The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [44]
At 1:30 p.m., the boats pushed off. There was a heavy swell, and the lanes of open water zigzagged erratically between the lurching floes.
“Our first day in the water was one of the coldest and most dangerous of the expedition,” wrote Bakewell. “The ice was running riot. It was a hard race to keep our boats in the open leads.… [W]e had many narrow escapes from being crushed when the larger masses of the pack would come together.”
The men had been trapped in the ice for fifteen months. But their real ordeal had just begun.
First landing on Elephant Island
April, 15, 1915: Solid land after 497 days on ice and sea. “The Boss, the Skipper, the cook and Hurley went on board the ‘Wills,' and helped her crew to take her up a small creek in the rocks.… She then made trips to and fro under Tom Crean's charge.” (Wordie, diary)
Into the Boats
4–10–16
Last night, a night of tension & anxiety—on a par with the night of the ship's destruction.… Sea & wind increase & have to draw up onto an old isolated floe and pray to God it will remain entire throughout the night. No sleep for 48 Hours, all wet Cold & miserable with a N.E. Blizzard raging … no sight of land & Pray for cessation of these wild conditions.
—FRANK HURLEY, diary
In the gathering dusk of the first night at sea, Shackleton and his men camped on a floe measuring some 200 by 100 feet, which rocked visibly in the ocean swell. Darkness came early, at around 7 p.m., but it was a mild evening, with the temperature around 18°. After a hot meal cooked by Green on the blubber stove, the men retired to their tents.
“Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp,” Shackleton wrote. “I started to walk across the floes in order to warn the watchman to look carefully for cracks, and as I was passing the men's tent the floe lifted on the crest of a swell and cracked right under my feet.” As Shackleton watched, the crack ran beneath the sailors' tent and emptied How and Holness, who was still in his bag, into the water. How struggled out, and Shackleton, grasping Holness's bag, hove it onto the ice before the edges of the floe clamped together again.
There was no more sleep that night. Hudson generously offered dry clothes to Holness, who was grumbling that he had lost his tobacco. Shackleton issued hot milk and Streimer's Polar Nut Food—a treat from the uncracked sledging rations—to all hands, who huddled around the blubber stove. From the leads of dark water around them, the blowing of the killer whales punctuated the long hours of the night.
When dawn broke at 6 a.m., the men discovered that the floe was surrounded by loose ice. While all hands waited anxiously for an opening to clear, a dangerous swell was growing, crashing the ice fragments together, as Lees noted, “with a force sufficient to smash a moderately sized yacht.”
By the time the boats were launched at 8 a.m., the wind was high and squally, at times reaching gale force. For two hours the men rowed against the heavy swell through a tortuous network of channels and leads, then through “survival ice,” old hummocky floes and brash at the outer margins of the pack. The crew's all-meat diet had taken a toll, as Lees had predicted. Lacking even minimal carbohydrates over the past months, the men working the oars were soon exhausted.
A light haze had descended upon an otherwise mild day, obscuring their intended landfall, Clarence or Elephant island, now a mere sixty or so miles distant. The overloaded, unwieldy boats did not allow for refinements in navigation. The Stancomb Wills in particular was already cause for grave concern, lacking “the canvas” to keep abreast of her more seaworthy companions. Shackleton had given orders that all three were to stay in hailing distance of one another, but this was not always easily accomplished.