Lost in the Antarctic: The Doomed Voyage of the Endurance

by Tod Olson

  Then they looked back up the slope. No one knew how far they had slid. Shackleton, who was not given to exaggeration, figured 900 feet. The more colorful Worsley would later claim 3,000.

  Finally, Shackleton said, “It’s not good to do that kind of thing too often.”

  They had two more slopes to climb, and it took them all night. But in the first glimmer of daylight they stood at the top of a ridge. They could see the tortured rock formations of Stromness Bay below. A short while later, the throaty sound of a steam whistle rose from the bay below. It was 7 a.m., and the whistle was calling the whalers to work. It was the first sound of civilization the men had heard since they left the island on December 5, 1914.

  Seven hours later they stumbled into the Husvik whaling station in Stromness Bay, not far from Grytviken, where they had stayed before setting out 17 months ago. The familiar stench of decomposing whale hung in the air. They paused for a moment, suddenly self-conscious. They hadn’t bathed in more than half a year. Their beards were long, their clothes tattered and stained. Worsley surprised Shackleton by producing a couple of safety pins from his pocket. He made some hasty repairs to his pants that only called attention to the mess.

  The first people they saw were a couple of boys, 10 or 12 years old. Shackleton asked them how to get to the station manager’s house. The boys took one look at the strangers and ran.

  Finally, the three survivors stood facing the station manager, who had hosted them briefly during their month on South Georgia in 1914. Now, the man stared at them blankly.

  “Don’t you know me?” Shackleton asked.

  “I know your voice; you’re the mate of the Daisy,” the station manager said, confusing him with someone else.

  The response came, quiet and matter-of-fact: “My name is Shackleton.”

  On Tuesday morning, May 23, the steam whistle that had welcomed Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean to Stromness Bay three days earlier sounded again. This time it blew a farewell to the three men, who stood on the deck of a whaler called the Southern Sky. They steamed out of the bay and turned west for Elephant Island.

  Three days was not a lot of recovery time, but Shackleton felt he couldn’t wait any longer. The coldest days of winter had nearly arrived. The pack would be closing soon—if it hadn’t already.

  During their time on South Georgia, the men had been bathed, shaved, and fed. They had told their story to a host of astonished whalers. They also retrieved McNish, McCarthy, and Vincent from King Haakon Bay and arranged to have them sent back to England. Seeing McNish without layers of bulky sweaters and jackets, Shackleton realized how emaciated the carpenter was. Their rescue had come just in time.

  As the Southern Sky motored through the Drake Passage, Shackleton started to worry. On the third night out, the temperature dropped and a thin coat of ice formed around the ship. They veered north to avoid the pack, and then steered south for Elephant Island. When ice blocked their way they ventured farther west and tried again. The pack ice that had closed in on Cape Wild in the middle of May still surrounded the island.

  Recognizing that the Southern Sky wasn’t built for battle with the pack, Shackleton gave in and retreated north to the Falkland Islands. He had been stopped 70 miles from Elephant Island, no closer than he had been when they had launched their boats from Patience Camp.

  In the Falklands, Shackleton searched desperately for another ship. He cabled the British navy, and word came back that they couldn’t send a ship until October.

  Shackleton had assumed that the war would be a thing of the past. In fact, battles were still raging around the world. The young men of Western Europe had been dug into trenches for two years, slaughtering one another. More than 10 million people had died in the war already.

  It was a rude awakening for Shackleton. He had expected a rousing welcome, but the rest of the world had other things to worry about.

  All Shackleton had earned for his ordeal on the ice was a cable from the king: “Rejoice to hear of your safe arrival in the Falkland Islands and trust your comrades on Elephant Island may soon be rescued.”

  On Elephant Island, Shackleton’s comrades were wondering just how soon that rescue would come. “One cannot help but be a bit anxious about Sir Ernest,” Lees wrote on June 7 from his perch in the Snuggery. “One wonders how he fared, where he is now and how it is that he has not yet been able to relieve us.”

