The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [56]
On the third day, despite snowy, stormy weather, Worsley snatched the journey's first observation of the sun between patches of racing cloud. Kneeling on a thwart while Vincent and McCarthy strained to brace him in the pitching boat, Worsley managed to fix his sextant and take his “snap.” The precious almanac and logarithm charts, against which the observations were calculated, had become dangerously pulpy, the pages sticking together and the numbers blurred. Nonetheless, Worsley's calculations revealed that they had come 128 miles from Elephant Island.
They were, however, widely off the position he had previously reckoned. Worsley wrote,
Navigation is an art, but words fail to give my efforts a correct name. Dead reckoning or DR— the seaman's calculation of courses and distance — had become a merry jest of guesswork.… The procedure was: I peered out from our burrow — precious sextant cuddled under my chest to prevent seas falling on it. Sir Ernest stood by under the canvas with chronometer pencil and book. I shouted “Stand by,” and knelt on the thwart — two men holding me up on either side. I brought the sun down to where the horizon ought to be and as the boat leaped frantically upward on the crest of a wave, snapped a good guess at the altitude and yelled, “Stop,” Sir Ernest took the time, and I worked out the result. … My navigation books had to be half opened page by page till the right one was reached, then opened carefully to prevent utter destruction.
Steering at night was especially difficult. Under dense skies that allowed no light from moon or stars, the boat charged headlong into the darkness, the men steering by the “feel” of the wind, or the direction of a small pennant attached to the mast. Once or twice each night, the wind direction was verified by compass, lit by a single precious match. And yet navigation was every bit as critical as keeping the boat upright; the men knew that even a mile off course could result in a missed landfall, and the Caird would be swept into 3,000 miles of ocean.
In the afternoon of the third day, the gale backed to the north, and then blew continuously the next twenty-four hours. The heaving waves were gray, the sky and lowering clouds were gray, and all was obscured with mist. Heavy seas poured over the Caird's port quarter. The canvas decking, sagging under the weight of so much water, threatened to pull loose the short nails McNish had extracted from packing cases. As if to underscore their own vulnerability, a flotsam of ship wreckage drove past them.
“We were getting soaked on an average every three or four minutes,” wrote Worsley. “This went on day and night. The cold was intense.” Particularly hateful was the task of working the pump, which one man had to hold hard against the bottom of the boat with bare hands—a position that could not be endured beyond five or six minutes at a time.
In the afternoon of April 28, the fifth day, the wind died and the seas settled into the towering swells characteristic of the latitude; “The highest, broadest and longest swells in the world,” as Worsley wrote. So high were the waves that the Caird 's sails slackened in the artificial calm between wave crests; then the little craft was lifted onto the next hill of water, and hurled down an ever-steepening slope. On the following day, a west-southwest gale pitched and rolled the Caird in a high lumpy sea, but gave an excellent run of ninety-two miles on the desired northeast course. They had now come 238 miles from Elephant Island, “but not in a straight line,” as Worsley observed ruefully.
On April 30, the gale strengthened and shifted from the south, blowing off the ice fields