Antarctica (40 page)

To my less expert eye, the top of the core was just a nondescript sludgy grey, but deeper down, where the sediments were older, it changed to a fetching olive green. There it was, the very moment that the ice had appeared, written into the core. The green colour came from microscopic sea creatures; the sludgy grey, from where the glacier had advanced out on to the water and dropped its load on the sea floor, swamping the biology with hard grey grit.

In other words, the model was working. A few thousand years ago, there was no ice shelf here. But then, in the seventeenth century, the world was hit with a global climate cooling called the Little Ice Age. Londoners built bonfires and held markets and fairs on the frozen River Thames. And in Antarctica, out of human sight, the Müller Ice Shelf began to jut out into Lallemand Fjord and make its mark in the mud.

There was one last thing to check. To be sure that the mud on the sea floor really was an accurate record of the sediment falling through the water, Gene and his team had left a mooring in the fjord the previous year. A string of four bright yellow cones was now floating somewhere in the water, anchored to the sea floor with heavy weights, their heads turned upwards to catch the falling rain of dust, sand and debris. Now all we had to do was find the mooring and retrieve the traps.

The finding part was easy enough—the mooring's long string quickly showed up on the high-frequency sonar—but retrieving it was going to be tricky. Since it had been deployed, a large iceberg had drifted up close to the mooring site, and the captain was worried. Those of us who were non-essential were banned from the back deck and had to take turns watching through the open door. It was snowing now, thick fat flakes. The crew were out there in full immersion suits, attached to safety ropes to stop them falling into the frigid fjord. As the ship trawled past the site again and again, they toiled to snag the rope with a grappling hook over the side, like a heavy engineering version of the gift-grabbing games at seaside resorts.

Once, twice, they felt the snag and hauled the hook up only to find a few bare chunks of ice. Back over the edge, try again, and then . . . finally . . . gotcha! And the winch kicked in to haul the mooring up. I still can't believe how much effort it took to dot the i's of this model, to do the careful additional due diligence that would gather just a few more points on the graph.

But it was all a vital part of the story. The only way to be sure—really sure—of what was happening in Antarctica now was to interpret the clues from the past, and Gene was determined to get it right. And all his care was paying off. The results from Lallemand Fjord looked good; the model was making perfect sense. Now he needed to go to the other side of the Peninsula, to see if the other, bigger ice shelves were also just coming and going perfectly naturally, or if their recent retreats were something more sinister. That, however, meant sailing into the Weddell Sea, the iciest of Antarctica's waters, and also perhaps the most perilous. Even today, few ships manage to penetrate the pack ice that builds there; and one of the first that tried—the
Endurance's
namesake—met a horrible fate, in one of the most spectacular stories of the heroic age.

 

It was 1914 and Ernest Shackleton had a new plan. After turning back from his attempt to reach the South Pole five years earlier, he had decided to try a new adventure. He intended to make the first ever crossing of the continent, from sea to shining sea.

An expedition of this scale would need two ships. One, the
Aurora,
would go to the familiar Ross Sea side of the continent, while Shackleton himself would lead an expedition on a second ship, the
Endurance.
This would brave the infamous ice of the Weddell Sea, and land somewhere on the floating Ronne Ice Shelf, the mirror image of the great Barrier. Shackleton and his men would then make their way across the continent, using depots laid by the Ross Sea party. Never one to understate his case, he had named the expedition in the grandest of terms: the Imperial Transantarctic Expedition.

Of the two ships, the
Endurance
had the harder sailing task. For some reason the Weddell Sea was always far more choked with pack ice than the Ross Sea, and an earlier expedition had already lost a ship there. But at first all was well. Though it encountered ice early, the little ship made its way gamely along leads of open water, and steamed and smashed through the frozen sea ice between. On they crept through the pack, getting closer and closer to their goal. By January 1915 they were within eighty miles of the coast. They could see it. They could almost touch it. The men, heartily tired of the voyage, began to talk eagerly of how they would set up their base on land, and prepare for the expedition to come.

