The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [50]
On the 19th, with the blizzard still in full spate, the men were awakened by Shackleton bringing them their breakfast.
“The Boss is wonderful,” wrote Wordie, “cheering everyone and far more active than any other person in camp.” At least there was now plenty of food, and the men consumed prodigious amounts of blubber and seal steak. Hurley, Clark, and Greenstreet were enlisted as cooks, Green being one of the men on “the sick list.”
With shelter nonexistent, the sleeping bags were now sodden. The heat of the men's bodies melted not just the snow underneath them, but the frozen, reeking guano of the penguin rookery on which they lay.
For months the men had dreamt of land, and for long days and nights in the boats they had fought for it. But now the hard truth dawned on them that the conditions they had so far encountered on this particular piece of land did not represent some terrible aberration, or a run of atrocious weather; this was the way it was going to be as long as they were on Elephant Island. On April 19, a quiet rebellion against these cruel circumstances occurred among the sailors.
“Some of the men were showing signs of demoralization,” Shackleton noted. They had neglected to place their gloves and hats inside their shirts during the night, with the result that these items were frozen solid come morning—demonstrating, as Shackleton stated, “the proverbial carelessness of the sailor.” They used this negligence as an excuse not to do any work.
“Only by rather drastic methods were they induced to turn to,” wrote Shackleton. What happened here? As at Patience Camp, the diaries leave one with a sense that all the facts have not been plainly spoken.
On April 17, Shackleton led the men back out to sea and around to a spit of land seven miles to the west of their landing, which Frank Wild had discovered. The second campsite became known as Cape Wild—Cape Bloody Wild by the sailors—after both its “founder” and its weather. A blizzard raged for five straight days after the crew's landing.
“Some of the party … had become despondant,” wrote Wild, “& were in a ‘What's the use' sort of mood & had to be driven to work, none too gently either.” Wordie says, almost in passing, that “dejected men were dragged from their bags and set to work.” Hurley's pointed diary entry on this day, however, is blistering:
Elephant Island
“Such a wild & inhospitable coast I have never beheld. Yet there is a profound grandeur about these savage cliffs with the drifting snow & veiling clouds.…I thought of those lines of Service.—
‘A land of savage grandeur that measures each man at his Worth.' “ (Hurley, diary)
Now that the party are established at an immovable base I review their general behaviour during the memorable escape from the ice. … It is regrettable to state that many conducted themselves in a manner unworthy of gentlemen & British sailors.… Of a fair proportion of the [company] I am convinced they would starve or freeze if left to their own resources on this island, for there is such an improvident disregard for their equipment, as to allow it to be buried in snow, or be carried off by the winds. Those who shirk duties, or lack a fair sense of practicability should not be in these parts. These are harsh places where it takes all one's time & energies to attend to the individual, & so make himself as effective & useful a unit as possible.
It was perhaps no coincidence that Shackleton chose the following day, April 20, to gather his company to make a momentous announcement: A party of men under his command would shortly set out in the James Caird and make for the whaling stations of South Georgia. The stupendous