Caroline Alexander Read online

  It took nearly a year for Scott’s last words to reach the outside world. When they did, in February 1913, they plunged the entire empire into deep mourning. “With the sole exception of the death of Nelson in the hour of victory, there has been nothing so dramatic,” a journalist noted. Scott’s tragedy was commemorated in the press and in the pulpit. In the public telling, his party’s fatal, perverse blunders were not merely forgotten but evaporated out of existence. A myth was born, and propagated by the eventual publication of Scott’s diaries, subtly edited by Sir James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan and a master of sentimental prose.

  This, then, was the background against which Shackleton pulled together his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. Setting out the year after the news of Scott’s death, the Endurance expedition was ambivalently perceived as both a gripping national event and an anticlimax. In the public imagination, Antarctica was very much the place for heroic adventure; yet it seemed unthinkable that any future success could surpass Scott’s glorious failure.

  Shackleton’s aims, as stated in his expedition’s prospectus, were compelling:

  From the sentimental point of view, it is the last great Polar journey that can be made. It will be a greater journey than the journey to the Pole and back, and I feel it is up to the British nation to accomplish this, for we have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the largest and most striking of all journeys—the crossing of the Continent.

  Shackleton eventually cobbled together funds for his grand venture. His principal backers were the British government and Sir James Key Caird, a wealthy Scottish jute manufacturer who contributed a princely gift of £24,000. Other benefactors of note were Miss Janet Stancomb-Wills, daughter of a tobacco tycoon, and Dudley Docker, of the Birmingham Small Arms Company. Lesser outright gifts came from the Royal Geographical Society, other individuals, and public schools throughout England, who underwrote the dog-sledging teams.

  Another source of money was the advance sale of all “news and pictorial rights” to the expedition. Antarctica was the first continent to be discovered by camera. Beginning with Scott’s first expedition in 1902, photography had captured the slow inroads made on its white, inviolate vastness. These photographic records had proved to be not only of historic and geographic interest, but also highly popular. Herbert Ponting’s 90° South, a cinematographic tribute to Scott’s last expedition, was still a favorite when Shackleton’s party set out. Mindful of this, Shackleton formed the Imperial Trans Antarctic Film Syndicate specifically to exploit all film rights to the expedition, exclusive story rights having been sold to the Daily Chronicle.

  Shackleton purchased a ship from Norway’s famous Framnaes shipyard, long a supplier of polar vessels. A 300-ton wooden barquentine, she was named Polaris and had never sailed. She was 144 feet long, built of planks of oak and Norwegian fir up to two and one-half feet thick, and sheathed in greenheart, a wood so tough it cannot be worked by conventional means. Every detail of her construction had been scrupulously, even lovingly, planned by a master shipwright to ensure her maximum strength. She was, it seemed, ideally equipped to withstand the ice. Shackleton renamed her Endurance after his family motto: Fortitudine Vincimus—”by endurance we conquer.”

  In fact two vessels were required. While Shackleton intended to commence his overland trek from the Weddell Sea, his plans called for a relief ship to sail to his old base at Cape Royds in the Ross Sea. From there, a six-man depot-laying party would advance inland, depositing caches of supplies for the use of Shackleton’s transcontinental party when it slogged its way overland from the other side. For this task, Shackleton purchased the Aurora, an old-time sealer built in 1876 that had served a former colleague, the great Australian explorer Douglas Mawson.

  By August, all seemed ready. Although the British press had shown keen interest in Shackleton’s latest polar adventure, the departure of the Endurance from its London dock on August 1, 1914, was eclipsed by more important news: Germany had declared war on Russia, and a European war was now imminent. Having sailed from London to Plymouth, the ship was still in British waters when the order for general mobilization was given on Monday, August 4. After consulting with his crew, Shack-leton placed the Endurance and her company at the disposal of the government, believing “there were enough trained and experienced men among us to man a destroyer.” Privately, he must have held his breath: After so much work and planning, to be thwarted at the start! But the one-word telegraphed reply from the Admiralty dissolved his fears: “Proceed.” A longer cable from Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, followed, saying that the authorities desired the expedition to take place, and on August 8, the Endurance set sail from Plymouth.

