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On Elephant Island

The James Caird, Dudley Docker, and Stancomb Wills safely ashore at Cape Valentine, Elephant Island. The men pull the Caird to higher ground; two figures, one in the distance, can be seen seated to the left of the boat, one of whom is probably Blackborow, crippled by frostbite. Off-loaded supplies can be seen on the beach above the boats.

On Elephant Island; the first drink and hot food for three and a half days.

Left to right: Lees, Wordie, Clark, Rickinson (who would later suffer a heart attack), How, Shackleton, Bakewell, Kerr, and Wild.

They had spent seven fearful days in open boats in the South Atlantic, at the beginning of an Antarctic winter; 170 days drifting on a floe of ice with inadequate food and shelter; and not since December 5, 1914—497 days before—had they set foot on land.

After meals of seal steaks, the men laid their bags on the solid earth and turned in for the night.

“I did not sleep much,” Bakewell recalled, “just lay in my damp sleeping bag and relaxed. It was hard for me to realize that I was on good old solid earth once more. I got up several times during the night and joined the others, who were like me, just too happy to sleep. We would gather around the fire, eat and drink a little, have a smoke and talk over some of the past adventures.”

As they would soon discover, they had arrived on an abnormally fine day. Elephant Island offered salvation, but a grimmer or more hostile piece of land was difficult to conceive. The narrow shingle beach onto which they had drawn the boats offered little protection from high seas, and the morning after landing, Wild set out with Marston, Crean, Vincent, and McCarthy in the Dudley Docker to scout the coast for a better camp. He returned in the evening, after dark, with the news that there was a suitable place seven miles down the north coast. At daybreak on the 17th, the weary men loaded up the boats, leaving many boxes of sledging rations stacked against the rocks. No one had the energy to load them—and this at least ensured an emergency supply of provisions in the event a second boat journey was required. Shortly after they shoved off, another gale arose, threatening to sweep the boats out to sea.

Elephant Island

Cape Valentine is thought to have got its name because the sealer-explorer who charted the South Shetlands in the early nineteenth century came through on St. Valentine's Day. “Scenically, our present environments are some of the grandest I have ever set eyes on. Cliffs that throw their serrated scarps a thousand feet into the skies are interspersed with glaciers that tumble in crevassed cascades down to the sea. Here they present walls of blue ice 100 to 180 feet in height.” (Hurley, diary)

“Weathered what we call the Castle Rock and finally reached our destination,” wrote Wordie, “more exhausted I think, than by the previous boat journey.”

The new camp offered a somewhat larger, gravelly beach, but was still foreboding.

“Such a wild & inhospitable coast I have never beheld,” Hurley wrote upon their arrival, and evoked the “vast headland, black and menacing that rose from a seething surf 1,200 feet above our heads & so sheer as to have the appearance of overhanging.” On the other hand, wildlife was abundant, with seals, gentoo and ringed penguins, and even limpets in the shallow waters, although no sign of the elephant seal from which the island took its name.

Many of the men were still incapacitated. The most critical were Blackborow with severe frostbite, Hudson with frostbite and a mysterious pain in his lower back, and Rickinson, who was believed to have suffered a heart attack. The others on the sick list were simply “stove in.”

After meals of seal steaks and hot milk, the men pitched their flimsy tents as high above the tidal mark of their new camp as possible, and retired to their wet sleeping bags. But a blizzard rose in the night, ripping the largest tent to ribbons and bringing