by Tod Olson
For four months they had been stuck on the ice with no escape. Now they had been exiled from it for good. The cramped tents that had been their prisons just three days ago seemed like palaces next to the boats.
They spent the night huddled on the benches or in the icy bilge below. Spray and sleet soaked their clothing, froze instantly, and coated them in ice. They couldn’t row to keep warm because the darkness hid the obstacles lurking in the water. Instead they jockeyed for position or held one another for body heat. One or two men staved off marauding chunks of ice with the oars. Others simply sat and groaned, trying to keep from losing their dinner into the sea.
When dawn finally broke, the men willed their frozen bodies to life. They leaned into the oars, drained from lack of sleep. The sky was clear, and at noon Worsley got out his instruments. With frost-numbed fingers, he measured their position.
For three days they had barely slept. They had lived on raw meat and cold biscuits. They had narrowly escaped being cast into 30-degree water and crushed by 10-ton slabs of ice. For all their efforts they had somehow drifted south and east of Patience Camp. They now found themselves farther from land than when they started.
The next day, Shackleton took a good look at the three crews and didn’t like what he saw. The men looked terrible, lips cracked and bleeding, faces crusted in salt. Fingers had turned white from frostbite. Several of the crew had diarrhea from eating raw meat.
Deception Island was now out of the question. They had to make land fast, no matter the risk. Elephant Island and Clarence Island lay 80 miles away across treacherous seas. If they didn’t get there fast, men would begin to die.
The Boss distributed crates of food to the Docker and the Wills and gave everyone freedom to eat their fill. Then he led the way recklessly through the ice. The men tried to fight off growlers with the oars. The Caird was gored by a piece of ice above the waterline but kept going.
By the time darkness fell they had hit open water, and the men spent a harrowing night at sea. Sheets of water sprayed the boats relentlessly. The temperature plummeted. The men in the Wills had to bail constantly to keep the water from freezing around the supplies in the stern. Even so, a thick crust of ice weighed down the boat, threatening to sink her in the dark. Every hour, someone had to chip away at the ice with an ax.
Even in the Caird, men were stretched to the breaking point. They had no ice left to melt for drinking water, and thirst tormented them. Their tongues swelled in their mouths from dehydration, making it hard to eat. To Hurley, it seemed as though the torture would go on forever. “Never was dawn more anxiously awaited, never did night seem so long,” he wrote.
Finally, the sun climbed above the horizon and glistened off the water, and as the morning brightened, a distinct grayish-white shape, and then another, rose from the water in the north. To the men it was the sight of hope itself—Clarence Island and Elephant Island looming in the distance, not more than 30 miles away.
It took yet another day and night, but on the morning of April 15, they rowed beneath the cliffs of Elephant Island. The shore was nothing but sheer rock walls and ice, pounded by the sea. To Hurley the coastline looked “wild and savage beyond description.”
Finally, they found a beach guarded by a treacherous-looking row of rocks. Shackleton decided they had to risk it. They had been rowing in half-hour shifts to stay warm. By the time each shift gave up the oars their hands were frozen to the handles. They had started chewing hunks of frozen seal meat to let the blood moisten their mouths.
Some of the men in the Wills looked like they wouldn’t survive another half a day without water and a hot meal. Blackborow was losing his feet to frostbite, and the saltwater had worn painful boils into everyone’s skin. Hudson had collapsed and was no longer making sense. Frank Wild decided that half the crew had gone insane from cold, hunger, thirst, and pure exhaustion.
The boats maneuvered across a narrow channel between the rocks until the hulls scraped solid land. Giddy with relief, Shackleton insisted Blackborow take the honor of stepping ashore first. The Boss had come to like the young stowaway and knew he’d had a hard time of it in the Wills. Apparently, he didn’t know how badly frostbitten Blackborow’s feet were. When Blackborow made no move to climb out, Shackleton nudged him over the side. Blackborow’s feet failed to support him, and he promptly sat down in the frigid surf. He had to be carried onto the beach, where he sat while the men unloaded the boats.
