Читать книгу Shackleton’s Epic: Recreating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival - Tim Jarvis - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTerra Incognita.
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia
Great Britain, Hydrography Department, Ice chart of Southern Hemisphere, National Library of Australia, MAP RM 1658
“Victory has 100 fathers, and defeat is an orphan.”
John F. Kennedy, news conference, April 21, 1961
A boat against the odds: the James Caird on display at Shackleton’s alma mater, Dulwich College.
Courtesy of Seb Coulthard
The plan viewed from a distance was straightforward enough: build a replica James Caird, take her to Antarctica on board a larger ship, hire a dedicated support vessel for the duration of the journey, select the right team, get the permits and insurance, and do it. I would finance the expedition with corporate sponsorship and sale of the film rights, supplemented by funds from fee-paying passengers who’d get a once-in-a-lifetime trip on our support vessel.
Through the help and networks of Zaz’s cousin Melissa Shackleton Dann, her husband, Tom Dann, and Perry Hooks, who all lived in Washington, DC, along with the Yale World Fellows Program that saw me resident in Connecticut during the second half of 2009, I was able to get National Geographic and Discovery interested in filming the expedition. Now I could put any funds I raised toward building a boat.
After multiple trips back and forth from Yale to National Geographic’s headquarters in the heart of Washington, DC, and another two all the way from Australia in early 2010, the 125-year-old company signed on. I met so many people from National Geographic—from its TV channel and production departments, its book publishing, magazine and social media arms, its speaking agency, and its expedition grants department—in an attempt to communicate the full potential of the project.
But it was all worth it. That is until a personnel change at the company coincided with a key expedition supporter and National Geographic benefactor getting cold feet. While I respected his fears for the project’s safety, I had hoped National Geographic would trust my judgment. Unfortunately, his pulling out meant National Geographic did too. To make matters worse we’d now missed our chance with Discovery. It was August 2010 and all I had to show for my lengthy efforts was a half-finished boat, a bigger mortgage, and a bruised ego.
We were back to square one, except that the tireless Seb Coulthard, my first recruit to the crew, was now working on the Alexandra Shackleton. All the while, the fluid nature of expedition planning meant that changes to any one set of logistics had a domino effect on all the others, keeping me second-guessing and fighting fires.
CVs were by now flooding in from people wanting to join the Alexandra Shackleton crew, but it was difficult to get top-notch people to commit without cast-iron guarantees that the expedition was fully funded and definitely going ahead. Without a decent broadcaster on board I couldn’t get sponsors and therefore could guarantee nothing. It was a catch-22 situation: broadcasters wouldn’t commit until I’d secured funding from sponsors. Also, to set an expedition date required locking in logistics providers one to two years in advance—and sponsor dollars were needed to pay their deposit fees.
Shackleton probably suffered similar problems, although he didn’t have to contend with the considerable burden of bureaucracy placed on modern-day expeditions. Even with the support and understanding of the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the South Georgian government, it was almost impossible to finalize permits until we knew the finer details of the expedition—and these would be determined to a degree by our as-yet-unknown sponsors and broadcast partner.
I edged forward on multiple fronts as best I could, financing everything myself, but it was a very lonely period of my life. I knew the risks for such projects started long before you reached the ice: risks to reputation, finances, career, and even one’s marriage, as the pressures abound from throwing more and more energy and personal funds behind a project with an unknown outcome.
A turning point came in October 2010, when I joined the international engineering firm Arup on a part-time basis as a spokesman and sustainability leader. Robert Care, the chair of Asia-Pacific, and his successor, Peter Bailey, were visionaries who saw the benefits of supporting the expedition. The environmental messages of climate change and biodiversity loss that I proposed to leverage off the back of it, and the broader message of bringing to fruition something inspiring but technically and logistically challenging, paralleled what Arup was all about, making it a perfect backer for the project.