  Dr. Macklin grooming Mooch and Splitlip

  The sixty-nine sledging dogs taken on board in Buenos Aires required constant attention. They were quarantined in England at the Lost Dogs Home, Hackbridge.

  With the example of Amundsen’s triumph of efficiency vividly before him, Shackleton had taken what were by British standards enormous pains with his preparations. He had succeeded in having seconded to the expedition a young officer from the Royal Marines who, although officially the motor expert, was also proficient enough on skis to act as an instructor for the company. The Illustrated London News ran a photograph of Shackleton testing his new domed tents in Norway. He had consulted with professional nutritionists regarding sledging rations and, heeding the adamant advice of the Norwegians, arranged to have sixty-nine Canadian sledge dogs delivered to Buenos Aires, where the Endurance would pick them up on her way south. These were, according to his second-in-command, “a mixture of wolf & about any kind of big dog, Collie, Mastiff, Great Dane, Bloodhound, Newfoundland, Retriever, Airedale, Boarhound etc.”

  Despite these efforts his party was not as shipshape as Shackleton may have thought. He had his dogs, but his sole experienced dog trainer and driver, a Cana dian, dropped out at the last minute when Shackleton was unwilling to pay a hefty insurance deposit; also left behind were worm pills, which, as matters turned out, the dogs would desperately need. Shackleton’s plans for the continental crossing called for an average of fifteen miles’ sledging a day, very close to Amundsen’s outward-going average of sixteen—and yet only one of Shackleton’s men left England actually knowing how to ski.

  Owd Bob

  The sledging dogs were not huskies, but a mixed collection of big dogs who had shown in Canada that they were adapted to the cold. “Actually there is not one that is not to some extent a mongrel.” ( Lees, diary)

  Soldier

  Wild’s team leader

  But the expedition had intangible assets deriving from Shackleton’s previous endeavors. In 1909, having trudged to 88° south, 100 miles short of the pole, he had turned his back on certain glory and led his men on the long journey home. After so many hard miles, it was excruciating to leave the unclaimed prize for another man— let alone a rival. Yet Shackleton resisted persuading himself that he could safely cover those forgone miles, or that they counted for more than life itself. Had he been less self-possessed, or more desperate for glory, undoubtedly Ernest Shackleton would have been the first man to stand at the South Pole—and he and his trusting men would have died somewhere close to where Scott and his party perished in their little tent. Shackleton’s decision to turn back was more than a singular act of courage; it bespoke the dogged optimism that was the cornerstone of his character. Life would always offer more chances.

  “One has the feeling that if it had been Shackleton who lost to Amundsen at the pole, he would have met up with the Norwegians on the way back, and they would have all held a big celebratory party,” a distinguished polar historian once told me.

  The despondency that clearly crushed Scott on his loss to Amundsen was unknown to Shackleton. He seems to have been possessed of a ferocious but handily adaptable single-mindedness: Once intent on achieving the pole, he strained every nerve to get ther
e; but when survival became the challenge, he was not distracted by such demons as regret or the fear of being perceived a failure.

  Early in his career, Shackleton became known as a leader who put his men first. This inspired unshakable confidence in his decisions, as well as tenacious loyalty. During the march back from 88° south, one of Shackle-ton’s three companions, Frank Wild, who had not begun the expedition as a great admirer of Shackleton, recorded in his diary an incident that changed his mind forever. Following an inadequate meal of pemmican and pony meat on the night of January 31, 1909, Shackleton had privately forced upon Wild one of his own biscuits from the four that he, like the others, was rationed daily.

  “I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realize how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this,” Wild wrote, underlining his words. “I DO by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.”

