by Tod Olson
The sailors of the Belgica were saved by the return of the sun—and by long hours of backbreaking labor. In January 1899, they hacked and sawed a 2,000-foot lead out of the ice. The Belgica sailed into open waters, and the crew returned to Europe, where the sun can be trusted to come up 365 days a year.
With the Belgica in mind, Shackleton fought the winter blues with work, a strict routine, and fun. Every day like clockwork the men gathered in the Ritz for meals: breakfast at 9 a.m., lunch at 1 p.m., tea at 4 p.m., and dinner at 6 p.m. Worsley once came in from a ski a few minutes late for lunch. He heard about it from the Boss.
At first, the men ate well—Shackleton made sure of it. There might be porridge, liver, and bacon for breakfast; a seal stew the sailors called “hoosh” for lunch; and seal steak for dinner with black currant tart for dessert.
Lees fretted over how fast the food was disappearing, but Shackleton insisted: A well-fed crew was a happy crew. Lees consoled himself by keeping a close eye on the supplies. He made sure he had a bunk near the storeroom door so he could pounce on thieves looking for a midnight snack.
At night, the Ritz became a clubhouse with a regular entertainment schedule. On Saturdays they drank and remembered their loved ones at home. On Sunday nights they listened to music on the phonograph while they went to bed. Sometimes the meteorologist Hussey led sing-alongs on his banjo. They held competitions to see who had the most annoying voice. “It is astounding the musical talent we do not possess!” Hurley observed.
During the dark winter days, the scientists and the officers read books and debated important topics. Many a dispute ended with one party digging out a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica to get a higher authority on his side.
But for all the knowledge the encyclopedia contained, it offered nothing on the most important subject of all: the war. Everyone aboard was desperate to know if their friends and family were safe from the fighting. All they could do was sit around a map of the world, make wild guesses, and plan imaginary battles by the light of an oil lamp.
June was a cruel month at the bottom of the world.
The men kept close watch on their position in the ice. But it only reminded them how helpless they were. Their hope was to drift north toward the edge of the giant swirling pack of ice, where they might finally find open seas again. On June 8, they managed to make a little headway. “We have drifted 12 miles nearer Home & the Lord be thanked for that much as I am about sick of the whole thing,” McNish grumbled to his diary that night.
As winter set in, the animals on the pack ice disappeared. Worsley kept watch for a lone penguin or seal as best he could in the dim light. Night after night he recorded the results: “No animal life observed.”
The entire landscape was dead. Except for the dogs.
Back in February, when it became clear they were going nowhere for the winter, Shackleton had divided the dogs into teams for training with the sleds. Wild, Hurley, the artist Marston, the doctors Macklin and James McIlroy, and the rugged second officer Tom Crean each got a team. The dogs were unruly and always entertaining. They became a spark of life in the darkness.
Crean had been a devoted dad to a litter of puppies since January. He was a big, burly Irishman who had been at sea since the age of 16 and survived two trips to the Antarctic already. But when the pups were born, he couldn’t resist them. It wasn’t unusual to find Crean with his pipe clenched between his teeth and his brawny arms wrapped around a couple of balls of fluff. The puppies got so attached to him that they wailed whenever he left and calmed down as soon as he came back.
Crean and the other dog “owners” treated their teams like spoiled children. They snuck extra food to their dogs and praised them to anyone who would listen. Each owner knew for a fact that his team was smarter and faster than the rest.
On June 14, a debate broke out at lunch. Hurley, the proudest of the dog owners, insisted his team was far and away the fastest. His team leader, a giant sheepdog mix named Shakespeare, was a “magnificent animal,” a “noble creature.” With Shakespeare in command, Hurley boasted, no team could measure up to his.
The next day, he got a chance to prove it. In the dead darkness of winter, the entire crew gathered on the ice for the “Great Antarctic Derby.” A few of the sailors dressed as bookies and took bets. Worsley wagered his week’s ration of chocolate on Wild and his team leader, Soldier. The geologist Wordie put his ration on Hurley and the noble Shakespeare.
