Читать книгу Shackleton’s Epic: Recreating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival - Tim Jarvis - Страница 7
ОглавлениеPoint Wild, the place Shackleton’s twenty-two men would call home for four months, complete with characteristic brash ice.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
The trails of the world be countless,
and most of the trails be tried;
You tread on the heels of the many,
till you come where the ways divide;
And one lies safe in the sunlight,
and the other is dreary and wan,
Yet you look aslant at the Lone Trail,
and the Lone Trail lures you on.
Robert Service, The Lone Trail
In times of trouble pray God for Shackleton.
Photographs from the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
I thought I knew Antarctica by now. I had been to its frozen alien shores, a world with no native human population, three times. I had become, to the extent that one can, “used” to the highest, coldest, windiest continent in the world with its extreme weather and the staggering, kilometers-thick mantle of ice that covers it.
My initial expedition into the polar regions had been a trek of tortuous slowness across the island of Spitsbergen in the high Arctic with my close friend Andrew “Ed” Edwards, where the danger of polar bear attacks and crevasses challenged us to our limits and revealed a strength and determination I wasn’t aware I possessed. In 1999 I’d taken on what many regard as one of the last great land-based challenges on earth—crossing the continent’s 2,700 kilometers on foot and unsupported, pulling a sled weighing 225 kilograms through obstructive icy terrain. Among other consequences, I’d seen my fingers blackened by frostbite; experienced temperatures so low that three of my metal fillings contracted and fell out, requiring self-administered dental repairs; lost 20 percent of my body weight; eaten a sickness-inducing 7,200 calories of lard and olive oil each day; and written “That was the toughest day of my life” in my diary on seventeen consecutive days. On that occasion, my journey ended early, when a ruptured fuel container resulted in food contamination. Nevertheless, I had covered 1,800 kilometers and reached the Pole in a record forty-seven days, allowing even someone as self-critical as me to be rightly proud of what had been achieved.
Fate played its hand in my next journey, which was south to the Antarctic. For my work as a scientist I had moved to Adelaide in South Australia. This brought me into unlikely contact with the legacy of Australia’s greatest land-based polar explorer and an Adelaide legend, Sir Douglas Mawson.
In 1913 Mawson was forced to undertake an incredible survival journey. While mapping an uncharted section of the Antarctic coast as part of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, he lost the first of his two companions, Belgrave Ninnis, and the dog sled that contained most of the expedition’s food and equipment in a crevasse fall. What followed was starvation, blizzards, debilitating cold, and, ultimately, following the consumption of the remaining sled dogs, the death, in Mawson’s arms, of his second companion, Xavier Mertz, of what he described at the time as “fever.” Alone, Mawson faced ferocious winds, near-fatal crevasse falls, and terrible debilitation, all compounded by the loneliness and danger of solo travel. When, against all odds, he finally stumbled through the door of his hut fifty days later, his men asked, “Which one are you?” Mawson’s shocking physical state made him unrecognizable. With some having accused Mawson of cannibalizing Mertz in order to survive, I decided I would re-enact the journey with what he said he had available to him, not only to test myself but also to see if I could shed light on Mawson’s survival. When I returned to civilization, journey complete, I was asked for a word that described the hardship of surviving on my own on starvation rations in a frozen, reindeer-skin sleeping bag following the “death” of my colleague. All I could think of was “desperate.”
But this time I was planning a very different journey. In attempting to re-create Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic survival trek across sea and ice in 1916, I would trade pulling a sled through mountains toward an endless white horizon for sailing and rowing a tiny, unstable wooden boat toward an endless gray one. Antarctica would be my starting point rather than my final destination. And I would be on a journey where the Antarctic weather that raged all around us would not only threaten from above but also turn the ocean across which we traveled into a tortured, ever-changing landscape of terrifying proportions.
The prospect of what lay ahead haunted me. Try as I might, I could not shake the image of a man in the dark water facing certain death, alone, watching his boat drift into the distance as the merciless cold of the Southern Ocean drained his lifeblood. Many thought the trip was virtually impossible. As he set off in his tiny, keel-less boat to try to cross the Southern Ocean from Elephant Island to South Georgia, Shackleton had said to his skipper, Frank Worsley, “Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?” Worsley assured him that, luckily, he did. Shackleton was as usual being self-effacing about his ability. I, on the other hand, was not: I knew very little about boat sailing and in my darkest moments it weighed heavily on me.
