Chasing Shackleton

by Tim Jarvis

  This survival time in the water could, of course, be increased tenfold if we wore our neoprene survival suits. At Arctowski, we’d trialed how long it would take us all to put these on below deck and one after the other jump overboard as if abandoning ship. Although each man abandoning the “stricken vessel” left more space for those who remained, the fear would also be increasing with each minute that passed as the boat got closer to sinking. In calm conditions in Admiralty Bay, the best we could manage was twenty-nine minutes to don our suits. Unless we were in them way in advance of us needing to abandon ship or the boat capsizing or sinking, we were dead. I’m sure most of us thought about these options but said nothing. Better to focus on not going over in the first place.

  As it happened, even though the seas were now large and imposing, we had decided there was no point in two men getting soaked at the helm, particularly as the limited space didn’t allow for the second man to help much with steering anyway. Having trialed the second man on watch sitting low in the cockpit by the helmsman’s feet, we’d discovered that this cramped position, although out of the wind, induced bad seasickness and meant sitting in a bath of icy water while being doused with water from the waves above. We simply had to increase our recovery time down below and dry our clothes off with our own body heat and that of the others, much as Shackleton had done. In Worsley’s words: “Fortunately the bow space, when gained, was penetrated only by the heaviest seas, so that the sleeping bags did not get thoroughly wet for two days, and then we could generate a certain amount of warmth before the next extra heavy sea.” Other than the water that periodically penetrated the forward planks and got through the closed air vents, we remained relatively dry in the forward section of the boat, although the trade-off was that it was airless and the worst spot in the boat for seasickness. It was here that Ed’s camera console remained in waterproof housing and he somehow managed to operate it despite the seasickness in all but the worst conditions.

  The Alexandra Shackleton was terrible to steer, with her steering ropes, just like those of the James Caird, modified for a sea journey they were never designed for. This was unsurprising, given that the Caird was a lifeboat and not designed to cover vast distances under sail. In a bid to make things more workable, Nick had arranged the two ropes from the rudder so that they ran through wooden handrails in the front of the cockpit, the helmsman pulling them back toward himself to steer while braced at the rear. At least for landlubbers, pulling left moved the boat left and right, right—a godsend when the pressure was on and basic principles of sailing were forgotten under the stress of a threatening gray giant. But the lines required huge effort to pull and the friction of rope against rail added to the effort. Fingers fluctuated from feeling dead and numb to burning with pain as you adjusted your grip to get circulation back while your forearms ached with the effort. Each man chose the glove combination that worked best for him; I opted for woolen mitts as the rough wool helped me grip the rope. Still my fingers would turn numb and white as the ferocious wind and wet mercilessly stripped warmth away and my old frostbite injury to my right thumb and forefinger came back. Nick fashioned a loop in the steering lines so they could be operated with the feet like stirrups. It was an attempt to reduce the burning fatigue in the arms and the damage to fingers, but only an experienced sailor could operate these deftly, so the rest of us persisted with painful, hand-based heaving to steer the boat.

  The mast cam shows the growing wrath of the Southern Ocean.

  Larso’s face said it all as he came below to hand over the helm to Nick. He was a picture of sustained concentration, the frown lines deeper than normal and the ever-present smile replaced with a look of concern and focus. Conditions were worsening. “What’s it like up there?” Ed asked. “Blowing dogs off chains,” Larso grunted, throwing his sopping wet body into the pile of damp bodies on the floor in an attempt to force his way into some warmer place to get some sleep. Worsley’s words again came to mind: “We were like those monkeys which, during a cold night in the forest, lock themselves into a ball for mutual warmth. If one gets left out and, pushing in, disturbs the others, a furious row ensues. So it was with us. When some shivering unfortunate on the outside tried to push in, there instantly arose a frightful burst of profanity and dire threats of vengeance from the disturbed men.” Our reactions to the incoming helmsman never reached the same levels of disaffection, but our disgruntled mutterings were rough enough.