  Frank Wild

  Shackleton’s loyal second-in-command, according to Macklin, was “always calm, cool or collected, in open lanes or in tight corners he was just the same; but when he did tell a man to jump, that man jumped pretty quick.”

  When Shackleton headed south on the Endurance in August 1914, it was with Frank Wild as his second-in-command. Wild never forgot the private act of kindness, and his adamantine loyalty to Shackleton would prove to be one of the expedition’s major assets. However deficient the preparations for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition may have been, on one point it was secure: Its men had a leader who had shown signs of greatness. To be sure, Shackleton would fail once more to achieve his expedi-tion’s goal; in fact, he was destined never to set foot on the Antarctic continent again. Nevertheless, he would see his men through one of the greatest epics of survival in the annals of exploration.

  On the bow of the Endurance, December 9, 1914

  “Misty weather obscuring distant view & at 4:15 run into the pack again.” ( Hurley, diary)

  South

  Leaving England on August 8, 1914, the Endurance headed south by way of Madeira, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires, where it spent nearly two weeks loading stores while adjustments were made to the crew. Shackleton himself did not join the expedition until it reached Buenos Aires in mid-October. All had not been easy on this first leg south. Short of fuel, the Endurance had burned the wood allocated for the magnetician’s Antarctic hut, and under the command of the high-spirited Captain Frank Worsley, a New Zealander, discipline aboard ship had been markedly lax. Worsley himself mentions an altercation in Madeira, noting with some gusto, “Irving was cut with a sword on top of his head & Barr had had a large flower pot broken in his face.” Significantly, shortly after Shackleton met his ship, the names Irving and Barr, along with two others now forgotten, disappear from the ship’s roll.

  Also joining the Endurance in Buenos Aires, a few days before Shackleton, was James Francis Hurley, a gifted Australian photographer, and the man upon whom Shackleton’s film syndicate had pinned its hopes. Hurley was born for this kind of venture. Independent and stubborn even as a boy, he ran away from home at the age of thirteen, finding work with the local ironworks, which in turn took him to the Sydney dockyards. While a teenager he bought his first camera, a 15-shilling Kodak box paid for with a shilling a week. Hurley’s first professional work was taking pictures for postcards, but he had quickly moved on to more congenial assignments.

  On October 26, the Endurance, painted black and loaded with fresh supplies as well as sixty-nine Canadian sledging dogs, set sail for the South Atlantic. The company had not been particularly reassured to learn that the unusually wet weather in Buenos Aires indicated that the ice had not broken in the Weddell Sea. Nor could the state of the funding, shaky as usual, have contributed to Shackleton’s peace of mind. James Wordie, the expedition’s geologist, had advanced personal monies to Shackleton for the purchase of fuel. And although the ship carried a wireless receiver, the expedition could not afford to purchase a transmitting plant. Nevertheless, the Endurance was bound at last for South Georgia, east of the Falklands, her final port of call.

  Like most expeditions of this kind, the ship carried a mixed company of officers and scientists, as well as seamen. In Scott’s expeditions, the two groups had been strictly segregated in naval fashion, but under Shackleton less attention was paid to niceties of class.

  “So I find we have got to work!” wrote marine captain Thomas Orde-Lees in his diary. “The crew of the ship is insufficient for her needs as a sailing ship & so whenever she is under sail & a sail requires altering in any way we—the scientists, six of us—have to pull on the ropes.… Rope pulling makes the hands sore & the ropes are exceedingly dirty & tarry but it is good exercise.”

  Lees was Shackleton’s ski expert, and was also in charge of the aero-propellered motor sledges that were destined not to work. His diary, the most chatty and opinionated of those kept by expedition members, is also one of the most informative. Lees was a public-school man, educated at Marlborough. No one found the menial tasks more distasteful, and yet even he could discern their purpose.

  T. Orde-Lees

  Seconded from the Royal Marines, where he was a physical training instructor, Captain Orde-Lees had served in China before joining the Endurance. He had narrowly missed being chosen to join Scott’s second expedition.

