The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition Page 14

  When Worsley informed Shackleton that he “could not be sure of our position to ten miles,” it was decided that they would aim for the west coast of South Georgia, which was uninhabited, rather than the east coast where the whaling stations—and rescue—lay. This ensured that if they missed their landfall, the prevailing westerlies would carry them towards the other side of the island. Were they to fail to make an eastern landfall directly, the westerlies would carry them out to sea. If Worsley's calculations were correct, the James Caird was now a little more than eighty miles from South Georgia Island.

  Before darkness fell on May 7, a piece of kelp floated by. With mounting excitement the crew sailed east-northeast through the night, and at dawn on the fifteenth day, they spotted seaweed. The thrill of anticipation made them momentarily forget the most recent setback: One of the kegs of water was discovered to have become brackish from seawater that evidently had got in when the Caird had almost capsized shortly before leaving Elephant Island. They were now plagued with mounting thirst.

  Cape pigeons such as they had admired so many months before at Grytviken made frequent appearances, along with mollyhawks and other birds whose presence hinted at land. Worsley continued anxiously to monitor the sky, but heavy fog obscured the sun, and all else that might lie ahead. Two cormorants were spotted, birds known not to venture much beyond fifteen miles from land. There were heavy, lumpy cross swells, and when the fog cleared around noon low, hard-driving clouds bore in from the west-northwest, with misty squalls. Then at half past noon, McCarthy cried out that he saw land.

  “There, right ahead through a rift in the flying scud our glad but salt-rimmed eyes saw a towering black crag with a lacework of snow around its flank,” wrote Worsley. “One glimpse, and it was hidden again. We looked at each other with cheerful foolish grins. The thoughts uppermost were ‘We've done it.'” The land, Cape Demidov, was only ten miles distant, and it was on course with Worsley's calculations.

  By three in the afternoon, the men were staring at patches of green tussock grass that showed through the snow on the land ahead—the first living vegetation they had beheld since December 5, 1914, seventeen months before. It was impossible to make for the whaling stations: The nearest lay 150 miles away—a formidable distance given the conditions and changing winds. Also, they had been without fresh water for forty-eight hours. Two alternative landing sites were considered: Wilson Harbor, which lay north, but to windward, and was thus impossible to reach; and King Haakon Sound, which opened to the west, and where a westerly swell shattered on jagged reefs, spouting surf up to forty feet in the air.

  “Our need of water and rest was wellnigh desperate,” wrote Shackleton, “but to have attempted a landing at that time would have been suicidal. There was nothing for it but to haul off till the following morning.” As he well knew, making landfall could be the most dangerous part of sailing.

  A stormy sunset closed the day, and the men prepared to wait out the hours of darkness. Although they were weak in the extreme, their swollen mouths and burn ing thirst made eating almost impossible. The small crew tacked through the dark ness until midnight, when they stood to, eighteen miles offshore. Then, in the bleak, early hours of the morning, the wind strengthened and, as the Caird rose and fell, increased to a gale that showered sleet and hail upon the men. Although they hove to with only a reefed jib, they were shipping water and forced to bail continuously. By break of day, the Caird was trapped in a perilously heavy cross sea and enormous swell that was driving them towards the coast.

  Rain, hail, sleet, and snow hammered down, and by noon the gale had become a full-fledged hurricane whipping a mountainous sea into foam and obscuring every trace of land.

  “None of us had ever seen anything like it before,” wrote Worsley. The storm, he continued, “was driving us, harder than ever, straight for that ironbound coast. We thought but did not say those words, so fateful to the seaman, ‘a lee shore.'”

  At one in the afternoon, the clouds rent, suddenly exposing a precipitous front to their lee. The roar of breakers told them they were heading dead for unseen cliffs. In desperation, Shackleton ordered the double-reefed sails set for an attempt to beat into wind and pull away from the deadly course.

  “The mainsail, reefed to a rag, was already set,” wrote Worsley, “and in spite of the smallness of the reefed jib and mizzen it was the devil's own job to set them. Usually such work is completed inside of ten minutes. It took us an hour.”

