THE TURN OF THE season that brought winter darkness to Peary’s expedition at Cape Columbia in October 1908 bestowed summer daylight on Shackleton’s men at Cape Royds. Focused in purpose and eager to begin, they had two poles in sight. By September, Shackleton had settled on who would go on each journey. He would lead a party of four men with four ponies and four sledges south over the Ross Ice Shelf toward the south geographic pole. Shackleton still believed his pole lay on that flat, stable shelf some 850 miles away—a brutal but achievable pony march. In contrast, David would lead a party of three men hauling two sledges west over the Ross Sea’s frozen surface, then north along Victoria Land’s icebound coast, and finally over the Western Mountains and Great Ice Plateau to the south magnetic pole. Six decades earlier, James Clark Ross had determined that the magnetic pole lay beyond those mountains, which Scott’s Discovery Expedition found to front a 2-mile-high ice sheet.
Beyond these rough outlines, no one knew what lay ahead for either party. Among the few certainties was that both destinations, though storied, were but unmarked abstractions on featureless ice fields. Reaching them had no practical value: at the time, Shackleton depicted them as “ungilded by aught but adventure.”1 Adventure, however, mattered and gilded them beyond measure for the Gilded Age.
Shackleton planned for both teams to start in October, with David’s so-called northern party leaving on October 1 and his own southern party about four weeks later. Because of weather conditions, neither party could safely start sooner. Both groups were to return by March 1909 for the voyage home. The Nimrod could not remain in the Antarctic beyond that month without the risk of being frozen in for the winter. Anyone not returning by then would be left behind.
Before setting off in mid-September with five others to lay advance depots for his southern sledge journey, Shackleton gave his final written instructions to David for the northern party, which included Mawson and Forbes Mackay. Somewhat muddled and wildly overambitious, these orders set forth three tasks. Paragraph (1) directed the party to take observations to determine the location of the magnetic pole and, “if time permits,” to reach it. Second, the party was to survey the Victoria Land coast running north, collecting geological specimens as it went, but not at the cost of “time that might be needed to carry out the work noted in paragraph (1).”2 Logically, the party would do this work on the way to the pole, before turning inland, and the instructions seemed to permit skimping on it. They knew the rough distances: sledging from Cape Royds across McMurdo Sound and north along the coast on sea ice would cover about 250 miles, with another 250 miles inland from the coast to the pole, most of it uphill. To this point, the orders were clear, though Shackleton probably did not anticipate just how much resolve the Victorian-minded David would bring to the task of reaching the pole at the expense of all else, even the party’s safety. But there was more.
Shackleton’s third instruction showed that he did not yet appreciate either the challenge posed by man-hauling sledges in polar conditions or the vast distances involved. On its return journey, he directed David’s party to stop at Victoria Land’s ice-free Dry Valley, located roughly across McMurdo Sound from Cape Royds, and look for gold or other valuable minerals. David and Mawson had a well-earned reputation for finding coal and mineral deposits in Australia. Before leaving, David had hinted of the prospect of finding another Klondike in the Antarctic, which piqued widespread interest in the immediate aftermath of a gold rush that had drawn a hundred thousand prospectors to the Arctic. Shackleton bet on there being valuable rocks in Antarctica too.
Here, Shackleton’s instructions became confusing. On the one hand, they authorized the party to delay returning to the Dry Valley if lengthening the northern journey would allow it to reach the pole. On the other hand, they stated that a “thorough investigation of the Dry Valley is of supreme importance.”3 Further, Shackleton knew that the sea ice might break up before the northern party could return to Cape Royds, because his instructions speak of the Nimrod retrieving it at some undetermined point on the coast around February 1. If the sea ice was out when the men arrived back at the coast from the pole, they could not get to the Dry Valley. Cliffs and coastal glaciers rendered the shoreline itself impassable. When time proved too short for both reaching the pole and prospecting in the Dry Valley, the orders gave David grounds for pushing on toward the pole over the initial objections of Mawson, who wanted to prospect in the Dry Valley, and the later pleas of Mackay, who lost all faith that they could reach the pole.
The magnetic poles held a strong attraction for scientists and explorers during the Victorian era, though this had weakened by the turn of the twentieth century. Shackleton and Mawson were men of a new era; David was not. During the nineteenth century, scientific organizations and governments across Europe and in the European colonies had launched a global crusade to map the curved lines and shifting patterns of terrestrial magnetism to their convergences at the magnetic poles. It became the largest shared scientific enterprise to date, with three magnetic observatories erected with British funds in Australia alone. Navigation by compass had always required knowledge of the variation between the magnetic and geographic poles, but the discovery in the early 1800s of a relationship between current electricity and magnetic fields added to the interest in terrestrial magnetism. Physicists thought that it might affect electrical transmission. Early in the 1830s, James Clark Ross became a British national hero for leading the first party to reach the north magnetic pole; a decade later, he sailed in search of the southern one. It was his Antarctic expedition that first navigated through the pack ice to discover the Ross Sea, Victoria Land, and the Great Ice Barrier, but determined that the magnetic pole was out of reach beyond Victoria Land’s Western Mountains.
In Ross’s day, because of their supposed scientific and economic importance, the magnetic poles attracted more attention than the geographic poles. By 1900, however, with the press feeding popular interest in the geographic poles as the last two great unreached destinations on earth, goals shifted. Although the official instructions for Scott’s 1901–04 Antarctic expedition stressed magnetic research over geographic discovery, for example, Scott reversed the emphasis and received the most acclaim for his farthest south. Yet many in Britain and its colonies remembered the mystique surrounding the magnetic poles, and so, at the outset, Shackleton named the south magnetic pole as his expedition’s second objective. When pressed by Scott to shift his intended winter quarters from the ice barrier’s western to its eastern sea edge, the magnetic pole seemed beyond reach, and Shackleton dropped it from his plans. With David and Mawson joining the expedition in Australia and Shackleton opting to winter on Ross Island after all, the magnetic pole was back in play. Hastily organized, the northern party took up where Ross left off.
