To the Edges of the Earth

by Edward J. Larson

  By this point, the party was only a few miles west of the coast, with the Nimrod slowly approaching from the south but blocked from sight by the Drygalski Ice Tongue. The men needed to go southwest to their depot on the northern side of the ice tongue’s base, however, which meant crossing or circumventing the canyon. Initially they tried to cross it, which involved lowering the sledge down a vertical 40-foot bank. Due to an overhanging cornice, they could not scale the far side and retreated the way they came, where they camped after twenty-three hours of continuous effort and no progress. David’s feet were so frozen during much of their march that Mawson depicted him as “walking on his ankles” for most of the day.16 Bowing to Mackay’s ongoing demand, David now formally transferred command to Mawson, leading Mackay to crow, “I have deposed the Professor.”17 Mawson privately reassured David as much as possible, but by then the senior scientist was most likely beyond caring.

  The issue facing the men was not so much about whether they would reach the depot but what to do if the Nimrod did not come or had already passed. Mackay wanted to race south around the rough coastline to winter quarters at Cape Royds over 200 miles away but knew that David could not survive the trip. Mawson must make that decision, Mackay felt. Mawson and David simply wanted to get to the depot and hoped that the ship could rescue them from there. In either event, they had no option other than to round the canyon, which meant turning east away from the coast until they found a crossing.

  The crossing came in about 2 miles, where an icefall had created a tenuous bridge across the canyon. Then the party turned west along the canyon toward the coast, which it reached after roughly 4 miles at 10:30 P.M. on February 3, shortly after the Nimrod had sailed past during a sudden snow squall without sighting either them or their well-marked depot. “We were now all thoroughly exhausted and decided to camp,” David wrote. “The spot we had selected seemed specially suitable, as from the adjacent ice mound we could get a good view of the ocean beyond the Drygalski Barrier.”18 Scarcely a mile from their depot, they had a clear view of any approaching ship and took turns keeping watch.

  Since descending into the seawater canyon and now on the coast, concern over the lack of food gave way to visions of plenty. “We have penguins and seals galore within sight,” Mackay rejoiced on February 3.19 That day, Mawson’s diary spoke of “fried up penguins with seal blubber” and David’s extolled one Emperor penguin stew as “the most satisfying meal we had had for many a long day.”20 At least hunger was no longer a problem.

  After each man stood one watch while the others slept, they were eating together inside the tent about 4 P.M. on February 4. “Mac was just having a final fill up of blubber and we were discussing immediately shifting camp to higher depot when a shot rang out,” Mawson wrote.21

  “A gun from the ship!” he exclaimed as they all broke for the tent door, tripping over each other on the way.22

  After sailing north for another day searching the coast, the Nimrod had turned back south when First Officer John King Davis suggested reexamining the region around the Drygalski Ice Tongue obscured by the snow squall. Worried about the ship’s dwindling coal reserves, the captain only reluctantly agreed. There, a lookout on board now spotted the party’s depot but not yet its tent.

  “It would have been hard, indeed, for any one, not situated as we had been, to realize the sudden revulsion of our feelings,” David commented. “In a moment, as dramatic as it was heavenly, we seemed to have passed from death to life.”23

  Leading the way across the ice to flag down the ship without thinking to don a harness, Mawson abruptly dropped from sight into a deep crevasse. The others were so weak that they needed to wait for the ship’s crew to raise him.

  “Mawson has fallen down a crevasse,” Mackay now shouted to those on board, “and we got to the Magnetic Pole.”24 Fortunately, Mawson had landed on his back unhurt upon a ledge only about 18 feet down.

