The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [67]
It took three hours to descend the short distance to the sandy beach of Fortuna Bay and a quagmire of glacial mud that sucked at their boots. Here, too, they came upon evidence of man, “whose work,” as Shackleton wrote, “as is so often the case, was one of destruction.” The bodies of several seals bearing bullet wounds were lying around. Bypassing these, they headed for the opposite side of the bay.
By half past noon, they had crossed the opposing slope of the bay and were working their way over a blessedly flat plateau towards the last ridge that lay between them and Stromness Station. Suddenly, Crean broke through what turned out to be An hour later they stood on the last ridge, looking down into Stromness Bay. A whaling boat came in sight, and after it a sailing ship; tiny figures could be seen moving about the sheds of the station. For the last time on the journey, they turned and shook each other's hands.
Marching mechanically now, too tired for thought, they moved through the last stages of their trek. Searching for a way down the ridge to the harbor, they followed the course of a small stream, up to their ankles in its icy water. The stream ended in a waterfall with a twenty-five-foot drop, and without a second thought, they determined to follow it over. There was no time left, their strength and wits were failing; they could no longer calculate or strategize, but only keep moving forward. Securing one end of their worn rope to a boulder, they first lowered Crean over the edge, and he vanished entirely into the waterfall. Then Shackleton, and then Worsley, who was, as Shackleton wrote, “the lightest and most nimble of the party.” Leaving the rope dangling, they staggered ahead.
At three in the afternoon, they arrived at the outskirts of Stromness Station. They had traveled for thirty-six hours without rest. Their bearded faces were black with blubber smoke, and their matted hair, clotted with salt, hung almost to their shoulders. Their filthy clothes were in tatters; in vain Worsley had tried to pin together the seat of his trousers, shredded in their glissade down the mountain. Close to the station they encountered the first humans outside their own party they had set eyes on in nearly eighteen months—two small children, who ran from them in fright. As in a dream the men kept moving, through the outskirts of the station, through the dark digesting house, out towards the wharf, each banal fixture of the grimy station now fraught with significance. A man saw them, started, and hurriedly passed on, probably thinking the ragged trio were drunken, derelict sailors—it would not have occurred to anyone that there could be castaways on South Georgia Island.
The station foreman, Matthias Andersen, was on the wharf. Speaking English, Shackleton asked to be taken to Captain Anton Andersen, who had been winter manager when the Endurance sailed. Looking them over, the foreman replied that Captain Andersen was no longer there, but he would take them to the new manager, Thoralf Sørlle. Shackleton nodded; he knew Sørlle. Sørlle had entertained them two years previously, when the expedition had touched in at Stromness.
Tactfully unquestioning, the foreman led the three to the station manager's home.
“Mr. Sørlle came out to the door and said, ‘Well?'” Shackleton recorded.
“ ‘Don't you know me?' I said.
South Georgia Island
“In memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer of outside things. We had ‘suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.' We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.” ( Shackleton, South, describing the end of the crossing of South Georgia)
An old Norwegian whaler who was also present gave an account, in his broken English, of the