Lost in the Antarctic: The Doomed Voyage of the Endurance

by Tod Olson

  From Paulet Island, Shackleton could lead a small party 150 miles over 5,000-foot glaciers to Wilhelmina Bay. There, they would make contact with the whaling ships that used the bay as a stopping place.

  The first leg of the journey was going to be grueling work. The crew had to drag thousands of pounds of supplies and two 1-ton lifeboats across an ever-shifting sea of ice. The supplies would travel by dogsled. But to move the boats, the men had to strap into harnesses and pull. If they made 6 miles a day, they might reach their goal by New Year’s. Then they would have to get to Wilhelmina Bay before the whalers packed it in for the winter.

  The plan was a long shot at best. But Shackleton had something besides rescue in mind. Even if they never made it to Paulet Island, he wanted the men to have a goal. They couldn’t just sit down and wait like the crew of the Belgica. He needed them to feel like they controlled their fate.

  There would be a strict weight limit for the trek—six pairs of socks, one spare pair of boots, one pair of fur mitts, one pound of tobacco or cocoa, and one pound of personal gear. In front of the men, the Boss took out the gold cigarette case that Lees had been so concerned about and dropped it on the ice. He added books, fifty gold coins, and a dozen other things to the pile.

  Everyone else reluctantly followed suit. A heap of stuff accumulated on the ice, slowly disappearing under a blanket of snow. There were suitcases, clothes, cooking utensils, blankets, clocks, ropes, and tools. The only luxury allowed was Hussey’s banjo.

  Shackleton ordered one last sacrifice before they left. They couldn’t afford to take McNish’s cat or any of the puppies that hadn’t been trained in harness, he said.

  Big Tom Crean was devastated. The four pups that had been born in January were trained and part of a sled team. But he’d been caring for three more that weren’t ready to pull a sled.

  Macklin had another untrained pup named Sirius. A dreary shroud of snow fell on his head as he picked up a shotgun and took the pup aside. Sirius jumped up to lick his hand, and Macklin had to push him away. His hand was shaking so badly it took two shots to finish the dismal task.

  They set off at 3 p.m. on October 30 in a long line across the ice. Shackleton, Hudson, Hurley, and Wordie led the way, choosing as level a path as they could find. The seven dog teams followed, carrying loads up to 700 pounds.

  Bringing up the rear were 18 men, strapped into harnesses, straining to pull a 1-ton boat through wet snow and ice. McNish had built runners for the boats to help them glide across the pack. But instead, the boats sank in the slush. The men had to lean almost parallel to the ground to make progress. Every 15 minutes or so, they unstrapped and stood panting in the early summer air. Then they went back for the second boat.

  For three hours they relayed their gear across the ice, a quarter mile at a time. The Boss didn’t want the men spread out too far for fear the floe would split and leave the team separated for good.

  At 6 p.m., the men saw smoke rising from a blubber fire ahead. They slogged through the final yards, sat down to eat, fell into their sleeping bags, and slept. “All are in high hopes,” Hurley claimed, “and glad a start has been made from the depressing neighborhood of the wreck.”

  But there was still plenty to be depressed about. The exhausting labor of the first day left the ship’s “neighborhood” just a mile behind. The men spent the night on new ice with killer whales spouting in the leads around them. The next day they dragged their burdens half a mile through a bed of fresh snow before giving up. The third day they tried again. They sank hip-deep in the slush until the Boss finally ended the torture.

  The plan he laid out with such confidence a few days ago had failed.

  They found a spot on an old floe that felt solid underfoot. The tents went up again, and they named their new home Ocean Camp. After three days of backbreaking labor, they were 1½ miles closer to civilization.

  That night, Lees sat in a tent with his diary. He was soaked to the bone and shivering, and yet he managed to sound almost optimistic. “So long as we have the bare minimum of food we shall be all right,” he wrote.

  As a statement of faith in their future, it wasn’t exactly up to Shackleton’s standards. But it would have to do.

