South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition, 1914-1917
The main motor-sledge, with a little fitting from the carpenter,
carried our largest boat admirably. For the next boat four ordinary
sledges were lashed together, but we were dubious as to the strength of
this contrivance, and as a matter of fact it broke down quickly under
strain.... The ship is still afloat, with the spurs of the pack driven
through her and holding her up. The forecastle-head is under water, the
decks are burst up by the pressure, the wreckage lies around in dismal
confusion, but over all the blue ensign flies still.
“This afternoon Sallie’s three youngest pups, Sue’s Sirius, and Mrs.
Chippy, the carpenter’s cat, have to be shot. We could not undertake
the maintenance of weaklings under the new conditions. Macklin, Crean,
and the carpenter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather
badly. We propose making a short trial journey to-morrow, starting with
two of the boats and the ten sledges. The number of dog teams has been
increased to seven, Greenstreet taking charge of the new additional
team, consisting of Snapper and Sallie’s four oldest pups. We have ten
working sledges to relay with five teams. Wild’s and Hurley’s teams
will haul the cutter with the assistance of four men. The whaler and
the other boats will follow, and the men who are hauling them will be
able to help with the cutter at the rough places. We cannot hope to
make rapid progress, but each mile counts. Crean this afternoon has a
bad attack of snow-blindness.”
The weather on the morning of October 30 was overcast and misty, with
occasional falls of snow. A moderate north-easterly breeze was blowing.
We were still living on extra food, brought from the ship when we
abandoned her, and the sledging and boating rations were intact. These
rations would provide for twenty-eight men for fifty-six days on full
rations, but we could count on getting enough seal and penguin meat to
at least double this time. We could even, if progress proved too
difficult and too injurious to the boats, which we must guard as our
ultimate means of salvation, camp on the nearest heavy floe, scour the
neighbouring pack for penguins and seals, and await the outward rift of
the pack, to open and navigable water.
“This plan would avoid the grave dangers we are now incurring of
getting entangled in impassable pressure-ridges and possibly
irretrievably damaging the boats, which are bound to suffer in rough
ice; it would also minimize the peril of the ice splitting under us, as
it did twice during the night at our first camp. Yet I feel sure that
it is the right thing to attempt a march, since if we can make five or
seven miles a day to the north-west our chance of reaching safety in
the months to come will be increased greatly. There is a psychological
aspect to the question also. It will be much better for the men in
general to feel that, even though progress is slow, they are on their
way to land than it will be simply to sit down and wait for the tardy
north-westerly drift to take us out of this cruel waste of ice. We will
make an attempt to move. The issue is beyond my power either to predict
or to control.”
That afternoon Wild and I went out in the mist and snow to find a road
to the north-east. After many devious turnings to avoid the heavier
pressure-ridges, we pioneered a way for at least a mile and a half. and
then returned by a rather better route to the camp. The pressure now
was rapid in movement and our floe was suffering from the shakes and
jerks of the ice. At 3 p.m., after lunch, we got under way, leaving
Dump Camp a mass of debris. The order was that personal gear must not
exceed two pounds per man, and this meant that nothing but bare
necessaries was to be taken on the march. We could not afford to cumber
ourselves with unnecessary weight. Holes had been dug in the snow for
the reception of private letters and little personal trifles, the Lares
and Penates of the members of the Expedition, and into the privacy of
these white graves were consigned much of sentimental value and not a
little of intrinsic worth. I rather grudged the two pounds allowance
per man, owing to my keen anxiety to keep weights at a minimum, but
some personal belongings could fairly be regarded as indispensable. The
journey might be a long one, and there was a possibility of a winter in
improvised quarters on an inhospitable coast at the other end. A man
under such conditions needs something to occupy his thoughts, some
tangible memento of his home and people beyond the seas. So sovereigns
were thrown away and photographs were kept. I tore the fly-leaf out of
the Bible that Queen Alexandra had given to the ship, with her own
writing in it, and also the wonderful page of Job containing the verse:
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.
—[Job 38:29–30]
The other Bible, which Queen Alexandra had given for the use of the
shore party, was down below in the lower hold in one of the cases when
the ship received her death-blow. Suitcases were thrown away; these
were retrieved later as material for making boots, and some of them,
marked “solid leather,” proved, to our disappointment, to contain a
large percentage of cardboard. The manufacturer would have had
difficulty in convincing us at the time that the deception was anything
short of criminal.
The pioneer sledge party, consisting of Wordie, Hussey, Hudson, and
myself, carrying picks and shovels, started to break a road through the
pressure-ridges for the sledges carrying the boats. The boats, with
their gear and the sledges beneath them, weighed each more than a ton.
