The Endurance_ Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition - Caroline Alexander [86]
Wordie, later Sir James Wordie, became a highly distinguished geologist, president of the Royal Geographical Society, and the master of St. John's College, Cambridge. His expedition work in the Arctic received numerous awards, and he was responsible for inspiring a number of the next generation of polar explorers. He died in 1962, like his friend James at the age of seventy-three.
After serving as a medical officer in the war—for which he received a number of decorations, including the Military Cross—Macklin settled in Aberdeen. He eventually became head of Student Health Services at the University of Aberdeen, and remained in close contact with Clark. Macklin became one of the most important “historians” of both the Endurance expedition and Shackleton's later life. He died in 1967, aged seventy-seven. McIlroy joined the Orient Line after the war, and was aboard a vessel torpedoed in World War II. He endured a second open-boat journey before being rescued by the Vichy and taken to a camp in Sudan. He died in his eighties, a bachelor, but reportedly with girlfriends to the end.
Lees, while still in Punta Arenas, obtained a position in the Royal Flying Corps, with Shackleton's aid. Here, he took up the cause of acquiring parachutes for pilots, an innovation that was resisted by senior officers on the grounds that the possibility of bailing out would undermine a pilot's fighting spirit. To showcase parachutes' effectiveness, Lees parachuted off Tower Bridge, an event that was covered by the London newspapers. He later married a Japanese woman and settled in Japan and then New Zealand, working as a spy during the Second World War, an occupation eminently suited to his busybody, secretive nature. Lees may have been the most despised individual during the actual expedition, but it is impossible to dislike him posthumously. Without his busy, anxious chatter and compulsive candor, the record of the expedition would be much the poorer. Lees died at age seventy-nine in a mental hospital, the cause of death noted on his death certificate as “broncho-pneumonia—24 hours. Cardio-vascular degeneration. Senility?” Evidently, even the attending doctors could not quite get a handle on him. He was buried in the ex-servicemen's section of the Karori Cemetery—the same little patch of earth in which McNish was laid. The two men had loathed each other.
After the Quest expedition, Frank Wild settled in South Africa, where four years of drought and floods ruined his cotton farming. Drink, however, was the ultimate cause of his ruination; his ominous zeal in adopting the “Gut Rot” toasts on Elephant Island had always been a source of amusement to his companions. A newspaper journalist discovered Wild working as a bartender for £4 a month in a Zulu village at the head of a mine. “Teddy” Evans, whose life Crean had saved on Scott's last expedition, hearing word of the plight of a man whom he regarded as a shipmate and great polar explorer, assisted him in obtaining a pension; but the boon came too late, and Wild died only months afterward, in 1939.
Tom Crean returned to Anascaul, where he had been born; he married, opened a pub called the South Pole Inn, and raised a family.
“We had a hot time of it the last 12 months,” wrote Crean to an old shipmate from the Terra Nova, succinctly summarizing the months on the floes, the two boat journeys, and the crossing of South Georgia. “And I must say the Boss is a splendid gentleman and I done my duty towards him to the end.”
He led an organized, disciplined life, working in the pub and in his garden, and each evening taking a walk down to the sea in Dingle Bay with his dogs Fido and Toby, named after the pups he had lost in the Antarctic. He was said by those who knew him to have admired Scott but loved Shackleton. He died of a perforated appendix in 1938, and was buried just outside Anascaul.
Worsley spent the greater part of his life trying to recapture the thrill and daring of the Endurance expedition. During the war, while captain of a mystery ship, he sank a German submarine, for which he received