by Tod Olson
The carpenter, Harry McNish, would have two engineers to help him fix anything that broke down. The storekeeper, Thomas Orde-Lees, would be in charge of the food supplies. A cook named Charles Green had the thankless task of keeping 28 hungry sailors fed from a cramped ship’s galley.
Shackleton had also picked eight seamen to hoist sails, shovel coal into the steam boiler, and do whatever else it took to keep the ship running. Only one of the men had been to the Antarctic before.
Rounding out the crew were two artists whose skills seemed to have little to do with polar exploration. George Marston, a slow-moving but likeable man, brought a supply of paints and sketchbooks. Frank Hurley, who was still in his native Australia, would meet the Endurance in Argentina with crates of bulky camera equipment.
Shackleton was counting on Marston and Hurley to supply the images for a film, a lecture tour, and a book when the men got home. At sea or on the ice Shackleton was a great leader and organizer. But he was terrible at managing money. Between expeditions, he always had a get-rich-quick scheme brewing: gold in Hungary, timber in Mexico, buried pirate treasure in the South Pacific. Each scheme was a bigger failure than the last. He often struggled to support his wife, Emily, and their three children.
To pay for the Endurance, supplies, and salaries, Shackleton had run up a debt of nearly $4 million in today’s money. He could only hope that upon his return, paying customers would be waiting by the thousands to hear about his adventures at the bottom of the world.
On August 1, the Endurance eased out of its London dock and headed for the coast to start its journey. The next day, 300 miles to the east, tens of thousands of German soldiers stormed into the tiny country of Luxembourg, preparing to invade France. The Endurance docked at Margate, looking out on the French coast across the English Channel. Shackleton went ashore to find that the British army was mobilizing. In two days England would declare war on Germany to defend her French ally. Within a week, the First World War would engulf all of Europe.
Shackleton returned to the ship and called everyone together on deck. The months of preparations—of planning and raising money and hiring a crew—looked like they were about to be scrapped. He told the men they were free to join up and fight. Then he sent a message to Churchill offering the ship and the men to the navy.
“If not required,” he went on, “I propose continuing voyage forthwith as any delay would prevent expedition getting through pack ice this year.”
Churchill sent a one-word reply: “Proceed.”
It took the Endurance two months to cross the Atlantic, and the storekeeper Thomas Orde-Lees did not enjoy the trip.
Sailing out of Plymouth, England, signs of war were everywhere. Battleships steamed in and out of the harbor. Searchlights swept the water at night. Two days before the Endurance sailed, a British cruiser hit a German mine in the English Channel and 150 men went down with the ship.
For Lees, that wasn’t the half of it. He spent the first week on the Atlantic seasick and barely able to choke down a bowl of soup. When he finally felt up to eating, he didn’t like the company. The seamen drank and swore too much for his tastes.
The second week out, Lees forced himself to eat with the barbarians. “I think it is a good thing to try and accommodate oneself to ideas and ways less refined than one’s own,” he explained to his diary that night.
But when he sat down with the ship’s carpenter, he couldn’t stand the man’s table manners. McNish made annoying sucking sounds, picked his teeth with a match, and spit out the window. Lees was disgusted. The carpenter, he complained, was a “perfect pig in every way.”
As if eating with the sailors weren’t enough of an indignity, Lees had to work with them too. On a Shackleton expedition, officers and scientists were expected to help run the ship, and Lees whined about having to pull ropes and scrub the decks with the sailors. The ropes were dirty and made his hands sore, he said.
Yet for all Lees’s haughtiness, he was right about one thing: The sailors were out of control on the way across the Atlantic. During a stopover on the island of Madeira, four of the men got into a bar fight. One ended up with his scalp sliced open by a sword. Another had his face smashed with a flowerpot.
When the ship finally arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, two men went off to get drunk and didn’t come back for a week. Shackleton was traveling separately to Buenos Aires, and Lees thought Captain Worsley was too easygoing to keep everyone in line. “It will all be put right when Sir Ernest arrives, thank goodness,” Lees wrote.
