Chasing Shackleton

by Tim Jarvis

  In between our endless discussions about risks, each of us spent time personalizing and adjusting our gear, adding pockets and buttons to suit and applying grease to our gabardine jackets, trousers, and hoods to try to waterproof them. The waterproofing didn’t work, but it passed the time and took our minds off the dangers ahead. I joked to Baz that we’d spent $800,000 and looked like garbage collectors. Worsley wrote that as he, Shackleton, and Tom Crean set off to cross South Georgia, “any one of [them] would have been turned out of an East End doss house.” I dreaded to think what we might look like by the time we got to that stage of the journey.

  It was three days before our rendezvous with Australis and Alex the doctor was not at breakfast. I was told he’d hitched a ride on a Brazilian government vessel that morning so he could see the doctor at Frei to get a third opinion on his eyes, which continued to bother him. I understood his concern, but I was unhappy about his decision to go on many levels. If he didn’t return we would have no doctor, and our expedition insurance and permits would be compromised. Plus he had made his own decision to go and had done so on a one-way trip to Frei that as far as the base was concerned meant he had made his problems their problems by turning up with no way of independently getting back to Arctowski. Alejo told me in no uncertain terms in a series of rants over the radio that he and the base were not happy with the doctor. In the end Alex was reassured, and, not happy with the third opinion, he flew to Punta Arenas for a fourth. At least he was out of the way and I knew he could get back on the empty Kingair that was coming to pick up the sponsor team in a couple of days’ time. A silver lining was that he could at least collect some currency from Punta to pay our cash-only accommodation bill at Arctowski.

  The Alexandra Shackleton in her ice cradle.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  It was time to leave. Satellite weather information told us that in four days’ time, on January 23, we would have light southerly winds at Elephant Island. This meant ideal conditions for landing at Point Wild, on the northern side of the island, protected as it is by the island’s high mountains. We would need to leave for the twenty-four-hour, 100-nautical-mile journey with the first good weather, which was forecast for dawn on Monday the 21st. This was probably good too in that it meant we’d just miss out on a third alcohol-fueled Saturday night at the base, with Marek gleefully lining up vodka shots on the bar and Agatha, the base medic, ready to save anyone who went too far. Great as it was for team morale, it wasn’t very conducive to being fit for what we were about to attempt. Arctowski had been wonderful on so many levels. The great group of people based there were warm, hospitable, and had a wonderful can-do attitude. Our expedition would remain forever indebted to them.

  Modern communications, meanwhile, meant that financial and media commitments had followed me down to the base, and this combined with dealing with the constant demands of the TV crew meant I was always managing issues that distracted me from the massive challenge that lay ahead.

  Australis appeared in the bay just off the base. When we remet the sponsor team they regaled us with stories of whale and penguin sightings, the majesty of the Antarctic peninsula, and the things they had learned from the Shackleton leadership course, delivered by Arup’s Steve Lennon using materials provided by Margot Morrell, author of the seminal text on Shackleton’s leadership, Shackleton’s Way. Relieved that their trip had been such a success, I returned with them to Frei, ensured they got on their flights back to Punta, one of which had brought the doctor back down, and after setting Alejo straight on a few things got on Australis and returned to Arctowski, able momentarily to breathe a sigh of relief.

  The ice moves into Admiralty Bay, surrounding the Alexandra Shackleton at anchor.

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  Reprising the Zodiac shuttle from ten days prior, we reloaded our gear from the base. Within six hours we were ready to go, saying an emotional farewell to the nine Polish personnel at Arctowski who had suspended many of the base’s day-to-day duties in order to help us during our stay. We presented them with a signed pennant and a bottle of Mackinlay’s whisky and left, but not before giving Sylwia and Agatha a quick tour of the Alexandra Shackleton so they could see what she was like fully laden. They emerged with looks of disbelief on their faces, fearing, I suspect, that we would never be seen again. In fact, they said as much.

