The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [32]
“It is hard to write what I feel,” wrote Shackleton. “To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home. … Now, straining and groaning, her timbers cracking and her wounds gaping, she is slowly giving up her sentient life at the very outset of her career.”
Before departing for good, Hurley had taken one last look around their old quarters in the Ritz, already a foot deep in water. The sound of beams splintering in the darkness was alarming, and he abruptly left. But of all sights and sounds, it was the clock still ticking comfortably in the cozy wardroom as the water rose that perhaps most unnerved him.
Shackleton was the last to leave. He hoisted the blue ensign, and the men on the ice gave three hearty cheers. By a cruel accident, the ship's emergency light had switched on, and as its circuit was intermittently broken, the Endurance seemed to all hands to bid them a final, sad, flickering farewell.
The wreck of the Endurance
“The floes are in a state of agitation throughout the day, and in consequence, I had the cinema trained on the ship the whole time. I secured the unique film of the mast collapsing. Toward evening, as though conscious of having achieved its purpose, the floes were quiescent again.” ( Hurley, diary)
The wreck of the Endurance
“Awful calamity that has overtaken the ship that has been our home for over 12 months.…We are homeless & adrift on the sea ice.” ( Hurley, diary)
Shackleton's caption for this photograph in South was “The End.”
Patience Camp
For the Crew of the Endurance From Alexandra, May 31, 1914
May the Lord help you to do your duty & guide you through all dangers by land and sea.
“May you see the Works of the Lord & all His wonders in the Deep.”
—INSCRIPTION IN SHIP BIBLE
PRESENTED BY QUEEN ALEXANDRA
Assemble on floe: Boss explains situation and we turn in,” wrote Wordie. They had set up camp on what appeared to be a stable floe only some 100 yards from their shattered ship. As far as could be seen in every direction around them, the ice rose in contorted, colossal fragments. The temperature had fallen to –15°. They were 350 miles from the nearest land.
Each man was issued a sleeping bag and assigned to one of five tents.
“There was only 18 skin bags & we cast lots for them,” wrote McNish. “I was lucky for the first time in my life for I drew one.” By some piece of subterfuge that did not escape the sailors, most of the officers happened to draw the less desirable Jaeger wool bags.
“There was some crooked work in the drawing,” Able Seaman Bakewell recorded, “as Sir Ernest, Mr. Wild… Captain Worsley and some of the other officers all drew wool bags. The fine warm fur bags all went to the men under them.”
Lying on groundsheets that were not waterproof, the men listened to the grind ing and booming of the floes, like distant thunder, travelling through the ice directly under their heads, the sound now unmuffled by their ship's stout wooden walls. Their linen tents were so thin that the moon could be seen through them. Three times in the night, the floe on which they were camped cracked beneath them. Three times they had to pick up tent, sleeping bag, and groundsheet and pitch them all again.
“A terrible night,” wrote James, “with the ship outline dark against the sky & the noise of the pressure against her… seeming like the cries of a living creature.”
Shackleton himself did not return to his tent, but paced the ice, listening to the pressure and staring at the light in his ship. “Like a lamp in a cottage window, it braved the night,” he wrote, “until in the early morning the Endurance received a particularly violent squeeze. There was a sound of rending beams and the