Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World: List 3

From July 14 through 16, a blizzard pounded the ship with gale force winds.

When the blizzard subsided, a scene of destruction stretched from one ice-white horizon to the other.

The garbage dumps had been blown clear of snow and stood out stark and ugly against the white.

“Half blinded after the successive flashes, I lost my bearings amongst hummocks, bumping shins against all points and stumbling into deep snowdrifts,” said Hurley.

Often, it seemed, the pressure coincided with their “gramophone evenings,” and some of the more superstitious members of the crew began to think the music caused the pressure.

An increase in plankton in the water drawn from the boreholes around the ship—a sure sign of approaching spring—didn’t ward off the suspense that all the men now felt.

The afternoon of September 30 brought an enormous ice floe bearing down on the ship from the port side.

A killer whale surfaced beside the ship, its black sides glistening and its white patches tinged a dirty yellow by algae.

The engines were fired, and sea watches were set as the crew waited for a sizable lead that would take them out of the ice pack.

Endurance was pinned on all sides by this immense upheaval.

They tipped their heads up and began hooting dismally.

Now that the emperors were wailing at the ship, it sounded to everyone’s ears like a dirge.

Shackleton turned away and ordered the men to resume their backbreaking, futile work.

The sternpost was ripped away. The keel was sheared off. The decks began to buckle, and thick beams snapped like twigs.

Shackleton had the flag raised one last time on the battered mast, which brought a weary cheer from the men, and then began overseeing the evacuation.

“Well, no,” Orde-Lees ventured. “You wouldn’t have had anything to write a book about if it hadn’t been for this.”

In the family of tabular bergs, there are domed, horizontal, blocky, tilted, and uneven bergs; in the tribe of rounded bergs, there are subrounded, well-rounded, and rounded bergs; and when it comes to irregular bergs, there are tabular remnant, pinnacled, pyramidal, drydock, castellate, jagged, slab, and roof bergs.

In the family of tabular bergs, there are domed, horizontal, blocky, tilted, and uneven bergs; in the tribe of rounded bergs, there are subrounded, well-rounded, and rounded bergs; and when it comes to irregular bergs, there are tabular remnant, pinnacled, pyramidal, drydock, castellate, jagged, slab, and roof bergs.

Much of the ice on the continent of Antarctica is actually a form of consolidated snow called firn.

As the icebergs drift, the seawater erodes them from below, until the berg abruptly topples over and continues its journey upside down. The erosion continues until the berg flips again, and then again, and eventually it is eroded and melted away.

As the water on the surface cools, it begins to condense, and individual ice crystals act as seeds, causing the water to congeal around them, squeezing the salt out into the water below.

Because the water forces out salt as it freezes, the water below the ice field is saturated with salt and minerals, and the ice itself is clean enough to melt into drinking water.

The dogs milled around, straining at their tethers, snapping and snarling at one another.

Though we have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted, we are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us.

They had ample food, guns, matches, and dogs.

To the best of Shackleton’s knowledge, there was a cache of stores in a hut on Paulet Island from a 1902 Swedish expedition.

They would need the boats, no matter how burdensome they were to drag over the ice.

As the day wore on, the pile of discards grew. Extra clothes, books, scientific instruments and specimens, chess sets, flags, lanterns, tools, sewing kits, lucky talismans, razors, barometers, combs, scissors, playing cards, dishes, silverware, photographs—each man added to the heap.

But stretching ahead of them into the white horizon was a scene of utter devastation and chaos. It was as if a giant hand had smashed down onto the frozen face of the deep and broken it into a million shards.

If the sea had been frozen at the height of a tempest, and every storm-tossed wave locked into place, the scene could not have been more jumbled and uneven.

Over the next few days, the men made several trips back to Dump Camp and the wrecked ship to salvage everything they could, including the third lifeboat.

More precious foodstores—cases of nuts, boxes of sugar, crates of barley, flour, and jam—were sledged back to the new camp, dubbed Ocean Camp by the men.

There were more than 400 of them, documenting the voyage and ordeal of Endurance, but they weighed far too much to save all of them.

Hurley also kept a Kodak pocket camera and three rolls of film, with which he documented the remainder of the crew’s odyssey.

The men were soaking wet all the time and had to become ingenious in finding ways to keep their possessions dry.

Every day when he took his sightings with the sextant and calculated their position, the crew eagerly waited to hear how far they had traveled.

With scrap lumber from Endurance and a small and precious collection of used nails, he began raising the sides of the boats to make them more seaworthy. “I have only a saw, hammer, chisel, and adze, but we are managing alright,” he reported in his diary.

He filled the seams between the new planks with wool yarn unraveled from a scarf and then caulked them with Marston’s oil paints.

Shackleton was not amused. He hated unnecessary risks and disapproved of such shenanigans, knowing that leopard seals and killer whales could easily surface inside a lead and make a quick meal of the men.

He would have to pass a line of dogs tethered in teams to wires secured at one end to their own loaded sledges and at the other to an iron stanchion driven deeply in the snow.