David was delighted. Leading the first party to the south magnetic pole was a Victorian explorer-scientist’s dream, and for a glaciologist like David, it had the added appeal of a long trek over the world’s largest ice sheet. Yet he faced a peculiar problem: no one knew the pole’s precise location. Unlike their geographic counterparts, magnetic poles are not fixed points. Indeed, they are not even points. The south pole of any magnet (and the rotating earth with its molten iron core acts like a huge magnet) is where its lines of induction converge. An explorer reaching the earth’s south magnetic pole does not see or feel anything special except that the southern end of a magnetic dip needle points directly down toward the earth’s center. Further, the pole’s location migrates over time in an unpredictable manner due in part to the earth’s fluid core. Ross used nearby readings to fix the south magnetic pole’s location in 1841, only to have Scott’s team determine that it had moved east by 1902. Mawson would find that it had migrated northwest since 1902, increasing its distance from the coast.
Notwithstanding the transitory nature of “discovering” the south magnetic pole, David knew that it would attract the sort of professional and popular attention that he cultivated. In addition to his many academic publications and presentations, David crafted a public image by writing newspaper articles, giving lyceum lectures, and leading field trips. While others battled seasickness on the voyage to Antarctica, for example, he penned a series of thirteen popular articles about the trip that he sent back with the Nimrod for publication in Sydney’s leading paper. At winter quarters and on the polar journey, despite his senior-scientist status, David did his share of the menial tasks, but in a laborious, conspicuous way that some saw as designed to attract attention and approbation. Polite to a fault and seemingly deferential but actually strong-willed and opinionated, David typically got his own way while appearing to accede to others. On the northern sledge journey, David’s deliberate manner grated on Mawson and exasperated Mackay.4
WITH THE FOUR REMAINING ponies needed for the southern sledge journey and no dogs trained to pull sledges, Shackleton offered David the motor car. Already proved to be useless on snow, it did drive on smooth ice, and the first part of the northern sledge journey was over the Ross Sea’s still-frozen surface. Only the expedition’s motor expert, an Arrol-Johnston engineer named Bernard Day, could keep the temperamental vehicle running, so he played a bit part in the initial polar push, which was delayed by early spring blizzards.
“On September 25 we were up at 5:30 a.m., and found that the blizzard had subsided,” David wrote. “Day and I started in the motor-car, dragging behind us two sledges over the sea ice.” They planned to lay an advance depot for the northern party, which was to depart a week later. They did not get far. First, the engine overheated, forcing one delay; then, a cylinder stopped firing, causing another; finally, 10 miles out, slight but steep sastrugi stopped the vehicle’s forward progress. “A little low drift,” David called it, “brought up by a gentle blizzard.” The sastrugi were too much for the automobile’s frail motor drive to handle. The party left one fully loaded sledge behind and raced back to winter quarters in the car before the storm worsened. David hoped to try again the next day with another load, but the car’s piston rings needed fixing after the last effort, causing more delay. Then Day injured his foot tobogganing, and another storm hit, pushing the next outing with the car back to October 3. This time, it traveled 15 miles before depositing its load. David ripped the flesh from his finger pushing the car, and Mackay broke his wrist cranking the starter. They hobbled back to winter quarters at 10 P.M., David noted, “All thoroughly exhausted, all wounded and bandaged.”5
The northern party set its departure for October 5. With 500-odd miles man-hauling sledges over some of the roughest terrain on earth just to reach the south magnetic pole, David, Mawson, and Mackay faced a Herculean task, and they knew it. After supper on October 4, they gathered with those at winter quarters for an emotional farewell. The gramophone began with the aptly titled “We Parted On the Shore,” a new recording by Scottish vaudevillian Harry Lauder, then the world’s highest-paid entertainer and the first to sell a million records. “It’s a terrible thing being hundreds and hundreds of miles away,” Lauder ad-libbed on the cylinder. “Of course, there is one consolation; you’re away back from anyone you owe money to.” Then the music became more serious with “Loch Lomond”: “’Twas then that we parted, in yon shady glen / . . . But me and my true love will ne’er meet again.” Last of all came the John Henry Newman hymn “Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,” which would be sung by doomed passengers on the Titanic as it sank and imperiled British soldiers in the trenches during World War I: “The night is dark, and I am far from home.” No one knew what lay ahead for the northern party, but everyone took it seriously. David could not sleep that night.
THE PARTY LEFT EARLY the next morning. “Day was there with the motor-car,” David reported, but the snow was blowing so heavily that the car went only 2 miles before the men left it behind. From there they took up their harnesses and “with a one, two, three, and away, pulled off into the thickly falling snow.” They reached their 10-mile depot at 7 P.M. and set up camp. “We slept that night on the floe-ice, with about three hundred fathoms of water under our pillow,” David noted.6
Adding the sledge from this depot, the men now pulled two overloaded sledges with a combined weight of 900 pounds. They could not manage both at the same time, so they left the one behind and hauled the other half a mile forward, then returned for the first and repeated this backbreaking relay throughout the day. The men covered only 4 net miles but marched 12, with Mawson reporting that David, or “Prof” as he called him, was “dog tired all day.”7 Picking up their 15-mile depot early on October 7 raised the total drag-weight to 1,100 pounds, or about 370 pounds per person. It was a mark of their desperation that they took their biscuits out of tins, repackaged them in bags to save 8 pounds, and used some of the tins for other purposes.
The ensuing days proved much the same, or worse. The men rarely covered more than 4 net miles each day, and often much less. The sledges would bog down in snow and capsize on sastrugi. At times the men had to chop a way through pressure ridges with axes, navigate around or over cracks in the ice, or camp during storms. Sometimes a stiff breeze would enable them to hoist sails on the sledges to propel both along, but the wind could freshen into storms that cost more time than the sails saved. During this part of the trip, temperatures often dipped far below zero, and the unrelenting sunlight reflecting off the surface caused snow blindness.
