To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  After three days and 39 miles, the magnetic dip circle registered 89°48', or 12' shy of vertical. “Mawson considered that we were now practically at the Magnetic Pole, and that if we waited for twenty-four hours taking constant observations at the spot the pole would, probably, during that time, come vertically beneath us,” David noted.70 They decided to rush 13 more miles to reach the place where Mawson thought the pole’s mean position should lie.

  Departing at 6 A.M. on January 16, the men sledged 2 miles before dropping their heavy gear, and another 6 to where they ate lunch and left the tent and sledge. Then, without instruments to guide them, they marched northwest for 5 more miles: their “pole by acclamation.” “Mawson placed his camera so as to focus the whole group, and arranged a trigger which could be released by a string,” David wrote. “Meanwhile, Mackay and I fixed up the flag-pole. We then bared our heads and hoisted the Union Jack at 3:30 p.m. with the words uttered by myself, in conformity with Lieutenant Shackleton’s instructions, ‘I hereby take possession of this area now containing the Magnetic Pole for the British Empire.’ At the same time I fired the trigger of the camera.” At the suggestion of Mackay, a Scot, they gave three cheers for the king. “The temperature at the time we hoisted the flag was exactly 0° Fahr.,” David reported.71

  The party began marching back within minutes and reached its heavy gear by 10 P.M. As Mackay repeatedly reminded the others, they had a long way to go and only a few weeks to get there.

  ALTHOUGH THE NIMROD EXPEDITION’S two polar parties each stood about 280 miles from their respective goals on Christmas, the southern party would face at least 450 more miles getting back from its pole than the northern party. Both treks tested the limits for human endurance in 1909, but once they lost their ponies, Shackleton’s men confronted the stiffer test. It showed. When Marshall took their temperatures on Christmas, every man was 2º below normal, and that was after their only full meal in weeks. Four days later, all had dropped at least 2º more. By January 4, their temperatures no longer registered on Marshall’s clinical thermometer, which started at 94.2º.

  After losing Socks, the northern party lacked fresh meat to supplement its sledging rations. As the trip stretched on, the men further reduced even these scant rations so that, by the first of January, they survived on 20 ounces per man per day, mostly in the form of a few biscuits and some pemmican, which was scarcely more than half of the planned daily total. The ponies’ maize, which they ground with a stone for human consumption, ran out on December 28. Although marching over the largest frozen reservoir of freshwater in the world, they also suffered dehydration due to a lack of sufficient fuel to melt enough snow and ice to satisfy their thirst. Shackleton and Adams endured throbbing headaches from the high altitude.

  “The sensation is as though the nerves were being twisted up with a corkscrew and then pulled out,” Shackleton wrote on December 29. “The others have bled through the nose, and that must relieve them.”72

  From the descriptions of the plateau in reports from the Discovery Expedition, Shackleton expected the surface to level out at 9,000 feet once his party crossed the mountains. These reports came from two inland treks made across from Ross Island, and roughly fit what the northern party found. The plateau proved higher in the south. The men reached the head of Beardmore Glacier by Christmas at around 9,000 feet, but the surface kept rising long after the mountains disappeared behind them. It was not the same sort of continuous steep rise as on the glacier, but rather long flat stretches of snow separated by ridges of deeply crevassed pressure ice that Shackleton called icefalls. “Every time we reach the top of a ridge we say to ourselves: ‘Perhaps this is the last,’ but it never is the last,” he complained on December 26. Shackleton compared the topography to a series of terraces and wrote of “the waste[land] of snow all around.”73 To keep from all falling into the same crevasse at once, the men attached ropes to the sledge and pulled from scattered places.

  After passing the last ridge, instead of a firm, level surface, the men found soft snow and hard sastrugi. “Still further south we keep breaking through a hard crust that underlay the soft surface snow, and we then sank in about eight inches,” Shackleton noted.74 Each surface posed new challenges for men pulling a sledge on foot without skis, and the sledge had become so badly bent that it did not pull straight.