About the same time, the issue of how to get the Alexandra Shackleton down south was resolved. Lisa Bolton, the CEO of Aurora Expeditions, Australia’s leading polar tourism operator, told me their ship, Polar Pioneer, took on supplies in Poland each September before heading south for the Antarctic summer season. If I could get the Alexandra Shackleton to Poland, it could piggyback on Polar Pioneer and be dropped off in Antarctica. I knew I had to make this happen even if I had to drive the trailer with the Alexandra Shackleton on board to Poland myself.
In the meantime, I had to convince sponsors to fund an expedition where the major cost was $300,000 for a support vessel—a legal and moral requirement in case things went wrong in the deep Southern Ocean, but not a very exciting budget line item as far as funding went. Salvation came unexpectedly in early 2012 through a contact in the nautical community of Weymouth and Portland on the southern coast of England. It was here that the Alexandra Shackleton was based after John Dean and Richard Reddyhoff generously allowed us to turn their state-of-the-art marina into the unofficial home of the expedition. And it was from here that Seb called me excitedly to say he’d come across a tall ship that closely resembled the Endurance. Maybe it could be our support vessel.
I went to meet the ship’s original owner and builder at the iconic Cove House Inn, nestled behind the high shingle bank of nearby Chesil Beach, not fifty meters from “Deadman’s Bay,” one of the UK’s most dangerous sections of coastline. Many ships had been wrecked in the bay with great loss of life due to lee shore winds and currents driving them onshore. Just six months earlier I had no understanding of such conditions, but now I knew we would likely face a lee shore in our keel-less boat as we approached South Georgia from the southwest with winds blowing us directly onshore. With powerful surf rumbling in the background, I knew there and then that this ship, a steel-hulled barquentine that looked remarkably like the Endurance, was the hook needed to pull everything together.
Shackleton planning his assault on Antarctica; some things haven’t changed in a hundred years.
Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
The makers of Discovery Channel’s highly successful Gold Rush show, Raw TV in London, loved the idea of using an Endurance lookalike as our support vessel. Discovery Channel Europe loved it too. Now there was an extra story angle—life aboard the Endurance, as well as the Alexandra Shackleton—although all agreed there would be no need to crush and sink our tall ship in the ice of the Weddell Sea for the sake of realism. Plus the twenty or so berths not occupied by the ship’s crew and Raw’s team could be made available to sponsors and other interested paying parties.
About this time, PR guru Kim McKay came on board to help with publicity and fundraising for the expedition. Not only was Kim an expert in her field, she had also worked for both National Geographic and Discovery, we had mutual friends, and she was a committed greenie who cofounded the leading environmental charity Clean Up Australia and cut her teeth doing media and PR for the BOC Challenge solo around the world yacht races—in short she was a perfect choice. It took just one serendipitous meeting in Sydney, at an event to celebrate David de Rothschild’s Pacific voyage in his plastic-bottle boat Plastiki, and she was on board.
Expeditions are all about measuring your effort and picking your battles. It’s like doubling your efforts when you know a set of tennis is there for the taking but conserving energy and conceding points cheaply when you know it is lost. With Kim on board, Arup being brilliantly supportive, Discovery Europe having committed, and Seb fitting out the Alexandra Shackleton in Weymouth with an army of volunteers, the stars were aligning. Suddenly we were leading two sets to one and were a service break up in the third. I decided the austral summer of 2012–13 would be our time.
Of course, I should have anticipated the match would come down to a tiebreak in the fifth set. Eternal optimism is one thing but I was, after all, trying to pull off an expedition to re-create the world’s greatest survival journey during perhaps the worst recession the world has seen. Despite this, three wonderful sponsors signed on in 2012—Intrepid Travel became our naming rights sponsor; Whyte & Mackay Scotch whisky supported us with both funds and whisky (actual replica bottles of the same Mackinlay’s whisky Shackleton had taken on his expedition); and St. George Bank ensured we would have enough funding to at least make the expedition happen.
