MIDSUMMER DAYLIGHT IN THE Arctic coincides with midwinter darkness in the Antarctic. Thus, by the time Peary’s expedition left New York in July 1908, Shackleton’s men were tucked into their winter quarters on Antarctica’s Ross Island. When full daylight returned in October, they could focus their undivided effort on their polar sledge trips. After what these men had already endured, they had to wonder, how much worse could it get? Bonded by shared adversity, boyish enthusiasm, and Shackleton’s charismatic leadership, they were prepared for virtually anything. Adventure was in the air, and with Shackleton in charge, it infused the entire enterprise.
THE EXPEDITION HAD STARTED royally. King Edward VII, who then reigned over the largest empire in history, Queen Alexandra, two of their adult children, including the Prince of Wales, the future King George V, and George’s twelve-year old son, the future King Edward VIII, personally inspected Shackleton’s diminutive ship, the Nimrod, on August 5, 1907, two days before its departure from England. It was a grubby little barkentine: a forty-year-old, 136-foot-long, oak-hulled, steam-and-sail-propelled Newfoundland sealer that had suffered more than its fair share of hard use and heavy seas over the years. But it was solidly built and, at £5,000, within Shackleton’s limited budget. Even at that price, title was held by expedition patron William Beardmore, who had made a fortune manufacturing armor plate and heavy guns for Royal Navy vessels before diversifying into building the ships themselves. Beardmore, who went to the same private school as Shackleton, had hired the explorer as something of a roving company spokesperson after he returned from the Discovery Expedition without suitable job prospects.
For its royal inspection, the Nimrod anchored in Cowes Harbor on the Isle of Wight, near the newly commissioned HMS Dreadnought, the largest ship in the British navy and first in a new class of big-gun battleships that would revolutionize naval warfare for a generation. Many reports commented on the contrast. Both ships were there as part of Cowes Week, an annual regatta and naval show that, in 1906, featured nearly two hundred battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and submarines of the Royal Navy’s newly formed home fleet, which was created to counter the growing threat of German naval expansion. By extending Britain’s claims in the Antarctic and perhaps establishing them all the way to the South Pole, the Nimrod was serving somewhat similar imperial purposes as the Dreadnought. The little ship had been summoned to Cowes Week by royal command, delaying its departure from England for several days.
Boarding the Nimrod by steam pinnace from the royal yacht Victoria and Albert must have come as something of a shock for the royals, who were dressed in the finest yachting attire. By some accounts, the ship’s smell was pungent and its deck crowded to the point of cluttered. “The King expressed a desire to see the equipment of the vessel, and he and the Queen and the rest of the distinguished company were shown the sledges, sleeping-bags, tents, and a vast variety of preserved foods,” one report noted. “Heaps of fur-lined clothing also attracted the attention of their Majesties. In respect to one stout blue suit the King, with a smile, remarked to the lieutenant, ‘Do you think you will find this warm enough?’” Having rejected Fridtjof Nansen’s advice that the explorers wear outer garments made from the skins of Arctic animals and instead opted to manufacture them from donated, British-made Burberry gabardine, Shackleton could at best reply, “It should do.”1
After the queen presented Shackleton with a Union Jack to plant at the South Pole and the king conferred on him the Royal Victorian Order for service to the empire, Edward VII concluded, “There is nothing left for me to do except to wish you a very safe and prosperous voyage in connection with your important and difficult enterprise.”2 Few British explorers had ever received such a royal send-off.
WITH ONLY ITS CREW aboard, the Nimrod sailed from England on August 7, 1907, bound for New Zealand by way of Cape Town and a long, slow crossing of the Indian Ocean. Oval shaped with a broad, ironclad bow and wide beam, the ship bobbed through the ocean like a toy boat, pitching and rolling excessively but always righting itself.
“The ship is good, but dirty when deep,” Captain Rupert English reported to Shackleton after the Nimrod reached New Zealand on November 23, following a three-and-a-half-month passage.3 One Australian newspaper described it as “the smallest craft that has ever tried to reach the South Pole.”4 Nevertheless, over two thousand people had turned out to see it off from England, and twenty-five times that number did the same from its final port of call in New Zealand. Thinking better of taking the long voyage, Shackleton and the entire shore crew traveled by fast steamers, some leaving as late as November 7 but still catching up with the Nimrod in Lyttelton.
Added time in London followed by a series of stops in Australia gave Shackleton a chance to complete preparations and raise funds for an expedition that he had organized on the fly and financed on a shoestring. He had told his wife, Emily, about the expedition only in mid-February 1907, less than six months before the Nimrod sailed and barely six weeks after she had given birth to their first child.
“It will only be one year and I shall come back with honour and with money and never never part from you again,” he promised her in a letter that he closed with the words “Your Boy, Ernest, Your lover and husband.”5
Emily knew it was a promise Ernest could not keep. “It was his own spirit ‘a soul whipped on by the wander fire’ that would keep him going back,” Emily later commented.6
Indeed, without tipping his hand, seven weeks before telling his wife about the trip, Shackleton had said to Royal Geographical Society librarian Hugh Robert Mill about the lure of Antarctica, “What would I not give to be out there again doing the job, and this time really on the way to the Pole.”7 At the time, Mill could not reveal that Robert Scott was planning a second polar expedition for 1910, and it came as a shock to Scott when Shackleton publicly announced his own strikingly similar plans at one of the society’s dinner meetings in February 1907.
