The first pass, Sorko La, crossed over a glacier to an altitude of 16,700 feet with a long slope up and a steep drop down. This took the party to Shigar, where the local raja greeted the Italian climbers with riding ponies for the next leg of the trip. Then the party went on to Skardu, with the duke and five core members of his party rafting down the swollen river on three traditional zhaks composed of a latticework of branches tied to inflated pig- and goatskins while the others walked around. Sella filmed the rafting adventure on a motion-picture camera that he attached to his zhak. “We were seized by the current and given over to the mercy of the waves, veering now toward one bank, now to the other, tossed about like corks, whirled in the eddies,” De Filippi wrote. “The river banks seemed to fly past us, our course was so rapid.”96 They made the 12-mile passage in one exhilarating ninety-minute ride.
At Skardu, the expedition shifted back from Balti to Kashmiri porters for the trek over the 15,500-foot-high Berji Pass and across the arid Desoli Plain to central Kashmir. The snow-covered pass gave the duke and his party one last opportunity to view K2 from a distance, with Sella remaining behind for a day trying without success to capture a final panoramic photograph of the entire range. Mist and renewed bad weather prevented it.
From this point, the party traveled over several low passes, gradually descending for four days into the ever more densely settled regions of Kashmir and reaching its central valley on August 11. Government houseboats waited to carry the Italians through the valley’s scenic lakes and canals to Srinagar following their twenty-day trek from the base of Chogolisa. “We were once more in the heart of Kashmir—noisy, garrulous, bombastic, servile, yet withal charming Kashmir,” De Filippi concluded his account. “Our exertions were over.”97 From Srinagar to Mumbai and then back to Europe by ship took another month, with the duke arriving to a tumultuous welcome in Marseilles on September 12.
By coincidence, the first detailed report of Peary’s North Pole expedition appeared on that same day in the New York Times, sent to the newspaper by Peary as an exclusive account from a telegraph station in Labrador. On September 21, multitudes turned out to greet Peary’s ship in Sydney, Nova Scotia. “The throngs began to cheer as the Roosevelt drew near the densely packed wharf,” the Times reported, “while the esplanade and the slopes of the hills at the water front were reverberant with lusty cheers.”98
The next morning, Peary boarded a train bound for Maine. Crowds assembled at every stop as the train passed through the state, with five thousand in Waterville and still more at Peary’s boyhood hometown of Portland, where he spent the night of September 23 before returning to his Eagle Island retreat. Again by coincidence, on that same evening, a black-tie banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, hosted by the Arctic Club and attended by 1,185 persons, welcomed Cook back to his native New York.
On March 22, the Nimrod reached New Zealand, where Shackleton telegraphed his news to the world. David arrived in Sydney, Australia, by steamship from New Zealand on March 30 to a hero’s reception. Mawson followed two weeks later to similar applause. The British crown prince, the future George V, personally welcomed Shackleton to London in June, while the ailing King Edward VII hailed the explorer’s southern sledge journey as “the greatest geographical event of his reign.”99 By summer’s end, the grand expeditions of 1909 had returned from the earth’s edges to worldwide acclamation.
Epilogue
The Last Biscuit
“THE FASCINATING THING ABOUT Mr. Shackleton’s report,” the New York Evening Globe commented one day after its publication on March 24, 1909, “is the story of the struggle rather than the results of the struggle. All of us feel loftier in our inner stature as we read how men like ourselves pushed on until the last biscuit was gone.”1 At the dawn of the twentieth century, after the rise of industrialized technologies that promised to make all results possible and before the Great War that made even the most self-sacrificing human struggle seem meaningless while, at the same time, tarnishing technology’s gleam, the Globe’s comment captured the essence of heroism as extraordinary efforts by ordinary people.