  “The most awful day we have yet had,” Wild wrote on December 29. He found the next two days even worse.75 “Eleven miles only on the 31st in the face of a heavy southeast drift and 46 degrees of frost,” Marshall explained.76 Nevertheless, on New Year’s Day 1909, they crossed 87°6' south latitude and claimed another record by passing closer to a pole than Peary, the previous record holder from his 1906 effort. Every first or farthest mattered greatly, and each man took note of this one.

  “THE MAIN THING WE have against us is the altitude of 11,200 ft. and the biting wind,” Shackleton wrote on January 4. By repeatedly leaving behind small depots with anything not needed for going forward, they dropped their sledge weight to under 300 pounds but could not push their pace much past 1 mile per hour. That was not enough to get to the pole and back with the food available. To make the pole seem closer, the men had switched from using customary statute miles to 20 percent longer geographical miles, but that did not shorten the actual distance.

  “The end is in sight,” Shackleton added on the 4th. “We can only go for three more days at the most.”77 This would not be enough, they now realized. At most, it would pad their record farthest south. “Although mid summer, the temperature was seldom higher than 20° below zero,” Wild wrote, “& all the time whilst we were on the plateau we had to contend with a strong head wind which froze our breath into masses of ice around our mouths, & our faces were so frequently frostbitten they were covered with blackened skin & blisters.” They could have reached the pole, he claimed, “but our records would all have been lost with us.”78 They could not have returned, and most likely no one would ever have found their remains. Shackleton later summed up the situation: “We were weakening from the combined effects of short food, low temperature, high altitude, and heavy work.”79

  They had, however, established the pole on the world’s highest plateau and seen what it must look like. “But all this is not the Pole,” Shackleton acknowledged.80 The men dropped the sledge just past 88° south latitude after marching over 15 miles on January 6, which put them roughly 115 geographical miles from the pole.

  “Tomorrow we make our last dash without the sledge,” Marshall wrote.81 That might take them to within 100 (geographical) miles of the pole—a made-up goal to be sure, but something to shoot for nonetheless. “I would fail to explain my feelings if I tried to write them down,” Shackleton noted. “There is only one thing that lightens the disappointment, and that is the feeling that we have done all we could. It is the forces of nature that have prevented us from going right through. I cannot write more.”82

  As if to punctuate Shackleton’s point, a blinding blizzard with hurricane-force winds kept them in camp for the next two days, the first such delay in two months. “During this period the temperature fell to minus 40 degrees Fahr., and the feet of two men froze in their sleeping bags and had to be restored,” Marshall reported.83 “The wind cuts through our thin tent, and even the drift is finding its way in,” Shackleton added.84 The men passed the time by reading Shakespeare aloud from a small volume Shackleton carried. “We cannot smoke as our supply of tobacco has run out,” Wild complained on behalf of the group, all of whom were smokers, particularly Shackleton, who picked up the habit during Scott’s Discovery Expedition.85

  The men began their final march south in the early hours of January 9, 1909. “We covered 18 miles without sledges, carrying only a small supply of biscuits, chocolate and sugar,” Marshall reported.86 “At 9 a.m. we were in 88°23' South, half running and half walking over a surface much hardened by the recent blizzard,” Shackleton wrote.87 There they raised the British flag given to them by Queen Alexandra and pro
claimed dominion over the region in the name of King Edward VII.

  “We have shot our bolt,” Shackleton declared.88

  With this territorial claim, Shackleton pushed the British Empire—the largest empire in human history—to its greatest extent, a pinnacle it would maintain only briefly before it began unraveling with World War I. “The highest, coldest, bleakest, windiest plateau in the world, the ‘great King Ed[ward] VII Plateau,’” Marshall wrote in his diary that night with a faintly mocking tone.89