“It was an obsession that claimed them all,” the curator whispered in revered tones. The “them” to which he referred were Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, their obsession the exploration of the polar regions during the heroic era of exploration in the early years of the twentieth century. Looking at the equipment they used, it seemed hardly surprising and made my attempt on the North Pole the following year in Gore-Tex and Kevlar seem somehow lightweight—both literally and metaphorically—compared to their sepia-hued, superhuman feats featured on the walls and in the display cabinets all around us.
“May I introduce Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of Sir Ernest?” said another voice beside me. This time it was that of my good friend Geraldine. I turned to greet Alexandra with the respect the Shackleton name instantly commands, particularly in the hallowed surrounds of the Greenwich Maritime Museum. It was 2002 and we were there for the opening of the exhibition South, a celebration of the achievements of Alexandra’s grandfather, Scott, and Amundsen, but perhaps also a recognition of the esteem with which Shackleton’s account of the Endurance expedition of 1914–17 of the same name was regarded.
Mawson—scientist, explorer, survivor.
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia
Frank Hurley, National Library of Australia, vn4925816
Me, re-creating Mawson’s desperate journey of survival.
The route of the ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914–1916.
Courtesy of Ian Faulkner
Mawson’s achievements were noticeably absent from the exhibition, but Zaz, as Alexandra prefers to be known, was intrigued by my plans to retrace his journey the old way with the same starvation rations and hundred-year-old equipment. “It sounds fascinating,” she commented. “And what might you do if you are successful with that journey?” The significance of this question would not become clear until years later.
On my completion of the Mawson expedition, Zaz was one of the first to call to congratulate me on my success and praise the way in which I’d done it. I had kept it as true to the original journey as possible, with the notable exceptions being that no one died and we ate neither dogs nor men. This was something of a relief for my backers but even more so for my expedition partner, John Stoukalo, who was slightly concerned at the prospect of having to die halfway through like the ill-fated Mertz. The trip had been incredibly challenging, with more weight loss than ever before, a return of the old frostbite injuries plus a few new ones, and the need to plumb new depths of physical and mental resolve in order to complete the journey. But I had seen no need for the calories that eating another would have provided.
“What next?” Zaz asked innocently enough but with both of us knowing exactly what she meant. Through our close friendship that had developed since our first meeting, I knew she rued the fact that no one had successfully re-created her grandfather’s famous “double” as he had done it—a journey across the Southern Ocean in a replica James Caird followed by a climb across the mountainous interior of South Georgia. When one looked at the difficulty levels and the inherent danger, it was hardly surprising. “I would like you to lead a team to attempt this,” she stated. They were powerful words and, although I had anticipated them, they still made my pulse quicken. “I would be proud to,” I replied. With those few words I knew a cast-iron commitment had been made, one that Shackleton would have expected me to honor and that neither of us would let go.
Shackleton’s original expedition followed Amundsen and Scott, reaching the South Pole in 1912. Not to be outdone, Shackleton decided to embark on the most ambitious polar expedition of them all—the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (ITAE), a bid to cross Antarctica on foot from the Weddell Sea coast to the Ross Sea coast in what he described as “the one great main object of Antarctic journeyings.” In an interview for the Daily Mirror entitled “My Talk with Sir Ernest Shackleton,” William Pollock asked Shackleton why he was going on a South Polar expedition after Amundsen and Scott had succeeded in reaching the Pole itself. “He began to talk of the scientific, geographical and other benefits which he hoped would result from such an expedition,” wrote Pollock, “and then, suddenly fixing his eyes upon me, he said: ‘Besides, there’s a peculiar fascination about going. It’s hard to explain it in words—I don’t think I can quite explain it—but there’s an excitement, a thrill—a sort of magnetic attraction about polar exploration.’ ”
ITAE planned to use two ships to accomplish its goal. The first ship, the Endurance, on which Shackleton traveled, would land at a site near Vahsel Bay, adjacent to the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. From here Shackleton would begin his attempt to cross the continent by a route that interestingly was very similar to the starting point of my bid to cross Antarctica in 1999–2000 that left from nearby Berkner Island on the Ronne Ice Shelf. The second ship, Mawson’s former vessel the Aurora, would leave from Hobart under the command of Aeneas Mackintosh and land at McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea side. Its men would then lay a series of food caches in toward the Pole from their side that the crossing team would access once they passed the Pole.
