The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

Twelve

Twelve In steering a small boat before a heavy gale don’t look back—it may disconcert you. —Commander Frank Arthur Worsley Navigation is an art, but words fail to give my efforts a correct name. —Worsley writing of his work aboard the lifeboat James Caird In the New Zealand town of Akaroa, built by French and English settlers, a boy was born on a sun-filled morning in 1872. His name was Frank Arthur Worsley and he would sail all the oceans of the world. With mystical accuracy he learned the language of wind and waves and sky. In 1916, when Worsley was forty-three years old, he saved the lives of twenty-eight men in the sub-Antarctic by steering a small lifeboat across the roughest seas on the planet. That it was also winter and that they had already been trapped in Antarctica for three seasons and were half-starved, well, the tension mounts. When Worsley died in 1943 he was buried at sea by the admiralty, and lengthy elegies mourned his passing: the bbc, the New York Times, most newspapers in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, even the esteemed scientific journal Nature. For me, Worsley’s story stands above all other Antarctican adventures , and his life, travels, and writings came to define “Antarctican .” If the Earth’s youngest continental culture needed a representative man, Frank Arthur Worsley was it. Worsley’s 228 * the entire earth and sky Antarctic adventures began when he signed on as captain of the three-hundred-ton, Norwegian-built Endurance. On August 1, 1914, she sailed from London’s West India docks, en route to the Weddell Sea and the beginning of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The man who conceived of this trek was the formidable Ernest Shackleton. At this point, he had been twice to Antarctica and had made two attempts on the South Pole. After Amundsen succeeded in this feat in 1912, Shackleton cooked up an even more outrageous adventure : walking and sledging from the Weddell to the Ross Sea, prospecting and mapping. Shackleton’s bold plan called for two simultaneous expeditions , one to the Weddell Sea, the other leaving from New Zealand for the Ross Sea. The Ross Sea party would distribute a series of supply depots for the men coming across the continent. As they finalized their plans, however, the known world was crumbling. World War I broke out as they sailed. Shackleton offered to put off their expedition, volunteering ship and all hands for the war effort. A succinct telegram arrived from the First Lord of the Admiralty: Proceed. Winston Churchill had signed it. On November 5, 1914, they were anchored off South Georgia . Twenty-eight men made up her crew, seventeen seamen and eleven scientists. In December, the Endurance slammed south into an ice-clogged Weddell Sea. By mid-January the ice had overtaken them. “The Weddell Sea might be described as the Antarctic extension of the South Atlantic Ocean,” Worsley began his book, first serialized as a magazine story in 1924. “Near the southern extreme of the Weddell Sea in 77 degrees south latitude Shackleton’s ship Endurance, under my command, was beset in heavy pack ice.” Under my command. Who couldn’t admire a man who begins his story by taking responsibility for their fine mess? Worsley’s books on the Endurance adventure were published in 1931 and in 1940. The twelve * 229 earlier book, called simply Endurance, recounts the entirety of the expedition, from 1914 to 1916. The small-boat odyssey was broken out from this longer narrative and published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1940 as Shackleton’s Boat Journey. I believe a more accurate title features Worsley’s name as the boat journey’s architect. However, Worsley was an honorable man and Shackleton had been his best friend over seven arduous, adventurous years. Shackleton was the expedition leader, a national hero, and Worsley’s commanding officer. Yet Worsley concoctedthissinglegreatestfeatof small-boat navigation, not Shackleton, and we have the paper records— the navigational logs, as well as diaries, to prove it. Shackleton was no navigator. The puzzle of it was how Worsley managed to sail a small wooden boat eight hundred miles in the dead of winter through ice-littered seas, a place for which the current edition of the region’s navigational...