by Tod Olson
For Jill, who can never get enough ice and snow
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CAST OF CHARACTERS
PROLOGUE: WEDDELL SEA, ANTARTICA
CHAPTER 1: THE LAST GREAT JOURNEY
CHAPTER 2: SOUTHBOUND
CHAPTER 3: RAMMING
CHAPTER 4: FAST IN THE ICE
CHAPTER 5: WINTERING
CHAPTER 6: EVICTED
CHAPTER 7: “SHE´S GONE”
CHAPTER 8: A MISERABLE JOB
CHAPTER 9: LASH UP AND STOW!
CHAPTER 10: AN INFINITY OF ICE
CHAPTER 11: OUR ONLY HOPE
CHAPTER 12: ACROSS THE SEA
CHAPTER 13: OVER THE MOUNTAINS
CHAPTER 14: LAST STAND
EPILOGUE: COMING HOME
GLOSSARY
AUTHOR’S NOTE
SOURCES
END NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO AVAILABLE
COPYRIGHT
The ship didn’t stand a chance, and Frank Hurley knew it. He’d been in the engine room with the carpenter, trying desperately to keep the water out. They had walled off the leak, where the sternpost and rudder had been wrenched out of place.
It was hard to imagine how it had happened. The sternpost was a giant pillar of hardwood embedded in a 144-foot ship, and the ice had ripped it loose like an angry kid abusing a toy boat. That was the power this frozen land had over them.
Caulking the wall was miserable, frigid work for Hurley and the carpenter. Ice water soaked their boots. Cold air gnawed their fingers raw.
They were patching seams when Hurley heard the pressure hit again—a fierce grinding sound just outside the hull. On the other side of those planks, the ship stood trapped in a vast frozen sea. Slabs of ice the size of small buildings held her in a vise, and now the grip was tightening. The sidewalls groaned and creaked. The noise tore through the cramped compartment. Any minute, it seemed, the boards would splinter, and the ship that had sheltered them for more than a year would finally give up the fight.
The Endurance was being squeezed to death around them.
Hurley raced up on deck and took in the scene. The sled dogs, trapped in their kennels, sent out a chorus of howls. The men moved quietly by contrast. They disappeared into the hold and came out with crates rescued from the rising water below. There was canned meat and powdered milk, flour and sugar, rice and barley—all of it ready to be lowered to the ice at a moment’s notice.
Tents and sleeping bags had piled up in a corner of the deck—just a few yards of flimsy canvas, reindeer hide, and wool. If the ship gave in, the crew would have nothing else to shelter them from the worst weather on Earth. Today, the sky was blindingly clear, but the temperature hadn’t made it above zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Stretching to the horizon around Hurley and the men and the ship was the new home that awaited them: 1 million square miles of ice—an entire sea, frozen almost solid. Beyond it lay Antarctica, a continent bigger than the United States and Mexico combined, also covered in ice and completely uninhabited.
As the expedition’s official photographer, Hurley had spent a year capturing the strange, stark beauty of this world. Now, he and 27 other men were about to be dropped into it with no guarantee they would ever get out.
One man stood mostly still, watching the commotion from the raised deck in the stern. The crew referred to him as Sir Ernest in writing. In person they called him “the Boss.” He had broad shoulders and a compact frame, blunt features and a square jaw. He looked like he was built for this kind of venture—leaving every known thing behind to risk his life in a frozen wilderness.
Ernest Shackleton had been to the Antarctic twice already. Twice he had almost died there. Now, his third expedition hovered on the brink of disaster.
The expedition had left England more than a year ago, in August 1914. The goal was to cross the Antarctic continent by dogsled—1,800 miles in a land where temperatures can drop to −80 degrees at night. It was an ambitious idea. Crazy was another word used to describe it.
Just getting to the Antarctic coast to start the overland journey was a near impossible feat. Shackleton had decided to sail south from South America and push deep into the Weddell Sea, headed for a landing point at Vahsel Bay. That meant navigating a body of water roughly 1,000 miles across, most of it frozen into sheets of ever-shifting ice that could crush the ship into splinters—“the pack,” as it was called.
