Bradley’s yacht had taken along supplies for this purpose, and the ship’s twenty-nine-year-old German steward and cook, Rudolph Franke, volunteered to remain with Cook. They built a hut from packing crates on Greenland’s Smith Sound coast 15 miles north of Etah, gathered the local Inuits around them, and settled in for the winter. News of Cook’s planned assault on the North Pole spread rapidly. Newspapers reprinted Cook’s letter and hailed the prospect of an American race to the pole between him and Peary.
Peary was livid. He did not think that Cook, who had little sledging experience and none whatsoever on the polar ice pack, could reach the pole. Peary’s fear was that Cook might claim it nonetheless.
At the urging of the Peary Arctic Club, Columbia University professor Herschel Parker, who had joined Cook on his second Denali expedition until convinced that it was futile, now denounced Cook’s claim to have climbed North America’s highest mountain. “He might have ascended one of the peaks in the range,” Parker said, “but I do not believe that he made the ascent of Mount McKinley.”58 Peary then agreed to succeed Cook as president of the Explorers Club on the condition that it would question any claim that Cook reached the pole. Peary also published warnings that, in the event Cook returned before him claiming the pole, no one should believe him, and sent letters to supporters urging them to denounce any such claims by Cook.59
In the developing media battle, the New York Times (which held exclusive newspaper rights to Peary’s own story nationally through syndication) became Peary’s mouthpiece while the larger New York Herald favored Cook and bought his story. “That Cook had got the start of Peary does not count for so much,” the Times commented in October 1907. “Peary will be in the race.”60 Its editors clearly hoped so because they paid Peary a $4,000 advance for exclusive first rights to his story of reaching the pole.
Matters stood on the precipice, with the public divided and popular interest mounting as Peary’s ship made its courtesy call at Oyster Bay on July 7, 1908, for inspection by the president before steaming north toward the Arctic. “Decks of the ‘Roosevelt’ must be cleared absolutely,” Peary wrote to Captain Bartlett in anticipation of the presidential visit, “even if some of the stuff has to be pulled out of the hold again later.”61 After Peary and his wife lunched with the first family at Roosevelt’s summer home, the entire party toured the ship, with the president showing keen interest. “Nothing escaped his attention,” Bartlett noted. “He went into the lower hold and into the engine room. He inspected Peary’s quarters and the living spaces of the sailors.”62 The president insisted on personally greeting everyone aboard. “It’s ninety or nothing; ‘the North Pole or bust’ this time, Mr. President,” Bartlett declared.
“We’ll reach the pole, Mr. President, if it is possible for human beings to get there,” Peary added.
“Yes,” Roosevelt replied with a toothy grin, “I believe in you, Peary.”63
Chapter 6
Beyond the Screaming Sixties
MIDSUMMER DAYLIGHT IN THE Arctic coincides with midwinter darkness in the Antarctic. Thus, by the time Peary’s expedition left New York in July 1908, Shackleton’s men were tucked into their winter quarters on Antarctica’s Ross Island. When full daylight returned in October, they could focus their undivided effort on their polar sledge trips. After what these men had already endured, they had to wonder, how much worse could it get? Bonded by shared adversity, boyish enthusiasm, and Shackleton’s charismatic leadership, they were prepared for virtually anything. Adventure was in the air, and with Shackleton in charge, it infused the entire enterprise.
THE EXPEDITION HAD STARTED royally. King Edward VII, who then reigned over the largest empire in history, Queen Alexandra, two of their adult children, including the Prince of Wales, the future King George V, and George’s twelve-year old son, the future King Edward VIII, personally inspected Shackleton’s diminutive ship, the Nimrod, on August 5, 1907, two days before its departure from England. It was a grubby little barkentine: a forty-year-old, 136-foot-long, oak-hulled, steam-and-sail-propelled Newfoundland sealer that had suffered more than its fair share of hard use and heavy seas over the years. But it was solidly built and, at £5,000, within Shackleton’s limited budget. Even at that price, title was held by expedition patron William Beardmore, who had made a fortune manufacturing armor plate and heavy guns for Royal Navy vessels before diversifying into building the ships themselves. Beardmore, who went to the same private school as Shackleton, had hired the explorer as something of a roving company spokesperson after he returned from the Discovery Expedition without suitable job prospects.