  The Alexandra Shackleton left Arctowski under sail with Nick, Larso, and Ed on board. For the benefit of the film we conceded to a few hours’ sailing out of the bay into open ocean, as it represented a good chance for Nick and Larso to get in some more sea miles in slightly rougher conditions. In the interest of time, though, the Alexandra Shackleton would then be towed the rest of the way to Point Wild to ensure we got a half decent chance of landing. Making it all the way from Arctowski under sail had nothing to do with the Shackleton story anyway, whereas ensuring we left from Point Wild did.

  I watched the little boat recede into the distance until, after only fifteen minutes, she was barely visible in the enormity of the seascape through which she traveled. Fleetingly she appeared as a dark silhouette against the sheer cliffs of glacial ice in the bay and it sent a shiver down my spine to see her in these surroundings. Just looking at her made me feel like I’d time-traveled back a hundred years such that I almost expected to see the Dudley Docker and Stancomb Wills alongside her. I recalled Worsley’s description of the three boats crossing from the pack to Elephant Island: “Our dark sails showed in contrast with the white pack. We looked like a fleet of exploring or marauding Vikings.”

  For the Alexandra Shackleton progress was pretty slow. Even with Paul Larson, the world’s fastest sailor, at the helm, we’d only managed five knots out of her in dead calm seas with strong winds coming from a perfect angle. The norm was nearer three. So at the end of Admiralty Bay we came up alongside her, picked up Nick, Larso, and Ed, and put her on the long towline for the hundred-nautical-mile open-sea journey to Elephant Island. As we watched her from the stern of Australis, she kicked and rolled as if in protest at being shackled, her mast swinging madly from side to side like an out-of-control metronome. Baz said he could feel the seasickness rising already.

  The journey to Elephant Island begins auspiciously: the boat sets a cracking pace under tow.

  Courtesy of Si Wagen

  The open ocean was a rude shock after what we’d been used to from our sea trialing in the relative shelter of Admiralty Bay. The Alexandra Shackleton bucked and rocked violently with the two-meter gray swells that now passed beneath us. In anything much rougher than this the little boat was, in reality, untested. We’d told our families, sponsors, regulators, and insurers that we’d done extensive sea-trialing and had planned for most eventualities, but actually we had little idea of how the Alexandra Shackleton would perform in really big sea, least of all in what conditions she might capsize and how we’d recover from this. Our sea survival training had left us only too aware of how short survival time in 2˚C water was. It was a very sobering thought. Out here, watching the Alexandra Shackleton on the high sea, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what it had been like for the South Aris team upside down in their capsized boat in the dark, storm-tossed sea off the South Orkneys, terrified and fighting for their lives. It was fascinating watching the Alexandra Shackleton from the safety of Australis. But in twenty-four hours or so we would be relying on her to convey us all safely 1,500 kilometers across the forbidding gray immensity of the Southern Ocean. I turned and went back to my cabin. I’d seen enough. That was how it had been all through the planning of this expedition—I never lost sight of what lay in store but I measured my exposure to it, lest the prospect of what we were going to attempt ate into my resolve. Seeing how insignificant the Alexandra Shackleton looked in these surroundings wasn’t very constructive—it was like watching a Jack Russell pick a fight with a Rottweiler, having no sense of its own size. The next time I saw the ocean I wanted it to be from the Alexandra Shackleton, not from a perspective that al
lowed me to see how hopelessly inadequate and small she looked in these conditions.

  6

  THE GREAT GRAY SHROUD

  Alone with history: out in the Southern Ocean.

  Courtesy of Skye Whelan

  Butting through scarps of moving marble

  The narwhal dares us to be free;

  By a high star our course is set,

  Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

  Louis MacNeice, Thalassa

  “Growl and go”: looking the part in our Shackleton-era gear. The image was taken with a 1912 Vesta pocket camera.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  As I watched from Australis’s bridge, the jagged outline of Elephant Island slowly revealed itself on the horizon in the early post-dawn light. Thirty kilometers to our right was the spectacular cloud-capped mountainous skyline of Clarence Island, rising more than 2,000 meters from the sea.

