Chasing Shackleton

by Tim Jarvis

  In the meantime, the money from Raw for its half of the Australis hire fees hadn’t come through. Ben took in his stride the news that money that was meant to be in his account weeks ago was still in the UK. But he politely let me know he would be within his rights not to leave port until he received the second half of the payment. I didn’t blame him and got straight on the phone. A flurry of calls to the UK ended with assurances that the money would be sent to Ben’s account immediately.

  Later the same day I got a call from Jamie telling me to come to the naval hospital as soon as possible. I knew it meant trouble and also that, in typical documentary fashion, they would reveal nothing more until the cameras were in position to capture my arrival. Sure enough, I was met by Raw with cameras rolling. The news they’d been saving for me was that our doctor, Alex, was in a decompression chamber with the bends. Pretty impressive at sea level, I thought to myself as we approached the lozenge-shaped barometric chamber where, peering through a porthole, I could see a slightly sheepish figure sitting with an oxygen mask on his face. Determined not to give the cameras the reaction they craved, I asked how it had happened. “Surfaced too fast from his second scuba dive,” replied Jamie. “What was he thinking even going on the first dive?” I asked. Hadn’t we all signed papers to say we wouldn’t engage in risky activity in the immediate lead-up to the expedition? It was the beginning of a painful realization that my six-man handpicked team wasn’t all I had to worry about. In reality I had a team of fourteen and any one member of the group could ruin things for us all.

  Jamie pressed me for a summary of how things were going. “The money’s in London, the gear’s in Chile, and our doctor’s in a decompression chamber at an Argentinian military facility,” I replied. “Apart from that, all is good.” I turned and stormed off, heading for the Fin del Mundo that just about summed up how I felt.

  Several hours later Seb called to say he had survived his journey to Punta in the Sopwith Camel. “There’s good news and bad news . . .” he began. “Cut straight to it, Seb,” I responded impatiently. “The methanol and flares aren’t here, along with some of the food and the diesel generator. And the oars won’t fit in the plane.” I couldn’t believe it. Sure enough, the oars definitely wouldn’t fit inside the plane. Attaching them to the fuselage was out as was strapping them to the wings, which would apparently compromise aerodynamic lift—kind of important when you need to get over the Andes. With time against us, I told Seb to cut the oars in half at a diagonal so we could bolt them back together at Arctowski. Following several hours of frantic ringing around, Raw’s fixer in Ushuaia, Roxana, found someone who used methanol in his biodiesel-making operation. After initial suspicion of what we wanted it for, forty liters were sold to us, but not before we had joined the approved supplier list to allow them to sell us the chemicals. Australis had a generator we could use and we bought new flares from a chandler’s yard in Ushuaia, the exorbitant price reflecting the fact they knew we were desperate.

  Casting off from Ushuaia delivered the first genuine sense of relief I had felt for eighteen months. After a delay caused by Alex, our doctor, getting a second opinion on his eyes, which had been troubling him since his scuba-diving misadventure, we were away, heading into the spectacular Beagle Channel, mountains on either side of us. Next stop Puerto Williams.

  As we approached, we saw Seb standing quayside looking proud of himself: the oars had been repaired with metal sleeves fashioned from the hollow metal bumper bar of an old 4WD. Inspired! Puerto Williams didn’t have a lot going for it except its spectacular location and the prow of the Yelcho, the vessel that had ultimately rescued Shackleton, standing in the middle of town like an unofficial gateway to Antarctica. For us it certainly was: from here it was across the Drake Passage to King George Island.

