Chasing Shackleton

by Tim Jarvis

  It was, then, far more than ego and opportunism that drove Shackleton. He regularly used the power of heroic imagery and poetry to motivate both himself and his men to achieve great things, not as a contrivance but because he believed in it and what it represented. The explanation he gave to biographer Harold Begbie for his love of the poetry of Robert Browning reveals a great deal about his own philosophy:

  But I tell you, what I find in Browning is a consistent, a spontaneous optimism. He never wobbles. You never catch him doubting a purpose in creation or quailing before the infinite. The bigger the universe, the more he likes it. He can’t feel at home in the longitude and latitude of finity. There’s no parlour scepticism in his soul. His spirit goes up with something more than confidence to meet the mountain crags and the stars. He loves greatness and vastness. It’s the Whole that he is after, and the part can’t trouble him. If he looks at doubt it is to smile, never to sigh. No poet ever met the riddle of the universe with a more radiant answer. He knows what the universe expects of man—courage, endurance, faith—faith in the goodness of existence. That’s his answer to the riddle.

  Like Browning—whose lines “I hold that a man should strive to the uttermost for his life’s set prize,” are etched on his headstone at Grytviken—Shackleton believed life was to be lived. That he sought out the majesty of all it could offer and flourished in adversity, almost as if normal life were not worthy of his attentions, was evidenced by the expeditions that he put ahead of all else. His declaration to Worsley, “Never for me the lowered banner, never the last endeavour,” really does sum him up. His was the constant quest for challenges and avoiding what he saw as the humdrum day-to-day unless it served a greater purpose. It was the same sort of quality that saw Churchill at his best in wartime—and one that made the politician’s private skepticism about the merits of polar expeditions all the more surprising.

  Shackleton’s love of bold undertakings and sense of greater purpose—along with the fact he’d played only a minor role in the war, having arrived home too late and too old at forty-three—meant that by 1920 Shackleton was yearning again for the great white South. In 1922 he set off on board the Quest on an expedition with somewhat ill-defined goals. He traveled with seven men from the Endurance, perhaps all seeking to reacquaint themselves with something deeper and more meaningful that, once glimpsed, had proved impossible to forget. Shackleton died of a heart attack on the night of their arrival at South Georgia, back on the stage where he had enjoyed his finest moments. It was a final act of theater that he would surely have appreciated. I reread the words he uttered to Worsley years before at King Haakon Bay referring to what fate might hold in store for them, obviously unaware of their poignancy: “Some day, Skipper, you and I will come and dig here for old treasure, or perhaps sleep quietly with the other old seamen.” Fulfilling his own prophecy, he died on board the Quest in Grytviken harbor, aged just forty-seven. Unable to imagine her husband at peace in a cemetery in the gentle pastures of England, Shackleton’s widow, Emily, instructed that he should be laid to rest in the graveyard on South Georgia, his grave alone pointing south toward his spiritual home.

  We walked up to the whalers’ cemetery in Grytviken, where Zaz, our patron, awaited us. The Southern Ocean’s weather had, incredibly, brought us all together on the same day in this remotest of places, though we arrived on different vessels with itineraries that should not have allowed us to meet. It followed the wonderful synchronicity that saw us leave civilization on the anniversary of Shackleton’s death on January 5 and depart from South Georgia to return to civilization the following day on February 15—his birthday. The power of such timing would have been manna for his sense of the dramatic, our expedition being a story of his death to rebirth, a metaphor for the odyssey he undertook that arose from the wreck of the Endurance to eclipse the original journey. That we had managed to retrace this journey as close as it is possible to do in the modern era was humbling. We now realized more than can be expressed in the words we’d all read a hundred times how much they had suffered to achieve what they did and that it was a journey that could never truly be repeated.

  Many words have been written about Shackleton over the years but perhaps there are none better than those of Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a survivor of Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. “For speed across the ice give me Amundsen, for scientific research there is Scott, but in times of trouble pray God for Shackleton.”