  We moored tight under the cliffs of Cape Lookout on the southern tip of the island, gaining some protection from the same northwesterly winds Shackleton had experienced. The cliffs were steep and foreboding, with all but the steepest teeming with Chinstrap and Gentoo penguins, their cacophony and pungent urea overpowering from hundreds of meters away. Having used satellite weather forecasts to plan our landing at Point Wild, we now stopped here in the knowledge that a light southerly wind beckoned tomorrow—one that would maximize our chances of landing on Point Wild’s north coast. This was crucial, as any failure to start from the same point as Shackleton would have compromised our expedition from the outset and would have been difficult to put behind us psychologically.

  The following morning we passed the awe-inspiring natural amphitheater of rugged glacial ice that immediately precedes Cape Valentine, the easternmost point of Elephant Island. Aptly named “the Stadium,” it had borne witness to the incredible feats of endurance that had unfolded at Cape Valentine. Conditions today were calm, with good visibility. Those experienced by Shackleton, however, led to him landing here in desperation, due in equal measure to concerns over the condition of his men, the big seas that prevailed, and fear of ending up on the rocks due to poor visibility. Even on a day like today landing would have been difficult.

  Elephant Island’s majestic skyline rising out of the sea.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  When we arrived at Point Wild after an hour of motoring aboard Australis from Cape Valentine, we felt as though we hadn’t earned the right to land, such had been the relative comfort of our journey. Many were awestruck by the desolation of Point Wild, but for me it represented a place of great hope and the fulfillment of a dream to return here after my visit when planning the expedition two years ago. Our arrival brought with it an understandable amount of trepidation, and I imagined how Shackleton must have felt when he landed, knowing that someone would have to take one of the boats and undertake a desperate voyage to get help. Now, ninety-seven years later, we would undertake that same journey, for very different reasons but filled with the same dangers.

  We towed the Alexandra Shackleton to the eastern side of Point Wild, looking for the best approach through the brash ice and rocks that lay in wait for us. The brash ranged from basketball- to fridge-sized pieces, with 90 percent of their volume lurking beneath the waterline. The larch planks on the Alexandra Shackleton were only 1.5 centimeters thick, so a solid impact would easily damage her. And we didn’t have Chippy McNeish with us to carry out any serious repairs.

  We picked our way gingerly through the small brash lumps and landed on the eastern side of the spit. Shackleton had given his youngest crew member, Perce Blackborow, the honor of alighting first on the island, having developed a paternal relationship with the young stowaway who had stolen aboard at Buenos Aires. Our modern-day equivalents were the film crew who waited for us on shore cameras rolling, with whom no such paternal relationship had developed. I stepped carefully over the boulders at the seaward end of the spit to establish where the Caird had cast off. While the cameras lingered on the flatter shingle of the beach, I welcomed the opportunity to be away from them and quietly take in the awe-inspiring but forbidding atmosphere of the place that Hurley had gone on to describe as “truly a land where nature shows but her sullen moods.” It was also a chance to reflect on all that I’d gone through to get here. Making my way carefully along the shoreline, I came across a terribly injured Chinstrap penguin hidden behind a rock. It had a large, bloody, semicircular hole in its midriff, probably courtesy of a leopard seal. The penguin looked up at me blankly, then slowly turned away to rest his chin on his chest, quietly resigned to his fate. In that moment I became instantly conscious of how lonely it would be to die here. For the penguin there would be no Shackleton-style rescue.