  Lees had been obsessed with the food supply for months. Now he had company. With the failure of Shackleton’s epic trek, no one knew how long they would be on the ice. Everything depended on the whim of the pack. If the winds blew them northwest, they would make for Paulet Island again over land. If they drifted northeast, they would hit open water and launch the lifeboats.

  But what if they stalled exactly where they were? Shackleton refused to admit it openly, but they could be spending another winter on the ice. By his own calculations, they only had enough food to last till March, the very beginning of the Antarctic winter.

  Just when they had to think about rationing their food supply, the men became ravenously hungry. The human body, after all, wasn’t built for the cold. Unlike cold-blooded fish or reptiles, humans need to keep an internal temperature of 98.6 degrees. The body starts cooling when the temperature outside drops below 78. The men now had a living environment that ranged from barely above freezing to −30 degrees. And they had no escape. There was no Ritz with a cozy stove to huddle around after hunting seals on the ice.

  To keep their body temperatures from plummeting, they had to move constantly. They chased seals on skis or exercised the dogs or stood around and stamped their feet. Shivering alone can generate five times more heat than standing still.

  But everything they did to keep themselves from freezing to death required calories—and that meant massive amounts of food. After a few days on the ice, the men became obsessed with meals. “All we seem to live for and think of now is food …” wrote Worsley.

  The cook started throwing slices of seal blubber—pure fat—onto the stove or mixing it in the hoosh. The men devoured it and clamored for more.

  With the men obsessing about food, all eyes turned to the Endurance. They had clung to their hope for her survival right up to the end. As a result, several tons of supplies still sat packed in water-tight crates in the storeroom. But retrieving them wasn’t going to be easy. The crates lay submerged under 12 feet of water.

  While they settled into Ocean Camp, half the crew took the dog teams back to the ship to see what they could salvage. The Endurance looked more like a junk heap than a vessel. Her main mast had cracked near the deck and fallen into a tangle of ropes. Twenty-foot spars had broken off entirely and lay caught in the rigging like twigs in a spider’s web. The men had to take masts down and haul timbers away before it was safe to work.

  For two days they dragged loads of wood, canvas, and cooking pots back to camp. Hurley stripped to the waist and dove into four feet of water to get his camera negatives. Someone salvaged part of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Six pounds of lentils, 7 pounds of oatmeal, and a can of soup made it off of the ship.

  But after three days of labor, the bulk of the food still lay deep underwater. The men had to wade waist-deep just to stand on the deck over the storeroom.

  At this point, the entire crew turned to McNish. The carpenter, blunt and ornery, infuriated Lees. Shackleton didn’t trust him. No one quite knew whether he belonged with the officers or the sailors. But at times like this it became only too clear that they couldn’t live without him.

  On November 4, four days after the failure of their epic trek, McNish organized a team at the ship. He rigged a battering ram by tying one of the heavy, 3-inch-thick ice chisels to a rope and threading the rope through a pulley hung over the deck. One man hoisted the iron chisel high. Then he let it fall with a crash on the deck, just over the storeroom.

  Again and again, they battered the decking until a crack appeared big enough to fit a saw. When they had sawed out a 3-foot-square hole, they moved the battering ram and made another hole. Then they replaced the chisel with a large hook, snagged the planks in between the holes, and ripped a huge chunk of the deck away. />
  It was 11 a.m. when food started bobbing to the surface. A cheer went up as loose walnuts and onions rushed through the hole. Then came the crates. The men worked with long boathooks, arms submerged to the shoulders in icy water, steering boxes toward the hole. It was brutal work, but one by one, crates of sunken treasure appeared. There were supplies of flour and sugar and tea. There were boxes of nut food—a tasty candy bar–like snack made of ground nuts, sugar, and sesame oil. There were crates of sledding rations, the dense mixture of beef, oatmeal, salt, sugar, and lard they had intended for the overland trek. When someone snagged an especially coveted box, the hungry, homeless men sent a cheer into the frigid air.

  By the end of the day, 105 crates—3 tons of food—stood stacked on the ice at Ocean Camp. Thomas Orde-Lees was a happy man. “What this means to us in our present destitution,” he wrote, “words fail to express.”

