The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [60]
“Our need of water and rest was wellnigh desperate,” wrote Shackleton, “but to have attempted a landing at that time would have been suicidal. There was nothing for it but to haul off till the following morning.” As he well knew, making landfall could be the most dangerous part of sailing.
A stormy sunset closed the day, and the men prepared to wait out the hours of darkness. Although they were weak in the extreme, their swollen mouths and burn ing thirst made eating almost impossible. The small crew tacked through the dark ness until midnight, when they stood to, eighteen miles offshore. Then, in the bleak, early hours of the morning, the wind strengthened and, as the Caird rose and fell, increased to a gale that showered sleet and hail upon the men. Although they hove to with only a reefed jib, they were shipping water and forced to bail continuously. By break of day, the Caird was trapped in a perilously heavy cross sea and enormous swell that was driving them towards the coast.
Rain, hail, sleet, and snow hammered down, and by noon the gale had become a full-fledged hurricane whipping a mountainous sea into foam and obscuring every trace of land.
“None of us had ever seen anything like it before,” wrote Worsley. The storm, he continued, “was driving us, harder than ever, straight for that ironbound coast. We thought but did not say those words, so fateful to the seaman, ‘a lee shore.'”
At one in the afternoon, the clouds rent, suddenly exposing a precipitous front to their lee. The roar of breakers told them they were heading dead for unseen cliffs. In desperation, Shackleton ordered the double-reefed sails set for an attempt to beat into wind and pull away from the deadly course.
“The mainsail, reefed to a rag, was already set,” wrote Worsley, “and in spite of the smallness of the reefed jib and mizzen it was the devil's own job to set them. Usually such work is completed inside of ten minutes. It took us an hour.”
As the James Caird clawed her way against the wind, she struck each heaving swell with a brutal thud. With each blow, her bow planks opened, and water squirted in; caulked with oil paints and seal blood, the Caird was straining every joint. Five men pumped and bailed, while the sixth held her on her fearful course. She was not so much inching forward as being squeezed sideways.
“At intervals we lied, saying ‘I think she'll clear it,'” Worsley wrote. After three hours of this battle, the land had safely receded, when suddenly the snow-covered mountains of Annenkov Island loomed out of the dusk to their lee. They had fought their way past one danger only to be blown into the path of another.
“I remember my thoughts clearly,” wrote Worsley. “Regret for having brought my diary and annoyance that no one would ever know we had got so far.”
“I think most of us had a feeling that the end was very near,” wrote Shackleton. It was growing dark as the Caird floundered into the backwash of waves breaking against the island's precipitous coastline. Suddenly the wind veered round to the southwest. Coming about in the foaming, confused current, the Caird sheered away from the cliffs, and from destruction. Darkness fell, and the hurricane they had fought for nine hours abated.
“We stood offshore again, tired almost to the point of apathy,” wrote Shackleton. “The night wore on. We were very tired. We longed for day.”
When the morning of May 10 dawned, there was virtually no wind at all, but a heavy cross sea. After breakfast, chewed with great difficulty through parched lips, the men steered the Caird towards King Haakon Bay. The few charts at their disposal had been discovered to be incomplete