Antarctica is a world of colour, brilliant and intensely pure. The chaste whiteness of the snow and the velvet blackness of the rocks belong to days of snowy nimbus enshrouding the horizon. When the sky has broken into cloudlets of fleece, their edges are painted pale orange, fading or richly glowing if the sun is low. In the high sun they are rainbow-rimmed.
Douglas Mawson, The Home of the Blizzard
15 January 1909 and the day thereafter, nearing the South Magnetic Pole atop the Polar Plateau, Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson and Alister Mackay chase an unseen force to the ends of the earth
It has been a brutal journey, which has seen them ascending 5000 feet in 20 days on little more than half-rations. A potentially catastrophic concoction of strong blizzards, bad surfaces, freezing temperatures, exhaustion, starvation and anxiety about getting back to the Drygalski Depot has cruelled them all the way.
Part of the problem is the ever-changing position of the South Magnetic Pole over the years, which wanders the terrain like a drunken nomad. Before 1902, it was shifting eastward. Since then, it appeared to be moving north-west, and now it seems to be 40 miles north-west of where it was estimated to be by fellow Australian scientist Louis Bernacchi, on Scott’s Discovery expedition. The men are not so much going to a particular spot on the map as working out just where it might be on the map on the day they will hopefully manage to intercept it.
Frustratingly, much of it amounts to approximations, guesswork and gut-feel. On one occasion, after a hard day’s hauling, Mawson takes a reading only to discover that it is maddeningly further off than when they started the day.
Mawson is relying on his dip compass, which has been progressively, and now rapidly, standing more vertically (towards the centre of the earth) the closer they come to their goal. After marching seven miles in the afternoon, he sees that the compass needle is just 12 minutes off being straight up and down, and he calculates they are within 13 miles of their journey’s end.
The next day, after two miles, the Party leave everything non-essential they can in a prominent position to return to later, enabling them to travel light for the six or so hours they estimate it will take them to reach the region that Mawson has made an educated guess at. As Mawson explains to David and Mackay, calculation of the precise location of the South Magnetic Pole would take a month of observations – all he can do in a day is make his best estimate that they are as close to its location as his observations allow.
After 13 miles of marching, they arrive in the desired position – 72 degrees 25 minutes south, 155 degrees 16 minutes east, at an elevation of 7260 feet. As Mackay notes in his diary, their compass still points sluggishly towards the north-west, suggesting while they are in the Magnetic Pole’s suburb, they are not exactly in its home.1 But they are very close! True, this location does not have the same mythical glamour that the Geographic South Pole does – a spot that does not move from year to year and is the southern point of the axis on which the planet rotates – but it is something, all right. No one has been on this spot before them; many have tried and some have died.
‘It was an intense satisfaction,’ the Prof recorded, ‘to fulfil the wish of Sir James Clarke [sic] Ross that the South Magnetic Pole should be actually reached, as he had already in 1831 reached the North Magnetic Pole.’2
Planting the light flagpole they have carried all this way in the snow, they soon have the Union Jack gaily and proudly flying before a slight southerly wind.
And now for the ceremony, with Professor Edgeworth David, as their leader, making a brief speech. Precisely following the script Shackleton has given them to read out on this occasion, he declares, ‘I hereby take possession of this area now containing the Magnetic Pole for the British Empire. Three cheers for the King. Hip hip …’
‘Hurrah!’
‘Hip hip …’
‘Hurrah!’
‘Hip-hip …’
‘HURRAH!’3
A quick pause as they take a photo to mark the occasion, using a piece of string connected to the camera trigger. All of the men observe protocol and remove their hats, notwithstanding the temperature being minus 16 degrees, while they give the best chattering, frozen smile they can and Edgeworth David pulls the string. And then it is time to quickly head back to where they have left all of their supplies, to make this last dash. ‘With a fervent “Thank God” we all did a right-about turn,’ writes David, ‘and as quick a march as tired limbs would allow back in the direction of our little green tent in the wilderness of snow.’4
They, too, are now on an unforgiving timetable.
Four months earlier, Shackleton had written his instructions in ink, meaning they are now set in stone, and they state clearly to the captain of Nimrod that if there is no sign of Edgeworth David’s Northern Party at Cape Royds by the end of January, then, on 1 February, the ship should proceed north along the coast to search for them, not travelling any further north than ‘the low beach on the north side of the Drygalski Barrier, keeping as close as practicable to the shore and making a thorough search for the party’.5 Now, it is obvious to Professor David’s party that they have no hope of meeting Nimrod at Cape Royds, meaning that, from here, they will need to trek the 270 miles to the northern side of the Drygalski Barrier right by the coast in 16 days – a challenging average of a tad more than 16 miles a day.
They are in a very difficult position, complicated by the fact that Mackay has turned nastier than ever on Professor David, frequently ripping into him verbally as the older man ambles, rambles and shambles along. The Prof keeps trying to get back in Mackay’s favour by offering him more chocolate and biscuits, but Mackay will have none of it.
‘Why shouldn’t Mawson have it?’ Mackay demands.6
20 January 1909, Upper Glacier Depot, Shackleton’s Southern Party take the path less travelled back to Hut Point
After 11 days’ hard-hauling, getting thinner by the day, at long last Shackleton and his men are back on the ‘highway to the south’ that they first spotted two months earlier, but, mercifully, this time it is taking them to the north, back to safety. As they begin their descent, the frigid air of the Polar Plateau falls behind, and oxygen becomes more plentiful. Upon making camp, exhausted but relieved, Shackleton takes up his pen and writes:
We arrived at our depot at 12.30 pm with sore and aching bodies. The afternoon was rather better, as, after the first hour, we got off the blue ice on to snow. However bad as the day has been, we have said farewell to that awful plateau, and are well on our way down the glacier.7
24 January 1909 and two days thereafter, Butter Point, 42 miles’ march from Cape Royds, the Western Party break the ice
In the meantime, the third of Shackleton’s sledging groups, the Western Party of Raymond Priestley, Philip Brocklehurst and Bertram Armytage, have been having a tough time of it themselves. Led by Bertram Armytage, they managed to ascend the Ferrar Glacier, but their search for fossils was fruitless, with heavy snowfall, blizzard conditions and poor maps all conspiring to hamper them.
Complicating things is that the relationship between the tightly wound Armytage and the loosely insolent English baronet Philip Brocklehurst has turned as icy as the terrain they are covering. From the beginning, the aristocratic Englishman has not been content to follow the orders of a colonial – it seems against nature. When, early on, Armytage denied his request to have an extra pannikin of water every day so he could brush his teeth, things began to deteriorate.
Indeed, it fell to Priestley to communicate between the two as they made their way back to the coast – finally, on 14 January, pitching camp on the sea ice at the foot of Butter Point, where it was intended they rendezvous with the returned Northern Party. Alas, of the Professor, Mawson and Mackay there was no sign, so Armytage took an important decision. Shackleton’s written instruction was that if they hadn’t appeared by 20 January, he was to take his party to the Glacier Tongue, ‘if the ice permits’, in order that they might be easily spotted by Nimrod and picked up. Bertram did precisely that, leaving most of their supplies at Butter Point for the use of the Northern Party, should they turn up.
But would the ice permit? Armytage thought so. After having a close look, he took the view that it was stable, so they put up the tent.
When Priestley awakes on this morning of 24 January, however, and walks out of the tent, he cannot help but notice that something is different …
They are afloat in McMurdo Sound! Surrounded by water!