Moreover, the party could never go faster than its slowest member: David. “The Prof is certainly a fine example of a man for his age,” Mawson confided in his diary, “but he is a great drag on our progress. He certainly and admittedly does not pull as much as a younger man.” It was worse during breaks, when David was painfully slow at cooking and making or breaking camp. “The more we bustle to get a move on the more he dawdles,” Mawson wrote. He “takes double the time do to a thing than any ordinary person would.” The men shared a three-person sleeping bag that David typically entered long after the others. “God only knows what he does” before turning in, Mawson complained. “Finally, when we have the chill off the bag, he struggles in all cold and bedaubed with snow. Of course he has the warm middle berth and occupies certainly more than 1/2 the bag as he wears innumerable clothes.”8
David had his own complaints about the sleeping arrangements. “A three-man sleeping bag,” he observed, “where all snore and shin one another and each feels on waking that he is more shinned against than shinning, is not conducive to real rest.”9
Both David and Mawson realized by the end of October that they could not make it to the pole and back in one season at their current rate. The slender David suggested proceeding on half rations with one sledge and without relaying. Mawson wanted to skip the pole in favor of prospecting in the Dry Valley. Mackay sided with David about the pole but seemed dubious about the half rations. “I cannot do anything but agree,” Mawson conceded in his diary. Yet he added that “the Prof’s idea of 1/2 ration scheme for 21/2 months with same amount of work is ridiculous,” so Mawson ultimately countered with a plan of his own that the others accepted. “We must give up all else this summer,” he proposed, “preserve about a full ration of sledge food for 480 m[ile] journey inland, [and] in order to make this possible we must live on seal flesh and local food cooked by local means as much as possible.”10 It was the pole or bust for the northern party without as much as a nod to the Dry Valley.
Mawson’s plan allowed the party to discard immediately everything not needed for the polar trek and travel with a single sledge once they headed inland, but in the meantime it meant surviving on seals and penguins cooked over a makeshift seal-blubber stove made from a surviving biscuit tin. The men had not planned to hunt such food, did not know how to prepare it, and had not brought along the proper cooking equipment. They knew that Peary lived off the land in the Arctic, but he ate familiar game like bear, deer, and musk oxen.
Further, given their new schedule, the sea ice would be gone by the time they returned from the pole, so they had to hope that the Nimrod could retrieve them from the shore farther north than planned. The party left messages in marked depots along the coast announcing the changed plans, but could not be sure anyone would find them. “At tea this evening,” Mawson wrote on October 29, “the Prof began to talk of the importance of our journey [to the pole] and asked that we should give up all else for it.”11
HUNGER STALKED THE MEN. “About 18 days out I had a food dream,” Mawson wrote, “dreamt that we came upon a depot containing all sorts of choice delicacies.” Instead, their overland sledging rations consisted mainly of dried-meat-and-fruit pemmican and hardtack biscuits, which they boiled with melted snow or glacial ice to make a hoosh stew. While on the sea ice, they lived mostly on freshly butchered seals, which were easily killed as those large, lumbering mammals lounged on the shore or ice near holes and open-water leads, coupled with a much-reduced ration of hardtack. Seal meat was an ongoing experiment for the men. “Young bull seal is always good—steak from loins, liver and blubber,” Mawson reported. “The latter melts in the mouth and appears and cuts like bacon about 11/2" thick.” The kidneys, he noted, were rubbery, and “cow seal in breeding season is to be avoided.” Mawson liked penguin better than seal, with Emperor penguin liver “best of all,” but it proved difficult to get in sufficient quantity.12
The new diet had drawbacks. Though calorie-rich, no amount of seal meat ever seemed to fill the men up, and the unbalanced diet quickly caught up with their digestive systems. “I am now ravenous and delight in blubber though it does not agree with me,” Mawson noted only days after starting the new regimen. “When feeding on seal meat,” he later added euphemistically, “we opened out every hour at least.”13 While sledging, they planned diverse menus for future feasts back home. A Scotsman, Mackay spoke of haggis, “to be played round the table by a piper,” and bramble jam roly-poly.14 English by birth and upbringing, David craved jugged hare with mashed potatoes. Mawson focused on rich foods and sweets. “We don’t intend to let a meal pass in after life without more fully appreciating it,” he vowed.15
While still traveling with two sledges, the party crawled north at roughly 4 miles per day along the coast and over two glacial ice tongues that protruded so far into the Ross Sea that the men could not feasibly go around them. At one point, they ran so low on food that Mackay walked back 7 miles for seals from a place they had sledged past five days earlier. It took him a full day going and coming, which offers some measure of the difference between walking and sledging. “I got lots of seal-meat, and one Adelie penguin,” Mackay reported in his diary about this venture. “The bag which I carried back must have weighed 40 or 50 lbs.”16
This first part of the journey, covering some 250 of the estimated 500 miles to the pole, took over two months, with the crossing of the 20-mile-wide Drygalski Ice Tongue consuming nearly one-quarter of that period. There the men encountered walls of ice running perpendicular to their path and hidden crevasses that could swallow them whole. Their initial attempt to cross the ice tongue failed. “For half a day we struggled over high sastrugi, hummocky ice ridges, steep undulations of bare blue ice with frequent chasms impassable for a sledge, unless it was unloaded and lowered by alpine ropes,” David wrote, before retreating and trying again at another point farther east on the ice tongue. Even there, David noted, “the surface still bristled with huge ice undulations as far as the eye could see.” He likened it to a storm-tossed seascape and noted, “It was obvious, too, that the glacier ice over which we would have to travel, was still very heavily crevassed.”17
One day in camp, while Mackay was away and Mawson was changing light-sensitive photographic plates in the sleeping bag, David fell through a snow-covered crevasse. He saved himself by throwing his arms onto the surrounding snow lid, but the surface was so weak that he feared to move. “Mawson, Mawson,” he cried. When Mawson did not come without some explanation of his dire situation, David politely inquired, “Oh, you’re in the bag changing plates, are you?” and waited, again without further explaining his predicament. Gradually losing his grip, he called again with the same result before finally explaining, “I am really hanging on by my finger tips to the edge of a crevasse, and I don’t think I can hold on much longer. I shall have to trouble you to come out and assist me.”18 It became the two Australians’ favorite story of the trip and acquired legendary status down under.
