The Expedition
The ship that was to be renamed Endurance
was built originally for tourist cruises in the
Arctic by a partnership between Lars Christensen, a Norwegian ship owner
and the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache, leader of the Belgian Antarctic
expedition in 1897-99, and called the Polaris.
The ship became available for the Antarctic
expedition when the
tour scheme collapsed as de Gerlache was unable to pay his share on the
completion of the ship in summer 1913. She had 10 cabins, a darkroom for amateur
photographers and no cargo space. She was useless as a sealer and not sufficiently
luxurious for use as a yacht.
Buyers were not easy to find until
Shackleton informed de Gerlache in January 1914 that he was in search of
an expedition ship for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The Polaris was purchased for £11,600 (225,000 Kroner). She
was reckoned to be one of the
strongest ships ever built for ice work.
Shackleton had wanted to name the ship in
his previous expedition "Endurance", but had not been
able to so that ship remained the Nimrod and this latest instead was to bear
the name taken from the Shackleton family motto, Fortitudine Vincimus
"by endurance we conquer".
The Endurance sailed for Antarctica from
Plymouth at noon on the 8th of August 1914. Shackleton was not on
board as he still had matters to attend to at home, instead, he left from
Liverpool on a mail boat the Urugayo around the 26th of September
to join the Endurance in Buenos Aires, from where she departed on the 26th
of October.
Three days out of Buenos Aries a stowaway
was found hiding in a locker. He was nineteen year old Percy Blackborow,
a Welsh sailor who had tried to join the ship in port with the Canadian
William Bakewell, but had been turned away on account of his age while
Bakewell was taken on. Some of the crew were concerned that the ship was
short-handed, which Shackleton must also have known. After being bawled out
by Shackleton, and reminded that it was customary in particularly hard
circumstances to first of all eat the stowaways, he was taken away, fed
and put to work where he proved himself a good sailor.
The Endurance was now a more ordered
and a happier ship than on the journey to Buenos Aries under the rather
weak and indisciplined command of Frank Worsley. When Shackleton caught up
with the ship he relieved Worsley of direct command and discharged the worst seamen for disloyalty,
insubordination and drunkenness.
It was also a noisier and dirtier place due to the arrival of the sledge
dogs with Frank Wild, Shackleton's now second in Command.
After an uneventful journey, they came
to the Island of South Georgia - the "Alps in mid-ocean" - on the 5th of
November. The ships company was made welcome by the community of some
two thousand Norwegian whalers who manned the Grytviken whaling station in
the summer months. Shackleton and his crew expected to spend only a few
days there, but the whalers told them that it was a particularly bad year
for ice and so days turned to weeks.
The crew of the Endurance seemed to
gel with the whalers, perhaps both parties feeling that they belonged
better where they were than they did back home. The dogs in particular
enjoyed ideal days eating whale meat until they could eat no more, at
that time, the whale meat was largely otherwise wasted, bar that used to
fatten pigs kept on the island.
The expedition was underway again on the
5th of December heading into the ice-strewn waters of the Weddell Sea. Three
days later on the 8th they saw the first pack ice at 57 degrees south - the
warnings of the whalers had been correct, it was a particularly bad season
for ice.
At the entry point of the pack, the Endurance
was 600 miles from the nearest landfall, not that the men on board could
have known this as that particular coast would not be discovered for
another fifteen years. They were about 1000 miles from their intended
landing place at Vahsel Bay.
The ship battled and pushed through the ice
that would variously tighten up, then loosen and slacken off again.
Progress was slow, but progress was made and by the 10th of January 1915
land was sighted at 72°2' south, this was the icy front of Coats Land
first seen in 1902. The crew began to prepare for a landing at Vahsel Bay
and there was a feeling on board that they were reaching journey's end. The next few days gave good sailing conditions with calm
seas and little ice to bother the ship, on the 15th of January, she made
120 miles.
Soon though pack ice began to impede
progress again and large numbers of crabeater seals heading north proved
to be an unsettling presence perhaps fleeing from an early winter while the Endurance
pushed on ever southwards.
On January the 18th, they were some 80
miles from Vahsel Bay and the pack closed in once again at 76°30'S,
31°30'W. A week later they were still there, the loose ice appeared to be
freezing together. It should have been the peak of the summer, instead, the Endurance was surrounded by a plain of unbroken
congealed ice.
After reaching the furthest south point of
76°58' on the 21st of February, slowly it became apparent that the ship
was being taken northwards by the
movements of the ice. After a maiden voyage of 12,000 miles including
1,000 of it hard won through pack ice, the ship was thwarted only 60 miles
from its destination. Shackleton informed the men that they should prepare
for a winter in the pack ice. His own disappointment must have been
intense, it had been a great financial strain to mount the expedition at
all and was perhaps his last chance of a successful Antarctic adventure.
At one point, they
could even see very faintly in the distance the land above Vahsel Bay as
the movements of the ice took them past.