The teams started a half mile away and raced one at a time against the clock. A line of oil lamps marked the path to the finish line, near the ship. Shackleton started each team with the flash of a light. Worsley gave the play-by-play in his diary: “Somewhere in the crowd a pup yelps—a scientist swears … but presently the cry of ‘Here they come!’ is raised & something is seen moving swiftly ahead … Wild yells again & the pace becomes terrific. Soldier crouching low, head stretched forward & ears flapping in the breeze, dashes past the post in fine style, 2m 16 secs from the start.”
The performance was enough to make Wild the winner. Hurley had to eat his words for now. He took second and insisted on a rematch.
The true winner, however, was Shackleton. For one day, he had brought his 27 men together, made them care about something, and given them a temporary victory over the coldest, darkest place on Earth.
A month later, the Antarctic began to take its revenge. On Wednesday, July 14, the men woke to the sound of a gale screaming in the ship’s rigging. The temperature plummeted to −33 degrees. Blinding curtains of snow raked the ship all day and into the night. Winds tore across the ice at 60 or 70 miles an hour. To feed the dogs, the men had to crawl to the dogloos. If they stood up, the wind knocked them down like they were made of straw.
The next day, the blizzard let up enough for the crew to survey the damage. Drifts of snow had climbed 14 feet to the ship’s gunwales. The dogloos on the port side lay buried under 5 feet of powder. The men covered every inch of skin and waddled into the wind to dig their beloved dogs out.
At the height of the blizzard, Shackleton, Wild, and Captain Worsley gathered in the Boss’s cabin. The wind sounded to Worsley like a train racing through the room at top speed. In the early hours of the morning, the ship had taken an unnerving jolt from below. Shackleton had told McNish it was probably a whale giving the hull a friendly nudge. But the Boss knew what it really meant. It was the ice, beginning to test the walls of the Endurance.
With the crew, Shackleton always tried to stay positive. But Wild and Worsley were his two most important officers; he could be honest with them. The Boss paced the room with his shoulders hunched and his hands behind his back. Worsley recognized the posture. He knew there was bad news to come.
“She’s pretty near her end,” Shackleton said.
“You mean that the ship will—go?” Worsley asked.
“I do,” Shackleton responded.
Worsley refused to believe it. The ship had held up so far, and he couldn’t imagine things getting worse than they had been for the last couple of months.
“You seriously mean to tell me the ship is doomed?” he said.
That was exactly what Shackleton meant.
“It may be a few months, and it may be only a question of weeks, or even days,” the Boss said. “But what the ice gets, the ice keeps.”
The sun came back, and it brightened more than just the sky. In the middle of August five hours of real light shone on the crew every day. The ship drifted north at a good pace. By the end of the month they’d moved 300 miles closer to civilization.
As the weather warmed and the ship edged toward open water, the men started to think that the expedition wasn’t dead after all. If the pack broke up soon, they could go back to Buenos Aires or South Georgia for provisions. Then they could make another run for Vahsel Bay.
At night in the Ritz, they guessed at the date they would finally break out of the ice. McIlroy put his money on November 3. Lees, who could be counted on to see the worst in a goo
d situation, bet they’d be stuck until mid-February. Shackleton, always the optimist, claimed they’d be out by October 2.
The ice had given them a scare at the beginning of August. The floes shifted and squeezed together, rocking the ship and turning the dogloos into powder. Now at times they could hear the sea ice, restless in the distance. They struggled to describe the sounds—to relate the groaning and roaring to something they knew. It was like traffic in the streets of London. It was a giant train with squeaking axles, straining across the ice. Throw in steam whistles and roosters crowing. Under it all, Worsley heard the “moans and groans of souls in torment.”