The Endurance had to make its way with a mix of finesse and brute force. Sometimes she nosed her way through open waterways. Sometimes she made her own openings by ramming the ice head-on until it split down the middle.
In January 1915, both strategies had failed. The pack froze around them, and the ship had nowhere to go. It was now October, and the ice still held her prisoner.
The Boss knew how close they had come to their goal. Vahsel Bay had been a day’s sail away when the ice grabbed them for good. If only the current and the wind had opened a clear lane 60 miles farther. Shackleton and five companions would right now be trekking across Antarctica—an epic journey to the bottom of the world.
Standing on the deck with the Endurance groaning under his feet, Shackleton still had hope. If the ship held out long enough, the pack would break up. They could sail into open water. They might even be able to resupply in South America and make another run at Vahsel Bay before the sea froze solid again.
But right now, some combination of current and wind was squeezing the pack together, and the Endurance was caught in the middle. Where the pressure built to a breaking point, the ice buckled into giant ridges. Slabs 5 feet thick and 20 feet tall sprouted into long, jagged tents. To Shackleton it seemed like a mighty giant, buried under the ice, was writhing to break free. He’d been watching all day while a ridge on the starboard side slowly rumbled closer to the ship.
At around 6 p.m., the pressure began to close a crack that had opened behind the Endurance. Two giant sheets of ice—known as floes—ground together. They lifted the stern and jerked the entire ship forward in a series of shocks—one, then another, then another. The force wedged her bow into a floe 5 feet thick, squeezing her from end to end.
The deck under Shackleton’s feet twisted and bent. Gaps inches wide opened between the planks. He could actually see the sidewalls bend under the strain like an archer’s bow. If the front end of the Endurance didn’t slip above the floe that held it fast, the ship wouldn’t last the night.
Shackleton gave the order to lower the lifeboats to the ice. The three 20-foot boats could soon be the only seaworthy vessels they had.
Then, sometime after 8 p.m., the pressure suddenly gave up its hold on the ship. The aching timbers settled back into place. The terrible creaks and groans faded. There was only the steady clickety-clack of the pumps, laboring to stay ahead of the leaks. The crew would have to man the pumps in shifts all through the night. But maybe—just maybe—the worst of the damage had been done.
When Frank Hurley went below for the night, he took out his diary and wrote, “All hope is not given up yet for saving the ship.”
But for many of the men, a strange memory lingered as they lay in their bunks. In the evening, just as the pressure reached its height, eight emperor penguins had hopped up from a crack in the ice. They waddled in their stiff, strangely human way toward the ship. The birds lined up in formation as if to give a formal address to the intruder in their land. For a few seconds, they chattered the way they often did—a range of calls between a pigeon’s coo and a crow’s shrill caw. Th
en they threw back their heads and let out an eerie, wailing fugue.
The men had seen plenty of penguins during the last ten months, but they had never heard a sound like this. To the ship’s captain, Frank Worsley, it seemed the creatures were singing a funeral dirge for the Endurance.
Thomas McLeod, one of the older seamen, watched the ghostly concert from the deck. He turned to the man next to him. “Do you hear that?” he said in his Scottish brogue. “We’ll none of us get back to our homes again.”
Early in 1914, months before the Endurance took 28 men 9,000 miles from home, a new sign went up at 4 New Burlington Street in London. It read: IMPERIAL TRANS-ANTARCTIC EXPEDITION. The sign was 3 feet tall and hung at eye level. It stood out in the fashionable neighborhood of jewelry stores and clothing shops. To the wealthy men and women who lived nearby, it may have seemed like a romantic call to adventure.
To Ernest Shackleton it was the business at hand. He didn’t like to be confined to an office, but he needed to hire a crew and he had to interview them all somewhere. He had announced the journey in the newspapers—an invitation to spend the next couple of years in the coldest, least populated place on Earth.