  In the early evening half-light, I emerged on deck, my first bowel movement beckoning—perhaps at the prospect of my turn at the helm. I’d been considering the difficulty of the whole operation for the past hour, and was confident neither about how I would answer the call of nature nor how I would steer the boat. I squeezed down into the dark recesses of the cockpit by Nick’s feet while he kept helm. The cockpit was home to torrents of icy water that rushed madly from one end to the other with the boat’s wild movement. Listening for the metal bucket rather than trying to sight it, I fumbled in the dark, positioning it in a corner in the hope it might remain there. It didn’t. The rodeo conditions sent it tumbling across the cockpit seconds later, Nick stopping it as if trapping a soccer ball. Returning it to its corner, I knelt in the cold water with nausea that had been kept at bay now rising fast with the need to focus on stripping back layers of wet clothing. With my trousers finally undone, I peeled off woolen layers down to the ankles, propping myself out of the water with one frozen hand as the other held the bucket just as a massive wave tipped torrents of icy water down my back and sent the bucket flying again. Angrily I regained it, tipping out the excess water, searching for a compostable bag and stretching it to failure over the bucket’s sharp rim, hoping it would not tear as it surely must. Hovering improbably over the bucket’s wide rim (designed for accuracy, not load-bearing), my body seemed to sense the urgency and all was done in seconds before the next wave forced a brace in the corner of the cockpit to regroup. “All right down there?” shouted Nick mockingly. His humor evaporated as the bagged offering passed precariously close to his face before I tossed it overboard. “You picked a hell of a time,” he joked as he vanished below deck to rest. I had picked the roughest conditions possible in which to christen the bucket and was duly proud of my achievement. The others still had the experience to look forward to.

  Picture of focus: me during the storm.

  Emerging on deck to steer in rough seas was like being in the passenger seat of a car, woken from deep sleep by the driver and handed the steering wheel as it entered a massive skid—there was very little time to readjust to the noise and speed at which the world around you moved. By the time you had focused and recalibrated, the hatch had closed and you were left alone on deck, responsible for everyone’s safety. Alone, that is, save a skua or albatross wheeling high overhead.

  I took the reins and began battling the bucking bronco, the Alexandra Shackleton reminding me of a small toy boat my sons play with. We were just a tiny speck in a vast ocean with the water crashing against the sides of the boat, making it shudder and groan with each big-wave impact. The top of our mast was routinely dwarfed by the waves around us as we lingered in dark, black valleys surrounded by malevolent walls of gray topped with hissing white foam. Each time waves above us threatened to curl over and engulf us completely, the Alexandra Shackleton would miraculously bob back up. I fought to keep her at right angles to the steep slopes of massive waves down which she careered, conscious that if I made a mistake, we would potentially be rolled. For a land-based explorer, it was intimidating and exhilarating in equal amounts. As Worsley said, “In a short time our ideas of size altered amusingly.” Incredibly, being alone in the turmoil up on deck gave me the chance to contemplate the journey I’d been on personally up to this point and the enormous pressure I’d been under. The logistical, financial, and personnel issues that I’d dealt with right up until leaving Elephant Island had been intense, and, frankly, it had taken the enormity of this voyage to preoccupy me and banish thoughts of the
issues that awaited me on my return. Survival in the Southern Ocean in the company of a team of great men was the perfect antidote for now. I remembered Discovery Channel’s insistence that it was imperative for us to reach day four of our journey so they could get enough footage. It was a friendly but firm and oft-repeated maxim: without four days’ worth of footage from the journey the documentary wouldn’t be workable.

  Ice forms on the sails.