“It is held that the southern sledge party of the Discovery would have reached a much higher altitude if they had been more adequately equipped,” Shackleton then said of his own failed polar dash with Scott in 1902. “In the new expedition, in addition to dogs, Siberian ponies will be taken, as the surface of the land or ice over which they will have to travel will be eminently suited for this mode of sledge travelling.” He also announced that he would take along an Arrol-Johnston automobile modified for driving on ice, without mentioning that Beardmore, the automaker’s largest stockholder, brokered the arrangement as a publicity stunt.8 Neither the ponies nor the car worked well in Antarctic conditions.
Pointing out that dogs performed admirably for Peary and the Duke of the Abruzzi in their polar quests, Nansen had urged Shackleton to rely on them. The British explorer could not forget his bad experience with dog-sledging during the Discovery Expedition, however, and would not admit that poor handling had caused it. The only dogs he took along were those left in New Zealand after Borchgrevink’s 1898–1900 expedition, and he would never give them a chance to show their stuff. If the ponies and car failed, which they did, Shackleton vowed to fall back on old-fashioned British man-hauling, which he did. He even rejected Nansen’s plea to try skis, which the Norwegian had so successfully used in Greenland.
In his initial public announcement and an earlier private circular, Shackleton identified reaching the south geographic and magnetic poles as his new expedition’s twin objectives, with primacy for the former. The Discovery Expedition’s old Ross Island base would be his winter quarters. “The expedition has the support of many influential men who wish British prestige in exploration to maintain its premier place,” Shackleton boasted.9
Upon learning of Shackleton’s plans, Scott was livid. Fearing a British competitor for the pole, Scott asserted a proprietary right to the Ross Island route toward the South Pole, much as Peary claimed the Smith Sound route toward the North Pole. Both claims had little basis even under strict Victorian standards of rectitude, but Shackleton relented under pressure from the Royal Geographical Society. He agreed to establish his winter quarters where Borchgrevink’s expedition had briefly landed near the ice barrier’s eastern end and to sledge south across the ice shelf where it abutted King Edward VII Land in the east. The route had its advantages: the distance from the barrier’s edge to the geographic pole was 60 miles less starting from there rather than from Ross Island. But the route south was utterly unexplored, and the magnetic pole most likely would be beyond reach.
DURING THE FINAL WEEKS of 1907, the Nimrod with twenty-two officers and crewmen; Shackleton and eleven members of the shore party from Britain; Edgeworth David, Douglas Mawson, and two others that Shackleton had recruited in Australia; and fifteen ponies from Manchuria converged on Lyttelton, New Zealand. They were ready to sail south on January 1, 1908. The small ship was so chock-full of supplies and equipment that five ponies had to be left behind. As their common cabin, fifteen members of the shore party shared a 24-by-6-foot aft hold, reached by climbing down a hatch from the foredeck and packed with the shore parties’ luggage and equipment, which one occupant described as “more like my idea of Hell than anything I have ever imagined.”10 Even the ever-optimistic Shackleton termed it a “twentieth-century Black Hole.”11 Six-foot-three-inch-tall Mawson called it “an awful hole” and opted instead to sleep in a lifeboat on deck, even during raging storms.12 Shackleton billeted with two others in the captain’s cabin.
Worse yet, with everything else aboard, the ship could not carry enough coal to make the round trip safely. To conserve fuel, Shackleton persuaded a local steamship company and the New Zealand government to provide a ship to tow the Nimrod as far as the ice pack—or over 1,600 miles through the world’s most notorious seas. Even with this aid, the Nimrod sailed with its waterline 2 feet below the safe maximum draft, virtually assuring that water would spill over the deck in even moderately heavy seas. “We would have added at least another fifty tons to our two hundred and fifty; but the risk was too great,” Shackleton said of the stores.13 Towing aggravated the situation by pulling the ship’s bow down, into oncoming waves.
Nevertheless, the Nimrod received a resounding send-off from Lyttelton Harbour on New Year’s Day, a midsummer holiday and the date of the harbor’s annual regatta. “Quays, piers, shipping were just a swaying, shouting mass of humanity,” David wrote of the throng that gathered there.14 “Tremendous crowds everywhere on hills, special steamers, [and a] fleet of 4 warships, including flagship” of the Royal Navy’s Australian fleet, Mawson noted. Estimates placed the number of spectators at fifty thousand.15 Shackleton put the figure at thirty thousand for the harbor entrance alone, with another six or seven thousand on the special steamers. “The air trembled with the crash of guns, the piercing steam whistles and sirens of every steamship in the port, and a roar of cheering,” he wrote. “Then we drew abreast of the flagship and from the throats of the nine hundred odd bluejackets aboard her we got a ringing farewell, and across the water came the sound of her band playing ‘Hearts of oak are our ships,’ followed by ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”16 Shackleton’s bare-bones expedition had become a grand voyage of empire.
