The Ross Ice Shelf, which is about the size of France, has a smooth or undulating surface except where it abuts land and the resulting friction upturns hummocks and opens crevasses. Fed by glaciers from the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, it varies from about 1,000 to over 2,000 feet in thickness and contains over 50,000 cubic miles of frozen freshwater, making it the largest flowing body of ice in the world and the source of enormous tabular icebergs. In 1902, when Shackleton traversed some 300 miles of it with Scott and Edward Wilson, they hugged the Victoria Land coast, where the disrupted surface slowed their progress. This time, Shackleton led his party along a line running parallel to the coast but sufficiently east of it to gain a better surface. At some points, he likened it to “a billiard table, with no sign of any undulation”; at others, he spoke of “long undulations, the width from crest to crest being about one and a half miles, and the rise about 1 in 100.” Sometimes the surface was icy firm; sometimes soft with snow; and sometimes covered with a hard crust that the ponies broke through but dogs could have walked across easily.23
“We have never seen the surface alike for two consecutive days,” Shackleton noted on November 14. It is “as wayward and as changeful as the sea.” The direction stayed fixed, however: “We are going straight as a die to the south,” he wrote.24
As it turned out, this route also provided a more dramatic view of the Western Mountains than Scott’s close-in perspective. “Each mile shows us new land, and most of it consists of lofty mountains whose heights at present we cannot estimate,” Shackleton wrote on November 24 about the view toward the southwest. “There is an impression of limitless solitude about it all that makes us feel so small as we trudge along, a few dark spots on the snowy plain, and watch the new land appear.”25
So far as Shackleton knew at the time, those mountains could remain to the west as his party marched south. If so, the ice shelf might extend all the way to the South Pole, which by this point was (as he noted) about “750 miles as the crow flies.”26 In that event, he had the men and means to get there and back in time to meet the ship by March and return home in June. Of course, crows do not fly to the pole. As Shackleton soon learned, neither would his party. The pole did not lie on the ice shelf, as he hoped, but over those lofty mountains, which slowly swung from his right to dead ahead as the party pushed farther south.
Through late November, however, the party sped along over the ice shelf at a clip in excess of 15 miles per day, with ponies doing most of the hauling. The oldest pony, Chinaman, was put down on November 21 and butchered on the spot. He “was the least fit,” Wild noted matter-of-factly.27 Shackleton added about Chinaman, “He cannot keep up with the others, and the bad surface has played him out.”28 By then the load had diminished through the laying of depots for the return trip and the consumption of food to where it could fit on three sledges. Further, the men gained fresh meat for their diet, which Marshall viewed as essential to preventing scurvy.
“The killing of the ponies was not pleasant work,” Shackleton conceded. “Marshall and Wild would skin the carcass, and we took the meat off the legs, shoulders and back. In the case of Chinaman the carcass was opened and the liver and undercut secured, but the job was such a lengthy one that we did not repeat it in the case of the other animals.”29 Shackleton could not bring himself to do the killing. That duty fell to Wild, who used Marshall’s pistol. “We got about 150 lbs of good beef off him, which will be a welcome addition to our bill of fare,” Wild noted in his diary.30
Shackleton consoled readers at this point in his published narrative with a comment that the ponies were “well treated to the last, and that they suffered no pain.”31 If he believed this, then it evidenced a remarkable blindness. Marshall noted near the outset of the march that the ponies “seem very unhappy” and were “off their feeds,” eating little.32 Shackleton later observed that, when marching over the ice shelf, “the poor ponies are having a most trying time. They break through the crust on the surface and flounder up to their hocks.”33 Often they sank to their bellies in soft snow, he added.34 “Cruel work for the ponies,” Wild called it.35 Sweating through their hides doing heavy hauling in freezing weather, they also suffered miserably from the cold and wind, especially when tethered overnight.