  As the James Caird clawed her way against the wind, she struck each heaving swell with a brutal thud. With each blow, her bow planks opened, and water squirted in; caulked with oil paints and seal blood, the Caird was straining every joint. Five men pumped and bailed, while the sixth held her on her fearful course. She was not so much inching forward as being squeezed sideways.

  “At intervals we lied, saying ‘I think she'll clear it,'” Worsley wrote. After three hours of this battle, the land had safely receded, when suddenly the snow-covered mountains of Annenkov Island loomed out of the dusk to their lee. They had fought their way past one danger only to be blown into the path of another.

  “I remember my thoughts clearly,” wrote Worsley. “Regret for having brought my diary and annoyance that no one would ever know we had got so far.”

  “I think most of us had a feeling that the end was very near,” wrote Shackleton. It was growing dark as the Caird floundered into the backwash of waves breaking against the island's precipitous coastline. Suddenly the wind veered round to the southwest. Coming about in the foaming, confused current, the Caird sheered away from the cliffs, and from destruction. Darkness fell, and the hurricane they had fought for nine hours abated.

  “We stood offshore again, tired almost to the point of apathy,” wrote Shackleton. “The night wore on. We were very tired. We longed for day.”

  When the morning of May 10 dawned, there was virtually no wind at all, but a heavy cross sea. After breakfast, chewed with great difficulty through parched lips, the men steered the Caird towards King Haakon Bay. The few charts at their disposal had been discovered to be incomplete or faulty, and they were guided in part by Worsley's instinct for the lay of the land.

  Setting course for the bay, they approached a jagged reef line, which, in Shackle-ton's words, seemed “like blackened teeth” to bar entrance to the inlet. As they steered towards what appeared to be a propitious gap, the wind shifted once again, blowing right out of the bay, against them. Unable to approach directly, they backed off and tried to tack in, angling for entry. Five times they bore up and tacked, and on the last attempt the Caird sailed through the gap and into the mouth of the bay.

  It was nearly dusk. A small cove guarded by a reef appeared to the south. Standing in the bows, Shackleton directed the boat through a narrow entrance in the reef.

  “In a minute or two we were inside,” wrote Shackleton, “and in the gathering darkness the James Caird ran in on a swell and touched the beach.”

  Jumping out, he held the frayed painter and pulled against the backward surge; and when the boat rolled in again with the surf, the other men stumbled ashore and loosely secured her. The sound of running water drew them to a small stream nearly at their feet. They fell upon their knees and drank their fill.

  “It was,” wrote Shackleton, “a splendid moment.”

  McNish's handiwork had stood up to all that the elements had flung at it. Throughout their seventeen-day ordeal, Worsley had never allowed his mind to relax and cease its calculations. Together, the six men had maintained a ship routine, a structure of command, a schedule of watches. They had been mindful of their seamanship under the most severe circumstances a sailor would ever face. They had not merely endured; they had exhibited the grace of expertise under ungodly pressure.

  Undoubtedly they were conscious of having achieved a great journey. They wouldlater learn that a 500-ton steamer had foundered with all hands in the same hurricane they had just weathered. But at the moment they could hardly have known — or
cared — that in the carefully weighed judgment of authorities yet to come, the voy age of the James Caird would be ranked as one of the greatest boat journeys ever accomplished.

  South Georgia Island

  Struggling through the surf on shaky legs, the men unloaded the stores and gear and much of the ballast in order to bring the Caird onto land. But to no effect. Even when the boat was virtually empty, they found that their combined strength could not budge her.

  “We were all about done up,” wrote McNish, who had resumed his diary. “We left her rolling in the surf for the night with 1 man on watch.” Shackleton had spotted a cave on one side of the cove as they were running in, and into this the men staggered for the night. While the others tried to sleep in their wet clothes and four wet bags, Shackleton took the first watch, calling Crean out at 1 a.m. when he felt himself dropping asleep on his feet. It was a difficult job, holding the Caird by its short, frayed painter as it rolled in the surf in the darkness. At 3 a.m., she broke free from Crean, and all hands had to be awakened to pull her back. The men were so exhausted that they could not even turn the boat over in order to roll her up the beach, but had to stand by until daylight.