  “What a joyous grasping of hands and hearty all-round welcoming followed,” David added. “After our one hundred and twenty-two days of hard toil over the sea ice of the coast and the great snow desert of the hinterland, the little ship seemed to us as luxurious as an ocean liner.”25 He hobbled aboard with the aid of two walking sticks. “They were a curious looking little group,” the captain said of the three. “Abnormally lean because they had been reduced to very short commons for some six weeks, they were the color of mahogany with hands that resembled the talons of a bird of prey.”26

  After hearing their story, the captain marveled at all they had done. “There is nothing in polar travel to compare with the exploits of the party led by Professor David because so ambitious a project has never been undertaken with such slender resources,” he declared.27 Another officer wrote that David looked dazed and that all three of “their faces were skinned and frostbitten.”28 To their colleague from the Mount Erebus climb, Philip Brocklehurst, they now appeared in “a very bad state and dreadfully weak.”29 Upon reaching the ship, David promptly asked about Shackleton. No one on board knew the fate of his party. It was still out.

  EVEN AS THE NORTHERN party was being rescued, Shackleton and his men were barely halfway back from their farthest south. The return trek had devolved into a fight for survival. “Ours is an invalid camp,” Frank Wild wrote in his diary from the Ross Ice Shelf on February 4. “We are all too ill to march, all four down with acute diarrhea. Adams had to turn out seven times last night and there has not been an interval of a few minutes between the times that someone has been outside in agony.”30 Marshall and Shackleton called it dysentery and blamed it on meat from Grisi, the second pony shot, which they had picked up two days earlier from a depot left behind over two months earlier. The meat was rancid, but they had little else to eat.

  “So we shall all be hungry all the way to the Bluff [depot], probably three weeks, and if this illness does not prove short, we shall never get there,” Wild added.31 “I believe we all thought the end had come.”32

  Sicker than Wild, Shackleton simply jotted, “Terrible day. No march possible; serious outlook.” He could not write more.33 Marshall likened the campsite to “a battlefield.”34 That night, Shackleton asked Wild to sing the well-known dirge “Lead, Kindly Light,” but Wild could only make it through one verse.35

  The return trip had started out bleakly nearly a month earlier and soon became desperate. By the time his party turned back on January 9, Shackleton had already pushed himself and his men to their limits. They thought they had turned in time, however, which was to Shackleton’s credit, given the explorer’s strong impulse to reach the goal at all costs.

  “If we’d gone on one more hour,” Jameson Adams later commented, “we shouldn’t have got back.”36

  Yet a day after their turning, Wild wrote in his diary, “Given average luck and weather, we ought to get to Hut Point about 27 February, which would be in time for the Nimrod.”37 Before setting out, Shackleton had left orders authorizing the ship to steam north for New Zealand on March 1, and in no event later than March 10. If the southern party remained out, they were to leave a relief party with ample provisions behind at Cape Royds for a second winter in case the lost party turned up later or needed rescue. For Shackleton and his men, this schedule made their return a timed race against harsh conditions and the limits of human endurance.

  The first ten days of the march back across the Polar Plateau, while difficult, buoyed their hopes. The unrelenting winds that had hindered their advance going south propelled their retreat going north. With the temperature hovering between 10º and 25º below zero and a makeshift sail attached to their battered sledge, the party averaged 20 miles per day over the undulating ice. Gravity helped as well, as the plateau sloped evermore downward as the party approached the Western Mountains, where the Beardmore Glacier began its steep descent to the Ross Ice Shelf.

  “There has been tremendous wind here, and the sastrugi are enormous,” Shackleton wrote near the outset of this stretch. “This strong blizzard wind has been
an immense help this way, though not outward for us,” he added near its end.38

  The men could also follow their outward sledge tracks, which stood up in the windswept snowscape and obviated the need for navigation. “What a blessing we have the tracks to follow or we should be in Queer Street,” Marshall wrote in his trademark religious tone. “A great treat to have wind at one’s back instead of heading into it.”39

  The critical problem was hunger, for the men were on part rations with no prospect of more until they reached their upper glacier depot. “What a thing hunger is,” Wild wrote on January 12; “all day long we cannot help thinking about food, and at night we dream about it.”40