“A DAY TO REMEMBER,” Shackleton wrote of November 26, 1908. His party had surpassed Scott’s farthest south and done so in half the time. “We celebrated,” Shackleton reported, “with a four-ounce bottle of Curaçao.” He felt exonerated of the charge of unfitness that Scott had leveled against him after the Discovery Expedition’s disappointing polar trek. He also expressed a sense of “awe” at viewing “land not previously seen by human eyes.” Of those never-before-seen mountains appearing in “the south-south-east,” however, Shackleton added ominously, “I trust that no land will block our path.”36 For the pole to lie at or near sea level on the ice shelf, as Shackleton hoped, those mountains should remain to the west or southwest. If, however, the range swung around to the east or southeast, the peaks would stand astride their path to the pole and make reaching it fearfully more difficult. The men veered reluctantly to the southeast to avoid the mountains, and hoped for the best.
The southern party had gone so far so fast in November because of the ponies, but the animals could not pull heavy sledges through deep snow day after day, only to stand outside in the cold wind each night. Unlike Peary’s Inuit dogs, no one bred Manchurian ponies for such work. Wild put down Grisi one week after Chinaman and shot Quan three days later, leaving a depot of horsemeat at each spot. Three ponies gone; only Socks remained. He missed his mates and whinnied dolefully for them at night.
So long as two survived, the ponies could still do all the heavy hauling by consolidating the shrinking load onto two sledges weighing 630 pounds each. With only Socks, however, the men had to haul the second sledge. Then bitterness began bubbling over, with Wild in his diary scorning Marshall and Adams for not pulling their weight and Marshall privately faulting Shackleton’s leadership. “Following Sh[ackleton] to pole is like following an old woman,” Marshall wrote in his diary. “Always pausing.”37
One such delay began on December 2, as Shackleton looked for a way forward. Mountains curved across the southern horizon from northwest to southeast, leading him to suspect that his party had nearly reached the ice shelf’s end while still 450 miles from the pole. Worse, the inflow of an enormous glacier from the Western Mountains horribly disrupted the surface ahead. Unable to proceed on the Ross Ice Shelf, the party veered back to the south toward those mountains, which ran in a decidedly southeast direction. The pole, Shackleton worried, lay on the other side, across the mountains, on the snow-covered high-altitude East Antarctic Ice Sheet: the coldest, driest, windiest place on earth. Scott named it “the Great Ice Plateau.” For Shackleton, it became “the Polar Plateau.”
Approaching the mountain range, the men saw a 3,500-foot-high rock outcrop 7 miles away, with a low, snowy pass on its western side that Marshall hailed as “the Golden Gateway to the S[outh].”38 In their optimism, they dubbed this dome-shaped hill “Mount Hope.” Leaving Socks and the sledges behind, the men maneuvered through a deeply crevassed belt between the ice shelf and the coast, and then struggled up Mount Hope to survey what lay ahead. “There stretched before us a great glacier running almost south and north between two great mountain ranges,” Shackleton wrote.39 “It is at least thirty miles in width and we can see over one hundred miles of its length, beyond that must be the Great Plateau. Our Gateway is only a very small side entrance” to it, Wild added.40 Yet only this pass appeared navigable with sledges. On the next day, December 4, the party headed through it to the glacial highway that Shackleton named the Beardmore Glacier for the expedition’s sponsor. “The Almighty has indeed been good to us,” Marshall proclaimed in his diary about this broad pathway to the plateau and the pole beyond.41
With the men already stressed by a month of marching 300 miles over the ice shelf, now their real work began. They fa
ced a 9,000-foot rise in altitude while traversing 120 miles of some of the most difficult glacial terrain on earth, ranging from sheer blue ice to deep snow and hidden crevasses. Believing that the pole lay on the ice shelf, they did not carry crampons and climbing gear. One day in and struggling for every inch, they cached excess supplies at a lower glacier depot. Stripped to their shirts for the ordeal, the men became badly sunburned. Shackleton also suffered snow blindness after searching for a way through the broken ice without goggles. “Thirty-six days’ food supply had been exhausted of the ninety days’ total supply,” Marshall noted, “so drastic cuts lay ahead if we were to achieve our object.”42 Lacking sufficient nutrition for man-hauling at high altitude, the men fantasized about what they would order if they were let loose in a good restaurant.43