Armytage and Brocklehurst are awoken seconds later to his panicked shout: ‘We’ve broken out – we’re on a floe drifting!’8 It is close to their worst nightmare, with only falling into the endless blackness of a deep crevasse beating it. Quickly, they strike camp and head north along the floe to search for any way back across, trying to ignore the fact they are in danger of being swept out of McMurdo Sound and into the Southern Ocean, along with ignoring the snouts of the killer whales that now abound all around. The Western Party might have missed breakfast, but the whales – assuming them to be some kind of strange penguin – are hoping they haven’t.
Alas, there proves to be no way back, and their only recourse is to wait and see if the ice floe might tend back towards the fast ice. The three pass a desperate day, with the only positive point being that Armytage and Brocklehurst shake hands, on the reckoning that in these desperate straits to beat all desperate straits they must put aside their unstated quarrel and be united.
And, in the end, Shakespeare’s notion that ‘there are tides in the affairs of men’ is proved right, for at midnight that tide changes direction, to bring them a change in fortune. In the direction they are now heading, they can suddenly see that one edge of their floe might possibly nudge a fringe of fast ice on the western shore, just 200 yards ahead!
More shouts. More mad scrambling. The tent is collapsed in record time, the sledge thrown together, and when, just minutes later, the ice floe does indeed momentarily give a frozen kiss to the shore, they jump for their lives, pulling the sledge with them, and then watch in horror as the floe they had been on heads north to the open sea.
Barely able to believe their good fortune, the three extremely relieved explorers make it back to Butter Point, where, the following morning – praise the Lord! – they soon see Nimrod coming their way. When she finally manages to manoeuvre alongside the fast ice at 3 pm on 26 January, they are able to scamper aboard.
By this time, all safe, Brocklehurst and Armytage have tacitly agreed to resume their silent hostilities, and Captain Evans notes in his log that ‘a chill more than the ice’ exists between the two.9
No doubt about it, Antarctica could do strange things to men, even among, as Captain Evans later notes, well-bred university men like these:
Unmannerliness so primitive was the symptom in their cases of that nervous ill-health which afflicts in varying degrees all the members of a little community condemned to a most irksome intimacy by confinement within one small room through the long months of a Polar night.10
26 January 1909, 70 miles south-east of Hut Point, Scott’s man, Ernest Joyce, resupplies Bluff Depot
On this day, the first of two dog-hauled sledge journeys led by Joyce arrives to supply Bluff Depot, directly due east of Minna Bluff, leaving the food and fuel that Shackleton’s Southern Party will heavily rely on for the last 70 miles of their return journey. Having negotiated heavily crevassed country and numerous falls through the ice, Joyce and his three companions erect two bamboo poles flying three black flags atop a ten-foot snow mound, giving a total height of 22 feet (clearly seen from a distance of eight miles). Beneath them, they have laid down 500 pounds of provisions.
Late January 1909, Beardmore Glacier, Shackleton’s Southern Party push on
Trudging, falling, trudging, trudging, trudging, falling. Shackleton’s Party are suffering from a devastatingly cruel mixture of starvation, dysentery, intermittent blizzard conditions and a nightmare of one-foot-deep snow and sastrugi – the last like whipped up meringues.
Compounding it all for Shackleton is terrible snow-blindness, which so reduces his capacity to operate that, as they come to crevasses, Wild has to tell him which direction to take and where to jump, so he can stay clear of disaster. Inevitably, he falls far more often than the others, but he never complains.
Most days, their rations are reduced to just a few miserable biscuits and some even more miserable horse meat, no longer augmented by the pony maize, as this was exhausted some three weeks back. Things are deteriorating rapidly, and it is a close-run thing as to which is the worst: the physical condition of the men themselves, their spirits or their dilapidated sledge. Probably, it is a tie between the men and their low spirits, as at one stage the already deeply unhappy Adams collapses from hunger. (Like so many men, Adams was beguiled by both Shackleton and his description of the White Continent during a chance meeting two years earlier. He surrendered a Royal Navy promotion to enthusiastically enlist on the Nimrod expedition – only to now find himself more dead than alive.) For his part, Wild is suffering worst from the dysentery – almost certainly brought on by consuming some decayed flesh of the pony Grisi – and this, together with an uneven surface and bad light, means that on at least one day they are lucky to drag him five miles.
One of the strange things about descending the glacier is that they can see so far ahead. At the foot of the glacier is a large, perpendicular rock where they have left a major depot, and they can see that rock from 60 miles away. Alas, they are still 20 miles away when their all but last skerrick of food is consumed, and they must march on with little in their stomachs but the growing sound of gnawing. Many is the time that the man most weakened, Frank Wild, falls into a crevasse in his soiled pants and is in such a pitiful state that, while hanging in his harness above the black abyss, he prays that the rope will break so that his pain can be over. Yet despite their physical difficulties, Shackleton insists they retain the burdensome geological samples they have collected along the way.
Just before leaving the glacier for the last time, Shackleton crashes through the soft snow, plunging into a crevasse, only the jerk of his harness beneath his heart stunning and saving him. ‘There is the last touch for you, don’t you come up here again,’ Shackleton imagines the glacier to be warning.11
Finally, however, there is relief of sorts. ‘Thank God we are on the barrier again at last …’ Shackleton writes on 28 January, having spent just over a week on the descent that has included ‘some of the worst surfaces and most dangerous crevasses’ they have ever encountered.12
Even once upon the Barrier, however, the perilous difficulties remain. Both Shackleton’s leadership and his generosity of spirit are more than tested – and both pass muster like the prize thoroughbreds they are. In a gesture that Wild would remember all his life, the expedition leader sacrifices the one biscuit he has been allotted for the day’s rations and gives it to the ailing Wild. Wild records in his diary that night, ‘I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realize how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this. I do and by God shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.’13
Shackleton barely manages to record in his own diary, with quivering hand, ‘Please God we will get through all right. Great anxiety.’14
31 January 1909, Drygalski Ice Tongue, Mawson and Mackay rally while the Prof teeters on the brink
Having now successfully descended the Larsen tributary glacier onto the central ice sheet that feeds into the Drygalski Ice Tongue, the three exhausted explorers are now well aware that they must negotiate ‘a chaos of crevassed and serac ice’15 – serac ice being a field of icy pinnacles – between them and their point of potential rendezvous with Nimrod at the Drygalski Ice Tongue.
They may be just 16 miles from their Drygalski Depot, yet now it is 16 miles of intervening fast-melting ice they must cross. Quickly. The Party are suffering their respective afflictions: Mawson an injured leg, David a badly frostbitten and potentially gangrenous foot, Mackay a bout of snow-blindness. Between the three of them, they are lucky to make up one fit man. On one occasion on this day, both Edgeworth David and Alister Mackay narrowly escape disappearing down the same crevasse by clumsily throwing their arms out either side of the snow bridge.
It is, as Mawson describes it in his diary, ‘an awful day of despair, disappointment, hard travelling, agonising walking – forever falling down crevasses’.16 They cut themselves a way across to the shore, skirting alongside one of several semi-frozen lakes, Mawson himself falling after a snow bridge collapses. Their tempers grow shorter than an Antarctic winter’s day.
The Professor is quite a sight. The trousers of his windproof oversuit, known as Burberrys, are so badly ripped it is a close-run thing as to whether they are deemed actually on or off – but there is little doubt that he would have been arrested in Pitt Street for wearing the same.