Shackleton, like Robert Peary (but not Mawson, Henson, or the others who were not expedition organizers), had an advance contract with a leading newspaper for an exclusive first report on his expedition. For both men, income from these contracts helped to finance their efforts. For newspapers—then at the height of the publishing wars that marked the era in journalism—disasters, battles, and harrowing expeditions sold best. Publishers paid top dollar for exclusive accounts. On March 22, the Nimrod stopped for a day at Steward Island, just south of New Zealand, where a special telegraph operator waited to dispatch Shackleton’s report to London’s Daily Mail, much as Peary would lay over in Labrador six months later to telegraph his first account to the New York Times. Of royal lineage, and needing no funds beyond those of his family and his nation, the Duke of the Abruzzi had no such contracts, made no such stops, and gave no reports on his expedition beyond official ones to the Italian Alpine Club and the Italian Geographical Society. As he had done for the Mount Saint Elias and Ruwenzori expeditions, the duke turned the task of writing the official account for the Karakoram expedition to Filippo De Filippi. His handsomely illustrated volume joined Shackleton’s and Peary’s books in parlors and libraries around the globe.2
A MASTER STORYTELLER AND a family man with a gift for attracting women and befriending men, Shackleton knew what the public wanted and, in his report for the Daily Mail, dished it out in due measure. Newly discovered mountains and the world’s largest glacier; waist-deep snow with crevasses that swallowed ponies and left men hanging by their harnesses; man-hauling 500-pound sledges over blue ice; and struggle, always struggle, filled this first narrative. “For sixty hours,” he wrote at one point, “the blizzard raged, with 72 degrees of frost and the wind blowing at seventy miles per hour. It was impossible to move. The members of the party were frequently frostbitten in their sleeping-bags.” The race to survive ran through the account, underscored by the repeated refrain “food had again run out.”3 These were Shackleton’s own words. The ghostwriter who helped transform his sledging diary and this first narrative into a bestselling book, In the Heart of the Antarctic, would not join him until New Zealand.
To capitalize on its investment, the Daily Mail solicited dozens of celebrity endorsements for Shackleton’s feat, which it published along with the queen’s “very hearty congratulations,”4 though her telegram mistakenly credited Shackleton rather than Mawson with hoisting her flag at the magnetic pole. Mountaineer Martin Conway hailed the ascent of Mount Erebus as “a great achievement,” while Albert Markham of former farthest-north fame called the polar trek “a wonderful performance.”5 Fridtjof Nansen, Roald Amundsen, and Robert Scott added their tributes, though for personal reasons each was pleased that Shackleton had fallen short of the pole. By the time his first report had circled the globe, Shackleton had stepped out of Scott’s shadow and into the limelight of worldwide fame.
After the humiliation of the Boer War and with the rising German challenge to its military superiority, the British Empire needed heroes, and Shackleton seamlessly fit the bill. First in New Zealand, then in Australia, and finally in England, he was cheered by the masses and feted by the elites in the upstairs-downstairs Edwardian swirl. “I am representing 400 million British subjects,” Shackleton said before his departure, and upon his return, they all seemed to adopt him.6
It was the struggle more than the results that won plaudits. “An amount of pluck and determination has been displayed by Lieut. Shackleton and his companions which has never been surpassed in the history of Polar enterprise,” the Royal Geographical Society proclaimed.7 The Standard spoke of his “intrepid heroism,” the Morning Post of his “extraordinary endurance.”8 “The benefit,” the Spectator said of Shackleton’s expedition, “is to be seen in the proof it gives that we are not worse than our forefathers; that the blood of the Franklins, the Parrys, and the Rosses still flows in a l
ater generation; and that men of the various ranks and various callings are still found ready to encounter great risks and endure prolonged privation and suffering for no gain to themselves beyond the joy of mastering difficulties.”9 A knighthood followed. It scarcely mattered that Shackleton had failed to reach the pole. “His adventures,” the Nation observed, “appear to have been brilliant, if not extremely valuable.”10
Shackleton wanted to go back as soon as possible to finish the job. He discussed it with Frank Wild during the grueling return march and received Wild’s commitment to return. The fame, money, lectures, and elite social invitations only made him want to go more. “The world was pleased with our work, and it seemed as if nothing but happiness could enter life again,” Shackleton wrote with some candor, but he recognized the fleeting nature of celebrity and knew that it needed feeding by new fame.11
Scott was already planning an expedition to the South Pole, however, and Amundsen one to the North Pole that he secretly flipped south upon hearing the claims of Peary and Frederick Cook. Little glory lay in coming in second to a place whose reputed value lay in getting there first. As a British entrant in this race, Shackleton queued behind Scott. When Amundsen succeeded on December 14, 1911, and then Scott reached the pole five weeks later but perished with his party on the bitter march back, Shackleton was doubly eclipsed. Scott had followed Shackleton’s route up Beardmore Glacier and across the Polar Plateau. He also adopted Shackleton’s means by favoring ponies over dogs for pulling sledges but, like Shackleton, ultimately fell back on man-hauling. Amundsen, in contrast, followed Shackleton’s instincts (rather than his route) by starting his trek at the Bay of Whales—Shackleton’s intended winter quarters—and then taking the shorter, quicker path to the pole along the Ross Ice Shelf’s eastern edge. With the stories of Amundsen and Scott overshadowing his Nimrod accounts, Shackleton all but faded from sight. Repeated efforts to augment his book and lecture earnings by investment schemes and business ventures failed.
