In addition to David, the fourteen-member shore party included five persons charged mainly with conducting scientific work in the Antarctic and two surgeons. To distract them from storms and seasickness during the roughest part of the voyage south, Shackleton abruptly put all fourteen to work tending the distressed ponies, making hourly meteorological records, and operating hand pumps. David suspected that Shackleton did it to build morale. If so, it worked. “There can be no doubt that regular duties are healthful and chastening,” David wrote home from the voyage, and added about Shackleton, “He is certainly fulfilling the high expectations that had been formed of him as a leader.”27 For his part, Buckley returned to New Zealand praising Shackleton as a leader “under whose discipline and magnetic influence every member of the expedition will put forth his heartiest efforts.”28
And as for David, calling him as “hard as nails,” Shackleton wrote back from the Nimrod, “He will prove invaluable to me.”29 Shackleton and David may have made a heavenly match, but they consummated it in hellish conditions.
UNDER ITS OWN STEAM at last, the Nimrod headed south roughly along the 180th meridian until the morning of January 16, when it reached a broken wall of tabular icebergs drifting north. “Tongue and pen fail in attempting to describe the magic of such a scene,” Shackleton wrote. “As far as the eye could see from the crow’s-nest of the Nimrod, the great, white, wall-sided bergs stretched east, west and south, making a striking contrast with the lanes of blue-black water between them.” David compared it to sailing through Venice, but with buildings of pure alabaster and on a far vaster scale. “With full steam and all sail we hurried along, now down the wide waterways between burgs, now along narrow lanes, with a wall of ice to starboard and a wall of ice to port,” he wrote. “It was the most wonderful and fascinating sight, in the way of natural scenery, that had ever met our gaze.” The maze stretched for over 80 miles, north and south, and had untold breadth, east to west. After twelve hours passing through the bergs, Shackleton wrote, “A few more turnings and twistings through the devious water lanes, and we entered the ice free Ross Sea.”30
Once exiting the “silent city of the Snow King,” as David called the belt of icebergs, it was six days of smooth sailing south-by-southeast to the Great Ice Barrier.31 “We were now reveling in the indescribable freshness of the Antarctic that seems to permeate one’s being, and which must be responsible for that longing to go again which assails each returned explorer from polar regions,” Shackleton said of this part of the voyage.32 He loved being back, and the others delighted in discovering it for the first time.
Then another wonder: the barrier rose before them, a vertical wall of glacial ice reaching 200 or more feet above the waterline and extending up to 2,000 feet below it, the front of a floating ice shelf extending more than 500 miles south to the mainland. “It is hard again to convey in words what this wonderful ice barrier, which may fairly rank as the eighth wonder of the world, is really like,” David noted. “It seemed too mystic and wonderful for this earth, and fitter rather for those ‘crystal battlements of Heaven’ that Milton pictured.” Shackleton commented on the “exclamations of wonder and astonishment at the stupendous bulk of the Barrier” from everyone on board who had not seen it before.33 In an age of high adventure, the Antarctic was working its magic.
