by Tim Jarvis
Baz, who led the land crossing of South Georgia.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
Shackleton’s Polar Medal—recognition of his incredible achievements.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
In terms of the construction of the Alexandra Shackleton, we were as faithful as possible to the Caird with the exception that we put in an aft bulkhead, to separate the cabin from the open cockpit, and accessed the main area below deck via a hatch. This was part of our safety plan in that the air in our living area would be our main buoyancy aid in the event of capsize. The other difference was that while the Caird’s bow was completely watertight as far back as the main mast, from there to the stern she was decked with a lattice frame structure of four sledge runners and packing-case lids nailed together with canvas stretched over them. We used tongue-and-groove pine planks covered with cotton canvas that certainly leaked when waves crashed over us, but it was nevertheless better than they had.
One boat, six men, one hundred years: the James Caird launching (left) and our re-creation of the moment.
(left) From the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
(right) Courtesy of Paul Larsen
We also had a support vessel, Australis, under the expert captaincy of Ben Wallis, and with a great crew in Magnus and Skye, which provided a safety net, although how much of one is difficult to gauge. Had a man fallen overboard in a storm, poor visibility, at night, or, worse still, in some combination of these, it would have been the end for him. Besides, the kind of weather that could cause such an event would likely have seen Australis preoccupied with her own survival and in no position to help us. Her very presence, however, was a temptation that Shackleton didn’t have—the double-edged sword faced by modern-day explorers of knowing that the possibility of rescue exists. For Shackleton the fact that he was alone on the sea with twenty-two men left behind on Elephant Island gave him a unique motivation to succeed.
The James Caird setting off from Elephant Island in 1916, with the Stancomb Wills at left.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis/Frank Hurley Estate
Add to this the fact that the agendas of film and media, often conflicting with our own, impacted team solidarity, and that we needed to force-fit our weather with trying to complete his journey, and there were problems we had that he did not. This issue was brought into sharp relief when we tried to land at King Haakon Bay, a bay we would not have chosen to land at given the weather we had the day we arrived at South Georgia but did so in order to follow his route.
Shackleton and his men spoke of enduring gale-force winds on all but five of their days at sea, and of a “hurricane” on day sixteen. If these definitions are taken literally, a “gale” means seas of 5.5 meters high and winds of thirty-four to forty knots. A “hurricane” translates to sixty-four to seventy-one knots and seas of fourteen meters. We alternatively had gale-force winds during our two-day storm and some violent cross-seas with strong breezes and near gale-force winds on several other days but no hurricane. It is testament to their skill that they managed to survive such conditions with constant diligence required to ensure the boat did not broach on the waves and become swamped or capsize.
Our land crossing of South Georgia was fraught with issues. Testament to how damp and cramped conditions were below deck on our boat journey is the fact that half our team got trench foot, as did they. Worsley described it as “superficial frostbite” from the “constant soaking in sea-water with the temperature at times nearly down to zero, and the lack of exercise.” Our six days waiting at King Haakon Bay for suitable weather, which resulted in three of our crew being forced to abandon the climb, matched closely the week Shackleton spent at King Haakon Bay—albeit in two camps, Cave Cove and Peggotty. And in incredible synchronicity, the three of us who remained fit enough to make the land crossing were the navigator, skipper, and expedition leader—just as it had been with his team.
They left at 2 A.M. and took just under thirty-six hours to complete the crossing to Stromness. This despite wrong turns down to Possession Bay, a detour up the Briggs Glacier, multiple attempts to get through various passes down through the Tridents, and a detour to Best Peak on the Fortuna Glacier that forced a backtrack along Breakwind Ridge until a suitable way down was found. We, on the other hand, went due east with minimal detours save for the need to evacuate Si the cameraman down to Possession Bay—a route that interestingly saw us follow almost exactly in Shackleton’s footsteps on the detour he took. For our part, the crossing of South Georgia cost us five of our complement of eight men in conditions that were frankly among the worst South Georgia has to offer, as opposed to the good weather he received, in a journey that took ninety-six hours to complete.
The faces say it all: back on board Australis at King Haakon Bay, having successfully recovered the Alexandra Shackleton.
Courtesy of Paul Larsen
Shackleton set an incredible pace across South Georgia, taking uncharacteristic risks in order to get across and down whatever lay in his path as quickly as possible. However, he crossed in early May, when temperatures were colder than they were for us, by perhaps five degrees given the season and the warming effects of climate change. They also had very good weather with no rain or snowfall and a full moon to travel by while the ground over which they traveled was also less crevassed—a result of both the season and the fact that climate change has ravaged almost all of South Georgia’s glaciers in the intervening ninety-seven years. In short, there were fewer crevasses and those that there were would have been covered with more snow when he crossed. To suggest that Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean managed this journey with no climbing or trekking experience also does them a great disservice. Shackleton had been knighted for getting closer to the South Pole on foot than anyone before him and Crean was perhaps the physically strongest polar explorer of his generation, both of them having had a great deal of exposure to crevassed terrain. Nevertheless, the speed of their crossing and the fact that they made it at all are both truly amazing given the paucity of their gear and the fact that the interior of South Georgia was completely unexplored.