With this all finalized I returned to the UK in late July 2012 to “supervise” the still formidable list of tasks needed to keep the expedition on track. I was tired but undaunted at the prospect of what lay ahead with less than six months to go: final selection of our team’s sailors, sea trials, sea-survival courses and the South Georgian government’s environmental and expedition briefings, final fit-out of the Alexandra Shackleton, answering Discovery Channel’s questions, selling twenty berths aboard our support vessel, progressing the five sets of permits required for our expedition, reviewing legal aspects of contracts with sponsors and those traveling south with us, and media events in London and New York. It was a big list all right. We also had to ensure that the Alexandra Shackleton, on board Polar Pioneer, and our support vessel all left on time for their 10,000-mile journey to Antarctica. Clearly, there wasn’t going to be much time for watching the London Olympics on TV.
Insurance for this whole operation, meantime, was morphing into a subject fit for a Ph.D. thesis: factors included age, level of risk exposure, and duration of that exposure on a journey that now involved two boats and thirty people re-creating the world’s greatest journey of survival in the roughest ocean in the world. Shackleton would have approved of the challenge and the nine weeks in which I had to sort it all out.
Elizabeth, the boys, and I were by now house-sitting our friends Tamsin and Tom’s farmhouse in England’s West Country. I’m not sure what I had in mind, but I somehow thought it would be a hideaway where we could blend time as a family with my work on planning the expedition. In reality the two blended like oil and water. I’d commandeered the home office, above the old barn and away from the main house, as expedition HQ. It was a glorious spot but one where I’d already had some of my most stressful days, staring out beyond the old Tudor farmhouse to the rolling green hills of Gloucestershire. I would switch the phone off in the early hours of the morning with e-mails and messages still coming in from all over the world and reluctantly on again five hours later to see what the night had brought with it.
The Alexandra Shackleton needed to be finished and on board Polar Pioneer in Gdynia, Poland, by early September for her departure on the 20th. Our tall ship support vessel was due to start her journey south about a week later. Initially I had been charmed by the romance of using the tall ship, but for the past few months alarm bells had been ringing loudly for me, and for many serious reasons. The decision to make no changes to her schedule of traditional overseas sailing races in the immediate lead-up to her proposed departure date for Antarctica had left her way behind schedule and was indicative of how little her management appreciated the enormity of the task ahead.
To make matters worse, her skipper and his number two quit unexpectedly. There was also disagreement about fuel requirements and how to refuel safely, escalating costs, ambiguity as to how many berths were available for us to sell, and doubts over the adequacy of the clothing on board for Antarctic conditions. Having independently recruited and paid for an ice pilot and an expedition team leader, I also had to ask my good friend and polar logistics expert Howard Whelan to help the tall ship’s management sort out various things I thought they should have been on top of. I couldn’t help but feel they were becoming a burden I could ill afford spending time or money on. But I was committed, having invested a lot of my own money in backing their involvement. Still, I suspected that as good as they were at what they normally did, they weren’t up to this challenge physically or organizationally, despite their assurances to the contrary. I had to focus on other things, though, so I gave them a schedule of tasks that needed completion before further payments would be made and turned my attentions to getting the Alexandra Shackleton to Poland for her journey south.
Men of the sea: Dr. Robert Goodhart (left) and Philip Rose-Taylor.
Courtesy of Scott Irvine
Up in expedition HQ above the barn, I received a disturbing e-mail from Polar Pioneer: the frame supplied to transport the Alexandra Shackleton south on board Polar Pioneer was too big for the space set aside for her and needed to be reduced in size or she couldn’t go. I swore loudly. Seb had used up some favors and $4,000 of hard-won expedition funds to get the easy-to-disassemble, color-coded frame made at the last minute to specific dimensions, and now it would need to be chopped up and adjusted when it arrived in Poland.
