The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [79]
At the Buenos Aires railway station, Shackleton said goodbye to his men who had come to see him off. It was the last time so many members of the expedition—all but Blackborow and Hudson—would be gathered together.
“We have properly broken up,” Macklin wrote. With few exceptions, most were to be on their way back to Britain. Blackborow was in the hospital in Punta Arenas and was the object of doting attention from the city's female population; Bakewell was staying on.
“When I joined the expedition, I asked that I might be paid off at Buenos Aires on our return,” wrote Bakewell. “Sir Ernest consented to my wish and now I was at the parting of the way. I had to say good-bye to the finest group of men that it has ever been my good fortune to be with.”
Hudson—the invalid, the indisposed, he of the “general breakdown”— had already left, eager to take up his commission and be of service to his country. While on Elephant Island, the two doctors had drained his terrible abscess, which had grown to the size of a football, and this operation seemed to have put him on his way to recovery. The detached stupor in which he had reportedly spent most of the time on Elephant Island may have resulted from the fever that would have inevitably accompanied such a deep infection.
Hurley, having quickly tired of the celebratory receptions, spent long days in a darkroom made available to him by a generous local photographer.
“All the plates which were exposed on the wreck nearly twelve months ago turned out excellently,” he wrote. “The small Kodak film suffered through the protracted keeping but will be printable.”
From Punta Arenas, Shackleton telegraphed long articles to the Daily Chronicle in London.
“Relief of the Marooned Explorers.” “Shackleton Safe.” “Shackleton's Men Rescued.” The stories continued to run well into December.
Hurley arrived in Liverpool on November 11.
“The customs occupied considerable time,” he wrote, “especially with the film, which was weighed—a method of estimating the length & charged an import duty of 5d per foot. The entire film netted a customs revenue of 120 pounds.” Travelling to London by train, he went straight to the offices of the Daily Chronicle and handed over the film to Ernest Perris. For the next three months, Hurley worked single-mindedly on the development of his photographs, his motion picture film, lantern slides to be used in lectures, and the preparation of albums of selected images. Dramatic spreads appeared in some of the papers (the Chronicle, the Daily Mail, the Sphere), and he was greatly satisfied with a display of his Paget Colour Plates at the Polytechnic Hall; here, projected on a screen eighteen feet square, the Endurance soared out of the darkness under a luminous yet icy sky, once more to grapple with her fate.
As early as November 15, Hurley had decided to return to South Georgia to acquire wildlife photographs, hoping to reproduce the ones he had been forced to jettison on the ice. The sojourn in England was pleasant, despite the fact that “London possesses the worst climate I have ever yet experienced, as regards producing colds and sickness.” During this period, he frequently saw James, Wordie, Clark, and Greenstreet.
The South Georgia trip was successful, and after several weeks of characteristically intense work, Hurley returned to London in June 1917, and handed over another batch of film and plates to Perris. The film, In the Grip of the Polar Pack, was released in 1919, after the war, to much acclaim.
Why Shackleton had never liked and indeed deeply mistrusted Hurley is not clear; he had taken considerable pains to cater to his vanity on the ice, including him in all important counsels. For his part, Hurley expressed his admiration for Shackleton both openly and privately in his diary. Hurley was bombastic,