Seeking new feats in the Antarctic before interest waned, Shackleton planned the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition for 1914–16. The ambitious plan involved sending a support party to the old British huts on Ross Island to lay resupply depots as far as the Beardmore Glacier while he took the main party to the Weddell Sea, from which he would march across the continent to the Ross Sea. The Ross Island party was stranded at Scott’s old huts when its ship drifted out to sea in a gale, however, and Shackleton’s ship, the Endurance, was icebound and crushed before reaching the Weddell Sea coast.
These setbacks provided the path to lasting glory for Shackleton, whose leadership skills always rose in crisis situations. With an air of confidence that masked his own fears, Shackleton led his men on a storied five-month journey across drifting sea ice and by lifeboats to Elephant Island. From there, Shackleton and five others sailed 800 miles across the notoriously turbulent Southern Ocean by open boat to a whaling station on South Georgia Island. The leadership displayed by Shackleton during this epic trek and open-boat voyage was much like that shown by him on the Nimrod Expedition’s southern journey, writ large for everyone to see. Yet there was more. On the fourth attempt, in the teeth of midwinter storms, he rescued all his men on Elephant Island and turned his attention to the Ross Sea sector, where three had already died. But after joining the imperial effort to rescue the survivors, Shackleton returned to an England consumed with the bloodiest war of its history. Amid the Great War, no one much cared about polar heroics. Lasting fame for the Endurance Expedition came too late for Shackleton to enjoy. Following World War I, he tried one last time for Antarctic glory with an expedition in 1921–22, but died at the age of forty-seven from a heart attack on South Georgia Island. Rather than bring his body back to England for a hero’s funeral, Shackleton’s wife, Emily, asked that it be buried on South Georgia near his beloved Antarctic. The tombstone bears Shackleton’s favorite words, drawn from the poet Robert Browning, that a man should strive “to the uttermost for his life’s set prize.” Years later, Frank Wild’s ashes were interred on the right-hand side of The Boss’s grave.
FOLLOWING THE NIMROD’S RETURN, Australians reserved their heartiest adulation for Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson, who became the young commonwealth’s first national heroes. For them, it was about both struggle and results, because they had made it to the magnetic pole, whatever that was worth.
David reached Sydney first, arriving by steamer from New Zealand on March 30. A crowd gathered at the harbor before dawn to meet his ship; six hundred more filled the university’s Great Hall at noon for a reception. “Almost everyone who was anybody in the University was present,” one reporter noted.12 “Professor David, on rising, was obliged to stand mute for five minutes while cheering, shouting, stamping, and hand-clapping was maintained by the energetic undergrads.”13 Two days later, it was the city’s turn, at a town-hall reception where, due to overcrowding, as many were turned away as gained entrance. Newspapers reported that David’s wife was refused admission on the grounds that six ladies had tried the same ruse already. “To-day his name with Lieutenant Shackleton’s was acclaimed throughout the civilized world,” the Lord Mayor said of David.14 For his part, David characteristically demurred: “In all sincerity and without the pride that apes humility, I say that Mawson was the real leader and the soul of our expedition to the magnetic pole. We really have in him an Australian Nansen, of infinite resource, splendid physique, [and] astonishing indifference to frost.”15
Then it was Mawson’s turn, arriving in Sydney on April 16 and reaching Adelaide five days later. Both his childhood and adopted hometowns turned out to welcome him. Meeting him at the train station and drawing him on a handcart through the streets, hundreds of University of Adelaide students chanted:
Raw feet, raw feet, down a hole,
Rough seat, rough seat, on the pole;
Seal fat, seal fat, come and see,
Douglas Mawson, D.Sc.16
Like Shackleton, Mawson now felt the explorer’s pull back toward the ice.
