Into White Silence

by Anthony Eaton

  With the improvement in our prospects has come a distinct improvement in the general feeling aboard. Lawson has been released from his confinement, in order that he be able to capture every moment of our first sighting of land, and is now doing his level best to portray the entire episode as something of a lark, much to the amusement of the crew.

  For dinner tonight, in celebration of our progress, Cook knocked up a veritable feast, putting together a thick Irish stew from salted, tinned meat that he’d kept hidden away for a special occasion, and which most of the men attacked with great relish. Having a bellyful of hot, rich tucker has also done much for morale.

  For myself, however, the day has ended on a sour note, having just endured a less than agreeable meeting with Mr Rourke and Captain Smythe-Davis. After dinner, while we were all sitting around the wardroom table, the Leader announced that over the course of the next few weeks he would start considering seriously which two men would accompany him on his push to the pole next season, and that the final decision would be made by himself and Captain Smythe-Davis.

  This came as something of a surprise to me as I had joined the expedition on the understanding that not only would I be one of the polar party, but that I would also have a say in which member of the expedition would be the third to accompany us. As he made his announcement, Mr Rourke refused to meet my eye, and Captain Smythe-Davis looked distinctly uncomfortable when I put a questioning glance in his direction.

  As soon as the formalities of the meal were over, I asked to speak to the Leader and Captain Smythe-Davis privately and, with some reluctance, Mr Rourke invited the two of us into his cabin, there to discuss my grievances.

  I will not go into any great detail here as to what was said. Suffice to say that it is Mr Rourke’s opinion that I am no longer the most suitable man to join him on his attempt, and that the expedition would be better served by me remaining back at the hut, or possibly even aboard the Raven and assisting the crew to maintain its seaworthiness over the winter.

  Understandably, I was not at all happy with this turn of events, and strong words were spoken by both sides. I suggested that Mr Rourke was going back upon his word, and that it ill befitted him to do so. Naturally, he was rather disinclined to accept this accusation and the meeting eventually broke up with nothing resolved.

  I am not at all certain what to make of this situation. It is some time yet before we will be ashore, and the better part of a year before the push for the pole will begin in earnest, so I suppose that I should not worry too much – there is plenty of time to change Mr Rourke’s mind on this issue and, if he does not come around, then I imagine I will simply have to accept his decision with as much good grace as I can muster, and will remain with George at either the winter station, or upon the ship. I have to admit, though, that this evening, for the first time, I am wishing most fervently that I’d never set foot aboard this damned boat!

  * * *

  SEVENTEEN

  ENTRAPMENT.

  And so we come to 26th January 1922: Foundation Day, as it was then known. One hundred and thirty-four years to the day after Governor Phillip and his ragtag little fleet set foot upon the banks of Sydney Harbour, altering in that moment the face and future of an entire continent, the Polar Exploration Vessel Raven similarly suffered a change of fortune which would seal the fate of every last man aboard.

  There are many tales of polar survival, dating back to the moment that humanity first plunged south into the frozen wastes of ice and ocean below 60 degrees. Ships stranded, sledging teams plunging into crevasses, fires destroying supplies and obliterating shelters, blizzards sweeping away entire camps, people becoming dangerously ill and having to perform crude surgery upon themselves. Sir Douglas Mawson was forced to eat his dogs, including their poisonous livers, in order to survive his own ordeal, and even then he arrived back at his base, sick and exhausted, just in time to see his supply ship, the Aurora, vanishing over the northern horizon. Shackleton and his men hiked eight-hundred miles across treacherous sea ice in the dead of winter and then endured a long and dangerous voyage across a furious Southern Ocean to reach safety, taking more than eighteen months to rescue themselves.

  And for every tale of survival, there’s one of tragedy; the men who’ve become lost in blizzards and died just a couple of hundred metres from safety. Those who’ve fallen and broken a limb, miles and miles from help. Who’ve died of thirst, starvation, exposure, injury, or even loneliness down there in the frozen continent.

  Of course, perhaps most well known of them all, is the magnificent folly of Captain Scott, whose declaration: ‘Great God! This is an awful place!’ served only to highlight the futility, the mental and physical agony faced by the polar explorer.

  In all of these tales – both the epic survival stories and their more tragic counterparts – there is always a moment. A single instant, it seems, where everything suddenly changes from miserable but tolerable, to life-threatening and inevitably doomed.

  Often that moment is heralded by nothing more than a tiny, insignificant detail: a faint cracking underfoot, a slight rip in the fabric of a tent or a miniscule miscalculation of compass variation. At the time of the offence, it might well pass unnoticed, but what they say about the butterfly’s wings holds as true in Antarctica as anywhere else and, once that moment is past, there is no turning back – fate, it would seem, takes no prisoners in these circumstances.

  For Downes and his companions, the event that altered their course irrevocably probably occurred many thousands of kilometres away – perhaps up in Western Australia, where the summer sun baked the wheat fields into a brown haze and the warm air above them went spiralling up thousands of feet into the sky. This, of course, sent the atmospheric pressure plunging until, to fill the vacuum, a pattern of high pressure systems came sweeping across from the west, in turn forcing a low cold front far to the south, sending it swinging below the Great Australian Bight and pushing a wall of air aside and down, past 40, 50 and then 60 degrees, until it reached the edge of the pack ice, where the Raven was still threading her way through the frozen ocean with every knot she could muster.