The Endurance headed south from Buenos Aires on October 26, with everything put right for now. The ship was stuffed with fresh supplies. Shackleton had fired the two men who went missing for a week. In their place he hired an American seaman named William Bakewell. Bakewell had turned up at the docks with Perce Blackborow, his 19-year-old friend. Blackborow desperately wanted to sail with the Endurance. But he was inexperienced, and Worsley decided they had enough hands to run the ship.
When the Endurance steamed out to sea, a small, mostly British crowd gathered to see them off. They waved handkerchiefs, and the crew waved back. The dogs howled while a band played the British anthem, “God Save the King.”
There would be one more stop—a whaling station at the last populated place in the frozen south, the isolated island of South Georgia. They would anchor there for a while, stock up on coal and food, and learn from the whalers about the ice conditions in the Weddell Sea. But to everyone on board, it felt like they were finally on their way. The men started singing sea chanties while they set the sails.
For Shackleton it was a relief to leave all the preparations and the money-grubbing behind. He knew how to charm people, but he was happiest where human beings were scarce. The lecturing and the constant money worries had been a chore since he’d come back in 1909. “All the troubles of the South are nothing to day after day of business,” he had written to a friend in the middle of it all.
Ahead there would be frostbite and hunger to worry about. But physical hardship was simple—it demanded only courage and a willingness to suffer. “All the strain is finished and there now comes the actual work itself,” he wrote in his diary. “The fight will be good.”
The first challenge came quickly—at 4 p.m. the next day. They were well out to sea when Ernest Holness, one of the stokers, finished his turn tending the ship’s coal-burning engines and went to his locker. His clothes hung inside just as he’d left them. But on the floor he found a surprising addition to the wardrobe. A strange pair of boots stuck out from under his oilskin coveralls. In them stood Bakewell’s young friend, Perce Blackborow.
A few minutes later Blackborow was presented to Shackleton. The stowaway had been cramped in a locker for a day and a half with nothing but scraps of food to eat. He tried to stand at attention, but Shackleton ordered him to sit.
Blackborow could only hope the Boss wouldn’t leave him in South Georgia with no way to get home. Shackleton was hard to predict, after all. All his good cheer could turn to anger in an instant.
Shackleton stared Blackborow down and launched into a tirade. Finally, the Boss leaned close to Blackborow and said, “Do you know that on these expeditions we often get hungry, and if there is a stowaway available he is the first to be eaten?”
Blackborow was either a brave man or Shackleton had a hint of a smirk on his face, because the stowaway looked at the Boss and said, “They’d get a lot more meat off you, sir.”
A moment passed. Shackleton, who appreciated a sense of humor, turned to his second-in-command, Wild. “Take him to the bo’sun,” he said. “Introduce him to the cook first.”
For better or worse, Blackborow was on his way to Antarctica with a job as the cook’s helper.
Nine days later the Endurance steamed into Grytviken Whaling Station on South Georgia. As they made their way into the harbor, the smell was enough to take anyone’s appetite away. Several rotting whale carcasses bobbed in the water 200 yards off the wharf. Four mor
e clogged a slip between two piers. Men stood on the piers with 10-foot-long lances, slicing thick slabs of blubber off the dead giants.
The shore was a vast graveyard—except someone had forgotten to bury the corpses. Hurley counted at least 100 whale skulls, some as long as the 20-foot lifeboats on board the Endurance.
If the “Great South Land,” had anything of benefit to humans, this was it. For more than a century, whales in all the world’s oceans had been hunted ruthlessly for profit. Oil from their blubber was burned in lamps, boiled into soap, and congealed into margarine.
By the early 1900s, the whaleships had done their job too well. Whales were few and far between in northern waters. But in the southern summer they gathered around Antarctica by the thousands to feed on swarms of tiny crustaceans called krill.
