To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  Beyond the specific tasks given to the scientists and the added ones given to others, all members of the shore party followed an enforced routine of meals and sleep. Breakfast began at 9:00 A.M. sharp followed by a morning smoke. Lunch was catch-as-catch-can depending on one’s daily duties. Dinner came at 6:30 P.M. followed by tea, tobacco, and conversation until 7:30. Even though it was dark outside for twenty-four hours each day, the party followed the clock in keeping a set pattern of sleeping from around midnight to about 8:30 A.M. Everyone took turns both as “messman,” cleaning up after meals, and in standing the night watch. This included the fifty-year-old David—a Fellow of the Royal Society, or F.R.S.—who never sought or received special treatment. “It was a sight for the gods,” Priestley noted, “to see a well-known F.R.S., drying a wet plate with a wetter cloth, and looking ruefully at the islands of grease remaining, after he has spent five minutes hard at work on it.”48 By his willing attitude, David set an example for others.

  Each pair of men had a six-by-seven-foot designated cubicle for sleeping and storage. David and Mawson shared one that others called “The Old Curiosity Shop,” owing to its odd array of scientific instruments and geological specimens. Only Shackleton had a private room, but he swapped bunks with Brocklehurst while the baronet was recuperating from the amputation of his big toe. He used the occasion to try to cheer up Brocklehurst’s morose roommate, Bertram Armytage. To boost morale, Shackleton also visited the men as they worked, lending a hand or telling stories. It was his way to build esprit de corps.

  “He had a facility for treating each member of the expedition as though he were valuable to it,” Brocklehurst said of Shackleton. “He made us feel more important than we could have been.”49

  Despite later recollections that perfect harmony prevailed during the Nimrod Expedition, some dissension bubbled up from below. Armytage remained despondent despite Shackleton’s best efforts. Marshall’s diary overflowed with criticism of various members of the expedition, particularly Shackleton. Damning him as “a consummate liar & practiced hypocrite,” Marshall at one point depicted Shackleton as “a coward, a cad, who was incapable of keeping his word.”50 Shackleton’s broken vow to Scott about not wintering on Ross Island touched off Marshall’s venom, though it seemed rooted in the clash between the superior’s glib-tongued style and the subordinate’s judgmental religiosity. Then there was the prickly Mackay, who could overreact to perceived slights or indiscretions, as when a roommate stepped on his locker or when expedition artist George Marston, who sometimes dressed as a woman to lighten the mood, greeted him flirtatiously. These were exceptions to the rule, however. Due largely to Shackleton’s ability to pick and lead people, the shore party survived the long, dark Antarctic winter of 1908 in shape for a record-setting summer in 1909.51

  THE EXPLORERS NEEDED ALL the mental and physical reserves they had built up over the winter because in other respects they faced greater challenges than they had anticipated at the outset. Due to the orientation of the Ross Ice Shelf, starting the southern sledge journey at the west rather than the east end of the ice barrier added 120 miles to the distance from winter quarters to the south geographic pole and back. Losses had cut the number of ponies from ten to four, which was two less than Shackleton thought necessary for the southern sledge journey and left none for the northern sledge journey toward the south magnetic pole. Situating winter quarters at Cape Royds rather than Hut Point cut off the shore party from the route south during the critical months before midwinter darkness stopped all travel. As a result, the men could not lay advance supply depots for the southern sledge journey until spring. And of course the car proved useless for hauling supplies on the ice shelf. Each of these factors added to the man-hauling. Together, the combined effect was staggering.

  Fully aware of the expedition’s situation, Shackleton tried to right it as much as possible with the coming of first light. Although the sun would not rise above the horizon at Cape Royds until August 22, a distinct midday twilight began brightening the icescape earlier in the month. On August 12, Shackleton set out with David and Armytage to test conditions in the south with an eye toward beginning the movement of supplies well before the actual southern sledge journey could start, with the return of long days and warmer temperatures in late October. Anticipating extreme cold and bitter conditions on an August outing, rather than risk any of the remaining ponies, they man-hauled a single sledge the 20-some miles south to Hut Point. There, they spent one night in the Discovery Expedition’s drafty old shelter before proceeding another 12 miles south onto the ice shelf.

