Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys

by Neil Oliver

  You have to keep reminding yourself that these men came from a world and a time when hardly a soul before them had dared venture so far south. There had been no television documentaries, and precious few photographs, to forewarn them of them of the sights they would see. What they were looking out at was a world so new and fresh the frost of the dawn of the making of the world was still untouched upon it.

  By the end of the month, Scott and his crew were in virgin territory, viewing and mapping parts of the Antarctic coastline never before seen by man. They called the new domain King Edward VII Land, and on February 2 they finally reached an inlet that breached the Barrier and allowed them to steam toward the interior of the continent. They went ashore again at the first opportunity and on February 4 Scott made an ascent in a tethered balloon, rising to a height of 800 feet and gazing out toward the Great Ice Barrier and the mountains, glaciers and ice fields beyond. Next up in the Heath Robinson contraption was one Ernest Shackleton, a Merchant Navy man Scott had appointed as third lieutenant in charge of holds, stores, provisions and deep-sea analysis.

  Having seen the eastern end of the Barrier, Scott decided they should stop their eastward advance and head back to McMurdo Sound, where they planned to make their permanent camp. On February 8 the Discovery dropped anchor in the sheltered waters of a bay toward the southern end of a peninsula jutting out from the foot of Mount Erebus. Here, with the summit of the volcano towering more than 13,000 feet above them, they erected a prefabricated hut they had brought with them. Forever after, polar explorers would refer to the place as Hut Point. There were separate huts too for the scientists’ lab work, and also kennels for the huskies.

  If all seemed well enough to begin with, it wasn’t long before Antarctica demonstrated its capacity to harm the inexperienced and the unwary. In early March a dog-sled party went out under the leadership of Royds—a chance to practice their techniques on the ice and snow as much as anything else. It should have been commanded by Scott but he had injured his knee some days earlier and was not yet back to full fitness. Some of the men wore reindeer-fur boots that provided little in the way of grip on the ice, and when a blizzard descended upon them they soon learned how vulnerable they were. As they stumbled blindly through the whiteout, three of them lost their footing and slipped helplessly down a steep, ice-covered slope to within inches of a sheer cliff edge. Able Seaman George Vince was not so lucky and, along with one of the dogs, shot past the rest of the men and out into the abyss. It was a 200-foot drop into the sea below and he was never seen again.

  As they struggled to come to terms with what had just happened—and how quickly—they realized another of the party, an 18-year-old steward called Hare, was nowhere to be seen. The survivors struggled back to Hut Point—numb with cold and the horror of what had befallen their experimental expedition. Miraculously, young Hare walked back into the camp two days later, having somehow survived two nights in the open. By his own account, he had simply lain down and fallen asleep. Good luck dictated that the conditions created by the incessant snowfall somehow insulated him against the worst of the storm raging around him. After a day and a half spent dozing peacefully, he simply stood up and walked back to base.

  Soon after Lieutenant Royds’s near disaster, Scott called a halt to any further trips and the party settled down for “winter routine.” By now the sun was no longer rising above the horizon at any point during the day and the men spent the hours cleaning the huts, collecting ice for drinking water, maintaining the equipment and generally passing the time as constructively as possible. Through it all, the captain insisted that standards were maintained. On Sundays the officers and men put on the best of their available clothing and attended a church service conducted by Scott, reading from the Book of Common Prayer.

  As the weeks and months of darkness slipped by, preparations were made for the sled trips that would justify the expedition as a scientific exercise as well as a voyage of discovery. Increasing familiarity with the ways of the sled dogs caused great anxiety for the men—and in particular for Scott, who had been deeply sensitive to the welfare of animals all his life. For a polite English gentleman, raised to see dogs as lovable pets, the savage politics of the pack were heartbreaking for him to witness. It seemed that if any of the dogs received the slightest show of affection from one of the men—a pat on the head, a casual stroke of the coat—the rest would turn on it at the first opportunity and dole out summary justice. Furthermore, the dogs they had brought were not the best for sledding and generally refused to pull any loads at all unless the men walked in front of them, coaxing them all the way. Scott would eventually form the opinion that dogs were not the answer to the problem of crossing the Antarctic.

  On November 2 Scott, Shackleton and Wilson embarked upon a journey south that was supposed to be a dry run for any future attempt on the Pole itself. For the first couple of weeks they were accompanied by a support party, but conditions deteriorated and by the middle of month, the trio was left alone on the ice. The rest of the men returned to camp, dropping dumps of food and fuel supplies along the way for collection and use by the others as they made their painful way back. The dogs were as miserable and disappointing as ever, and had to be destroyed one by one. Reduced to man-hauling the huge weight of their sled, the three men suffered terribly. For part of the remainder of the trip Wilson was snow-blind—but it was Shackleton, youngest of the three at 28, who was most badly affected by the conditions.