From September to March, the Antarctic teemed with fin whales, majestic humpbacks, and blue whales the size of buses. They were the biggest mammals on Earth, too big for predators in the water. But their size made them slow and easy prey for the most ingenious predator of all—humankind.
The year before the Endurance arrived, Antarctic hunters had slaughtered nearly 10,000 whales. South Georgia alone was churning out 200,000 barrels of oil a year.
Hurley was disgusted by the whalers but fascinated by the process. He toured the factory where they boiled the blubber into oil. He learned about the exploding harpoons that scrambled a whale’s innards. He discovered the practice of inflating whale carcasses with air so they wouldn’t sink while they were towed home.
On the third night in South Georgia, the Norwegian manager of the whaling station invited the officers of the Endurance to dinner. Hurley went separately from the rest. A couple of sailors rowed him ashore and returned to the ship.
The photographer picked his way through the whale graveyard by the light of an oil lamp. Eventually, he found his way blocked by a fresh corpse. The head lay too close to the water to climb around. A pile of steaming intestines cut off the path around the tail. Hurley decided to brave a set of ladders bridging the way up and over the corpse. Halfway across he lost his balance and went tumbling into the dark, clammy, wide-open carcass of the whale.
Hurley tried a few times to scramble out, but traction was lacking. Finally, he gave up, swallowed his pride, and yelled for help. With the stench of whale innards still clinging to his clothes, he would later conclude, “It is impossible to view this trade with other than loathing.”
Cleaned up as best he could manage, Hurley joined Shackleton, Captain Worsley, and others for dinner at the home of the whaling station manager. Fridjof Jacobsen’s home was a welcome relief from the garbage heap outside. The men gathered in a sitting room with singing canaries and a piano. They played billiards and enjoyed an eight-course meal on fine china.
During the evening, the conversation turned to the expedition. Jacobsen confirmed what they had already heard in Buenos Aires. In the Southern hemisphere, where winter runs from June to September, spring was under way. In normal conditions, the pack ice in the Weddell Sea would be breaking up by now. But the winter had been bitterly cold, and it wasn’t warming as fast as expected. The ice still extended north of the Weddell into the South Atlantic. It would make for hard sailing if the Endurance left now.
Jacobsen, it turned out, had a famous father-in-law who had firsthand experience with the Weddell Sea ice. All the men had heard the story of Carl Larsen’s voyage, but they discussed it again over whale steaks and sausage made from whale-fed pigs.
Larsen had captained the ship Antarctic into the northwestern edge of the Weddell Sea in January 1903. He was returning to pick up the head of his expedition, the Norwegian geologist Otto Nordenskjöld. Nordenskjöld had been exploring the icy outpost of Snow Hill Island with five other men since February the year before.
The Antarctic rammed and prodded through the pack, trying to force its way to Snow Hill. On January 10, the ship began to shudder like a leaf in the wind. The shifting ice wedged itself under the hull with an ear-splitting crash and lifted the Antarctic four feet out of the water. That night the ship settled again, but a third of the keel had been torn away. Water gushed through a hole in the stern.
Six pumps chugged like mad to keep up with the leaks. But a month later, the water won. The men abandoned ship and watched while the Antarctic went under. “She is breathing her last,” wrote the ship’s botanist. “Now the water is up to the rail, and bits of ice rush in over her deck. That sound I can never forget, however long I may live.”
Larsen and his crew of 20 had to winter on the ice. Three of his men finally reached Nordenskjöld by land at the end of 1903, and the entire party was saved by an Argentine ship. By this time, Nordenskjöld and his two companions had been living on penguin meat for 21 months. They were alive but frostbitten and dazed after two winters in the Antarctic. Nordenskjöld was desperate for the sight of a single blade of grass. The vast expanse of white, pale blue, and brown, he said, radiated “something which resembles the chill of death.”