WITH THE NIMROD PERILOUSLY overloaded and in tow, those aboard it hoped for a smooth passage. They did not get one. Three separate gales pounded the ship as it passed through the so-called Furious Fifties and Screaming Sixties. “The little Nimrod pitched about like a cork on the ocean,” Shackleton wrote on the second day. “The seas began to break over her, and we were soon wet through.” Two days later he added, “As evening wore on the weather became worse, and we shipped huge quantities of water.” Calling it a “struggle against nature in its sternest mood,” Shackleton reported that “the Nimrod rolled over fifty degrees from perpendicular to each side; how much more than that I cannot say, for the indicator recording the roll of the ship was only marked up to fifty degrees, and the pointer hand passed that mark.”17 Rolls of this magnitude repeatedly put the ship more than halfway onto its side in raging seas. Water rushed through the deck-level wardroom and poured into the shore party’s below-deck cabin.
Every living thing on board suffered. “We were nearly all more or less horribly sea-sick,” David wrote, speaking for the nonsailors aboard. “Many even of the officers were distinctly off-colour.” With each sharp roll, the ponies were thrown headlong or hind-first into the ends of their stalls and struggled to remain standing.18 “On going aft,” chief surgeon Eric Marshall noted on January 9, “a huge sea came on deck & left me hanging on to a life line with a seething mass of water up to my waist. It was goodbye to anyone who let go.”19
Without fear of understatement, Mawson commented on the voyage a day later, “Up to date life has been hideous.” Surveying the damage so far, he added, “The bulwarks and some deck houses are broken, one dog and a pony are dead.”20 Marshall admitted to being “sick as hell.”21 One officer declared, “I have never seen such large seas in the whole of my seagoing career.”22
The Nimrod survived its harrowing voyage with no loss of human life. On January 15, after two weeks at sea, a white line of ice appeared on the southern horizon. After a brief exchange of letters, supplies, and one passenger, the tow ship cut its cable and turned north, leaving the Nimrod to sail south through the ice and into the Ross Sea. The exchanged passenger, Maclean Buckley, was a wealthy English yachtsman with landholdings in New Zealand who, scarcely an hour before the Nimrod left Lyttelton, joined it on a lark with nothing but the summer suit on his back and an overnight bag from his club in Christchurch. A £500 donation secured his passage as far as the ice pack. He joined “for sheer love of adventure,” Shackleton said of Buckley, who previously had sailed his yacht around the world.23 According to David, Buckley stood on deck shouting “Splendid!” and “Well done, old girl!” as the Nimrod crashed through the storm-tossed sea.24 With the ice in sight, Buckley returned north with the tow ship and more thrilling tales of survival at sea.
The letters sent back with the tow ship included one from David saying that he would stay with the expedition through 1909 rather than return with the Nimrod as first agreed. Shackleton made the offer on the voyage, David claimed, and he accepted.25 David’s wife, Cara, expected something of this sort all along. Interviewed when the expedition left, she had said about David, “I believe he is praying that the Nimrod will be iced in, so that he will have some excuse to stay.”26 The love of adventure that had carried him from Oxford to a geologic survey post in colonial Australia, repeated expeditions into the bush, and research on Funafuti was not extinguished when he reached age fifty. For a geologist of his stature, Antarctica was the destination of a lifetime. For an expedition leader with Shackleton’s ambitions, David’s presence offered the promise of scientific credibility beyond even what Scott had gained with his big-budget Discovery Expedition. If the deal was sealed on the voyage south after each of these larger-than-life figures had fully sized each other up, rather than before departure as some historians suspect, it was a match made amid conditions that gave both men fair warning of the challenges ahead. Neither would have been deterred by them.
In addition to David, the fourteen-member shore party included five persons charged mainly with conducting scientific work in the Antarctic and two surgeons. To distract them from storms and seasickness during the roughest part of the voyage south, Shackleton abruptly put all fourteen to work tending the distressed ponies, making hourly meteorological records, and operating hand pumps. David suspected that Shackleton did it to build morale. If so, it worked. “There can be no doubt that regular duties are healthful and chastening,” David wrote home from the voyage, and added about Shackleton, “He is certainly fulfilling the high expectations that had been formed of him as a leader.”27 For his part, Buckley returned to New Zealand praising Shackleton as a leader “under whose discipline and magnetic influence every member of the expedition will put forth his heartiest efforts.”28
And as for David, calling him as “hard as nails,” Shackleton wrote back from the Nimrod, “He will prove invaluable to me.”29 Shackleton and David may have made a heavenly match, but they consummated it in hellish conditions.
UNDER ITS OWN STEAM at last, the Nimrod headed south roughly along the 180th meridian until the morning of January 16, when it reached a broken wall of tabular icebergs drifting north. “Tongue and pen fail in attempting to describe the magic of such a scene,” Shackleton wrote. “As far as the eye could see from the crow’s-nest of the Nimrod, the great, white, wall-sided bergs stretched east, west and south, making a striking contrast with the lanes of blue-black water between them.” David compared it to sailing through Venice, but with buildings of pure alabaster and on a far vaster scale. “With full steam and all sail we hurried along, now down the wide waterways between burgs, now along narrow lanes, with a wall of ice to starboard and a wall of ice to port,” he wrote. “It was the most wonderful and fascinating sight, in the way of natural scenery, that had ever met our gaze.” The maze stretched for over 80 miles, north and south, and had untold breadth, east to west. After twelve hours passing through the bergs, Shackleton wrote, “A few more turnings and twistings through the devious water lanes, and we entered the ice free Ross Sea.”30
Once exiting the “silent city of the Snow King,” as David called the belt of icebergs, it was six days of smooth sailing south-by-southeast to the Great Ice Barrier.31 “We were now reveling in the indescribable freshness of the Antarctic that seems to permeate one’s being, and which must be responsible for that longing to go again which assails each returned explorer from polar regions,” Shackleton said of this part of the voyage.32 He loved being back, and the others delighted in discovering it for the first time.
