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| Secrets of the last adventure of the Endurance Ship and its Captain, Ernest Shackleton |
“She’s going, boys,” came the cry. “It’s
time to get off.”
From the moment Ernest Shackleton and his
crew aboard the British expedition ship, HMS Endurance had become immobilized
in Antarctica's ice 10 months earlier, they had been preparing for this
moment. Now, those on board removed their last remaining belongings from
the ship and set up camp on the ice. Twenty-five days later, what remained of
the wreck convulsed once more, and the Endurance disappeared beneath the ice.
Incredibly, all 27 men under Shackleton's
command would survive the grueling Antarctic expedition, but their ship
remained sunk and lost to history—until 106 years later.
On March 9, 2022, a team of scientists and
adventurers announced they had finally
located what remained of the Endurance at the bottom of
Antarctica's Weddell Sea. The team made the discovery using submersibles
and undersea drones and released stunning photos of the long-lost wooden ship
where it had lodged in the seabed nearly 10,000 feet deep in clear and icy
waters.
Endurance
had left South Georgia for Antarctica on December 5, 1914, carrying 27 men
(plus one stowaway, who became the ship’s steward), 69 dogs, and a tomcat
erroneously dubbed Mrs. Chippy. The goal of expedition leader Shackleton, who
had twice fallen short—once agonizingly so—of reaching the South Pole, was to
establish a base on Antarctica’s Weddell Sea coast.
From there
a small party, including himself, would set out on the first crossing of the
continent, ultimately arriving at the Ross Sea, south of New Zealand, where
another group would be waiting for them, having laid depots of food and fuel
along the way.
Two days
after leaving South Georgia, Endurance entered the pack ice—the barrier of
thick sea ice that stands guard around the Antarctic continent. For several
weeks, the ship poked and prodded its way through leads in the ice, gingerly
making its way south; but on January 18, a northerly gale pressed the pack hard
against the land and pushed the floes tight against each other. Suddenly, there
was no way forward, nor any way back. Endurance was beset—in
the words of one of the crew, Thomas Orde-Lees, “frozen like an almond in the
middle of a chocolate bar.”
They had been within a day’s sailing of
their landing place; now the drift of the ice was slowly pushing them farther
away with each passing day. There was nothing else to do but establish a
routine and wait out the winter.
Shackleton wrote Alexander Macklin, one
of the ship’s surgeons, “did not rage at all, or show outwardly the slightest
sign of disappointment; he told us simply and calmly that we must winter in the
Pack; explained its dangers and possibilities; never lost his optimism and
prepared for winter.”
In private, however, he revealed greater
foreboding, quietly expressing to the ship’s captain, Frank Worsley, one
winter’s night, “The ship can’t live in this, Skipper … It may be a few
months, and it may be only a question of weeks, or even days … but what the ice
gets, the ice keeps.”
In the time that passed between abandoning
Endurance and watching the ice swallow it up completely, the crew
salvaged as many provisions as they could, while sacrificing anything and
everything that added weight or would consume valuable resources— including
Bibles, books, clothing, tools, and keepsakes. Some of the younger dogs, too
small to pull their weight, were shot, as was, to the chagrin of many, the
unfortunate Mrs. Chippy.
The initial plan was to march across the
ice toward land, but that was abandoned after the men managed just seven and a
half miles in seven days. “There was no alternative,” wrote Shackleton, “but to
camp once more on the floe and to possess our souls with what patience we could
till conditions should appear more favorable for a renewal of the attempt to
escape.” Slowly and steadily, the ice drifted farther to the north; and, on
April 7, 1916, the snow-capped peaks of Clarence and Elephant Islands came into
view, flooding them with hope.
“The floe has been a good friend to us,”
wrote Shackleton in his diary, “but it is reaching the end of its journey, and
is liable at any time now to break up.”
On April 9, it did just that, splitting
beneath them with an almighty crack. Shackleton gave the order to break camp
and launch the boats, and all at once, they were finally free of the ice that
had alternately bedeviled and supported them.
Now they had a new foe to contend with:
the open ocean. It threw freezing spray in their faces and tossed frigid water
over them, and it batted the boats from side to side and brought brave men to
the fetal position as they battled the elements and seasickness.
Through it all, Captain Worsley navigated
through the spray and the squalls, until after six days at sea, Clarence and
Elephant Islands appeared just 30 miles ahead. The men were exhausted. Worsley
had by that stage not slept for 80 hours. And while some were crippled by
seasickness, others were wracked with dysentery. Frank Wild, Shackleton’s
second-in-command, wrote that “at least half the party were insane.” Yet they
rowed resolutely toward their goal, and on April 15, they clambered ashore on
Elephant Island.