  The bow vanished into a thick wall of green, cleaving it in two and splaying white foam from either side, our stomachs dropping dramatically as if on a roller coaster. The anemometer registered seventy-five knots of headwind as we crowded on the bridge watching the might of the ocean in awed silence. It was the end of a four-day Drake Passage crossing between Cape Horn and Antarctica, one of the roughest stretches of ocean in the world. In a bid to lighten the mood I uttered Blackadder’s immortal words, “So some sort of hat is probably in order,” his flippant response to the grizzled sea captain who tells him, “’Round the Cape, the rain beats down so hard it makes your head bleed.” The few nervous laughs I got suggested most of us were contemplating what this would be like if we were aboard the Alexandra Shackleton approaching South Georgia. Later, as I was confined to my bunk in a semiconscious state, a form flew past me. It was Jo Stewart, our expedition blogger, who had been thrown violently out of her top bunk to the floor by a massive wave, luckily cushioned by the clothes and bedding that preceded her. The normally bustling communal areas of Australis were, by day two, eerily quiet as people tried to hold on to the contents of their stomachs. There were large vats of food still lukewarm on the stove for anyone game enough to try them, but the kitchen and living areas were now eerily reminiscent of the Mary Celeste. Visibility was only four miles and we wondered if the situation would be similar when trying to spot South Georgia through the mist from the Alexandra Shackleton. Actually, I imagined, it would be a good deal worse, being so much lower in the water.

  Australis moored in Ushuaia against a spectacular mountain backdrop.

  Courtesy of Ed Wardle

  Seb prepares for his eleventh-hour mercy flight over the Andes to rescue gear including the oars, which were too long.

  Courtesy of Ed Wardle

  Our ambitious, highly weather-dependent flights with sponsor guests and gear worked smoothly enough. Six people arrived at the base in Frei on the Kingair on the same day as Australis, linking up with the remaining two members of the team, Donald Ewen and Steve Lennon, who’d arrived on the ninety-seater two days earlier.

  Frei and the adjoining base Bellingshausen, run by the Russians, were uninspiring places—a collection of drab, scruffy buildings, the only highlight being a beautiful little Eastern Orthodox church overlooking the bay. We greeted the sponsor team on the beach and everyone boarded Australis for the two-hour journey to Arctowski. We were all energized at the prospect of seeing the Alexandra Shackleton and beginning our adventures. For me, it had taken a tortuous five years to reach this point and had required me to tap into just about every emotion, skill, and ounce of resolve I possessed. As Tomas Holik had said, “With Antarctica you do not need an A and a B plan; you need also a C, D, and E plan!” How right he’d been.

  Arctowski was a collection of brightly colored, prefabricated buildings but, unlike Frei, it was surrounded by majestic cliffs of rock, ice, and glaciers and set in the spectacular Admiralty Bay. Magnus and I climbed into the Zodiac to go ashore and establish contact with the locals. I felt nervous, perhaps due to the fact the whole expedition, as ever, relied on the success of this next link in the chain. For us this would be organizing all of our gear and picking a weather window to go to Elephant Island, still 100 nautical miles distant, all based on $600 of fruit and vegetables and a modest board-and-lodging rate. “Welcome to Arctowski!” shouted a lone figure on the beach as we waded ashore. It was Sylwia, with whom I’d negotiated the fruit-and-veg deal. “I have a lot of apples, oranges, and garlic for you,” I offered. She laughed and suggested we get out of the cold wind. I entered the cozy, warm interior of an unmistakably Eastern European scene. In the mess-cum-bar area, pennants from those who had visited before us adorned the wood-paneled walls and bowls of sweets and nuts sat on the tables and ominously vodka-laden bar. Sylwia introduced me to Radek, an ecologist who also spoke good English, and Marek, the base commander and a bear of a man who made up for his lack of English with a permanent smile and generous hospitality.

  Zodiacs plied the water between Australis and the base and we established ourselves in our overheated but extremely comfortable accommodations, enjoying the meat-laden meals provided by Peter, the
cook. Never without his white chef’s hat, apron, and broad smile below his mustache, he was a salt-of-the-earth character performing one of the most important roles on the base. The following day we were officially reunited with the Alexandra Shackleton for the benefit of the cameras, Baz, Seb, and I having had an illicit look at her the evening before, together with the sponsor team, who were amazed at how tiny she was. I had slept well knowing she had survived her journey from Europe and looked forward to getting her in the water as quickly as possible. The next day, cameras rolling, the six-man crew strode Reservoir Dogs style toward the Alexandra Shackleton, Larso climbing inside immediately to get his first look at the boat as the sponsor group receded into the distance on board Australis. Larso reappeared ten minutes later with the reassuring words, “I reckon we might actually survive this thing.” Seb and Ed started worked on the electrics, cameras, and batteries, Nick and Larso on the sails and rigging. Meanwhile Baz and I sorted all the clothing, climbing gear, and food.