Upon reaching the barrier, Shackleton sailed east along its front looking for the twin inlets that Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross Expedition and Scott’s Discovery Expedition had charted earlier in the decade. In these inlets, those expeditions had landed parties that sledged for a few miles southward over the ice shelf. Shackleton planned to winter here, but the ice front had broken off, leaving one large bay, which he named the Bay of Whales, where two inlets had been. That raised concerns about the safety of wintering on the ice shelf. Further, a thick skin of sea ice blocked the ship from entering far enough into the bay to find moorage. Shackleton looked farther east for landing sites, but sea ice again barred the way, leaving him with the apparent alternatives of returning west toward Ross Island or going north to New Zealand. But for his promise not to use Scott’s route toward the pole, Ross Island was the obvious pick. As he put it in a letter to his wife, Shackleton had to choose between either the duty owed his men and country to carry on or the honor of keeping his word to Scott. “Of course, for a moment the second alternative could not be entertained,” David declared. “So with a heavy heart I gave the order for turning back” to Ross Island, Shackleton explained to his wife. “My conscience is clear but my heart is sore.”34
Arriving at Ross Island on January 28, Shackleton spent a week exploring landing sites before settling on Cape Royds, a rocky promontory jutting from the island’s west coast into McMurdo Sound. He had hoped to reach the Discovery’s old anchorage, where Scott’s expedition had left a cabin, or “hut,” on shore, but the sea ice had not yet gone out that far south. Cape Royds, 23 miles north of Scott’s Hut Point base, was as far as the Nimrod could sail in 1908. The chosen site boasted an Adélie penguin rookery for eggs and meat, a shallow lake for freshwater, and an easy slope from the shore to a level site for buildings. Work began at once unloading the tons of supplies, equipment, ponies, car, and other materials needed for the expedition. Racing to get the ship unpacked before the weather turned, the men labored long hours for two weeks until the Nimrod departed on February 22, leaving them to face winter on their own. They erected a 19-by-33-foot prefabricated wooden hut for themselves, makeshift stables for the ponies, and a shed for the automobile. The hut’s door opened to a stunning view of the Western Mountains rising across McMurdo Sound on the Victoria Land coast. Mount Erebus, the active volcano then assumed to be Antarctica’s highest peak, rose dramatically behind them.
WHILE IN SOME WAYS Cape Royds offered a good setting for Shackleton’s winter quarters, and a more scenic one than either Scott’s Hut Point or Borchgrevink’s base at Cape Adare, it had one major drawback as the starting point for a trek to the South Pole. Unlike Hut Point, which had ready access onto the Ross Ice Shelf, Cape Royds was cut off by bays, glaciers, and ice falls in the south. The only practical way by foot, sledge, or motorcar from Cape Royds toward the South Pole lay over the sea ice to Hut Point and from there onto the ice shelf. Once that sea ice broke apart, shortly after the expedition’s arrival in February, the explorers could not travel south until the ice reformed during the winter, by which time it was too dark for anyone to venture far from the base until spring. The south magnetic pole was equally problematic on foot from Cape Royds. It lay across McMurdo Sound, which was open water when the expedition arrived and only froze over in winter.
The location of his expedition’s winter quarters left Shackleton with a dilemma. During March and April, before the full onset of winter, he planned to lay advance supply depots along the route south in preparation for his dash to the pole, which he hoped to begin in October of the following spring. Not only would these depots measurably assist the southern sledge journey, laying them would give his restless men something constructive to do. As Cook and Amundsen had discovered during the 1897–98 Belgian expedition, and Borchgrevink’s men had learned during the 1899–1900 Southern Cross Expedition, idleness and lack of purpose among persons cooped together through a long Antarctic winter leads to bitterness, backbiting, and both mental and physical illness. On both expeditions, members died over the winter and collegiality was lost forever.
A natural leader, Shackleton knew his men should not remain idle during the winter and planned various activities for them. To help keep his men occupied and working together during the Discovery Expedition, Scott had them write and print a newspaper, which Shackleton edited. Besting Scott, Shackleton took along equipment so that his men could publish a book, Aurora Australis, with many of them contributing articles, short stories, poems, or illustrations. Like Scott, he also planned to have the men keep regular meteorological and other scientific records, celebrate birthdays and holidays, engage in sports, and maintain a daily regi
men of work, meals, leisure, and sleep. Further, his men had ponies to tend, which included regular feedings and exercise. Perhaps as important as anything, Shackleton brought along an acetylene gas lighting system to keep the hut bright during the midwinter darkness. But he struggled to come up with a meaningful replacement for laying depots in the south until he looked more closely at the mountain rising behind Cape Royds. Some speculate that David gave him the idea.
Mount Erebus, though well known since James Clark Ross’s day as the world’s most southerly active volcano, had never been climbed. “From a geological point of view the mountain ought to reveal some interesting facts,” Shackleton wrote. “Apart from scientific considerations, the ascent of a mountain over 13,000 ft. in height, situated so far south, would be a matter of pleasurable excitement both to those who were selected as climbers and to the rest of us who wished for our companions’ success.”35 Though no one in the group had training or equipment for mountaineering, Shackleton felt that climbing Erebus in the fall would give his men a sense of shared achievement to savor over the winter. Further, it could provide material for the expedition’s book, and, at a time when interest in mountain climbing was ascendant and first ascents hailed, it would represent a noteworthy feat for the expedition, different from anything that Scott’s Discovery Expedition accomplished. Shackleton was all for firsts and farthests, especially if they involved beating Scott.