  The most common guess from the men around the stove was that the Boss had tried to get to them in a whaler and failed. Now he was hunting for a ship that would be a match for the ice. Accurate as it was, that scenario left an important question unanswered: Would he make it before they starved to death?

  The penguins came and went, providing food and fodder for the running feud between Lees and Wild. On June 8, after a few days of bloody slaughter, Wild thought they had food to last them through August. Lees insisted they would run out in July.

  On June 15, the monotony was interrupted by a grim but essential task. The flesh in Blackborow’s frostbitten toes had died and turned completely black—a condition known as gangrene. Now the rot was threatening to spread up his leg. The doctors Macklin and McIlroy decided they would have to amputate the toes on Blackborow’s left foot.

  Wild ordered everyone out of the Snuggery except Hudson and Greenstreet, who couldn’t walk. The doctors stripped to their undershirts. Hurley tended the fire while Wild boiled the surgical instruments in a hoosh pot to sterilize them. Macklin held a cloth soaked in chloroform over Blackborow’s face until the patient dropped off to sleep. Hudson, still bedridden, turned away. Greenstreet followed the whole procedure, fascinated. When Macklin cut the toes off Blackborow’s foot they dropped with a frozen clatter into a tin can below.

  After three hours the medical team emerged from the hut. The rest of the men had huddled in a cave and cut each other’s hair to pass the time. Cold, hungry, and bored, they filed back into the Snuggery to find the patient sleeping peacefully.

  By the beginning of June, the men on Elephant Island had been waiting for nearly two months. Wild had stopped the charade of rolling up the bags in the morning. He insisted that everyone except the invalids get an hour of exercise each day. But there wasn’t much work to do. Sometimes the men stayed in their sleeping bags nearly the entire day. Macklin noted on July 6 that he could lie for hours on end “without even so much as thinking.”

  Greenstreet summed it up even more vividly one night: “Everyone spent the day rotting in their bags with blubber and tobacco smoke—so passes another rotten day.”

  On Saturday, July 22, while the men in the Snuggery toasted their loved ones, Shackleton anchored for the night in an Argentine schooner, 100 miles away. It was his third attempt to reach Elephant Island. A month earlier he had come within a few miles of Cape Wild before the ice nearly destroyed his ship.

  Now, Worsley once again tried to carve his way through the pack. But the schooner was half the size of the Endurance. She was pushed around by slabs of ice heavier than the ship. Worsley couldn’t get them anywhere near Cape Wild.

  At the beginning of August, exactly two years after the Endurance left London, Shackleton gave up again. He and Worsley fought their way through a gale back to the Falklands, knowing they were running out of options. By this time, for all they knew, half the crew could be dead. Shackleton could no longer talk about the men he’d left behind without growing sullen and testy. Worsley noticed that the Boss’s hair had turned gray since they left England.

  On August 6, just after the schooner turned her stern to Elephant Island and headed north, Frank Hurley stood on a rise the men called Lookout Bluff. Temperatures had started to climb above freezing the last week. The sun shone bright on the ocean. A number of men joined Hurley, warming themselves on the rocks. Beyond their little inlet, a few icebergs absorbed a pounding from the Cape Horn rollers. Aside from the bergs, the sea was clear of ice, as far as the eye could see. “It would be ideal weather for the ship to arrive,” Hurley concluded.
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br />   Even as it seemed more and more unlikely, rescue was still everyone’s fantasy. The Snuggery had become intolerable. On warm days, snowmelt seeped in from all corners. The floor turned into a soupy mess of rotting seal bits, reindeer hairs, and penguin guano. At one point Lees found a pool of penguin blood under his sleeping bag and half a pound of rancid meat stuck between the stones. They had started referring to their home as the “sty.”

  Blackborow, who had barely left the hut in four months, had the worst of it. His foot wasn’t healing well, and the doctors were worried about infection. The young stowaway was in a lot of pain, but he never complained. The engineer Alfred Kerr had appointed himself Blackborow’s personal nurse. On August 12, he sewed a few transparent photo coverings into the wall of the tent so Blackborow could have some light.