  “The surface generally was hard, but there were very marked sastrugi, and at time patches of soft snow,” Shackleton noted about travel on the ice shelf in late winter. “At 6 p.m. the thermometer showed fifty-six degrees below zero” and fell still lower before dawn. The party shared a single three-person sleeping bag in a lone tent. “Everything we touched was appallingly cold, and we got no sleep at all,” Shackleton wrote.52

  Turning back toward Hut Point in the morning, the men arrived at the shelter just before a blizzard struck. It kept them inside for five days. At these extreme temperatures, individual snow crystals become like glass shards. Propelled by gale-force winds across the glacial surface, they can penetrate layers of clothing and flash-freeze exposed flesh. It was hard to stand against the wind, and not much easier to crawl. With no hope of reaching Cape Royds until the weather cleared, they used the time to clean and reconfigure Scott’s shelter for use as a storage depot for the southern sledge party. Although not much farther south than Cape Royds, Hut Point offered direct access onto the ice shelf without fear of being cut off should the sea ice break out in McMurdo Sound.

  SO THE HAULING BEGAN, as the men took turns pulling sledges loaded with supplies from Cape Royds to Hut Point for the coming polar trek. “Sledging work in the spring, when the temperature is very low, the light bad, and the weather uncertain, is a rather severe strain on man and beast,” Shackleton wrote. And since by this point ponies were in shorter supply than people, he added, “Man-hauling was the order for the first journeys.”53 One party left each week for what was typically a four-day trek, two days out and two days back. Each hauled about a quarter ton of gear and provisions, half of which it left at Hut Point for use on the southern sledge journey with the remainder used or consumed on the trip. “Each party came back with adventures to relate, experiences to compare, and its own views on various matters of detail connected with sledge-travelling,” Shackleton observed. “Every one of the parties encountered bad weather.”54 By mid-September, enough equipment and supplies were stored at Hut Point for the polar trek. The focus shifted onto getting some of it farther south before the main journey commenced a month later.

  On September 22, Shackleton and five others began what they called the “southern depot journey”—a three-week, 320-mile march to move supplies onto the ice shelf. Much of this backbreaking man-hauling was in service of the ponies, which were not used in this trek. Dogs can eat what people eat. When they run out of food, they can eat each other. In short, as Peary, Amundsen, and the Duke of the Abruzzi learned, dogs pull their own weight even as they pull for the party, and when they reach the end of the line, they become food for each other and their handlers. Not so ponies. During a trip as long as the southern sledge journey, they eat more maize and compact fodder than they can haul, and will not eat one another. Men can eat ponies as well as dogs, of course, but there are more of the latter, allowing them to be culled selectively as needed for food. To accommodate the peculiar needs of a polar trek with ponies, the southern depot journey carried nothing but maize to stock a depot on the ice shelf over 100 miles south of Hut Point. By doing so, as Shackleton noted, “our load would be lightened considerably for the first portion of the journey when we started south.”55 In the meantime, however, everyone slated for the southern ledge journey had a brutal workout because all were among those participating in the maize-hauling depot journey. As a result, th
ey started the main mission already somewhat spent.

  In addition to himself, Shackleton chose Marshall, Adams, and Frank Wild for the polar party. Marshall knew cartography as well as medicine, so he was essential for the mission. Once Shackleton opted to send Mawson with David toward the magnetic pole and Brocklehurst became incapacitated, the choice of Adams and Wild for the southern sledge journey became all but obvious. Raised to the Royal Navy’s officer corps from positions in the merchant marine before leaving it to join the Nimrod Expedition, both were strong, smart, and self-reliant. “We only had four ponies left,” Adams later explained about the choice and number of men, “so it was the four fellows most likely to stay the course.”56

  The weak link was Shackleton, Marshall worried. Ever since his health problems on the Discovery Expedition’s southern journey, Shackleton had feared he had a weak heart. The palpitations that sometimes followed asthma attacks deepened his anxiety. He never had it checked out prior to the Nimrod Expedition for fear of what the doctor might find, but during an otherwise routine medical examination at Cape Royds, Marshall found that Shackleton had a heart murmur, though neither man knew its severity. The Boss (as Shackleton soon became known) still insisted on going south, and so he did.