The enterprise came together quickly. “No sooner was it decided to make the ascent, which was arranged for, finally, on March 4, than the winter quarters became busy with the bustle of preparation,” Shackleton wrote, “yet such was the energy thrown into this work that the men were ready for the road and made a start at 8.30 a.m. on the 5th.”36 They jury-rigged three pairs of crampons by driving spikes through strips of leather, which were then looped with straps so they could be attached, nail-points down, onto the bottom of the climbers’ finnesko boots. In place of backpacks, which the expedition did not carry, the climbers strapped their sleeping bags over their backs and shoulders as a sort of makeshift knapsack. They also hauled an 11-foot sledge loaded with a quarter ton of supplies as far as possible up the mountain, which proved to be about a third of the way.
Attuned to the potential geologic significance of the climb, Shackleton tapped David, Mawson, and the expedition’s Scottish assistant surgeon, Forbes Mackay, for the main party assigned to summit. Shackleton would remain behind. The expedition’s second-in-command, Jameson Adams; its assistant geologist, the young, adventure-loving English baronet Philip Brocklehurst; and chief surgeon Eric Marshall went along to help pull the sledge as far as it would go up the mountain, with authority to continue on to the summit should conditions warrant. Shackleton was considering all three members of this supporting party for the polar trek and saw the climb as a chance to test their mettle. Given their enthusiasm and ambition, the men naturally found conditions warranting all six to attempt the summit.
ALTHOUGH CAPE ROYDS SITS on the flanks of Mount Erebus only 17 miles from the summit, the climb was complicated by a steeply rising grade, bitter cold, inadequate preparations, and a blizzard. “At one spot,” Shackleton wrote, “the party had a hard struggle, mostly on their hands and knees, in their effort to drag the sledge up the surface of smooth blue ice thinly coated with loose snow.”37 At others, deep sastrugi, or wind furrows in the crusted snow, made pulling uphill almost impossible. “Frequently,” David wrote, “these ‘sastrugi’ caused our sledge to capsize, and several times it had not only to be righted, but repacked.”38
On day three, at an altitude that David estimated as 5,630 feet, or less than halfway up the mountain, the climbers exchanged their 560-pound sledge for 40-pound improvised knapsacks and proceeded with only essentials. “Some of us with our sleeping bags hanging down our backs, with the foot of the bag curled upwards and outwards, resemble the scorpion men of the Assyrian sculpture,” David wrote; “others marched with their household goods done up in the form of huge sausages.”39 Beginning that night, gale-force southeast winds pinned them in two collapsed tents for thirty-two hours at 8,750 feet above sea level. “There was nothing for it, while the blizzard lasted, but to lie low in our sleeping-bags,” David noted.40
The storm passed after a full day and two nights, and the combined party resumed its ascent. Nearing the rim of the volcano’s old, dormant crater, which lay about 2,000 feet below the new, active one, the slope became so steep that the climbers had to cut steps in the hard-packed snow with an ice ax or resort to rocky arêtes where possible. Climbing was difficult even for those with crampons and nearly impossible for those without them. Unaccustomed to the altitude and burdened with heavy loads, the climbers gasped for air.
Reaching the rim after noon on March 9, the men made camp with the intention of spending the rest of the day exploring the old crater. Climbing on his twenty-first birthday in badly fitting ski shoes that pinched off circulation to his toes, Brocklehurst had developed frostbite in both feet that he only now admitted. It later cost him a big toe and a place in the polar sledge party; for now, it cost him the summit. He stayed in camp as the others entered the crater. Here, crossing a snow plain, the men found a fairyland of whimsically shaped, hollow ice mounds, formed when hot steam rising from volcanic vents hits the frigid Antarctic air. No one had seen such a sight; it took David to explain it.