‘You are a bloody fool,’ snarls Mackay one more time, after a hobbling David yet again disappears down a crevasse.17 And Mackay does not let up. At a point when Mawson is far enough away that he cannot hear him, Mackay plays the strongest card he has in his deck. As the designated doctor on this expedition, he is ultimately responsible for the health of them all, with the authority to determine what ails them. With that in mind, he now tells the Prof that he will declare him insane unless he soon, formally and in writing, relinquishes the leadership to Mawson, as per Shackleton’s original instruction should calamity arise.
It is Mackay’s view that so debilitated is the Prof, such a shambling and incompetent wreck has he become, that calamity has now arisen. And he intends to act upon it. The Prof has been told.
Late January to early February 1909, Cape Barnes, McMurdo Sound, Nimrod takes shelter, on her mission to pick up the explorers
At this advanced stage of the season, the pack ice in McMurdo Sound is beginning to break up and move north. Reluctant to move any further south of Cape Royds, Nimrod impatiently takes shelter in the lee of an iceberg against the frequent blizzards in order to preserve her precious coal.
Her men wait by for that blessed brief moment when the Ross Sea might sufficiently clear to allow the ship to approach Hut Point and quickly get out again before it freezes them in. With Professor David’s Northern Party three weeks overdue and Shackleton’s party also still out, Captain Evans grows anxious. As each day passes with no sign of them, and the thermometer continues to fall, it becomes ever more likely that Nimrod will be forced by the freezing over of the Ross Sea to leave for the north before either party is picked up.
Complying with Shackleton’s instructions, on 1 February Evans crosses the Sound and heads north – dangerously hugging the coast of Victoria Land – in search of Professor David’s party.
2 February 1909, northern side of the Drygalski Ice Tongue, with Edgeworth David’s Northern Party
Onwards, onwards, onwards they plough with great haste and determination through fresh snow, racing with time lest they miss Nimrod – which, if all is well, should have been travelling north up the coast looking for them since the day before. They barely stop to eat, and sleep is a luxury they can no longer afford. The Prof’s feet are so useless that he has taken to walking on his heels, doing the best he can this way.
In any case, Alister Mackay really has had enough of David’s performance as leader, his constant stumbling into crevasses, his general incompetence and decrepitude, his trousers so torn he can barely keep them up. Mackay’s rage is so great, Mawson notes, that when they are both in harness and the Prof’s posterior presents itself, the Scotsman appears – with barely deniable intent – to kick him in the backside.18 Again and again, Mackay demands in his thick brogue that the Prof stand down as leader and hand over to Mawson. Finally, on this day, exhausted as he is, the old man – for that is what he now is, and no mistake, so worn down does he appear – can resist no more. He formally suggests to Mawson that he take over. In response, the young lion tells his old mentor, the one responsible for bringing him on this expedition in the first place, that he does not like the idea of it and will have to think it over.
After a few miles, they strike that same barranca (broad valley) in the central ice sheet they had met on their way out and must now cross. Now so close to the coast, a proliferation of seals and penguins can be seen all along the canyon floor …
But wait! There, in the distance! Mawson spots the flapping depot flag from the other side of what he refers to as a ‘steaming crack’ – an enormous ravine in the ice – that they must cross to reach their depot.19
It is with some difficulty that they crash the sledge to the floor of the barranca, only to find there is no suitable slope on the other side to haul it up again – meaning they are forced to trace their way back to where they started. Nevertheless, it is something to have spotted the depot, and in celebration the sizeable excised liver of one of the two emperor penguins Mackay has slaughtered on the ravine floor bubbles away in the camp stove that night. That taste! That softness! That wonderful feeling of a full belly and returning strength and purpose … It proves to be as deeply appreciated and savoured a repast as they have ever known.
The fact that they now have fresh meat available in the form of seals and penguins at least means they are unlikely to starve in the short term. But still they need to get to the Drygalski Depot, not just for its food but because it is situated at the point where the passing Nimrod will spot them and retrieve them. What is passing now is time, and it becomes ever more urgent to find a way to navigate across the ravine, before it is too late. It may be that Nimrod is just hours away. Such worries continue to plague the totally exhausted – and now teetering on deranged – expedition leader, Edgeworth David, who also has escalating physical problems. One of his feet has gone numb, and both his boots appear to be frozen. They need to get to the depot, find Nimrod and get away.
The worry of it all is debilitating, and something about the Prof is definitely not all right. While Mack is off hunting seals, the exhausted and befuddled 51-year-old has started to commit to paper, in duplicate, his letter of resignation as party leader. The mantle is to be transferred to his protégé, Mawson – who now feels he has no choice but to reluctantly concur with Mackay that their leader is, for the moment, ‘partially demented’.20
And yet, Mawson, concerned at this needless humiliation of his mentor before it is absolutely necessary, tells David he ‘does not like the business’ and states that David should leave matters ‘as they are until the ship fails to turn up’.21
But that is not good enough for Mackay, who gets wind of it when he returns and writes in his diary that night:
I have deposed the Professor. I simply told him that he was no longer fit to lead the party, that the situation was now critical, and that he must officially appoint Mawson leader, or I would declare him, the Professor, physically and mentally unfit. He acted on my proposal at once.22
Unknown to the three men, just 15 minutes after they turn in that night, Nimrod passes by from between two cables and three-quarters of a mile offshore. In part because of a large iceberg off the coast and because a light wind is carrying a snowdrift that obscures visibility, neither the depot flag or tent are spotted.
3 February 1909, Relief Bay, the Northern Party keep their eyes peeled
After snatching five hours’ sleep, stomachs satisfied with more than a soupçon of boiled penguin meat, the Party head off, this time along the north bank of the steep-walled ravine, passing by a multitude of seals at rest on the canyon floor beneath them. So pressed for time are they, so urgent their mission, that there is simply no time to slaughter the seals to stock up their provisions. After travelling one and a half miles inland in search of a crossing, they come to the narrow snow bridge across the main canyon and at 10 pm that night, the spent Party at last arrive at Relief Bay.
However, having come in on the wrong bearing, they must camp a little beneath their depot, yet still within good view of the coast. Following Mawson’s sumptuous meal of seal blubber, blood and oil, with a side order of fried meat and liver, he and David turn in, while Mackay commences the first four-hour watch, his eyes glued to the coast for any glimmer of Nimrod.
4 February 1909, Relief Bay, the Northern Party make tracks
Still no sign of the ship. It is a brutal, desperate decision they must make. They must either prepare to dig themselves in at their nearby depot – building a snow cave to keep them from the wind – which would enable them to winter in that very conspicuous spot (now that they are on the coast again, they should be able to kill enough penguins and seals to get them through), or immediately attempt the 230-mile trek back to their base at Cape Royds.
Mackay, not believing that Nimrod will search for them, is all for starting straight away for Cape Royds. He proposes they take with them a cooker and adequate seal meat for sustenance, leave a note for Nimrod telling them of their plans and get going! David and Mawson are quite opposed, however, and opt for waiting it out until the end of February, allowing ample time for Nimrod to rendezvous with them there.
The discussion is right at its most intense – this is, after all, a matter of life and death – when suddenly, at about half-past three in the afternoon, two shots ring out. They are quite distant, but they are shots all right! There is a sudden pause in the conversation as the three men try to work out what it can possibly mean, when it is Mawson who realises there can be only one explanation: Nimrod!
