only once in the night was a positive check on the direction permitted, and then a flaming match was lighted so they could see the compass for a moment to make certain that the wind was still out of the same quadrant. They had only two candles which were being strictly preserved for that time that now seemed so far away - the landfall at South Georgia.

  The dawn of the fifth day, April 29, rose on a lumpy sea under a dull sky. Low, troubled clouds skudded past, almost touching the surface of the water. The wind was nearly dead astern, and the Caird labored forward like a protesting old woman being hurried along faster than she cared to go.

  Just before noon a rift appeared in the sky, and Worsley hurriedly got his sextant. He was just in time, for a few minutes later the sun smiled down for one wintry flicker and then was gone. But Worsley had his sight, and Shackleton had recorded the chronometer reading. When the position was worked out, it put the Caird at 58°38' South, 50°0' West - they had covered 238 miles since leaving Elephant Island, six days before.