Shackleton had learned from mistakes made on previous expeditions and was taking a large team of dogs, dietary precautions against scurvy, and a Royal Marine physical-fitness instructor, Thomas Orde-Lees, whose role among other things would be to teach the men to ski. Their improved diet, the result of painstaking research and analysis by Shackleton and Colonel Wilfred Beveridge of the Royal Army Medical Corps in a bid to minimize the risk of scurvy, undoubtedly helped their cause. It turned out, however, that neither the dogs nor an ability to ski would be needed, given the events that transpired.
The Endurance left Grytviken, South Georgia, in early December 1914 and headed south, bound for Vahsel Bay, in a year when the sea ice was the worst the whalers had ever experienced. For a week the ship, which was powered by engine and sail, barged and cajoled her way through the pack, her thick hull specifically designed for the purpose. But with Vahsel Bay still some 135 kilometers distant, the ice finally formed an impenetrable barrier many meters thick to the horizon in every direction. The same winds that supplemented the power from the Endurance’s engines by filling her sails and pushing her onward were, ironically, largely responsible for driving the vast mass of pack ice hard up against Antarctica, trapping them in the process.
After many attempts to free themselves, Shackleton announced on February 24 that the ship was officially a winter station and suspended ship routine, accepting that they were not going to escape the ice until the following spring or summer. He now had to get twenty-eight men from disparate backgrounds to live together harmoniously—not easy given that the sailors had been expecting to head back to civilization soon after dropping off the “shore party” of expeditioners and scientists. With big personalities involved and wide-ranging personal likes and dislikes bubbling below the surface, it was a huge challenge.
What the ice gets, the ice does not surrender: the Endurance beset by ice.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/143
Shackleton established a structured routine of social activity, including lantern evenings, regular exercise, and tending to the dogs, and he relocated all of the men’s living quarters down into the warmest part of the ship. Now the eccentricities of his recruitment process came to the fore: the optimism and flexibility he had looked for in each man began to pay dividends. Shackleton held optimism almost above all else, calling it “true moral courage,” and they would need all they had to get through.
The Endurance remained beset until September, when the ice started to break up. The men greeted this positively and started speculating about their being freed and perhaps being able to continue south. But actually it signified great danger—the kind of danger one gets when rafts of ice many meters thick and the size of cities are driven together by powerful forces of wind and currents. The resulting “pressure” will crush anything in its path, even the strongest ice-strengthened vessel like the Endurance, especially when she was embedded in the ice. “Pressure” was a very apt description of the situation in which they now found themselves: on their own in this alien world with no one knowing they were there and with no means of communicating with anyone.
A man’s best friends: Shackleton’s ship and his dogs on ice.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/13
By October the intense pressure of the ice had breached the stricken ship’s hull and she was sinking despite bilge pumps and men operating around the clock to try to save her. On October 27 Shackleton ordered the men to abandon ship, setting up camp in tents on the ice nearby. Immediately and with typical decisiveness, he determined that they would prepare to march toward the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, some 400 kilometers to the northwest. Shackleton’s ability to refocus on new goals and his characteristic optimism and conviction were clearly demonstrated by his calm announcement to the men: “So now we’ll go home.”
Their bullishness was soon dampened, however, as they discovered the impossibility of pulling the lifeboats across the contorted surface of pack ice. The three lifeboats—the James Caird, Dudley Docker, and Stancomb Wills, named after the expedition’s sponsors—had been rescued from the Endurance and would be their only way home. But each boat weighed more than a tonne (a metric ton) and, despite being on sleds, was desperately heavy and cumbersome to pull. I can certainly attest to the difficulty of pulling a sled through the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean—like a building site with walls and piles of frozen rubble many meters high, over and through which you need to pick your way. A more demoralizing and confused surface would be difficult to imagine.
