by Tod Olson
Every time the doctor Macklin asked about Shackleton’s health, the Boss changed the subject. All he wanted to do was sit and listen to Hussey play the banjo—just as they had done during the endless days on the ice. Macklin had trouble explaining to the new crew members what was so inspiring about the man who had engineered the greatest escape in the history of polar exploration.
On January 4, 1922, the snow-covered crags of South Georgia edged into view, and Shackleton came to life. He and Worsley grabbed anyone who would listen and pointed out the landmarks of their last-ditch trek across the island. There in the distance was the ridge on which they’d coiled their ropes and slid into the unknown. And there was the exact point where they had emerged from the mountains. The elation they had felt five and half years ago all came rushing back. Worsley said he and Shackleton turned into “a pair of excitable kids.”
Fridjof Jacobsen, the station manager who had treated the officers of the Endurance to whale steaks before they sailed into the ice, came out to greet the men. Once again, they ate dinner ashore. Back in his cabin on board the Quest, Shackleton told his diary it had been “a wonderful evening.” For the first time since the voyage began, the Boss seemed like himself again.
That night, in the early hours of the morning, Macklin was called to Shackleton’s bedside. The Boss had been stricken by a heart attack. He asked Macklin feebly what the doctor was going to ask him to give up this time: smoking? drinking?
A few minutes later, Shackleton was dead.
Frank Wild took command of the Quest and sailed without much purpose for a few more months. Before he headed home to England, he navigated past Elephant Island. The men squinted over the side of the ship at the windbeaten shore where Shackleton had rescued them from near certain death.
That night, Macklin sat down to write in his journal. “Ah what memories what memories!—they rush to one like a great flood & bring tears to ones eyes… Once more I see the little boat, Frankie Wild’s hut, dark & dirty, but a snug little shelter all the same. Once more I see the old faces & hear the old voices—old friends scattered everywhere. But to express all I feel is impossible.”
The Quest turned and sailed for home. Behind them, Shackleton lay buried under the snow on South Georgia with the stench of rotting whale in the air. It was exactly what he would have wanted. Before the Quest left England, he had told a friend that he didn’t want to die in Europe. He said, “I shall go on going till one day I shall not come back.”
ballast: heavy material placed in a boat to make it more stable in the water
bilge: lowest part of a ship where water collects
bo’sun: an abbreviation for boatswain, the sailor in charge of most work on deck
chanties: songs sung by sailors, often in rhythm with their work
dirge: a slow, mournful piece of music
floe: a large sheet of floating ice
fugue: a piece of music with one interwoven theme played by different instruments
growler: a floating chunk of ice, broken free from an iceberg
gunwales (pronounced gunnels): the top edge of a ship’s sidewalls
mutiny: deliberate revolt against officers in the military or on board a ship
port: the left side of a ship when you’re facing forward
scurvy: disease that terrorized explorers for centuries, caused by a lack of vitamin C in the diet
skua: seabird that scavenges for food by stealing fish from other birds
snow petrel: white seabird that feeds on fish and dead animals
spar: strong pole used to support lines or sails on a ship
starboard: the right side of a ship when you’re facing forward
stern: the rear of a ship
stoker: sailors whose job it is to throw fuel into the boiler that powers a ship’s steam engine
Antarctica is unusual in the history of exploration because the people who risked their lives there knew they wouldn’t get much in return—nothing that would make them rich, anyway. In all its 5.4 million square miles, Antarctica had not a single acre of fertile soil. If the ground harbored gold or silver, it was buried under thousands of feet of snow and ice.
The fact that Antarctica had little of practical value to offer to visitors makes its story a happy one compared to the rest of the world. In the Americas and in Australia, European explorers created new nations but left a trail of destruction in their wake. In the years after Europeans arrived, close to 90 percent of the American and Australian indigenous population died, either in battle or from diseases carried across the ocean by the newcomers. On the west coast of Africa, slave traders captured or bought more than 12 million human beings and transported them to the Americas. For 350 years, black men and women worked and died in slavery from the sugar plantations of Brazil to the tobacco fields of Virginia.
