The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [82]
At the end of the day, they returned to the ship and had dinner on board. After the meal, Shackleton rose and jokingly announced, “To-morrow we'll keep Christmas.” At two in the morning, Macklin was summoned by a whistle to Shackleton's cabin.
“I noticed that although it was a cold night he had only one blanket, and asked him if he had no others,” wrote Macklin in a revealing passage, which suggests that he had for some time acted as a kind of furtive nurse to the Boss. “He replied that they were in his bottom drawer and he could not be bothered getting them out. I started to do so, but he said, ‘Never mind to-night, I can stand the cold.' However, I went back to my cabin and got a heavy Jaeger blanket from my bunk, which I tucked around him.”
Macklin sat with him quietly for some minutes, and took the opportunity to suggest that he might take things easy in the future.
“You are always wanting me to give up something,” replied the Boss. “What do you want me to give up now?” These were Shackleton's last words. A massive heart attack took him suddenly, and he died at 2:50 a.m.; he was only forty-seven years old. Macklin, upon whom fell the task of conducting an autopsy, diagnosed the cause of death as “atheroma of the coronary arteries,” a long-standing condition exacerbated, in Macklin's opinion, by “overstrain during a period of debility.” Macklin had in mind not the more recent ordeal of the Endurance expedition, but the strain of his Farthest South, as far back as 1909.
Hussey volunteered to accompany Shackleton's body back to England, but in Montevideo, he was intercepted by a message from Shackleton's wife, Emily, requesting that her husband be buried in South Georgia; the thought of his restless spirit closeted in the narrow rank and file of a British cemetery was insupportable. Hussey turned back, and on March 5, Shackleton was laid to rest among the Norwegian whalers who had, perhaps, above all other men on earth best comprehended his achievements. The small band of men who had stuck with him to the end were at his simple funeral. Hussey played Brahms's “Lullaby” on his banjo, then Shackleton's spirit was left alone with the harsh grandeur of the landscape that had forged his greatness.
Although Shackleton had dreamt his whole life of achieving success in ordinary, civilian circumstances, he seemed to understand that he would never do so.
“Sometimes I think I am no good at anything but being away in the wilds just with men,” Shackleton had written to his wife in 1919. He would be remembered not so much for his own accomplishment—the 1909 expedition that attained the farthest South—as for what he was capable of drawing out of others.
“Shackleton's popularity among those he led was due to the fact that he was not the sort of man who could do only big and spectacular things,” Worsley wrote. “When occasion demanded he would attend personally to the smallest details.… Sometimes it would appear to the thoughtless that his care amounted almost to fussiness, and it was only afterwards that we understood the supreme importance of his ceaseless watchfulness.” Behind every calculated word and gesture lay the single-minded determination to do what was best for his men. At the core of Shackleton's gift for leadership in crisis was an adamantine conviction that quite ordinary individuals were capable of heroic feats if the circumstances required; the weak and the strong could and must survive together. The mystique that Shackleton acquired as a leader may partly be attributed to the fact that he elicited from his men strength and endurance they had never imagined they possessed; he ennobled them.
Shackleton did not attain the recognition accorded to Scott. England had room for only one great polar explorer in its pantheon, and coming after the First World War, the memory of the doomed, tragic youthful hero who had died in bringing honor to his country was better suited to the national mood of mourning.
Shackleton nonetheless