In light of the circumstances, Shackleton changed his plan and decided to set up Ocean Camp less than three kilometers from the wreck of the Endurance. The goal now was to hope they drifted northwest in the pack so that when it ultimately broke up, they would be free to complete the remainder of the journey at sea in the boats, sticking close to shore. It was a tense time as the wind appeared not to have read the script, sending them backward and out to sea as often as toward land. Meanwhile, Shackleton battled with severe sciatica and the men suffered in damp sleeping bags, the wood salvaged from the Endurance not insulating them sufficiently from the snow and ice beneath. They were also worried they would run out of food, given their rate of consumption. Just when any sane consideration of their circumstances would surely have resulted in feelings of utter hopelessness and despondency, Shackleton’s optimism again came to the fore. Such an ability to look favorably at one’s predicament, almost to the point of self-delusion in the face of the awful truth of one’s circumstances, is crucial to every polar expeditioner, especially given the enormity of the task one sets oneself in places where the chances of success are low and problems and doubts unrelenting. It was a skill over which Shackleton had complete mastery, but it was not to everyone’s liking. The Endurance’s first officer, Lionel Greenstreet, referred to it as “absolute foolishness,” summing up what quite a few of the men thought.
It was here at Ocean Camp that Shackleton got the expedition’s carpenter, Henry “Chippy” McNeish, to begin preparing the Caird and the other boats for a long sea journey. With extremely limited resources, McNeish managed to add thirty-five centimeters to the gunwales of the Caird using nails from the Endurance and filling the seams with lamp wick and the oil paints of Marston, the artist. This gave the Caird some seventy centimeters of freeboard, all of which would be needed for the journey ahead.
Despite Chippy McNeish’s excellent work, relations were not good between him and Shackleton. The carpenter, who feared the drift was carrying them out to sea, had vocally disagreed with Shackleton’s latest decision to begin marching again toward land. The rift between the two men would never heal, as Shackleton felt McNeish’s behavior was tantamount to mutiny. “I shall never forget him in this time of stress,” he lamented. In the end, ice conditions forced a rethink anyway and a move to stronger ice nearby and what they dubbed “Patience Camp.” Here, a more candid assessment of their dire food situation resulted in the need to shoot twenty-seven of their dogs that they could no longer afford to feed, Frank Wild reporting that it was the worst job he had ever had to do: “I have known many men I would rather shoot than the worst of the dogs.”
Man-hauling the boats: in a desperate bid to reach the open sea and be free of the ice, the crew tried to drag the boats by hand.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/39
Fear and uncertainty stalked the camp as the men drifted north, parallel with the peninsula and tantalizingly close to Paulet and Joinville islands, less than five kilometers to the west and the last islands before the end of land, the vastness of the Southern Ocean, and an even worse fate.
Over the course of the next week, the men were carried farther north out into the open ocean by the strong currents, their soccer-field-sized home rapidly disintegrating beneath them in the big ocean swell—a two-meter-thick leaf on a 2,000-meter-deep pond. Finally, a further crack in their floe forced their hand and they launched the boats on April 9, knowing that either Clarence or Elephant Island, the mountains of which had appeared on the horizon, was their last chance of survival. If they missed the islands, certain death at sea awaited. It was the austral autumn of 1916, the First World War raged on, and the crew of the Endurance were twenty-eight men in three small wooden lifeboats adrift in the roughest ocean in the world.
Their journey was a terrifying one. Initially it involved trying to follow leads in the shifting pack ice that dangerously opened and closed with a force that could crush the boats in an instant. Although terribly dangerous, at least the pack afforded protection from the open water that was far rougher without the dampening effect of the ice. Plus each night they could at least camp on a suitable floe—a better option than remaining on the open sea.
Based on the constantly changing winds, at one stage Shackleton opted to aim for King George Island to the west. Then the winds changed again, driving them depressingly back beyond Patience Camp. At this stage they had no drinking water left and the men were exhausted and understandably fearful of what might happen next. Temperatures were well below freezing, snow was falling, waves were crashing into the boats, and the Stancomb Wills, whose gunwales had not been raised, was awash with knee-deep, freezing seawater. Hypothermia was close at hand and the men were suffering from trench foot—an ailment not unlike frostbite—caused by the cold, damp, restricted conditions. In addition, a dangerous apathy was setting in, born in roughly equal parts of their being completely at the mercy of the elements and their utter exhaustion. Shackleton decided to head for Elephant Island, admitting privately that he “doubted if all the men would survive that night.” Elephant Island was deemed to be the better option largely because the winds they had would allow an attempt at Clarence if they missed it. If they missed Clarence Island, that would be it: there was no more land save South Georgia, an impossible 800 nautical miles to the northeast—an inhospitable dot in a very large ocean.