For its royal inspection, the Nimrod anchored in Cowes Harbor on the Isle of Wight, near the newly commissioned HMS Dreadnought, the largest ship in the British navy and first in a new class of big-gun battleships that would revolutionize naval warfare for a generation. Many reports commented on the contrast. Both ships were there as part of Cowes Week, an annual regatta and naval show that, in 1906, featured nearly two hundred battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and submarines of the Royal Navy’s newly formed home fleet, which was created to counter the growing threat of German naval expansion. By extending Britain’s claims in the Antarctic and perhaps establishing them all the way to the South Pole, the Nimrod was serving somewhat similar imperial purposes as the Dreadnought. The little ship had been summoned to Cowes Week by royal command, delaying its departure from England for several days.
Boarding the Nimrod by steam pinnace from the royal yacht Victoria and Albert must have come as something of a shock for the royals, who were dressed in the finest yachting attire. By some accounts, the ship’s smell was pungent and its deck crowded to the point of cluttered. “The King expressed a desire to see the equipment of the vessel, and he and the Queen and the rest of the distinguished company were shown the sledges, sleeping-bags, tents, and a vast variety of preserved foods,” one report noted. “Heaps of fur-lined clothing also attracted the attention of their Majesties. In respect to one stout blue suit the King, with a smile, remarked to the lieutenant, ‘Do you think you will find this warm enough?’” Having rejected Fridtjof Nansen’s advice that the explorers wear outer garments made from the skins of Arctic animals and instead opted to manufacture them from donated, British-made Burberry gabardine, Shackleton could at best reply, “It should do.”1
After the queen presented Shackleton with a Union Jack to plant at the South Pole and the king conferred on him the Royal Victorian Order for service to the empire, Edward VII concluded, “There is nothing left for me to do except to wish you a very safe and prosperous voyage in connection with your important and difficult enterprise.”2 Few British explorers had ever received such a royal send-off.
WITH ONLY ITS CREW aboard, the Nimrod sailed from England on August 7, 1907, bound for New Zealand by way of Cape Town and a long, slow crossing of the Indian Ocean. Oval shaped with a broad, ironclad bow and wide beam, the ship bobbed through the ocean like a toy boat, pitching and rolling excessively but always righting itself.
“The ship is good, but dirty when deep,” Captain Rupert English reported to Shackleton after the Nimrod reached New Zealand on November 23, following a three-and-a-half-month passage.3 One Australian newspaper described it as “the smallest craft that has ever tried to reach the South Pole.”4 Nevertheless, over two thousand people had turned out to see it off from England, and twenty-five times that number did the same from its final port of call in New Zealand. Thinking better of taking the long voyage, Shackleton and the entire shore crew traveled by fast steamers, some leaving as late as November 7 but still catching up with the Nimrod in Lyttelton.
Added time in London followed by a series of stops in Australia gave Shackleton a chance to complete preparations and raise funds for an expedition that he had organized on the fly and financed on a shoestring. He had told his wife, Emily, about the expedition only in mid-February 1907, less than six months before the Nimrod sailed and barely six weeks after she had given birth to thei
r first child.
“It will only be one year and I shall come back with honour and with money and never never part from you again,” he promised her in a letter that he closed with the words “Your Boy, Ernest, Your lover and husband.”5
Emily knew it was a promise Ernest could not keep. “It was his own spirit ‘a soul whipped on by the wander fire’ that would keep him going back,” Emily later commented.6
Indeed, without tipping his hand, seven weeks before telling his wife about the trip, Shackleton had said to Royal Geographical Society librarian Hugh Robert Mill about the lure of Antarctica, “What would I not give to be out there again doing the job, and this time really on the way to the Pole.”7 At the time, Mill could not reveal that Robert Scott was planning a second polar expedition for 1910, and it came as a shock to Scott when Shackleton publicly announced his own strikingly similar plans at one of the society’s dinner meetings in February 1907.