A few days earlier, I’d received a message asking when our expedition representatives would arrive in Poland to supervise the unloading and reloading of the Alexandra Shackleton onto the ship. What expedition representatives? Most of the team as it currently stood was based in Australia and working on funding, legal contracts, or selling berths aboard our support boat. Meanwhile, Howard and I were grappling with the logistics of fuel placement for the support ship, while Seb and the volunteers in Weymouth were working around the clock on finalizing fittings on the Alexandra Shackleton. I also had my own very long list of face-to-face meetings around the UK. Because the price tag for getting the boat to Poland on a flatbed truck was comparable to hiring a London cab to tow her there, I’d foolishly assumed the drivers could at least coordinate offloading her quayside from their truck and onto the ship without the need for us to be there. Apparently not.
We needed help, and luckily a supporter, Dr. Robert Goodhart, and Philip Rose-Taylor, a traditional sailmaker, were able to go in our stead. Two more trustworthy and capable people you’d be hard pressed to find, and, given the twinkle in Philip’s eye as he left, I got the impression they loved the idea of a road trip to Europe. I just hoped these two old seadogs wouldn’t be reprising some of the stuff Philip used to get up to in his youth traveling the world’s oceans.
The next day we received an e-mail from Polar Pioneer asking for paperwork to show we had applied the biological cleaning agent Virkon to the Alexandra Shackleton in order to eliminate any nasties that might contaminate Antarctica. Seb immediately arranged this, making good use of his army of volunteers who were applying finishing touches to the boat at the British Navy’s historic dockyard in Portsmouth following our sea trials a few weeks earlier. Philip and Robert, meanwhile, were armed with the appropriate documentation to take to Poland, along with a letter I’d been asked to provide guaranteeing that the Alexandra Shackleton would be offloaded at Chile’s Antarctic base, Eduardo Frei, on King George Island, although this had not yet been formally authorized. In the absence of something official from the Chilean authorities, I provided a confirmation document on expedition letterhead, knowing I had a month up my sleeve to get this signed off. At least I had the assurances of our fixer Alejo, who worked at the Frei base, that all would be well and that he would be there to take delivery of our boat. This, it turned out later, meant very little.
But we were heading in the right direction. Earlier we’d been told the boat was going to be too big and heavy for the Polar Pioneer. The exact dimensions had been provided to the ship’s owners on a manifest from Seb indicating that the Alexandra Shackleton was 2.2 meters wide, not the 2.1 meters I’d told them previously. A few days prior, the Polish government had decided to load an additional shipping container, so space on the 1,000-tonne ship was now down to centimeters. I knew the slipup was mine. I hadn’t realized how tight on space and weight they were on board. Luckily Polar Pioneer’s crane could cope with the extra weight, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered and I didn’t want to test the friendship. Aurora and the crew of Polar Pioneer were doing us a huge favor transporting the Alexandra Shackleton south. Without them we’d be sunk before we got in the water.
Next Robert and Philip rang to say the captain of Polar Pioneer had asked to see our permits before setting sail the next morning. I broke into a cold sweat; it was another potential deal breaker. We needed five permits: a Section 3 Expedition Permit and Section 5 Ship Permit under the UK Antarctic Act, and three permits from the South Georgian authorities for ship activity, landing on South Georgia, and crossing it. All of these were still several months away. I explained to Polar Pioneer’s captain that we were applying for the permits and that they were all in hand but not yet finalized. The fact that he saw we were embarked on the process and speaking to the right people in accordance with the right laws put his mind at ease, but he would have been justified in refusing to let the Alexandra Shackleton on board. Perhaps it was the enormity of what we were trying to accomplish and how difficult it was that got us across the line.
I stared out of the barn window at the old farmhouse and could see Elizabeth and the boys in the kitchen eating without me, as had become the norm. I felt guilty that I was subjecting them to all this stress. Money had dried up and shaking the tin in the UK yielded little, so I had been eating into our mortgage for some time now, funding everything myself to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a month. I was being as transparent as I could about it to Elizabeth while trying not to burden her unduly, but she knew me well enough to see how stressful it had become. She could also see our declining bank balance online but chose to be supportive and trust me, for which I am eternally grateful.