Shackleton approached the underbelly of Elephant Island in a howling gale, aiming for a broad bay some seventeen miles wide on its southeastern side that they could not see due to the “blackness of the gale and thick snow squalls,” according to Worsley. They approached cautiously until the wind yet again changed direction, blowing from the southwest, directly behind them, causing heavy, confused seas. Worsley, who was skippering the Dudley Docker, felt there was serious danger of capsizing. Finally, they managed to round Cape Valentine, the strength of the sea abating and the gale decreasing as they moved into the lee of the island, but it had been a desperately close run.
On Elephant Island, the end of an improbable journey for two lifeboats—but only the beginning for the James Caird.
From the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
Sealers named Elephant Island, or Sea Elephant Island, after the massive creatures that lived there, the only mammals that had managed to establish themselves on its inhospitable shores. Even the sealers and whalers themselves had been unable to do so due to its remoteness, rough weather, and absence of a sheltered anchorage. Every indentation of Elephant Island’s rugged coastline is steep glacial ice save for the dark rock cliffs that descend directly into an ocean of huge seas crashing unrelentingly at their base.
After their arrival, the mist cleared, as expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s description of Cape Valentine attests. “Such a wild and inhospitable coast I have never beheld,” he wrote, going on to describe “the vast headland, black and menacing, that rose from a seething surf 1,200 feet above our heads and so sheer as to have the appearance of overhanging.” All in all this meant that, other than representing terra firma, Cape Valentine was a very poor prospect for their ongoing survival. Their position on a narrow, shingle beach underneath overhanging cliffs meant it was a race between a big sea washing them away or snow, ice, and rocks cascading down on them from the cliffs above. They had to move immediately.
Frank Wild again took to the sea in the Dudley Docker to find a better camp, and chose the spot later named Point Wild by the men in his honor. The name could just as easily have been a description of the site itself—a shingle and rock spit extending perpendicular into the sea capped by large, rocky outcrops on the seaward side. Seas from both east and west battered it. The western side, meanwhile, was routinely choked with ice from the glacier only 200 meters away, major ice falls created enormous waves that on several occasions almost engulfed Shackleton’s puny camp on the shingle beach. The violent, contorted river of glacial ice prevented progress anywhere on foot to the south and west while 300-meter-high black cliffs did the same to the east.
Iron Men: Shackleton’s chosen few, clockwise from top left: Tom Crean, John Vincent, Chippy McNeish, Timothy McCarthy, and Frank Worsley.
(top right) Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
(top left) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, ON 26/5
(bottom right) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, SLIDES 22/123
(bottom left) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, SLIDES 22/121
All were relieved to have made it to this inhospitable, rocky outcrop, no one more so than Shackleton. But his relief was soon overshadowed by the knowledge that, on an island without a human population and seldom visited even by whalers, they would never be found. He knew, too, that only a thin veneer of morale remained among many of the men despite the joy and relief—initially at least—at having made it this far, and that neither morale nor men would likely survive the fast-approaching winter. It was April 1916, and with autumn upon them already, he knew that he would have to bring civilization to them, and waste no time in doing it.
The journey that followed unbelievably eclipsed what had gone before and was described by Sir Edmund Hillary as “the greatest survival journey of all time.” Shackleton and five of his most able men left Elephant Island on April 24 on an 800-nautical-mile voyage across the notoriously treacherous Southern Ocean in the largest of the three lifeboats, the James Caird.