Before the northern party reached the Drygalski Ice Tongue—their last obstacle along the coast—midday temperatures rose to the freezing point, making the salty sea-ice surface soft and sticky. “It gripped the runners of the sledges like glue, and we were only able with our greatest efforts to drag the sledges over this at a snail’s pace,” David complained. With twenty-four hours of sunlight daily, the men began sleeping in the afternoon and traveling during the early morning hours when the sun was lower and the footing firmer than later in the day. Still, they worried that the ice would break up around them, leaving them unable to proceed north.
After crossing the Drygalski Ice Tongue, the men spied a smooth-looking glacier with a steep snout flowing from the interior around the south side of Mount Larsen to the coast. They had originally planned to travel farther north along the coast before turning inland but, from the ice tongue, they could see the sea ice broken up ahead. The shoreline looked impassable. Larsen Glacier, as the men called it, became the party’s path through the Western Mountains. “Looks good going, icy, and not very rough,” Mackay wrote. His spirits rose. From the day before on the ice tongue, when he had despaired in his diary, “I feel as if we have very little chance of the pole,” now he exulted: “Really a joyful day.”19
With the ice tongue behind them and a seemingly manageable glacier rising from the sea through the mountains toward their goal, the men gained hope. In anticipation of returning here after their dash to the pole, they looked for a conspicuous site near the Drygalski Ice Tongue’s base to cache excess supplies under a well-marked mound of snow. Should all go well, they counted on the Nimrod finding this depot and retrieving them here in early February. Mawson took note of the occasion by starting a new diary, leaving his old one in the depot with a sledge, spare equipment, the geologic specimens collected so far, and letters from all three men.
“These are last adieus, so they ought to be tragic,” Mackay wrote in his diary about the letters, “but I cannot make mine so, as I feel we have such a good chance of reaching the pole.”20 It was mid-December, however, and time was running short.
BY THIS TIME, SHACKLETON and his southern party were on the way to the geographic pole and, in comparison to the northern party, all but flying over the ice. After returning to Cape Royds from his depot-laying journey and giving instruction to those remaining behind on what they should do while he was away and if he did not return, Shackleton set off for the pole on October 29. His party took provisions for ninety-one days, knowing that it was entering a barren land with no alternative sources of supply. Biscuits, pemmican, oatmeal, cheese, and chocolate were virtually the only foods that it carried, except feed for the ponies and, of course, the ponies themselves, which would become food for the men. Tea and tobacco rounded out the consumables.
Shackleton left behind a letter for his wife, to be delivered if he did not return. “Think kindly of me and remember that if I did wrong in going away from you and our children that it was not just selfishness,” he wrote. “Your husband will have died in one of the few great things left to be done.”21 Peary, of course, expressed similar sentiments to his wife, but about reaching a different pole. Again sounding like Peary, in his sledging diary Shackleton depicted the pole, in his case the South Pole, as “the last spot of the world that counts as worth the striving for.”22 And strive he would with a determination that matched Peary’s stride for stride.
A support party man-hauling one sledge accompanied the southern party for nine days, which included three spent at Scott’s Hut Point shelter and another in camp during a blizzard. This initial 50-mile stretch took the men onto the ice shelf at the place where it presses against Ross Island to the north and Victoria Land to the west. When the support party fell back on November 7, the four ponies took up the full load, hauling nearly a ton of supplies and equipment. Beginning at this point, Shackleton, Eric Marshall, Jameson Adams, and Frank Wild each led one pony and sledge south over a featureless expanse of snow-covered ice. Hidden crevasses and whiteout conditions slowed their progress for the first few days as they pulled away from land, but gave way to better sledging terrain and weather as they moved deeper onto the shelf. Temperatures dipped well below zero at the outset but reached into the low 20s by late November.
The Ross Ice Shelf, which is about the size of France, has a smooth or undulating surface except where it abuts land and the resulting friction upturns hummocks and opens crevasses. Fed by glaciers from the East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets, it varies from about 1,000 to over 2,000 feet in thickness and contains over 50,000 cubic miles of frozen freshwater, making it the largest flowing body of ice in the world and the source of enormous tabular icebergs. In 1902, when Shackleton traversed some 300 miles of it with Scott and Edward Wilson, they hugged the Victoria Land coast, where the disrupted surface slowed their progress. This time, Shackleton led his party along a line running parallel to the coast but sufficiently east of it to gain a better surface. At some points, he likened it to “a billiard table, with no sign of any undulation”; at others, he spoke of “long undulations, the width from crest to crest being about one and a half miles, and the rise about 1 in 100.” Sometimes the surface was icy firm; sometimes soft with snow; and sometimes covered with a hard crust that the ponies broke through but dogs could have walked across easily.23
“We have never seen the surface alike for two consecutive days,” Shackleton noted on November 14. It is “as wayward and as changeful as the sea.” The direction stayed fixed, however: “We are going straight as a die to the south,” he wrote.24
As it turned out, this route also provided a more dramatic view of the Western Mountains than Scott’s close-in perspective. “Each mile shows us new land, and most of it consists of lofty mountains whose heights at present we cannot estimate,” Shackleton wrote on November 24 about the view toward the southwest. “There is an impression of limitless solitude about it all that makes us feel so small as we trudge along, a few dark spots on the snowy plain, and watch the new land appear.”25
So far as Shackleton knew at the time, those mountains could remain to the west as his party marched south. If so, the ice shelf might extend all the way to the South Pole, which by this point was (as he noted) about “750 miles as the crow flies.”26 In that event, he had the men and means to get there and back in time to meet the ship by March and return home in June. Of course, crows do not fly to the pole. As Shackleton soon learned, neither would his party. The pole did not lie on the ice shelf, as he hoped, but over those lofty mountains, which slowly swung from his right to dead ahead as the party pushed farther south.
