An Unsung Hero: Tom Crean - Antarctic Survivor (28 page)

On 4 August,
Endurance
sailed round the southern coast of England to Eastbourne where Shackleton disembarked and hurried to London to meet the King. Events were moving apace and Britain had now moved one step from war by giving the Germans an ultimatum to respect the neutrality of Belgium. Despite the mounting crisis, King George V saw Shackleton for 25 minutes, gave him a Union Jack and urged him to go South. At 11 p.m. on 4 August the ultimatum expired and the First World War had started.

Endurance
went first to Plymouth and then sailed for Buenos Aires in Argentina on 8 August as the first shots of war were being fired in Europe. It was a largely uneventful trip under the leadership of the easy-going Worsley, although Crean was on hand to save the life of one fortunate sailor as the
Endurance
crossed the Equator in mid-September.

In the exuberant celebrations of ‘crossing the line,’ several seamen became very drunk and one tried to throw himself overboard. Crean rushed forward, grabbed the man’s leg and saved him from certain death.

Shackleton remained behind in England, finalising his money-raising plans. He was still deeply concerned about the
wisdom of disappearing off to Antarctica while the country was plunging into war but on 25 September he finally sailed from Liverpool and eventually caught up with
Endurance
in Buenos Aires in mid-October. There he weeded out the more unruly and drunken seamen, took on a few more willing hands and prepared to depart a world which, in itself, was on the brink of unimagined horror and sweeping change.

On 25 October the small British community in Buenos Aires gathered on the quayside to bid farewell to
Endurance
as she set forth for the island of South Georgia, the most southerly point in the British Empire. There was concern that the ship, despite its peaceful intentions, might be vulnerable to attack from one of the many German warships gathering ominously in the South Atlantic for what would later materialise into the Battle of the Falklands on 8 December. Shackleton, fortuitously, decided to abandon his original plan to visit the Falklands and instead headed for the island of South Georgia.

Endurance
sailed peacefully southwards, the only diversion being the discovery of a stowaway on the third day out of Buenos Aires. This turned out to be a nineteen-year-old Welsh seaman, Percy Blackborrow, who was given a full-scale dressing-down by Shackleton. With a twinkle in his eye, he finally told the terrified lad that stowaways were the first to be eaten if things got tough on polar expeditions and the party ran out of food. Blackborrow’s unusual recruitment brought the
Endurance
party to 28.

Endurance
put into Grytviken, the Norwegian whaling station on South Georgia, in early November and stayed for a month, as the party made final preparations and took on the last supplies of coal. During this time, Shackleton spent many hours talking to the seasoned Norwegian whalers, who were in the middle of their hunting season and knew more than anyone on earth about ice conditions in the Weddell Sea.

South Georgia had been a centre for adventurous and entrepreneurial seamen for well over a century. Captain Cook
had made the first landing in January 1775 and named the island after King George III. But his published account two years later, which gave the first reports of South Georgia’s teeming wildlife, brought a huge influx of seal-hunters from Britain and America. By the turn of the twentieth century, after over 100 years of plunder, the seals had been hunted to near-extinction and new booty was sought. Norwegian whalers arrived and in 1904 established a base at Grytviken, South Georgia’s most attractive natural harbour. Grytviken, which means ‘Pot Cove’, was named after the sealers’ trypots found on the site.

However, what the whalers had to say was not very encouraging. The ice in the Weddell Sea, they divulged, was further north than any of the seamen could remember and they urged caution before allowing the ship to enter the hazardous, mostly uncharted waters.

But Shackleton was impatient to get under way. The expedition could wait no longer and on 5 December 1914,
Endurance
quietly severed links with the civilised world and pulled out of Grytviken on the first leg of the 1,000-mile (1,600-km) journey to the coast of Antarctica. The world would be a different place when they returned.

Departure was another subdued affair with none of the fanfare which saw off
Discovery
or
Terra Nova
from the New Zealand staging post of Lyttelton. There was no flag-waving, no bands to play stirring patriotic tunes and no thronging, cheering crowds to bid the party of 28 men a warm farewell. Shackleton remembered:

The mail ship, carrying the last letters from home, steamed into Grytviken two hours after
Endurance
had disappeared across the southern horizon.

Tom Crean’s memory of home was still carried in the scapular he wore around his neck.

E
ndurance
, heavily laden with coal and equipment in the tradition of all polar vessels, pushed slowly across the Southern Ocean towards the Weddell Sea. But, as if to warn of the dangers ahead, three days out of South Georgia the ship ran into heavy pack ice at latitude 57°. This was farther to the north than anyone had expected and confirmed the fears of the experienced Norwegian whalers on the island.

It was just the first of many brushes which
Endurance
would soon encounter with the ice. The advice from the Norwegians to wait until the southern summer was more advanced must have weighed heavily on the minds of Shackleton and his senior lieutenants.

There followed several days as
Endurance
picked her way through the belt of ice, which Shackleton graphically described as a ‘gigantic and interminable jigsaw-puzzle’. The worry, however, was that the ice stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see and Vahsel Bay, the ship’s intended destination, was still nearly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away to the south. To reach it,
Endurance
would have to sail in a semi-circle around the daunting pack of ice, heading first eastwards and then turning south, deep into the Weddell Sea.

The Weddell Sea, named after the nineteenth-century Scottish naval captain, James Weddell, was a largely unexplored
area as the
Endurance
pressed south in late 1914. Weddell had sailed into the region in 1823 and named it after King George VI. It was not until 1900 that it was finally given Weddell’s name, by which time its heavy pack ice had gained a fearsome reputation among seafarers. Even today ships rarely penetrate the waters.