Then another wonder: the barrier rose before them, a vertical wall of glacial ice reaching 200 or more feet above the waterline and extending up to 2,000 feet below it, the front of a floating ice shelf extending more than 500 miles south to the mainland. “It is hard again to convey in words what this wonderful ice barrier, which may fairly rank as the eighth wonder of the world, is really like,” David noted. “It seemed too mystic and wonderful for this earth, and fitter rather for those ‘crystal battlements of Heaven’ that Milton pictured.” Shackleton commented on the “exclamations of wonder and astonishment at the stupendous bulk of the Barrier” from everyone on board who had not seen it before.33 In an age of high adventure, the Antarctic was working its magic.
Upon reaching the barrier, Shackleton sailed east along its front looking for the twin inlets that Borchgrevink’s Southern Cross Expedition and Scott’s Discovery Expedition had charted earlier in the decade. In these inlets, those expeditions had landed parties that sledged for a few miles southward over the ice shelf. Shackleton planned to winter here, but the ice front had broken off, leaving one large bay, which he named the Bay of Whales, where two inlets had been. That raised concerns about the safety of wintering on the ice shelf. Further, a thick skin of sea ice blocked the ship from entering far enough into the bay to find moorage. Shackleton looked farther east for landing sites, but sea ice again barred the way, leaving him with the apparent alternatives of returning west toward Ross Island or going north to New Zealand. But for his promise not to use Scott’s route toward the pole, Ross Island was the obvious pick. As he put it in a letter to his wife, Shackleton had to choose between either the duty owed his men and country to carry on or the honor of keeping his word to Scott. “Of course, for a moment the second alternative could not be entertained,” David declared. “So with a heavy heart I gave the order for turning back” to Ross Island, Shackleton explained to his wife. “My conscience is clear but my heart is sore.”34
Arriving at Ross Island on January 28, Shackleton spent a week exploring landing sites before settling on Cape Royds, a rocky promontory jutting from the island’s west coast into McMurdo Sound. He had hoped to reach the Discovery’s old anchorage, where Scott’s expedition had left a cabin, or “hut,” on shore, but the sea ice had not yet gone out that far south. Cape Royds, 23 miles north of Scott’s Hut Point base, was as far as the Nimrod could sail in 1908. The chosen site boasted an Adélie penguin rookery for eggs and meat, a shallow lake for freshwater, and an easy slope from the shore to a level site for buildings. Work began at once unloading the tons of supplies, equipment, ponies, car, and other materials needed for the expedition. Racing to get the ship unpacked before the weather turned, the men labored long hours for two weeks until the Nimrod departed on February 22, leaving them to face winter on their own. They erected a 19-by-33-foot prefabricated wooden hut for themselves, makeshift stables for the ponies, and a shed for the automobile. The hut’s door opened to a stunning view of the Western Mountains rising across McMurdo Sound on the Victoria Land coast. Mount Erebus, the active volcano then assumed to be Antarctica’s highest peak, rose dramatically behind them.
WHILE IN SOME WAYS Cape Royds offered a good setting for Shackleton’s winter quarters, and a more scenic one than either Scott’s Hut Point or Borchgrevink’s base at Cape Adare, it had one major drawback as the starting point for a trek to the South Pole. Unlike Hut Point, which had ready access onto the Ross Ice Shelf, Cape Royds was cut off by bays, glaciers, and ice falls in the south. The only practical way by foot, sledge, or motorcar from Cape Royds toward the South Pole lay over the sea ice to Hut Point and from there onto the ice shelf. Once that sea ice broke apart, shortly after the expedition’s arrival in February, the explorers could not travel south until the ice reformed during the winter, by which time it was too dark for anyone to venture far from the base until spring. The south magnetic pole was equally problematic on foot from Cape Royds. It lay across McMurdo Sound, which was open water when the expedition arrived and only froze over in winter.
The location of his expedition’s winter quarters left Shackleton with a dilemma. During March and April, before the full onset of winter, he planned to lay advance supply depots along the route south in preparation for his dash to the pole, which he hoped to begin in October of the following spring. Not only would these depots measurably assist the southern sledge journey, laying them would give his restless men something constructive to do. As Cook and Amundsen had discovered during the 1897–98 Belgian expedition, and Borchgrevink’s men had learned during the 1899–1900 Southern Cross Expedition, idleness and lack of purpose among persons cooped together through a long Antarctic winter leads to bitterness, backbiting, and both mental and physical illness. On both expeditions, members died over the winter and collegiality was lost forever.
