‘Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.’
ADVERTISEMENT PLACED IN THE TIMES BY ERNEST SHACKLETON
SCOTT OF THE Antarctic was an awesomely brave guy. No question. And the men who accompanied him were pretty uncompromising too.
On Scott’s first trip to the Antarctic, on board the ship Discovery, another young man was present who would join him in the ranks of the great explorers. Possibly the greatest. He too had gone to sea at a young age. One of his captains described him as ‘the most pigheaded, obstinate boy I ever came across’.
He probably didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it’s worth remembering that where some people see pigheadedness and obstinacy, others see true grit.
This young man accompanied Scott on that first trek across Antarctica, braving the treacherous conditions that the polar region threw at them, and was part of the team that successfully reached further south than any man had previously journeyed. He deserves proper respect for that feat alone.
But this young man went further. And his epic adventures culminated in one of the most amazing rescues and survival escapes in history. His name was Ernest Shackleton, and he was one of the toughest and most inspirational leaders the world has ever known.
*
Captain Scott’s Discovery expedition made Shackleton very ill. Hardly surprising. All three men who made the trek south suffered from frostbite, snow blindness and scurvy. But Shackleton suffered the most. When they got back to the Discovery he was sent home early. Some people say that he and Scott fell out over this, but nobody really knows the truth.
What is sure, however, is this: whereas many people would have been put off by the harshness of that expedition, Shackleton, like Scott, had been bitten by the Antarctic bug.
Back in Britain he tried to make a life for himself, first as a journalist, then as a businessman, and even as an MP. But he had the soul of an adventurer. These conventional professions were not for him.
Shackleton needed danger in his life. And he knew that if danger was what he wanted, then the Antarctic was the place to find it in abundance.
He headed back there in 1908, this time as leader of his own expedition aboard his own ship: Nimrod.
Even before they reached the Antarctic, Shackleton’s crew faced difficulties. One of his men caught a metal hook in his eye. He was taken, bleeding and howling, to the ship’s doctor, who declared that the eye had to be removed. And so it was: the patient was pinned down by two of his shipmates while the doctor gouged out the damaged eye with the help of only a lungful of chloroform.
Such were the realities those early Antarctic explorers had to endure.
The purpose of the Nimrod expedition was to be the first to reach the South Pole. But first, in order to keep the men on his expedition active, he ordered a small team to scale Mount Erebus.
If you’ve read the chapter on Sir John Franklin (see here), the name Erebus will be familiar. It was the name of one of his ships that got consumed by the Arctic ice. This Antarctic mountain was named after that ship, which was in turn named after a Greek god of the Underworld. A huge, threatening, snow-clad volcano rising up out of the Antarctic ice, it suits its name. It’s 12,500 feet high, and had never been climbed.
One of the men Shackleton sent up Erebus was Douglas Mawson. It took Shackleton’s men five days to reach the summit, before practically sliding all the way back down. When they reached their base camp they were, according to one of the men, ‘nearly dead’.
But they still had their journey south to consider. And they were all eager to follow their leader into the unknown.
Shackleton didn’t reach the South Pole, but he and his men did beat the record of the Discovery expedition for the furthest south a man had ever trod. As Scott would find out for himself a few years later, their journey back to base – after seventy-three days of heading south – would prove almost unendurably harsh.
They marched on half rations, dragging their own sledges. Along with the usual Antarctic ailments, they were struck down with severe enteritis after eating spoiled pony meat. They suffered chronic dysentery – never fun in the frozen wastelands – and Shackleton himself was a physical wreck. He didn’t let that slow him down, however – and the more his body deteriorated, the harder he marched. Near starvation, he even donated some of his rations to his flagging teammates.
He was showing himself to be a man who led from the front – always.
When Shackleton finally returned to Britain he received a knighthood and a hero’s welcome. But it was not the Nimrod expedition – awesome though it was – that assured him a place in the history of exploration.
That accolade would come five years later, when he set sail for the Antarctic once more, this time in a ship named Endurance.
The name was truly apt for what lay ahead.
1914.
Captain Scott, by now, was dead. Amundsen had reached the South Pole. War was breaking out in Europe. But the Antarctic still called to Shackleton.
There was, in his opinion, only one more great Antarctic expedition to be completed: to cross the entire continent, from one edge to the other.
That, Shackleton decided, was the expedition with his name on it.
The Endurance set sail from Plymouth in August 1914. Its first destination was Buenos Aires, which it reached without any problems. From there it sailed to South Georgia, where Shackleton would prepare for his next battle with the Antarctic.
As they sailed south the omens were bad. They reached floating pack ice earlier than expected, and had to negotiate their way through half-frozen water as thick as setting concrete, which gave off great clouds of sinister frozen mist. Around them were holes, some as wide as 25 feet, where killer whales had smashed through the underside of the ice to find food.