  The final farewell: Shackleton embarking on the Quest just six years after his greatest achievement, unaware of the fate that awaited him.

  Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge

  Toasting the Boss: raising our glasses, or rather mugs, at Shackleton’s grave.

  Courtesy of Joe French

  “ . . . heard the text that Nature renders . . .”

  Courtesy of Paul Larsen

  SAVING ANTARCTICA FROM MAN

  Our expedition provided an opportunity to observe man’s impacts on the western part of Antarctica and the sub-Antarctic over the years, commencing with the exploitation of marine resources in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, more recently, the effects of climate change.

  Exploitation of seals and whales began shortly after Captain Cook’s second expedition aboard the HMS Resolution in 1775, when he discovered South Georgia. The early polar explorer James Weddell stated in 1825 that “the number of skins brought from off South Georgia cannot be estimated at fewer than 1,200,000.” King George Island was a center of sealing until the end of the nineteenth century, by which time fur seals had been hunted to extinction on the South Shetland Islands, with sealers being replaced by whalers. Whalers needed large, deep bays to capture whales, and Admiralty Bay was one of the best. In the period 1911–30 in the South Orkneys and South Shetlands area, the total number of whales taken was 118,159. Today there are still bones from hundreds of whales strewn on the shores of Admiralty Bay from this period. When Shackleton reached Stromness whaling station in 1916, land-based whaling was still at its height, but as little as a decade later whaling on the high seas—“pelagic whaling”—was taking over owing to the scarcity of whales around South Georgia Island caused by overharvesting. Whale-catching ships with a range of around 300 kilometers harpooned whales using an explosive grenade inflated with air, marking the whale for subsequent retrieval. They then towed the harpooned whales to a factory ship or shore station, where the blubber was removed and boiled under pressure to extract the oil. Between 1904 and 1965 some 175,250 whales were processed at South Georgia shore stations. In the whole Antarctic region some 1,432,862 animals were taken between 1904 and 1978, when hunting of the larger species ceased. Probably the largest whale ever recorded was taken at South Georgia; a blue whale processed at Grytviken in about 1912, it was 33.58 meters (110 feet) long and weighed in at just under 200 tonnes.

  In 1986 all commercial whaling was stopped, although some nations such as Japan continue to hunt certain whales for “scientific purposes.” Seal numbers are now back to their pre-exploitation levels, but blue and humpback whales are at only a fraction of their prewhaling numbers: 1 percent for blue whales and between 2 and 20 percent for humpbacks.

  Man’s main impact on Antarctica today is climate change, with global mean warming 0.8°C above preindustrial levels. Oceans have warmed by 0.09°C, while sea levels have risen by about 20 centimeters since preindustrial times and are now rising at 3.2 centimeters per decade.

  These changes relate to the accumulation in the atmosphere of excess greenhouse gases, which at the time of writing have cumulatively reached 450 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 equivalent concentration in the atmosphere. This represents an increase since the industrial revolution of 37 percent for carbon dioxide, 150 percent for methane, and 18 percent for nitrogen oxide.

  In terms of Antarctic ice melt, the warming of the atmosphere and oceans is leading to an accelerating loss of ice from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, and this melting is likely to add substantially to
sea-level rises in the future. Overall, the rate of loss of ice has more than tripled since the 1993–2003 period as reported by the International Panel on Climate Change, reaching 1.3 centimeters per decade between 2004 and 2008; the 2009 rate is equivalent to a loss of about 1.7 centimeters per decade. If ice loss continues at these rates, the increase in global average sea level due to this source alone would be about 15 centimeters by 2100.

  The main part of Antarctica where ice loss is occurring is the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), which warmed by about 2.4°C between 1958 and 2010, making it one of the fastest-warming areas of the planet. The WAIS, to the west of the Transantarctic Mountains, including the Antarctic Peninsula, makes up about 10 percent of the total volume of ice in Antarctica, and alone contains enough ice to raise sea levels by at least 3.3 meters.