“It is held that the southern sledge party of the Discovery would have reached a much higher altitude if they had been more adequately equipped,” Shackleton then said of his own failed polar dash with Scott in 1902. “In the new expedition, in addition to dogs, Siberian ponies will be taken, as the surface of the land or ice over which they will have to travel will be eminently suited for this mode of sledge travelling.” He also announced that he would take along an Arrol-Johnston automobile modified for driving on ice, without mentioning that Beardmore, the automaker’s largest stockholder, brokered the arrangement as a publicity stunt.8 Neither the ponies nor the car worked well in Antarctic conditions.
Pointing out that dogs performed admirably for Peary and the Duke of the Abruzzi in their polar quests, Nansen had urged Shackleton to rely on them. The British explorer could not forget his bad experience with dog-sledging during the Discovery Expedition, however, and would not admit that poor handling had caused it. The only dogs he took along were those left in New Zealand after Borchgrevink’s 1898–1900 expedition, and he would never give them a chance to show their stuff. If the ponies and car failed, which they did, Shackleton vowed to fall back on old-fashioned British man-hauling, which he did. He even rejected Nansen’s plea to try skis, which the Norwegian had so successfully used in Greenland.
In his initial public announcement and an earlier private circular, Shackleton identified reaching the south geographic and magnetic poles as his new expedition’s twin objectives, with primacy for the former. The Discovery Expedition’s old Ross Island base would be his winter quarters. “The expedition has the support of many influential men who wish British prestige in exploration to maintain its premier place,” Shackleton boasted.9
Upon learning of Shackleton’s plans, Scott was livid. Fearing a British competitor for the pole, Scott asserted a proprietary right to the Ross Island route toward the South Pole, much as Peary claimed the Smith Sound route toward the North Pole. Both claims had little basis even under strict Victorian standards of rectitude, but Shackleton relented under pressure from the Royal Geographical Society. He agreed to establish his winter quarters where Borchgrevink’s expedition had briefly landed near the ice barrier’s eastern end and to sledge south across the ice shelf where it abutted King Edward VII Land in the east. The route had its advantages: the distance from the barrier’s edge to the geographic pole was 60 miles less starting from there rather than from Ross Island. But the route south was utterly unexplored, and the magnetic pole most likely would be beyond reach.
DURING THE FINAL WEEKS of 1907, the Nimrod with twenty-two officers and crewmen; Shackleton and eleven members of the shore party from Britain; Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and two others that Shackleton had recruited in Australia; and fifteen ponies from Manchuria converged on Lyttelton, New Zealand. They were ready to sail south on January 1, 1908. The small ship was so chock-full of supplies and equipment that five ponies had to be left behind. As their common cabin, fifteen members of the shore party shared a 24-by-6-foot aft hold, reached by climbing down a hatch from the foredeck and packed with the shore parties’ luggage and equipment, which one occupant described as “more like my idea of Hell than anything I have ever imagined.”10 Even the ever-optimistic Shackleton termed it a “twentieth-century Black Hole.”11 Six-foot-three-inch-tall Mawson called it “an awful hole” and opted instead to sleep in a lifeboat on deck, even during raging storms.12 Shackleton billeted with two others in the captain’s cabin.
Worse yet, with everything else aboard, the ship could not carry enough coal to make the round trip safely. To conserve fuel, Shackleton persuaded a local steamship company and the New Zealand government to provide a ship to tow the Nimrod as far as the ice pack—or over 1,600 miles through the world’s most notorious seas. Even with this aid, the Nimrod sailed with its waterline 2 feet below the safe maximum draft, virtually assuring that water would spill over the deck in even moderately heavy seas. “We would have added at least another fifty tons to our two hundred and fifty; but the risk was too great,” Shackleton said of the stores.13 Towing aggravated the situation by pulling the ship’s bow down, into oncoming waves.