Five thousand people responded.
Some of the applicants were lifetime sailors who couldn’t stand more than a year at a time on dry land. Some were scientists, hoping for a chance to study the strange conditions in a frozen land. Others were drawn by the promise of adventure, of a ripping good tale to tell their kids and grandkids. Still others simply wanted a seaman’s job that would pay them decent money for a couple of years.
Shackleton worked closely with his longtime friend and second-in-command, Frank Wild. Together they divided the applications into piles: “Mad,” “Hopeless,” and “Possible.” It was the Possibles who filed through the office on New Burlington Street in the spring of 1914. Rarely did the interviews last longer than five minutes.
When Leonard Hussey walked in the door and sat down, Shackleton was too restless to sit with him. Instead, he paced the floor and talked nonstop. As a meteorologist, Hussey was applying for one of the more important jobs the expedition had to offer. He would attempt to predict the brutal weather on the journey. But his experience hadn’t exactly prepared him for blizzards and sub-zero temperatures. He’d spent the last year working in the African desert.
Shackleton didn’t seem to care where Hussey had been or what his qualifications were. He walked around for a few minutes, talking more than listening. Finally, he decided he liked Hussey’s sense of humor. “Yes, I like you,” he declared. “I’ll take you.”
Reginald James had an equally baffling experience. James applied to be the expedition’s physicist, but Shackleton didn’t ask a thing about science. He wanted to know instead if James could sing. Not opera, he said, “but I suppose you can shout a bit with the boys?”
Shackleton also asked if James had good circulation. James told him that one of his fingers tended to go numb in the cold. In response, Shackleton asked how attached to that finger James was. Would he mind losing it to frostbite on the way across Antarctica?
To the scientists, the interview process may have seemed like a joke. But Antarctica had taken a lot more than fingers from the humans who dared to travel there. And few people knew more about the dangers than Ernest Shackleton.
When Shackleton was in his twenties, Antarctica was one of the last great mysterious places on Earth. European soldiers and explorers had marched across nearly every other part of the globe. But here was a continent bigger than Europe, and barely anyone had set foot on its shores.
For thousands of years, people had only guessed at its existence. The ancient Greeks knew there was land near the North Pole, and they decided there had to be a continent in the south to balance out the globe. This legendary place became known as Terra Australis, or South Land. In the 1500s, geographers put Terra Australis on their maps, even though no one knew for sure it was there. Some people even imagined a land full of rivers, parrots, and “good, honest” people.
The British explorer James Cook finally sailed below the Antarctic Circle in 1773 and put an end to the Great South Land fantasy. Dodging through a maze of icebergs—which he called “ice islands”—he made it farther south than anyone had ever gone.
No one would get farther, Cook predicted. In his opinion, there was no reason to try. All he had seen was a “horrid” region of blizzards and soupy fog. The entire place was “doomed by Nature never to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays, but to lie for ever buried under everlasting snow and ice.”
Shackleton first ventured into the snow and ice in 1901. By that time, Antarctica had been discovered and named. But no one had gotten near the South Pole.
A British navy officer named Robert Scott made the first serious attempt. In August 1901, he left England on the ship Discovery with Shackleton as his third officer. After wintering in Antarctica, Shackleton, Scott, and the scientist Edward Wilson set off toward the Pole in November 1902 with 19 dogs and five sleds packed with supplies. None of the men had much experience skiing or handling dogs. Three months later they stumbled back to their ship, frostbitten and snow-blind. Shackleton was spitting blood and nearly dead from the nutritional disease scurvy.
But he couldn’t wait to try again.
In 1908 he went back, as leader of an expedition. This time he almost reached the Pole. He set out from the coast with three men, including his friend Frank Wild. They bumbled their way south with four ponies to pull supplies. When the ponies sunk to their bellies in the snow and had to be put down, the men harnessed themselves to the sleds and trudged on. After 10 weeks of misery, they made it to within 100 miles of the Pole, farther south than anyone had gone before. They nearly starved to death on the way back.