  Arctowski base, the last frontier of comfort before we got started.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  The following morning we looked for a deep enough place to put her in the water, finding a spot 1.5 kilometers away, near the base’s old oil storage tanks. A Bob the Builder convoy of vehicles—a tracked amphibious vehicle (AV), a crane, and a backhoe—disrupted the serene Antarctic scene as they trundled down the dirt track to the drop-off point. Seb, like an overprotective mother, had supervised the Alexandra Shackleton being lifted from the frame and placed onto the AV. Luckily his concerns about her planking being too weak to support the weight of her ballast when out of the water were unfounded. With a raise of the hand from Radek, the caravansary ground to a halt at the water’s edge. The crane was gingerly positioned in deep tidal sand and kelp, its operator doing a fantastic job getting the boat into the water, undoubtedly helped by his lack of English as ten sets of conflicting instructions were uttered. With Nick and Larso aboard, Marek then dragged her out into deeper water with the Zodiac. It had taken all nine base personnel and the ten of us, but she was in and looked very much like the returning hero against a backdrop of turquoise glacial ice. “Could we fix it? Yes we had!”

  Yes, we can: the Alexandra Shackleton hitching a ride on Arctowski’s amphibious vehicle.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  Longer term, we needed a mooring closer to the base for ease of access and had found a 400-kilogram former section of concrete building foundation complete with a convenient loop of metal sticking out of it. This would allow it to be dropped onto the seabed with a mooring line attached. The crane lifted the block onto the AV and we trundled back down the road. I was wondering how we would get over the boulder-strewn beach to the open water when the nearest thing I’d seen to a smile appeared on the AV driver’s normally stern face as he turned a sharp left off the track and sent us thundering down over the rocks. Making no effort to avoid anything in our path, he powered the heavy vehicle through, grinding gears as black fumes poured from the exhaust funnel. I hadn’t quite pictured this when I wrote the environmental impact assessment.

  Splashdown: the boat back where she belongs.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  Never work with sailors or animals: Joe’s subjects seem distracted.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  Having base Zodiacs at our disposal meant we could tow the Alexandra Shackleton back to her mooring at the end of each day if need be. That would gain us some time and also meant we could fine-tune our feel for her speed by checking it against a handheld GPS. The bay was a wonderful spot to trial the boat but was sheltered from big seas. We’d have to wait until the expedition proper to experience those. But at least we had a good communal space in the base’s mess area where we could sit and discuss capsize and man-overboard risks.

  We talked about the optimal position of Australis and figured two to three nautical miles was about the farthest she could afford to be from us in rough seas. This equated to fifteen to twenty minutes of her traveling at full speed in such conditions and meant she appeared more or less on the horizon. I recalled Arved Fuchs’s book in which he quoted Jamie Young of the 1997 South Aris team. He said: “My greatest fear was that the boat would be rolled over by a huge sea. That happened. If the weather had gotten worse and the wind had struck at more than sixty-five knots the boat might have come apart at its weakest point in the cockpit area. If it gets really stormy out there your support vessel may as well be on the other side of the world. In any bad weather, our support vessel was miles away and struggling to take care of herself.” So basically, regardless of the skill of Ben and his crew, in big seas we would be on our own. Even if she did manage to find us, the prospect of a fifty-tonne vessel like Australis alongside you in terrible conditions, even with an experienced skipper like Ben at the helm, wasn’t good. At worst Australis could reduce the Alexandra Shackleton to driftwood.

  Our relationship with the film crew while on the base was friendly enough, although their “Can you do that again for the camera?” methods got the Alexandra Shackleton crew’s hackles up pretty quickly. We understood that they had a difficult job to do, but their constant desire for drama, overt reaction, and spontaneity wore a bit thin after a while, particularly with Baz and Larso, who resented the intrusion into our world and the time it wasted. I tried to calm my guys down a couple of times, reminding them that the film would be an important legacy, but in reality echoed their sentiment. The “You must be excited, let’s see some emotion” requests were more likely to provoke a “Get the camera out of my face” reaction from us, but the film crew was slow to catch on.