Frank Worsley was skipper. The New Zealander was something of an eccentric, a risk taker and not a natural leader—in the authoritarian sense at least—but he was undoubtedly one of the most accomplished sailors of his time. Tom Crean was a tough Irishman from County Kerry and perhaps the strongest polar expeditioner of the heroic era. He was fiercely loyal to Shackleton and virtually begged to be included in the Caird team. His experience and resilience were invaluable: as a petty officer in the Royal Navy, Crean had already served under Scott on two of his Antarctic expeditions. Chippy McNeish, with whom Worsley in particular did not get on, was a rough Scot whom Shackleton described as “the only man I’m not dead certain of.” But his efforts to make the Caird more seaworthy were remarkable and, as it turns out, critical. One of the oldest men on the Endurance, McNeish had a rough, cantankerous manner that was problematic, and Shackleton undoubtedly chose him for the Caird crew as much to safeguard morale among those left behind on Elephant Island as for his respected skills as a sailor and shipwright. Similarly, Shackleton chose John Vincent, a hardened ex-naval North Sea trawlerman, because of his physical strength and sailing skill, but in no small part to remove him from Elephant Island due to his bullying ways. Timothy McCarthy, meanwhile, was perhaps the best and most efficient of the sailors, always cheerful under the most trying circumstances and described by Worsley as “the most irrepressible optimist I’ve ever met.” Having survived this great journey, he was tragically still claimed by the sea, dying as he did only three weeks after returning home on a navy ship that was lost with all hands during the Great War. It was McCarthy’s first day under enemy fire.
For seventeen days this tough group of men battled constant gales, terrible cold, and mountainous seas in their twenty-three-foot keel-less wooden boat, using only Worsley’s occasional sextant sightings from the boat’s pitching deck to navigate by. That they not only found South Georgia but also managed to land on this remote island is incredible. Their epic voyage and subsequent survival is a remarkable testament to both Shackleton’s leadership and the seamanship of Worsley, who saw the sun for only four sightings during the whole voyage in tumultuous seas.
Upon their arrival at South Georgia, following a hurricane that nearly finished them off, the six men clawed their way into King Haakon Bay, a spectacular fjord on the southwestern side of the island. There, Shackleton left Vincent and McNeish, who were too exhausted to continue, in the care of McCarthy. He, Worsley, and Crean then climbed over the unexplored, heavily glaciated mountains of South Georgia to reach Stromness whaling station on the other side. It was a thirty-five-kilometer journey that the world’s top mountaineers in the modern era have subsequently been unable to replicate in the way Shackleton did it.
Ultimately Shackleton was able to save all of his men—the three who remained on the other side of South Georgia and, with the help of the Chilean Navy, all twenty-two of the crew members who had been left stranded on Elephant Island. It was an epic triumph of endurance and leadership.
This boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia and the climb across the mountains to Stromness was what Zaz had been referring to when she asked me to lead a team to attempt “the double.” My unequivocal agreement meant I needed not only to build a replica Caird from scratch but also to assemble a team skilled and brave enough to attempt this with me.
So why did I do it? A simple answer was that I was honored to be asked by Shackleton’s granddaughter to undertake this journey and was inspired to want to do it as the greatest survival story of the heroic era of exploration. Despite my reprising the conversation her grandfather and Worsley had had in which Shackleton suggested he was “no small-boat sailor,” she remained unmoved and I am grateful to her for her confidence. In no small part, too, it felt like the logical conclusion of my bid to cross Antarctica in 1999, thwarted as it was by a fuel leak 1,800 kilometers into the crossing. I hadn’t been trapped in the pack ice as Shackleton had been, unable even to land on Antarctica, but I still had unfinished business in the Great White South. Perhaps the journey in the replica Caird and climbing across South Georgia would be a closing chapter for us both.
At a more philosophical level, I consider exploration to be the adventure of seeing whether or not you can achieve something, the thrill of trying, and the process of learning more about yourself and your surroundings that going on a journey to find out affords you, and I think this outlook is consistent with Shackleton’s. That we as individuals need to challenge ourselves to find out more about the world and our place in it is, I believe, as relevant a concept now as it was for Shackleton. As André Gide said so eloquently, “It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves—in finding themselves.”
Certainly this love of exploration both literal and personal was a major driver for Shackleton, as undoubtedly was the desire to excel, with polar exploration being the means by which this could happen. As a middle-class, merchant-navy man of Anglo-Irish parentage (despite moving to England at the age of ten, his voice apparently retained traces of his Irish roots), he did not naturally fit easily into either Irish or English society, obsessed as they were in Edwardian times—and to an extent still are—with social standing. As the outsider—unlike Scott, who in every way represented the establishment—Shackleton defied pigeonholing and actively resisted it, displaying a healthy disregard for class and tradition. Polar expeditions offered him a way to transcend these boundaries while fueling his love of adventure—and not hurting his marriage prospects either.
