The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [34]
“The condition of the surface is atrocious,” wrote Hurley. “There appears scarcely a square yard of smooth surface which is covered by a labyrinth of hummocks & ridges.” After a conference with his ad hoc advisory committee, consisting of Wild, Worsley, and Hurley, Shackleton acknowledged that further efforts were futile. He announced that they would pitch a new camp and await the breakup of the ice, which would allow them to take the boats into open water. His hope was that the drift of the pack would carry them northwest to within striking distance of Paulet Island, nearly 400 miles distant. Nordenskjöld's Swedish expedition had built a hut there in 1902, and Shackleton knew it to be stocked with emergency supplies; he himself had helped provision the relief operation for the expedition twelve years earlier. From here, a small overland party would continue west to Graham Land, and make its way to Wilhelmina Bay, where they could expect to meet up with whaling vessels. Meanwhile, the new camp, established on a sturdy floe some twenty feet thick only a mile and a half from the wreck of the Endurance, was christened Ocean Camp.
Hauling the James Caird
“We all followed with the heavier boat on the composite sledge. It was terrific work to keep it going. We all did our best but were practically exhausted by the time we reached the new camp, No. 4, barely 3?miles away” (Lees, diary). Loaded, the boats weighed as much as a ton each.
A distant view of the camp
When the march was abandoned, Ocean Camp was established on a solid floe roughly a mile and a half from the wreck of the Endurance, which was still visible in the distance; the tip of its broken mast and funnel can just be seen over the horizon to the left of the photograph.
Throughout the ensuing days, salvage teams ferried back and forth between “Dump Camp,” the site where the Endurance had been abandoned, and their new quarters. Many objects removed from the ship during the disaster had sunk into the snow and become embedded in the ice. Nonetheless, much was retrieved, including part of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The entire wheelhouse, now under three feet of water, was removed from the ship's deck and put to use as a storehouse. McNish hacked an opening through the deck above the old Ritz, disgorging various cases of food, some more useful than others: Containers of sugar and flour floated out to loud cheers, while the appearances of walnuts, onions, and soda carbonate were met with groans.
It was during this time of precarious digging in the bowels of the wrecked ship that Hurley determined to rescue his negatives.
“During the day,” he wrote, “I hacked through the thick walls of the refrigerator to retrieve the negatives stored therein. They were located beneath four feet of mushy ice & by stripping to the waist & diving under I hauled them out. Fortunately they are soldered up in double tin linings, so I am hopeful they may not have suffered by their submersion.”
As the new plan called for eventual recourse to the boats, the weight of personal possessions allowed to each man was still strictly limited. But when Hurley returned with his precious negatives, Shackleton relented.
“I spend the day with Sir Ernest selecting the finest of my negatives from the year's collection,” Hurley wrote on November 9. He resoldered 120 and dumped about 400. “This unfortunate reduction is essential, as a drastic cutting down in weight must be effected owing to the very limited space that will be at disposal in boat transport.” The selected negatives included twenty Paget color as well as 100 whole and half glass plates. He also retrieved an album of already developed prints.
The wreck
“The wardroom is a pile of broken timber, while as to the fore-hold I did not dare go in lest I should