“What next?” Zaz asked innocently enough but with both of us knowing exactly what she meant. Through our close friendship that had developed since our first meeting, I knew she rued the fact that no one had successfully re-created her grandfather’s famous “double” as he had done it—a journey across the Southern Ocean in a replica James Caird followed by a climb across the mountainous interior of South Georgia. When one looked at the difficulty levels and the inherent danger, it was hardly surprising. “I would like you to lead a team to attempt this,” she stated. They were powerful words and, although I had anticipated them, they still made my pulse quicken. “I would be proud to,” I replied. With those few words I knew a cast-iron commitment had been made, one that Shackleton would have expected me to honor and that neither of us would let go.
Shackleton’s original expedition followed Amundsen and Scott, reaching the South Pole in 1912. Not to be outdone, Shackleton decided to embark on the most ambitious polar expedition of them all—the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (ITAE), a bid to cross Antarctica on foot from the Weddell Sea coast to the Ross Sea coast in what he described as “the one great main object of Antarctic journeyings.” In an interview for the Daily Mirror entitled “My Talk with Sir Ernest Shackleton,” William Pollock asked Shackleton why he was going on a South Polar expedition after Amundsen and Scott had succeeded in reaching the Pole itself. “He began to talk of the scientific, geographical and other benefits which he hoped would result from such an expedition,” wrote Pollock, “and then, suddenly fixing his eyes upon me, he said: ‘Besides, there’s a peculiar fascination about going. It’s hard to explain it in words—I don’t think I can quite explain it—but there’s an excitement, a thrill—a sort of magnetic attraction about polar exploration.’ ”
ITAE planned to use two ships to accomplish its goal. The first ship, the Endurance, on which Shackleton traveled, would land at a site near Vahsel Bay, adjacent to the Ronne Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea. From here Shackleton would begin his attempt to cross the continent by a route that interestingly was very similar to the starting point of my bid to cross Antarctica in 1999–2000 that left from nearby Berkner Island on the Ronne Ice Shelf. The second ship, Mawson’s former vessel the Aurora, would leave from Hobart under the command of Aeneas Mackintosh and land at McMurdo Sound on the Ross Sea side. Its men would then lay a series of food caches in toward the Pole from their side that the crossing team would access once they passed the Pole.
Shackleton had learned from mistakes made on previous expeditions and was taking a large team of dogs, dietary precautions against scurvy, and a Royal Marine physical-fitness instructor, Thomas Orde-Lees, whose role among other things would be to teach the men to ski. Their improved diet, the result of painstaking research and analysis by Shackleton and Colonel Wilfred Beveridge of the Royal Army Medical Corps in a bid to minimize the risk of scurvy, undoubtedly helped their cause. It turned out, however, that neither the dogs nor an ability to ski would be needed, given the events that transpired.
The Endurance left Grytviken, South Georgia, in early December 1914 and headed south, bound for Vahsel Bay, in a year when the sea ice was the worst the whalers had ever experienced. For a week the ship, which was powered by engine and sail, barged and cajoled her way through the pack, her thick hull specifically designed for the purpose. But with Vahsel Bay still some 135 kilometers distant, the ice finally formed an impenetrable barrier many meters thick to the horizon in every direction. The same winds that supplemented the power from the Endurance’s engines by filling her sails and pushing her onward were, ironically, largely responsible for driving the vast mass of pack ice hard up against Antarctica, trapping them in the process.
After many attempts to free themselves, Shackleton announced on February 24 that the ship was officially a winter station and suspended ship routine, accepting that they were not going to escape the ice until the following spring or summer. He now had to get twenty-eight men from disparate backgrounds to live together harmoniously—not easy given that the sailors had been expecting to head back to civilization soon after dropping off the “shore party” of expeditioners and scientists. With big personalities involved and wide-ranging personal likes and dislikes bubbling below the surface, it was a huge challenge.
What the ice gets, the ice does not surrender: the Endurance beset by ice.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/143
Shackleton established a structured routine of social activity, including lantern evenings, regular exercise, and tending to the dogs, and he relocated all of the men’s living quarters down into the warmest part of the ship. Now the eccentricities of his recruitment process came to the fore: the optimism and flexibility he had looked for in each man began to pay dividends. Shackleton held optimism almost above all else, calling it “true moral courage,” and they would need all they had to get through.
The Endurance remained beset until September, when the ice started to break up. The men greeted this positively and started speculating about their being freed and perhaps being able to continue south. But actually it signified great danger—the kind of danger one gets when rafts of ice many meters thick and the size of cities are driven together by powerful forces of wind and currents. The resulting “pressure” will crush anything in its path, even the strongest ice-strengthened vessel like the Endurance, especially when she was embedded in the ice. “Pressure” was a very apt description of the situation in which they now found themselves: on their own in this alien world with no one knowing they were there and with no means of communicating with anyone.
A man’s best friends: Shackleton’s ship and his dogs on ice.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/13
By October the intense pressure of the ice had breached the stricken ship’s hull and she was sinking despite bilge pumps and men operating around the clock to try to save her. On October 27 Shackleton ordered the men to abandon ship, setting up camp in tents on the ice nearby. Immediately and with typical decisiveness, he determined that they would prepare to march toward the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, some 400 kilometers to the northwest. Shackleton’s ability to refocus on new goals and his characteristic optimism and conviction were clearly demonstrated by his calm announcement to the men: “So now we’ll go home.”
Their bullishness was soon dampened, however, as they discovered the impossibility of pulling the lifeboats across the contorted surface of pack ice. The three lifeboats—the James Caird, Dudley Docker, and Stancomb Wills, named after the expedition’s sponsors—had been rescued from the Endurance and would be their only way home. But each boat weighed more than a tonne (a metric ton) and, despite being on sleds, was desperately heavy and cumbersome to pull. I can certainly attest to the difficulty of pulling a sled through the pack ice of the Arctic Ocean—like a building site with walls and piles of frozen rubble many meters high, over and through which you need to pick your way. A more demoralizing and confused surface would be difficult to imagine.
In light of the circumstances, Shackleton changed his plan and decided to set up Ocean Camp less than three kilometers from the wreck of the Endurance. The goal now was to hope they drifted northwest in the pack so that when it ultimately broke up, they would be free to complete the remainder of the journey at sea in the boats, sticking close to shore. It was a tense time as the wind appeared not to have read the script, sending them backward and out to sea as often as toward land. Meanwhile, Shackleton battled