An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor (31 page)

At one point, Crean performed an impromptu little act to help build up their larder. The Irishman was out with Worsley and three others searching for meat when they spotted an Emperor penguin. Without hesitation Crean sank onto all fours and began making noises like a fish and Worsley recounted:

The biggest concern was the direction of the drift. If it continued on its present northwesterly course, it would take them close to the northerly tip of the Graham Land peninsula and the relative safety of nearby Paulet or Snow Hill Island. The fear was that the drift would change direction towards the northeast which would send the slowly melting ice floe out into the vast open expanses of the South Atlantic between the land masses of South America and South Africa. It was vital to take to the boats before that happened.

Work on the three small boats was virtually complete and it was decided to give them names. Shackleton wanted to remember his key benefactors and called the whaler
James Caird
. The two smaller boats, both cutters, were called the
Dudley Docker
and the
Stancomb Wills
. McNeish, working with the minimum of tools and equipment, had performed a minor miracle raising the gunwales in the hopes of keeping out the waters of the Southern Ocean, skilfully using nails extracted from the sides of the
Endurance
.

With the work finished, Shackleton began final preparations for departure from the ice floe and on 19 December he recorded in his diary:

Next day he took three of his most reliable and trusted colleagues – Crean, Wild and Hurley – on a short trip to survey the ice conditions to the immediate west. Taking dogs, the four men travelled for about 7 miles and were reasonably encouraged.

Spirits lifted and Shackleton, a great man-manager, decided to lift morale further by bringing forward Christmas Day celebrations to 22 December, just before they set out westwards. Large quantities of food would be left behind because it could not be carried. With great enthusiasm the men tucked into their remaining luxuries, scoffing ham, jugged hare, anchovies, baked beans, biscuits, pickles and jam and washing it down with ample mugs of tea and coffee.

The next day, 23 December, the men set off again in a replay of the back-breaking hauling of the boats across the hummocks of contorted ice. The procession was, as before, led by trailblazers and dog teams ferrying supplies at what seemed breakneck speed in stark contrast to the laborious plod of the struggling boat-hauling teams.

It was a tortuous process. The boats were now pulled in a relay by eighteen men at the rate of 60 yards (55 m) at a time, which meant the men walked 180 yards (165 m) for every 60
yards gained. The pulling was extremely heavy and even the toughened seamen in the harness could pull for only 200 or 300 yards (182–274 m) at a time before sinking to their knees exhausted and gasping for breath. They hauled the
Caird
a few hundred yards, then returned to pick up the
Docker
and hoped that her sledge runners had not frozen firmly to the ice in the low temperatures. When they did, it required three or four violent jerks of the harness to get the leaden weight moving across the ice, even before they began the terrible strain of pulling.

But, by general consent, it was better to be on the move, regardless of the heavy pulling in dreadful conditions. Anything was better than sitting in the cold, wet slushy snow passing the time. Also they all knew they were pulling for their lives.

There was concern among some that only two boats – the
James Caird
and the
Dudley Docker
– were to be taken on the new bid for freedom. The
Stancomb Wills
, the smallest vessel, would remain at Ocean Camp. Inside the little boat the expedition left a message for posterity, detailing the date and their position. Rather optimistically, it concluded: ‘
All well
.’

The reality was that the men were fighting a losing battle and despite immense effort, once again they were moving at barely one mile a day. At the current rate of progress, they would take 300 days – about ten months – to reach land in the west. But there was no question of their strength holding out for ten months.

On 29 December a quick reconnaissance of the immediate surroundings demolished all hopes of continuing with the march. For at least 2 miles ahead the terrain, in Shackleton’s words, was ‘quite unnegotiable’ with a jumbled mess of broken ice and hummocks. More worryingly, the ice ahead appeared to be very thin and there were some narrow leads of open water which were not enough to take a boat but unstable enough to cause the ice to collapse under their weight. There was no prospect of hauling heavily laden boats across this surface.

It meant a retreat to firmer ice and another humiliation for the bitterly disappointed men. But they had no choice. Once again, they camped and waited for what the drift had in store for them. They were at the mercy of the drift and Shackleton called it ‘Patience Camp’.

The failure of the escape march was a blow to the men’s already strained morale. In general, spirits had been fairly high throughout the long drift on
Endurance
and despite some isolated difficulties, the mood overall had been reasonably optimistic. Shackleton still leant heavily on the support of men like Crean and Wild and somehow succeeded in conveying the belief that they would escape.

The new year, 1916, arrived with the more optimistic development that the drift was picking up speed, carrying them faster and faster on the journey towards open water. On 21 January they crossed the Antarctic Circle (66° 33’) and the men climbed the tallest nearby fragment of ice in an attempt to pick out a faint glimpse of far-off land, which was the tip of Graham Land. Hope was briefly restored.

But food was becoming a problem. Seals were far less abundant and Shackleton was anxious to avoid breaking into the sledging rations until absolutely necessary. The alternative was to cut back on their food consumption and so, reluctantly, the decision was taken to shoot most of the remaining 50 dogs. Crean, who had devoted so much time to the animals in the past year, had the cheerless task of helping to lead the dogs away from the camp area where they were summarily despatched by Wild.

Soon after spirits were raised by, of all things, a howling gale. Although the winds roared to 70 mph, the men were delighted that it was a southwesterly wind which blew them further and further northwards towards open seas.

Shackleton said it was the ‘most cheerful good fortune for a year’ and estimated that the castaways were no more than 170 miles (270 km) from Paulet Island, a tiny volcanic outcrop little more than a mile in diameter. In six windswept
days they covered 84 miles (135 km). But, crucially, there was no open water and therefore no hope of launching the boats. They were still imprisoned on their floating island of ice.