In an instant, the young scientist is up and out of the tent, yelling back to the others, ‘It’s a gun from the ship!’23 By the time Mackay and David get out of the tent themselves, Mawson is already 100 yards in front of them, impatiently calling for them to follow him at speed, just as soon as they have found and brought the thing he has forgotten. ‘Bring something to wave!’ he calls back over his shoulder.24
Professor David heads back inside to grab a red rucksack and is quickly on his way out to see his dream of all dreams coming true. After his long, exhausting and debilitating trek, suffering fatigue to the point of incapacity, snow-blindness, severe frostbite to his feet to the very edge of gangrene and fearing many times that death was right upon him, not to mention the constant humiliation at the hands of Mackay, finally, finally … salvation has arrived. For there, coming up the inlet, is the mighty Nimrod, no more than 400 yards from him, her men on the deck, her smokestack breezily billowing, her three sail masts cutting the mist like beacons of salvation.
Upon Nimrod, Chief Officer John King Davis, who is peering out from the lookout on the main topmast, bellows, ‘There they are!’ A mighty cheer is raised as others rush up from the decks below, to see first one, then two, and then a third man rush out of the tent on yonder hill. Hurrah! Three out of three accounted for.
And only half a minute later, while all the crew cheer to the echo, they can make out who is who, as they crowd on the shore. There is Mackay, waving at them furiously from the shore, and there is the Professor. But where … where is Mawson? The answer comes when Mackay shouts to them in his thick Scottish brogue, ‘Mawson has fallen down a crevasse! Bring a rope!’ Almost in the same breath, though, Mackay shouts other news: ‘We got to the magnetic pole!’25
While that rope is being retrieved and a shore party is assembled, Mackay and David rush over to the fissure to find the crestfallen Mawson still peering up at them from 18 feet below. They are too physically weak to extract him, but, of course, the cavalry has just arrived from the ship. It is Davis who quickly responds, leading a rescue party over the ice to where Mawson has been swallowed up.
When they first met, over a year earlier, when Mawson was seasick in the lifeboat, Davis’s first words to him of course were, ‘What are you doing there, why don’t you get below?’ Now, the question is rather why doesn’t he come on up, and Davis is just the man to make it happen. In short order, the grizzled mariner bridges the opening with a piece of timber and, with a rope around his waist, is lowered away. Deftly tying the rope around Mawson’s waist, Davis gives the signal for the Australian to be hauled into the daylight, and the process is repeated for Davis’s extraction. All three of the intrepid explorers are soon bundled back onto Nimrod, together with their gear and their oh-so-precious records, and they are safely back on board the ship amid warmth, food, hot tea and other people – in other words, civilisation! Mackay, who believes the Prof’s condition to be so poor that they would never have made it back to Cape Royds, declares their salvation ‘enough to make a man turn religious’.26
But gee, they smell. Captain Evans insists they have baths before doing anything else, and then a splendid hot meal follows. Gathering around as they eat and talk, the crew of Nimrod are thrilled to hear of the success of the expedition and that, in the course of a staggering man-hauled sledge journey of 1260 miles in 122 days (this figure includes the considerable relaying of sledges), they actually made it to the South Magnetic Pole – a real coup for the entire expedition, although David feels that, had they had dogs, they could have completed the journey in half the time.27 Courtesy of Mawson’s efforts, they have also succeeded in charting with approximate accuracy the outline of the coast in this part of Antarctica plus the position of several newly discovered mountains.28
And Mawson, Mackay and the Prof listen in turn to the adventures of the Western Party, including their narrow brush with being lost forever on an ice floe. All up, it is a wonderful evening of bonhomie and feasting, telling stories and catching up. Still, it seems Mackay, for one, has overdone it, for afterwards Brocklehurst, hearing a ‘noise like a seal calling’,29 investigates. It proves to be Mackay, holding his belly as he writhes in agony on his bunk. After being on starvation rations for so long, his stomach is not used to so much rich food and drink all at once.
Mawson, at least, is able to keep going, and there is even a little time for him to hear something of the story, from his friend Davis, of how they came to find them, and how lucky it was that they didn’t miss them entirely. As Davis tells him, if the ship had missed them, it would have been all Davis’s fault. For Davis was the man on watch the night before, as they steamed north towards Cape Washington, cautiously hugging the coast, eagerly looking for some sign that they were alive, when they passed by a group of icebergs just off the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Four hours later, when Captain Evans came on deck, he first remarked that there seemed no chance of finding anyone now and that they would have to turn back shortly as their coal supplies were getting perilously low. He then asked whether Davis’s examination of the coast had been thorough.
Davis initially replied, ‘Yes,’ but then he hesitated momentarily before saying that there had been a group of bergs he’d seen four hours earlier at 4 am that had obscured a close examination of the coast behind them. The good captain immediately took him up on it and crisply had him fetch and then read out the orders that Davis had just put his initials to. Wretchedly, realising where this was going and the mistake he had made, Davis read aloud, ‘The Officer of the Watch is to examine every feature of the coastline and ensure that the ship does not pass any inlet or bay without searching it.’
‘Now,’ Captain Evans bored in, ‘did you or did you not pass any inlet or bay during your watch this morning?’30
Davis felt that they very likely had not, but he was now beset by doubt and ultimately had to reply that he simply could not be sure.
And so they returned on their previous course and carefully threaded their way behind the icebergs, whereupon they first came upon what seemed like a perfect dock in the Drygalski Ice Tongue. Then, as the sun swept low above the mountain peaks to the westward, shining upon the snow-covered, gently undulating slopes, they spied a black flag flapping from the top of what would prove to be a green conical tent!
And Mawson, of course, knows the rest. Yes, it has been a close-run thing, and yes, it was Davis’s mistake that would have seen them still left there, but he is nothing if not honest, and the bond between the men grows.
But for now, to bed. A real bed!
As Professor David writes in his diary that night, ‘None but those whose bed for months has been on snow and ice can realise the luxury of a real bunk, blankets and pillow in a snug little cabin.’31
Pass the pillows. Inevitably, though, now that the three men are out of danger themselves, they have the luxury of wondering – not for the first time, but certainly for the first time at any length – how the Shackleton Southern Party are getting on. Did they get to the Pole? Are they safe? Will they be able to get back to Hut Point in time, by 1 March, for Nimrod to pick them up and pluck them to safety? Just how are they going?
And, of course, they are not the only ones wondering.
5 February 1909 and five days thereafter, 70 miles south of Hut Point, Scott’s old companion Ernest Joyce arrives at Bluff Depot
A difficult man, Ernest Joyce. It is the opinion of Eric Marshall, always willing to record his full and frank views of others, that he is ‘of limited intelligence, resentful and incompatible’.32 And yet no one doubts his overall ability when sledging. It was for that reason that Shackleton recruited him for this expedition, to look after the dogs and do precisely what he is doing now: resupplying the depots that he and his men will be relying on upon their return from their assault on the South Pole.
For Joyce and his companions, this has been a long, hard haul, fraught with danger and difficulty, but on this day his second supply journey reaches Bluff Depot. This time, they carry with them luxury items such as apples and mutton brought from Nimrod, which met them at Cape Royds back on 15 January.
Joyce has been hoping all this way to find Shackleton’s Southern Party camped there, and to be able to surprise them with their wondrous food supplies, but to their disappointment Bluff Depot is just as lost and lonely, freezing and windswept as when they left it, and of Shackleton and his men there is no sign. All they can do for the moment is wait, day after weary day.
