Terra Incognita (13 page)

Clive had disappeared outside for ten minutes. ‘Look,' he said when he came back in. ‘We should drink this whiskey with glacier ice,' and he deposited an extremely large and alarmingly blue ice cube on the table. John took to it with an ice axe.

‘What do you think?' asked Clive, after we had added chunks of glacier ice to our mugs.

‘Delicious,' I said.

‘Lake ice is more delicious,' said Ed, who referred to water as ‘liquid ice'. With that, lake ice was fetched, and a treatise on the relative merits and properties of each type of ice hastened the disappearance of the whiskey.

The conversation moved on to drilling into the lake. Penetrating ice, yards thick, to get at the water below it posed interminable problems in those temperatures, and scientific minds were much occupied with it. The stories and their permutations were endless – about copper coils carrying heated glycol, about instruments freezing, about the advantages of hand drills. The four men shared a deep sense of the absurdity of their situation, floundering around on frozen lakes at seventy-seven degrees south. It was obvious that they all could have gone on yarning for ever.

John suddenly turned to me.

‘What's your impression, then? Of Antarctica?'

‘Well,' I said slowly, ‘I have a million impressions.'

‘Don't you have one overwhelming impression?'

I thought about that.

‘I feel as if I'm getting to know a person. It's like having a love affair – I'm finding out more and more and more, it's all different and overwhelming and intoxicating, and I don't know where it's going to end.'

‘Ha!' he said. ‘I used to feel like that.'

∗

I slept in a Scott tent overlooking the lake, and woke to a perfect spring day. Clive and Mark were already out on the ice, struggling with their instruments. We sat outside drinking coffee, and watched them. John was stretched out on the rocky shore.

‘Did you notice,' he said, ‘that when I got up to go to bed at five o'clock this morning Clive said, “Oh, can't take the pace, eh?” After fourteen years, it's still a pissing contest.' He laughed loudly.

I was gratified that anyone could live so patently at ease in an Antarctic environment. It seemed to like people, up there. It liked him, anyway. Even Ed, on his first trip, commented that he ‘didn't feel like a foreigner'.

Later, when everyone went out to take samples, I walked up the valley. The 1:250,000 map I carried in my pocket was bisected by a jagged line marked ‘
Limit of compilation
', and the half to the left of the Taylor Glacier was blank. I had reached the end of the map.

I hitched a lift out on a helicopter three days later, at five o'clock in the afternoon. I had just taken a bread-and-butter pudding out of the oven. The helicopter crew were revving up for Saturday night, and as I waved to a diminishing Ed and John I heard the pilots discussing a girl over the headsets.

‘Is she pretty?' one asked.

‘I've been here so long I've forgotten what pretty is,' replied the other.

CHAPTER FIVE

On passing our winter quarters at Cape Royds we all turned out to give three cheers, and to take a last look at the place where, in spite of discomforts and hardships, we had spent so many happy days. We watched the little hut, which had been our home for a year that must always live in our memories, fade away in the distance with feelings almost of sadness, and there were few men aboard who did not cherish a hope that some day they might again live strenuous days under the shadow of mighty Erebus.

Shackleton, from
The Heart of the Antarctic

A
T TEN O'CLOCK
on Easter Monday morning, 1916, a diminutive wooden boat lurched off a rock shelf on one of the islands to the north of the Antarctic Peninsula and into the angry Southern Ocean, immediately tossing two of the men on board into the broth. Within minutes the freezing waters of a roller were pouring through the plughole. Standing on the sandless and wind-whipped beach behind, a tall Anglo-Irishman was calmly making final preparations before himself climbing into the boat. His name was Ernest Shackleton.

The two sodden men were pushed ashore with an oar, the anchor was dropped, the hole was plugged with a filthy handkerchief until the real plug was found, stores and over a ton of ballast were stowed, and at half-past twelve Shackleton gave the order to set sail. For 137 days the twenty-two men left behind grew blubbery on seal and penguin underneath a pair of upturned boats, watching themselves grow old as the chance of rescue, slim at the outset, shrank to an almost imperceptible filament of hope. The story of their rescue is the greatest epic in the history of Antarctica.

The Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had set sail aboard
Endurance
from London's East India Docks on 1 August 1914, three days before Britain declared war on Germany. The plan was that a party led by Shackleton would sledge across Antarctica, starting from the Weddell Sea, while a team on the other side of the continent laid depots for them. But in January the ship was caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea ‘like an almond in a chocolate bar'.

‘Almost like a living creature', wrote Shackleton during the painful weeks of ebbing hope as he watched his ship die, ‘she resisted the forces that would crush her.' When she finally went down, Frank Worsley, her skipper, recorded in his diary, ‘When one knows every nook and corner of one's ship as we did, and has helped her time and again in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without its pathos, quite apart from one's own desolation, and I doubt if there was one amongst us who did not feel some personal emotion when Sir Ernest, standing on top of the look-out [a platform they had rigged up on the ice], said somewhat sadly and quietly, “She's gone, boys.”'

They were each allowed to take off two pounds of personal possessions, and these they buried in snowholes. Shackleton himself tossed a handful of gold sovereigns from his pocket on to the ice and picked up a slim volume of Browning's poetry. ‘I throw away trash', he said, ‘and am rewarded with golden inspirations.'

For five months, then, the twenty-eight drifted on ice floes for two thousand miles, tents and all, and when the chance came they travelled for six days in the three small lifeboats from the
Endurance
until they reached Elephant Island, an outpost of the South Shetlands. On this brutal journey, Shackleton did not sleep for a hundred hours.

Even then he spoke of the beauties of the sea, and of anxieties dwindling to nothing amid those splendours.

When they landed on Elephant Island, Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, recorded that they were more dead than alive, and that many of them could no longer row. Later Shackleton, whom they called the Boss, wrote in his book
South
, ‘The smiles and laughter, which caused cracked lips to bleed afresh, and the gleeful exclamations at the sight of two live seals on the beach, made me think for a moment of that glittering hour of childhood when the door is open at last and the Christmas tree in all its wonder bursts upon the vision.'

The southern winter was already upon them, and Perce Blackborow, the man who had joined the
Endurance
as a stowaway, had his frostbitten toes amputated.
¹
The men took to referring to their prison as ‘Hell-of-an-Island'. There was no hope of a chance rescue, so no alternative but to send one of the lifeboats to the whaling stations on South Georgia 700 miles away. From there, a vessel could be found to fetch the stranded men. Before the
Endurance
sank, its captain, Frank Worsley, a New Zealander and an officer in the merchant navy, had worked out the courses and distances from the South Orkneys and Elephant Island to South Georgia, the Falklands and Cape Horn. Of the three battered lifeboats, the
James Caird
offered the least horrifying option, and they finished caulking the seams with Marston's artist's paint and seal blood, stripping the two other wretched boats for parts. These new additions included an extra sail, which brought the total to three. The
James Caird
, named after the expedition's main sponsor, was twenty-two feet long and her height above the water was two feet two inches: not a great deal higher than a bath. She had been built to Worsley's specifications in Popular, East London, from Baltic pine, American elm and English oak. After the
Endurance
went down, the shipwright fitted the little boat with a pump made from the casing of the ship's compass, and two men laboured over a blubber stove with canvas and needles to fashion a cover for the makeshift cabin.

Six of them went, and Worsley was at the helm. Before they left, Shackleton issued instructions to Frank Wild, the leader of the stranded party, to the effect that if relief had not arrived in six months, when the whaling station opened on Deception Island, Wild was to assume the boat had gone down and set out himself.

Worsley recorded in his diary that on the first evening, with the Southern Cross overhead, Shackleton sent the rest in to sleep and the two of them ‘snuggled close together all night', relentlessly inundated by waves and ‘holding north by the stars that swept in glittering procession over the Atlantic towards the Pacific . . . While I steered, his arm thrown over my shoulder, we discussed plans and yarned in low tones. We smoked all night – he rolled cigarettes for us both, a job at which I was unhandy.' They had one compass, and it was faulty. Shackleton confided that if any of the twenty-two perished, he would feel like a murderer. Worsley's account of how he navigated by dead reckoning beggars belief. He concluded his story, ‘I often recall with proud affection memories of those hours with a great soul.'