  Courtesy of Si Wagen

  I was unsure of what day it actually was in our strange world. It was still day three—at least I thought it was, but I might have been wrong. Because we’d left at 7 P.M. from Elephant Island, new days theoretically came around only at 7 P.M. the next day, which was counterintuitive when daybreak normally symbolized a new day. We lived in a strange half-light below deck, our sleep constantly broken by the movement of people leaving or returning from watches, with every fifth hour signifying it was your turn again to battle the elements. And all this occurred as we headed toward an endless horizon with neither the evidence nor the means to show us whether we’d actually gone anywhere. Add to this days that lasted eighteen or nineteen hours, the absence of the sun meaning we didn’t know our position, and the disorientation of using hundred-year-old gear, and we weren’t sure exactly where we were, geographically or temporally. A big wave crashed over me, snapping me out of my fugue and reminding me of my immediate priorities.

  Life below deck, meantime, was getting increasingly damp, with each man returning to the fold wet through. As his wet clothes touched you when he came off watch it only added to our group misery. Not that they differed much from your own clothes but, lying still, you’d deluded yourself that you were drier than you were.

  Baz’s military way of doing things was constantly frustrated by the lack of order down below. While he removed his jacket, folded it, and placed it where it could be found when next needed, it would always have been moved as a result of someone trying to find something of his own. However innovative we became about choosing unique spots for our gear, like wedging it behind a spar or in a corner, nocturnal migration always occurred. In the darkness below, to the right of the hatch, the jackets sat in a sopping wet heap as if they had fallen from a washing machine with a broken spin cycle. The only way to identify what was yours was by feeling for familiar contents in the front breast pocket.

  Meanwhile, Baz, who had been nominated cook, battled to keep the stove going and everyone fed. And there were inherent dangers: every time the meths was lit to preheat the kerosene a huge orange flame issued forth, plus boiling water threatened to spill over Baz or us with every wave that hit. Other more insidious threats also lurked, in particular the feared hypoxia. I recalled Worsley describing the process of Crean lighting the Primus, keeping it balanced between his and Worsley’s feet while it took three of them “to steady the Primus and cooker against the boat’s violent motion.” The hoosh that they prepared and ate “scaldingly hot” was a life-giving tonic to the men.

  Even in the damp that was our world, fire was certainly a real risk. We lived atop 560 kilograms of camera batteries that were drip-fed by a battery recharging unit that ran on 40 liters of 99.9 percent pure methanol—one of the most poisonous and volatile substances around and one that should probably be avoided at all costs on a boat. Add to that each of us having sundry boxes of matches and lighters about our person and our full complement of eighteen flares, which if set off in a methanol-vapor-rich atmosphere would act like a detonator and, as Seb delicately put it, “Then you can kiss your arse good-bye.”

  For us it was more crowded on board than it was for Shackleton and his men. Our batteries for filming at least added little to the space constraints since we simply slept on them rather than rock ballast as Shackleton had. I can report, however, that neither was conducive to a decent night’s sleep. One could only imagine the seriousness of the crime for which we were doing penance as we lay in our itchy wet hairshirts atop the solid, angular surface of batteries and rocks. Extra items we carried meanwhile included six cameras for filming, which protruded from various corners of the boat (two below deck, four above); a large control panel that enabled Ed to change over memory cards and view footage he had taken; four ten-liter plastic containers containing pure methanol for our battery recharging unit; the unit itself, which sat in a dedicated protective wooden box about the size of an old-fashioned TV set; six lifejackets; a VHF radio; and six large duffel bags, each containing an immersion suit and a dry suit. That combined with the greater physical size of us as a crew—Tom Crean, whom the navy records as being five-foot-ten (although Worsley claimed he was over six foot), was referred to as Endurance’s “Irish giant,” whereas our shortest man, Nick, was five-foot-eleven with me standing six-foot-five—meant there was scarcely room to move below deck.

  The most dangerous section of the boat was the fifteen centimeters that separated the below-deck access hatch and the cockpit, which each man needed to sit astride momentarily when going on or coming off watch. It felt high and exposed, particularly in a big sea when the Alexandra Shackleton was perched atop a massive wave as you looked down into deep, forbidding valleys either side of its crest. All of us had close shaves where a sideways impact from a wave threatened to knock us either through the hatch, into the cockpit or, worse still, overboard. Nevertheless, we became adept at balancing with our legs and holding on to the runners on the deck placed there for that very purpose.