  I also had trouble with them laying claim to being the arbiters of authenticity. Any perceived departure from what they regarded as Shackleton’s way was challenged, with the same reason always cited: “We’re doing this for you, to ensure no one is critical of you for not doing things authentically.” I suspected, however, that their pedantry about clothing and equipment was more about making good TV. The more miserable we looked in our old gear, the happier they were. Authenticity levels, as far as I was concerned, should be left up to us. After all, we were the ones risking our lives in a replica twenty-three-foot boat with no modern clothing or navigational aids.

  Case in point was discussions about the authenticity of the food we were eating. Shackleton had managed to take a lot of the provisions from the Endurance as she slowly succumbed, and had successfully supplemented this with seal and penguin meat and albatross and their eggs. Given that it was illegal to approach, let alone kill and consume, any of these animals, we had accepted there were aspects of food authenticity we simply couldn’t replicate. We would eat nougat, nuts, chocolate, and tack biscuits and drink sugary milk—similar fare to the “nut food,” biscuits, lump sugar, Trumilk, Bovril cubes, and Cerebos salts he had on the Caird. We would also eat meals of meat broth made from either pemmican (lard with beef seasoning) or army rations and cooked on a Primus kerosene stove—the equivalent to their “sledging rations.” In short, our food consumption would be similar to Shackleton’s without us getting too hung up about it. Shackleton took thirty days’ worth of food for a journey that in the end took seventeen days, so quantity was never an issue.

  The TV crew decided they wanted an experiment of half the crew eating traditional rations and half eating modern stuff in order to do a study of how tough the food was to survive on. As Ed, Baz, and I were to do the whole expedition traditionally, it seemed logical that we should be the ones to eat the old stuff, with Larso, Nick, and Seb eating more modern fare. I was skeptical of this approach, in part because I thought the three sailors would want to do the boat journey as authentically as possible, with all of us consuming the same rations. I also didn’t like the idea of creating subgroups on board and didn’t want to leave the door open for future claims that the sailors’ modern food made their journey easier. In the end I vetoed Raw’s idea, saying we would all eat the same basic food with the same calorific value as Shackle
ton’s diet (about 4,750 to 5,000 calories a day) without obsessing over its exact makeup. It didn’t go down too well, particularly with the doctor, but my decision was final.

  Our team, meanwhile, was getting on well. Shackleton hadn’t had the same experience—while his crew was made up of the best men, it also included the malcontents Chippy McNeish and John Vincent, whom Shackleton had taken as part of his strategy of safeguarding the morale of those he left behind. This perceptive man-management had been noted by Lionel Greenstreet at Patience Camp when Shackleton “collected with him the ones he thought wouldn’t mix with others,” billeting them in his own tent. It was also highlighted when he allowed the openly anxious Thomas Orde-Lees to be ejected from one of the tents at Patience Camp by his fellow occupants due to snoring. This, Shackleton thought, would minimize the demoralizing effects of Orde-Lees’s doom mongering on the other men.

  This is serious: conducting the sea trials in Admiralty Bay.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  The unfortunate Orde-Lees was, however, unwavering in his admiration of Shackleton, noting in his journal, “He is always careful to give his comrades the impression that he has absolute confidence in them, each in their own special sphere & yet he keeps a watchful eye on all. The reliance he places in one is certainly by far the best incentive one could have to do one’s work conscientiously.” My own leadership style was to intervene or ask to be consulted only if a serious situation was developing that might threaten the team, an individual, or the expedition as a whole. Beyond that, I left the sailing to Nick and Larso, boat maintenance to Seb, filming to Ed, and land-based safety to Baz, and I’m sure they appreciated it that way. Nick and Larso would inform me of what they were doing but didn’t rely on my input, and Baz and Seb, as military men, were comfortable with this need-to-know way of doing things. There was, however, some tension between Seb, who was understandably very protective of all the work he had done on the Alexandra Shackleton, and Nick and Larso, who changed quite a few things such as some of the rigging at the last minute. Although their modifications served us well, no one disputed the fantastic job Seb did in building much of the boat, and I periodically made sure we all remembered his input.