In early February, Crean and Macklin led teams across the ice to recover any remaining items of value from Ocean Camp, which was only about 7 miles away. They returned with some tinned fish, beef cubes and tobacco, which brought a welcome relief for the men whose digestion was struggling with the unrelenting diet of meat. It was causing horrid constipation and thunderous flatulence and Crean was among the men who suffered most. Worsley wrote:

At the same time, Wild returned with eighteen men to recover the other cutter,
Stancomb Wills
. Worsley, who had long argued that all three boats would be needed when they finally encountered open water, was delighted. He insisted that it would be ‘a practical impossibility’ to bring 28 men out of Antarctica in only two boats.

The following day, Crean, Worsley and Macklin set out for another foraging trip to Ocean Camp and found their path blocked by leads of open water. The trip was abandoned and it was apparent that they had only managed to recover the
Stancomb Wills
at the last possible moment. Had they left 24 hours later, the 28 men would have faced the boat journey crammed into only two small boats.

As the month of February wore on, the supplies of food began to dwindle and the men began scrabbling about in the waste dumps to retrieve scraps of seal or blubber for cooking. The last of the cheese – a one-inch cube apiece – was served out in the middle of the month. Later some Adelie penguins
were caught and on 29 February – 1916 was a leap year – the hungry men drank their final cup of hot cocoa. Most of the tea was gone and the only drink soon would be powdered milk, laced with sugar.

On one occasion, a massive sea-leopard climbed onto the ice and tried to attack one of the men. Wild shot the beast and after cutting it open, found several undigested fish in its stomach. It was the only ‘fresh’ fish they managed to catch on their long drift.

They were still hungry, however, and the prospect of once again dragging the boats across the ice was a miserable one. In addition, they were short of exercise after idly sitting around on the drifting ice floe for many months and lacked the fitness and strength for the task. The only good news was that, despite their discomfort, there was no sign of scurvy, thanks to the fresh supplies of meat.

The castaways were now less than 100 miles (160 km) from Paulet Island and there was some hope that the ordeal was finally nearing an end. It was an end that could not come soon enough for many of the trapped men. Spirits were now deteriorating and the mood had changed. Meals were getting smaller, the daily servings of hoosh growing noticeably weaker. Hot drinks were rationed to one a day.

There was an air of depression about the camp, despite the constant optimism conveyed by Shackleton. The patience at Patience Camp was wearing thin.

On 11 March hopes were again briefly raised when the men felt a distinct movement of the pack and dark-coloured leads of open water began to appear in the distance. The boats, which had been strengthened and improved over the past few months, were made ready for launching. One particularly important task was to ensure that the boats were seaworthy, which meant an unusual piece of improvisation to block any leaks between the seams of the little vessels. To caulk and waterproof the seams, the men replaced the traditional pitch and oakum with seals’ blood.

There was some cheer when, on 23 March, they made a definite sighting of land far off to the west, the first for five months. Again, however, their hopes were dashed. The land, probably Joinville Island at the northern tip of Graham Land, was an estimated 57 miles (91 km) away. It meant that Paulet Island, their intended destination, was now behind them to the south. Like a ship in the night, they had passed their hoped-for refuge.

In normal conditions it was probably no more than 24 or 48 hours’ sailing to Joinville, the largest of the three small islands at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. But the ice was too broken and thin to march across and, equally, far too dangerous for their tiny boats. They had to watch helplessly as their floe slowly drifted northwards and the land receded away in the distance.

The sight of Joinville Island, instead of cheering the men, only confirmed the gravity of their plight, for they were now drifting past known solid ground and out into the enormous seas of the fearsome Drake Passage between the Weddell and Southern Ocean. South Georgia, over 900 miles (1,500 km) to the northeast, was probably the ideal destination. But in their weakened, demoralised condition, there was no realistic prospect of all 28 men surviving a lengthy journey in open boats across the world’s most violent and dangerous stretch of water.

Instead, attention was focused on the much closer Elephant Island or Clarence Island, two small uninhabited dots of inhospitable rocks and mountains in the vast area of water that lay ahead.

Finding either island in the enormous expanses of water alone would be a massive task calling for a supreme act of navigation. But if they missed the islands, they were doomed. After Clarence or Elephant Islands, the nearest major landfall was Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America about 500 miles (800 km) to the north across the Drake Passage. But to reach South America, the little boats would
have the improbable task of rowing or sailing against the powerful currents and winds which whip up the Drake Passage into the most fearsome expanse of water on earth. More likely was that if they missed Clarence or Elephant Islands, the men would drift into the vast uninhabited expanses of the South Atlantic.

While the men contemplated their fate, winter began to close in. It was late March, temperatures were dropping and the light was fading. More importantly, the supplies of seal and penguin were disappearing and the food shortage was becoming critical.

On 30 March the last remaining dogs and Crean’s last pup were shot, a sorry occasion for many. But, without hesitation, the animals were immediately cut up and fried before being served to the hungry men who, more than anything else, were relieved for the welcome change of diet. With a flourish Crean delivered a dog steak to Shackleton in his tent, like a Master Chef serving his favoured guests at their table in a high-class restaurant.

The loss of the dogs also signalled the inevitable fact that they would not be marching across the broken ice hauling the boats to Graham Land. Shackleton realised how the men’s condition had deteriorated and he knew that many were simply not up to weeks of heavy man-hauling the boats across the icy terrain. Instead they would be sailing or rowing to safety, which meant waiting for the drift to carry them northwards until they reached open water.