The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [83]
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you.
The James Caird, the most tangible relic of his endeavors, eventually made her way to Shackleton's old school, Dulwich College, where she still resides.
After Shackleton's death, the Quest doggedly continued under the command of Frank Wild. At the end of this somewhat meandering journey, Wild took the ship to within sight of Elephant Island, although he did not land.
“Few of us thought when we left it last that it would ever be our fate to see it again,” Macklin wrote. “Ah what memories what memories!— they rush to one like a great flood & bring tears to ones eyes, & as I sit & try to write a great rush of feeling comes over me & I find I cannot express myself or what I feel. Once more I see the little boat, Frankie Wild's hut, dark & dirty, but a snug little shelter all the same. Once more I see the old faces & hear the old voices—old friends scattered everywhere. But to express all I feel is impossible.”
Although the world to which Shackleton and his men returned was indeed greatly changed from the one they had left behind, it must be allowed that the “old age,” and its skills and values, were in decline even as the Endurance departed from London in 1914. When Shackleton had been in Buenos Aires, looking for replacements for his crew, he had been especially pleased to find Bakewell, whose years of experience in sailing vessels was becoming an increasingly rare commodity in an age when steam travel was slowly claiming the seas. Shackleton's entrepreneurial method of financing his expedition was itself indicative of a new order, one in which energetic, ambitious men would seek to force their own opportunity, with or without the kind of patronage that had blessed Scott. The Endurance had never been intended for heroic endeavor, but was originally built as a tourist vessel to convey wealthy clients on polar safaris to the Arctic; this was why she had been such a comfortable, well-equipped little vessel. Likewise, in this increasingly sophisticated age, photo and story rights for whatever adventure might transpire had been sold well in advance; that a book would be the outcome of their experience was never completely out of the crew's mind, and at critical junctures Shackleton had made sure that the diarists and Hurley preserved their work.
“With a boat …we could reach the seals we occasionally see out on the floes,” Lees had written, in June 1916, while they were on Elephant Island. “But if we had everything we wanted we should have no privations to write about and that would be a serious loss to the ‘book.' Privations make a book sell like anything.”
Many of the Endurance crew did very well in their post-expedition life, but others did not adjust to the loss of the old order that had been swept away by the war. The lives of the men who had participated in one of the greatest survival stories in expeditionary history took very different courses.
In February 1918, the London Telegraph ran a half-column story under the heading “Antarctic Expedition: The Polar Medal.” There followed a list of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition members and a brief account of their ordeal. One of the awards was already posthumous; four months after landing the James Caird on South Georgia Island—three weeks after arriving in England—Tim McCarthy was killed at his gun in the Channel. Not much later, Alf Cheetham, who was said to have crossed the Antarctic Circle more times than any of the other men, would be drowned when his minesweeper was torpedoed by a German submarine off the River Humber, a few weeks before Armistice.
Strikingly, four names are missing from the roster: Shackleton had not recommended Stephenson and Holness for the medal,