What then can be said about how Shackleton achieved this journey against such incredible odds? Today’s world may be more bureaucratic and media-driven, but I have no doubt that Shackleton would have been able to organize an expedition in the modern era. His entrepreneurialism and media savvy would have shone just the same. As Hurley observed: “Any day you may see Sir Ernest, always alone, taxi-ing from one newspaper office to another. He is trying to arrange the best terms and it is going to be a battle royal both for the news and pictorial rights.” In a manner more modern than Edwardian, he knew the commercial worth of his ventures.
How our different journeys to Elephant Island affected our two teams is impossible to calculate. Shackleton and his men would have been worn down by but also well acclimatized to their surroundings, and certainly Shackleton’s resolve would have been steeled to salvage something from the wreckage of both ship and expedition. The absence of any possibility of rescue also provided a unique motivator for the Caird crew. If they hadn’t made it, the men they left behind would have perished, failure for them quite literally not being an option. It was this outlook Baz and I sought to emulate when tent-bound after Si’s evacuation on the Shackleton Gap. As Amundsen said in his tribute to Shackleton in the Daily Chronicle, “The word failure is not found in Shackleton’s vocabulary, and he succeeded.”
The König Glacier. Fully formed in Shackleton’s day, it’s now a victim of climate change.
Courtesy of Joe French
That success is testament to Shackleton’s ability to take constant problems in his stride; the ease with which he adapted to changed circumstances; and his determination, selflessness, and irrepressible optimism—in short, his leadership. This is reflected in the team he chose to take with him in the Caird and his determination to pursue the goal of saving all of his men with the same dedication, endurance, and good humor he had bro
ught to the original goal of crossing Antarctica. To achieve this he led from the front, never asking another to do what he would not do himself and, more often than not, doing others’ work for them. According to Worsley, Shackleton would always undertake the “most dangerous and difficult task himself. He was, in fact, unable by nature to do otherwise. Being a born leader, he had to lead in the position of most danger, difficulty and responsibility.” His watches on the Caird as they journeyed to Elephant Island from the pack, with him going without sleep for three days, and his again resisting sleep during the crossing of South Georgia so that Worsley and Crean might rest, are legendary.
Shackleton’s caring for others speaks much of the instinct for compassion which he had inherited from the women in his life (his mother and eight sisters in particular) and strengthened by a desire to treat others better than he had been treated as a young seaman in the merchant navy. Again Worsley seems to have summed it up best:
Looking back on this great boat journey, it seems certain that some of our men would have succumbed to the terrible protracted strain but for Shackleton. So great was his care of his people that, to rough men, it seemed at times to have a touch of woman about it, even to the verge of fussiness. If a man shivered more than usual, he would plunge his hand into the heart of the spare clothes bag for the least sodden pair of socks for him. He seemed to keep a mental finger on each man’s pulse.
He was tough but compassionate, finding ways to connect with each man even if he did not naturally identify with him. His decision to play cards with Hurley on the pack ice each day was a prime example. It gave the two men a reason to talk, where otherwise words between them did not come easily. He was, as an early shipmate said, “a Viking with a mother’s heart”—a characteristic that made those with him extend themselves in the knowledge that he had their best interests at heart and that dying for king and country was not the ultimate goal.
His team was, of course, of the highest caliber, and under Shackleton’s leadership they worked as one against the elements. The leadership and optimism of Shackleton and the skill of Worsley, McNeish, and McCarthy, combined with the strength and resilience of Vincent and Crean, meant they were the right men for the job. To my mind McNeish was unjustly maligned, his early insubordination on the pack having blotted his copybook with Shackleton. From this he would never recover in Shackleton’s eyes, to the extent that he was controversially denied the Polar Medal along with Vincent, who had supported his challenge to Shackleton’s authority. Still, his role should not be underestimated. Shackleton had got him to begin preparing the Caird for a long sea journey as far back as Ocean Camp, so plenty of thought and labor went into making her right for the job. That she survived was attributable in equal part to McNeish’s skill and Shackleton’s forethought. Even so, McNeish’s efforts only gave them seventy centimeters of freeboard and had them bailing for their lives when waves crashed in and chipping ice from a deck so glassy that it is amazing no one was lost overboard.
And what of Worsley’s near-mythical feat of navigation to reach South Georgia with only two or three accurate sun sights? Our journey has proved it can be done but only together with razor-sharp accuracy in dead reckoning for the remainder of the time—a critical point. You need to judge speed and direction accurately in between such sightings to ensure you remain on track and that cumulative error does not result in you either running into or missing South Georgia by the end. No one can diminish the enormity of Worsley’s achievement, but huge credit here must also be given to the skill and dedication of our principal sailors, Larso and Nick. In Worsley’s words, by day thirteen, “Since leaving Elephant Island I had only been able to get the sun four times, two of these being mere snaps or guesses through slight rifts in the clouds.” By curious coincidence Larso also managed just two good noon sextant readings—on day four and day nine—with two other, unreliable, observations on days five and eight. These readings were less reliable due to their not being noon sights and given the conditions in which they were taken.