  Each participant received a baptism in ice during the depot-laying trek. “The journey was a severe one, for the temperature got down to fifty-nine degrees below zero Fahr., with blizzard winds,” Shackleton reported. “Most of us had the experience at one time or other of dropping into a crevasse to the length of our harness.”57 The harnesses were one advantage of man-hauling sledges over glacial ice. When anyone broke through a snow lid and dropped into a deep crevasse, which was likely to happen without warning, the traces would arrest the fall with a stiff jerk on the upper torso, leaving one’s feet dangling in thin air and hands grasping for the ice walls on either side. The bottom could lie hundreds of feet below, resulting in certain death if nothing stopped the descent. No one was immune to the risk or became hardened to the danger. The more it happened, the more unnerving it became. It was worse for the ponies, though, because there was no lifting them back to the surface and an ever-present worry that any sledges in tow would follow them down the abyss. In this respect as well, dogs were a safer option because they pull in a pack rather than one to a sledge, tread lightly over snow lids, hang secure in their harnesses when they fall, and are easily pulled back up to the surface.

  For the southern depot party, after duly stocking the so-called Depot A with 167 pounds of maize, the return trip proved even worse than the outbound march. The temperature remained low and blizzards increased. “We could not see more than ten or fifteen yards ahead,” Shackleton noted at one point. “Then we found we were amongst crevasses, for first one man and then another put his foot through a snow lid.”58 Badly frostbitten on their faces from the bitter wind and blowing snow, the party camped in a hastily erected tent for thirty hours only a few miles from the Hut Point shelter. In all, the men had been able to march only about two out of every three days and lived on reduced rations by the end, which did not bode well for the polar journey. The six men finally reached Cape Royds hungry and tired on October 13, by which time David, Mawson, and Mackay had already left winter quarters for their thousand-mile round-trip trek to the south magnetic pole. Two weeks later, with the promise of perpetual daylight for the next four months, Shackleton, Marshall, Adams, and Wild headed back out, retracing their route for 150 miles to Depot A before beginning the added 700 miles to the geographic pole.

  The stage was set. With boundless faith in their cause, the Nimrod Expedition’s two polar parties, one heading northwest and another due south, hoped to reach their respective poles early in 1909. And as the Antarctic day extended to continuous light, the Arctic night descended into perpetual dark at the Roosevelt’s winter anchorage off Ellesmere Island, where Peary’s eighth and presumably last expedition waited for dawn to launch its final assault on the North Pole. Like Shackleton, Peary planned to reach his goal early in 1909. Meanwhile, as these parties struggled toward their goals, the Duke of the Abruzzi planned his expedition to reach a Pole of Altitude in the greater Himalayas.

  After decades of relentless striving by multiple parties toward those marks, 1909 was shaping up to become the year of their conquest. Adventure was in the air and on countless minds. The era’s omnipresent press fixated on these stories. To accommodate the burgeoning new media of silent film, Shackleton and the Duke of the Abruzzi took along motion-picture cameras to complement their battery of still cameras. With boundless resources, the duke also recruited the world’s premier mountain photographer, Vittorio Sella. Like Peary, they had visions of lasting glory to follow on the heels of reaching a pole. Claiming them, all three reasoned, would bring a symbolic close to the age of exploration and open one of limitless human attainment.