A natural leader, Shackleton knew his men should not remain idle during the winter and planned various activities for them. To help keep his men occupied and working together during the Discovery Expedition, Scott had them write and print a newspaper, which Shackleton edited. Besting Scott, Shackleton took along equipment so that his men could publish a book, Aurora Australis, with many of them contributing articles, short stories, poems, or illustrations. Like Scott, he also planned to have the men keep regular meteorological and other scientific records, celebrate birthdays and holidays, engage in sports, and maintain a daily regimen of work, meals, leisure, and sleep. Further, his men had ponies to tend, which included regular feedings and exercise. Perhaps as important as anything, Shackleton brought along an acetylene gas lighting system to keep the hut bright during the midwinter darkness. But he struggled to come up with a meaningful replacement for laying depots in the south until he looked more closely at the mountain rising behind Cape Royds. Some speculate that David gave him the idea.
Mount Erebus, though well known since James Clark Ross’s day as the world’s most southerly active volcano, had never been climbed. “From a geological point of view the mountain ought to reveal some interesting facts,” Shackleton wrote. “Apart from scientific considerations, the ascent of a mountain over 13,000 ft. in height, situated so far south, would be a matter of pleasurable excitement both to those who were selected as climbers and to the rest of us who wished for our companions’ success.”35 Though no one in the group had training or equipment for mountaineering, Shackleton felt that climbing Erebus in the fall would give his men a sense of shared achievement to savor over the winter. Further, it could provide material for the expedition’s book, and, at a time when interest in mountain climbing was ascendant and first ascents hailed, it would represent a noteworthy feat for the expedition, different from anything that Scott’s Discovery Expedition accomplished. Shackleton was all for firsts and farthests, especially if they involved beating Scott.
The enterprise came together quickly. “No sooner was it decided to make the ascent, which was arranged for, finally, on March 4, than the winter quarters became busy with the bustle of preparation,” Shackleton wrote, “yet such was the energy thrown into this work that the men were ready for the road and made a start at 8.30 a.m. on the 5th.”36 They jury-rigged three pairs of crampons by driving spikes through strips of leather, which were then looped with straps so they could be attached, nail-points down, onto the bottom of the climbers’ finnesko boots. In place of backpacks, which the expedition did not carry, the climbers strapped their sleeping bags over their backs and shoulders as a sort of makeshift knapsack. They also hauled an 11-foot sledge loaded with a quarter ton of supplies as far as possible up the mountain, which proved to be about a third of the way.
Attuned to the potential geologic significance of the climb, Shackleton tapped David, Mawson, and the expedition’s Scottish assistant surgeon, Forbes Mackay, for the main party assigned to summit. Shackleton would remain behind. The expedition’s second-in-command, Jameson Adams; its assistant geologist, the young, adventure-loving English baronet Philip Brocklehurst; and chief surgeon Eric Marshall went along to help pull the sledge as far as it would go up the mountain, with authority to continue on to the summit should conditions warrant. Shackleton was considering all three members of this supporting party for the polar trek and saw the climb as a chance to test their mettle. Given their enthusiasm and ambition, the men naturally found conditions warranting all six to attempt the summit.
ALTHOUGH CAPE ROYDS SITS on the flanks of Mount Erebus only 17 miles from the summit, the climb was complicated by a steeply rising grade, bitter cold, inadequate preparations, and a blizzard. “At one spot,” Shackleton wrote, “the party had a hard struggle, mostly on their hands and knees, in their effort to drag the sledge up the surface of smooth blue ice thinly coated with loose snow.”37 At others, deep sastrugi, or wind furrows in the crusted snow, made pulling uphill almost impossible. “Frequently,” David wrote, “these ‘sastrugi’ caused our sledge to capsize, and several times it had not only to be righted, but repacked.”38
On day three, at an altitude that David estimated as 5,630 feet, or less than halfway up the mountain, the climbers exchanged their 560-pound sledge for 40-pound improvised knapsacks and proceeded with only essentials. “Some of us with our sleeping bags hanging down our backs, with the foot of the bag curled upwards and outwards, resemble the scorpion men of the Assyrian sculpture,” David wrote; “others marched with their household goods done up in the form of huge sausages.”39 Beginning that night, gale-force southeast winds pinned them in two collapsed tents for thirty-two hours at 8,750 feet above sea level. “There was nothing for it, while the blizzard lasted, but to lie low in our sleeping-bags,” David noted.40
The storm passed after a full day and two nights, and the combined party resumed its ascent. Nearing the rim of the volcano’s old, dormant crater, which lay about 2,000 feet below the new, active one, the slope became so steep that the climbers had to cut steps in the hard-packed snow with an ice ax or resort to rocky arêtes where possible. Climbing was difficult even for those with crampons and nearly impossible for those without them. Unaccustomed to the altitude and burdened with heavy loads, the climbers gasped for air.
Reaching the rim after noon on March 9, the men made camp with the intention of spending the rest of the day exploring the old crater. Climbing on his twenty-first birthday in badly fitting ski shoes that pinched off circulation to his toes, Brocklehurst had developed frostbite in both feet that he only now admitted. It later cost him a big toe and a place in the polar sledge party; for now, it cost him the summit. He stayed in camp as the others entered the crater. Here, crossing a snow plain, the men found a fairyland of whimsically shaped, hollow ice mounds, formed when hot steam rising from volcanic vents hits the frigid Antarctic air. No one had seen such a sight; it took David to explain it.