Perhaps it was this refreshingly modern attitude that resonated so strongly in my own mind, as much as his extraordinary achievements. The more I discovered about Shackleton, the more I recognized, from his adaptability born of living in a number of different places and needing to fit in, his determination to follow projects through to completion and the energy with which he did so, right down to the stubbornness and impatience he exhibited once he had decided upon a course of action. His intolerance of any negativity expressed by his men, along with his not being fazed by problems as long as a solution was suggested, were also familiar attitudes, not to mention his hunger for adventure and new experiences. In short, had we met over a few drinks, I think Shackleton and I would have had quite a few things to talk about and agree on.
And, of course, there were the many intriguing anecdotal details that made Shackleton such a compelling character and the story of his survival so remarkable. His powerful personal charm and charisma, which enabled him to talk as easily to Kaiser Wilhelm II as to the lowliest member of his crew and which won over financial backers for his expensive expeditions and gained him the unswerving loyalty of those who served under him (who affectionately called him “the Boss”), are the stuff of legend. Combine this with the failings he displayed both financially and personally and, for me, he became over time the most extraordinary and most “human” of all the heroic-era explorers. The invitation to retrace his journey was more than just an opportunity for adventure.
In the years since the achievements of Shackleton and his peers, there has been an ebb and flow in the way in which their exploits have been regarded. Mawson survived to old age, going on to achieve great things beyond his Antarctic feats, and is now finally beginning to get the recognition he deserves. Scott, once the hero who had paid the ultimate price by selflessly giving his life in the pursuit of his goal, has come to be seen by many as someone who went too far. Perhaps he was too readily prepared to sacrifice not only his life but also those of his men, and made serious mistakes along the way that contributed to their demise. Amundsen, who was seen as unfeeling and dispassionate with his routine butchering of his dogs and clinical way of operating on the ice, with time has revealed human failings. His poor judgment in initially leaving too early in his first bid for the South Pole meant his men barely escaped with their lives. One, Hjalmar Johansen, felt so betrayed he fell out with Amundsen and was dropped from the successful polar team. The shame he felt resulted in Johansen taking his own life.
For Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, pro patria mori ended up reigning supreme. Scott, the last to die in his tent, was writing eloquently until the end. Amundsen, having conquered the Northwest Passage by boat and the South Pole on foot, was lost in a plane searching for a former colleague, Umberto Nobile, in the Arctic. And as for Shackleton, he died only five years after the legendary journey he undertook after the loss of the Endurance.
Shackleton’s star has risen and continues to do so, his decisiveness, compassion, and ability demonstrated so ably by his salvaging victory from the jaws of defeat in saving his men, representing an ideal to aim for in a world where selfless heroic leadership is aspired to by many, practiced by few, and needed by all. Now I was committed to emulating this most difficult of journeys by this most incredible of men and hoped that I could rise to the challenge. An apocryphal advertisement for the original expedition read, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Safe return doubtful . . . honour and recognition in case of success.”
Together alone: the Endurance crew beside their ice-bound ship.
From the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
The heroic era of exploration—to which Ernest Shackleton and his contemporaries Robert Falcon Scott, Roald Amundsen, and Douglas Mawson belonged—began with the first Antarctic landing by Carsten Borchgrevink in 1895. It ended with Shackleton’s Endurance expedition of 1914–17, which coincided with the loss of innocence on the fields of Flanders as cavalry charges were cut down by machine-gun fire.
Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen, and Mawson were seeking to conquer the three “poles”—the North and South Poles and the Northwest Passage, a near-mythical sea route above Canada. Their need to challenge themselves and find out more about the world and their place in it lies at the heart of so many spheres of human endeavor and remains as true today as it was back then. It is as much about discovering what lies within as it is about triumphing over adversity.
These heroic-era expeditions also served the dual purpose of satisfying the national interests of the countries concerned and the egos of the personalities involved. These same motivations remain—although perhaps today’s expeditions are done more with corporate sponsors in mind than king and country.