But then, agonisingly, the pack closed in. There were no more leads of open water, no more thin sections of ice that the ship could smash her way through. She was stuck. On 20 January 1915,
Endurance
found herself pinioned, a helpless prisoner forced to drift back north as the coast moved tantalisingly back out of sight. Shackleton had had to turn back within one hundred miles of the Pole. Now, once again, his goal was slipping away.

February passed, and March. The pack around the ship was like solid ground, enough for the men to practise sledging, exercise their dogs, play games and climb the pressure ridges that the ice threw up as it shifted and squeezed. Many were still hoping that the ship would eventually go free, but Shackleton knew better. In the privacy of his cabin he confided to Frank Worsley, captain of the
Endurance
: ‘You had better make up your mind that it is only a matter of time . . . What the ice gets, the ice keeps.'
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And the ice kept up its pressure, in visible waves that squeezed ever tighter around the ship. She listed this way and that. Her timbers creaked and groaned, and then finally cracked. On 27 October, the crew were forced to abandon ship. Shackleton gathered the men around him in front of
Endurance's
shattered remains. ‘Ship and stores have gone,' he said, ‘so now we'll go home.'
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‘I think it would be difficult to convey just what those words meant to us,' wrote one of the men, ‘situated as we were, surrounded by jostling ice floes as far as the eye could reach, tired out with our efforts to save the ship, and with no idea as to what was likely to happen to us—“We'll go home”.'
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Each man was allowed no more than two pounds of personal gear. (One of the few exceptions was a banjo belonging to one of the crew members, which Shackleton insisted on taking, saying it was ‘vital mental medicine'.
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) In such a pass, the values of the outside world were meaningless. Forced to confront what mattered most to them, men threw away money and kept photographs. Shackleton himself cast a handful of sovereigns onto the snow, and tore a page from the ship's Bible, with this memorable verse from the Book of Job:

 

Out of whose womb came the ice?
And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it?
The waters are hid as with a stone,
And the face of the deep is frozen.
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At first the men marched, attempting to drag their two lifeboats with them over the towering pressure ridges of ice. But the hills were too high and too hard. ‘The floes grind stupendously, throw up great ridges, and shatter one another mercilessly,' Shackleton wrote in his diary. ‘Human effort is not futile, but man fights against the giant forces of nature in a spirit of humility.'
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And so they waited, and drifted, at a camp they called ‘Patience' until in April 1916 they met enough open water to launch their lifeboats and sail for the nearest land. This was Elephant Island, a tiny, uninhabited and unsung patch of volcanic rock at the very tip of the Peninsula. The men set up camp on an inhospitable spit of land and contemplated their future. Nobody would come to rescue them there, for nobody knew where to look. Shackleton decided the only recourse was to equip one of the open lifeboats, the
James Caird
—which was less than twenty-five feet long—and sail it across the stormy Southern Atlantic, seeking help.

Cape Horn was the closest occupied land, about 600 miles away, but it lay in the wrong direction. The prevailing westerly winds that tore around the continent made reaching it impossible. Instead, Shackleton and the five men he chose to accompany him would have to forge out into the wide ocean, and try to reach the whaling station at South Georgia, a tiny pinprick of land more than 700 miles to the north-east, a needle in the great grey haystack of the Atlantic Ocean. If they missed it, all would be lost. The next nearest land was thousands of miles away.

To the twenty-two men left behind, and perhaps also to the six in the tiny boat, the mission must have seemed suicidal. But nobody dared say so. For Shackleton, pessimism was the only unforgivable sin, and he described optimism as ‘true moral courage'. He was convinced that believing in an endeavour took you more than halfway to achieving it. And as his story shows, he may well have been right.