Starting the next morning at 6 A.M., the party (minus Brocklehurst) made for the mountain’s summit at the active crater’s rim. “Our progress was now painfully slow, as the altitude and cold combined to make respiration difficult,” David reported. “The cone was built up chiefly of blocks of pumice, from a few inches up to three feet in diameter.” The top was reached after four hours of hard climbing. “The scene that now suddenly burst upon us was magnificent and awe-inspiring,” David wrote. “We stood on the verge of a vast abyss, and at first could neither see to the bottom, nor across it, on account of the huge mass of steam filling the crater.” After a northerly breeze cleared the air, David added, “Mawson’s measurements made the depth 900 feet, and the greatest width about half a mile.”41 Using a combination of methods, the party placed its altitude at 13,370 feet above sea level, which was nearly 600 feet too high but stood for generations as the mountain’s accepted elevation.
With their injured companion waiting at the last campsite, the climbers quickly headed back down once they took photographs and measurements. Reaching Brocklehurst after noon, the party pushed on past one more prior campsite in a single afternoon. “Finding an almost endless succession of snow slopes below us, we let ourselves go again and again, in a series of wild rushes towards the foot of the main cone,” David recalled.42 Tossing their packs ahead and using ice axes like rudders, they had slid well over halfway down the mountain by 10 P.M., to where they had left the sledge. Marshall described the plunge: “Pushing bag, glissading, following up, recovering it, dragging, shoving, soaked through.” After one more night out, all six climbers stumbled into winter quarters before noon on the next day. “Bruised all over,” Marshall wrote, “nearly dead.”43 They were greeted with champagne and Quaker Oats. Along with its two polar treks, this first ascent of Mount Erebus became one of the expedition’s three best-known feats. “Fierce was the fight to gain that height,” Shackleton wrote in a poem commemorating the event.44
EVEN AS THE EXPLORERS celebrated the Erebus party’s success, they had growing concerns about their main mission. The car, they found, would not operate on snow, which made it useless for the South Pole trek. The drive wheels spun in place, one of the mechanics noted, “Burying themselves to such an extent that the car moved not an inch.”45 Shackleton had never placed much faith in motor transport, however. He was relying on ponies to pull the sledges across the snow-covered ice shelf toward the pole and thought that six were needed for the job. Two ponies had died due to the rough voyage, leaving eight. Another succumbed during the unloading process after eating wood shavings used to pack chemicals. A fourth pony, unfortunately named Sandy, died at winter quarters while the Erebus party was away. Seeking the cause, a postmortem found Sandy’s stomach full of sand. Upon landing, the ponies had been picketed on sandy ground that sea spray had coated with salt, leading the pony to eat the sand. “All the ponies seem to have done this, but some were more addicted to the habit than the others,” Shackleton reported. “We shifted them at once from the place where they were picketed, so that they could get no more sand, and gave them what remedial treatment lay in our power, but two more died in spite of all our efforts.”46 By the onset of winter, only four ponies survived: Socks, Quan, Grisi, and Chinaman.
With the deepening darkness and worsening weather limiting outings to Cape Royds and its environs from May through August, Shackleton and his party settled into a winter routine that lasted for four months. David and Raymond Priestley, a novice British geologist who had signed on to the expedition before anyone knew that a scientist of David’s stature would join it, ventured as far afield as conditions permitted collecting rock specimens and then sorted and studied them over the long Antarctic night. Priestley later credited his work with David as the inspiration for his own distinguished career in science.
David’s restless energy did not stop with collecting rocks. Drawing on his youthful experience charting the retreat of Ice Age glaciers by the placement of erratic boulders left behind in his native Wales, David, aided by Priestley and Mawson, used this technique to study the history of glacier movement in the McMurdo Sound basin. Although David and Mawson said they joined the Nimrod Expedition to study an “ice age in being,” by their examination of erratic boulders, they became the first to find that glaciers were retreating even in the Antarctic.47 For his individual research, stretching his official role as the expedition’s physicist to include work in his favored field of glaciology, while taking the obligatory magnetic readings of the southern lights, Mawson studied the structure of ice and snow crystals at low temperatures.
Beyond the specific tasks given to the scientists and the added ones given to others, all members of the shore party followed an enforced routine of meals and sleep. Breakfast began at 9:00 A.M. sharp followed by a morning smoke. Lunch was catch-as-catch-can depending on one’s daily duties. Dinner came at 6:30 P.M. followed by tea, tobacco, and conversation until 7:30. Even though it was dark outside for twenty-four hours each day, the party followed the clock in keeping a set pattern of sleeping from around midnight to about 8:30 A.M. Everyone took turns both as “messman,” cleaning up after meals, and in standing the night watch. This included the fifty-year-old David—a Fellow of the Royal Society, or F.R.S.—who never sought or received special treatment. “It was a sight for the gods,” Priestley noted, “to see a well-known F.R.S., drying a wet plate with a wetter cloth, and looking ruefully at the islands of grease remaining, after he has spent five minutes hard at work on it.”48 By his willing attitude, David set an example for others.