  On the last two days before reaching the depot, the plateau began turning down in a series of intermittent crevasses, pressure ridges, and icefalls. As far as distance covered, the steeper descent more than compensated for the obstructions. The party registered its two record days for the entire journey on January 18 and 19, covering over 26 miles on the former and an amazing 29 miles on the latter, despite repeated falls by everyone, a broken sledge runner, and Shackleton suffering from frostbitten feet. “I don’t know how Shackleton stands it,” Wild wrote on the 19th; “both his heels are split in four or five places, his legs are bruised and chafed, and today he has had a violent headache though falls, and yet he gets along as well as anyone.”41

  Adams also marveled about the man they were calling “The Boss”: “The worse he felt, the harder he pulled.”42

  And there was no denying their progress. “We have been running with the sledge at times overtaking us,” Wild wrote on February 19. “We have crossed hundreds of crevasses wide and narrow, all at the run, and have had no accidents. We are camped tonight about eight miles from our upper glacier depot.”43

  The men reached the depot shortly after noon on January 20, just as the terrain shifted from an increasingly sloped and disrupted ice sheet to a steep glacier descent with heavily crevassed névé and patches of slick blue ice. At times, they lowered the sledge by rope down particularly deep icefalls. “A gale was blowing, and often fierce gusts came along, sweeping the sledge sideways, and knocking us off our feet,” Shackleton reported. “On several occasions one or more of us lost our footing, and were swept by the wind down the ice-slope, with great difficulty getting back to our sledge and companions.”44 Perhaps because of his bad feet, Shackleton suffered the most frequent and serious falls. Their rapid progress continued through to the head of Beardmore Glacier, however.

  “Good bye to the plateau,” Marshall commented at this point, “thank god we are off it.”45

  Here began the hell that persisted through the “invalid camp” on February 4. With lower altitude, the temperature rose daily until it exceeded the freezing point, making for a slow snow surface mixed with patches of slippery blue ice. We were “often up to our knees in soft snow,” Marshall reported. “The pace slowed as we approached the lower reaches of the Glacier, which had become masked, in our absence, by heavy fall of soft snow,” he added. “Only when completely exhausted did we camp.”46

  Repeatedly one man or another would drop into a crevasse to the length of his sledging harness, leaving the others to haul him back to the surface. “Whilst hanging in the harness I prayed the rope would break so that I could have a nice long rest,” Wild later recalled.47

  Supplies again began running low just four days after passing the upper glacier depot, with 40 miles of deeply crevassed glacial ice still remaining before the lower glacier depot. “No biscuit, only cocoa, tea, salt and pepper left, very little of those also,” Shackleton reported on January 25. “Must reach depot to-morrow.”48

  The next morning, the men consumed their only remaining solid food—a porridge made from leftover maize for the long-gone ponies—and then marched for twenty hours through knee-deep snow with a broken sledge. “Except for the swish of the deep snow as we shuffled through it, complete silence reigned broken at times by the tinkle of falling ice into the crevasses over which we were passing,” Marshall recalled. He depicted the pace as “funereal.”49

  As the party’s physician, Marshall kept the men going with repeated doses of a cocaine-laced drug called Forced March, which he had saved for just such an emergency. “While it lasted, the effect was dramatic,” Marshall reported about his first use of these energy pills.50 They ran out at 2 A.M. on the 27th, however, and the men collapsed. Following a five-hour rest, they man-hauled for five more hours on no solid food before collapsing again.

  This time, they were close enough to the depot for Marshall to flounder ahead and bring back 4 pounds of food and their first tobacco for weeks. “Reached depot in 25 min[utes] after falling into 3 crevasses covered by recent heavy fall of snow,” he related.51 Three lumps of sugar gave him the energy to get back. “After nearly 60 hours without food the response in energy was strikingly effective,” Marshall observed.52

  Shackleton depicted these two days as “the hardest and most trying we have ever spent in our lives.”53

  Wild called them “one long awful nightmare.”54

  Having nearly reached the level ice shelf with the promise of two more pony-meat caches ahead, the half-starved men thought the worst was over except for the worry of not reaching Cape Royds before the Nimrod sailed north. “From now onwards it was a race against time and the onset of the Antarctic winter,” Marshall wrote.55 If so, it was an obstacle course. First, Shackleton dropped into one last crevasse with such a hard jerk on his harness under his fragile heart that it badly shook him. Then a blizzard struck with hurricane-force gusts that kept them in camp for a day and froze their wet gear into a solid mass of ice. After the sky cleared, they reached the depot housing Grisi’s remains on February 2, and shortly afterward all fell ill.