Then, disaster. Socks broke through a snow-capped crevasse on the second day, nearly taking Wild and a sledge with him. “We lay down on our stomachs and looked over the gulf, but no sound or sign came to us,” Shackleton wrote.44 The pony had disappeared into the crevasse. Only a snapped whiffletree, the crossbar in the pony’s harness, saved the sledge, and with it half the party’s supplies and rations. “This accident left us with two sledges and a weight of about 250 lbs. per man to haul.”45 Like the northern party, the southern party began relaying. “Often it became necessary to cut steps with our ice-axes, and haul the sledges after us with the Alpine rope,” Shackleton noted of the party’s ascent up Beardmore Glacier.46 “On December 6 the surface was so crevassed that it took a whole day to fight our way 600 yards,” he wrote.47 Further, with Socks went the meat he would have provided at some point along the way. “The loss of Socks,” Shackleton commented, “was a severe blow to us.”48 Yet Wild’s first thought was “Thank God I won’t have to shoot Socks.”49 The pony was his favorite. “There never was a more clever horse,” Wild wrote. “Socks must have been killed instantly.”50
The party pushed on, about ten hours each day. The weather remained mostly clear on the glacier, but the temperature steadily dropped from 20°F at the base to minus 20°F near the top. “Sometimes we were able to pull both sledges & were able to do as much as 16 miles in a day,” Wild reported, “but there were many days of relay work when 5 miles was considered good work.”51 On December 12, he called it damn hard work “over the most awful stuff ever sledges were pulled on.”52 If their private writings revealed their faith, then on this punishing march, Marshall trusted in God, Shackleton trusted in Providence, Wild trusted in Shackleton, and Adams trusted in Empire.
Sharp blue ice was the worst for sledging, shredding runners and bruising men, but hidden crevasses spawned the greatest dread. “To find oneself suddenly standing on nothing, then to be brought up with a painful jerk & looking down into a pitch black nothing is distinctly disturbing, & there is the additional fear that the rope may break,” Wild wrote of the sensation. He got used to it after a few dozen falls, he said, but Adams never overcame the horror.53 “Marshall went through one and was only saved by his harness,” Shackleton noted on December 9. “Soon after, Adams went through, then I did.”54
Having gained a mile in altitude by December 14, the men gained in hope as they neared the top. “One more crevassed slope, and we will be on the plateau, please God,” Shackleton wrote on the 16th. “Almost up!” he noted two days later. “Not yet up, but nearly so,” he added on the 20th. Even on the 23rd, at 8,820 feet, Shackleton reported, “Still steering upward amid great waves of pressure and ice-falls, for our plateau.”55
They had passed beyond the glacier’s head but not yet attained the Polar Plateau. Winds increased as they neared the top, cutting their faces and causing frostbite. “We have only the clothes we stand up in now, as we have depoted everything else,” Shackleton wrote on December 24, “and this continued rise means lower temperatures than I had anticipated.”56 Thinking themselves finally on the plateau, they left a sledge and some supplies behind early that day in what they called the “upper glacier depot” and proceeded with one tent, one sledge, and reduced rations. Having rejected Peary’s example and Nansen’s advice to wear hooded fur parkas, Shackleton and his men shivered in threadbare gabardine. They did not carry a change of clothes, and spent much of their time in camp mending what they had without ever making it fully satisfactory.
The next day was Christmas. After hauling their remaining sledge for eleven hours up to 9,500 feet, they stopped for their first full meal since starting their ascent, complete with plum pudding, medicinal brandy, and cigars. “May my worst enemies never spend their Xmas in such a dreary God forgotten spot as this,” Wild wrote.57 “Up here the biting wind is always in our faces,” Marshall added.58 That night, they all discussed how to proceed. Still 280 miles from the pole and over 1,000 miles from getting there and back to Cape Royds, Shackleton reported his men deciding, “We are going to make each week’s food last ten days. We will have one biscuit in the morning, three at mid-day, and two at night. It is the only thing to do. Tomorrow we will throw away everything except the most absolute necessities.”59 Reduced to similarly dire straits as the northern party, the southern party was equally resolved to reach its pole. It would not enjoy another full meal for two months. “It is now or never,” Marshall wrote in his diary, “and we must average 14 miles per day.”60
WHILE THE SOUTHERN PARTY shared Christmas dinner atop its glacial highway to the Polar Plateau, their counterparts heading to the south magnetic pole still faced most of their climb from sea level to the plateau and barely acknowledged the holiday. “No Christmas luxuries at all,” Mackay noted in his diary.61 After leaving one of its two sledges along with supplies and equipment at a depot on the north side of the Drygalski Ice Tongue on December 12, the men had spent the next two weeks navigating the badly faulted surface of the tongue’s northern rim to the coast and then looking for some way up the steep snout of a broad glacier flowing around the south side of Mount Larsen to the plateau.
