by Neil Oliver
After a few more miles of marching, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley presented themselves quietly at the door of one of the buildings. A Norwegian by the name of Anderson found them first and was so shocked by their appearance—and their claim to have walked across the island—that he left them on the doorstep while he went to find his boss.
The man who came next was Thoralf Sorlle, who had entertained Shackleton and his party all those months before. There was no recognition on his face as he beheld the three wild men, who looked as if they’d emerged whole and breathing from some ancient past. Shackleton would later recall their first exchange.
“Well?” said Sorlle.
“Don’t you know me?” I said.
“I know your voice…you’re the mate of the Daisy.”
“My name is Shackleton,” I said.
Sorlle put out his hand at once. “Come in, come in,” he said.
Arrangements were quickly made to collect McCarthy, Vincent and McNeish from King Haakon Bay, but it was not until late August that it was finally possible to return for the 22 men on Elephant Island. Several attempts were made, but the pack-ice drove the rescue ships back each time.
Shackleton, Crean and Worsley were aboard the steamer Yelcho when it made the successful trip from Punta Arenas, in Chile, to that desolate rock where the lost souls sat patiently awaiting whatever fate would choose to deliver.
Once they were within sight of the island, Shackleton and Crean climbed aboard a cutter as it was lowered over the side of the ship and rowed over to the beach. When they were close enough to be heard over the breaking waves of the surf, Shackleton shouted out: “Are you all well?”
Back from the beach came the reply the leader had hoped with all his heart to hear, and done everything in his power to ensure.
“We are all well, Boss!”
The achievement of Shackleton, Crean and Worsley has never been equaled, let alone surpassed. They survived months aboard the trapped Endurance, then led 25 men across the Southern Ocean in open boats to Elephant Island, before setting out with their three colleagues to complete a further 800 miles of sea crossing. All of this was done in the worst possible conditions and with wholly inadequate and unsuitable clothing and equipment. And after all that, they managed a forced march across 40 miles of uncharted glaciers, ice fields and mountains in the interior of South Georgia in order to bring help to their comrades.
The crew of their support ship Aurora had not been so fortunate. Knowing nothing of the plight of Shackleton and the rest of the men aboard the Endurance, the 10-man team had battled tremendous hardships of their own. Ill-equipped and faced with appalling weather conditions throughout, they had struggled to complete their assigned task of marching into Antarctica’s interior to lay the supply dumps for the planned second leg of their comrades’ journey past the Pole. Unbeknownst to them, they were risking everything for a journey that would never even be attempted, let alone completed. Three of them died in the attempt, and yet such was the furor that greeted the reports of the survival of Shackleton and his first team that the bravery of the “Ross Sea Party” was all but overlooked by history.
And so to that fourth soul sensed by Shackleton, Crean and Worsley as they crossed South Georgia. It would be easy to say that three men in such a predicament, weakened by malnutrition and exhausted to the point of collapse, might be subject to hallucinations. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that men pushed to the limits of their physical and mental strength have been tricked by their own imaginations as their minds fought for survival.
But the fact remains that while the phenomenon was not acknowledged, far less discussed by the men at the time, both Shackleton and Worsley later wrote about it in their accounts of the expedition.
In South, for example, Shackleton noted:
I know that during that long and racking march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.
There can be no rational explanation for what those men experienced on their march to save their comrades. Crean would later say simply that God had watched over them and brought them home. Maybe he was right. God certainly seemed absent from the war in France, where millions of boys and men were fighting, killing and dying. There was a time, and that time is not now, when British men took the presence of God for granted. Their belief is part of the explanation for why, and even how, they did the things they did.
The voyage of the James Caird and the crossing of South Georgia is, anyway, a story not of gods but of men. Most fitting of all was the comment made by one of the whalers as they gathered around the grateful trio in their club-room on the night they arrived at Stromness. These were tough individuals all, hardened by years of physical labor in the toughest environment on earth, yet every one of them was desperate to shake hands with the pilgrims in their midst.
Out of the tobacco-smoke haze stepped one old man, a veteran of four decades or more on the Southern Ocean. In all his years, he said, he had never heard the like of the tale he’d just had from Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley. It was an honor he said, a real honor to know fellows such as these. And then, having all but run out of words, he gestured flamboyantly at the dazed newcomers.
“These—are men!” he said.
The scale and significance of what they’d done was not lost on the Boss. By the time they had reached that whaling station at Stromness, they had thrown away their stove and adze. Their last obstacle had been a waterfall and the rope, securely tied to a rock at the top, had to be left behind when all three reached the bottom. They brought out of the Antarctic only the clothes they wore. After all, wrote Shackleton:
That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich.