Nevertheless, the Nimrod received a resounding send-off from Lyttelton Harbour on New Year’s Day, a midsummer holiday and the date of the harbor’s annual regatta. “Quays, piers, shipping were just a swaying, shouting mass of humanity,” David wrote of the throng that gathered there.14 “Tremendous crowds everywhere on hills, special steamers, [and a] fleet of 4 warships, including flagship” of the Royal Navy’s Australian fleet, Mawson noted. Estimates placed the number of spectators at fifty thousand.15 Shackleton put the figure at thirty thousand for the harbor entrance alone, with another six or seven thousand on the special steamers. “The air trembled with the crash of guns, the piercing steam whistles and sirens of every steamship in the port, and a roar of cheering,” he wrote. “Then we drew abreast of the flagship and from the throats of the nine hundred odd bluejackets aboard her we got a ringing farewell, and across the water came the sound of her band playing ‘Hearts of oak are our ships,’ followed by ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”16 Shackleton’s bare-bones expedition had become a grand voyage of empire.
WITH THE NIMROD PERILOUSLY overloaded and in tow, those aboard it hoped for a smooth passage. They did not get one. Three separate gales pounded the ship as it passed through the so-called Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties. “The little Nimrod pitched about like a cork on the ocean,” Shackleton wrote on the second day. “The seas began to break over her, and we were soon wet through.” Two days later he added, “As evening wore on the weather became worse, and we shipped huge quantities of water.” Calling it a “struggle against nature in its sternest mood,” Shackleton reported that “the Nimrod rolled over fifty degrees from perpendicular to each side; how much more than that I cannot say, for the indicator recording the roll of the ship was only marked up to fifty degrees, and the pointer hand passed that mark.”17 Rolls of this magnitude repeatedly put the ship more than halfway onto its side in raging seas. Water rushed through the deck-level wardroom and poured into the shore party’s below-deck cabin.
Every living thing on board suffered. “We were nearly all more or less horribly sea-sick,” David wrote, speaking for the nonsailors aboard. “Many even of the officers were distinctly off-colour.” With each sharp roll, the ponies were thrown headlong or hind-first into the ends of their stalls and struggled to remain standing.18 “On going aft,” chief surgeon Eric Marshall noted on January 9, “a huge sea came on deck & left me hanging on to a life line with a seething mass of water up to my waist. It was goodbye to anyone who let go.”19
Without fear of understatement, Mawson commented on the voyage a day later, “Up to date life has been hideous.” Surveying the damage so far, he added, “The bulwarks and some deck houses are broken, one dog and a pony are dead.”20 Marshall admitted to being “sick as hell.”21 One officer declared, “I have never seen such large seas in the whole of my seagoing career.”22
The Nimrod survived its harrowing voyage with no lo
ss of human life. On January 15, after two weeks at sea, a white line of ice appeared on the southern horizon. After a brief exchange of letters, supplies, and one passenger, the tow ship cut its cable and turned north, leaving the Nimrod to sail south through the ice and into the Ross Sea. The exchanged passenger, Maclean Buckley, was a wealthy English yachtsman with landholdings in New Zealand who, scarcely an hour before the Nimrod left Lyttelton, joined it on a lark with nothing but the summer suit on his back and an overnight bag from his club in Christchurch. A £500 donation secured his passage as far as the ice pack. He joined “for sheer love of adventure,” Shackleton said of Buckley, who previously had sailed his yacht around the world.23 According to David, Buckley stood on deck shouting “Splendid!” and “Well done, old girl!” as the Nimrod crashed through the storm-tossed sea.24 With the ice in sight, Buckley returned north with the tow ship and more thrilling tales of survival at sea.
The letters sent back with the tow ship included one from David saying that he would stay with the expedition through 1909 rather than return with the Nimrod as first agreed. Shackleton made the offer on the voyage, David claimed, and he accepted.25 David’s wife, Cara, expected something of this sort all along. Interviewed when the expedition left, she had said about David, “I believe he is praying that the Nimrod will be iced in, so that he will have some excuse to stay.”26 The love of adventure that had carried him from Oxford to a geologic survey post in colonial Australia, repeated expeditions into the bush, and research on Funafuti was not extinguished when he reached age fifty. For a geologist of his stature, Antarctica was the destination of a lifetime. For an expedition leader with Shackleton’s ambitions, David’s presence offered the promise of scientific credibility beyond even what Scott had gained with his big-budget Discovery Expedition. If the deal was sealed on the voyage south after each of these larger-than-life figures had fully sized each other up, rather than before departure as some historians suspect, it was a match made amid conditions that gave both men fair warning of the challenges ahead. Neither would have been deterred by them.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 14