By 1914, the sea had been only partially mapped by another Scottish explorer, William Speirs Bruce. It was Bruce who a decade earlier had crossed the sea and discovered Coats Land on the Antarctic continent, which he named after his industrialist backers. Ominously enough, Bruce was lucky to escape disaster when his ship,
Scotia
, came close to being crushed by the ice in the seas that were now
Endurance
’s intended destination.

Progress was painfully slow.
Endurance
, dodging and weaving, took twenty days to cover just 480 miles (770 km), or about one mile an hour southwards. Spirits were lifted by a typical celebration of Christmas, which included the now-traditional indulgence of a massive feast and a hearty sing-song. Hussey enlivened proceedings with an impromptu session on his banjo and there was a big demand for Irish jigs.

By early January the ship had passed 70° south and appeared to have cleared the worst of the pack by judiciously picking her way through the ice belt. Open water lay ahead and
Endurance
began to make good progress, eventually sighting the snow-shrouded peaks of far-off Coats Land. On 12 January they passed the land mapped by Bruce and ran close to new territory on their left which Shackleton named Caird Coast in honour of his prime benefactor, Sir James Caird, another Scottish industrialist to have part of the continent named after himself.

A little later on 15 January,
Endurance
came across a natural bay which had been formed by a glacier disgorging out into the sea. Worsley, the captain, wanted to seize the opportunity, land supplies and set up a base camp immediately. Shackleton disagreed. A base there would have
added about 200 miles to their overland crossing and the proposed journey would be long and hazardous enough without adding to the mileage, he reasoned.

The ship pressed on, making good progress and raising hopes that Vahsel Bay would soon come into sight. A gale struck from the north on 17 and 18 January forcing the ship to seek shelter behind a mighty iceberg which towered over the ship like a floating mountain. The crew watched with considerable apprehension as smaller, highly dangerous bergs hurried past and crashed into each other in the swirling storm. Without the shelter afforded by the giant berg,
Endurance
would have struggled to survive the storm.

As soon as the gale abated, Worsley ploughed on, covering 20 miles (32 km) in a southwesterly direction and spirits were lifted at the prospect of making a landfall in a matter of days. However, these hopes were soon dashed when the pack ice suddenly reappeared and formed an insurmountable barrier.

The strong northerly gale had blown the ice pack against the land mass of Antarctica and
Endurance
was surrounded by an endless plain of ice which stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Only a similar gale from the opposite – southerly – direction offered any hope of opening the ice and releasing them.

It had taken almost seven weeks to reach this spot and the 28 men were now resigned to sit back and wait for the winds that would open up a pathway to the safety of Vahsel Bay. In maritime terms the landing spot was almost within spitting distance, barely 80 miles (130 km) across the horizon.

The party awoke next day to find that the ice had closed all around
Endurance
. The ship was stuck fast. It was 19 January 1915, at latitude 76° 34′.
Endurance
was a tiny, lonely speck of stranded humanity in a million square miles of frozen, treacherous and unmapped seas.

There was no immediate concern on board, partly because there was still perhaps six weeks of summer weather ahead for the ship to work herself free. Experience had shown that the
ice frequently broke up towards the end of the season.
Discovery
, for example, had been imprisoned for two years and not freed until mid-February, the equivalent of late summer in the northern hemisphere. Also, the ship was drifting slowly in a southwesterly direction which, if it continued, would bring them nearer to their intended destination at Vahsel Bay.

But the weather was ominously poor for the time of the year and after ten days of captivity, Shackleton ordered that the ship’s boilers, which devoured half a ton of coal a day, should be allowed to go out to save fuel. As the dull repetitive chugging of the engines died away, an eerie silence descended over the white plain, interrupted only by the idle chattering of the men and occasional yelping of the discontented dogs. Thoughts began to turn to the prospect of the ship remaining in the icy grip of the pack throughout the coming winter.

Winter routine, which men like Crean, Wild and Shackleton knew only too well, gradually took over as they began to reconcile themselves to perhaps months of captivity. Few could take their minds off their predicament. One crew member gloomily recalled that the German explorer, Wilhelm Filchner, was beset in the Weddell ice only a few years earlier and had drifted over 600 miles (1,000 km) before finding open water.

Endurance
, though firmly ice-bound, was still drifting slowly in a southwesterly direction. Ironically, the ship was edging ever more slowly towards Vahsel Bay. But as the days and weeks passed by, it became necessary to make plans for the Stygian gloom of a dark, isolated winter before the sun disappeared for months. For some it would be their first time. For others like Crean, Wild and Shackleton it was all too familiar, but no less threatening.

Shackleton made one final strenuous attempt to free the ship on 14 February when he raised steam and ordered the men out onto the ice with picks and chisels to force their way through the encircling pack. They even employed a makeshift long-bladed saw in an effort to slice through the ice. For two
days the ship strained and heaved and the men on the ice battled to carve out a channel which would free
Endurance
. It was, said Shackleton, ‘terrific labour’ but there were still 400 yards (365 m) of heavy ice blocking the ship’s path.

Every opening won by tremendous physical effort by the men was soon wiped out as the sea immediately froze over in the very low temperatures. It was the moment when Shackleton and experienced hands like Crean realised that the game was up.
Endurance
was helpless, locked in for the winter. Shackleton wrote:

Understandably, the men were deeply disappointed and began to come to terms with the unpalatable prospect of a winter drifting ice-bound in the Weddell Sea.

They considered the obvious option of trekking what was now the 60-odd miles (100 km) across the ice to Vahsel Bay and building a hut for the winter. It was, by any standards, a short journey. Indeed, on clear days it was possible to glimpse the area from the crow’s nest.