Month: May 2018

Endurance. An Epic of Polar Adventure by F.A. Worsley. W.W. Norton and Co. New York. 1931. (With an Introduction by Patrick O’Brien, 1999)

 Worsley was in command of Endurance, the ship that carried Earnest Shackleton’s 1914 expedition to cross Antarctica. Caught in the pack ice in the Weddell Sea, from February to November 1915 the Endurance drifted until she was crushed and sunk. From then until April, the twenty-eight men camped on the ice in thin canvas tents, without floors, on limited rations. They made several attempts to march north, an exhausting job over the rough and broken ice, until they were finally able to launch their three lifeboats to cross to Elephant Island, one of the last bits of land off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, most of them camped under the shelter of two overturned boats, while Shackleton, Worsley and four others made a dangerous sixteen-day trip in the third boat to South Georgia. That they arrived there and did not simply sail on into the endless South Atlantic to sink or starve is testimony to the nearly legendary navigational skill of Worsley, who learned the craft traveling to remote islands while working for the British South Pacific Service. To cap this remarkable feat, Shackleton, Worsley and a third man had to cross the island to reach the whaling station on the south shore. This they did during the only window of weather for months when it was possible to struggle over the mountains and glaciers with any chance of surviving.

 Having found help and picked up the other three men, they headed straight for Elephant Island, but the pack ice blocked the way. Only on the fourth try, in their fourth borrowed ship, starting from Punta Arenas, Chile, near Tierra del Fuego, did they reach the stranded crew on August 30, 1916. All twenty-eight of Shackleton’s men had survived. Ironically, several soon perished while serving in the First World War, which had been going on the entire time they were away. Before they returned to England, however, they were honored by the Chileans of Punta Arenas with a banquet. The Chilean guests rose one by one to drink a glass of wine with the Brits, resulting in each hero having to consume multiple glasses while their hosts remained relatively sober. Shackleton, who drank little, was permitted to withdraw, but when the rest tried to follow a bit later, they were sent back at bayonet point by Chilean soldiers, who were under orders to allow no sober English, nor even any not sufficiently drunk, to pass.

Afterwards, Worsley served in the Royal Naval Reserve, commanding an anti-submarine ship. He sank a German U-boat by ramming it. He was also in the British Northern Russia Expedition against the Red army. After the war, he knocked around, leading several difficult trips to the Arctic but usually ending up in financial difficulties. Finally, in 1922, Shackleton took him on again for another Antarctic expedition, but Shackleton died on the trip south. After one more arctic voyage and an unsuccessful treasure hunt on Cocos Island, Costa Rica, Worsley spent the interwar years writing and lecturing. He lied about his age to secure a command in the Merchant Navy in 1941, but he was soon found out and put to work as a training officer on shore. He died in 1943 of lung cancer.

All I can say is that, as far as putting up with cold, hunger and strenuous exercise, even more than the early Mount Everest climbers, those guys were tough. Furthermore, the men in charge of the different parties were good at maintaining discipline and morale, keeping up a routine that included regular musical performances as well as hunting expeditions. In more than two years, there seems to have been only a single hint of mutiny: at one point, the ship’s carpenter, claiming (like Steven Hopkins – see my earlier post on the Sea Venture) that the loss of the Endurance set them free from Shackleton’s command, refused to go on. Shackleton stood firm and convinced him to stick. The other factor in the crew’s favor was that unlike the early English voyages to places like America, there were neither indigenous people to antagonize nor much in the way of infectious diseases to contend with. One man lost a foot to gangrene following frostbite, but there were two doctors in the party and an anesthetic, so it went well. They also got enough fresh meat to keep scurvy at bay. A final minor miracle of the trip was that a large number of their photographic negatives survived, giving us an amazing visual record of what they endured.

 Worsley is a good writer; the book is the sort to read in a few big chunks with much satisfaction and amazement.