Shackleton first went south on the Discovery expedition led by Scott in 1901–03. The two men, along with Dr. Edward Wilson, got to within 720 kilometers of the South Geographic Pole. Overcome by scurvy and without sufficient food to sustain them, the trio had to turn back. They were unable to pull their sleds any farther, a problem exacerbated by their poor ski experience and dog-handling skills. Shackleton’s level of debilitation was by far the worst and his subsequent evacuation home by Scott was a slight he found difficult to live with. It began an unbridgeable rift between the two men.
Amundsen finally conquered the third pole—the Northwest Passage—in 1903–06, but not before the British Navy threw men and resources at the task in the hope of being the first to find a way through. One of its goals was to find a faster trade route from Britain to the jewel in the imperial crown, India. Attempts came thick and fast, including John Franklin’s ill-fated journey. Franklin, a former governor of Tasmania, was past his prime at age fifty-nine when the expedition began in 1845. He and all 128 of his men perished—the biggest non-wartime loss of life sustained by the Royal Navy. His ships Erebus and Terror have never been found.
In 1907–09 Shackleton organized his own attempt on the South Pole—the British Antarctic Expedition, otherwise known as the Nimrod Expedition after his ship. The goal eluded his team by only 155 kilometers (97 miles), but Shackleton’s decision to abandon his quest undoubtedly saved the lives of the entire party. To continue would have meant certain death. Again, had the party been more proficient dog handlers, taken a larger dog team, and dispensed with the ponies that proved to be a liability, they might have been more successful. Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing? Ultimately Shackleton’s decision to turn back exemplified the compassion and fearless decision-making that came to symbolize his ability as a leader. His “surrender” was particularly brave given it ran counter to the mood of the day, where a philosophy of pro patria mori would soon result in millions dying for their country in the trenches of the First World War. As Shackleton said to his wife, “I thought you’d rather a live donkey than a dead lion.”
Shackleton was subsequently knighted for his achievements during the Nimrod Expedition. But the trip was also notable for another major achievement. During it, Mawson, together with Alistair Mackay and Edgeworth David, reached the South Magnetic Pole. Theirs was the longest unsupported sledging journey ever undertaken and included the first ascent of the 3,800-meter volcano Mount Erebus.
The austral summer of 1911–12 was a busy period in Antarctica. Mawson set sail from Hobart to begin his Australasian Antarctic Expedition (AAE) in December 1911, just as Amundsen and Scott were racing to be the first to reach the South Pole. Amundsen reached his goal on December 14. When Scott, who toiled across the Ross Ice Shelf, arrived at the Pole on January 17, he found that the Norwegian had narrowly beaten him to his prize. He and his four men—Edward Wilson, Lawrence Oates, Henry Bowers, and Teddy Evans—started the 1,500-kilometer journey back. Evans died about a month into the return trip, and was followed by Oates, who, realizing he was a hindrance to his companions, walked out into a blizzard uttering the now immortal line, “I’m just going outside and may be some time.” The remaining three men died just twenty kilometers from the final food depot that would have saved them.
Mawson would undertake his own desperate survival journey in the austral summer of 1912–13 when the Far Eastern Sledging Journey that formed part of AAE went wrong, claiming the lives of his two companions. His survival against terrible odds secured his place in the annals of Antarctic exploration history. My re-enactment of his journey of survival in 2006—in which I used the same clothing, equipment, and starvation rations—taught me the depths of resolve he must have called upon.
With Amundsen and Scott having already reached the South Pole, Shackleton embarked on the most ambitious polar expedition of all—the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (ITAE). It was a bid to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea coast to the Ross Sea coast in what he described as “the one great main object of Antarctic journeyings.” ITAE planned to use two ships to accomplish its goal. The Endurance, on which Shackleton traveled, would land at a site near Vahsel Bay adjacent to the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. From here Shackleton would begin his attempt to cross the continent on a route that was very similar to my unsupported expedition to cross Antarctica in 1999–2000, which left from the northernmost tip of Berkner Island on the Ronne Ice Shelf. A second ship, Mawson’s former vessel the Aurora, would leave from Hobart under the command of Aeneas Mackintosh and land at McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea side. Its men would then have the job of laying a series of food caches that the crossing team would access once past the Pole.
The expedition went disastrously wrong. The Endurance was crushed in the ice and Shackleton was forced to undertake a desperate survival bid in one of its lifeboats, the James Caird.