The crew resigned themselves to their fate,
Shackleton kept up the hope that once released from the pack in the
spring, they would be able to sail back to Vahsel Bay and complete their
goal of the Trans-Antarctic crossing. They were drifting in unknown
waters, the Antarctic Peninsula lay to the West, but the nearest known
feature was 600 miles away at the tip of Alexander Island. The greatest
threat was from the mixture of characters on board the ship in the
circumstances of boredom, inactivity, disappointment at not achieving
their goal and worries of the hopelessness of
their fate.
Shackleton rose to the challenge of being
the leader in these circumstances, though perhaps he was distant from the
men and seemed to not have any close friends amongst them, as Roland
Huntford says in his biography:
The 60 or so dogs remaining had been moved
from the ship onto the ice floe surrounding it. They lived in kennels made
by the carpenter or in small igloos constructed by others. The presence of
the dogs was a welcome diversion, the dogs were arranged in teams with
appointed regular drivers and often went for journeys across the ice.
Shackleton still was talking about preparation for the journey across
Antarctica in the following season and this practice and familiarizing
with dog travel was ostensibly for this event. The practice was certainly needed
as despite having the dogs as a primary form of transport, none of the
expedition members were experienced in travel with them. Shackleton had
tried to take an experienced dog driver with him, but for various reasons,
he ended up taking none of the men put forwards for this.
On the 14th of July there was a noise from
beneath the Endurance aft. Shackleton tried to pass it off as a whale, but
McNeish the carpenter, knew it for what it was - the movement of the ice
beginning to nip. Shackleton knew that if the ship were squeezed by the
ice, then she had little chance of survival, other ice ships such as the Fram
had rounded bottoms, so that they could rise up above the ice in such
circumstances. Shackleton had been warned when he bought the Endurance
that she would not do this.
The ice had begun to move much faster than
it had done until now and the ship was carried northwards twice as fast as
previously. Ice blocks would slide over each other and be pushed up to 15
and 20 feet before breaking and landing with a thud, then again all would
be quiet as the pressure was released.
The Endurance had developed a list to port,
beams had buckled and the rudder was damaged. Worsley climbed the mast and
reported that the surrounding pack was broken, buckled and in a
"state of chaos". For months it had all been calm, flat and
smooth. Icebergs which in the still of winter had been fixed landmarks
were moving position.
For now, it was thought that the Endurance
had had a narrow escape, one particularly dramatic pressure wave had
stopped about 15 feet short of the ship, she would almost certainly have
been crushed had it continued. The general assumption was however that
soon the ship would be floating free. Through August the men waited.
On the first of September more pressure
waves came, the ship creaked and groaned and timbers snapped, the ice had
hold, she was not rising above it and it was simply her massive structure
that was resisting the force of the ice. The ship also appeared twisted
and out of line. Ever the optimist Shackleton nevertheless ordered that a
wheelhouse be built for the comfort of the steersman once the ship floated
free.
On the 15th of October the Endurance broke
completely free and was floating in open water again in a narrow lead, on
the 17th the pressure waves came again and the ice closed in and squeezed
the hull. She was thrown over at a list of 30 degrees, slowly to right
herself again. On the 20th, the boiler was filled and steam raised,
expectations were high though the men knew that the ice could keep them
from sailing for days or months.
By the 23rd McNeish had built a coffer dam
in the engine room, water was flooding in through opened seams caused by
the ice twisting the ship. Despite the dam, steam pumps had to be kept
working constantly to pump out the flood water with back up from hand
pumps working at all times. The Endurance had settled lower in the
water now than she had been, any slight possibility of her rising when
nipped was now gone, if the ice took hold again it would have a better
grip on a weakened ship. The ice continued to move, to creak, break and
groan. Apart from this there was no other sound, no indication of why the
ice should be moving in such a way.
The force for the pressure waves was coming
from the westerly current pushing the floes up against the land of the
Eastern side of the as yet unexplored and undiscovered Antarctic
Peninsula. Extra momentum perhaps coming from some far off gale that was
pushing the ice ever harder.
By the morning of October the 25th it
became clear that the battle to save the Endurance was being lost
and the men stopped pumping. More and more seams were opening. The ship
was being squeezed from the sides and also from the stern.
The 27th brought increased pressure again,
but Green the cook continued making supper in the galley. The men all
assembled in the wardroom for the last meal onboard the ship, eaten in
silence. At 5pm Shackleton ordered all hands out onto the ice floe. The
men had all been affected by what they had seen, they hadn't just lost
their ship, their home, but had watched it tortured over a period of weeks
and had fought to save her, failing in the process.
The crew were now on the ice floe that was increasingly
on the move, starting to show signs of melting at the edges and had only
themselves to look to for any chance of a return home.
The wreck of the Endurance remained
above the ice for some time allowing for salvage of stores. The crew were
camped some miles away in a more stable area. On the 21st of November at
4.50pm they saw and heard movements as final contortions of the ice
allowed the wreck to slip beneath the surface.