In Antarctica, however, the entire continent survived almost unchanged. It was uninhabited by humans when the first European explorers arrived, so there was no one to befriend, conquer, or enslave. No one could settle there. Hunters went after whales and fur seals with a vengeance. But for most of the last 50 years, hunting has been outlawed. The Antarctic whale and fur seal populations are recovering.
Today Antarctica is the one large piece of land on Earth that has barely been touched by humans. About 5,000 people stay there during the summer. That’s one resident for every 1,080 square miles. During the winter, the population drops to 1,000.
Nearly all of Antarctica’s residents are there for one reason: to do scientific research. More than 50 countries have signed a treaty agreeing that no single nation can claim to own the continent. The treaty bans all military activity and mining.
Thanks in part to the international agreement, Antarctica is one of the least polluted places on Earth. There are no landfills there. All trash has to be burned, recycled, or carried back to civilization. Antarctic waters are free of the toxic runoff that has created low-oxygen “dead zones” in other ocean regions.
Unfortunately, that’s not the full story. Antarctica may not have much of a human presence on its shores, but in today’s world, no place on Earth can stay fully isolated from human activity.
As we burn fossil fuels to run factories, cars, and power plants, we pump methane and carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere. Those gases act like a greenhouse around the planet. They trap heat from the sun close to the Earth.
As the gases build up, our climate warms, and Antarctica is already feeling the effects.
The entire continent is surrounded by floating ice shelves—the barrier ice that the Endurance encountered as it got close to Vahsel Bay. Scientists now think warm water is drifting in from the north and melting the ice shelves from below. In July 2017, an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Larsen C ice shelf, about 250 miles south of Paulet Island. In that area, near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, temperatures have warmed by about 5 degrees in the last 70 years.
All of this may sound like good news if you’re planning a visit to Antarctica. And it may, in fact, make a journey through the Weddell Sea less treacherous than it was for the crew of the Endurance.
But for the rest of the planet, melting ice means trouble, because when ice turns to water it drains into the sea. Some scientists predict that melting in Antarctica alone could cause sea levels to rise 3 feet in the next century. Eventually, many experts think, all the ice in Antarctica will disappear. It will happen slowly over hundreds, maybe thousands of years. But as it does, coastal areas all around the world will flood. New York, Miami, London, Amsterdam, Beijing, Venice, and Tokyo will be underwater.
The men aboard the Endurance were humbled by the size and power of the frozen world around them. Macklin and Lees used almost identical language to describe how the landscape made them feel—like “puny mortals” overwhelmed by the “colossal forces of nature.”
Something about that experience felt larger and more authentic than the world of meetings and bosses and social obligations that awaited
them at home. On Christmas 1915, Lees wrote in his diary, “Were it not for a little natural anxiety as to our ultimate progress I have never been happier in my life than I am now, for is not this kind of existence the ‘real thing,’ the thing I have for years set my heart on.”
Maybe it was that longing that drew these men to a world that offered them tremendous risk without much material reward. They wanted to feel dwarfed by icebergs and humbled by the wind. It was a world they couldn’t tame. They just hoped to prove they were worthy of it for a while.
Now, the ice that nearly killed them is in danger from the civilization they tried to leave behind. I wonder how that would make them feel.
Books
Alexander, Caroline. The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Anthony, Jason C. Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012.
Bickel, Lennard. Shackleton’s Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001.
Brooke-Hitching, Edward. The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps. London: Simon and Schuster, 2016.
Cherry-Garrard, Apsley. (2004). The Worst Journey in the World. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. April 16, 2018, from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363.
Day, David. Antarctica: A Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Fisher, Margery, and James Fisher. Shackleton. London: Barrie Books, 1957.
Fleming, Fergus. Off the Map: Tales of Endurance and Exploration. New York: Grove Press, 2006.