Each pair of men had a six-by-seven-foot designated cubicle for sleeping and storage. David and Mawson shared one that others called “The Old Curiosity Shop,” owing to its odd array of scientific instruments and geological specimens. Only Shackleton had a private room, but he swapped bunks with Brocklehurst while the baronet was recuperating from the amputation of his big toe. He used the occasion to try to cheer up Brocklehurst’s morose roommate, Bertram Armytage. To boost morale, Shackleton also visited the men as they worked, lending a hand or telling stories. It was his way to build esprit de corps.
“He had a facility for treating each member of the expedition as though he were valuable to it,” Brocklehurst said of Shackleton. “He made us feel more important than we could have been.”49
Despite later recollections that perfect harmony prevailed during the Nimrod Expedition, some dissension bubbled up from below. Armytage remained despondent despite Shackleton’s best efforts. Marshall’s diary overflowed with criticism of various members of the expedition, particularly Shackleton. Damning him as “a consummate liar & practiced hypocrite,” Marshall at one point depicted Shackleton as “a coward, a cad, who was incapable of keeping his word.”50 Shackleton’s broken vow to Scott about not wintering on Ross Island touched off Marshall’s venom, though it seemed rooted in the clash between the superior’s glib-tongued style and the subordinate’s judgmental religiosity. Then there was the prickly Mackay, who could overreact to perceived slights or indiscretions, as when a roommate stepped on his locker or when expedition artist George Marston, who sometimes dressed as a woman to lighten the mood, greeted him flirtatiously. These were exceptions to the rule, however. Due largely to Shackleton’s ability to pick and lead people, the shore party survived the long, dark Antarctic winter of 1908 in shape for a record-setting summer in 1909.51
THE EXPLORERS NEEDED ALL the mental and physical reserves they had built up over the winter because in other respects they faced greater challenges than they had anticipated at the outset. Due to the orientation of the Ross Ice Shelf, starting the southern sledge journey at the west rather than the east end of the ice barrier added 120 miles to the distance from winter quarters to the south geographic pole and back. Losses had cut the number of ponies from ten to four, which was two less than Shackleton thought necessary for the southern sledge journey and left none for the northern sledge journey toward the south magnetic pole. Situating winter quarters at Cape Royds rather than Hut Point cut off the shore party from the route south during the critical months before midwinter darkness stopped all travel. As a result, the men could not lay advance supply depots for the southern sledge journey until spring. And of course the car proved useless for hauling supplies on the ice shelf. Each of these factors added to the man-hauling. Together, the combined effect was staggering.
Fully aware of the expedition’s situation, Shackleton tried to right it as much as possible with the coming of first light. Although the sun would not rise above the horizon at Cape Royds until August 22, a distinct midday twilight began brightening the icescape earlier in the month. On August 12, Shackleton set out with David and Armytage to test conditions in the south with an eye toward beginning the movement of supplies well before the actual southern sledge journey could start, with the return of long days and warmer temperatures in late October. Anticipating extreme cold and bitter conditions on an August outing, rather than risk any of the remaining ponies, they man-hauled a single sledge the 20-some miles south to Hut Point. There, they spent one night in the Discovery Expedition’s drafty old shelter before proceeding another 12 miles south onto the ice shelf.
“The surface generally was hard, but there were very marked sastrugi, and at time patches of soft snow,” Shackleton noted about travel on the ice shelf in late winter. “At 6 p.m. the thermometer showed fifty-six degrees below zero” and fell still lower before dawn. The party shared a single three-person sleeping bag in a lone tent. “Everything we touched was appallingly cold, and we got no sleep at all,” Shackleton wrote.52
Turning back toward Hut Point in the morning, the men arrived at the shelter just before a blizzard struck. It kept them inside for five days. At these extreme temperatures, individual snow crystals become like glass shards. Propelled by gale-force winds across the glacial surface, they can penetrate layers of clothing and flash-freeze exposed flesh. It was hard to stand against the wind, and not much easier to crawl. With no hope of reaching Cape Royds until the weather cleared, they used the time to clean and reconfigure Scott’s shelter for use as a storage depot for the southern sledge party. Although not much farther south than Cape Royds, Hut Point offered direct access onto the ice shelf without fear of being cut off should the sea ice break out in McMurdo Sound.
SO THE HAULING BEGAN, as the men took turns pulling sledges loaded with supplies from Cape Royds to Hut Point for the coming polar trek. “Sledging work in the spring, when the temperature is very low, the light bad, and the weather uncertain, is a rather severe strain on man and beast,” Shackleton wrote. And since by this point ponies were in shorter supply than people, he added, “Man-hauling was the order for the first journeys.”53 One party left each week for what was typically a four-day trek, two days out and two days back. Each hauled about a quarter ton of gear and provisions, half of which it left at Hut Point for use on the southern sledge journey with the remainder used or consumed on the trip. “Each party came back with adventures to relate, experiences to compare, and its own views on various matters of detail connected with sledge-travelling,” Shackleton observed. “Every one of the parties encountered bad weather.”54 By mid-September, enough equipment and supplies were stored at Hut Point for the polar trek. The focus shifted onto getting some of it farther south before the main journey commenced a month later.
