The Entire Earth and Sky: Views on Antarctica

Thirteen

Thirteen Marston, the artist, assisted with alterations. Being stuck for something to “pay” her seams with, after they had been caulked with cotton lampwick, he used his oil paints finishing off with seal’s blood. —Frank Worsley, on sealing the Caird for her journey to South Georgia Unknown to known, the march continued, and the tally looked like this, the North Pole had gone to the Americans, and the South Pole to the Norskies. No one had yet made a complete Antarctic map. No one knew what lay beyond the shores. Maybe vast resources of coal. Maybe gold. Thousands of eager volunteers answered Shackleton’s advertisement for Endurance crew—military men, mountaineers , scholars, scientists, schoolboys, and a handful of women. In addition to sorting through all the applications, courting press attention, charting the trek, Shackleton raised all of the money himself—a large and under-reported piece of polar exploration history. He bought a solid whaling ship and christened her Endurance, after his family motto, Fortitude vincimus, “by endurance we conquer.” While the Ross and Weddell Seas cut similar wedge shapes into the Antarctic continent, disturbing its otherwise circular form, the Weddell is exponentially more severe— clogged with a fierce ice pack that extended 1,800 miles into 248 * the entire earth and sky the Southern Ocean. This ice circles the sea in a relentless clockwise drift. Tracing the Endurance’s course, a course roughly resembling an outline of the human heart, you can see how they began at South Georgia, departing from the whaling station at Grytviken. From there, the ship arced south and eastward , past the South Sandwich Islands, crossing the Antarctic Circle around Christmas Day. They zigged into the pack ice in early January and were beset by the eighteenth day of that month. The ice, pushed by the Weddell’s gyral, took the ship north toward the Antarctic Peninsula, also called Graham’s Land. They lived in a prismatic world, ice growing and moving by its own crystalline law. The water was so transparent they could see down twenty-five or thirty feet. The ice did not unsettle Worsley, or if it did he did not record this in his journals or draft manuscripts. Likely he knew nature, disciplined and chaotic, demanded first careful observation, then the ability to spring into action. He rarely mentioned the hand of God. Shackleton, on the other hand, carried a page torn from the Book of Job: “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.” All of this captured by the Australian photographer Frank Hurley: They drifted for ten months northwards, the ship listed to the left, forced upwards, as though held slightly aloft by a hand from below. The images call to mind Edgar Allen Poe, one of his ghost creations, lit to gloamy creepiness by incandescent light. As spring arrived, the pack cracked and rafted, slowly compressing the old whaling ship. The Endurance sank on November 21, 1915. Life at sea is a collage of skill and luck, and the Endurance thirteen * 249 crew’s life on the sea ice evolved into an amplified version of same. Hurley designed their makeshift stove, which consisted of a five-gallon ash bucket from Endurance, with a metal cup in the base holding methylated spirits, which when ignited heated blubber in a pan above it. Above this, another, larger pan then melted blubber, generating a fierce heat, which cooked food in a three-gallon pot resting on two iron bars. A piece of canvas stretched around four oars blocked wind for the cook. This tent filled with oily soot, coating the cook’s face. Worsley noted that despite countless new dangers and hardships , their spirits rose because “we had exchanged inaction for action. We had been waiting and drifting at the mercy of the pack ice. There had been nothing that we could do to escape.” Their battle against hunger and cold refined itself over time. In order to sleep, the men needed to exercise to warm themselves. But too much exercise brought pangs of hunger. So a delicate kinetic equation was drawn, one that warmed hands and feet without exciting the gut. I flew to Wellington to dig into...