Declining an invitation to go with Scott, Mawson organized his own expedition for 1911–13 to explore unknown portions of coastal Antarctica due south of Australia. The trek became the stuff of Australian folklore after one of Mawson’s two sledging companions disappeared into a crevasse with his dogs, sledge, and most of the supplies, leaving the other two to march some 300 miles to the main base. Eating their remaining dogs as virtually their only food and sleeping under a tent cover, only Mawson made it back, and he suffered abominably from extreme hunger and exhaustion; severe skin, hair, and nail loss (including the entire layer of skin on the soles of both feet); snow blindness; and depression. His second colleague became delirious before dying, likely due to hypervitaminosis A from eating so much dog’s liver. At one point after dropping into a sheer-walled, seemingly bottomless crevasse, the now-alone Mawson gained the strength to pull himself up on his harness rope by thinking, “There was all eternity for the last and, at its longest, the present would be but short.”17 Given up for lost by this time, Mawson arrived at his base only hours after the supply ship had sailed, leaving him with a small rescue party in the Antarctic for a second brutal winter. His account of the ordeal, The Home of the Blizzard, became a polar classic.18 After distinguished service as a munitions officer during World War I, Mawson settled down to a celebrated career as a research geologist in South Australia. He led joint British, Australian, and New Zealand expeditions to the Antarctic from 1929 to 1931, resulting in the formation of the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1936. Mawson remained an active member of the Australian Antarctic Executive Planning Committee until his death in 1958. The first issue of Australia’s $100 note featured a picture of him in polar garb on the front.
David also served in the Great War, volunteering at age fifty-seven to organize and lead a corps of Australians engaged in mining and tunneling for trench warfare on the Western Front. He received the Distinguished Service Order and was promoted to the rank of lieu
tenant colonel following his role in the mining of German positions during the Battle of Messines in 1917. David never went back to Antarctica but, like Mawson, remained a champion of Australian discovery and exploration there.
DUE TO COOK’S PREVIOUSLY published claims, Peary returned from the Arctic in 1909 to an unexpectedly cool reception. It was not that Americans did not care that one of their countrymen had reached the North Pole. If anything, from Peary’s perspective, they cared too much, and jumped to a rash conclusion based on a superficial reading of the character of the claimants. The “polar controversy,” as it became known, unfolded in one tumultuous week in September 1909, with Peary on the defensive, after which he was either powerless to recover fully or too broken to try. The heroic eluded him.
On August 9, while Peary was in Smith Sound and first learning of his rival’s claim from local sources, Cook secured passage on a Danish ship from Greenland to Copenhagen. After the captain heard Cook’s astonishing news, he stopped in the Shetland Islands on September 1 at the first port with a telegraph station so that Cook could tell the world. Cook sold his story to the New York Herald. Forty years earlier the Herald had sent Henry Stanley to find David Livingstone in Africa; thirty years earlier it had dispatched the ill-fated Jeannette Expedition to the Arctic. No publication had a better reputation for expedition coverage, and Cook now offered it his exclusive newspaper account for a mere $3,000. To Cook, credibility mattered more than cash. The Herald’s legendary publisher, James Gordon Bennett, could scarcely believe his good fortune and threw the full weight of his global publishing empire behind Cook’s account. The story broke on September 2 with front-page coverage that continued for weeks. As it appeared in the Herald, Cook’s tale had all the hallmarks of a polar narrative except much detail on key parts of the trek.
To the Edges of the Earth Page 29