Concerned that the Party has not arrived at the depot by 10 February, Joyce decides, contrary to Shackleton’s orders to return, to venture further south towards the Pole in search of the overdue party. After finding nothing but the outward tracks of the Southern Party, they turn back towards Bluff Depot and are just approaching it when …
When they see them!
For, suddenly in the far distance, they can just manage to make out an erected tent and men walking about!
Alas, alas, as they move closer, the men and the tent slowly dissolve before their very eyes.
‘It is curious what things one can see in circumstances like these,’ writes a disconsolate Joyce, of how they have been expecting Shackleton’s party to appear ‘out of the loneliness’.33
The Southern Party are now 18 days overdue. Where oh where can they be?
Mid-February 1909, upon the Barrier, 225 miles south of Hut Point, the Southern Party run over a Chinaman
They are struggling. Their hunger has been ‘too awful to describe’, at times all four suffering from diarrhoea and too ill to march. ‘We cannot keep our thoughts, waking or sleeping, from food and our conversation continually turns to it,’ Frank Wild records.34
Just when it appears that they will all perish, though, they are extremely fortunate to run over a Chinaman … specifically, their Chinaman, the first pony they shot, some three months earlier. After thawing and cooking the good-sized liver – always the softest part – they devour it with relish. Then, when Shackleton catches sight of red-stained snow, further investigation uncovers a frozen core of Chinaman’s blood – and they soon have a most welcome beef-tea-like addition to their scant supplies.
Under renewed horsepower, with abatement of the sastrugi, for a time the going proves relatively easy; however, in between picking up cairns they are often down to half a pannikin of horsemeat and a few biscuits a day, so their energy abates in equal measure and the men again grow exhausted.
Shackleton’s spirits are lifted at least a little when, on his 35th birthday, 15 February 1909, the normally taciturn Marshall somehow spirits up a cigarette as a present for him, which he smokes with delight, sucking it deeply into his lungs and blowing it to the winds with all the savoir faire of a lord of the realm.
So exhausted are the men that to get into the tent each night they must raise their legs into the sleeping bags by hand, as though their lower limbs are separate from their bodies. At night, the cold is like a living thing, constantly striking at them. The only things remotely warm in their world are the primus stove when they are cooking on it – just how close can you get your frostbitten fingers to the flame without actually burning them? – and their own hot breath in their sleeping bags at night, where they leave just enough space at the top for oxygen to get in without letting the hot air out.
Still, they battle on, day after day, the sledge harnesses biting their stomachs from without and devastating hunger attacking them from within. Lively, almost childlike, debate ensues at mealtimes and nearly always centres on their favourite subject – food. Should one eat one’s biscuits in one sitting or, like Shackleton, save a little something to aid sleep at bedtime? Well, I think …
The week of determined walking finally pays off on 20 February when they reach Depot A at 79 degrees 36 minutes south. There, they fill their bellies with hoosh and a blackcurrant pudding that they make with a tin of Hartley’s jam and biscuits, followed by fat Tabard cigarettes, the smoke of which bites their lungs with exquisite beauty. ‘Never was a meal more enjoyed and I am sure there were never four more grateful than us,’ records Wild in his diary.35
Spurred on by the anticipation of more sumptuous and plentiful supplies at Bluff Depot, Shackleton and his men are up and about at just after 4.30 the next morning, raring to go. Despite the winds picking up and the temperature plummeting, death so closely stalks them if they tarry that, tapping into what feels to be their last reserves of physical and spiritual strength, they manage to reel off another 20 miles, and then with desperate dynamism another 20 miles the following day.
Tracks! On 22 February, the Party come across the tracks of four men and their dogs, which they assume to be made by Joyce’s party, heading towards the depot that Shackleton ordered them to establish from 15 January. They follow the tracks closely. Inspecting one of the strangers’ camps, Shackleton feels sure that Nimrod has arrived, as he recognises new brands of goods among their refuse. Shackleton’s men are so desperate that they scrounge like monkeys among the remnants of the camp, growing irrational when they find but a few blocks of chocolate and a biscuit.
22 February 1909, in the lee of the Glacier Tongue, Nimrod waits for the Shackleton party to turn up
What to do? It is the question that both Captain Evans and biologist James Murray – who has become nominal expedition leader in Shackleton’s absence, though that means little when they are on Nimrod, where the skipper commands – have been wrestling with over for the past two weeks since picking up Edgeworth David, Mawson and Mackay. For, while that was indeed a great breakthrough, the fact remains that Shackleton and his men remain missing well after their expected return date of 10 February.
Compounding the problem is that Shackleton’s written instructions issued to Murray are ambiguous as to whether he wants a rescue party located at Cape Royds or, as he later has it, Hut Point. In his initial instructions prior to heading for the Pole in late October, Shackleton stated that if the Southern Party have not arrived by 25 February then Murray is to appoint a three-man rescue party to be stationed at Cape Royds and sufficiently supplied for seven men for an additional winter. However, Shackleton’s later instructions appear to countermand this, saying the rescue party should be at Hut Point, which would seem to make more sense in terms of proximity to the Southern Party’s return journey.
At least it is clear who he wants to lead the relief party: Douglas Mawson, whom Shackleton regards as strong, capable and potentially a good leader. An extraordinary step, perhaps, to give such responsibility to such a young man who joined the expedition only at the last minute and has minimal rank compared with others – but perhaps Shackleton recognised the similarity with his own position vis-á-vis Scott on the Discovery expedition seven years earlier. For Shackleton, too, had joined Scott as a relatively anonymous third lieutenant and had risen to the point of accompanying Scott on his attempt on the Pole through ability alone. Mawson was like that. Most importantly, however, before they had headed off on their separate expeditions, Mawson had told Shackleton he was available – no small thing when he was being asked to spend another year in this place. Mawson had come a long way from the man who, 18 months earlier, had only wanted to go on a quick trip to Antarctica. Now, he was contemplating spending two years straight there.
If the Southern Party still have not arrived by 1 March, Mawson will lead the rescue party that must set out to look for them.
Late February 1909, Great Ice Barrier, the Southern Party reach Bluff Depot and then the haven of Hut Point
And then they see it. Far, far on the farthest horizon of the frozen white waste all around, they spy as if in a vision an ethereal light, a flash of something wonderful beckoning them forth. For it can only be one thing: Bluff Depot! And sure enough, as they proceed, they begin to see the huge white shape of the depot emerging, and from atop its ten-foot brow a cleverly positioned biscuit tin is reflecting the sun at them.
At last arrived, on this day of 23 February they tear upon the food supplies and give thanks to their old comrade Ernest Joyce. Joyce’s trip means that instead of just the pemmican, pemmican and a little more pemmican that they had been expecting, they suddenly find nothing less than eggs, cakes, gingerbread, crystallised fruit, even a fresh saddle of roast boiled mutton from the ship, Carlsbad plums and, most welcome of all, a full plum pudding! Like ravenous wolves on baby chickens, the four men take enormous bites of these prized foods and gulp it all down in massive chunks, trying to ease the hunger pains that have been with them now for months.
‘Good old Joyce,’ the exhausted but elated Wild writes in his diary.36
But careful …
Warned by Scott and Wilson’s experience on the Discovery expedition of what happens when one overeats after a period of starvation, Shackleton advises the others not to overdo it. In the end, however, they all ignore the warnings and gorge themselves, meaning that all four of them are reduced to lying, gasping, in their sleeping bags for many an hour thereafter, four anacondas that have swallowed a pig each and must try vainly to digest it all.