Two hours later, smoke rose from a blubber stove in the middle of the rocky beach. On top of it, a pot of powdered milk simmered. Steaks from two freshly killed seals awaited room over the flames. Around the stove, the men kneeled on solid ground for the first time in more than 16 months. When they smiled, beads of blood rose through the cracks in their lips. They buried their faces in the rocks or gathered pebbles in their hands and let them trickle through their fingers. To Shackleton they looked like “misers gloating over hoarded gold.”
The men spent their first day on dry land moving crates, setting up tents, and eating. A herd of Weddell seals had welcomed them to the beach. In exchange for their hospitality, the cook went on a killing spree with an ax. When he was done, he served the weakest of the men first with hot milk. He spent the next hours frying seal steaks and blubber. The men ate them as fast as they came off the fire.
That night, they had trouble getting comfortable. The smooth bed of snow they’d slept on for six months had been replaced by a rocky beach. But a few rocks poking at their ribs seemed a small price to pay for the knowledge that the ground below could not crack and send them plunging into the sea.
Hurley, for one, was ecstatic: “How delicious to wake in one’s sleep and listen to the chanting of the penguins mingling with the music of the sea. To fall asleep and awaken again and feel this is real. We have reached the land!!”
But when the initial elation wore off it wasn’t exactly clear what they had gained. Hurley and the rest of the men could count themselves pioneers of a barren wasteland. Elephant Island supports no year-round life besides the moss and lichens that cling to its rocks. Seals and penguins visit the island but desert it in the winter.
It didn’t take the men long to realize they couldn’t stay where they had landed. They could see watermarks on the cliffs at the back of the beach. When high tide came in they’d be swamped.
No one wanted to get back in the boats, but on April 16, the day after they landed, Shackleton sent Wild out in the Wills with four men to scout the coast. They found another haven, and the next day, the crew packed up the boats and moved. After a miserable six-hour sea journey they made camp yet again. They called their new home “Cape Wild.”
They settled in as best they could. At least eight men were completely useless. The engineer, Louis Rickinson, had collapsed from a mild heart attack. Blackborow still couldn’t walk. Hudson’s hands hadn’t recovered, nor had his brain. He lay in his sleeping bag, refusing to move.
As Greenstreet’s hands came back from frostbite they blistered badly. On the boat journey to the new beach, the liquid in the blisters froze solid. When he came ashore he saw steam rising from freshly butchered seals. He stumbled over to a carcass and plunged his hands inside to warm them up.
Their new home was no more comfortable than the old one. Hurley said it was “like the courtyard of a prison only 250 yards by 50 yards wide.” Cliffs 1,200 feet high and the icy slope of a glacier formed the walls of the prison. Penguin poop, known as guano to the seamen, carpeted the ground. Winds swept down from the cliffs powerfully enough to lift pebbles in the air. “A more inhospitable place could scarcely be imagined,” Macklin concluded.
A five-day blizzard greeted them at Cape Wild, and it seemed as though some of the men had finally had enough. According to Wordie they had to be “dragged from their bags and set to work.” Driving snow rushed down the throat with every breath. The first night in the new camp the wind shredded the largest of the tents, and the men had to pull the remains around them and huddle
till dawn. McNish curled up with his diary the night of April 20 and made a prediction: “I don’t think there will be many survivors if they have to put in a winter here.”
In front of the men, Shackleton was as confident as ever. He knew that many of them were ready to give up, and it was his job to make sure they stayed motivated. “The boss is wonderful,” Wordie wrote, “cheering everyone and far more active than any other person in camp.”
In private, Shackleton struggled with the fear McNish had confessed to his diary. As the blizzard persisted, he took the doctor Macklin aside and asked him how long he thought the men would last on the island. At this point they had full rations for five weeks, maybe three months if they cut their meals to near starvation level. Seals and penguins would add to their supply, but no one knew when the animals would disappear for the winter. If the conditions didn’t change, Macklin said, they’d start losing men in a month.