True moral courage: Shackleton and Wild at Ocean Camp.
From the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
I am proud to have been involved in a journey where a combination of Nick and Larso’s world-class sailing skills and the determination and focus of the rest of the crew got us to our target against such odds. It was an incredible feat and worthy of great praise. Having said that, they would agree that Worsley achieved what he did in rougher sea, and with pressure on him that we simply did not have. For me, the amazing thing about what he did is not the number of sightings he took of “Old Jamaica” to find South Georgia, but the circumstances in which he accurately took them. This can never be repeated.
And then there was their rogue wave. Near-mythical creatures until recently verified by measuring gauges on North Sea oil platforms and found to be real, rogue waves are defined as waves twice the height of anything else in a given sea state. We didn’t experience one, although once in a while a wave that was noticeably larger than the rest would appear. What caused the one that struck the Caird, no one knows. It was certainly not a shallowing of the ocean: where they encountered it on day ten, 444 miles from South Georgia, the ocean is 3,000 meters deep. Could it have been a wave caused by a capsizing iceberg, as Worsley suggested? It is possible, but, given that they hadn’t seen an iceberg for many days and were in such deep sea, we can only speculate. It is perhaps more likely to have been a combination of the giant rollers that pulse around Cape Horn from the Pacific—Worsley’s “leviathans of the deep”—combined with seas generated by the southwesterly gale that had been blowing hard for three days from the same direction. Whatever the case, all we know for sure is that, as unlucky as they were to have experienced it, they were even luckier to have survived it.
Regardless of Shackleton’s leadership, his team, and the skill and resilience they exhibited in worse weather than we experienced on the ocean, he did also enjoy a lot of good luck. I once heard it said that life is about “playing a bad hand of cards well.” If so, Shackleton was the master, riding or making his luck in equal amount. A slightly bigger wave, a man falling overboard, lower gunwales, fewer views of the sun, the hurricane lasting a moment longer—all could so easily have resulted in epic failure. As Shackleton himself said, “I have marvelled often at the thin line that divides success from failure and the sudden turn that leads from apparently certain disaster to comparative safety.” Judgment, skill, and determination certainly allowed them to prevail, but to say luck played no role in things would be wrong.
Much of what we might ascribe to luck today was for Shackleton a firm belief that “Providence”—or “Old Provvy”—wanted them to make it—almost a belief of Shackleton’s that it was his destiny to do so, as much as any denominational religious belief. Interestingly, although he came from a Quaker background, he did not hold religious services on the Endurance. Among the mountains of South Georgia, however, all three men firmly believed that another walked beside them, something from which they all obviously derived tremendous strength. Shackleton later wrote:
When I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us, not only across those snow-fields, but across the storm-white sea that separated Elephant Island from our landing place on South Georgia. I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.
It was not only the expeditioners themselves who were moved. T. S. Eliot, inspired by Shackleton’s journey, wrote in his poem “The Waste Land”:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
This feeling continued after their ordeal was over. Within twenty-four hours of their arrival in Stromness, a gale swept over the island. According to Wors
ley, “Had we been crossing that night nothing could have saved us. The Norwegian whalers afterwards told us there was never another day during the rest of the winter that was fine enough for us to have lived through on top of the mountains. Providence had certainly looked after us.”
Certainly then the strength of Shackleton’s team, his leadership, the unique motivation that death as an alternative provides, and both luck and spiritual guidance all played a part in Shackleton’s success. But perhaps the key reason he was able to motivate himself and others to pull off this journey against such incredible odds is because it represented precisely why he was in Antarctica in the first place: to pit himself against the greatest challenges he could find in order to discover more about what lay within him and us all. Shackleton said as much when writing after the expedition about arriving in Stromness with virtually nothing save their ship’s log, adze, and cooker:
That was all, except our wet clothes, that we had brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment and high hopes. That was all of tangible things, but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole. We had seen God in his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.
“We had seen God in his splendours . . . ”
Courtesy of Si Wagen
The need to rescue his men against seemingly impossible odds served this just as well as the original quest to cross Antarctica and meant he was able to bring all of his energy, optimism, and belief to bear on achieving it.
Although articulated considerably less eloquently than Shackleton’s, my reasons are consistent with his in that I also undertake journeys to such places for reasons of self-discovery and to experience a greater understanding of life at some level. Antarctica, removed as it is from the noise of everyday life, allows you to explore who you are without having society dictate it to you. It is a challenging environment but in response to it a resourceful side of your personality emerges—one that only appears in response to challenging situations. Perhaps the third man “who walks beside you” is in fact the one who walks inside you—the one you are so unaccustomed to experiencing that it feels like another whenever you encounter it. Whoever or whatever it is, you feel drawn to come back and reacquaint yourself with it at every opportunity.