Though their immediate danger of starving to death has passed, what has not is the enormous distance they have to cover in the very limited time that remains before Nimrod will have to leave to avoid being frozen into the ice for another year. Even now that things are looking up, a blizzard of such ferocity has hit that they must stay in their tents – Marshall with Wild, Shackleton with Adams – for another day before getting moving. Marshall, at least, is glad of it. Of them all, he is the one who has suffered most from the overeating the day before, and his diarrhoea is severe. Beyond that, he has been feeling so poorly over the previous weeks, so thoroughly run down and exhausted, that for the next 24 hours he barely moves from his sleeping bag, until the blizzard abates and they are on their way once more.
On 25 February, though they get away all right, after lunch Marshall grunts that he simply cannot walk a foot further. No matter that the worst of the journey is now well behind them, that they have moved to within two days’ march of Hut Point and safety. The truth of it is that Marshall is physically finished. On this afternoon, he sinks to the snow, and no amount of coaxing or cajoling can get him to move again. All they can do is get him into a tent and try to keep him warm. Collapsing in these climes is problematic at the best of times, and Shackleton – who is not without sympathy, given that Marshall’s experience is similar to his own on the Discovery expedition – is left with a hard decision. Whatever he is going to do, it will have to be done quickly, and so Shackleton decides.
They will leave Adams here to care for Marshall, with most of the food and supplies, while he and Wild make a mad dash for Hut Point both to get Nimrod to stay long enough that they won’t have to spend another wretched winter there – an unthinkable option – and to get help, so that Marshall and Adams can be rescued. Carrying a prismatic compass, sleeping bags and food for but one meal, they set off in the late afternoon of 28 February.
And yes, Shackleton and Wild are both exhausted, both debilitated after four solid, gut-busting months of sledging, much of it on starvation rations, but the two 35-year-olds are not without some advantages. It is Wild’s strong view, based on his long experience, that while a young man would likely best a man of 30 to 40 years in a short and strenuous contest such as a soccer game or boxing bout, when it comes to an exercise lasting days, weeks and months of solid toil, then ‘the older man invariably beats the youngster’.37 And sure enough, after a hard slog that includes finally discarding the sledge to make faster progress across the ice, and trying to compensate for Wild’s fast-failing feet, at ten o’clock that night they finally make it to Hut Point to find … no Nimrod in the harbour and nary a soul in the hut!
Not in all of their struggles to this point, in all of their yearnings to arrive, had they ever imagined arriving ‘in such a cheerless fashion’.38
However, inside the hut they find a letter, telling them that Nimrod was there over a week earlier and that they have on board the Edgeworth David Party, who successfully reached the South Magnetic Pole. Though it is too dangerous to have Nimrod moored close by due to the difficult ice and sea conditions, they would anchor in the lee of the Glacier Tongue until 26 February in the hope that Shackleton and his party would soon turn up.39
This is a problem. For it is now 28 February. Are they really, now, forsaken here? Shackleton is perplexed; his premature abandonment, if that’s what it is, appears to directly contravene what he believes were his orders: ‘If we had not returned by 25 February, a party was to be landed at Hut Point, with a team of dogs, and on March 1 a search-party was to go south.’40 Ice conditions permitting, Nimrod was meant to remain in the vicinity until 10 March, in the event they were quickly found. Based on this, Shackleton’s expectations were threefold: there would be men and food in the hut, a lookout stationed at Observation Hill, behind Hut Point, and Nimrod on hand until 10 March to fetch them off.
And yet it appears that, with the Southern Party having been out for 120 days, with food for only 91 days, come 25 February Captain Evans has for the moment overruled Shackleton’s instructions for Murray to supply Hut Point and drop off a relief party.
Meanwhile, aboard Nimrod, the protests of the Shackleton faithful, including Mackay and particularly Brocklehurst, grow louder with each passing hour. Brocklehurst writes in his diary, ‘We are beginning to dislike [Captain Evans’s] attitude. He considers himself too important and it looks as if he is going to make himself head of the Expedition.’41
In addition to their frustration with Evans is the fact that the proposed relief party to be headed by Mawson is only composed of colonials – nary a Brit in sight. Outrage. Meanwhile, this international conflict disguises the fact that no southern search party has been launched, no lookout established on Observation Hill, no supply of the Discovery hut accomplished. Rather, Nimrod, under Evans’s command, has languished, inert, near the Glacier Tongue. Though at Hut Point there has been a little food left for the missing men – onions, plum pudding, biscuits, together with a Primus lamp and a little oil – there has certainly been no search party. And nor has anyone thought to leave them sleeping bags.
Yet Shackleton, a British bulldog on two legs, is simply not the type to resign. Just as it goes dark, a short time after they arrive, Wild and Shackleton try in vain to ignite the Magnetic Hut, an outbuilding of the main hut. It is their hope that the resulting blaze, together with the Union Jack they have put on the hill, will serve as beacons of hope – as signs that they are ruddy well alive and expect to be picked up by Nimrod, if indeed she has stayed beyond the 26 February deadline and is still in the area. Surely they would have given them another few days’ leeway?
And even when the hut refuses to burn in the first instance, there is no capitulation from Shackleton. He and Wild simply pass an extremely cold, uncomfortable night sitting up with a piece of roofing felt tied tightly around them in a futile attempt to get warm, and then in the morning they try again.
This time, mercifully, the hut, she blazes.
And sure enough, almost as if it is the phantom of a ship long-ago lost coming to them through the mists of time, just as their desperation is nearing its blackest ebb, Nimrod’s crow’s nest suddenly appears atop the fog that lies low above the water.
‘No happier sight ever met the eyes of man,’ Frank Wild records of his vision of the ship.42 And perhaps they are inordinately lucky the ship is still there? But, on the other hand, Frank Wild always believes in helping luck along the way, and before their extraordinary trek began he secretly sewed a bean into Shackleton’s trouser bottoms, in the Irish tradition that it would bring him good fortune.
And good fortune it is, for the ship is in fact returning to Hut Point to drop off Mawson and the wintering party that will begin the search for what would likely be the Southern Party’s miserably frozen cadavers somewhere out there. Perhaps it is prudent not to tell Shackleton this right now …
Yet now Nimrod approaches Hut Point to see two wild men on top of the hill frantically waving the Union Jack. As recorded by Mackay:
[W]e heard a cheerful yell and a clatter of feet on the deck above. We all tumbled out and rushed for’ard to the fo’c’sle head … There was a crowd there some saying that they had seen a flash signal, and some a figure besides Vince’s Cross.43 Soon we could make out two figures plainly and the excitement was tremendous. We all danced about and cheered and waved our arms, and then fell to punching each other.44
A boat manned by Armytage, Mackay and Mawson is quickly lowered away and, after picking up the two men, is now back within shouting distance of Nimrod. It is Chief Officer Davis who asks the question on behalf of the ship, shouting out, ‘Are you all well? Where are the other two?’
‘We left Marshall and Adams twenty miles back,’ comes the reply. ‘They’re all right!’45
All within earshot recognise Shackleton’s voice, meaning the other wild man – all dirt and beard and hair – must be Frank Wild. And then one of the crew, forgetting himself a little but unable to resist asking the other question they have all been wondering, shouts out, ‘Did you get to the Pole, sir?’