  Data for ice melt on Elephant Island is not readily available, but a great deal of data exists for other islands in the South Shetland Island group, in particular for King George Island (only 80 nautical miles from Elephant Island), including Arctowski base, where the team spent almost two weeks sea-trialing the Alexandra Shackleton and undertaking crevasse training. King George Island provides an excellent test case for predicting future responses to climate change as it is undergoing dramatic glacier recession and environmental change.

  Arctowski is situated in Admiralty Bay and was established in 1977. In terms of sea ice, the sea in Admiralty Bay froze completely eleven times between 1977 and 1996 during the winter. In the period 1999–2012, it did not apparently freeze once.

  As a direct consequence of climate change, reduced sea ice in Admiralty Bay has unquestionably contributed (along with pollution and human disturbance) to massive reductions in penguin numbers in the colonies adjacent to Arctowski. Adélie penguins, who breed on ice-free land but live on sea ice, have, for example, declined from approximately 10,000 pairs in 1978 to only 3,600 pairs in 2012. The Chinstrap population at Arctowski, meanwhile, is down from 500 breeding pairs in 1978 to one breeding pair today. Although Chinstraps prefer to live in ice-free sea, their main food source, krill, depends on algae that attaches to the underside of sea ice. Reduced sea ice means less algae, which in turn means less krill and fewer Chinstrap penguins. The third type of penguin present at Arctowski, Gentoo penguins, are also down from 780 breeding pairs to 70 pairs; again, a major contributor is the warming of the sea around King George Island and the consequent reduction in krill quantities. Interestingly, a fourth type of penguin was observed by the expedition team at Arctowski in January 2013—a solitary King penguin. Normally a sub-Antarctic penguin, Kings are now occasionally seen farther south than they would otherwise be, perhaps an indication that the climate is increasingly suitable for them.

  The Windy, Baranowski, and Ecology glaciers next to Arctowski base are part of the Warszawa ice field, which is part of the King George Island ice cap. During the past decade, a rapid retreat of these glaciers has occurred, consistent with warmer temperatures in the region. The Ecology Glacier has been receding continuously since at least 1956–57, with rates ranging from 4 meters per year in the late 1980s to up to 30 meters a year in the decade 1989–1999. The Windy and Baranowski glaciers reveal similar results.

  The expedition’s final destination was South Georgia, over half of which is covered in “permanent” snow and ice. Based on historical maps, satellite images, and other data, the history of South Georgia’s glaciers can be traced. A study in 2010 of 103 of the 160 glaciers on the island from the 1950s to the present found that 97 percent retreated during this period. At low elevations, some are even approaching disappearance.

  Our expedition team certainly felt this to be the case. When Shackleton crossed South Georgia, he encountered three large glaciers: the Crean, Fortuna, and König. Our team followed the same route and found that the Fortuna appeared largely intact, while the Crean was very heavily crevassed, with virtually no snow covering the crevasse mouths. This is partly attributable to the fact that we visited South Georgia at a warmer time of year, but it also relates to the effects of warming and increased precipitation. Meanwhile, whereas Shackleton had to cross the end of the König Glacier, our modern team found a grassed alpine meadow, the König having retreated many kilometers up the valley.

  Temperature and precipitation levels since 1930 have both been rising, which generally leads to smaller glaciers. The South Georgia glacier changes are broadly matched by those on other sub-Antarctic islands, including Heard Island, Kerguelen, and the South Shetlands including Elephant Island, as well as in southern South America.

  Another interesting indicator of climate change on South Georgia witnessed by the expedition team is the reindeer eradication program currently being undertaken by the South Georgia government. Reindeer, which were introduced to South Georgia by the Norwegians in the 1900s as a food source, are now able to venture farther inland as the natural physical barriers provided by the glaciers have retreated. Reindeer eradication is occurring because the flora and fauna in the island’s interior cannot cope with grazing and trampling—a problem the South Georgia government knows will only increase with the ongoing climate change that is sadly going to occur.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The majority of an iceberg remains hidden from view, and so it is with this expedition. Six of us undertook the boat journey, while three of us took the final steps into Stromness after a grueling journey across South Georgia’s mountains, but we are part of a much larger team, all of whom played their part in our achievement. To you all, I say our success is your success. Of particular note:

  The Honorable Alexandra Shackleton (Zaz), for asking me to lead the expedition and for providing her patronage and unstinting support throughout.

