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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
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 of course 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.
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.
Landmarks named after James Hurley
Feature Name:
Cape Hurley
Feature Type: cape
Latitude: 6736S
Longitude: 14518E
Description: An ice-covered coastal point marking on the east
the mouth of the depression occupied by the Mertz Glacier. Discovered
by the AAE (1911-14) under Douglas Mawson.
Feature Name:
Mount Hurley
Feature Type: summit
Latitude: 6617S
Longitude: 05121E
Description: Snow-covered massif with steep bare slopes on the
W side, standing 7 mi S of Cape Ann and 3 mi S of Mount Biscoe. Discovered
in January 1930 by the BANZARE, 1929-31, under Mawson.
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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