Through late November, however, the party sped along over the ice shelf at a clip in excess of 15 miles per day, with ponies doing most of the hauling. The oldest pony, Chinaman, was put down on November 21 and butchered on the spot. He “was the least fit,” Wild noted matter-of-factly.27 Shackleton added about Chinaman, “He cannot keep up with the others, and the bad surface has played him out.”28 By then the load had diminished through the laying of depots for the return trip and the consumption of food to where it could fit on three sledges. Further, the men gained fresh meat for their diet, which Marshall viewed as essential to preventing scurvy.
“The killing of the ponies was not pleasant work,” Shackleton conceded. “Marshall and Wild would skin the carcass, and we took the meat off the legs, shoulders and back. In the case of Chinaman the carcass was opened and the liver and undercut secured, but the job was such a lengthy one that we did not repeat it in the case of the other animals.”29 Shackleton could not bring himself to do the killing. That duty fell to Wild, who used Marshall’s pistol. “We got about 150 lbs of good beef off him, which will be a welcome addition to our bill of fare,” Wild noted in his diary.30
Shackleton consoled readers at this point in his published narrative with a comment that the ponies were “well treated to the last, and that they suffered no pain.”31 If he believed this, then it evidenced a remarkable blindness. Marshall noted near the outset of the march that the ponies “seem very unhappy” and were “off their feeds,” eating little.32 Shackleton later observed that, when marching over the ice shelf, “the poor ponies are having a most trying time. They break through the crust on the surface and flounder up to their hocks.”33 Often they sank to their bellies in soft snow, he added.34 “Cruel work for the ponies,” Wild called it.35 Sweating through their hides doing heavy hauling in freezing weather, they also suffered miserably from the cold and wind, especially when tethered overnight.
“A DAY TO REMEMBER,” Shackleton wrote of November 26, 1908. His party had surpassed Scott’s farthest south and done so in half the time. “We celebrated,” Shackleton reported, “with a four-ounce bottle of Curaçao.” He felt exonerated of the charge of unfitness that Scott had leveled against him after the Discovery Expedition’s disappointing polar trek. He also expressed a sense of “awe” at viewing “land not previously seen by human eyes.” Of those never-before-seen mountains appearing in “the south-south-east,” however, Shackleton added ominously, “I trust that no land will block our path.”36 For the pole to lie at or near sea level on the ice shelf, as Shackleton hoped, those mountains should remain to the west or southwest. If, however, the range swung around to the east or southeast, the peaks would stand astride their path to the pole and make reaching it fearfully more difficult. The men veered reluctantly to the southeast to avoid the mountains, and hoped for the best.
The southern party had gone so far so fast in November because of the ponies, but the animals could not pull heavy sledges through deep snow day after day, only to stand outside in the cold wind each night. Unlike Peary’s Inuit dogs, no one bred Manchurian ponies for such work. Wild put down Grisi one week after Chinaman and shot Quan three days later, leaving a depot of horsemeat at each spot. Three ponies gone; only Socks remained. He missed his mates and whinnied dolefully for them at night.
So long as two survived, the ponies could still do all the heavy hauling by consolidating the shrinking load onto two sledges weighing 630 pounds each. With only Socks, however, the men had to haul the second sledge. Then bitterness began bubbling over, with Wild in his diary scorning Marshall and Adams for not pulling their weight and Marshall privately faulting Shackleton’s leadership. “Following Sh[ackleton] to pole is like following an old woman,” Marshall wrote in his diary. “Always pausing.”37
One such delay began on December 2, as Shackleton looked for a way forward. Mountains curved across the southern horizon from northwest to southeast, leading him to suspect that his party had nearly reached the ice shelf’s end while still 450 miles from the pole. Worse, the inflow of an enormous glacier from the Western Mountains horribly disrupted the surface ahead. Unable to proceed on the Ross Ice Shelf, the party veered back to the south toward those mountains, which ran in a decidedly southeast direction. The pole, Shackleton worried, lay on the other side, across the mountains, on the snow-covered high-altitude East Antarctic Ice Sheet: the coldest, driest, windiest place on earth. Scott named it “the Great Ice Plateau.” For Shackleton, it became “the Polar Plateau.”