  It was truly testament to Frank Wild’s leadership that he managed to sustain the men in this inhospitable place. I wondered who had the less enviable task—Shackleton, who had to keep himself and five others motivated on a small boat but who at least controlled their destiny up to a point, or Wild, who, together with the twenty-one men left behind, was entirely reliant on the Boss’s return for survival. With our being faced with a boat journey of unknown duration, I felt for Wild in not knowing how to measure his effort given that he had no idea of how long he would remain there. Wild faced this challenge magnificently, maintaining an indefatigable optimism throughout the four-month stay on the island. Shackleton wrote of him with palpable gratitude:

  Wild had reckoned that help would come in August, and every morning he had packed his kit, in cheerful anticipation that proved infectious, as I have no doubt it was meant to be. One of the party to whom I had said, “Well, you all were packed up ready,” replied, “You see, boss, Wild never gave up hope, and whenever the sea was at all clear of ice he rolled up his sleeping-bag and said to all hands, ‘Roll up your sleeping-bags, boys; the boss may come to-day.’”

  A member of the support crew called me enthusiastically to say he’d found the precise spot from which Hurley photographed the Caird setting off. I boulder-hopped eagerly to the spot and, sure enough, found myself looking out to sea, the viewfinder of my camera framing exactly the scene Hurley had seen ninety-seven years prior. The image of the men manhandling the Caird into the surf was etched in my memory, although I could see the beach was somehow different from the way it had been then. I assumed the tide must be in, covering the sand and gravel of the Hurley photograph, but just as likely one hundred years of storms had eroded the beach.

  Our Caird replica, meanwhile, was safely offshore beyond the breaking surf, hence our departure from Point Wild in the Alexandra Shackleton would be quite different from how Shackleton and his men had managed theirs. As we’d made the easy decision not to sink a perfectly good square-rigger into the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, we had only one replica whaler rather than the fleet of three that traveled down with Shackleton aboard Endurance, and so didn’t have the luxury of being able to load our boat with ballast offshore, relaying rocks and water barrels out to her using a Dudley Docker or a Stancomb Wills as Shackleton had. Nor would it, of course, have been permissible: if everyone who had visited Point Wild over the ensuing years had taken rocks, there would be no beach left. So our little boat was already fully laden with ballast—rocks, marine batteries, food, water, sailing rig, and personal equipment—when it arrived at Elephant Island. It weighed in at more than 2.5 tonnes; three when we were on board.

  Another obvious difference between the two expeditions was that we had only six men in our team; Shackleton had twenty-seven. Finding five people crazy enough to want to join me in re-creating the James Caird journey was one thing. Convincing twenty-two more to wait on Elephant Island for us to rescue them would have been quite another. Our absence of manpower meant it would be nigh on impossible to keep the Alexandra Shackleton off the rocks were we to try to launch her from the shore, even with the small surf running today. Hurley’s photographs clearly show the Caird, at this stage more than a tonne lighter than the Alexandra Shackleton, being held in
position by most of the men. Our fully laden boat would have broken either us, itself, or both on the rocks if we’d tried to replicate the same beach launch.

  As if it were only yesterday: me standing at the same point on Elephant Island where the James Caird set off for her incredible voyage (top).

  (top) Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/169

  (bottom) Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  Also, had we pushed the Alexandra Shackleton off the beach ourselves, we would have been soaked in the process, something we wanted to avoid at all costs. We knew from our experience at Arctowski how long it took to dry our clothes and simply couldn’t afford to be plunging waist deep into icy water prior to our boat journey and spending the next few weeks trying to dry them out with body heat. As the James Caird was launched, McNeish and Vincent, who were standing on deck, were thrown into the swell by “a large roller” that almost capsized the boat. McNeish’s trousers were wet and Vincent was soaked from head to toe. As Shackleton observed, “This was really bad luck, for the two men would have little chance of drying their clothes after we had got under way.” When offered an exchange of clothes by their colleagues, McNeish declined dry trousers while Vincent accepted crew member Walter How’s dry trousers for his. Vincent’s refusal to change out of his wet jacket “called forth some unfavourable comments as to the reason, and it was freely stated that he had a good deal of other people’s property concealed about his person,” according to Orde-Lees, the men having been forced to discard most of their personal items on the pack ice to save weight. How’s trousers subsequently took two weeks to dry, which was certainly not something we wanted to re-create.