  The expedition team: Nick Bubb (skipper), Paul Larsen (navigator), Seb Coulthard (bosun), Barry Gray (mountain leader), Ed Wardle (cameraman), Paul Swain (reserve sailor). A more capable team of men would be difficult to find. They made the world’s most difficult survival journey seem manageable.

  Sponsors, without whom none of this would have been possible: Naming rights sponsor Intrepid Travel and in particular Geoff “Manch” Manchester, Robyn Nixon, and Eliza Anderson for their tremendous support and warmth. Major sponsors St. George Bank: special thanks to Andy Fell for his “can-do” approach. Whyte & Mackay and their Mackinlay’s Highland Malt based on Shackleton’s original: to Richard Patterson, Rob Bruce, Jill Inglis, and Chris Watt—“Slange Var.”

  My employers and major sponsors Arup, who are wonderful supporters of my endeavors, and in particular Peter Bailey, Robert Care, Philip Dilley, John Clay, James Kenny, Miles King, Martin Ansley-Young, Julian Brignell, Ramona Dalton, Ben Richardson, and Piers van Till.

  The James Caird Society, in particular Sir James Perowne KB, Stephen Scott-Fawcett, David Tatham, Pippa Hare, Dorothy Wright, Nick Smith, and, of course, Zaz, for their moral and financial support. To John Leece/Borough Mazars, Bobby Haas, Dick Smith, Dr. Martin L. Greene, and James Caird Asset Management for their generous donations that made such a big difference to things.

  Kim McKay and her wonderful team at Momentum 2, Biarta Parnham, Jo Stewart, and Simone Bird, who helped with all aspects of media, PR, and fundraising for the project and continue to be great supporters, and who arranged for Emanate PR to assist us with our media launches in both New York (Marissa Mastellone) and London (Lishai Kaufer).

  Aurora Expeditions, who provided free transport for the Alexandra Shackleton to and from Antarctica on board Polar Pioneer. A special thanks to Lisa Bolton, CEO of Aurora, Captain Yury Gorodnik, skipper of MV Polar Pioneer, and the outstanding polar logistician Tomas Holik, who worked tirelessly to help us.

  Our conservation partners and the oldest and surely the most effective environmental charity in the world, Fauna & Flora International, in particular CEO Mark Rose, Joe Heffernan, Ally Catterick, and Clare Verberne. I look forward to working together.

  The sponsor team who accompanied us as far as Arctowski and who were a great support to us: J
ulian Brignell, Ashley Henley, Keith Hewett, Steve Lennon, and Donald Ewen from Arup, Intrepid Travel’s Jane Crouch, Sam Tomaras from St. George Bank, and Virgin Media/Discovery Channel competition winner Nigel Sinclair.

  Nat and Gill Wilson and all at the International Boatbuilding Training College, who built the Alexandra Shackleton for the love, one that got us safely across the roughest ocean in the world in one piece—the warmest of wishes.

  All at Discovery Channel and PBS for having confidence in the program and supporting it wholeheartedly, and to NBC for promoting it in conjunction with PBS.

  To the crew of Australis—skipper Ben Wallis, Magnus O’Grady, and Skye Marr-Whelan—for their fantastic judgment and “can-do” attitude.

  Margot Morrell for her help, support, and friendship in researching all aspects of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his team and who surely knows more about him than anyone bar Zaz.

  John Quigley of QXI for helping us insure the uninsurable.

  For wonderful legal and contractual advice provided pro bono by Sydney’s leading law firm Corrs Chambers Westgarth, in particular Trevor Danos (partner), Eugenia Kolivos (partner), and Heather Hong (lawyer).