It was a great moment for a very proud patron.
Alexandra Shackleton
Point Wild, the place Shackleton’s twenty-two men would call home for four months, complete with characteristic brash ice.
Courtesy of Tim Jarvis
The trails of the world be countless,
and most of the trails be tried;
You tread on the heels of the many,
till you come where the ways divide;
And one lies safe in the sunlight,
and the other is dreary and wan,
Yet you look aslant at the Lone Trail,
and the Lone Trail lures you on.
Robert Service, The Lone Trail
In times of trouble pray God for Shackleton.
Photographs from the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
I thought I knew Antarctica by now. I had been to its frozen alien shores, a world with no native human population, three times. I had become, to the extent that one can, “used” to the highest, coldest, windiest continent in the world with its extreme weather and the staggering, kilometers-thick mantle of ice that covers it.
My initial expedition into the polar regions had been a trek of tortuous slowness across the island of Spitsbergen in the high Arctic with my close friend Andrew “Ed” Edwards, where the danger of polar bear attacks and crevasses challenged us to our limits and revealed a strength and determination I wasn’t aware I possessed. In 1999 I’d taken on what many regard as one of the last great land-based challenges on earth—crossing the continent’s 2,700 kilometers on foot and unsupported, pulling a sled weighing 225 kilograms through obstructive icy terrain. Among other consequences, I’d seen my fingers blackened by frostbite; experienced temperatures so low that three of my metal fillings contracted and fell out, requiring self-administered dental repairs; lost 20 percent of my body weight; eaten a sickness-inducing 7,200 calories of lard and olive oil each day; and written “That was the toughest day of my life” in my diary on seventeen consecutive days. On that occasion, my journey ended early, when a ruptured fuel container resulted in food contamination. Nevertheless, I had covered 1,800 kilometers and reached the Pole in a record forty-seven days, allowing even someone as self-critical as me to be rightly proud of what had been achieved.
Fate played its hand in my next journey, which was south to the Antarctic. For my work as a scientist I had moved to Adelaide in South Australia. This brought me into unlikely contact with the legacy of Australia’s greatest land-based polar explorer and an Adelaide legend, Sir Douglas Mawson.
In 1913 Mawson was forced to undertake an incredible survival journey. While mapping an uncharted section of the Antarctic coast as part of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, he lost the first of his two companions, Belgrave Ninnis, and the dog sled that contained most of the expedition’s food and equipment in a crevasse fall. What followed was starvation, blizzards, debilitating cold, and, ultimately, following the consumption of the remaining sled dogs, the death, in Mawson’s arms, of his second companion, Xavier Mertz, of what he described at the time as “fever.” Alone, Mawson faced ferocious winds, near-fatal crevasse falls, and terrible debilitation, all compounded by the loneliness and danger of solo travel. When, against all odds, he finally stumbled through the door of his hut fifty days later, his men asked, “Which one are you?” Mawson’s shocking physical state made him unrecognizable. With some having accused Mawson of cannibalizing Mertz in order to survive, I decided I would re-enact the journey with what he said he had available to him, not only to test myself but also to see if I could shed light on Mawson’s survival. When I returned to civilization, journey complete, I was asked for a word that described the hardship of surviving on my own on starvation rations in a frozen, reindeer-skin sleeping bag following the “death” of my colleague. All I could think of was “desperate.”
But this time I was planning a very different journey. In attempting to re-create Sir Ernest Shackleton’s legendary Antarctic survival trek across sea and ice in 1916, I would trade pulling a sled through mountains toward an endless white horizon for sailing and rowing a tiny, unstable wooden boat toward an endless gray one. Antarctica would be my starting point rather than my final destination. And I would be on a journey where the Antarctic weather that raged all around us would not only threaten from above but also turn the ocean across which we traveled into a tortured, ever-changing landscape of terrifying proportions.
The prospect of what lay ahead haunted me. Try as I might, I could not shake the image of a man in the dark water facing certain death, alone, watching his boat drift into the distance as the merciless cold of the Southern Ocean drained his lifeblood. Many thought the trip was virtually impossible. As he set off in his tiny, keel-less boat to try to cross the Southern Ocean from Elephant Island to South Georgia, Shackleton had said to his skipper, Frank Worsley, “Do you know I know nothing about boat sailing?” Worsley assured him that, luckily, he did. Shackleton was as usual being self-effacing about his ability. I, on the other hand, was not: I knew very little about boat sailing and in my darkest moments it weighed heavily on me.
“It was an obsession that claimed them all,” the curator whispered in revered tones. The “them” to which he referred were Scott, Shackleton, and Amundsen, their obsession the exploration of the polar regions during the heroic era of exploration in the early years of the twentieth century. Looking at the equipment they used, it seemed hardly surprising and made my attempt on the North Pole the following year in Gore-Tex and Kevlar seem somehow lightweight—both literally and metaphorically—compared to their sepia-hued, superhuman feats featured on the walls and in the display cabinets all around us.
“May I introduce Alexandra Shackleton, granddaughter of Sir Ernest?” said another voice beside me. This time it was that of my good friend Geraldine. I turned to greet Alexandra with the respect the Shackleton name instantly commands, particularly in the hallowed surrounds of the Greenwich Maritime Museum. It was 2002 and we were there for the opening of the exhibition South, a celebration of the achievements of Alexandra’s grandfather, Scott, and Amundsen, but perhaps also a recognition of the esteem with which Shackleton’s account of the Endurance expedition of 1914–17 of the same name was regarded.
Mawson—scientist, explorer, survivor.
Courtesy of the National Library of Australia
Frank Hurley, National Library of Australia, vn4925816
Me, re-creating Mawson’s desperate journey of survival.
The route of the ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914–1916.
Courtesy of Ian Faulkner
Mawson’s achievements were noticeably absent from the exhibition, but Zaz, as Alexandra prefers to be known, was intrigued by my plans to retrace his journey the old way with the same starvation rations and hundred-year-old equipment. “It sounds fascinating,” she commented. “And what might you do if you are successful with that journey?” The significance of this question would not become clear until years later.
On