The fifth day on Elephant Island, Shackleton confirmed the next plan, which was no surprise to the men. They had been talking about it since before they left Patience Camp. As soon as the weather cleared, the Boss would launch the Caird with a crew of five.
Cape Horn at the tip of South America and the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic were the nearest targets. But they both lay north and west of Elephant Island while the current and the wind ran hard to the east. Shackleton didn’t think they stood a chance of fighting their way north. Instead they would make the longer voyage east to South Georgia, find their way to one of the whaling stations, and return with a ship to carry the rest of the men back to civilization.
It could all be done, he claimed, in a month. They’d be back before the end of May.
Many of the men wondered if it could be done at all. They had traveled no more than 80 miles to get to Elephant Island and it nearly killed them. South Georgia lay 800 miles away across seas that had swamped far bigger boats than the Caird. “I would rather die than undertake such a journey,” Lees confided to his diary.
Lees, and perhaps a few others, thought Shackleton was making a mistake. The whaling station at Deception Island lay 200 miles to the southwest across calmer seas. Lees thought that should be their target. But the Boss was convinced the pack was too dense to make the journey now. And the whalers had no doubt abandoned the harbor for the winter. The men would have to wait till September at the earliest to make the trip. Shackleton was convinced they didn’t have that long.
McNish went to work in the howling gale building a deck for the Caird. Right now she was open to the sky and the sea, and the men would never survive the journey exposed to the surf. With help from Marston and the old seaman McLeod, the carpenter scavenged wood and nails from the Docker and plywood from old crates. They used runners saved from one of the sleds to build a framework across the gunwales. They nailed boards on top for decking. Then they stretched canvas from the shredded tents across the entire thing, hoping it would keep most of the raging ocean out.
McNish had a personal stake in his work on the Caird because he would be aboard for the voyage to South Georgia. For all his faults, the carpenter had proved himself essential to the crew several times over. If the Caird needed work in the middle of the Drake Passage, Shackleton wanted McNish aboard to do it.
For the rest of the crew, Shackleton chose Worsley for his navigation skills, the indestructible second officer Crean for his experience and his loyalty, and two hardy sailors named Timothy McCarthy and John Vincent.
All work came to a halt on April 22 when a blizzard turned Cape Wild into a war zone. No one left his sleeping bag unless he absolutely had to. The men on mess duty could barely walk upright long enough to get food from the galley and hustle it back to the tents. Ice and gravel, tossed by the wind, slashed the skin on their faces. A 10-gallon aluminum pot went airborne and landed far out to sea. Socks, mittens, sheets, wood, and boots followed the same route. Lees lost a shirt even after weighing it down with two stones the size of a man’s head.
Two days later, the gale had finally died. Just after noon, 22 men stood on the shore of Cape Wild, watching the Caird’s sail lift on a swell and then vanish into a trough. The 22-foot boat carried four weeks’ worth of food, two casks of water, a ton of rocks as ballast, and six men—including their leader, their navigator, and their carpenter.
According to Hurley they were “six proven veterans seasoned by the salt and experience of the sea.” He had confidence they would make it to South Georgia in 14 days and return as planned. Then again, Hurley rarely expressed anything without confidence.
Wordie, who was more of a realist, watched the sea until the sail disappeared for the last time. He and the rest of the men turned back to their wind-swept prison with its walls of granite and ice. That night he went to bed thinking of the Caird. He tucked himself into his sleeping bag on a reeking bed of penguin guano, and wrote, “She is our only hope.”
Their first night out in the Caird, Shackleton and Worsley sat up piloting the boat through the darkness. Worsley took the tiller and Shackleton huddled for warmth with his arm around the Skipper’s shoulder. They had rowed their way through the first hazard of the voyage—the loose pack that surrounded Elephant Island. Now they were under sail, taking advantage of winds out of the south. They would sail as far north as they could to make sure they cleared the ice. Then they would ride the westerly winds toward South Georgia.
