Ernest Shackleton portrait by Jack Keith.
ERNEST SHACKLETON
The discovery of the South Pole will not be the end of Antarctic exploration’, wrote a defiant Ernest Shackleton in 1912. ‘The next work of importance is the determination of the whole coastline of the Antarctic continent and then a trans-continental journey from sea to sea crossing the Pole.’ Shackleton, the most beloved and charismatic of British explorers, had come to know Antarctica well, having served as Third Officer in Robert Falcon Scott’s Discovery Expedition of 1901-04, the first British investigation of the region since that of James Clark Ross some sixty years before, and a trailbreaker for future efforts.
Charm personified, Shackleton inspired faithfulness in men to follow him anywhere. It was an appeal that also worked well in eliciting funds, and with £7000 (£680,000 today) provided by his employer, the wealthy industrialist William Beardmore, Shackleton announced his plan to the Royal Geographical Society and attracted further contributions. In January 1908 he was back in the Antarctic with the Nimrod, a vessel only half the size of Scott’s Discovery, and a scientific team that included the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson. Two years were spent carrying out ostensible scientific and cartographic objectives, but these were punctuated with heroic escapades like the scaling of Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s second highest volcano at 3794m (12,448ft). Shackleton’s main target, though, was the South Pole. Though unsuccessful, the four-man Southern party that left camp on 29 October 1908 reached a farthest south latitude of 88°23’S, just 971/2 nautical miles (180.6km) from the Pole. At this time, it was the closest anyone had got to either Pole.
Douglas Mawson had intended to spend only a year with Shackleton, but instead lasted the duration. In an age when society placed greater cachet on dramatic heroic struggles (with disaster only making the tales more seductive) over productive scientific collection, Mawson, in contrast to Shackleton, was something of an anomaly. With his mentor, Edgeworth David, Mawson was in the party that summited Mount Erebus and made the trek to the Magnetic South Pole. The data he collected was substantial, but so much about the continent remained a mystery that its questions obsessed him: was Antarctica a single vast landmass, or islands draped in a giant ice sheet? And what secrets lay along its enormous uncharted coastline from the Ross Sea (just south of New Zealand) to the longitude of South Africa? Robert Falcon Scott invited Mawson, a meticulous geographer, to join his disastrous Terra Nova Expedition but the Australian declined – his sights were set on leading his own mission to map the Antarctic shores.
The funds were raised from both the British and Australian governments (a charted Antarctic would be invaluable to mining and whaling industry), and the Australasian Antarctic Expedition departed from Hobart, Tasmania on 2 December 1911 aboard the Aurora, intending to chart the 2000 mile- (3200km-) long coastline of Antarctica to the south of Australia. They landed at Cape Denison, Commonwealth Bay, where they set up the first of two camps to serve as home for the next three years. Denison, referred to by Mawson as ‘the windiest place on Earth’, was the subject of fierce katabatic winds (‘descending’ winds that fly down slopes, accelerated by gravity) and the expedition often had to fight to remain on their feet, as documented in the iconic photograph taken by Frank Hurley (see here).
Mawson’s men were divided into teams, five at Cape Denison and three at the western base on the ice shelf at Queen Mary Land, where the eight men overwintered together in a 20-sq. ft- (6-sq. m-) hut. Enduring constant blizzards, with phenomenal local whirlwinds frequently hurling their gear into the air, they explored with sledges and made excellent progress delineating the miles of coastline. Despite his assiduousness, drama in the Antarctic theatre was inevitable and Mawson had a brush with death in the summer of 1912, when he, Xavier Mertz and Belgrave Ninnis surveyed George V Land. Ninnis, who was jogging beside Mawson’s sled, plummeted down a crevasse to his death, taking with him six of the dogs, their tent and their rations. Mawson and Mertz were forced to survive by eating their dogs, but were poisoned by the excessive amount of Vitamin A in the animals’ liver. Mertz went mad, biting off his own finger and flying into rages that Mawson had to suppress by sitting on his chest. Mertz died on 8 January 1913, and Mawson, with frostbitten fingers and crumbling shoes, cut his sledge in half with a pocket saw and dragged himself the last 100 miles (160km) solo. Mawson returned to Australia in 1914 a national hero, in what was considered the greatest Antarctic venture to date.