  Chapter 7

  The Savage North

  EVEN INTO THE EARLY twentieth century, ocean voyages severed communication with the mainland. Expeditions departed, navies dispatched, or ships sailed, and contact ended for months or more. Returning vessels might bring back reports, and letters could come from distant ports, but before the telegraph, once an overseas expedition sailed, no matter how newsworthy it was, the news largely stopped until it came back. Transcontinental and transoceanic telegraph wires and cables began bridging the gap during the 1800s, but these did not reach to the polar regions or, for that matter, the central Himalayas and Karakoram. Communicating with such places required wireless radio technology. The expeditions of 1909 were among the last to travel without transmitters. Just two years later, in 1911, Antarctic parties would take along wireless equipment that allowed them to talk directly with radio operators in Australia. In contrast, despite the widespread attention on Robert Peary when his expedition left New York in July 1908, and the growing interest in the race to the North Pole between him and Frederick Cook, the public knew virtually nothing about their exploits until they returned over a year later. The same, of course, was true of Shackleton’s British Antarctic Expedition.

  In the case of Peary’s expedition, the news largely dried up soon after his ship left Theodore Roosevelt’s Oyster Bay summer home. Skipping the slow voyage, Peary remained behind after his ship sailed and traveled instead with his family and some major donors by train to Sydney, Nova Scotia, the northernmost port with a rail connection, by way of his summer house at Eagle Island, Maine. Peary met the ship at Eagle Island, where it took on a spare rudder, and then boarded it at Sydney, where it loaded coal and supplies. A few more stops in Labrador followed to add whale meat for the dogs, pick up fur boots, and rendezvous with Peary’s old ship, the Erik, which was going along as far as Smith Sound with extra coal and whale meat.

  “When may your friends expect to hear from you again?” Peary was asked upon departure.

  “Late next Summer or early next Fall,” he replied.1

  While he made a few changes to improve on his last effort, such as planning to start farther east to counter sea-ice drift, to travel with his support parties as a group until those parties fell back, and to move his resupply base to a more northerly position, Peary vowed to take much the same approach as before. It was “the Peary System” or way.2 Captain Bob Bartlett was back from Peary’s last voyage, as was Ross Marvin, who in the meantime had become an engineering instructor at Cornell and whom Peary now listed as his “secretary,” and Matt Henson, who had been with Peary since 1887. “He is about forty years old,” Peary wrote at this time of Henson, “and can handle a sledge better, and is probably a better dog-driver, than any other man living, except some of the best of the Eskimo hunters.”3 Henson also knew the local language, and could communicate with the Inuit drivers and hunters. Like Peary, Henson had fathered at least one Inuit child and was well accepted in the Smith Sound community.

  Counting the ship’s crew, the Roosevelt sailed from Sydney with twenty-two men, all of whom would winter in the Arctic. This number included John Goodsell,
a solidly built Pennsylvania physician who served as the expedition’s surgeon, and two former New England varsity athletes, thirty-four-year-old fitness instructor Donald MacMillan of Peary’s Bowdoin College and twenty-one-year-old championship runner George Borup from Yale, each of whom idolized Peary as a model explorer and traveled as his “assistant.”4 Borup had rich parents, and, although Peary invited him to join the expedition “unconditionally” on June 14, within two days Peary asked him, and then his father, to contribute toward its unpaid expenses.5 Peary referred to Goodsell, MacMillan, and Borup as “my Arctic ‘tenderfeet’” and sought to toughen them for the grueling sledging ahead.6 At first Henson dismissed Borup, who had a ready smile and boyish face atop a strapping frame, as “the kid” but grew to admire his cheerfulness and pluck.7

  The expedition had a masculine cast. Of course, all prior polar expeditions had only taken men, except for the two times Peary took along his wife, Jo. Since those 1891 and 1893 trips, however, the Spanish-American War had occurred, Theodore Roosevelt had risen to prominence, and a cult of manliness had taken hold in America. Indeed, upon departing for his 1898–1902 expedition, this is how Peary explained his project to the American people: “I am after the Pole because it is the Pole; because it has a value as a test of intelligence, persistence, endurance, determined will, and perhaps, courage, qualities characteristic of the highest type of manhood.”8 In so saying, he spoke for the age.