Eventually, on 19 January 1915, Endurance became fully trapped by the thickening ice.
The men stayed on board for month … after month … after month. But the ship, strong though it was, was simply no match for the sheer, awesome power of the grinding ice. Little by little it began to break up. Giant oak timbers were steadily crushed and wrenched apart into matchsticks before the men’s eyes.
On 27 October, it sank. Their way home, their ticket to freedom, was gone for ever. The men were totally alone, with no communications and no means of escape.
The men – twenty-eight of them – decamped on to the ice, along with three small rowing boats and the stores that they could rescue from the sinking Endurance. Their plan was to drag all this gear across the ice, towards open water. But it soon became clear that this was impossible for the exhausted, frozen men. So Shackleton made a different call. They would camp on the ice in the hope that it would drift north and take them towards safety.
It did drift north. Slowly. But they certainly weren’t safe.
Provisions ran frighteningly low. They caught and killed seals to bolster their meagre supplies. They also had dogs with them. At first they kept them alive by feeding them seal meat. But as the seal meat grew scarce, they had to shoot the dogs, and eat them, in order to survive.
As the ice moved further from Antarctica, the seas grew warmer, and the ice started to break up. It was no longer safe for them to camp upon it. At one point, one of the men fell into the sea after the ice floe they were on split in half. He had to march around the remaining small floe all night, in soaking gear, in order to avoid freezing to death.
The men now had no choice but to climb into their boats and start to row.
They were at sea for five days before, utterly drenched and exhausted, they landed on a deserted stretch of barren rock called Elephant Island. It was the first time they’d stepped on to solid ground for sixteen months, and at first they were ecstatic to have reached land.
Their delight didn’t last for long.
Elephant Island: population, zero. Temperature: sub-zero. It was as remote and windswept an outcrop as it is possible to imagine. A blip in the middle of the mighty and violent Southern Ocean. And many, many hundreds of miles from any civilization.
Shackleton’s team had escaped the danger of the disintegrating ice, but their new home was harsh beyond belief. Living off the land was extremely difficult – they found a few seals and penguins, which they slaughtered for food and to provide fuel for their blubber stove, and they gathered whatever shellfish they could scavenge. But they were weak, and knew they couldn’t survive long without help. No ships ever ventured into this area. The nearest place they could get help was at the whaling stations back on South Georgia.
That was 800 miles away.
But Shackleton wasn’t going to let his men die on this bleak island.
He decided to go for broke.
*
Shackleton’s decision was to take one of their little boats and a few of his strongest men and set sail in the vain hope of navigating and surviving his way across the coldest, most violent ocean on the entire planet – with the goal of reaching South Georgia.
It was a crazily ambitious plan, with almost no chance of success.
The rowing boat James Caird was the best of their small craft, but at only seven metres long and two metres wide it was no Endurance. They modified it to make it a little stronger, and made an improvised deck out of a sheet of canvas that would give them some scant protection from the Antarctic sea and storms. They would need fresh water, so they loaded 250 pounds of ice on to the boat that they could melt as they went along.
But as Shackleton and five of his crew prepared to leave the main party and set sail once more, they knew, deep down, that the little James Caird could not survive the harsh Southern Ocean for long. They packed only enough supplies for four weeks at sea. It was all they could carry. And with that they cast off the rock of Elephant Island, wondering if they would ever see each other again.
The likelihood was not.
Make no mistake: the Southern Ocean is not for the fainthearted, even in an ocean liner. You get waves 100 feet high. They either slam you back down into a trough with heart-stopping force, or they curl over and cover you completely. Shackleton’s diary records many a terrifying moment:
I called to the other men that the sky was clearing, and then a moment later I realized that what I had seen was not a rift in the clouds but the white crest of an enormous wave. During twenty-six years’ experience of the ocean in all its moods I had not encountered a wave so gigantic. It was a mighty upheaval of the ocean, a thing quite apart from the big white-capped seas that had been our tireless enemies for many days. I shouted, ‘For God’s sake, hold on! It’s got us.’
Somehow, the crew held on and survived these monster waves. But the ocean had other weaponry to throw at them.
It was so cold that the spray froze as it hit the hull and crashed over the boat, turning it into a lopsided, floating ice cube. The men continually had to hack the ice away to stop it capsizing the small craft.
Their only source of warmth was their wet sleeping bags. These were constantly drenched through, and often frozen – so much so that they had to throw two of them overboard.
Their skin – which had not been washed for months – was constantly cold, wet and raw from their sodden woollen clothes. The relentless salt water on that chafed skin worsened their weeping sores by the day.
