Terra Incognita (14 page)

Still it wasn't over. They had hit South Georgia on the uninhabited south coast, not the north coast where the whaling stations were located. They had to penetrate the perilous and unknown interior.

Together with Worsley and Crean, Shackleton trekked for thirty miles over mountains and glaciers no man had crossed. It took them thirty-six hours, and it was winter. To give the other two a psychological boost at a critical juncture he told them they could have half an hour's sleep – then woke them after five minutes without revealing how long they had rested. On 20 May 1916 they arrived at the Stromness whaling station, 800 miles from Elephant Island. The terrified faces of two lads who fled at their wild appearance and unguessed provenance was their first contact with the outside world for seventeen months. Captain Sørlle, the manager of the station, had met Shackleton before, but he didn't recognise him.

‘Who are you?' he asked.

The quiet reply came back, ‘My name is Shackleton.'

Then, ‘When was the war over?'

No betting man would have put odds on it. The Norwegian whalers, hard men even among seafarers, listened to the story of this journey later, and one of them came forward. He laid his hand on Shackleton's arm, and in his halting English he said, ‘These are men.'

‘When I look back on those days', the Boss had said, ‘I have no doubt that Providence guided us . . . I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.' Worsley and Crean, he said, confessed to the same idea of a fourth presence. ‘One feels', he wrote, ‘“the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.'

It seems fitting that the Boss inspired a stanza in the greatest poem of the twentieth century. In his notes to
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot wrote that an experience recounted by Shackleton had inspired these seven lines:

What T. S. Eliot did not know was that the whole fourth-presence story was a later fabrication in order to add a dash of spirituality to the story before it went to press.

Shackleton eventually got his men out, after several agonising attempts. Leonard Hussey, the meteorologist and one of the stranded, recorded in his diary that in the evenings they had occupied themselves by reading out recipes from Marston's penny cookbook and suggesting improvements and alternatives. It had been a testing time. They told Blackborow that they would eat him first, if the seals and penguins stopped coming. Thomas Orde-Lees irritated everyone; they said he was mean-spirited and tetchy. Even before Elephant Island, Shackleton had privately referred to him as the Old Lady. He had been chosen primarily for his mechanical expertise, and had tested the motor-sledges in Switzerland.

On a muggy Cambridge afternoon, under the beady eye of the archivist at the Scott Polar Research Institute, I read his unpublished diary, scrawled in pencil between food lists in a small leather bank pass-book. I had read so very many diaries by then, but when I held the tattered originals I saw worlds in the cramped, unpunctuated, spidery handwriting, splashed with blubber and seawater. Orde-Lees' reputation as a quartermaster reached beyond the grave when I found a darning needle – a precious commodity on Elephant Island – in the creased gutter of his diary. He noted, ‘There is a clique up against me to whom Wild gives too much head. I am called a jew.' The diary mostly concerns skinning penguins, but it leaps to life when the rescue vessel appears. The Old Lady writes about the makeshift flagpole behind camp which jammed, with the result that Shackleton, standing on the deck of the ship and straining his eyes, thought it was at half mast, and that someone had died.

On the long journey home to England Sir Ernest travelled free; kings and presidents entertained him. He never let the crowds down: as Roland Huntford said in his biography, he had the instincts of a showman. On another Cambridge day, this time assisted by the beady-eyed archivist, I found a bunch of flimsy green and pink fliers printed in Los Andes, a town on the Chilean and Argentinian border. The sheets read, in Spanish and English, ‘Shackleton is the crystallisation of human endeavour, triumphing over the forces of nature, Hosanna! Together [with Wild] they make the symbol of those lofty sentiments of Love for the Truth, of one's Country, of Science, and of Humanity, which bears Mankind onwards with ardour towards its ideal, which places men above suffering, above destiny, which makes them heroes . . . Hosanna!'

∗

Shackleton watched over his subordinates like a broody hen, quietly assessing each man's emotional state. If someone was weakening physically he would order extra hot milk all round, without revealing who needed it, so that the man would not carry the invalid's burden. When Frank Wild had lost sensation in his hands, Shackleton tried to force him to take his gloves. Wild refused. ‘If you don't', said Shackleton, ‘I'll throw them into the sea.'

His leadership skills had been learned in the hard school of the merchant navy, not the rigid and hermetic world of the Royal Navy, and back at home he didn't fit in polar circles because he wasn't a Navy man. Throughout his life he flitted from scheme to scheme, even standing at one time as a Unionist MP for Dundee. He wasn't perfect, as a man or as an expedition leader. He drank too much, smoked too much and had affairs with other people's wives. That's why so many people like him. He's like the rest of us. Hurley noted in his diary, ‘Sir Ernest's humour in the morning before breakfast is very erratic.' During one of the attempts to get the men off Elephant Island, Worsley recorded that Shackleton ‘was human enough . . . to become irritable with me', and he treated the gale which blew up as if it were Worsley's fault. The latter responds heroically: ‘I didn't mind; I was glad that he should have some little outlet for his misery.'