  By mid-August the food supply was dwindling, and Lees wasn’t the only one worried anymore. They were nearly out of penguin breast so they boiled the skinny legs and ate them for breakfast. On August 20, the nut food supply gave out, casting everyone into a deep depression. A few days later they were stewing penguin carcasses and seal bones to make broth. They boiled seaweed into a jelly and ate it. The men spent hours scouring the rocks in shallow water for limpets, shellfish that are so tiny it took hundreds to make a meal.

  On August 29, they had seen exactly 6 penguins in 2 days—enough to feed a single breakfast to 12 men. They had 5 days’ worth of food left, and the men were openly worrying about Shackleton. Even Wild admitted the Boss and the rest of the Caird’s crew might well have been swamped in the Drake Passage and lost forever.

  That day, Wild announced to a few of the men that he had made up his mind. At the beginning of October he would take the Docker from the Snuggery and patch it up as best he could. With a crew of four men, he would launch for Deception Island.

  The plan was a long shot. They’d be running against the wind, and all they had for a mainsail were tattered pieces of tent canvas. As for the men left behind, they were already packed like sardines into their hut. With the Docker gone their space would be cut in half.

  But when he sat with his diary that night, Lees felt like Deception Island was probably their only hope. “The idea of a ship ever coming now,” he wrote, “is getting more and more remote.”

  The next day, a clear, cold dawn gave way to gloomy skies by late morning. Several feet of wet snow had accumulated around the Snuggery in the last two weeks. The men spent the morning shoveling and catching limpets. At around 1 p.m., they were sitting around the hut eating a hoosh made from seal backbone when they heard Marston’s voice outside. “Wild, there’s a ship! Shall we light a fire?”

  Twenty men, who had been hungry and listless a moment before, suddenly sprang to life. Mugs full of precious hoosh dropped to the ground. The entire crew tried to exit the tent at once. In seconds the wall had been torn to shreds, and a crowd of bony, bearded castaways hobbled down the slope to the shore. Even Hudson roused himself from his sick bed. He and Lees carried Blackborow out and sat him down where he could watch the excitement.

  The ship was still a mile off, and everyone took a long look to make sure that it wasn’t an iceberg. They had been fooled before and couldn’t tolerate it happening again.

  She was unmistakably a ship—but it wasn’t clear what kind. She wasn’t a whaler or an ice-breaker but some kind of steam tug. The men thought maybe she had arrived by accident, but they didn’t care, as long as she didn’t leave without them.

  Hurley made a pile of seal blubber and dry grass and doused it with kerosene. It exploded in flames when he put a match to it, but failed to produce much smoke. Macklin ran to an oar they had dug into the snow and hoisted his jacket as high as it would go.

  Neither effort was especially effective, but at this point it didn’t matter. The ship was fast approaching, until she anchored 150 yards from shore. The men still couldn’t tell if Shackleton was aboard.

  Finally, the ship lowered a lifeboat, and a sturdy figure climbed down into it. The men let out as loud a cheer as they could manage. As the boat approached, Shackleton called out, “Are you all well?”

  “We are all well, Boss,” Wild yelled back.

  “Thank God,” Shackleton said.

  He stepped off the boat into the crowd of grateful men. Perhaps proud of the fact that they had survived four months on their own, the men begged Shackleton to come see the Snuggery.

  The Boss refused. He was already looking anxiously out to sea for signs of their old enemy, the pack. In an hour, he had all 22 men and their meager possessions aboard the ship. Worsley pointed them north for Argentina.

  There was no ice in sight.

  At 7 a.m. on October 8, 1916, the crew of the Endurance gathered one final time at the railway station in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Shackleton and Worsley were leaving for a ship that would take them to the other side of Antarctica. The Ross Sea party—the men who laid supplies for the overland trek that never happened—had been trapped on the ice for nearly two years and needed rescue.

  The men at the railway station had been ashore for a month and they were beginning to look like human beings again. Their clothes were clean. A year’s worth of stove soot and penguin grease had been scrubbed and scraped from their skin. They’d been shaved, clipped, and snipped by a barber.