Loading the Alexandra Shackleton onto her mother ship, Polar Pioneer, for the 10,000-mile journey south from Gdynia, Poland.
Courtesy of Rob Goodhart
When we’d arrived at the farm, I’d insisted on our friend Tom telling me what jobs needed doing around the place while he was away. Reluctantly he’d mentioned a large fallen tree that needed cutting up. At one point I went into the barn and looked at the modern chainsaw that could dispatch the tree in less than a day. But in the shadows lay a rusting, heavy, blunt ax. With gladiatorial flourish I took up the ax and used it over the course of several days to batter not only the tree but also my problems into submission. Some days the pile of logs I chopped was the only tangible evidence of having made any progress; it kept me going.
I was getting tired of new problems presenting themselves each day. To (badly) paraphrase the Dalai Lama: “There are two types of problems: the ones you can overcome, in which case don’t worry, and the ones you can’t, in which case don’t worry.” I tested this philosophy to the limit most days.
I needed a break and made plans to spend three days visiting my godchildren in Brussels. It was quite something to think we were about to board a train that would take us under the English Channel while 100 meters above us, at exactly the same time, the Alexandra Shackleton would be on a Channel ferry. I hadn’t planned it that way but that’s how the dates had fallen. And I was now looking forward to having no phone reception for the half-hour tunnel journey. Just minutes before I was due to drive our vehicle onto the train, my phone rang. It was Seb. “French customs won’t let the bloody boat onto the ferry and it’s boarding in fifteen minutes!” “Why the hell not?” I snapped. Apparently they needed final ownership details, including my UK National Insurance number, expedition bank account, and expedition company particulars. Sensing my frustration, Seb launched into a tirade about our cross-channel neighbors, beginning with our victory at Agincourt. I cut him short, knowing I had less than eight minutes before I lost phone reception. “Wait for my call and keep the line free.”
I hung up, asked Elizabeth to drive, and jumped into the passenger seat, rummaging for my laptop, which was buried under kids’ toys and holiday bags. I found the bank account details and could for some unknown reason remember my UK National Insurance number even though I’d not used it for many years. It was 10 p.m. in Australia and with three minutes until boarding time, Ramona, my PA who had been helping me out on planning issues, was my only hope. Her Canadian burr reassuringly came down the phone line, but she said it would take a couple of minutes for her to fire up her laptop and find what I needed. Elizabeth drove onto the train but mercifully it remained motionless as Ramona quoted the necessary numbers and letters to me. I called Seb and gave him the information as the train set off, hanging up seconds before we entered the tunnel. We emerged half an hour later and I turned on my phone immediately. A text message popped up saying, “All fine.” It wasn’t really—it was incredibly stressful—but somehow I’d got used to it.
When Polar Pioneer finally set sail with the Alexandra Shackleton on board, I was relieved beyond compare. Now I could turn my attentions to our support vessel. With just over a week to go before sailing south herself, she still needed to have an upgraded satellite communication system installed and her fire alarm system repaired, not to mention repairs to a big dent in her side obtained when a bow wave from a passing ferry caused her to break free of her moorings. Plus we still had to negotiate for 13,000 liters of diesel to be made available for her journey home from South Georgia and they had no space for the spare Zodiac I told them they needed (nor had they even purchased one). I was feeling very uneasy, but finally she left the UK bound for the Caribbean en route to Punta Arenas, Chile. Relations with her team had been strained for the past few months as we bickered over whether I was behind on payments to them or they were behind on delivering what was required in order to justify me paying them. Churchill famously said about the end of the Second World War, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I for one felt as if I’d been in a war of attrition, and the end of the relationship was nigh.