In the comfort of Jacobsen’s villa, Shackleton finished off his meal with an expensive cigar. After the night’s conversation, he decided to wait a month in South Georgia before setting off. Hopefully, the pack would begin to break up. Then he and Worsley would lead the Endurance south, 850 miles deeper into the ice than Carl Larsen’s ship had gone when it was crushed beneath the feet of its crew.
On December 5, the Endurance slipped past the rotting whale carcasses into the South Atlantic. Shackleton had spent the last few days waiting for a British ship to arrive with news of the war. Finally, he decided they couldn’t wait any longer. The height of the Antarctic summer was two weeks away. After that, the days grew shorter, the weather colder, and the ice thicker.
Riding the swells, the ship looked a mess. Thirty tons of coal had been heaped on the deck to feed the ship’s steam engines. A ton of whale meat hung from the rigging. Whale blood dripped onto the kennels below, whipping the dogs into a frenzy. As soon as the dogs calmed down, McNish’s cat, Mrs. Chippy, pranced the length of the kennels, tormenting them into another fit.
To the sweet music of six dozen dogs howling, the men watched the South Georgia coastline fade into the horizon. Most of them knew it could be a year and a half before they saw another piece of land settled by humans.
One thousand miles to the southeast lay Vahsel Bay, their gateway to a place that barely supports life of any kind. For 30 million years, snow has been falling on Antarctica, compressing with the force of gravity and turning to ice. You could walk the entire continent in midsummer and your feet would hit bare land less than 2 percent of the time. In places, you would have to drill through 2 miles of ice to reach the ground. Below the ice are mountain ranges the size of the Rockies whose peaks never see the light of day.
The weather on this barren ice cap is brutal. At the Pole, the average winter temperature sinks to −75 degrees. Winds whip down off the coastal mountains at 150 miles per hour. The British explorer Apsley Cherry-Garrard was crazy enough to attempt a winter trek on the Antarctic coast in 1911. When a blizzard blew his tent away, he was convinced he would never see home again. “I have never heard or felt or seen a wind like this,” he wrote. “I wondered why it did not carry away the Earth.”
The weather is so inhospitable that no land mammal spends the entire year in Antarctica. The largest land creature to stay there year round is a 1/4-inch-long insect known as a wingless midge. Even the sea creatures need special defenses to survive. Fish that make it through the winter carry a kind of antifreeze in their blood made of sugar and proteins. Some are so rugged they’ve been found frozen solid in the ice—and perfectly alive.
The Endurance hit pack ice on her fifth day out, much sooner than the Boss had hoped. Shackleton thought of the pack as a vast jigsaw puzzle of ice. Most of the pieces are slabs 5 to 6 feet high and covered in snow. Some are as small as barges, others as big as islands. In loose pack, the pieces float apart and press together again. In the lanes between th
e slabs, known as leads, the water freezes into thin, brittle “young ice.” When the pack closes, the pieces squeeze together and the sea becomes land as far as the eye can see.
Everyone knew what the ice could do to a ship. But it didn’t seem to bother Worsley. “The Skipper,” as the crew called him, guided the Endurance through the obstacle course as though it were the most fun a human being could have on Earth. Standing high in the bow, he scanned the pack for leads. McNish had built him an 8-foot-tall arrow that swiveled in an arc. Worsley used it to tell the helmsman, 140 feet away in the stern, which way to steer.
Most of the time, the ship crunched and ground its way through young ice. When an island-sized floe blocked their path, Worsley had two choices. He could navigate around the chunk. But if the ice measured less than 3 feet thick, he chose the option he obviously preferred: Ram the floe till it split down the middle.
When Worsley gave the signal, the stoker built up steam in the engine and slammed full speed into the ice. The bow of the Endurance, 4 feet thick and strong as iron, lifted like it was about to lead the ship out of the water onto the floe. Then it settled, carving a bow-shaped notch into the ice. At Worsley’s urging they reversed the engines, backed up, and rammed again. This time, if they were lucky, a crack would open and spread with a croaking echo into the distance. With a few more bone-crunching impacts, the floe finally split like an island torn apart by an earthquake.