  But no amount of grooming could erase the effects of their ordeal. Blackborow had been willing to do almost anything to join the expedition. Now he was in the hospital recovering from the emergency amputation of his toes. Thomas McLeod was just starting to gain back the 100 pounds he had lost.

  The men had been crammed together in close quarters for two years, and yet they had trouble saying good-bye. Both the Boss and the Skipper felt depressed to be leaving the others behind. The old seaman McLeod wept when he said good-bye to William Bakewell. And Bakewell felt just as sad. “I had to say goodbye to the finest group of men that it has ever been my good fortune to be with,” he recalled later.

  A train pulled up. Shackleton and Worsley stepped inside and they were gone. How easy this journey must have seemed after 18 months spent paying for every mile in blood and sweat, aching limbs and frostbitten fingers.

  For most of the men, the return to Europe was a shock. They had been through the most grueling experience of their lives. The rest of the world was trapped in its own brutal hell.

  The Endurance had left England during the first week of World War I. Since then, millions of people had died on the battlefields of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. It was the bloodiest war Europe had ever seen, and the crew of the Endurance had missed it all. “We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad,” wrote Shackleton.

  That world didn’t exactly give the men a hero’s welcome. Barely a village in England had gotten by without losing a good portion of its young men in battle. Those men had made the ultimate sacrifice, and even though the crew of the Endurance had been through hell, they had survived. When Shackleton returned from one of his attempts to rescue the Elephant Island crew, a newspaper reporter overheard someone on the docks grumbling about what a waste the expedition had been. “ ’E ought ter ’ave been at the war long ago instead of messing about on icebergs,” the man complained.

  At least some of the men took that criticism to heart. They felt ashamed they had missed so much of the war. Nearly all of them enlisted in the military as soon as they could. Most made it through to the end. Tim McCarthy, who had survived an open-boat voyage across the worst seas in the world, was killed at sea by enemy fire six weeks after he signed up. Alf Cheetham, third officer on the Endurance, went down with his ship in the North Sea less than two months before the war ended.

  By war’s end, Shackleton had found his way back to the snow and ice. He was directing the transport of troops and supplies in northern Russia. Now, he had to think about making a living again. And that meant telling the story of the Endurance to whoever would pay to listen.

  Reliving the ordeal on the ice wasn’t easy for Shackl
eton. Before he left for the war, he had dictated much of the story to an author he hired to help him write a book. Shackleton had to stop and leave the room to compose himself during the retelling. After the first half hour, he turned to his longtime friend and adviser Leonard Tripp, who was sitting in on the sessions. Fighting back tears, he said, “Tripp, you don’t know what I’ve been through, and I’m going through it all over again, and I can’t do it.”

  But Shackleton did do it, because he needed the money. He traveled through England showing Hurley’s slides and telling the story to half-full rooms. The experience wore him down. Night after night he recounted the details—the diet of blubber and bannocks, the shooting of the dogs, the desperate boat journeys. All the while the images flickered behind him like a bad dream—the Endurance crushed to death in the ice a thousand times over. Before long Shackleton was drinking heavily and wracked with colds, fevers, and back pain.

  Three years back at home had brought him to a familiar place: It was time for another expedition.

  Shackleton hatched a vague plan to sail around the entire Antarctic continent. But the real goal was simply to get away from civilization again. He didn’t have the patience for bills and cocktail parties. “I am just good as an explorer and nothing else,” he had written to his wife before leaving in the Endurance.

  Or as Reginald James the physicist put it, “Shackleton afloat was a more likeable character than Shackleton ashore.”

  On September 17, 1921, Shackleton left England in the 111-foot, oak-framed ship Quest. Many of the Endurance crew had vowed never to go back to the Antarctic. But Macklin, Worsley, McIlroy, Wild, Hussey, McLeod, the engineer Alfred Kerr, and the cook Charles Green were all on board.

  From the start of the voyage, it was obvious Shackleton wasn’t healthy. He looked pale and haggard. His plans were unclear. They were headed for South Georgia, but beyond that no one knew exactly where they were going.