Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: List 1

Just imagine yourself in the most hostile place on earth. It’s not the Sahara or the Gobi Desert. It’s not the Arctic. The most hostile place on earth is the Antarctic, the location of the South Pole.

He was a world-famous celebrity, a hero to thousands who read his thrilling book on his “Furthest South” expedition.

He was determined to try again for the conquest of the South Pole, but before he could organize a new expedition, two other explorers headed for the frozen continent.

Antarctica had never even been sighted before the nineteenth century. Until then it was a rumor, an undefined, unseen question mark shrouded in fog and surrounded by ice.

The Jurassic climate of Gondwana was semi-tropical, and fossils from Antarctica prove that the continent was once inhabited by giant flightless birds, sharks and freshwater fish, snails, beetles, reptiles, and protomarsupials, all thriving under giant ferns and trees.

The cold air masses created by this icecap clash with the warm winds from the ocean to churn up a storm belt that surrounds the continent, making the Southern Ocean the most treacherous sea anywhere.

The southern latitudes—from forty degrees south latitude to the Antarctic Circle at sixty-seven degrees south latitude—long ago earned their nicknames from the sailors who dared approach the continent: the Roaring Forties, the Furious Fifties, and the Screaming Sixties.

These perilous seas kept the continent locked away until 1774, when Captain James Cook reached the farthest south latitude yet attained.

Shackleton sweet-talked wealthy patrons, took public donations, and raised money as an advance based on future sales of film and photo rights.

Its thick wooden hull was specially designed for plowing through polar ice packs: in some places it was more than four feet thick, but the wood was still flexible enough to withstand the squeezing of polar ice.

In honor of his family motto, “By endurance we conquer,” Shackleton rechristened the ship Endurance.

In the ship’s hold were stores for at least two years, including a recent innovation: concentrated Bovril sledging rations for the trans-Antarctic run on dogsleds.

Worsley explained that this mixture “was composed of lard, oatmeal, beef protein, vegetable protein, salt, and sugar. The result was heating, nourishing, and antiscorbutic [scurvy-preventing], and it was invaluable. Made up in half-pound bricks for one man’s meal, it had the consistency of a new cheese and a yellow-brown color, but looked, when boiled with water, like thick pea soup.”

Scurvy, the depletion of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, had always been a problem on long voyages and had contributed to Captain Scott’s death en route from the South Pole.

Scurvy, the depletion of vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, had always been a problem on long voyages and had contributed to Captain Scott’s death en route from the South Pole.

Shackleton had consulted the British Army’s nutritionist, who believed in the newfangled idea of vitamins and who helped concoct the rations.

Shackleton had consulted the British Army’s nutritionist, who believed in the newfangled idea of vitamins and who helped concoct the rations.

In addition to these sledging rations were powdered milk and cocoa, sugar, tea, potatoes, tobacco, canned meats and vegetables, liquor, flour, and a dozen and one other staples and delicacies.

The Aurora team would also trek inland, laying down stores of food for Shackleton’s group to pick up and use on their final run to the coast.

The ship also carried coal, rifles, ammunition, scientific apparatus, a radio, games, books, navigational charts, lanterns, tanks and cages for bringing back live seals and penguins, three lifeboats and a small landing boat, a miniature billiard table, typewriters, sleeping bags, tents, matches, lumber for a hut, a bicycle, a motor-propelled sledge and dogsleds, two gramophones, skis, a sewing machine, hockey skates, soccer balls, the meteorologist’s banjo, and the carpenter’s cat, Mrs. Chippy.

The expedition's main object, explained in the fund-raising brochure, was “to cross the Antarctic from sea to sea, securing for the British flag the honor of being the first carried across the South Polar Continent.” That, in a patriotic nutshell, was the plan.

Like many explorers of his day, Shackleton was a great believer in improvisation: he would figure things out as the need arose.

The great Amundsen himself sent a telegram that read: MY WARMEST WISHES FOR YOUR MAGNIFICENT UNDERTAKING.

Great Britain was preparing to join the war against Germany. Shackleton had no choice but to telegraph the Admiralty and place the entire ship, crew, and stores at the Royal Navy’s disposal.

On the eve of Britain’s entry into war, every man knew he was leaving his country at a critical time, and would be out of all contact for at least a year and a half.

A motley pack of sixty-nine half-wild sled dogs from Canada was brought on board.

“Do you know that on these expeditions we often get very hungry, and if there is a stowaway available he is the first to be eaten?” he warned, ignoring the cat purring at his feet.
Blackborrow was not dismayed. “They’d get a lot more meat off you, sir!”

Endurance headed for South Georgia Island, one of the Subantarctic Islands on the edge of the Antarctic Convergence. The convergence, also called the polar front, is where frigid, oxygen-rich water from the south (cold water holds more oxygen than warm water) mixes with warmer water from the north, causing a thermal swap or slow churning in the water that pulls nutrients up from the ocean floor.

Snow squalls and heavy seas made visibility poor and forced Endurance to creep forward with the engines dead slow as it headed into Stromness Bay.

Immediately, the Sitka came alongside Endurance and, with a whale carcass acting as a bumper between the two vessels in the heavy waves, piloted the ship into Grytviken.

The whaling station was a rough spot, with the carcasses of blue and humpback whales putrefying in the midnight sun, and the harbor red with blood and shimmering with grease around the oil factory.

Tons of whale meat, bone, and scrap blubber lay rotting around the station.

Billowing clouds of steam rose from the plant where blubber was being boiled down.

According to Hussey, the harbor had a “most appalling stench” from the dead whales moored in the harbor awaiting flensing.

From the mountainsides echoed the harsh donkey bray of gentoo penguins, the screech of skuas, and the bellowing of elephant seals.

Meteorologist Leonard Hussey described the noise that sleeping elephant seals make as “suggestive of a nightmare or a guilty conscience. The inspirations of the breath are irregular gasps, the expirations tremulous wheezes. The body shakes violently from time to time, and the foreflippers are ever nervously moving about.”

When Endurance docked at Grytviken, the Canadian wolf dogs were let off to gorge themselves on whale meat, and they added their barking and snarling to the din that echoed from the Alps of the Southern Ocean.

“A bad year for ice” was the terse description Shackleton heard over and over.

Because they were so far south, the sun shone around the clock, and the crew was resourceful in finding entertainment.

Yet ahead to the south in the Weddell Sea, brilliant blue icebergs shone in the polar sun like the walls and ramparts of a fortress.