  In the morning, McNish removed the strakes and upper decking in order to lighten the boat further, and with great exertion they dragged her up above the high-water mark. Now at last they could rest; without the Caird they would have been lost as there was no way out of the cove except by sea.

  King Haakon Bay was a deep sound flanked to the north and south by steep, glacier-streaked mountains. Their cave was in a recess of overhanging cliff at the back of the small cove they had entered, on the bay's southern headland. At the foot of the mountains grew clumps of rough tussock grass, which the men strewed on the floor of the cave. Huge icicles that hung like curtains at the cave mouth provided above the beach and returned with fledgling albatrosses they had found in scattered nests. Four birds of about fourteen pounds apiece went into the hoosh pot, with Bovril rations added for thickening.

  “The flesh was white and succulent, and the bones, not fully formed, almost melted in our mouths,” wrote Shackleton. “That was a memorable meal.” Afterward, they lay in their bags drying tobacco in the fire embers and smoking.

  “We have not been as comfortable for the last 5 weeks,” wrote McNish with satisfaction. “We had 3 young & 1 old albatross for lunch with 1 pint of gravy which beets all the chicken soup I ever tasted. I have just been thinking what our companions would say if they had food like this.”

  On the day after arriving in the cove, Shackleton had already announced the next stage of the rescue. Stromness Bay, where the nearest manned whaling stations lay, was about 150 miles distant by sea. But given the treacherous weather and coastline, it was simply too far for the battered boat and debilitated crew to attempt; there would be no more boat journeys. Instead, Shackleton decided that he and two others would cross overland to one of the several stations at Stromness, a distance of about twenty-two miles—twenty-two miles as the crow flies, that is. Actually, there was no such thing as a straightforward journey across South Georgia Island. Although the highest mountains on the island were just under 10,000 feet, the interior was a confusion of jagged rocky upthrusts and treacherous crevasses, overlain with deep snow and thick ice. To further complicate matters, no one had ever made this crossing before. No maps existed to guide the way.

  “We had very scanty knowledge of the conditions of the interior,” wrote Shackle-ton. “No man had ever penetrated a mile from the coast of South Georgia at any point, and the whalers I knew regarded the country as inaccessible.” On the blueprint map the men carried with them the interior was depicted with a blank.

  Shackleton allowed the men four days to dry, rest, sleep, and eat. They were not only exhausted and shaky from exposure, but with superficial frostbite and chafed legs, they were also in some pain. Mentally, too, no one had entirely recovered from the journey. On the night of May 12, according to Worsley, Shackleton suddenly “awoke us all by loudly shouting: ‘Look out, boys, look out!'” He had been dreaming of the great wave that had come so close to engulfing them.

  Yet for all their fatigue, two days after landing, Shackleton, Worsley, and Crean were out scouting the land, and McNish was back at work repairing the Caird. Access to the island's interior could be gained only from the head of the bay, where a pass led through the mountains. In turn, the head of the bay could be reached only & bring home the food Vincent lays down by the fire & smoks some times coming out for more wood while the Boss & Creen looks after the cooking & McCarthy is my assistant. We had four young birds for lunch then we think of hard times.”

  On the day before they left the haven of their cove, McNish went for a walk.

  “I went on top of the hill & had a lay on the grass & it put me in mind of old times at Home sitting on the hillside looking down at the sea.”

  This last day also brought them an unexpectedly good omen. The rudder of the Caird had been lost during the landing; now, while McCarthy stood by the water line, the same rudder, as Shackleton wrote, “with all the broad Atlantic to sail in and the coasts of two continents to search for a resting-place, came bobbing back into our cove.”