  The salvage operation, it turned out, happened just in time.

  McNish was convinced that all their disasters came on Sundays, and Sunday, November 21 seemed to prove his point. The men settled down in the late afternoon, trying to get comfortable enough on their sleeping bags to read. At 5 p.m. they heard the Boss’s voice yell, “She’s going!”

  In a minute, everyone was on the ice, scrambling for a view. The sailors had built a 20-foot lookout tower out of wood scavenged from the ship, and that’s where Shackleton stood. In the distance, he could see that the stern of the Endurance had been thrust high in the air. In a few minutes, it began to disappear. The entire ship—what was left of her—slipped bow first under the ice.

  “She’s gone, boys,” Shackleton said quietly.

  It didn’t really qualify as a disaster. For Hurley, anyway, it was a relief. They had salvaged everything of value from the ship. Her creaking planks were a menace to anyone who tried to go aboard. The wreck was little more than a depressing reminder of their failure so far.

  Even so, a silence fell over the camp. Bakewell, the American sailor who brought aboard his stowaway friend Blackborow, felt a lump in his throat as he watched the ship go. Lees felt like their last link to civilization had disappeared.

  That night, Shackleton used a single sentence to record the event in his diary. Then he concluded, “I cannot write about it.”

  The morning after the wreck sunk, Lees added sausage to the breakfast menu. It wasn’t like him to dole out luxuries so easily, but he thought a treat might add a little cheer to a dreary morning. If he was hoping it would also earn him praise from the Boss, he was wrong. Shackleton told him the sausages were too small and ordered him to give each man 2 instead of 1½. Lees gave in, but only after a lengthy battle at 7 in the morning. To get back at Shackleton, he took ham off the dinner menu.

  It was a petty squabble—two grown men fighting over what amounted to 14 sausages. They had far bigger things to worry about. But both Lees and Shackleton knew how uncertain their future had become. To Shackleton, that meant doing whatever he could to keep the men from losing hope. To Lees it meant that 14 sausages might one day make the difference between starving to death and living to another sunrise.

  Mealtime became a primitive affair on the ice. The men had scavenged sails and spars from the Endurance and built a tent to serve as a galley. Inside was a stove that Hurley made out of an old ash chute from the ship. The cook, Charles Green, used strips of seal or penguin blubber for fuel. He fried seal steaks in blubber and cooked hoosh in an old oil drum. For plates the men used lids from biscuit tins or pieces of wood ripped from old crates. They ate hoosh in aluminum mugs. When they finished, grease and fragments of seal meat flavored their tea. Each man counted his spoon and his pocketknife as his most precious possessions.

  At breakfast, lunch, and dinner, one man from each tent brought rations from the galley. He doled out portions while a tentmate closed his eyes and called out names randomly. Even then, the men couldn’t help comparing their share to the others. An extra piece of blubber in a neighbor’s hoosh was enough to make a hungry man burn with envy.

  Most of the men devoured their food as soon it was handed to them. Lees, however, saved scraps obsessively. He stashed away hunks of cheese or pieces of bannock—a fried dough that became a delicacy as the flour started to run low. Lees drove everyone crazy by pulling random snacks out of his pocket when no one else had access to food.

  The tents were a miserable substitute for the bunks in the Ritz. The men slept head to toe like sardines in a can. At night, their breath condensed on the canvas walls and froze into crystals that fell on their heads like snow. On days when the sun shone, the temperature in the tents could rise into the 60s, turning the snow under their sleeping bags to slush. Floorboards salvaged from the wreck kept them somewhat dry. But many of those boards had been torn from the dog kennels. It wasn’t always clear what was to blame for the stench in the tents—the boards or multiple pairs of socks that hadn’t been washed in two months.

  After a couple of weeks on the ice, Lees was ejected from his tent because the men couldn’t stand his snoring. Worsley called it his “nasal trombone.” They had already suffered through months of loud rumblings in the Ritz. One night in May, when Hurley and Hussey were on watch, they had found Lees on his back snoring at top volume. They stuffed sardines and dry lentils in his gaping mouth to make him stop. Now, in the confines of a tent, the snoring became unbearable. Lees accepted his exile without too much resentment. The sailors had built a storeroom out of timbers from the wreck, and he made his own private bedroom there.