With the summer solstice, temperatures at the glacier’s base hovered around the freezing point and everything was wet. Pools formed on the surface; meltwater rushed beneath the ice and opened chasms in it; avalanches thundered down the nearby mountains. Successive blizzards buried the tent in wet snow and shredded its worn-out shell nearly beyond repair. The 670-pound sledge sank deep into drifts. “Crevasses found by falling in them,” Mawson noted on December 20.62 About one such fall, David wrote of Mawson, “He seemed to disappear as certain characters do through trap doors in the stage.”63
At first they tried to lift their lone sledge directly up the steep snout of the Larsen Glacier. When this failed, they found a side outlet to the main glacier running around a rock outcropping to the north. They named it Backstairs Passage because it rose in steps to the glacier’s more manageable middle. Relaying their load up this passage and onto the glacier, the men reached 2,000 feet above sea level by the 25th. This was their Christmas. Like the southern party on this day, they were roughly 280 miles from their goal.
Time became the limiting factor. Hauling two sledges, the men had covered 210 net miles from Cape Royds to the glacier in eighty days. Now, to get to the pole and back with any chance of the Nimrod retrieving them, they would have to go over twice as far in half the time. After leaving climbing gear, some food, and added geologic specimens in a small depot on the south side of Mount Larsen, they hauled seven weeks of rations and camping gear on a single sledge. From this point on, the way would be over the Polar Plateau with no opportunity for further geologic field work.
Mackay gave up hope of success, and at times even of survival, but was duty bound to follow. “He would make a good soldier but no general,” Mawson said of Mackay in a late-December diary entry.64 Mawson reasoned that 10 miles per day going out and 15 miles per day coming back should do it; such figures struck Mackay as utterly unreasonable.
To complicate matters, David showed signs of severe stress. “Prof very doggo,” Mawson noted on Christmas. “He has of late appeared to have lost all interest in th
e journey.”65 Yet he never declined to go on, and seemed intent on doing so. Mackay called him “very nearly crocked,” and feared that he could not continue much longer.66 On New Year’s Eve, Mawson wrote of David, “Something has gone very wrong with him of late as he is almost always morose,” and on January 3 Mawson added, “How much better though would we get along had we a third younger man.”67
From their Christmas Day perch above the glacier’s snout, the way opened out onto a smooth incline with remarkably few obstructions. The men made their 10 miles per day, gaining roughly 600 feet in altitude daily through January 3, and then somewhat less in altitude but often more in distance until the way leveled out at 9,000 feet atop the plateau on January 9. The work was grueling, but they kept to it, even in stiff winds that frosted exposed flesh and peeled the skin off lips. “Feeling the exhaustion and hunger awfully,” Mackay wrote on December 29, adding a day later about repairing the tent in a blizzard, “It was intense torture.”68 To lighten their load, they carried reduced rations from the coast, consisting mainly of seal meat, which continued to cause diarrhea. Once on the plateau, the surface became undulating, with mixed sastrugi and patches of snow, which made it almost as difficult as the glacier incline for sledging. Moreover, it foretold a harder than expected return trip.
Mackay recorded the miles since the coast and to the pole in daily diary entries that reflected his growing anxiety about returning alive. Then a bombshell. “Last night Mawson made the astounding announcement that the pole is probably 40 miles farther off than we had ever thought,” Mackey wrote on January 13. “I, of course, agreed to go if the others were decided, but I said plainly, as I think now, that we have not more than a 50 per cent chance of getting back.”69 They settled on racing some 50 extra miles over the next four days, which Mawson thought would put them within the region of the magnetic pole. He would not have time to make precise observations.
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