The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [23]
He was fond of claiming that his cabin was too stuffy, and slept instead in the 0° passageway; he relished shocking his shipmates by taking snow baths on the ice. His diaries are anecdotal, with a keen eye for situational comedy and for the beauty of the landscape around him. Like Shackleton, he was a romantic, dreamily in search of buried treasure, of improbable journeys. Yet for all Worsley's impracticalities, he was an expertly skilled sailor. Before moving to England, he served for several years in the New Zealand Government Steamer Service, a time spent mostly in the Pacific, where he learned to sail small boats in heavy surf.
Captain Frank Worsley
“The skipper's principle whims were his eagerness to announce at every port at which we touched on the way out that this was, ‘Sir Ernest Shackleton's flag ship Endurance bound for the Antarctic on a voyage of discovery,' and his persistence in declaring that the cabins etc. on board are so stuffy that he had to sleep outside in the passages, which is what he actually does; but he is very much ‘all there' in spite of these quaint little peculiarities.…” ( Lees, diary)
Lionel Greenstreet, a young officer in the merchant service, between commissions, had signed on to the Endurance at short notice— twenty-four hours before the ship sailed from Plymouth—when the original first officer withdrew to join the war effort. His father was a respected captain in the New Zealand Shipping Company. Perceptive, critical, and a hard worker, he chose as companions the taciturn Clark and the rather superior Frank Hurley.
Huberht Hudson, the navigator, was the son of a minister and had grown up in an educated family, but in a tough East End neighborhood. He had left a school sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Carpenters at age fourteen, to be apprenticed at Trinity House. He was a “mate” in the merchant service, but was studying hard for his “master” rank while on the Endurance. He was regarded by his shipmates as extraordinarily good-hearted and unselfish, although at times a bit “touched.”
“One never quite knows,” wrote Lees, “whether he is on the brink of a mental breakdown or bubbling over with suppressed intellectuality.” He earned the nickname “Buddha” after appearing in a bedsheet with a kettle lid tied to his head at a small costume party held early in the expedition on board the ship. He was also the most proficient catcher of penguins for the ship larder.
A handful of men kept busy despite the expedition's setback. Charles Green, the cook, and Blackborow, the steward, worked hard in the galley from early morning until night, preparing meals for twenty-eight men. Green was the son of a master baker, and had run away to sea at the age of twenty-one, becoming a cook in the Merchant Navy. When war broke out, he joined a Royal Mail Line passenger liner, which docked in Buenos Aires around the time Shackleton was cleaning house. Hearing that the Endurance cook had been sacked, Green applied for the job; he had in fact met Worsley once before, in Sardinia. Blackborow, the eldest of nine children, grew up in Newport, Wales, near the town's active docks in a seafaring family. A hint of temper, the capability of plainly speaking his mind, was perceived to lurk beneath his pleasant, easygoing manner. At only twenty, he was the youngest member of the crew.
Hudson with young Emperor Penguin chicks, 12 January 1915; Lat. 74° 45S, 22.33W
The navigator became renowned for his penguin-catching skills.
Cook skinning a penguin in the galley
On the Endurance, Green's day began at dawn and ended only after dinner. The son of a pastry chef, he baked twelve loaves of bread a day, in addition to skinning and preparing game captured on the ice.
Chippy McNish was also rarely idle. He was not merely a carpenter, but a master craftsman and shipwright, and was constantly