  “One can always have a bath afterwards, & I suppose it is good for one from a disciplinary point of view,” he conceded in his diary. Just how vital this discipline would prove to the well-being of the company as a whole not even Shackleton could have known.

  The Endurance arrived at South Georgia on November 5, eleven days after leaving Buenos Aires, in a mist of snow squalls that obscured a jagged, precipitous coastline. The company were greeted warmly by the island’s small population of Norwegian whalers, and were impressed by the level of amenity their hosts had managed to maintain at this most remote outpost of humanity. There were electric lights and hot water; and the home of the Grytviken station manager, Fridthjof Jacobsen, was not only heated but had geraniums blooming in its bow windows. These charms, however, could not conceal the noxious presence of the whaling industry: The island’s natural harbors were full of greasy offal and the stench of decaying whale carcasses, and the waters of Grytviken were red.

  Washing the floor

  Left to right, Wordie, Cheetham, and Macklin. “I simply hate scrubbing. I am able to put aside pride of caste in most things but I must say that I think scrubbing floors is not fair work for people who have been brought up in refinement.” (Lees, diary)

  Grytviken Whaling Station, seen from the Endurance

  This was the ship’s last port of call before heading south towards the Weddell Sea.

  The whalers provided the expedition with coal and clothing, bought on credit, as well as valuable information. No men on earth knew better the seas Shackleton was poised to enter, and they confirmed the reports from Buenos Aires that ice conditions were unusually severe that year, with pack extending farther north than it had in anyone’s recollection. Shackleton was advised to wait until later in the austral summer, and so the brief time he had planned to spend on South Georgia turned to a full month.

  The month on South Georgia appears to have been passed agreeably with the men getting to know one another and each becoming familiar with his duties. Amid the magnificent subantarctic scenery and fauna—elephant seals, penguins, and other bird life—they could at last feel their adventure to the great white south was truly under way. The dog trainers took their charges to a nearby hillside and attempted to restrain them from gorging on whale offal and rooting through the old whalers’ cemetery; the scientists wandered up into the hills looking at the abundant wildlife and “securing specimens.” Frank Hurley, aided by Captain Worsley and First Officer Lionel Greenstreet, lugged his forty pounds of camera equipment to the heights overlooking the Grytviken harbor and preserved the image of the Endurance riding at anchor, rendered insignificant by the stupendous encircle
ment of mountains. Lees, characteristically, sought to go off and climb challenging peaks on his own; Shackle-ton, characteristically, forbade him. The carpenter was busy constructing a covering for the extra deck space. The sailors remained with the ship.

  Veslegard Hut, South Georgia, 28 November, 1914

  Reginald James took this picture of Wordie, Hurley ( holding camera bag ), and Clark while on a camping trip during the monthlong sojourn on the island.

  Several members of the expedition could count themselves old Antarctic hands. Alfred Cheetham, the third officer, had been south more times than any other man on board the Endurance except Frank Wild: first in 1902, as boatswain on the Morning, the relief ship sent to search out and supply Scott’s Discovery; as third officer with Shackleton on the Nimrod; and with Scott again on the Terra Nova. Born in Liverpool, Cheetham was small and wiry, known for his cheery, willing manner; he was the chanty-man on both the Nimrod and the Endurance, and an old salt to the marrow of his bones. When asked to join the Nimrod crew, so the story goes, Cheetham had immediately agreed, then hastened off to tell the wife of his mate “Chippy” Bilsby, carpenter on the Morning, that her husband was going to the Antarctic again. Having delivered this message, he continued to the house where Bilsby himself was working.

  “Eh! Chippy lad, coom darn,” Cheetham called out, in broad Liverpudlian. “Tha’s barn t’ert South Pole wi me.”

  Bilsby: “I’se better see t’missus furst.”

  Cheetham: “Ah’ve seen t’wife, Chippy. Coom on.”

  Panorama of South Georgia Island, with Endurance in harbour