Shackleton, meanwhile, had been knighted by King Edward VII and awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Geographical Society, but behind the scenes he was struggling to pay off the debts left him by the Nimrod Expedition. His thoughts returned to a transcontinental crossing.
Despite the outbreak of the First World War on 3 August 1914, Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914-17) was directed to proceed by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, and so left British waters on 8 August in two parties of men selected from a shortlist divided into ‘Mad; Hopeless; Possible’. The Endurance would navigate the Weddell Sea to reach Vahsel Bay on Antarctica’s Luitpold Coast, following Filchner’s plan to use it as a base of operations for the continental crossing. Shackleton’s second ship, the Aurora, would carry the Ross Sea party around to the other side of the continent, south of Australia, and lay supply depots to support the sledge team in the second half of their crossing. As Endurance entered the Weddell Sea in January 1915, however, a flash-freeze caught them in a trap of pack ice, and they were forced to drift helplessly for ten months until on 21 November the ice finally crushed the Endurance, and it disappeared below the floes. Before its loss, the twenty-eight-man crew had salvaged their equipment but were now stranded on the ice, with only the fabric of their tents for defence against the Antarctic winds.
After months in their makeshift camps with the ice audibly cracking beneath them, the men took the three rescued whaleboats and remaining provisions and set out for Elephant Island, just north of the Antarctic Peninsula. Ice-covered and mountainous, the barren island was no more hospitable but at least it was solid ground to rest on; but not a place that a rescue mission would investigate to seek them out. There was only one chance for survival: someone would have to take one of the 22ft- (7m-) long open boats out across the world’s coldest and most violent waters to raise the alarm at the Norwegian whaling station on the island of South Georgia, about 870 miles (1400km) away.
Shackleton volunteered to lead the suicidal mission, taking with him five men chosen for their navigational skills (and, in Tom Crean’s case, his near indestructability). On 24 April, in the face of approaching winter, they took the James Caird out into the Southern Ocean and into ‘the highest, broadest and longest swells in the world’, wrote one of the men, Frank Worsley. ‘They race on their encircling course until they reach their birthplace again, and so, reinforcing themselves, sweep forward in fierce and haughty majesty.’ Worsley had to be held in place by two of the men as he took measurements with his sextant, for even a slight error in calculation could send them wide of South Georgia. Shackleton and his men fought through heavy gales that tossed their boat with unrelenting savagery, threatening to sink it with the weight of forming ice that had to be routinely chipped away. The stars and horizon were obscured by the extreme weather, forcing them to rely on dead reckoning and sensing the wind on the back of the neck for course correction. After fourteen days, the peaks of South Georgia came into view and after enduring a final hurricane they landed on its southern shore. Rather than risk taking to the sea again to reach the whaling station on the north shore, Shackleton, Worsley and Crean left the others to recuperate and made a thirty-six-hour land crossing of the mountainous island territory, equipped with little more than a length of rope, before strolling into the station at Stromness Bay to the astonishment of the whalers. It took Shackleton four attempts to return through the ice to collect his men, but when he did, on 30 August 1916, it was ultimately without the loss of a single man.
The icy face of a member of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition team.
Ernest Shackleton, Captain Frank Worsley and crew setting out in the James Caird, from Elephant Island, Easter Monday, 24 April 1916.
The Endurance in the Antarctic winter darkness, trapped in the Weddell Sea, Shackleton expedition, 27 August 1915.
Map drawn from memory by Frank Worsley on his return from the Shackleton expedition. It shows the route across South Georgia trekked by himself, Shackleton and Tom Crean in May 1916.