Approaching the mountain range, the men saw a 3,500-foot-high rock outcrop 7 miles away, with a low, snowy pass on its western side that Marshall hailed as “the Golden Gateway to the S[outh].”38 In their optimism, they dubbed this dome-shaped hill “Mount Hope.” Leaving Socks and the sledges behind, the men maneuvered through a deeply crevassed belt between the ice shelf and the coast, and then struggled up Mount Hope to survey what lay ahead. “There stretched before us a great glacier running almost south and north between two great mountain ranges,” Shackleton wrote.39 “It is at least thirty miles in width and we can see over one hundred miles of its length, beyond that must be the Great Plateau. Our Gateway is only a very small side entrance” to it, Wild added.40 Yet only this pass appeared navigable with sledges. On the next day, December 4, the party headed through it to the glacial highway that Shackleton named the Beardmore Glacier for the expedition’s sponsor. “The Almighty has indeed been good to us,” Marshall proclaimed in his diary about this broad pathway to the plateau and the pole beyond.41
With the men already stressed by a month of marching 300 miles over the ice shelf, now their real work began. They faced a 9,000-foot rise in altitude while traversing 120 miles of some of the most difficult glacial terrain on earth, ranging from sheer blue ice to deep snow and hidden crevasses. Believing that the pole lay on the ice shelf, they did not carry crampons and climbing gear. One day in and struggling for every inch, they cached excess supplies at a lower glacier depot. Stripped to their shirts for the ordeal, the men became badly sunburned. Shackleton also suffered snow blindness after searching for a way through the broken ice without goggles. “Thirty-six days’ food supply had been exhausted of the ninety days’ total supply,” Marshall noted, “so drastic cuts lay ahead if we were to achieve our object.”42 Lacking sufficient nutrition for man-hauling at high altitude, the men fantasized about what they would order if they were let loose in a good restaurant.43
Then, disaster. Socks broke through a snow-capped crevasse on the second day, nearly taking Wild and a sledge with him. “We lay down on our stomachs and looked over the gulf, but no sound or sign came to us,” Shackleton wrote.44 The pony had disappeared into the crevasse. Only a snapped whiffletree, the crossbar in the pony’s harness, saved the sledge, and with it half the party’s supplies and rations. “This accident left us with two sledges and a weight of about 250 lbs. per man to haul.”45 Like the northern party, the southern party began relaying. “Often it became necessary to cut steps with our ice-axes, and haul the sledges after us with the Alpine rope,” Shackleton noted of the party’s ascent up Beardmore Glacier.46 “On December 6 the surface was so crevassed that it took a whole day to fight our way 600 yards,” he wrote.47 Further, with Socks went the meat he would have provided at some point along the way. “The loss of Socks,” Shackleton commented, “was a severe blow to us.”48 Yet Wild’s first thought was “Thank God I won’t have to shoot Socks.”49 The pony was his favorite. “There never was a more clever horse,” Wild wrote. “Socks must have been killed instantly.”50
The party pushed on, about ten hours each day. The weather remained mostly clear on the glacier, but the temperature steadily dropped from 20°F at the base to minus 20°F near the top. “Sometimes we were able to pull both sledges & were able to do as much as 16 miles in a day,” Wild reported, “but there were many days of relay work when 5 miles was considered good work.”51 On December 12, he called it damn hard work “over the most awful stuff ever sledges were pulled on.”52 If their private writings revealed their faith, then on this punishing march, Marshall trusted in God, Shackleton trusted in Providence, Wild trusted in Shackleton, and Adams trusted in Empire.
Sharp blue ice was the worst for sledging, shredding runners and bruising men, but hidden crevasses spawned the greatest dread. “To find oneself suddenly standing on nothing, then to be brought up with a painful jerk & looking down into a pitch black nothing is distinctly disturbing, & there is the additional fear that the rope may break,” Wild wrote of the sensation. He got used to it after a few dozen falls, he said, but Adams never overcame the horror.53 “Marshall went through one and was only saved by his harness,” Shackleton noted on December 9. “Soon after, Adams went through, then I did.”54
Having gained a mile in altitude by December 14, the men gained in hope as they neared the top. “One more crevassed slope, and we will be on the plateau, please God,” Shackleton wrote on the 16th. “Almost up!” he noted two days later. “Not yet up, but nearly so,” he added on the 20th. Even on the 23rd, at 8,820 feet, Shackleton reported, “Still steering upward amid great waves of pressure and ice-falls, for our plateau.”55
They had passed beyond the glacier’s head but not yet attained the Polar Plateau. Winds increased as they neared the top, cutting their faces and causing frostbite. “We have only the clothes we stand up in now, as we have depoted everything else,” Shackleton wrote on December 24, “and this continued rise means lower temperatures than I had anticipated.”56 Thinking themselves finally on the plateau, they left a sledge and some supplies behind early that day in what they called the “upper glacier depot” and proceeded with one tent, one sledge, and reduced rations. Having rejected Peary’s example and Nansen’s advice to wear hooded fur parkas, Shackleton and his men shivered in threadbare gabardine. They did not carry a change of clothes, and spent much of their time in camp mending what they had without ever making it fully satisfactory.
The next day was Christmas. After hauling their remaining sledge for eleven hours up to 9,500 feet, they stopped for their first full meal since starting their ascent, complete with plum pudding, medicinal brandy, and cigars. “May my worst enemies never spend their Xmas in such a dreary God forgotten spot as this,” Wild wrote.57 “Up here the biting wind is always in our faces,” Marshall added.58 That night, they all discussed how to proceed. Still 280 miles from the pole and over 1,000 miles from getting there and back to Cape Royds, Shackleton reported his men deciding, “We are going to make each week’s food last ten days. We will have one biscuit in the morning, three at mid-day, and two at night. It is the only thing to do. Tomorrow we will throw away everything except the most absolute necessities.”59 Reduced to similarly dire straits as the northern party, the southern party was equally resolved to reach its pole. It would not enjoy another full meal for two months. “It is now or never,” Marshall wrote in his diary, “and we must average 14 miles per day.”60
WHILE THE SOUTHERN PARTY shared Christmas dinner atop its glacial highway to the Polar Plateau, their counterparts heading to the south magnetic pole still faced most of their climb from sea level to the plateau and barely acknowledged the holiday. “No Christmas luxuries at all,” Mackay noted in his diary.61 After leaving one of its two sledges along with supplies and equipment at a depot on the north side of the Drygalski Ice Tongue on December 12, the men had spent the next two weeks navigating the badly faulted surface of the tongue’s northern rim to the coast and then looking for some way up the steep snout of a broad glacier flowing around the south side of Mount Larsen to the plateau.
With the summer solstice, temperatures at the glacier’s base hovered around the freezing point and everything was wet. Pools formed on the surface; meltwater rushed beneath the ice and opened chasms in it; avalanches thundered down the nearby mountains. Successive blizzards buried the tent in wet snow and shredded its worn-out shell nearly beyond repair. The 670-pound sledge sank deep into drifts. “Crevasses found by falling in them,” Mawson noted on December 20.62 About one such fall, David wrote of Mawson, “He seemed to disappear as certain characters do through trap doors in the stage.”63
At first they tried to lift their lone sledge directly up the steep snout of the Larsen Glacier. When this failed, they found a side outlet to the main glacier running around a rock outcropping to the north. They named it Backstairs Passage because it rose in steps to the glacier’s more manageable middle. Relaying their load up this passage and onto the glacier, the men reached 2,000 feet above sea level by the 25th. This was their Christmas. Like the southern party on this day, they were roughly 280 miles from their goal.