It was the first time they had been on dry
land since leaving South Georgia 497 days previously. But their ordeal was far
from over. The likelihood of anybody coming across them was vanishingly small,
and so after nine days of recuperation and preparation, Shackleton, Worsley, and
four others set out in one of the lifeboats, the James Caird, to
seek help from a whaling station on South Georgia, more than 800 miles
away.
For 16 days, they battled monstrous swells
and angry winds, bailing water out of the boat and beating ice off the sails.
“The boat tossed interminably on the big waves under grey, threatening skies,”
recorded Shackleton. “Every surge of the sea was an enemy to be watched and
circumvented.” Even as they were within touching distance of their goal, the
elements hurled their worst at them: “The wind simply shrieked as it tore the
tops off the waves,” Shackleton wrote. “Down into valleys, up to tossing
heights, straining until her seams opened, swung our little boat.”
The next day, the wind eased off and they
made it ashore. Help was almost at hand; but this, too, was not the end. The
storms had pushed the James Caird off course, and they had landed on the other
side of the island from the whaling station. And so Shackleton, Worsley, and Tom
Crean set off to reach it by foot—climbing over mountains and sliding down
glaciers, forging a path that no human being had ever forged before, until,
after 36 hours of desperate hiking, they staggered into the station at
Stromness.
There was no conceivable circumstance
under which three strangers could possibly appear from nowhere at the whaling
station, and certainly not from the direction of the mountains. And yet here
they were: their hair and beards stringy and matted, their faces blackened with
soot from blubber stoves and creased from nearly two years of stress and
privation.
An old Norwegian whaler recorded the scene
when the three men stood before the station manager Thoralf Sørlle:
“Manager says: ‘Who the hell are
you?’ And the terrible bearded man in the center of the three says very quietly:
‘My name is Shackleton.’ Me – I turn away and weep.”
Once the other three members of the James
Caird had been retrieved, attention turned to rescuing the 22 men remaining on
Elephant Island. Yet, after all, that had gone before, this final task in many
ways proved to be the most trying and time-consuming of all. The first ship on
which Shackleton set out ran dangerously low on fuel while trying to navigate
the pack ice, and was forced to turn back to the Falkland Islands. The
government of Uruguay proffered a vessel that came within 100 miles of Elephant
Island before being beaten back by the ice.
Each morning on Elephant Island, Frank
Wild, whom Shackleton had left in charge, issued the call for everyone to “Lash
up and stow” their belongings. “The Boss may come today!” he declared daily.
His companions grew increasingly dispirited and doubtful. “Eagerly on the
lookout for the relief ship,” recorded Macklin on August 16, 1916. “Some of the
party have quite given up hope of her coming.” Orde-Lees was clearly one of
them. “There is no good in deceiving ourselves any longer,” he wrote.
But Shackleton procured a third ship, the
Yelcho, from Chile; and finally, on August 30, 1916, the saga of the Endurance
and its crew came to an end. The men on the island were settling down to a
lunch of boiled seal’s backbone when they spied the Yelcho just off the coast.
It had been 128 days since the James Caird had left; within an hour of the
Yelcho appearing, all ashore had broken camp and left Elephant Island behind.
Twenty months after setting out for the Antarctic, every one of the Endurance
crew was alive and safe.
While Shackleton's crew miraculously made it back to England, his ship did not. For more than a century, the Endurance remained among history's most elusive shipwrecks. But in 2022, an international team of marine archaeologists, explorers, and scientists located the Endurance at the bottom of the Weddell Sea, approximately four miles south of the position originally recorded when Endurance sank.
“We have made polar history with the
discovery of Endurance, and successfully completed the world’s most challenging
shipwreck search,” said John Shears, the leader of Endurance22, the
expedition team that used submersibles and drones to locate the wooden ship.
Ernest Shackleton never did reach the
South Pole or crossed Antarctica. He launched one more expedition to the Antarctic,
but the Endurance veterans who rejoined him noticed he appeared weaker, more
diffident, drained of the spirit that had kept them alive. On January 5, 1922,
with the ship in South Georgia, he had a heart attack in his bunk and died. He
was just 47.
With his death, Wild took the ship to
Antarctica; but it proved unequal to the task, and after a month spent futilely
attempting to penetrate the pack, he set a course for Elephant Island. From the
safety of the deck, he and his comrades peered through binoculars at the beach
where so many of them had lived in fear and hope.
“Once more I see the old faces & hear
the old voices—old friends scattered everywhere,” wrote Macklin. “But to
express all I feel is impossible.”
And with that, they turned north one last
time and went home.
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