Before setting out on the first great sledging journey, with Scott and Wilson, not only had Shackleton never put up a tent before, he had never slept in a sleeping bag. Yet his men were devoted to him. Frank Wild, who took over as leader of the
Quest
expedition after Shackleton's death, said this at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on 13 November 1922: ‘I am in the unique position of having served with
all
the British Antarctic explorers of repute since my first voyage with the
Discovery
and of having an intimate first-hand knowledge of their work in the field. My opinion is that for qualities of leadership, ability to organise, courage in the face of danger, and resource in the overcoming of difficulties, Shackleton stands foremost, and must be ranked as the first explorer of his age.' Apsley Cherry-Garrard, who went south with Scott,' made a comparison which has been hijacked and rearranged by almost every explorer ever since: ‘For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.' The finest decision ever made in the Antarctic belongs to the Boss. It was when he decided, during the
Nimrod
expedition, to turn back just ninety-seven miles from the Pole.

Although Shackleton knew that the Southern Ocean was ‘pitiless almost to weakness', he was an indefatigable optimist, and his power to inspire hope and courage amid seemingly desperate misery has scarcely been equalled in the rich history of human endeavour. ‘It is in these circumstances,' Hurley wrote, ‘stripped of the veneers of civilisation, that one sees the real man . . . A born poet, through all his oppressions he could see glory and beauty in the stern forces which had reduced us to destitution . . .'

On another expedition a colleague noted in his diary that for Shackleton ‘Antarctica did not exist. It was the inner, not the outer world that engrossed him.' To the Boss, the continent represented much more than a landmass. ‘I have ideals,' he said, ‘and far away in my own white south I open my arms to the romance of it all.' Yes boys, we will be home again, he wrote:

The war loomed over the
Endurance
expedition like a thundercloud. When it was declared, the Boss offered the services of the whole expedition to the Admiralty. The telegram came back saying simply ‘Proceed'. Over the months and years on the ice, Shackleton wrote in
South
, ‘The war was a constant subject of discussion . . . and many campaigns were fought on the map during the long months of drifting.' When he finally learnt of the horrors he wrote, ‘We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad', and in Australia, on his way home, he issued a messianic appeal to Australian men urging them to fight, drawing the analogy of ‘the white warfare of the Antarctic and the red warfare of Europe' from his extensive and well-polished arsenal of rhetoric. Like Scott, he was used as a national icon at home to bolster morale. One newspaper wrote, after the news of the epic rescue mission had broken, ‘As long as Englishmen are prepared to do this kind of thing, we need not lie awake dreading the boys of the dachshund breed.' Conan Doyle wrote, ‘We can pass the eight Dreadnoughts, if we are sure of the eight Shackletons.' Every single one of the men who had sat it out on Elephant Island went off to fight when he got home, and Shackleton dedicated
South
‘To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders'.

Even in peacetime, war has been used as an image for the exploration of the continent. Admiral Byrd, one of the grand old men of America's Antarctica, wrote, ‘The Antarctic was like war, in one respect', and after listing names of ice camps in his book
Discovery
, published in the States in 1935, he says, ‘these names were later to be burned into the minds of my men, to become as bitterly unforgettable as the localities of hard-fought engagements to the memories of soldiers.' On Frank Hurley's first night in London after the
Endurance
expedition, the city was bombed. He ends his book, ‘Emerged from a war with nature, we were destined to take our places in a war of nations. Life is one long call to conflict, anyway.'

∗

When I got back to McMurdo from the valley I set about making arrangements to travel overland to Cape Royds to see Shackleton's hut before the sea ice melted out. Ann, the long-haired photographer, wanted to shoot the interior of the hut.

‘You go and get all the survival gear and some food', she drawled, ‘and I'll score us a vehicle again.'

The food stores were run by a tall, straight-backed woman called Sarah with clear eyes, long hair and a seraphic countenance. For five years she had been in charge of what people took to their camps to eat and drink. She relied almost exclusively on dried, canned and frozen food, though some fresh goods arrived on planes from New Zealand.

‘I'm pushing dried figs quite hard right now,' she said, ‘as I was sent 900 pounds, rather than the 90 pounds I ordered.'

‘Do people eat more down here because it's cold?' I asked as I walked up and down the aisles picking up ziplock bags of trail-mix and cartons of juice.

‘Sure – they need to. And I notice that in a warm season they eat a lot less than in a cold season,' Sarah said. ‘Which makes my job difficult as I have to place my order eighteen months in advance.'

Food assumes a role of abnormal importance in a place deficient in so many of life's pleasures. In his book
Life at the Bottom
, published in 1977, the American journalist John Langone mentions a submarine commander who wintered over in Antarctica and reported a group obsession with food, going on to say the men cared desperately if meals weren't up to scratch as food served as a substitute for sex. In the early days culinary ingenuity occupied a good deal of time. One man assured himself of lifelong popularity by producing minty peas, revealing later that he had squirted toothpaste into the pot. Christmas and Midwinter Day menus were elaborately recorded and printed up. During the hard times out sledging they played the game Shut-eye, or Whose Portion is This? when food was doled out. Someone named the recipient of each plate with his eyes closed, so the cook couldn't be accused of favouritism. It wasn't a game, really; it was a peace-keeping mechanism. When rations dwindled they began having food dreams, and spoke bitterly to each other about turning down a second helping of such-and-such ten years previously.