Starting the next morning at 6 A.M., the party (minus Brocklehurst) made for the mountain’s summit at the active crater’s rim. “Our progress was now painfully slow, as the altitude and cold combined to make respiration difficult,” David reported. “The cone was built up chiefly of blocks of pumice, from a few inches up to three feet in diameter.” The top was reached after four hours of hard climbing. “The scene that now suddenly burst upon us was magnificent and awe-inspiring,” David wrote. “We stood on the verge of a vast abyss, and at first could neither see to the bottom, nor across it, on account of the huge mass of steam filling the crater.” After a northerly breeze cleared the air, David added, “Mawson’s measurements made the depth 900 feet, and the greatest width about half a mile.”41 Using a combination of methods, the party placed its altitude at 13,370 feet above sea level, which was nearly 600 feet too high but stood for generations as the mountain’s accepted elevation.
With their injured companion waiting at the last campsite, the climbers quickly headed back down once they took photographs and measurements. Reaching Brocklehurst after noon, the party pushed on past one more prior campsite in a single afternoon. “Finding an almost endless succession of snow slopes below us, we let ourselves go again and again, in a series of wild rushes towards the foot of the main cone,” David recalled.42 Tossing their packs ahead and using ice axes like rudders, they had slid well over halfway down the mountain by 10 P.M., to where they had left the sledge. Marshall described the plunge: “Pushing bag, glissading, following up, recovering it, dragging, shoving, soaked through.” After one more night out, all six climbers stumbled into winter quarters before noon on the next day. “Bruised all over,” Marshall wrote, “nearly dead.”43 They were greeted with champagne and Quaker Oats. Along with its two polar treks, this first ascent of Mount Erebus became one of the expedition’s three best-known feats. “Fierce was the fight to gain that height,” Shackleton wrote in a poem commemorating the event.44
EVEN AS THE EXPLORERS celebrated the Erebus party’s success, they had growing concerns about their main mission. The car, they found, would not operate on snow, which made it useless for the South Pole trek. The drive wheels spun in place, one of the mechanics noted, “Burying themselves to such an extent that the car moved not an inch.”45 Shackleton had never placed much faith in motor transport, however. He was relying on ponies to pull the sledges across the snow-covered ice shelf toward the pole and thought that six were needed for the job. Two ponies had died due to the rough voyage, leaving eight. Another succumbed during the unloading process after eating wood shavings used to pack chemicals. A fourth pony, unfortunately
named Sandy, died at winter quarters while the Erebus party was away. Seeking the cause, a postmortem found Sandy’s stomach full of sand. Upon landing, the ponies had been picketed on sandy ground that sea spray had coated with salt, leading the pony to eat the sand. “All the ponies seem to have done this, but some were more addicted to the habit than the others,” Shackleton reported. “We shifted them at once from the place where they were picketed, so that they could get no more sand, and gave them what remedial treatment lay in our power, but two more died in spite of all our efforts.”46 By the onset of winter, only four ponies survived: Socks, Quan, Grisi, and Chinaman.
With the deepening darkness and worsening weather limiting outings to Cape Royds and its environs from May through August, Shackleton and his party settled into a winter routine that lasted for four months. David and Raymond Priestley, a novice British geologist who had signed on to the expedition before anyone knew that a scientist of David’s stature would join it, ventured as far afield as conditions permitted collecting rock specimens and then sorted and studied them over the long Antarctic night. Priestley later credited his work with David as the inspiration for his own distinguished career in science.
David’s restless energy did not stop with collecting rocks. Drawing on his youthful experience charting the retreat of Ice Age glaciers by the placement of erratic boulders left behind in his native Wales, David, aided by Priestley and Mawson, used this technique to study the history of glacier movement in the McMurdo Sound basin. Although David and Mawson said they joined the Nimrod Expedition to study an “ice age in being,” by their examination of erratic boulders, they became the first to find that glaciers were retreating even in the Antarctic.47 For his individual research, stretching his official role as the expedition’s physicist to include work in his favored field of glaciology, while taking the obligatory magnetic readings of the southern lights, Mawson studied the structure of ice and snow crystals at low temperatures.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 15