It was here at Ocean Camp that Shackleton got the expedition’s carpenter, Henry “Chippy” McNeish, to begin preparing the Caird and the other boats for a long sea journey. With extremely limited resources, McNeish managed to add thirty-five centimeters to the gunwales of the Caird using nails from the Endurance and filling the seams with lamp wick and the oil paints of Marston, the artist. This gave the Caird some seventy centimeters of freeboard, all of which would be needed for the journey ahead.
Despite Chippy McNeish’s excellent work, relations were not good between him and Shackleton. The carpenter, who feared the drift was carrying them out to sea, had vocally disagreed with Shackleton’s latest decision to begin marching again toward land. The rift between the two men would never heal, as Shackleton felt McNeish’s behavior was tantamount to mutiny. “I shall never forget him in this time of stress,” he lamented. In the end, ice conditions forced a rethink anyway and a move to stronger ice nearby and what they dubbed “Patience Camp.” Here, a more candid assessment of their dire food situation resulted in the need to shoot twenty-seven of their dogs that they could no longer afford to feed, Frank Wild reporting that it was the worst job he had ever had to do: “I have known many men I would rather shoot than the worst of the dogs.”
Man-hauling the boats: in a desperate bid to reach the open sea and be free of the ice, the crew tried to drag the boats by hand.
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, SLIDES 22/39
Fear and uncertainty stalked the camp as the men drifted north, parallel with the peninsula and tantalizingly close to Paulet and Joinville islands, less than five kilometers to the west and the last islands before the end of land, the vastness of the Southern Ocean, and an even worse fate.
Over the course of the next week, the men were carried farther north out into the open ocean by the strong currents, their soccer-field-sized home rapidly disintegrating beneath them in the big ocean swell—a two-meter-thick leaf on a 2,000-meter-deep pond. Finally, a further crack in their floe forced their hand and they launched the boats on April 9, knowing that either Clarence or Elephant Island, the mountains of which had appeared on the horizon, was their last chance of survival. If they missed the islands, certain death at sea awaited. It was the austral autumn of 1916, the First World War raged on, and the crew of the Endurance were twenty-eight men in three small wooden lifeboats adrift in the roughest ocean in the world.
Their journey was a terrifying one. Initially it involved trying to follow leads in the shifting pack ice that dangerously opened and closed with a force that could crush the boats in an instant. Although terribly dangerous, at least the pack afforded protection from the open water that was far rougher without the dampening effect of the ice. Plus each night they could at least camp on a suitable floe—a better option than remaining on the open sea.
Based on the constantly changing winds, at one stage Shackleton opted to aim for King George Island to the west. Then the winds changed again, driving them depressingly back beyond Patience Camp. At this stage they had no drinking water left and the men were exhausted and understandably fearful of what might happen next. Temperatures were well below freezing, snow was falling, waves were crashing into the boats, and the Stancomb Wills, whose gunwales had not been raised, was awash with knee-deep, freezing seawater. Hypothermia was close at hand and the men were suffering from trench foot—an ailment not unlike frostbite—caused by the cold, damp, restricted conditions. In addition, a dangerous apathy was setting in, born in roughly equal parts of their being completely at the mercy of the elements and their utter exhaustion. Shackleton decided to head for Elephant Island, admitting privately that he “doubted if all the men would survive that night.” Elephant Island was deemed to be the better option largely because the winds they had would allow an attempt at Clarence if they missed it. If they missed Clarence Island, that would be it: there was no more land save South Georgia, an impossible 800 nautical miles to the northeast—an inhospitable dot in a very large ocean.
Shackleton approached the underbelly of Elephant Island in a howling gale, aiming for a broad bay some seventeen miles wide on its southeastern side that they could not see due to the “blackness of the gale and thick snow squalls,” according to Worsley. They approached cautiously until the wind yet again changed direction, blowing from the southwest, directly behind them, causing heavy, confused seas. Worsley, who was skippering the Dudley Docker, felt there was serious danger of capsizing. Finally, they managed to round Cape Valentine, the strength of the sea abating and the gale decreasing as they moved into the lee of the island, but it had been a desperately close run.
On Elephant Island, the end of an improbable journey for two lifeboats—but only the beginning for the James Caird.
From the Collection of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
Sealers named Elephant Island, or Sea Elephant Island, after the massive creatures that lived there, the only mammals that had managed to establish themselves on its inhospitable shores. Even the sealers and whalers themselves had been unable to do so due to its remoteness, rough weather, and absence of a sheltered anchorage. Every indentation of Elephant Island’s rugged coastline is steep glacial ice save for the dark rock cliffs that descend directly into an ocean of huge seas crashing unrelentingly at their base.
After their arrival, the mist cleared, as expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s description of Cape Valentine attests. “Such a wild and inhospitable coast I have never beheld,” he wrote, going on to describe “the vast headland, black and menacing, that rose from a seething surf 1,200 feet above our heads and so sheer as to have the appearance of overhanging.” All in all this meant that, other than representing terra firma, Cape Valentine was a very poor prospect for their ongoing survival. Their position on a narrow, shingle beach underneath overhanging cliffs meant it was a race between a big sea washing them away or snow, ice, and rocks cascading down on them from the cliffs above. They had to move immediately.
Frank Wild again took to the sea in the Dudley Docker to find a better camp, and chose the spot later named Point Wild by the men in his honor. The name could just as easily have been a description of the site itself—a shingle and rock spit extending perpendicular into the sea capped by large, rocky outcrops on the seaward side. Seas from both east and west battered it. The western side, meanwhile, was routinely choked with ice from the glacier only 200 meters away, major ice falls created enormous waves that on several occasions almost engulfed Shackleton’s puny camp on the shingle beach. The violent, contorted river of glacial ice prevented progress anywhere on foot to the south and west while 300-meter-high black cliffs did the same to the east.
Iron Men: Shackleton’s chosen few, clockwise from top left: Tom Crean, John Vincent, Chippy McNeish, Timothy McCarthy, and Frank Worsley.
(top right) Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
(top left) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, ON 26/5
(bottom right) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, SLIDES 22/123
(bottom left) Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW, SLIDES 22/121
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