In trying to give words to his feelings, he turned to lines by the poet Robert Service in “The Call of the Wild”:
We had pierced the veneer of outside things.
We had “suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled 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.
In search of a place in the world
Brave, physically tough and resourceful though he undoubtedly was, Shackleton was also a lucky man. He pushed himself and his men to the limits of endurance, and during those moments when they teetered on the brink, he had good fortune to thank for their deliverance as well as his own skills as leader. A different twist of fate here or there might have undone his good works and sent them all to oblivion. But instead Shackleton came home, a deserving hero and a legend of polar exploration.
The survivors of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition returned to a world changed beyond recognition.
“We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad,” wrote Shackleton.
Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and unimagined slaughter, of a world-conflict that had grown beyond all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us.
It was 1917 before Shackleton made it back to Britain. He was 42 and officially too old to join any of the armed services. He made numerous offers to get into the fray on behalf of King and Country, but all were rejected. Weakened by all he had put his body through—hard drinking not the least of it—he finally died of a heart attack on January 5, 1922. He was back on South Georgia when the moment came, still exploring, still looking for something out there just beyond his reach. His body was put aboard a ship
bound for England, but when word reached his wife, Emily, she had it turned back. If Shackleton had ever belonged to another human being—and that seemed doubtful—it had not been her, or their children. Shackleton’s was a vagabond heart and it belonged not at home, but on the journey. He was duly returned to South Georgia and there buried among whalers and mariners in one of the loneliest graveyards on Earth.
Of the rest of his men—both those of the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea teams—no fewer than 30 joined the fighting of the Great War. By the end of it all, five of them lay dead on the battlefields, drowned in the seas or lost to illness.
But those fates lay in the future, beyond the imaginations of those who lived out their lives in the years before 1914.
Back on the Antarctic ice of 1904, Scott was coming to the end of his first cradling in those frigid arms. After a second winter on the ice at Hut Point, the Discovery expedition came to a close in the February of that year. This time two ships, the Morning and the Terra Nova, had been sent south by the worried folks back home—and again Scott was infuriated at being ordered to return to Britain. This time there was no escaping the inevitable. By the end of the month all three ships were heading north, arriving back in the harbor at Lyttelton around Easter time.
Scott and the crew of the Discovery eventually sailed into Stokes Bay between Southsea and the Isle of Wight at around 11 o’clock on the morning of September 10, 1904. They arrived in Portsmouth harbor later the same day and the ship was instantly surrounded by boats of all sizes, their passengers desperate to catch a glimpse of the men aboard. Boy sailors in the rigging of Nelson’s Victory added their voices to the cheering.
Like astronauts returning from another world, they were hailed as heroes—and their achievements had been immense. They had after all been the first travelers to explore and survey the Great Ice Barrier, first to discover the polar ice cap and first to lay the groundwork that would eventually fix the position of the South Magnetic Pole. During 28 sled journeys they had advanced the studies of marine biology, glaciology and terrestrial magnetism. In so doing they had mapped and surveyed hundreds of square miles of previously unknown coastline. Scott himself had led the team of men that had made the “furthest south” journey, which almost claimed their lives.
But while the press and the public made a celebrity of Scott of the Antarctic, the still quiet and retiring Navy man struggled to cope with the spotlight now turned upon him. Laurels were heaped upon him—the King made him a Commander of the Victorian Order and the French welcomed him into their Legion of Honor. He received gold medals from the geographical societies of nation after nation. Even Shackleton wrote to congratulate him and to welcome him home. The younger man was fully recovered from his ordeal, newly married and making the most of life back on dry land. He told his former leader that while he had no more energy for further expeditions, his heart “had ever been turned south.”
Of all the advancements, the one that pleased Scott most was his promotion to the rank of captain and its associated pay rise. He was after all a Navy man through and through. He asked for six months’ leave to write up his adventures in a book, and set his heart on dropping out of public life.
What he thought he wanted was peace.
The Flight of the Nez Perces
On September 21, 1904, a doctor was summoned to examine the corpse of a Native American man who had died earlier that day on the Colville Reservation in Washington. It was the same month that saw Scott’s triumphant return to England.
He was 60 years old and had lived on the reservation since 1885, when the United States Government had seen fit to separate him from the younger members of his tribe. While the Indians were sent to a reservation set aside for their people, on land north of the Wallowa River beneath the Bitterroot Mountains, the old man was considered too dangerous to go with them. He might exert his baleful influence over the impressionable youngsters and turn them back to their old wild ways, and so, together with other senior members of the tribe, he was sent instead to Nespelem on the Colville Reservation. It was there that he lived out the remainder of his years, cut off from the blood and the land of his fathers.