  November turned to December. The midnight sun returned. The men did what they could to stay busy. McNish labored to make the lifeboats seaworthy. He built up the sides of the Caird, the largest of the three, using Marston’s paints and seal’s blood to caulk the boards. Hurley stayed spirited as always. He tinkered with a bilge pump for the Caird to keep the boat from getting swamped with water if they ever tried to launch it. He read novels and what was left of the encyclopedia. He exchanged stories with Shackleton. They even planned a new polar expedition for the future.

  In the tents, the men held a running debate about their fate. Lees, true to form, figured they wouldn’t reach the edge of the pack till June. Shackleton called him a pessimist—the worst insult possible in the Boss’s view. They might find open water any day, Shackleton insisted. On December 8, they practiced loading the Caird and launching it in a small lead.

  A week later they’d drifted to within 230 miles of Paulet Island. But they were farther east than Shackleton wanted to be. If they got a chance to launch the lifeboats, they would have to fight a strong west-to-east current in order to reach Paulet Island or the narrow strip of icy islands just north of it known as the South Shetlands.

  If they couldn’t reach Paulet, they weren’t sure what they would do. There were two more tiny specks of land on the north edge of the Weddell Sea—Elephant Island and Clarence Island. Neither of them were inhabited. The men might find solid ground there and a few penguins or seals to feed them for a while. But the nearest human beings would still be 800 miles away at the whaling stations on South Georgia—800 miles of the most treacherous seas on the planet.

  On December 21, Shackleton gathered everyone on the ice to announce yet another plan. As soon as they could pack the dogsleds, they would march again, directly west. This time, they would travel in the early morning and at night, when the surface had frozen into solid terrain. When he looked around, he thought he saw eager faces—men who were thrilled to have a goal after weeks of sitting around. But grumbling could be heard through the thin walls of the tents that night. “As far as I have seen the going will be awful,” wrote the first officer Lionel Greenstreet, “and I sincerely hope he will give up the idea directly.”

  They held an early Christmas feast on December 22. For a single day it was all you can eat. There were sausages and ham for breakfast; baked beans and anchovies for lunch; canned rabbit, canned peaches, and an unlimited supply of jam for dinner. Lees knew they couldn’t carry the food wi
th them, but he couldn’t help venting to his diary that night: “I hate to see so much good food being recklessly consumed.”

  At 4:30 a.m. the next day they were under way, stomachs groaning from the feast. But stomach pains were the least of their worries. The ice was treacherous, even in the colder hours. Cracks opened under the sleds; the dogs fell into open leads. The men sunk to their hips while hauling the lifeboats and had to be pulled out by their harnesses.

  Once again, they ferried the boats in a relay, supervised by Worsley. This time, the ice was shifting so rapidly underfoot that they moved in 60-yard stretches. Every 20 yards they had to stop, lean on their knees, and catch their breath. By the time they returned for a boat, the slush had often frozen solid around its runners.

  After a few hours each day, the men were exhausted and soaked to the bone with sweat and seawater. They scoured the horizon ahead for a piece of canvas stretched across a pole—the telltale sign that the cook had set up his galley and the end was in sight for the day.

  One day, before he crawled into his sleeping bag, Worsley stripped to his long underwear and hung his pants and socks on a boat to dry. When he woke up they were frozen solid. There wasn’t a thing he could do except beat the excess ice off of them and put them on.

  They had reached their fourth day of torture when a sailor made his way to the front and found Shackleton. Captain Worsley had a problem in the rear and needed the Boss’s help.

  Shackleton trudged back and found the Skipper in a standoff with McNish. The carpenter was older than most of the men—in his early forties. He was exhausted, he was surly as always, and he was flat-out refusing to go any farther. What he was going to do instead was unclear. He wouldn’t have survived a month on the ice by himself. But right now that didn’t matter. He insisted he would not spend another minute as a beast of burden.