Shackleton was in a reflective mood. Alone with Worsley, he didn’t have to bolster anyone’s morale. In the dark he dropped the cloak of confidence he showed to the world and allowed the sound of pessimism to creep into his voice. He was sick with regret that he had to split up the party and leave 22 men behind. It was the only reasonable choice—he knew that. They couldn’t simply camp on a barren island and wait until they starved to death. And if the voyage had to be made, as the leader of the expedition, he couldn’t leave it to anyone else.
But it was a terrible choice to have to make, and now the fate of the men depended on the whims of the weather and the sea. Already, the stiff west-to-east current of the Drake Passage was making itself felt. They had sailed into the one place on Earth where the ocean circles the entire planet, unbroken by land. Winds lash the water at speeds up to 200 miles per hour. With no obstacle for 12,000 miles, waves known as “Cape Horn Rollers” can reach heights of 80 or 90 feet. The famous biologist Charles Darwin witnessed them when he sailed past Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, in 1834. “One sight … ,” he wrote, “is enough to make a landsman dream for a week about death, peril and shipwreck.”
The swells didn’t approach 80 feet the night of April 24, 1916. But they were perilous enough. When they caught the Caird broadside they swamped her deck and sent saltwater streaming through McNish’s handiwork. Less than 24 hours out, it was already clear they would spend the entire voyage soaked to the bone.
Shackleton rolled cigarettes, and they fought the wind and the spray to get them lit. He asked Worsley if he thought they’d made the right choice. If they headed for Cape Horn, they could cut the distance almost in half. Worsley assured him the wind would blow them too far east. South Georgia was the only reasonable target.
As the boat rode on into the dark, Shackleton asked again. Worsley gave him the same answer. It was an unfamiliar scene, someone offering reassurance to the Boss. But Shackleton obviously needed it. He felt responsible for the entire ordeal, starting with his decision 16 months earlier to pass up a landing at Glacier Bay and start the overland trek from there. His men now sat on Elephant Island with nothing to do but wait. He was in fact their only hope. If they didn’t survive, he told Worsley later, he would feel like a murderer for the rest of his life.
As the Caird disappeared into the waves on April 24, Shackleton’s trusted friend and second-in-command Frank Wild was left guarding the survival of 22 men. And when the party turned to trudge back to camp, Wild noticed a couple of them crying. Someone said, “that’s the last of them,” and Wild felt like picking up a rock and knocking the pes
simist down. Instead he spent a minute or two cursing him out.
Frank Wild was Shackleton’s man, and he had taken up where the Boss left off, doing what he could to keep the men from sinking into despair. And like Shackleton, his most effective tactic was to put them to work.
On the 28th, the men gave up on their ragged tents and made a shelter out of the Wills and the Docker. It was grueling work for a crew that had been starved of carbohydrates for months on end. They hauled stones from 150 yards away and stacked them into walls four feet high. Lees said it took three men to haul a load normally fit for one. With the end walls in place, the boats were turned upside down to make the roof. Marston hung tent canvas from the gunwales of the boats for the sidewalls.
When it was done, the men jockeyed for positions inside. Ten of them immediately claimed the benches of the overturned boats for beds. The rest slept underneath on a thin carpet of canvas stretched over the pebbles and the penguin guano.
The finished structure was something to be proud of—until they woke the next morning buried in snow. Yet another blizzard had swept the beach during the night, finding every little imperfection in the hut. Boots were frozen so stiff they had to be put on in stages. The men brushed off the snow and sat on their sleeping bags, quietly cursing their miserable prison of rock and ice. “All attempts seemed so hopeless,” Macklin wrote, “and Fate seemed absolutely determined to thwart us.”
On April 26, two days into the Caird’s voyage, a westerly gale ripped into her sails. They had turned east, and Worsley did his best to keep them on course for South Georgia. But the boat pitched and rolled violently on the waves. The Skipper needed two men steadying him on either side to free up his hands for the instruments. Even then, he found it impossible to line up his sextant accurately with the sun. He figured they’d made 128 miles so far. But he wasn’t at all sure he could find an island 700 miles away.