But near the end of September, life returned to the ice. Wordie saw an emperor penguin and lured it out of the water. The next day, Wild shot their first seal in five months. On September 29, two petrels rode the air currents over the ship. Since petrels feed in the sea, Lees observed, open water couldn’t be far away. “My birthday,” McNish recorded that day, “and I sincerely hope to spend my next one at Home.”
Spring fever was working its way through the drafty passageways of the Endurance. They’d been on board more than a year and hadn’t seen open water since January. Now, long cracks split the ice floes around the ship. Leads of dark water striped the vast canvas of white.
Shackleton decided it was time to move from the Ritz back on deck to their “summer cabins.” McNish, who was convinced they would be sailing again any day now, got to work putting bunks back in the old quarters. “The ship reverberates with hammers, sawing, cheers and song,” Hurley wrote on October 12.
Two days later the ice split beneath the ship and for the first time in 8 months, they sailed through 100 yards of open water.
It would be the final voyage of the Endurance.
At 4 p.m. on October 18, the officers and scientists were drinking tea belowdecks when they felt the ice nudging the hull of the ship. It was enough to send the men ambling on deck to see what was happening.
As soon as they emerged, all hell broke loose. A wall of ice climbed the starboard side of the ship. The deck lurched underfoot and pitched to one side. In five seconds the Endurance tilted 30 degrees to port, and everything that wasn’t nailed down started to slide. Kennels, sleds, crates, lumber, and men careened down the deck. James, the physicist, landed under two crates of clothing with a mass of frightened dogs howling on top.
Worsley stopped himself at the side of the ship and leaned out over the edge. He watched as the port side of the hull sank, inch by inch into the ice. Just when it seemed the ship would roll onto her side and give in, all movement stopped. The ship’s captain brimmed with pride. “She seemed to say to the grinding hungry pack, ‘You may smash me, but I’m damned if I’ll go over another inch for you; I’ll see you melting in Hell first.’”
The men spent the next two hours cleaning up as best they could. They nailed boards to the deck so they could walk without sliding into the mess jammed against the port gunwales. Then they liberated the dogs from the pile of kennels and secured the gear that hadn’t already moved.
When everything on deck had been stabilized the crew gathered in the wardroom for a meal. Hurley managed to get a laugh out of the seating arrangement. Everyone sat on the floor with their feet jammed against freshly nailed boards. They balanced their food on their knees. Occasionally someone would forget their predicament, put a plate down on the floor, and watch it careen into the port sidewall.
At 9 p.m., the ice shifted. The ship righted itself, and the men were once again walking on level ground.
The next day a killer whale almost as big as a bus surfaced in the tiny pool around the ship. All evening, the sleek predator swam from one end of the pool to the other. It poked its head above water, disappeared, and then rose again. “He was a cruel looking shark-like beast quite capable of swallowing one of us at a single gulp,” Lees wrote.
And they could no longer count on the ship for protection.
The final wave of pressure arrived at 6:45 p.m. on October 24. It moved through the pack slowly, squeezing the ship between giant slabs of ice. Macklin couldn’t watch. “The whole sensation,” the doctor wrote, “was of something colossal, of something in nature too big to grasp.”
The crew soon realized that the sternpost—the giant pillar of wood that anchored the rudder to the rear of the ship—had been battered. Seawater was gushing into the stern.
McNish went back to start walling off the leak. Worsley and two others went below to get the main water pump working. A team climbed onto the floe to cut away the ice around the ship. But as soon as they cleared a section it froze again.
They got a day’s rest from the pressure, but on October 26, the ice closed in again. Shackleton ordered everyone to get the essential gear onto the floe. Down went the three lifeboats, the sleds, the harnesses, and the tents. Worsley tore maps out of the ship’s library books so they could leave the heavy volumes behind. Marston, Lees, and James hauled crates out of the hold with the sound of water rushing under them. Beams cracked like pistols overhead.
That night, the penguins popped up from the frozen sea and sang their strange, mournful dirge at the ship.