The doctor made an examination of the old man’s body and was somehow able to record the cause of death as “a broken heart.”
In the language of his people—a language spoken then by only a handful of human beings left alive on the whole Earth—his name was Hin-ma-towya-lak-ket. To the white men who wrote about him later, he was Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces.
The destruction by Europeans of every civilization they encountered in the Americas—North and South—is an old and well-known story. Having crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the wake of Christopher Columbus, they were in no mood to put up with the sitting tenants they found occupying their New World. Relations were briefly cordial in North America—in the early days when the incomers were still few in number and living space upon the vast new terrain was hardly an issue. But as the 19th century dawned and progressed, and with the immigrants numbering now in the millions, the people referred to today as Native Americans were systematically brushed off the page to make way for a new story.
This is what Europeans have always done, at home and abroad. The ancient history of Europe, as revealed by archeology, hints at innumerable occasions when one people has roughly displaced—or replaced—another.
Through centuries and millennia, waves of new peoples had arrived on British shores and muscled their way past existing populations on the way to creating new societies. The Picts gave way to Scots and to Vikings; Britons submitted to Romans, and then to Anglo-Saxons—who in turn fell before the Norman conquerors of 1066. But those vanished peoples survive only as names on a historian’s page, and some artifacts in the display cases of museums. In the case of the opening up of the Old West of North America, however, we have photographs of the men and women swept aside.
The stories of people like Lone Wolf, Cochise, Kicking Bird, Standing Bear and Sitting Bull would be heartbreaking enough even if only their names had survived. But seeing the unsmiling faces of those sentinels, who look right through the lens to accuse the world beyond, makes it that much harder to hear about their lives and deaths. This is bad luck for modern Americans. The land has been inherited from men and women who committed many wrongs against a people that lacked either the numbers or the technology to truly threaten them. Everyone in the northern hemisphere is descended from invaders like that—but we’re mostly spared the discomfort of having to look into the faces of the victims.
There is a photograph of Chief Joseph in the US National Archives, taken when he was still in his middle years. Like the rest of the people of the Nez Perces, he was relatively fair-skinned. The native peoples, scattered in tribal groups throughout the American continent, varied greatly in color, from almost black to a tone lighter than that of any Portuguese or Spaniard. Contrary to the Hollywood image created by the movie The Last of the Mohicans, for example, the men and women of that tribe were light-skinned, with mid-brown hair. The cast of the movie was composed, in the main, of members of the Sioux tribe—who bore no resemblance to real Mohicans. Also relatively fair-skinned were the people of tribes like the Blackfeet of Saskatchewan or the Pammas of Brazil.
Chief Joseph has an open face, a wide, handsome mouth and a high forehead. His chin is slightly raised for the camera, challenging. He is made instantly recognizable by the long side plaits in his hair and the style of his clothes. In the photograph he is not looking directly at the camera but off to one side, which is probably just as well. His eyes shine with an emotion that is somewhere between pride and sadness, and it looks as though it would have been hard to look him fully in the face.
His father, a chief of the Nez Perces before him, was called Old Joseph. It was Old Joseph who could more clearly remember the days when the whites were considered good neighbors. The members of the exploration party led by Lewis and Clark in the early years of the 19th century were among the first to see the Nez Perc
es. The encounter was a happy and peaceful one for all concerned—and especially lucky for the whites, who had been close to starvation and suffering from dysentery when they stumbled down out of the Rocky Mountains, into what would become modern-day Idaho, en route to the Pacific coast. The Nez Perces took them into their homes, fed them and cared for them until they had regained their health and strength.
Apparently the explorers noticed that some among their hosts wore jewelery, made from shells, in holes pierced through their noses. Since they had heard reports of such “pierced-noses” from the French trappers and explorers called the coureurs de bois—those who run in the woods—they applied the French name to this people they found living by the banks of the Clearwater River: Nez Perces. At the time of that first meeting, the Nez Perces numbered around 4,000 souls in total. They fished for salmon and, in the hunting season, made the tough crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in search of buffalo. They were outstanding horsemen and that they kept one of the largest herds of any of the native peoples they had encountered so far.
After a few weeks, Lewis and Clark and the rest of their party were strong enough to continue on their westward adventure. A basis for warm friendship had been made, though, and for the next 70 years the Nez Perces would take pride in the fact there had never been bad blood between themselves and the whites.