  “While the Union Jack blew out stiffly in the icy gale that cut us to the bone, we looked south with our powerful glasses, but could see nothing but the dead white snow plain,” Shackleton wrote. This was their “pole of consolation.” “We stayed only a few minutes, and then, taking the Queen’s flag and eating our scanty meal as we went, we hurried back and reached our camp about 3 p.m.”90 Wild smoked a cigar he had saved for the occasion; they all had extra pemmican and a drop of sloe gin. The stated latitude of their farthest south put them 97 geographical miles from the pole, but it rested on dead reckoning. They did not take a reading from the sun, and the distance meter on their sledge had broken. All four men swore by the mileage covered, however, and few besides an embittered Scott questioned it as too much for the final day. “It did give us pleasure to get within one hundred miles” of the pole, Adams later commented.91

  “Homeward bound at last,” Shackleton wrote at the end of his diary entry for that climactic day. “Whatever regrets may be we have done our best. Beaten the South Record by 366 miles and the North Record by 77 miles. Amen.”92 He later asked his wife, “A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?” She answered, “Yes darling, as far as I am concerned.”93

  Assessing their situation at the time, Marshall wrote, “We were satisfied that we had strained our resources to the limit of achievement, but unless we maintained our effort . . . we stood a good risk of not returning to tell the tale.”94

  Adams said of the harrowing dash back, “It was as close as [anything] ever was.” Close in every sense. Close to reaching each depot even as they seemed to recede before them; close to running out of food and fuel altogether. Close to dropping into the ever-present bottomless crevasses; close to treading lightly over them. Close to being trapped in the sort of endless blizzard that would kill Scott and his men three years later; close to skating by on fair weather. Close to falling just short; and close to returning with the greatest story of the young century. The days ahead would inspire Adams to hail Shackleton as the “king of leaders and adventurers.”95

  Chapter 9

  On Top of the World

  TWO MONTHS TO THE day after Shackleton’s southern party claimed Robert Peary’s record for reaching nearest a geographical pole, the American, without knowing of the British team’s stunning achievement, set off from Cape Columbia to recover that title and more. Traveling with all deliberate speed, Peary’s northern party was sledging toward its goal even before Shackleton returned to Cape Royds. Unlike the Nimrod teams, Peary (after three failed attempts to reach his pole) knew precisely what to expect and was prepared to face it.

  “The only variation in the monotony being that it occasionally gets worse,” he warned his men at the outset of the journey.1 At age fifty-two, this surely would be Peary’s last attempt to reach the pole. The wind blew strongly from the east—an unusual direction for the region and seen as a bad omen by Peary’s Inuit drivers. The temperature hovered around 50 degrees below zero.

  “Sunday, February 28, I left the land with three Eskimos and dogs,” Captain Bob Bartlett wrote. “We were the pioneer party. Our work was to set the course, break the trail, and gauge the distance for the main party.”2 As Peary explained, “The pioneer party was the pace-setter of the expedition, and whatever distance it made was the measure of accomplishment for the main party.”3

  The leader of the pioneer party often marched ahead on snowshoes charting the course. His party’s three lightly loaded sledges followed close behind, breaking a rough trail in the snow and ice. Borup’s more heavy-laden party departed from Cape Columbia later on the 28th, deepening and widening the trail.

  The remaining five parties, or “divisions,” as Peary called them, left the land in rapid succession on March 1, with Peary’s departing last. Sometimes bunching together, sometimes traveling apart, the divisions remained fundamentally separate during this portion of the expedition. Rough ice and pressure ridges occasionally required pickaxes to cut through, but the old floes were mostly level. Each succeeding party improved the trail by use so that it was generally clear by the time the last one passed, carrying Peary. Prior parties also built igloos at their camps that later arrivals used. By going last, Peary explained, he could monitor movements ahead, address delays, and remain fresh for the final burst after the support parties fell back. To start, he directed Bartlett to set a pace of 10 miles per day.