  At the outset it’s possible that the men aboard the Raven barely noticed anything other than a shift in the breeze. Perhaps Captain McLaren looked up, realised that his sails were suddenly backing from the north and sent his men scrambling across the icy deck to brace the yards around. Or perhaps they were making so much headway under steam that the apparent wind in their faces was enough to hide its true direction. It’s possible that one or two of the men noted the plume of smoke from their stack now streaming off to the south, a smeared, grey finger, reaching for the continent ahead of them.

  Whatever occurred, it’s unlikely that anybody aboard would have been aware of the full magnitude, the planetary scale of the forces which were in that moment arrayed against them.

  Miles behind, back at the edge of the icepack through which they’d ventured just two days earlier, the swinging wind began to have its way. It flowed, quicksilver across the ocean, until it reached the ice. There it began to exert massive energy – piling up against the flat faces of icebergs, eddying along the surface of the pancake ice, driving and pushing every floe, every growler and grumbler and rotting pool of slushy brash ice back towards Antarctica and, in the process, undoing the work of the blizzard which had, three days earlier, opened the pack enough to allow the Raven entry.

  Now, under the onslaught of the northerly wind, the ice retreated. Fleeing south towards the continental landmass. The leads of open water through which a ship might safely pass were quickly filled and the floes then driven into and onto each other so that ridges of pressure were thrust up here and there, where the leading edge of one was forced below that of its neighbour. Enormous plates of ice met and collided and battled for every cubic metre of space between the edge of the icepack and the distant coast.

  As the comparatively warm northern air met the colder, drier air pouring down from the polar icecap, snow
formed and swirled across the ice-sea, filling in the narrowing gaps between the leads, piling upon the floes themselves and thickening them, hiding any open water beneath a thick, sticky layer. Atop the clashing ice, sky and ocean became one continuous white world, unbroken by any sort of horizon, unblemished except by shadows.

  And, in the middle of this tumult, the Raven struggled south.

  The moment of disaster itself is described by Downes in the simplest of terms – perhaps the only way he could cope with the sheer immensity of the predicament in which he found himself was to keep his account as objective as possible. Much of his usual meticulous description and observation is notably absent from these entries. He does, however, over the course of 25th and 26th January, supply more than enough detail and information for us to build a suitably informed picture of what he and his crewmates experienced during those two fateful days.

  His entry for the 25th is surprisingly brief:

  ‘Still proceeding south through loose pack ice. Conditions aboard remain unchanged. Possible land sky sighted briefly at around 1745, but deteriorating visibility due to increasing snow falls means that we haven’t seen it again. Situation with Rourke et al. the same.’

  Some time during the evening of the 25th the wind changed and, when Downes rose at midnight to take over the middle watch, the Raven was already finding the going a lot heavier; In the first section of his entry for the 26th, he records that he:

  ‘… came onto deck at 2345, to find a worried Captain McLaren. The lead we’d been following had closed up significantly, and increasingly we were having to push our way through thicker and thicker patches. The Captain roused Mr Weymouth, and ordered all available power to the engines …’

  For three more hours they struggled forward, Captain McLaren forgoing his bunk in favour of trying to coax his ship safely onwards until, sometime in the small hours of the morning, he requested that Edward Rourke join him and Downes on the poop. There, the Captain suggested that they attempt to retreat temporarily to the clear water behind a large grounded iceberg which they’d passed several miles previously.

  ‘… this suggestion Mr Rourke greeted with flat refusal and instead ordered the Captain to push her further south, using the engines and our armoured hull to break the ice ahead, if necessary …’

  By the end of his watch, at 0400, Downes records that almost all hands were awake and on deck, and that progress was:

  ‘… pitifully slow, and despite the most valiant efforts of our little ship to push on, we were making headway of well under two nautical miles per hour.’

  At 0630, Charles Weymouth came up on deck and informed the Captain and Rourke that the ship was consuming coal at a prodigious rate and that, unless they were able to reach open water in the very near future, he estimated that they should soon have only enough coal remaining to operate the ship under power for just a little over one week. To this, Mr Rourke replied that he should immediately:

  ‘… Get back below and tend to your damned engine, man, or else I’ll put you over the side and you can walk across the ice to find your bloody open water!’

  At 0700, Captain McLaren again reiterated his belief that they should attempt a retreat to the nearest pool of open water and again Rourke refused. Downes, usually so thorough in his records of conversations of significance, is unusually circumspect with regard to this one, noting simply that:

  ‘… a heated exchange occurred between the two men, with the result that Captain McLaren resigned to his cabin at around 0730, after making a number of pronouncements about Mr Rourke’s character.’