Time became the limiting factor. Hauling two sledges, the men had covered 210 net miles from Cape Royds to the glacier in eighty days. Now, to get to the pole and back with any chance of the Nimrod retrieving them, they would have to go over twice as far in half the time. After leaving climbing gear, some food, and added geologic specimens in a small depot on the south side of Mount Larsen, they hauled seven weeks of rations and camping gear on a single sledge. From this point on, the way would be over the Polar Plateau with no opportunity for further geologic field work.
Mackay gave up hope of success, and at times even of survival, but was duty bound to follow. “He would make a good soldier but no general,” Mawson said of Mackay in a late-December diary entry.64 Mawson reasoned that 10 miles per day going out and 15 miles per day coming back should do it; such figures struck Mackay as utterly unreasonable.
To complicate matters, David showed signs of severe stress. “Prof very doggo,” Mawson noted on Christmas. “He has of late appeared to have lost all interest in the journey.”65 Yet he never declined to go on, and seemed intent on doing so. Mackay called him “very nearly crocked,” and feared that he could not continue much longer.66 On New Year’s Eve, Mawson wrote of David, “Something has gone very wrong with him of late as he is almost always morose,” and on January 3 Mawson added, “How much better though would we get along had we a third younger man.”67
From their Christmas Day perch above the glacier’s snout, the way opened out onto a smooth incline with remarkably few obstructions. The men made their 10 miles per day, gaining roughly 600 feet in altitude daily through January 3, and then somewhat less in altitude but often more in distance until the way leveled out at 9,000 feet atop the plateau on January 9. The work was grueling, but they kept to it, even in stiff winds that frosted exposed flesh and peeled the skin off lips. “Feeling the exhaustion and hunger awfully,” Mackay wrote on December 29, adding a day later about repairing the tent in a blizzard, “It was intense torture.”68 To lighten their load, they carried reduced rations from the coast, consisting mainly of seal meat, which continued to cause diarrhea. Once on the plateau, the surface became undulating, with mixed sastrugi and patches of snow, which made it almost as difficult as the glacier incline for sledging. Moreover, it foretold a harder than expected return trip.
Mackay recorded the miles since the coast and to the pole in daily diary entries that reflected his growing anxiety about returning alive. Then a bombshell. “Last night Mawson made the astounding announcement that the pole is probably 40 miles farther off than we had ever thought,” Mackey wrote on January 13. “I, of course, agreed to go if the others were decided, but I said plainly, as I think now, that we have not more than a 50 per cent chance of getting back.”69 They settled on racing some 50 extra miles over the next four days, which Mawson thought would put them within the region of the magnetic pole. He would not have time to make precise observations.
After three days and 39 miles, the magnetic dip circle registered 89°48', or 12' shy of vertical. “Mawson considered that we were now practically at the Magnetic Pole, and that if we waited for twenty-four hours taking constant observations at the spot the pole would, probably, during that time, come vertically beneath us,” David noted.70 They decided to rush 13 more miles to reach the place where Mawson thought the pole’s mean position should lie.
Departing at 6 A.M. on January 16, the men sledged 2 miles before dropping their heavy gear, and another 6 to where they ate lunch and left the tent and sledge. Then, without instruments to guide them, they marched northwest for 5 more miles: their “pole by acclamation.” “Mawson placed his camera so as to focus the whole group, and arranged a trigger which could be released by a string,” David wrote. “Meanwhile, Mackay and I fixed up the flag-pole. We then bared our heads and hoisted the Union Jack at 3:30 p.m. with the words uttered by myself, in conformity with Lieutenant Shackleton’s instructions, ‘I hereby take possession of this area now containing the Magnetic Pole for the British Empire.’ At the same time I fired the trigger of the camera.” At the suggestion of Mackay, a Scot, they gave three cheers for the king. “The temperature at the time we hoisted the flag was exactly 0° Fahr.,” David reported.71
The party began marching back within minutes and reached its heavy gear by 10 P.M. As Mackay repeatedly reminded the others, they had a long way to go and only a few weeks to get there.
ALTHOUGH THE NIMROD EXPEDITION’S two polar parties each stood about 280 miles from their respective goals on Christmas, the southern party would face at least 450 more miles getting back from its pole than the northern party. Both treks tested the limits for human endurance in 1909, but once they lost their ponies, Shackleton’s men confronted the stiffer test. It showed. When Marshall took their temperatures on Christmas, every man was 2º below normal, and that was after their only full meal in weeks. Four days later, all had dropped at least 2º more. By January 4, their temperatures no longer registered on Marshall’s clinical thermometer, which started at 94.2º.
After losing Socks, the northern party lacked fresh meat to supplement its sledging rations. As the trip stretched on, the men further reduced even these scant rations so that, by the first of January, they survived on 20 ounces per man per day, mostly in the form of a few biscuits and some pemmican, which was scarcely more than half of the planned daily total. The ponies’ maize, which they ground with a stone for human consumption, ran out on December 28. Although marching over the largest frozen reservoir of freshwater in the world, they also suffered dehydration due to a lack of sufficient fuel to melt enough snow and ice to satisfy their thirst. Shackleton and Adams endured throbbing headaches from the high altitude.
“The sensation is as though the nerves were being twisted up with a corkscrew and then pulled out,” Shackleton wrote on December 29. “The others have bled through the nose, and that must relieve them.”72
From the descriptions of the plateau in reports from the Discovery Expedition, Shackleton expected the surface to level out at 9,000 feet once his party crossed the mountains. These reports came from two inland treks made across from Ross Island, and roughly fit what the northern party found. The plateau proved higher in the south. The men reached the head of Beardmore Glacier by Christmas at around 9,000 feet, but the surface kept rising long after the mountains disappeared behind them. It was not the same sort of continuous steep rise as on the glacier, but rather long flat stretches of snow separated by ridges of deeply crevassed pressure ice that Shackleton called icefalls. “Every time we reach the top of a ridge we say to ourselves: ‘Perhaps this is the last,’ but it never is the last,” he complained on December 26. Shackleton compared the topography to a series of terraces and wrote of “the waste[land] of snow all around.”73 To keep from all falling into the same crevasse at once, the men attached ropes to the sledge and pulled from scattered places.