  They felt the full impact on February 3 after feasting the evening before on slabs of Grisi’s horseflesh. With food in short supply, it was now rushing through their bowels at a rate of up to once each hour. “I have taken sufficient drugs to kill three men, and it has had scarcely any effect,” Wild complained.56 “My diary noted that more than one member turned out eight to nine times that night,” Marshall reported about the first evening spent at their so-called invalid camp.57 “Adams passing much blood due to horsemeat,” Shackleton added on May 4. “Outlook serious.”58 The only benefit from this depot came in retrieving the sledge left there when they put down Grisi. It replaced their broken one for the long stretch remaining.

  THE SOUTHERN PARTY RESUMED its trek north on February 5, still suffering the effects of acute hunger and food poisoning. “Shackleton and I are now the best in health and Adams is the worst,” Wild wrote. He called it “a poor day’s march,” but Marshall noted that at least they were able “to get along a little, in spite of frequent halts.”59

  By this point it was march or die, with meager rations for a week or more to the next depot, where the first pony, Chinaman, had been butchered. “Dead tired. Short [of] food; very weak,” Shackleton wrote on February 7. “All thinking and talking of food,” he added on both the 9th and 10th. Each entry was short and mostly about food or weather.60

  “Our hunger is awful too awful to describe,” Wild lamented. “My greatest desire now seems to be to sit on the hearth rug at Mother’s feet and be petted.”61

  Aided by a strong southerly wind, which at one point Wild described as “howling like hell” and Marshall depicted as sent by God to assist them, the men averaged 12 miles per day despite their weakened state.62 They reached the next depot on February 13 with no food to spare. By this point, close calls of this sort had become the norm for the southern party and would remain a trademark of Shackleton’s expeditions. “All the way back it was just touch & go whether we should reach the next depot in time or not,” Wild wrote.63

  The Chinaman depot, as Shackleton called it, contained horsemeat, a pool of frozen blood congealed in snow, and some tobacco, but little else. “For dinner we had the whole of Chinaman’s liver,” Wild wrote, with Marshall adding tha
t “more smokes are a great treat.”64 The blood-and-snow mixture “was like beef tea when boiled up,” Shackleton noted. He called it “splendid.”65

  Without gaining much for their larder and still on short rations, the men pushed on toward the open sea, where they hoped to catch the Nimrod before it sailed. They estimated that they had roughly two weeks to go, with their own depot A in one week and another depot supposedly laid at Minna Bluff by a supply party from winter quarters a few days farther along. Again, they carried barely enough food to reach the next depot, with no measure for error. Surviving on about a cup of horsemeat and a few biscuits per day, they were “more hungry than ever,” Wild wrote.66 He suffered nightmares about sitting down at a royal banquet but protocol preventing him from eating.

  “The harness around our weakened stomachs gives us a good deal of pain when we are brought up suddenly,” Shackleton complained, yet they made the 100 miles to depot A in seven days, despite plunging temperatures and a blinding blizzard.67 They reached it with no food remaining except a few scraps of meat from Grisi that they dared not eat unless worse came to worst.

  “It is neck or nothing with us now,” Shackleton wrote on February 21 as his party raced north from depot A in a blizzard with scarcely enough food to reach the bluff depot, if indeed it existed. “Our food lies ahead, and death stalks us from behind. This is just the time of year when the most bad weather may be expected.”68 The sun now set each night bringing palpable darkness. The temperature dropped to minus 35°F. They resorted to eating the scraps from Grisi that night, which renewed Wild’s diarrhea.