  I recalled Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa-wood log-raft journey across the Pacific aboard the Kon-Tiki. He described saving one of the men who fell overboard by throwing a rope to him as his bobbing head and flailing arms quickly receded into the distance with the current. We had a modern throwing line or Jonbuoy (which for me conjured up ridiculous images of the eldest son in TV’s The Waltons) and a life jacket if we chose to use it. We had also considered putting out twenty meters of knotted rope behind the boat so that a man might grab it, but the chances of his being able to do so once in the water were virtually zero. As it was for Heyerdahl, if anyone went overboard, it would be curtains unless the Jonbuoy could be thrown because, without a keel, we had no chance of turning around to pick him up.

  Nightfall for us was defined as that time when you could no longer read the compass without a candle, particularly as the compass sat in a recess under the lip of the cockpit. It was a lovely old piece of maritime history—heavy brass weighted with lead and oil and gimbled to allow it to move, in theory at least, independent of the motion of the boat. Nighttime was Larso and Nick’s time because they could steer more accurately than the rest of us without the compass, using instead the sound of the wind in the sail, the feel of the boat, and the flap of the pennant, just visible in the wan moonlight on the mizzen near our heads. But they still needed to occasionally check that the wind hadn’t shifted and sent us off course.

  The conditions incessantly frustrating us made even the simplest tasks difficult. Sometime during what we agreed was our fourth night, Larso shouted down for a candle. Baz and I found one and began searching for dry matches in tins in our pockets with which to light it. After seven or eight attempts we finally did so, sheltering it as best we could, but as we exited the hatch the candle went out repeatedly, each failed attempt being met with increasing frustration. Baz climbed into the cockpit and tried several more times. The candle could not, however, be lit in its position in the glass case that housed it in the rear of the compass due to the tight space, while the “still” air by Larso’s feet was too drafty to allow us to light it there. Baz removed the glass housing from the back of the compass and returned below deck with it and the candle, cursing under his breath. By now, fifteen minutes into our attempt, our matches had stubbornly decided not to work. We woke Ed for a lighter after Seb fruitlessly searched for our spares bag in the darkness. With Ed’s lighter the candle lit the first time and was placed carefully into its housing for the almost ritualistic journey back to the compass. We felt like Neanderthals carrying a burning log from their fir
st fire, fearful of its going out. The air gap in the housing that let in enough air to keep the candle alight, this time let in too much. The candle extinguished again. Baz finally took the candle, lit it by Larso’s feet with the lighter, and swiftly put it back into its protective housing. After all our efforts, Larso checked the compass and, reading “North,” put the candle out immediately to conserve it, just as the James Caird crew did the few times they used their only candle, saving it, as Worsley recalled, “for emergencies—principally making the coast.”

  The frequency of loud booming hits from waves to the side of the boat was abating, and it seemed that the wind that had raged incessantly for the past two days was dropping. Larso was at the helm. As ever, I marveled at his and Nick’s ability to read the wind. Suddenly the VHF radio crackled into life, a sense of urgency evident in Ben’s voice. “We can’t see you,” he said. Given his serious tone, my humorous response—“We can’t see you either”—might have been misplaced. “We’re not picking up your AIS or radar,” he continued. I wasn’t surprised at the radar not working—a small wooden boat with linen sails like ours would provide little for it to get a reflection off—but the Automatic Identification System not working meant not only could Australis not track us but also that any other vessel in the vicinity would not see us either. Although few ships ply these waters, it would be an unfortunate irony to be run over by an “In Shackleton’s Footsteps” icebreaker or tourist vessel heading to South Georgia from Elephant Island. Sure enough, the telltale lights behind the wooden casing that normally indicated that the AIS was on were dark and lifeless. We told Ben we’d investigate immediately. Even though the wind was dropping, the seas were still huge from the storm. With darkness upon us our small, unlit vessel would be impossible to see even in moonlight.