On September 22, Shackleton and five others began what they called the “southern depot journey”—a three-week, 320-mile march to move supplies onto the ice shelf. Much of this backbreaking man-hauling was in service of the ponies, which were not used in this trek. Dogs can eat what people eat. When they run out of food, they can eat each other. In short, as Peary, Amundsen, and the Duke of the Abruzzi learned, dogs pull their own weight even as they pull for the party, and when they reach the end of the line, they become food for each other and their handlers. Not so ponies. During a trip as long as the southern sledge journey, they eat more maize and compact fodder than they can haul, and will not eat one another. Men can eat ponies as well as dogs, of course, but there are more of the latter, allowing them to be culled selectively as needed for food. To accommodate the peculiar needs of a polar trek with ponies, the southern depot journey carried nothing but maize to stock a depot on the ice shelf over 100 miles south of Hut Point. By doing so, as Shackleton noted, “our load would be lightened considerably for the first portion of the journey when we started south.”55 In the meantime, however, everyone slated for the southern ledge journey had a brutal workout because all were among those participating in the maize-hauling depot journey. As a result, they started the main mission already somewhat spent.
In addition to himself, Shackleton chose Marshall, Adams, and Frank Wild for the polar party. Marshall knew cartography as well as medicine, so he was essential for the mission. Once Shackleton opted to send Mawson with David toward the magnetic pole and Brocklehurst became incapacitated, the choice of Adams and Wild for the southern sledge journey became all but obvious. Raised to the Royal Navy’s officer corps from positions in the merchant marine before leaving it to join the Nimrod Expedition, both were strong, smart, and self-reliant. “We only had four ponies left,” Adams later explained about the choice and number of men, “so it was the four fellows most likely to stay the course.”56
The weak link was Shackleton, Marshall worried. Ever since his health problems on the Discovery Expedition’s southern journey, Shackleton had feared he had a weak heart. The palpitations that sometimes followed asthma attacks deepened his anxiety. He never had it checked out prior to the Nimrod Expedition for fear of what the doctor might find, but during an otherwise routine medical examination at Cape Royds, Marshall found that Shackleton had a heart murmur, though neither man knew its severity. The Boss (as Shackleton soon became known) still insisted on going south, and so he did.
Each participant received a baptism in ice during the depot-laying trek. “The journey was a severe one, for the temperature got down to fifty-nine degrees below zero Fahr., with blizzard winds,” Shackleton reported. “Most of us had the experience at one time or other of dropping into a crevasse to the length of our harness.”57 The harnesses were one advantage of man-hauling sledges over glacial ice. When anyone broke through a snow lid and dropped into a deep crevasse, which was likely to happen without warning, the traces would arrest the fall with a stiff jerk on the upper torso, leaving one’s feet dangling in thin air and hands grasping for the ice walls on either side. The bottom could lie hundreds of feet below, resulting in certain death if nothing stopped the descent. No one was immune to the risk or became hardened to the danger. The more it happened, the more unnerving it became. It was worse for the ponies, though, because there was no lifting them back to the surface and an ever-present worry that any sledges in tow would follow them down the abyss. In this respect as well, dogs were a safer option because they pull in a pack rather than one to a sledge, tread lightly over snow lids, hang secure in their harnesses when they fall, and are easily pulled back up to the surface.
For the southern depot party, after duly stocking the so-called Depot A with 167 pounds of maize, the return trip proved even worse than the outbound march. The temperature remained low and blizzards increased. “We could not see more than ten or fifteen yards ahead,” Shackleton noted at one point. “Then we found we were amongst crevasses, for first one man and then another put his foot through a snow lid.”58 Badly frostbitten on their faces from the bitter wind and blowing snow, the party camped in a hastily erected tent for thirty hours only a few miles from the Hut Point shelter. In all, the men had been able to march only about two out of every three days and lived on reduced rations by the end, which did not bode well for the polar journey. The six men finally reached Cape Royds hungry and tired on October 13, by which time David, Mawson, and Mackay had already left winter quarters for their thousand-mile round-trip trek to the south magnetic pole. Two weeks later, with the promise of perpetual daylight for the next four months, Shackleton, Marshall, Adams, and Wild headed back out, retracing their route for 150 miles to Depot A before beginning the added 700 miles to the geographic pole.
The stage was set. With boundless faith in their cause, the Nimrod Expedition’s two polar parties, one heading northwest and another due south, hoped to reach their respective poles early in 1909. And as the Antarctic day extended to continuous light, the Arctic night descended into perpetual dark at the Roosevelt’s winter anchorage off Ellesmere Island, where Peary’s eighth and presumably last expedition waited for dawn to launch its final assault on the North Pole. Like Shackleton, Peary planned to reach his goal early in 1909. Meanwhile, as these parties struggled toward their goals, the Duke of the Abruzzi planned his expedition to reach a Pole of Altitude in the greater Himalayas.
After decades of relentless striving by multiple parties toward those marks, 1909 was shaping up to become the year of their conquest. Adventure was in the air and on countless minds. The era’s omnipresent press fixated on these stories. To accommodate the burgeoning new media of silent film, Shackleton and the Duke of the Abruzzi took along motion-picture cameras to complement their battery of still cameras. With boundless resources, the duke also recruited the world’s premier mountain photographer, Vittorio Sella. Like Peary, they had visions of lasting glory to follow on the heels of reaching a pole. Claiming them, all three reasoned, would bring a symbolic close to the age of exploration and open one of limitless human attainment.