After passing the last ridge, instead of a firm, level surface, the men found soft snow and hard sastrugi. “Still further south we keep breaking through a hard crust that underlay the soft surface snow, and we then sank in about eight inches,” Shackleton noted.74 Each surface posed new challenges for men pulling a sledge on foot without skis, and the sledge had become so badly bent that it did not pull straight.
“The most awful day we have yet had,” Wild wrote on December 29. He found the next two days even worse.75 “Eleven miles only on the 31st in the face of a heavy southeast drift and 46 degrees of frost,” Marshall explained.76 Nevertheless, on New Year’s Day 1909, they crossed 87°6' south latitude and claimed another record by passing closer to a pole than Peary, the previous record holder from his 1906 effort. Every first or farthest mattered greatly, and each man took note of this one.
“THE MAIN THING WE have against us is the altitude of 11,200 ft. and the biting wind,” Shackleton wrote on January 4. By repeatedly leaving behind small depots with anything not needed for going forward, they dropped their sledge weight to under 300 pounds but could not push their pace much past 1 mile per hour. That was not enough to get to the pole and back with the food available. To make the pole seem closer, the men had switched from using customary statute miles to 20 percent longer geographical miles, but that did not shorten the actual distance.
“The end is in sight,” Shackleton added on the 4th. “We can only go for three more days at the most.”77 This would not be enough, they now realized. At most, it would pad their record farthest south. “Although mid summer, the temperature was seldom higher than 20° below zero,” Wild wrote, “& all the time whilst we were on the plateau we had to contend with a strong head wind which froze our breath into masses of ice around our mouths, & our faces were so frequently frostbitten they were covered with blackened skin & blisters.” They could have reached the pole, he claimed, “but our records would all have been lost with us.”78 They could not have returned, and most likely no one would ever have found their remains. Shackleton later summed up the situation: “We were weakening from the combined effects of short food, low temperature, high altitude, and heavy work.”79
They had, however, established the pole on the world’s highest plateau and seen what it must look like. “But all this is not the Pole,” Shackleton acknowledged.80 The men dropped the sledge just past 88° south latitude after marching over 15 miles on January 6, which put them roughly 115 geographical miles from the pole.
“Tomorrow we make our last dash without the sledge,” Marshall wrote.81 That might take them to within 100 (geographical) miles of the pole—a made-up goal to be sure, but something to shoot for nonetheless. “I would fail to explain my feelings if I tried to write them down,” Shackleton noted. “There is only one thing that lightens the disappointment, and that is the feeling that we have done all we could. It is the forces of nature that have prevented us from going right through. I cannot write more.”82
As if to punctuate Shackleton’s point, a blinding blizzard with hurricane-force winds kept them in camp for the next two days, the first such delay in two months. “During this period the temperature fell to minus 40 degrees Fahr., and the feet of two men froze in their sleeping bags and had to be restored,” Marshall reported.83 “The wind cuts through our thin tent, and even the drift is finding its way in,” Shackleton added.84 The men passed the time by reading Shakespeare aloud from a small volume Shackleton carried. “We cannot smoke as our supply of tobacco has run out,” Wild complained on behalf of the group, all of whom were smokers, particularly Shackleton, who picked up the habit during Scott’s Discovery Expedition.85
The men began their final march south in the early hours of January 9, 1909. “We covered 18 miles without sledges, carrying only a small supply of biscuits, chocolate and sugar,” Marshall reported.86 “At 9 a.m. we were in 88°23' South, half running and half walking over a surface much hardened by the recent blizzard,” Shackleton wrote.87 There they raised the British flag given to them by Queen Alexandra and proclaimed dominion over the region in the name of King Edward VII.
“We have shot our bolt,” Shackleton declared.88
With this territorial claim, Shackleton pushed the British Empire—the largest empire in human history—to its greatest extent, a pinnacle it would maintain only briefly before it began unraveling with World War I. “The highest, coldest, bleakest, windiest plateau in the world, the ‘great King Ed[ward] VII Plateau,’” Marshall wrote in his diary that night with a faintly mocking tone.89
“While the Union Jack blew out stiffly in the icy gale that cut us to the bone, we looked south with our powerful glasses, but could see nothing but the dead white snow plain,” Shackleton wrote. This was their “pole of consolation.” “We stayed only a few minutes, and then, taking the Queen’s flag and eating our scanty meal as we went, we hurried back and reached our camp about 3 p.m.”90 Wild smoked a cigar he had saved for the occasion; they all had extra pemmican and a drop of sloe gin. The stated latitude of their farthest south put them 97 geographical miles from the pole, but it rested on dead reckoning. They did not take a reading from the sun, and the distance meter on their sledge had broken. All four men swore by the mileage covered, however, and few besides an embittered Scott questioned it as too much for the final day. “It did give us pleasure to get within one hundred miles” of the pole, Adams later commented.91
“Homeward bound at last,” Shackleton wrote at the end of his diary entry for that climactic day. “Whatever regrets may be we have done our best. Beaten the South Record by 366 miles and the North Record by 77 miles. Amen.”92 He later asked his wife, “A live donkey is better than a dead lion, isn’t it?” She answered, “Yes darling, as far as I am concerned.”93
Assessing their situation at the time, Marshall wrote, “We were satisfied that we had strained our resources to the limit of achievement, but unless we maintained our effort . . . we stood a good risk of not returning to tell the tale.”94
Adams said of the harrowing dash back, “It was as close as [anything] ever was.” Close in every sense. Close to reaching each depot even as they seemed to recede before them; close to running out of food and fuel altogether. Close to dropping into the ever-present bottomless crevasses; close to treading lightly over them. Close to being trapped in the sort of endless blizzard that would kill Scott and his men three years later; close to skating by on fair weather. Close to falling just short; and close to returning with the greatest story of the young century. The days ahead would inspire Adams to hail Shackleton as the “king of leaders and adventurers.”95