The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [12]
Worsley directing helmsman through the ice
Shielded from the wind, Worsley semaphores directions to the ship's helmsman.
As the Endurance continued south, she entered fields of snowy ice, enormous floes up to 150 square miles. “All day we have been utilizing the ship as a battering ram,” Hurley wrote in his diary in mid-December. “We admire our sturdy little ship, which seems to take a delight herself in combating our common enemy, shattering the floes in grand style. When the ship comes in impact with the ice she stops, dead, shivering from truck to kelson; then almost immediately a long crack starts from our bows, into which we steam, and, like a wedge slowly force the crack sufficiently to enable a passage to be made.”
Days of thick mist opened onto clear days of radiant sunshine. During the long dusk of the austral summer night the broken pack appeared to float like so many giant white water lilies on an azure pond. The ship passed crabeater seals basking on the ice and crowds of always entertaining Adélie and emperor penguins, who would pop up unexpectedly on floes and clamor at her as she passed. Gradually the bodies of open water got smaller and smaller, until the whole sea looked like a vast snowfield, broken only here and there by lanes and channels.
Christmas Day was celebrated with mince pies and Christmas pudding, colorful flags and table settings, and a singsong in the evening. Magnificent sunsets were admired from the ship's rail, and on the last day of 1914, after a difficult morning spent ramming through a bad patch of ice, the Endurance crossed the Antarctic Circle in a dreamlike twilight reflected in calm waters. On the night of January 1, 1915, the Scottish contingent singing “Auld Lang Syne” woke the “respectable members” who had retired for the evening. Lees peevishly noted, “Scotchmen always are a nuisance at New Year and never have voices worth speaking of.” Meanwhile, on the bridge,
Endurance in pack ice
“Pack-ice might be described as a gigantic and interminable jigsaw puzzle devised by nature.” ( Shackleton, South)
Shackleton, Wild, Worsley, and Hudson shook hands all around and wished each other a happy New Year.
The weather by now was usually overcast, and the Endurance was encountering more icebergs, grand structures that rose like fantastic sculptures of blue-white marble above the waterline, and which appeared peacock blue below it. The expedition company whiled away the time in domestic pursuits. Lees darned his socks and washed and mended his clothes; Hurley took photographs in the midnight sun. Robert Clark, the biologist, studied the diatomaceous deposits of the Weddell Sea under a microscope. On January 6, the dogs were taken off onto a convenient floe for exercise, the first they'd had since leaving South Georgia a month before; they immediately initiated one of their infamous “scraps,” falling through rotten ice into the water.
Ice conditions on January 7 and 8 forced the ship to backtrack through the pack to seek a better opening, but on January 10, at 72° south, an important landmark was reached: The ship came in sight of Coats Land and began to work her way close to its great 100-foot-high wall of barrier ice. The Endurance was now, with fair going, as little as a week away from Vahsel Bay. With the expectation that she would still return to Buenos Aires or South Georgia for the winter, the expedition's wintering-over shore party were busy writing letters home to be carried with the returning ship.
Berg, observed 21 December, 1914
“[A]t 10:00 a.m. we entered long leads of ice free water, in which were drifting some fine bergs of magnificent forms. One a fine cuniform mass 200 feet high, I photographed.” ( Hurley, diary)
On January 11, the ship's company began the day with a breakfast of Quaker Oats, seal's liver, and bacon. Bad weather forced the Endurance to drift with a large floe. McNish, the carpenter, used this layover to make a small chest of drawers for “the Boss.” Shackleton himself was observed to be looking “dead tired”; he had