Fothergill, Alastair. Life in the Freezer: A Natural History of the Antarctic. London: BBC Books, 1993.
Gurney, Alan. The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Huntford, Roland. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole. New York: Random House, 1999.
——–—. Shackleton. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998.
Hurley, Frank. Argonauts of the South: Being a Narrative of Voyagings and Polar Seas and Adventures in the Antarctic with Sir Douglas Mawson and Sir Ernest Shackleton. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925.
——–—. South With Endurance: Shackleton’s Antarctic Expedition 1914–1917. New York: BCL Press, 2001.
Landis, Marilyn J. Antarctica: Exploring the Extreme: 400 Years of Adventure. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2001.
Lansing, Alfred. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999.
McClintock, James. Lost Antarctica: Adventures in a Disappearing Land. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012.
Mills, Leif. Frank Wild. London: Caedmon of Whitby, 1999.
Nordenskjöld, Otto G., and Gunnar Andersson. Antarctica, or Two Years Amongst the Ice of the South Pole. London: Hurst and Blackett, Limited, 1905.
Riffenburgh, Beau. Racing with Death: Douglas Mawson—Antarctic Explorer. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Rosove, Michael H. Let Heroes Speak: Antarctic Explorers, 1772–1922. New York: Berkeley Books, 2000.
Shackleton, Ernest. South: the Endurance Expedition. London: Penguin, 2002 (orig. published 1919).
Smith, Michael. An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean, Antarctic Survivor. Wilton, Cork: The Collins Press, 2000.
———. Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer. London: Oneworld, 2014.
———. Sir James Wordie, Polar Crusader: Exploring the Arctic and Antarctic. Edinburgh: Birlin, 2004.
Thomson, John. Elephant Island and Beyond: The Life and Diaries of Thomas Orde Lees. Norwich, Norfolk: Erskine Press, 2003.
Tyler-Lewis, Kelly. The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party. New York: Viking, 2006.
Walker, Gabrielle. Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.
Wilford, John Noble. The Mapmakers: The Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography—from Antiquity to the Space Age. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981.
Worsley, F. A. Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure. (orig. published 1931.) New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
Diaries and Journals
Hurley, Frank. Diary, 1914-1916. Transcript by Shane Murphy. MS 883, National Library of Australia.
McNish, Harry. Journal of Harry McNish, 1914-1916. Transcript by Shane Murphy. MS-1389. National Library of Australia.
Orde-Lees, Thomas. The Diary of Thomas H. Orde-Lees. Transcript by Margot Morrell. Rauner Stefansson Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.
Wordie, James. “Weddell Sea Log.” Reprinted in Michael Smith, James Wordie: Polar Crusader. Edinburgh: Birlin, 2004.
Worsley, Frank. Journal, 1914-1916. Transcript by Shane Murphy. Micro-MS-0633. National Library of Australia.
Television
The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Directed by George Butler, WGBH Boston, 2000.
Articles
Hamblin, James. “How Being Cold Burns Calories.” The Atlantic, Feb. 13, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/how-being-cold-burns-calories/283810/.
Prologue: Weddell Sea, Antarctica
the temperature hadn’t made it above zero: Worsley diary, Oct. 26, 1915
“All hope is not given up”: Hurley diary, Oct. 26, 1915
“Do you hear that?”: quoted in Alexander, The Endurance, 88
Chapter 1: The Last Great Journey
“Mad,” “Hopeless,” “Possible”: Tyler-Lewis, Lost Men, 21
“Yes, I like you”: quoted in Smith, Shackleton, 289
“I suppose you can shout a bit”: quoted in Lansing, Endurance, 17
land full of rivers: from the first modern world atlas, published in 1570, in Wilford, Mapmakers, 139
“good, honest” people: from German geographer Johannes Schöner’s 1533 Opusculum Geographicum, quoted in Brooke-Hitching, Phantom Atlas, 225.