  During this first day, each party crossed the rough, upturned surface of the tidal crack, which could shred wooden sledges. Riding on his 12-foot-long sledge, Peary passed Inuits from prior parties repairing their 9-foot-long broken ones or running back to land for replacements. “It had been a trying day for the sledges,” Peary noted after the first march. “The new ‘Peary’ type, by reason of its shape and greater length, had come off best.” Each division traveled with one longer and two or more shorter sledges, but only the “old Eskimo type,” as Peary called the 9-foot-long ones, broke down that first day.4 Each division also carried a “repairing outfit” and spare parts for fixing broken sledges, plus all the essential equipment and supplies for traveling on the Arctic ice pack, including a small oil stove for drying clothes and an alcohol-fueled one for heating tea. At the outset, each fully loaded sledge weighed about 450 pounds.5

  Peary reached the first major open-water lead at 3:30 P.M. on the second day. It ran east to west directly across his path like an enormous moat, and he estimated it at one-quarter mile wide. The parties led by Bartlett and Borup had gotten over before it opened, but those led by Henson, Goodsell, MacMillan, and Marvin were backed up when Peary arrived. “If a lead is full of floating ice,” Henson noted, “we can use a large cake as a ferryboat and paddle across with our snowshoes.”6 This fresh lead was ice-free except for a thin skin of new ice forming over it. The parties had no choice but to wait for an opportunity to cross.

  THE LEAD CLOSED OVERNIGHT with a grinding crush of collapsing, or rafting, young ice, and the parties pushed on without further delay. “Imagine crossing a river on a succession of gigantic shingles, one, two, or three deep, and all afloat and moving, he will perhaps form an idea of the uncertain surface over which we crossed this lead,” Peary would explain. “Such a passage is distinctly trying, as any moment may lose a sledge and its team, or plunge a member of the party into the icy water.”7 Much later, Goodsell vividly recalled the thin ice “crackling, buckling and rafting under our feet.”8

  On the second day after resuming his northward march, Peary lost a friend in the White House. “Mr. Taft becomes President today,” Peary noted in his diary on March 4 as if it were a matter of consequence for the expedition.9 It was. Having Roosevelt in office assured Peary of a hero’s reception in Washington and a prompt promotion to rear admiral should he reach the pole. Retired and most likely on a yearlong expedition of his own to Africa, Roosevelt could do little on Peary’s behalf during the balance of 1909.

  ON THE SAME DAY that Peary wrote this note, his division reached the so-called Big Lead between the coastal ice and the oceanic pack. Bartlett’s pioneer party had stalled here a day earlier, and the other divisions had backed up here as well except for the two led by Borup and Marvin, which Peary had sent back 45 miles to Cape Columbia for fuel. “Our alcohol and petroleum tins had sprung leaks in the rough going of the last few days, and I wanted an additional supply to make up for present and possible future loss,” Peary explained.10 Borup blamed the problem on poor soldering of the tins by Henson.

  The wind shifted to
the west and then dropped as they waited, the temperature rose to the minus single digits before falling back into the double numerals, and the late-winter sun finally rose above the horizon, but forward progress stopped for six days at the Big Lead. “I paced back and forth, deploring the luck which, when everything else was favorable—weather, ice, dogs, men, and equipment—should thus impede our way with open water,” Peary complained. “I think that more of mental wear and tear was crowded into those six days than into all the rest of the fifteen months we were absent from civilization.”11

  Bartlett called the six-day delay “Hell on Earth.”12

  The Inuits felt it too, and three cried to go back, citing sickness. Convinced that their illnesses were feigned, Peary persuaded one to stay but let the others go, including Panikpah, who was with him at his farthest north in 1906. “Am done with those two,” Peary scrawled in his diary.13 He sent them with a note directing the mate on the Roosevelt to give them enough provisions to depart immediately with their families on the 600-mile trek to Etah. They received nothing more for their efforts, Henson noted, while Peary promised the one who stayed “nearly everything that was on the ship.”14 Exiling the two men and their families over land to Etah, Goodsell wrote, should “impress the other Eskimos of the consequences of malingering and disobedience.”15 It was Peary’s way. Although the departure of two senior Inuits disturbed the rest, Bartlett wrote, “Peary managed to keep them in line, one minute by being fatherly and the next minute being firm.”16 MacMillan helped by organizing athletic contests to divert attention from the delay.