‘No,’ says Shackleton, in words he has surely been aching to say for weeks, and intends to say for years more, ‘but we got within ninety-seven miles of it!’46
The mightily relieved Captain Evans soon welcomes both men on board. A hot bath is run in the engine room for them, and they are offered a special box of delicacies from Fortnum & Mason that has been kept for this specific occasion. Neither man, however, wants anything so fancy. What their bodies crave is warm fat and lots of it, and while they sit there in the smoke-filled wardroom and tell some of their story, a small and smoking mountain of piping-hot bacon and fried bread is brought to them from the galley. They consume it at a great rate before – like a couple of frozen Oliver Twists – they call for still ‘more!’. All of the ship’s company is of course delighted at their survival, but, as Davis would later recount, ‘To Shackleton these welcome diversions seemed only an interlude, for he was merely waiting for a sledge to be equipped before setting out again to bring in the two men he had left behind.’47
And no matter how much Captain Evans implores Shackleton to let any of a dozen of his own men from the ship lead the relief party, the exhausted leader will have none of it. Out of the question, Captain. For the instant the freshly provisioned sledge is ready, the expedition leader so newly and miraculously saved from the polar wilderness girds his loins, fixes his harness and heads out into it once more. In the company of Mawson, Mackay and one other, he is to retrieve the men he was obliged to leave behind.
Watching them go, just three hours after the initial rescue, Frank Wild is standing on the bridge beside Captain Evans. A short time earlier, Shackleton asked Wild if he would go back for the men. Wild had told Shackleton straight, ‘Yes, if you stay aboard as there is no need for the two of us.’48
A fair point, by any measure, but Shackleton – who just like Wild had not slept for the previous 52 hours – replied with an irrefutable point of his own: ‘I must go.’ And so he now does, with the mood on the ship one of deepest admiration for their leader, best expressed by Captain Evans, who remarks to Wild, ‘Shackleton is a good goer, eh?’49
3 March 1909, Hut Point, Marshall is surely surprised
And in the end it is a close-run thing, but Shackleton, Mawson, Mackay and the fourth man, New Zealand crew member Michael Thomas McGillion, do indeed get to Adams and Marshall while they’re both, mercifully, still alive, though both very hungry. (One can’t help but wonder, under the circumstances, if, upon seeing Shackleton and Mawson as two of his rescuers, Marshall alters his assessment of the former as not having ‘the guts of a louse’50 and the latter as ‘useless and objectionable, lacking in guts and manners’.51) As a matter of fact, after his long enforced rest followed by eating the precious food, Marshall is improved enough that he is even able to take his place pulling the sledge, and they all set off back to Hut Point in an exhausted state.
It is an extremely difficult journey, but after jettisoning most of their equipment – including one of the two sledges, the tent and the cooker – so as to be able to better negotiate the climb over to Hut Point, they arrive just before midnight. This time, they raise a signal by bursting open a tin of carbide, ‘pump-shipping [urinating on it] and setting a light to it’, and their aim is achieved.52 The flare is spotted nine miles away at the Glacier Tongue by the lookout on Nimrod, and within a few hours the total expedition is at last reunited on board. Having marched over 100 miles in five days, and not having slept for the last 55 hours, the heroic Shackleton, promptly and deservedly, collapses in a wet heap.
March 1909, Southern Ocean, Nimrod sails home
And so, at 8 am on 4 March, now with all of their merry crew back on board and the winds abated, it is time to leave this frozen continent. Already, the icy hand of winter is starting to tighten its grip, as the waters surrounding McMurdo Sound begin to freeze over. There is no time to spare. As Nimrod continues north up the coast of Ross Island, the bow and sides of the tiny ship are constantly buffeted by small chunks of ice three or four inches thick, some of which are just on the point of joining together solidly as the temperature falls, before the determined Nimrod once again splits them asunder. This time, Marshall need have no worry that Shackleton has ‘not rubbed an ounce of paint off [Nimrod’s] sides’,53 for the ship loses far more than that as she ploughs forward, lurching only a little as she breaks through some of the thicker ice. In just a few hours, those on board can see the familiar landscape of the hills around Cape Royds, and they know they are within mere miles of their hut, which is soon within sight.
As they pass it, all of the men crowd onto the windy deck, and when they see the hut, standing a little forlorn and windswept in the far distance, they pause for a last look and then give a spontaneous, rousing three cheers. In the words of Shackleton:
The hut was not exactly a palatial residence … but, on the other hand, it had been our home for a year that would always live in our memories … We watched the little hut fade away in the distance with feelings almost of sadness, and there were few men aboard who did not cherish a hope that some day they would once more live strenuous days under the shadow of mighty Erebus.54
Shackleton, as a matter of fact, is already planning it. On the way back from their Pole attempt, while sharing a tent with Wild, the expedition leader asked him if he would be interested in making another attempt. If only he’d known, he might not have asked … For in fact, only a short time before, Wild had penned in his journal, ‘This trip has completely cured me of any desire for further polar exploration, nothing will ever tempt me to face that awful glacier and terrible plateau again.’55 And yet, so highly does he regard Shackleton, sitting there facing him, his jaw jutting forward as he awaits his answer, Wild replies without hesitation, ‘Yes!’
Which is to the good. The problem they have now is that they have no sooner boarded Nimrod than they receive news from Captain Evans that Scott is preparing for his own next Antarctic expedition, which means … they must hold off for a couple of years. It might be possible for Great Britain to muster the resources to send one expedition to the South Pole but not two. ‘That knocks us out, Frank,’ Shackleton breathes to Wild, ‘we must give Scott his chance first.’56
Ah, but there is another on board with them who is already making his own plans and is untroubled by news of Scott, for he intends to explore the possibilities of mounting an expedition on behalf of another nation: Australia. As they sail away, the original idea of Douglas Mawson to explore and chart 2000 miles of Antarctic coast west of Cape Adare – that region that lies directly below the southern shores of Australia – is beginning to crystallise.
The 26-year-old Mawson bears little resemblance to the ingénu who just over a year ago spent the majority of the outward journey seasick and supine in a lifeboat and was one of the most junior members of the shore party. This Mawson really has risen in the ranks to the point where he was the one selected to lead Shackleton’s relief party, and to then accompany the great man to rescue his stricken comrades – and he stands astride Nimrod’s foredeck sniffing the Antarctic sea breeze with relish.
The three-week journey back to New Zealand barely provides the young scientist enough time to contemplate the magnitude of the accomplishments now attached to his name – first to scale Mt Erebus, first to get to the South Magnetic Pole and involved in the longest recorded unassisted sledge journey – not that this man of science is particularly interested in such accolades.
He has further learnt about the art of leading men from Shackleton, and how energy, selflessness and generosity of spirit are the keys to it. He has tasted leadership himself on the return leg of the South Magnetic Pole expedition, and the responsibility sat comfortably across his broad and capable shoulders. Above everything else, he has proved to himself that he has what it takes to prosper amid all the madness of Antarctic exploration – physically and, most importantly, mentally.
Mawson knows all too well that he is still not satisfied and won’t be satisfied until he has achieved more in these parts. Since that day he sat atop Mt Erebus, observing along with his party that phenomenal sight of the shadow of the volcano cast long across ‘the screen of low lying cloud like a Goliath’s magic lantern show’,57 the feeling he has left something major undone has only grown.
Scientific endeavour aside – for it is now so much more than that – this strange and fascinating land is more than in his blood. The desire to return to this rarest of all lands, to explore the 2000 miles of coastline that lie ever untrodden and still unclaimed now resides deep in his marrow. It is odd, but, somehow, the further to the north they go, the more Mawson’s mind returns to the south and the things he wishes to accomplish there.
