The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [61]
Setting course for the bay, they approached a jagged reef line, which, in Shackle-ton's words, seemed “like blackened teeth” to bar entrance to the inlet. As they steered towards what appeared to be a propitious gap, the wind shifted once again, blowing right out of the bay, against them. Unable to approach directly, they backed off and tried to tack in, angling for entry. Five times they bore up and tacked, and on the last attempt the Caird sailed through the gap and into the mouth of the bay.
It was nearly dusk. A small cove guarded by a reef appeared to the south. Standing in the bows, Shackleton directed the boat through a narrow entrance in the reef.
“In a minute or two we were inside,” wrote Shackleton, “and in the gathering darkness the James Caird ran in on a swell and touched the beach.”
Jumping out, he held the frayed painter and pulled against the backward surge; and when the boat rolled in again with the surf, the other men stumbled ashore and loosely secured her. The sound of running water drew them to a small stream nearly at their feet. They fell upon their knees and drank their fill.
“It was,” wrote Shackleton, “a splendid moment.”
McNish's handiwork had stood up to all that the elements had flung at it. Throughout their seventeen-day ordeal, Worsley had never allowed his mind to relax and cease its calculations. Together, the six men had maintained a ship routine, a structure of command, a schedule of watches. They had been mindful of their seamanship under the most severe circumstances a sailor would ever face. They had not merely endured; they had exhibited the grace of expertise under ungodly pressure.
Undoubtedly they were conscious of having achieved a great journey. They wouldlater learn that a 500-ton steamer had foundered with all hands in the same hurricane they had just weathered. But at the moment they could hardly have known — or cared — that in the carefully weighed judgment of authorities yet to come, the voy age of the James Caird would be ranked as one of the greatest boat journeys ever accomplished.
South Georgia Island
Struggling through the surf on shaky legs, the men unloaded the stores and gear and much of the ballast in order to bring the Caird onto land. But to no effect. Even when the boat was virtually empty, they found that their combined strength could not budge her.
“We were all about done up,” wrote McNish, who had resumed his diary. “We left her rolling in the surf for the night with 1 man on watch.” Shackleton had spotted a cave on one side of the cove as they were running in, and into this the men staggered for the night. While the others tried to sleep in their wet clothes and four wet bags, Shackleton took the first watch, calling Crean out at 1 a.m. when he felt himself dropping asleep on his feet. It was a difficult job, holding the Caird by its short, frayed painter as it rolled in the surf in the darkness. At 3 a.m., she broke free from Crean, and all hands had to be awakened to pull her back. The men were so exhausted that they could not even turn the boat over in order to roll her up the beach, but had to stand by until daylight.
In the morning, McNish removed the strakes and upper decking in order to lighten the boat further, and with great exertion they dragged her up above the high-water mark. Now at last they could rest; without the Caird they would have been lost as there was no way out of the cove except by sea.
King Haakon Bay was a deep sound flanked to the north and south by steep, glacier-streaked mountains. Their cave was in a recess of overhanging cliff at the back of the small cove they had entered, on the bay's southern headland. At the foot of the mountains grew clumps of rough tussock grass, which the men strewed on the floor of the cave. Huge icicles that hung like curtains at the cave mouth provided above the beach and returned with fledgling albatrosses they had found in scattered nests. Four birds of about fourteen pounds apiece went into the