At one point, while packing sleds for another brutal day, Wild looked like he wouldn’t last much longer. Shackleton handed over his biscuit ration for the day and insisted Wild take it. “All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit,” Wild wrote in his diary, “and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me.”
Shackleton came back to England a hero. He spent the next couple of years touring Europe, giving lectures about his voyage. He dined with dukes and lords. He met the tsar of Russia; the prime minister of Canada; and the American president, William Howard Taft.
By 1912, he was sick of it all and scheming to get back to Antarctica. But while Shackleton had been touring, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had made it to the Pole. And Robert Scott had frozen to death trying to beat Amundsen there.
While the British were still mourning the loss of Scott, Shackleton announced an even bigger, more audacious plan. “We have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole,” Shackleton wrote. “There now remains the most striking journey of all—the crossing of the Continent.”
To do it he would take the Endurance through the Weddell Sea to Vahsel Bay. From there he would lead a sledding party of six men 800 miles overland to the South Pole. A second ship, the Aurora, would sail into the Ross Sea on the other side of the continent. The Aurora would send a sledding party toward the Pole to stash supplies along the second half of Shackleton’s journey. If all went well, Shackleton and his team would reach the Pole and trek another 800 miles to the Ross Sea, well supplied along the way.
To Shackleton, it was “the last great Polar journey that can be made.”
Not everyone was convinced. Admiral Winston Churchill, for one, thought Shackleton’s plan was a colossal waste of time and resources. “Enough life and money has been spent on this sterile quest,” he wrote. “The Pole has already been discovered. What is the use of another expedition?”
Churchill was in charge of the British navy, and for some years, he’d been locked in a dangerous arms race with the Germans. Warships, tanks, cannons, rifles, and ammunition piled up on both sides. It wouldn’t be long before all the life and money Britain had to offer was needed for a stru
ggle far greater than a trip across Antarctica.
On July 14, 1914, a cargo ship chugged up the river Thames into London with a precious but unruly shipment. The ship steamed into the West India Docks. Eventually, about 70 dogs—big, shaggy, and loud—clambered onto the pier, straining at their leashes.
These were not purebreds bound for a dog show. They were mangy, powerful mongrels. To Frank Wild, they looked like a mix of “wolf and any kind of big dog.” To the men who were determined to cross Antarctica, they could mean the difference between life and death.
The dogs would provide the muscle for Shackleton’s expedition. They would haul sleds packed with food supplies across the snow and ice. Near the end of the journey, after spending all the strength they had on their job, they might themselves become food for a party of starving men. That was the harsh reality of Antarctic exploration.
At the West India Docks, amidst a forest of masts, stood the ship that would carry the dogs and their human companions into the Antarctic. She was called the Endurance, and she was built for the task. Planks of oak and fir thicker than telephone poles made up her hull. Her bow was sheathed in greenheart, a wood denser than many others on Earth. Every inch of her had been made with one purpose in mind—to withstand the ice. In case that wasn’t enough, in her rigging hung three 20-foot lifeboats, the James Caird, the Dudley Docker, and the Stancomb Wills.
The Endurance was packed to the gunwales with supplies. Crates of food filled the dark storeroom. There were dense, high-calorie rations for the sledding journey; tubs of basics like flour and sugar; luxuries like turtle soup, canned herring, figs, dates, and jam. To keep the crew entertained, Shackleton’s cabin had a library full of novels, accounts of polar expeditions, and volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Sharing space with the books and the food would be the men who had made it through the interviews on New Burlington Street. Aside from Shackleton, Wild, and Captain Worsley, there were three officers and a navigator. A biologist, a geologist, and two doctors joined the scientific staff. Reginald James had decided to risk his finger in the name of science. Leonard Hussey was about to go from 100-degree days in the desert to a place where temperatures can drop below −100 degrees.