At 4 p.m. the next day, a pressure ridge bore down on the starboard side of the ship. With one surge, the ice slipped under the Endurance, lifting her by the stern, and then by the bow. With the next surge, the floe climbed the side of the ship and broke off, sending blocks weighing as much as trucks tumbling backward. The surges followed, one after another. With each blow came a thunderous crash as the ship was tossed first to port, then to starboard.
Hurley set up his motion picture camera on the ice, expecting any minute to record the complete destruction of the Endurance.
Lees looked on with a sick feeling in his stomach. The ship was as powerful as any wooden vessel afloat. Now the ice was tearing her apart, plank by plank.
Finally, the deathblow came. The ship sat high out of the water, with the already damaged rudder exposed. A tumbling mass of ice swept across the stern and ripped the rudder and sternpost clean out of the ship. Giant timbers snapped with the sound of artillery guns firing into the air.
McNish emerged from below. The water was gaining on the pumps, he said. It wouldn’t be long before the ship’s boiler was swamped.
Shackleton, watching from the ice with Captain Worsley, gave the order to get the rest of the supplies down. The men lowered crates of food and bags of clothing while the ship heaved under their feet.
The Boss smoked cigarettes and mingled with the men. He reminded people not to forget one thing or another, as though they were packing for a weekend away.
“Mind you put your old diary in my bag,” he said to Lees, “as it has been kept rather more regularly than mine, I believe.”
Someone stretched a broad piece of canvas from the deck to the ice. One by one, the dogs were lifted into it and they slid, stumbled, and tumbled to safety. They were strangely quiet through the operation, as though they understood the importance of the moment.
By dinnertime, tents sprouted from the ice a safe distance from the ship. The temperature dropped to −15 degrees, and the men settled in to shiver in their sleeping bags. The nights in the Ritz, boring as they were, seemed like paradise now. There would be no more coal fire keeping them warm at night, no more sturdy hull between the men and the frozen sea. “We are homeless and adrift on the ice,” Hurley wrote.
Shackleton stayed up to pace the ice. Before going to bed, Lees went up to him and tried to make conversation. With the work done for now and no orders to give, the Boss had sunk into a different mood than he’d been in a few hours earlier.
“I hope you haven’t lost that cigarette case,” Lees said, thinking of a beautiful gold case Shackleton carried.
“Cigarette case be blowed,” the Boss snapped. “I’ve just lost a bally ship haven’t I?”
Shackleton was feeling the strain, and Lees understood why. Their best hope at this point was to drag the lifeboats toward open water. But the ice w
as a minefield of jagged pressure ridges and open leads. It would be tough going even without all the gear they had to haul. And even if they could navigate the sea ice, where would it get them? Besides their weather-beaten crew of 28 men, the only land creatures for 1,000 miles around were penguins and seals.
Then, of course, there was the food supply. Lees was in charge of rationing what they had, and he often felt like Shackleton would use it up in feast after feast, just to keep the men happy. Despite their efforts to salvage everything, tons of food was trapped in the ship under many feet of water. How long could they get by on what they had?
Later that night, in the cold comfort of a tent on the ice, Lees got out his diary and wrote, “For the first time in my life, we realized that we were face to face with one of the gravest disasters that can befall a polar expedition.”
In the morning, after a steaming pot of hoosh had been ladled out and consumed, Shackleton gathered everyone on the floe. He’d been pacing the ice all night, but he was calm and matter-of-fact when he laid out the plan. “As always with him, what happened had happened,” Macklin explained. “Without emotion, melodrama, or excitement, he said, ‘Ship and stores have gone, so now we’ll go home.’”
As usual, it wasn’t as simple as he made it sound. Shackleton wanted to march 350 miles northwest to Paulet Island, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. At Paulet Island, hopefully they would find a hut that had been stocked with supplies during the relief of the Nordenskjöld expedition. (Never mind that the supplies had been deposited there in 1903, more than 12 years ago.)