Early March 1909, Oslo, Amundsen plans an expedition
At this same time, already in the far, far north, a handsome if weather-beaten 36-year-old Norwegian man by the name of Roald Amundsen is focusing his own thoughts on the even further north – in fact, on the North Pole itself. In many ways, his background is similar to that of Mawson, in that he is a curious combination of ambition, intelligence and physical prowess – while also possessed of an overwhelming belief that there is little the world can throw at him to which he is not equal.
Born and raised in Borge on the eastern coast of Norway, Amundsen comes from many generations of dashing seafarers on his father’s side, giving him such a sense of adventure that, while growing up, he would frequently leave his bedroom window open during winter to toughen himself up for the terrible trials that he hoped awaited him. This was balanced a little by having a mother who was insistent that her notably accomplished fourth son would become a doctor instead. Amundsen bowed to her wishes while she was alive and began medical studies at Norway’s University of Oslo, but as soon as his mother died when he was 21 the strapping young man – he is well over six foot tall, with a lean and powerful frame – headed off to sea.
Inspired by Fridtjof Nansen’s feat of crossing Greenland in 1888, Amundsen visited Antarctica in 1897–99 on Belgium’s Belgica expedition, where, after the ship had been frozen in, he was very impressed by how the American surgeon Frederick A. Cook worked so hard to keep them alive and sane through that terrible winter. And while so many of the others of that expedition had suffered during that time, and hated every moment of it, with Amundsen it had been the reverse. There was something about extreme conditions that he liked, nay, loved, and he had used the experience to focus on his long-held ambition to be the first man to get to the North Pole.
First, however, he needed to prove himself as an explorer and leader in his own right. From 1903 to 1906, in his tiny 70-foot square-sterned sloop Gjøa, he had succeeded in being the first to find and force the famed and fabled North-West Passage, managing to sail the boat, with his crew of six, right across the top of the world, from Oslo through the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans – pausing only to live for a time with a Netsilik Eskimo tribe, so he could study how they survived and even prospered in such extreme cold – into the Pacific Ocean and down to San Francisco, California, where the men were met with a hero’s welcome.
On the basis of this success – after all, others had been trying to do it for no fewer than 300 years – the now legendary Amundsen was able to gather sponsors for the very project he is now focused on. On 9 February 1909, the Norwegian legislature passed a resolution that allowed the ship that had helped make Nansen famous, Fram, to be loaned to Amundsen for his expedition, while a sum of 75,000 Norwegian kroner (just over £4000) was granted for repairs and necessary alterations. The ship had the perfect pedigree for what Amundsen wanted to do now.
Late March 1909, New Zealand, Shackleton and his men have their homecoming
First, on 23 March 1909, Nimrod arrives in Stewart Island, just below the South Island of New Zealand, and two days later, amid great fanfare, she sails into the place where it all began: Lyttelton, New Zealand.
On arrival, thousands upon thousands of cheering people turn out to greet them, and the press pronounces them international heroes:
FARTHEST SOUTH
SHACKLETON’S MAGNIFICENT JOURNEY
WITHIN NINETY-SEVEN MILES OF POLE
TERRIBLE HARDSHIPS ENCOUNTERED
PROFESSOR DAVID AT MAGNETIC POLE58
Accolades for their remarkable achievements stream in from scientists and others from all over the world. Her Majesty Queen Alexandra relays her congratulations, as does King Edward VII, who cables Shackleton, ‘I congratulate you and your comrades … on having succeeded in hoisting the Union Jack … within 100 miles of the South Pole and the Union Jack at the South Magnetic Pole.’59
The men are instructed not to talk to the press about the expedition as Shackleton has an exclusive agreement with the Daily Mail. Yet, after a year and a half away from civilisation, the adventurers do have one urgent question for the Fourth Estate. ‘I say, who won the Burns–Johnson fight, eh?’ is the first question posed by one of them to a journalist.60 (The journalist tells him with wonder that the black American Jack Johnson absolutely thrashed the Canadian white man Tommy Burns so badly in front of 20,000 screaming fans in Sydney that, in the 14th round, the police themselves had to step into the ring to stop the fight.)
Within an hour of docking and after hurried farewells, a notably dishevelled Professor Edgeworth David (he is initially refused embarkation because customs staff think him an undesirable) is bound for Australia aboard the SS Maheno.
Meanwhile, the excitement over the collective achievements of the Shackleton expedition continues to grow. Shackleton’s success is regarded as a reflection of the worth of the whole British race, with a writer for The Sphere newspaper opining that, ‘So long as Englishmen are prepared to do this kind of thing, I do not think we need lie awake all night dreading the hostile advance of the “boys of the dachshund breed.’”61
Spontaneous warm tributes to Shackleton immediately stream in to the Daily Mail from around the globe, most particularly from the English-speaking world, following syndicated news of his Antarctic adventure. ‘The fascinating thing about Mr Shackleton’s report is the story of the struggle rather than the results of the struggle,’ waxes The Globe of New York. ‘All of us feel loftier in our inner stature as we read how men like ourselves pushed on until the last biscuit was gone.’62 Not forgetting the great strides forward that have been made for science, the Daily Mail declares that Shackleton’s discovery of coal and limestone brings fresh evidence that not only was Antarctica once joined to South America and New Zealand, it also ‘corroborates a theory that the moon represents a part of the Earth, torn off what is now the Pacific Ocean’. As to his exploration of the enormous polar tableland stretching all the way to the South Pole, this ‘supports the view that Antarctica is a continent and not a mere collection of islands’.63
All of which acclaim leaves Captain Scott in a dashed ticklish position. Mustering public enthusiasm as needs must, that good man says:
I have not had time to look at Mr Shackleton’s expedition in all its bearings, but there can be no doubt that most magnificent journeys have been made and that the work altogether has been conducted in a splendid manner. It appears that the Manchurian ponies, like the dogs in our own southern sledge trip, only helped in a portion of the journey. The really brilliant part appears to have been accomplished by the men themselves dragging their loads … In whatever measure that remaining distance [to the South Pole] is computed, it is for England to cover it!64
There is great rejoicing at Shackleton’s alma mater, Alleyn’s College, Dulwich, where it so happens that Professor David’s brother is the chaplain. A half-day holiday is declared, and every boy – rally, school! – subscribes a halfpenny towards a congratulatory telegram.
One of Shackleton’s former masters, Mr William Escott, who is still at the school, fondly remembers the lad for the press:
He never rose high in the school, or applied himself seriously to his books, but his merits were always recognized as being out of all proportion to his place in the form. He was considered rather delicate. He was always full of energy but could never put his nose to the grindstone – a rolling stone gathering no moss, but a lively and pleasant fellow.65
And, of course, Mrs Emily Shackleton at their residence in Edinburgh – where the Shackletons moved for his work with the Royal Scottish Geographical Society – is herself both thrilled and overwhelmed with hearty telegrams of congratulations. ‘I am supremely happy to know of my husband’s safety, for I have had no word of him for about a year,’ she says.66
Not that the acclaim is universal, however, with Scott’s man, Sir Clements Markham, weighing in with a casual cross-court backhand worthy of the tennis tournament that is all the rage these days, Wimbledon. ‘A very wonderful performance,’ he notes acerbically to the Daily Mail. ‘That Lieutenant Shackleton could do so much in such a short time seems almost inexplicable.’67
If Sir Clements has anything to say about it – and he most certainly will – his man Scott will have the last word on the whole affair …