Their exposed fingers became covered with massive blisters and frostbite.
They ate only the most frugal of rations, and had to draw on untold reserves of energy to battle with everything the Southern Ocean was throwing at them.
*
Despite these unbelievable hardships, Shackleton and his men managed to navigate their tiny vessel to South Georgia – a feat of extraordinary and unsurpassed navigational skill in such a small boat, over so many hundreds of miles. Eventually, after fifteen days of hellish seafaring, the island loomed into view across the angry, dark sea. But their journey was still not over.
A storm with freezing hurricane-force ferocity blew up – it was strong enough, they later learned, to sink a massive whaling steamer ship in the vicinity. If the James Caird approached the island, it would be smashed to bits against the rocks in the huge swell.
But just to keep afloat in the open sea was a massive struggle in itself. The crew manned the oars and fought the sea for two days, before finally locating a small inlet on the southern part of the island where they could attempt to land.
Trouble was, the southern part of South Georgia was completely uninhabited.
The whaling stations were all to the north.
Between the whaling stations and Shackleton’s men was an almost impossible 36-mile trek over snow- and ice-covered mountains and glaciers, reaching 4,500 feet high, which had never been crossed before.
Shackleton knew what he had to do.
He left the three weakest men behind, taking with him two of the most experienced mountaineers. Together they set out across the mountain range. To do or die. One final, monumental push.
It would be almost thirty years before anybody braved this range again. When they did, they expressed utter disbelief that Shackleton had managed it with nothing in the way of mountaineering equipment, no supplies and very little in the way of experience. But that’s what makes Shackleton unique. ‘Impossible’ was not a word he believed in.
To battle up and over those mountains would have been epic at the best of times. To do it in the starved, frozen, injured and weakened condition they were in, was beyond belief.
When night fell, they allowed themselves a few moments to sit down and rest. They wrapped their arms round each other for warmth, and, almost instantly, Shackleton’s two companions fell asleep out of sheer and utter exhaustion. But Shackleton himself knew that if he drifted off as well, then, more than likely, they all would die of exposure and cold. They would never wake up.
So, after only a few minutes, he roused his companions and forced them to keep marching.
He told them that they had slept for a few hours and it was now time to push on.
For thirty-six hours solid they continued over those windswept, frozen peaks until, finally, and almost beyond the limits of human endurance, they reached the Stromness whaling station.
The job was not yet finished. First Shackleton had to collect the three men he had left on the southern coast of South Georgia. He did this safely.
But then, of course, there were the twenty-two men still stranded on Elephant Island.
*
Life for the men left behind on Elephant Island had been almost unbearably harsh. When the food ran out, they were reduced to living off the occasional penguin they managed to catch. When the penguins stopped coming ashore, they had to dig up old seal bones and boil them with seaweed.
They started to joke, grimly, that they would have to eat the meat of the first of them to die. Deep down, they all knew that might soon become a very real possibility.
They drank teaspoons of methylated spirit to keep them warm. When one of them suffered frostbite on his toes, the ship’s surgeons had to amputate them using only a little chloroform and their blubber stove for light.
Things were getting desperate. They could only pray that Shackleton had not abandoned them. That he and his party had somehow, miraculously, made it.
Shackleton tried three times to set sail to rescue the remainder of his men. Three times he was stopped by the ferocity of the unforgiving Southern Ocean and the Antarctic ice. But he never gave up. If the boats they had in South Georgia weren’t up to the job, he’d just have to find one that was. He approached the Chilean government, who gave him the use of a navy tug called the Yelcho. And on 30 August, using this ship, he set sail for Elephant Island.
When he finally reached his stricken crew, he found that every one of the twenty-two men he had left there was still alive. Now, having risked his life and gone through hell in order to save them, their leader had returned.
His word was his bond.
*
Shackleton had left Britain in 1914 in the firm belief that the war would be over in six months. It wasn’t, of course. His countrymen were dying in their thousands.
There is a cruel irony, though, to Shackleton’s story. Within months of returning to Britain, a substantial number of the brave survivors of the Endurance expedition were killed on the front line. They had survived their Antarctic hell, only to die in the quagmire of the trenches.
Shackleton survived the Great War, but the Antarctic has a way of keeping you in its grasp. And, despite the dangers and hardships he had faced there before, he planned another expedition, with the goal of circumnavigating the Antarctic in 1921. He left England and arrived at South Georgia in 1922.
But Shackleton was to go no further. He suffered a massive, fatal heart attack, and remains buried there to this day.
Laid to rest in a desolate, lonely grave, surrounded by sea and the mountains, the place not only of his greatest achievements, but of one of the greatest survival escapes in the history of exploration.