“doomed by Nature”: from The Journals of Captain James Cook, quoted in Gurney, Race to the White Continent, 11
“All the money that was ever minted”: quoted in Mills, Wild, 108
“We have been beaten”: from the expedition prospectus, quoted in Alexander, The Endurance, 9
“Enough life and money has been spent”: quoted in Smith, Shackleton, 255
“If not required”: quoted in Huntford, Shackleton, 379
Chapter 2: Southbound
“I think it is a good thing”; a “perfect pig”: Lees diary, Aug. 17, 1914
“It will all be put right”: Lees diary, Oct. 1, 1914
“God Save the King”: Worsley diary, Oct. 26, 1914
“All the troubles of the South”: quoted in Smith, Shackleton, 248
“All the strain is finished”: quoted in Fisher and Fisher, Shackleton, 331
“Do you know that on these expeditions”: Wild’s account of the encounter, quoted in Hurley, South with Endurance, 12
“It is impossible to view this trade”: Hurley diary, “An Epitome of our Stay at South Georgia, Nov. 5, 1914 to Dec. 5, 1914”
“She is breathing her last”: Nordenskjöld, Antarctica, 536
“something which resembles the chill of death”: Nordenskjöld, Antarctica, 290
Chapter 3: Ramming
bare land less than 2 percent of the time: for natural history of Antarctica see Fothergill, Life in the Freezer, 16
“I have never heard or felt”: Cherry-Garrard, Worst Journey
“It’s a splendid sensation”: Worsley diary, Dec. 16, 1914
“Worsley specialized in ramming”: quoted in Butler, The Endurance
They fought their way south: Worsley kept track daily in his diary.
“one great solid desert snowfield”: Lees diary, Dec. 18, 1914
played soccer, Antarctic style: described in McNish diary, Dec. 20, 1914
“Clark! Clark!”: Worsley diary, Dec. 12, 1914
The scenery, to Hurley: described in Worsley diary, Jan. 24, 19
15
“Sir Ernest looks dead tired”: Lees diary, Jan. 11, 1915
Shackleton named the inlet Glacier Bay: Shackleton, South, p. 27
“Spirits are high all round”: Lees diary, Jan. 18, 1915
Chapter 4: Fast in the Ice
“No water in sight”: Worsley diary, Jan. 19, 1915
“Thursday 21st …”: McNish diary, Jan. 21-25, 1915
“I grudge every tin”: Lees diary, Jan. 27, 1915
“He has an exceptionally offensive manner”: Lees, Feb. 12, 1915
“Puny mortals striving frantically”: Lees, Feb. 15, 1915
“I never saw such unanimous cooperation”: Lees, Feb. 15, 1915
“Today … we practically cease being a ship”: Worsley diary, Feb. 24, 1915
“We will have to wait God’s will”: McNish diary, Feb. 15, 1915
Chapter 5: Wintering
“A wave of depression”: Wordie, “Weddell Sea Log,” Jan. 29, 1915, reprinted in Smith, Polar Crusader, 284.
“It was an awful bloody business”: Worsley diary, Jan. 6, 1915
“More villainous … looking creatures”: Hurley diary, Feb. 10, 1915
“We are under the spell of the black Antarctic night”: Frederick Cook, quoted in Landis, Antarctica, 195
“It is astounding”: Hurley diary, March 6, 1915
“We have drifted 12 miles”: McNish diary, June 8, 1915
“magnificent animal”: Hurley diary, April 9, 1915
“Somewhere in the crowd a pup yelps”: Worsley diary, June 16, 1915
“She’s pretty near her end”: Worsley’s version of the conversation, in Worsley, Endurance, 3–4
traffic in the streets of London: Lees quoting James, in Lees diary, Oct. 21, 1915
giant train with squeaking axles: Worsley diary, June 10, 1915
“moans and groans of souls in torment”: Worsley diary, June 10, 1915
“My birthday”: McNish diary, Sept. 29, 1915