Tom Crean, a petty officer in the navy, was in charge of the ‘kitchen'. He was obliged to light the primus stove while bent double and jam it between his and another man's legs to keep it steady. There was no room for anyone to sit upright and eat their hoosh, the standard Antarctic meal of a dehydrated meat protein mixture dissolved in hot water. It was usually followed by a sledging biscuit, some Streimer's Nutfood and a few sugarlumps. By the third day everything, with the exception of matches and sugar in watertight tins, was irredeemably soaked. The men's feet and legs, immersed almost constantly, were already frostbitten and swollen. They had rations, water and oil for thirty days. Apart from that, they didn't have much, except methylated spirits for the stove, a tin of seal oil, six reindeer-hair sleeping bags, a small sack of spare clothes and one chronometer. There wasn't enough room for them all to lie down at once, so they took it in turns to crawl on their chests and stomachs over sharp stone ballast, Shackleton directing the in-out operation, into a hole seven feet long and five feet wide. Then they slid into saturated sleeping bags which after a week began to smell of sour bread. The air was bad in there, and stifling, and sometimes they woke suddenly with the feeling that they had been buried alive.

By the fifth day John Vincent, able seaman and a bully, was experiencing severe pain in his legs and feet. He lost his appetite for the fight after that. It was the psychological cramp that did for him, not the physical kind. He had worked on North Sea trawlers too, so he was no stranger to hardship.

By the seventh day their faces and hands were black with soot and blubber. They needed calories, so they drank the seal oil. Two of the sleeping bags were proclaimed beyond redemption and tossed overboard, lifted briefly against the blanched sky.

On the eighth day the ice on the boat grew so thick that they were obliged to take to the
James Caird
with an axe. It was agonisingly painful work. Their thighs were inflamed by the chafing of wet clothes, and their lower legs turned a spectral white, and numb. The painter snapped, the sea-anchor was swept away and the white light of fear flashed through six souls as the biggest wave they had ever encountered crashed over the little boat. But by the eleventh day Worsley calculated that they had crossed the halfway mark. Two of the men found tobacco leaves floating in the bilges and laboriously dried them and rolled them into cigarettes with toilet paper. By the thirteenth day frostbite had skinned their hands so frequently that they were ringed like the inside of a tree-trunk. Then they discovered that the remaining water was brackish.

As sunlight leaked into the sky on the fifteenth day, someone spotted a skein of seaweed. The hours ticked by. If they had missed South Georgia, they were lost. Then, at half-past twelve, as in a vision, the turban of clouds unravelled on the pearly horizon and revealed a shining black crag. It was land. It was in fact Cape Demidov, the northern headland of King Haakon Sound on South Georgia. What they didn't know, as they celebrated, was that the worst was not behind them. It was still to come.

A gale got up. The wind and current were against them, forcing the
James Caird
almost on to the rocks. It began to snow, and roaring breakers shattered into the mist. It looked hopeless. They steered, pumped and bailed, lying to each other with encouraging phrases. Their mouths and tongues were so swollen from thirst that they could barely swallow. At one point they were driven so close to land that they had to crane their necks to look up at the top of the crag. Tension took them, then, beyond speech. Worsley said later that for three hours they looked death square in the eye, and he felt annoyed that nobody would ever know they had got so far.

The ordeal lasted for nine hours, and then they knew that they were going to live. The storm subsided. On the seventeenth day they sailed on to the entrance of King Haakon Bay and got in. It was dark by the time they spotted a cove. They carried the boat in and heaved themselves ashore, eyes fixed on the glint of freshwater pools. Shackleton wrote later that they flung down the adze, logbook and cooker. ‘That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic, which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had “suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole”. We had seen God in all his splendours, heard the text that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.'