  May 15 dawned with a gusty northwesterly wind and misty showers of rain. After breakfast at 7:30 a.m., the men loaded up the Caird and, navigating through the cove's narrow entrance, sailed forth into the bay. The sun came out briefly, and although the sea was running high the crew were all in good spirits. Approaching the north shore just after noon, they could hear the roar of sea elephants, and soon the Caird landed on a sandy beach amid hundreds of the animals.

  The weather had turned again, and in a fine, drizzling rain, the men dragged the boat above the high-water mark and turned it over so as to form a shelter. With one side set up on stones to make an entrance and the whole covered over with turf, the Caird made a snug enough hut, and was nicknamed Peggotty Camp, after Dickens's boat hut of the same name. A sea elephant provided them with food and fuel for the night. Scattered close by over half an acre was a litter of driftwood—masts, bits of figureheads, brass caps, broken oars, timbers —”a graveyard of ships,” as Worsley noted. When the moon came out, Crean yelled that he had seen arat.

  “We jeered at him,” said Worsley, “and with tears in my voice I implored him to give me a little of what had made him see rats; but when, some time later, the carpenter also thought he saw one, our derision was less pronounced.” They concluded the rats had come ashore with the wreckage.

  Bad weather, with snow and hail, kept them more or less in their new shelter for the next three days, with Shackleton becoming increasingly restless. Once, Shackle-ton and Worsley ventured out to scout the pass they would take through the mountains, but they were driven back by a sudden snowstorm.

  “I'll never take another expedition, Skipper,” Worsley reported Shackleton saying. They were anxious to set out while the moon was still full, but could not do so with

  Their moment came at 2 a.m. on May 19. With a full moon shining in a still, clear sky, Shackleton knew the conditions would never be better. He, Crean, and Worsley took their breakfast hoosh and just over an hour later began the trek. Vincent and McCarthy appear to have remained in their bags, but McNish accompanied them for the first 200 or so yards.

  “He could do no more,” wrote Shackleton simply. In the last blank pages of McNish's diary, Shackleton had written in a bold, confident hand a final directive:

  May 16, 1916

  South Georgia

  Sir

  I am about to try and reach Husvik on the East Coast of this island for relief for our party. I am leaving you in charge of this party consisting of Vincent, MacCarthy & yourself. You will remain here until relief arrives. You have ample seal food which you can supplement with birds & fish according to your skill. You are left with a double barrelled gun, 50 cartridges—40 to 50 Bovril sledging rations, 25 to 30 biscuits: 40 Streimers Nutfood—you also have all the necessary equipment to support
life for an indefinite period. In the event of my non-return you had better after winter is over try and sail round to the East Coast. The course I am making towards Husvik is East magnetic.

  I trust to have you relieved in a few days.

  Yours faithfully

  E. H. Shackleton

  H. McNish.

  As McNish returned to Peggotty Camp, the three men set out past the ship graveyard, under moonlight that cast long shadows over the glinting mountain peaks and glaciers. They were soon ascending a snow slope that emerged just north of the head of the bay from an inland saddle between the ranges of mountains. Shackleton had originally intended to take along a small sledge, constructed by McNish, to carry sleeping bags and gear. In a trial run the day before departure, however, it had become apparent that such a conveyance was not suited to the terrain.

  “After consultation we decided to leave the sleeping-bags behind and make the journey in very light marching order,” wrote Shackleton. “We would take three days' provisions for each man in the form of sledging ration and biscuit. The food was to be packed in three socks, so that each member of the party could carry his own supply.” Additionally, they carried the Primus lamp filled with oil for six hot meals, ship's chronometer around his neck. In lieu of a walking stick, each man had taken a piece of the wood from the Caird's former decking. Their Jaeger woolen underwear and cloth trousers were by now threadbare.

  “I was unfortunate as regarded footgear, since I had given away my heavy Bur-berry boots on the floe, and had now a comparatively light pair in poor condition,” wrote Shackleton. “The carpenter assisted me by putting several screws in the sole of each boot with the object of providing a grip on the ice.” The screws had been taken from the James Caird.