  It is worth bearing in mind the kind of clothes the men were wearing for their journeys across one of the harshest environments on Earth. Not for them the protection of modern textiles, or Gore-Tex or any of the other developments in weatherproofing that most of us take for granted. Scott and the rest of the British men of the heroic age of exploration wore a few layers of woolen undergarments and sweaters topped by close-weave outer garments of cotton or plaid. On their feet they wore leather boots with tacks in the soles for grip, and on their heads woolen balaclavas. I wear more than that to take my kids to the park in October. None of it had been tested for the conditions—and they didn’t really know how bad conditions could get in any case. It was all about being tough—each man testing himself and desperate that he would not be found wanting.

  In spite of it all, Scott, Wilson and Shackleton managed to cross the 82nd parallel and made a final camp at 82 degrees 16' 33", by 300 miles the furthest south that any human beings had ever traveled. They were, however, still 420 miles from the Pole, and turned for home on New Year’s Day 1903. Shackleton was severely weakened and with every passing day his condition worsened. His breathing was labored, he coughed blood and his gums darkened—a classic symptom of scurvy. Pulling the sled was beyond him now and he could do no more than stumble alongside it as Wilson and Scott shared the work of three between them—a load of around 250 pounds per man. Eventually, too weak even to walk, Shackleton had to add his own weight to the sled by sitting on it, dejectedly tending a makeshift sail he had erected in hope of easing the burden he had become to his comrades.

  By the time they made it back to Hut Point, on February 3, the experience had taken its toll on the personal and working relationship between Scott and Shackleton, as well as upon the health and well-being of all three. They had nonetheless achieved a major first in the story of polar exploration: they had covered a distance of 960 miles in 93 days and had shown some of what would have to be done to reach the South Pole.

  Within days of their return, word reached Hut Point that a support vessel named the Morning was just a dozen miles or so away from them across the ice blocking McMurdo Sound. It had been sent jointly by the Royal Society and the RGS—the Presidents of both bodies having convinced themselves that an orderly withdrawal from the south was now the best course of action. Scott was to take command of both ships and return to New Zealand with his whole team at the first opportunity. Irked by the suggestion that he should abandon his expedition, Scott was relieved to see that the Discovery was completely ice-bound a
nd unlikely to be able to move for months to come. Instead he decided the Morning should depart before it too became trapped—taking with it those team members who had had enough. He added Shackleton’s name to the list of those who would be leaving. And with that stroke of the pen, one of the great rivalries in the Heroic Era of Polar Exploration was born.

  Sir Ernest Shackleton and the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition

  The interior of South Georgia was unknown to man in 1916. Captain James Cook had made the first landing on the shore of the island, in 1775, and named the place for King George III. Hunters came soon after, attracted by reports of abundant wildlife, and all but wiped out the population of seals that struggled on to the rocky beaches each year to give birth to their young. By the turn of the 20th century it had attracted whalers from Norway, who made working stations for themselves in the natural harbor they called Grytviken. There they could process their catch before making the long journey home to the other end of the world.

  The coastline of South Georgia had become familiar to mariners of the most adventurous sort—notably those like Scott and his men making for Antarctica—but in more than 135 years no one had found the need or the nerve to venture among the mountains and glaciers that loomed behind the shoreline.

  In the early hours of May 19, 1916, three men set out from King Haakon Bay on the southwest of the island, making for a whaling station at Stromness, on the northeast coast. As the crow flies, it’s a distance of no more than 40 miles, but it was across completely uncharted territory. Who knew what lay ahead of them? And this was to be no sightseeing trip—this was a matter of life and death. Depending upon the success of the crossing were the three men actually embarking upon the journey, three men left behind in a cave at Haakon Bay—and 22 men stranded beneath two upturned boats on a barren, un inhabited rock called Elephant Island, 800 miles away across the Southern Ocean.

  They could hardly have been less well equipped for the ordeal ahead, these pioneers. Already physically and mentally exhausted by months of hardship in the toughest environments on earth, half-starved and frostbitten, they set out wearing worn-out clothes and carrying their food rations in a sock. They had scavenged brass screws from the timbers of the boat that had brought them to the island, and worked them into the soles of their boots in hope of adding a bit of grip, the better to tackle glaciers, cliffs and ice-covered rocks. They carried a primus stove, fuel to cook six meals, 50 feet of rope and a carpenter’s adze.

  Three men set out that morning, tramping into the frozen dark with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Their names were Tom Crean, Frank Worsley and Ernest Shackleton—and they were on the last leg of one of the greatest adventures of all time. But as the hours and miles began to fall behind them, each had the strangest and most unexpected feeling. None of them mentioned it at the time—there was too much at stake and no strength left for fanciful talk—but each felt it just the same. As they walked across that barren and treacherous landscape, all three felt the unmistakable, unseen presence of a fourth soul.

  Ernest Shackleton was born in County Kildare, in Ireland, on February 15, 1874. The family later moved to London, where Ernest was educated. His father was a doctor—and wanted his son to follow him into the profession—but Ernest was a stubbornly independent boy and joined the Merchant Navy instead, winning his master mariner’s ticket in 1898.

  A member of Scott’s ultimately triumphant Discovery expedition of 1901–4, he was humiliated by his leader’s decision to send him home early after his near-death during the “furthest south” march of 1902–3. Taking his dismissal from the team as a personal slight, he developed a grudge for his erstwhile boss that never left him. The characters and personalities of the two men were too different, and their ambitions too much the same, for there to be any hope of repairing the damage. Alpha dogs lead alone.