‘We fought the seas and the winds,' Shackleton wrote. ‘At times we were in dire peril . . . flung to and fro by Nature in the pride of her strength . . . So small was our boat and so great were the seas that often our sail flapped idly in the calm between the crests of two waves. Then we would climb on the next slope and catch the full fury of the gale where the wool-like whiteness of the breaking water surged around us.'
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The men not on watch, or bailing out the leaky craft, crawled into soaking sleeping bags in the tiny covered space that the carpenter had contrived and tried to get some rest. But the hasty construction had not been designed for comfort. ‘The bags and cases seemed to be alive in the unfailing knack of presenting their most uncomfortable angles to our restseeking bodies,' Shackleton wrote. ‘A man might imagine for a moment that he had found a position of ease, but always discovered quickly that some unyielding point was impinging on muscle and bone.'
²⁸
And the makeshift cabin was also suffocating. One of the crew wrote that more than once on waking, he had the ghastly fear that he had been buried alive.
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But Shackleton had chosen his five companions well. Worsley wrote in his navigating book that Irish seaman McCarthy ‘is the most irrepressible optimist I've ever met. When I relieve him at the helm, boat iced & seas pourg down yr neck, he informs me with a happy grin “It's a grand day, sir”.'
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And Shackleton also had Worsley himself, the captain of
Endurance,
the master navigator whose task was to find South Georgia in this wide and stormy sea. The normal procedure by which seamen calculate courses and distances had become, Worsley wrote, ‘a merry jest of guesswork'. Instead, on the rare occasions where the sun could be seen, Worsley knelt on the thwart, two men holding him on either side, and tried to snap the altitude of the sun with his sextant while the
James Caird
bucked and heaved and rolled beneath him.

It ought to have been impossible. It
was
impossible. But fourteen days after they left Elephant Island, the men saw the cliffs of South Georgia rearing in front of them. Worsley's handful of sextant sightings had done the trick. They had achieved one of the greatest boat journeys ever made.

However, their ordeal was not over. Before the men could land they were hit by a mighty storm that nearly dashed the poor
James Caird
to pieces. Two days later, when the craft finally limped to shore, it was on the uninhabited side of a mountainous and uncharted island. The whaling station that could bring rescue lay ninety miles round the coast. Their boat was wrecked and so were they.

So Shackleton took two of his companions up and over the mountains of the interior on a forced march lasting thirty-six hours. Typically, Shackleton led from the front. He insisted on going ahead, breaking the trail in the snow, staying awake to watch while he let his men sleep for five minutes at a time, and then waking them (and pretending for their spirits' sake that they had slept for half an hour).

And when the three men arrived at the whaling station at Grytviken, the first humans they had seen in nearly three weeks—two small boys—saw their filthy, battered appearance and ran away.

The manager of the whaling station took a different view. As soon as he had grasped the names, and exploits, of his guests, he shook their hands, then had them bathed, fed and feted, and their three companions rescued from the far side of the island. But winter was closing, and there were still the men on Elephant Island to reach.

Shackleton cabled the Admiralty requesting a rescue ship. But the Admiralty had never supported him; he was a merchant seaman, who was not, and never would be, one of them. The reply came that there would be nothing available until October. Too late. By then, some or even all of the men might have succumbed. Shackleton felt personally responsible for every one of his marooned men. He raced to South America from where he made two attempts to sail into the pack, on ships lent first by the Uruguayan government and then by a British shipowner. Both times the ice beat him back.

But the third time was the charm. In mid-August, Shackleton finally reached Elephant Island aboard a little steam tug, the
Yelcho,
lent to him by the Chilean government. When they saw the ship coming into the bay, the men on the island signalled frantically. They lit a fire. They raised a flag. The running gear on the flagpole wouldn't work and the flag itself was frozen solid, so they tied a Burberry jacket halfway up the flagpole, as high as they could reach.

On board the
Yelcho,
Shackleton saw the ‘flag' at half-mast and was dismayed. But then he pulled out his field glasses and carefully counted the men waving on the shore. Twenty-two. All present and correct. ‘He put his glasses back in their case and turned to me,' wrote Worsley, ‘his face showing more emotion than I had ever known it show before.'
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