The cutter was smaller than the whaler, but weighed more and was a much
more strongly built boat. The whaler was mounted on the sledge part of
the Girling tractor forward and two sledges amidships and aft. These
sledges were strengthened with cross-timbers and shortened oars fore
and aft. The cutter was mounted on the aero-sledge. The sledges were
the point of weakness. It appeared almost hopeless to prevent them
smashing under their heavy loads when travelling over rough
pressure-ice which stretched ahead of us for probably 300 miles. After
the pioneer sledge had started the seven dog teams got off. They took
their sledges forward for half a mile, then went back for the other
sledges. Worsley took charge of the two boats, with fifteen men
hauling, and these also had to be relayed. It was heavy work for dogs
and men, but there were intervals of comparative rest on the backward
journey, after the first portion of the load had been taken forward. We
passed over two opening cracks, through which killers were pushing
their ugly snouts, and by 5 p.m. had covered a mile in a
north-north-westerly direction. The condition of the ice ahead was
chaotic, for since the morning increased pressure had developed and the
pack was moving and crushing in all directions. So I gave the order to
pitch camp for the night on flat ice, which, unfortunately, proved to
be young and salty. The older pack was too rough and too deeply laden
with snow to offer a suitable camping-ground. Although we had gained
only one mile in a direct line, the necessary deviations made the
distance travelled at least two miles, and the relays brought the
distance marched up to six miles. Some of the dog teams had covered at
least ten miles. I set the watch from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m., one hour for
each man in each tent in rotation.
During the night snow fell heavily, and the floor-cloths of the tents
got wet through, as the temperature had risen to +25° Fahr. One of the
things we hoped for in those days was a temperature in the
neighbourhood of zero, for then the snow surface would be hard, we
would not be troubled by damp, and our gear would not become covered in
soft snow. The killers were blowing all night, and a crack appeared
about 20 ft. from the camp at 2 a.m. The ice below us was quite thin
enough for the killers to break through if they took a fancy to do so,
but there was no other camping-ground within our reach and we had to
take the risk. When morning came the snow was falling so heavily that
we could not see more than a few score yards ahead, and I decided not
to strike camp. A path over the shattered floes would be hard to find,
and to get the boats into a position of peril might be disastrous.
Rickenson and Worsley started back for Dump Camp at 7 a.m. to get some
wood and blubber for the fire, and an hour later we had hoosh, with one
biscuit each. At 10 a.m. Hurley and Hudson left for the old camp in
order to bring some additional dog-pemmican, since there were no seals
to be found near us. Then, as the weather cleared, Worsley and I made a
prospect to the west and tried to find a practicable road. A large floe
offered a fairly good road for at least another mile to the north-west,
and we went back prepared for another move. The weather cleared a
little, and after lunch we struck camp. I took Rickenson, Kerr, Wordie,
and Hudson as a breakdown gang to pioneer a path among the
pressure-ridges. Five dog teams followed. Wild’s and Hurley’s teams
were hitched on to the cutter and they started off in splendid style.
They needed to be helped only once; indeed fourteen dogs did as well or
even better than eighteen men. The ice was moving beneath and around us
as we worked towards the big floe, and where this floe met the smaller
ones there was a mass of pressed-up ice, still in motion, with water
between the ridges. But it is wonderful what a dozen men can do with
picks and shovels. We could cut a road through a pressure-ridge about
14 ft. high in ten minutes and leave a smooth, or comparatively smooth,
path for the sledges and teams.
CHAPTER V
OCEAN CAMP
In spite of the wet, deep snow and the halts occasioned by thus having
to cut our road through the pressure-ridges, we managed to march the
best part of a mile towards our goal, though the relays and the
deviations again made the actual distance travelled nearer six miles.
As I could see that the men were all exhausted I gave the order to
pitch the tents under the lee of the two boats, which afforded some
slight protection from the wet snow now threatening to cover
everything. While so engaged one of the sailors discovered a small pool
of water, caused by the snow having thawed on a sail which was lying in
one of the boats. There was not much—just a sip each; but, as one man
wrote in his diary, “One has seen and tasted cleaner, but seldom more
opportunely found water.”
Next day broke cold and still with the same wet snow, and in the
clearing light I could see that with the present loose surface, and
considering how little result we had to show for all our strenuous
efforts of the past four days, it would be impossible to proceed for
any great distance. Taking into account also the possibility of leads
opening close to us, and so of our being able to row north-west to
where we might find land, I decided to find a more solid floe and there
camp until conditions were more favourable for us to make a second
attempt to escape from our icy prison. To this end we moved our tents
and all our gear to a thick, heavy old floe about one and a half miles
from the wreck and there made our camp. We called this “Ocean Camp.” It
was with the utmost difficulty that we shifted our two boats. The
surface was terrible—like nothing that any of us had ever seen around
us before. We were sinking at times up to our hips, and everywhere the
snow was two feet deep.
I decided to conserve our valuable sledging rations, which would be so
necessary for the inevitable boat journey, as much as possible, and to