  By 0900, the situation was dire. The ship was making less than half a knot of headway and the ice surrounding them:

  ‘… had become thick with snow, like molasses or treacle and seemingly as sticky too, clinging to the steel plating of our hull as though attracted by some force of magnetism …’

  At 0912, with Captain McLaren still below in his cabin, the ice was close and solid enough that Rourke took the desperate step of having men leap out onto it with pry-bars and axes, to hack and lever at the narrowing lead ahead.

  It was to no avail, and by 10.00 on that Foundation Day morning the inevitable had occurred. Downes records the moment of their entrapment with understated simplicity:

  ‘… by 10.00 we were beset, and there seemed little else to do about it.’

  The pack ice closed around the black armoured hull of the Raven like an icy fist, its grip inexorable and unyielding. For the next twelve hours, the men laboured in shifts on the ice, desperately trying to extricate their stricken vessel from her frozen berth, but to no avail. Once it became apparent that their efforts were futile and they were simply exhausting themselves to no useful purpose, Rourke recalled all hands to the ship and ordered the fires banked in order to preserve their last dregs of coal, in the event that the icepack might open up again of its own volition at some point in the next few days.

  It was a vain and altogether futile hope.

  * * *

  From the Journal of Lieutenant William Downes

  27th January, 1922

  Polar Exploration Vessel Raven

  Exact position unknown

  1130 Hours

  A quiet ship today. As I write this most of the men, apart from those on watch, are still in their bunks or hammocks, exhausted after the exertions of yesterday. No sign of Mr Rourke or Captains McLaren and Smythe-Davis, so I have assumed command for the moment.

  Not that there is much to do; the Raven remains firmly locked into the pack ice, as much as she was when I turned in last night, possibly even more so. Outside, the atmosphere is eerie; while the wind has dropped completely, the snow is still falling heavily. Gentle curtains of it continue to drift down upon us out of a heavy, leaden sky. Visibility is less than twenty yards and there is no sign of the sun; the ship and surrounding ocean are bathed in a strange, diffused light, which seems to soften everything. Occasionally, a breath of breeze sends the snow swirling around us, but for the most part it simply floats peacefully from the air and settles upon everything. Already the ship is blanketed to a depth of almost two feet and I have set the men on watch to shovelling the decks and superstructure clear of the stuff, as much to keep them warm and busy as for any other purpose.

  The men themselves are also in an odd mood – there is a numbness and docility about their manner this morning which reminds me of the hours immediately following a heavy bombardment. Among those who’ve managed to rouse themselves, there is very little discussion or conversation and, when not actively engaged in some form of undertaking, most simply sit and stare vacantly into space.

  The same is true in the wardroom. Only Alex and Greg have emerged from their cabins and both of them are currently seated at opposite ends of the table, neither involved in any productive pastime, just sitting. Alex is as subdued as I’ve ever known him to be, while Greg at least made a fairly wan effort at greeting me when I went below.

  I am certain that this behaviour is largely a result of the sudden lack of movement and momentum. Naturally, I have been turning my thoughts to our situation and have concluded that, stuck though we most certainly are, we are still a long way from finished. There is enough summer ahead to hope for a warm change and, once the pack loosens up again, as it must surely do in the next few days or weeks, I am confident we will be able to push our way out, either onwards to the coast or back out to sea. In the meantime, we have supplies to last us comfortably for as long as we need, and so there is certainly no need to drop our bundles at this juncture.

  Shortly, I think I shall rouse Lawson and take him below with me to check on Piotre. Mr Rourke still steadfastly refuses to allow the lad to be released from the brig, despite my best efforts to persuade him to the contrary, and so all that is to be done is to keep him as comfortable as possible. In all the stresses of yesterday, I didn’t have an opportunity to visit him, however Lawson, for all his faults, has at least proven himself diligent in regard to this task.

 
; 2230 Hours

  After our slow start to the day, this afternoon has proven quite busy, all things considered. After lunch, Mr Rourke called a meeting with the two Captains, Dick Ryan, and myself. While the Leader seemed somewhat reluctant to include me in the proceedings, I expect that George Smythe-Davis has been working on my behalf to soften his recent displeasure with me and I am taking this as an indication that he is succeeding, to some degree.

  The meeting itself was brief, just a discussion of our situation and the choices open to us at this point. I am not alone in feeling optimistic about our chances of escaping the pack ice – both Mr Rourke and Captain Smythe-Davis agree that, with a little more than a full month of summer left ahead, there is a very good chance that the icepack will release the ship of its own accord sometime in the next couple of weeks.

  Failing that, we also have on board a good supply of dynamite, which we had intended to use in forming the site for our winter hut. If the weather clears sufficiently in the next day or two we might attempt to use some of this to blast open the ice ahead, if there is any prospect that we might be able to free ourselves by doing so.

  In the meantime, there is much to be accomplished. Despite the generally optimistic feeling that we are not done for, Captain McLaren pointed out, rather dourly, that we would nevertheless be well advised to start planning immediately for the worst – that we might remain stuck here for some months, even through winter. Initially, this contribution was not at all well received by Mr Rourke, who suggested that the Captain ‘would do better to stay quiet and let us get on with untangling the mess he’d gotten us into, than to make pointless suggestions’.