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South with Endurance:
Frank Hurley - official photographer
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Frank Hurley: A Photographer's
Life
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Antarctic Eyewitness: South With Mawson and Shackleton's
Argonauts
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Frank Hurley
Photographer
Australasian Antarctic
Expedition
1911-13
Photographer
Endurance 1914-17
The Endurance Expedition
Single, was of Sydney, New South Wales. He had been
the recipient of many amateur and professional awards for photographic
work before joining the Expedition. At the Main Base he obtained excellent
photographic and cinematographic records and was one of the three members
of the Southern Sledging Party. He was also present on the final cruise
of the `Aurora'.
From Appendix 1, Mawson - Heart of the Antarctic
The only member of Shackleton's expedition that Shackleton
didn't meet or interview before the expedition set off, Hurley was accepted
on the the strength of his work with Mawson on the 1911-13
Australasian Antarctic Expedition.
Hurley joined Shackleton's Endurance expedition at
six weeks notice meeting the ship in Buenos Aires after travelling from
Australia. He had been warned by Mawson to make an arrangement with
Shackleton whereby he was paid a percentage of the "profits" of the
expedition. It was also in Shackleton's financial interests to make
sure that a full pictorial record of the expedition made it back home.
Hurley was tall and tough, his first impressions of
the crew of the Endurance were not favourable thinking that their physiques
were small and not up to standard of the men on Mawson's Australian
Antarctic Expedition.
Nonetheless, he was as Greenstreet put it
"a warrior with his camera & would go anywhere
or do anything to get a picture". At that time a camera
was a large wooden boxed structure weighing many pounds and requiring
more wooden boxes of glass plates that were used to take the negatives.
Even taking the simplest photograph was a significant undertaking and
Hurley regularly hauled his equipment, 40 lbs of it and more to difficult
places, to the top of the Endurance's masts or up peaks in South Georgia
for instance.
He was also a skilled tinsmith and made a water pump
for the lifeboats and also a portable stove taken around from camp to
camp from materials salvaged from the Endurance, both difficult jobs
due to the lack of correct and sharp tools for the jobs.
Even though many photographic plates taken on the
Endurance expedition were destroyed before taking to the lifeboats,
many survived along with a good deal of cine film which provide the
pictorial record of the story. Hurley rescued many of the plates after
the Endurance had been lost, but still not fully submerged by returning
to the wreck and bare-chested to the waist dived into 3 feet of mushy
ice and sea-water to retrieve cases of glass negative plates that were
protected by being zinc lined and soldered shut.
Hurley sat with Shackleton on the ice at Shackleton's
insistence and they decided between them which plates to keep and which
to leave to conserve weight. Those to be left were broken so second
thoughts were not an option. 150 of the best plates were saved and the
remainder, about 400 were destroyed.
Hurley was nicknamed "the Prince" on the expedition
for his susceptibility to flattery, a trait which Shackleton had reason
to use as a means to keeping Hurley onside during the most difficult
times and to temper Hurley's sometimes overly forthright and uninhibited
manner.
He continued to be critical about his fellow crew
members on arrival at Elephant Island, recording in his diary that
"... many conducted themselves
in a manner unworthy of Gentleman and British sailors. Some of whom
it was anticipated would be the bulwarks of the party "stove in". In the majority of cases those suffering from severe frostbites
could be traced to negligence..."
"Amongst those that stand meritorious,
Sir E. has mentioned: Wild - a tower of strength who appeared as
well as ever after 32 hours at the tiller in frozen clothes, Crean
who ... piloted the Wills, McNiesh (Carpenter) Vincent (AB) McCarthy
(AB) Marston (Dudley Docker) & self"
Note that he included himself without comment. He
went on to say that:
"A fair proportion of the remainder.
I am convinced would starve or freeze if left to their own resources
on this island"
Hurley had total admiration for Shackleton's
leadership under these circumstances with what he saw was less than
ideal material.
After the rescue and return home of the expedition
members, Hurley returned to South Georgia, to shoot more footage for
his film of the expedition. He attempted to follow in the footsteps
of Shackleton, Crean and Worsley across the island, but despite it being
summer and having proper equipment, he found it impossible to do so.
It is largely due to Hurley's pictures that we are
able to get such a good impression of the events and that the Endurance
story is still very alive and capturing people's imaginations even today.
Biography
Hurley left school and home at the age of 13, without
any qualifications and worked in a steel mill and the Sydney dockyards.
Eventually he studied at the University of Sydney and taught himself
photography.
After the Endurance expedition, Hurley served as an
army photographer in the First World War.
Later he became the official photographer to a number
of expeditions to tropical regions, returning to the Antarctic again
in 1929-31 on the BANZARE voyage (British, Australian and New Zealand
Antarctic Research Expedition).
He was a war photographer again in World War Two.
Frank Hurley died aged 76 on the 17th of January 1962
in Sydney.
Frank Hurley photograph collection at the
National Library of Australia
Frank Hurley papers collection at the
National Library
of Australia
References to Frank Hurley
in Shackleton's book "South!"
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 | Seals were plentiful. We saw large numbers
on the pack and several on low parts of the barrier, where
the slope was easy. The ship passed through large schools
of seals swimming from the barrier to the pack off shore.
The animals were splashing and blowing around the Endurance,
and Hurley made a record
of this unusual sight with the kinematograph-camera.
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| On the following day Wild,
Hurley, Macklin, and McIlroy
took their teams to the Stained Berg, about seven miles
west of the ship, and on their way back got a female crab-eater,
which they killed, skinned, and left to be picked up later.
They ascended to the top of the berg, which lay in about
lat. 69° 30´ S., long. 51° W., and from an elevation of
110 ft. could see no land. Samples of the discoloured ice
from the berg proved to contain dust with black gritty particles
or sand-grains. |
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| If the ship had heeled any farther it
would have been necessary to release the lee boats and pull
them clear, and Worsley was watching to give the alarm.
Hurley meanwhile descended
to the floe and took some photographs of the ship in her
unusual position |
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| Morning came in chill and cheerless.
All hands were stiff and weary after their first disturbed
night on the floe. Just at daybreak I went over to the Endurance
with Wild and Hurley,
in order to retrieve some tins of petrol that could be used
to boil up milk for the rest of the men. |
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| Hurley
meanwhile had rigged his kinematograph-camera and was getting
pictures of the Endurance in her death-throes. While he
was engaged thus, the ice, driving against the standing
rigging and the fore-, main- and mizzen-masts, snapped the
shrouds. The foretop and topgallant-mast came down with
a run and hung in wreckage on the fore-mast, with the fore-yard
vertical. The main-mast followed immediately, snapping off
about 10 ft. above the main deck. The crow's-nest fell within
10 ft. of where Hurley stood
turning the handle of his camera, but he did not stop the
machine, and so secured a unique, though sad, picture.
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| A path over the shattered floes would
be hard to find, and to get the boats into a position of
peril might be disastrous. Rickenson and Worsley started
back for Dump Camp at 7 a.m. to get some wood and blubber
for the fire, and an hour later we had hoosh, with one biscuit
each. At 10 a.m. Hurley
and Hudson left for the old camp in order to bring some
additional dog-pemmican, since there were no seals to be
found near us. |
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| On December 20, after discussing the
question with Wild, I informed all hands that I intended
to try and make a march to the west to reduce the distance
between us and Paulet Island. A buzz of pleasurable anticipation
went round the camp, and every one was anxious to get on
the move. So the next day I set off with Wild, Crean, and
Hurley, with dog teams,
to the westward to survey the route. |
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