  In April 1904 he married Emily Dorman, a friend of his sister’s, and the couple would eventually have three children together. Like all men of his calling, the ties of family were never enough to keep him at home. Siring children was one thing, but the job of rearing them and loving them was among the many things those adventurers freely chose to leave behind them in their wake.

  Shackleton’s adventures on the southern continent continued without Scott, and in March 1909 newspapers carried reports that he had made it to within 100 miles of the Pole during his Nimrod expedition. It was another tale of awful hardship, and the readers could only wonder at the spirit and determination of such men. Shackleton and his three comrades had barely made it back to their base alive, but on his return to Britain he was awarded a knighthood. It was the best shot at the Pole until Scott and Amundsen would make their respective trips to the place in 1912.

  By 1913 Shackleton had conceived of what he called the “last great journey on earth.” Both Poles had been conquered and now it required imagination to come up with anything else worth doing at the ends of the earth. Shackleton was nothing if not inventive, and came up with a splendid adventure he called “The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.” He was going to lead a handpicked party of men from one side of the southern continent to the other, via the South Pole. As if that wasn’t bold enough, he said they would cover the distance of 1,800 miles in just 100 days. He had little experience of, far less expertise in, the use of sled dogs and yet he planned to take 120 of them to spare his men the old horror of man-hauling the sledge-loads of necessary food and kit across the barren terrain. No one had ever contemplated such an undertaking before, but while Scott had been every inch the reticent Navy man, less than comfortable when exposed to the full glare of publicity, Shackleton had something of the flamboyant showman about him.

  When it came to raising funds for the trip, he took to the job like a natural. He needed the modern-day equivalent of around $4.5 million to finance the project, and cheerfully embarked upon the necessary round of glad-handing and public speaking. David Lloyd George, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, provided a fifth of the total from the public purse. The rest was harvested in the form of donations great and small from the people of Great Britain. The largest single gift—something in the region of $1.5 million in today’s money—was received from James Caird, a multi-millionaire jute manufacturer turned philanthropist, from the Scottish city of Dundee.

  The expedition headquarters were established at an address in Burlington Street in central London, and legend has it that an advertisement was placed in the newspapers that read:

  Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

  Not exactly an invitation to join the Big Brother house then, but it attracted the usual mix of the good, the bad and the ugly. Thousands of men offered their services and Shackleton famously sorted the letters of application into three boxes marked, “Mad,” “Hopeless” and “Possible.” Gradually he whittled them down, using his considerable ability to judge the character of men almost at first sight. Three women applied as well, but Shackleton decided the expedition would be challenging enough without the complication of adding a second sex into the mix.

  The expedition would take two ships. The main thrust of the voyage would be undertaken by the Endurance, a converted Norwegian-built vessel that had already won its colors in the Southern Ocean. She would carry Shackleton and his team to the Weddell Sea, from where they would head off toward the Pole and the eastern coast of the continent beyond. A second ship, the Aurora, would sail to Cape Evans in McMurdo Sound in the Ross Sea, and drop off a team of men tasked with traveling into the interior from the other side of the continent. They would then work their way back toward their ship, dropping supply dumps as they went. Shackleton and his men would collect these supplies and make use of them as they completed the second half of their proposed journey from the Pole back out to the sea.

  By June the Endurance was in London, being loaded with the mountains of supplies required
for such a trip. On the 28th of the month Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in the Balkan city of Sarajevo and the kindling of the Great War was lit. On August 1, the same day that Germany declared war on Russia, the Endurance set sail from Millwall Docks. Shackleton brought the men together on deck and said any and all of them were free to leave the ship and enlist in His Majesty’s armed forces, if they so wished. The ship docked in Margate and several members of the team duly took their leave of it, and headed off to war. Shackleton sent a telegraph to the Admiralty saying that he, his ship and all of its supplies were at the disposal of the country. But Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, sent back a one-word reply urging the men to go ahead with their odyssey. It read: “Proceed.”

  Taking the message to mean that the continuation of the expedition was now a patriotic duty, Shackleton pressed ahead with his final preparations. He stayed behind in England to secure the outstanding funds pledged for the trip and sent the ship and her crew on to South America, where she made port in Buenos Aires, in Argentina. He finally sailed from Liverpool and rejoined the Endurance in mid-October. On the way to South Georgia, their last staging post, they discovered a stowaway—a 19-year-old named Percy Blackborrow. Shackleton gave the teenager a severe dressing down, but decided he should be allowed to join the team. Now there were 28 men en route to Antarctica.

  On arrival in Grytviken, Shackleton received depressing news from Thoralf Sorlle, one of the leaders of a party of Norwegian whalers working there. He said the pack-ice was further north than usual for the time of year, and in the opinion of him and his men it would be foolish to take a ship toward the Weddell Sea in such conditions. Despite the warnings—and advice to delay the trip south—Shackleton would not be put off. On December 5, 1914, while the great nations of Europe set about tearing themselves into bloody pieces, the Endurance sailed away from the world of men.