Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (22 page)

Although they had performed the miracle of reaching inhabited land, still their ordeal was not over. King Haakon Bay was on the southern coastline of the island and all the inhabited whaling stations were around Grytviken Bay in the north. One last journey, this time overland through the never before explored territory of South Georgia’s interior, would be required of the men if they were finally to re-establish contact with humankind.

It was clear, however, that they wouldn’t all be making the last leg of the trip. McNeish and Vincent had reached the ends of their tethers, both physical and mental, and would have to stay behind and await rescue. A relatively comfortable base was established on King Haakon Bay—beneath the upturned hull of the
James Caird
—and it was agreed that McCarthy would stay behind to look after the other two. Shackleton, Crean and Worsley allowed themselves a few days’ rest—and some welcome meals of fresh meat, caught and cooked on the island—before setting out yet again in the early hours of May 19. Three tattered vagabonds, ill-clad and with long hair and beards matted by months of neglect, they shook hands with their comrades and headed north. Once again the fate of the many would depend upon the fortitude of the few.

The weather at least was kind to them, remaining relatively calm, but a fog descended so thickly that for a time the trio could hardly see their hands in front of their faces. A close shave, which saw all three come within inches of stumbling into a huge crevasse, persuaded them to rope themselves together. It was in this manner, depending on one another for the safety of every step, that they picked their way toward the mountains separating them from their goal. Time and again they climbed to heights of 4,000 feet or more only to find their way blocked by sheer drops or impassable crevasses. They were driving themselves onward mercilessly,
stopping only to cook hurried meals of seal stew before plodding on again. Hours went by and still they could see no end to their troubles. Finally, after more than 30 hours without sleep, they crested a rise and looked down upon the distant but unmistakable shapes of the buildings of the whaling station at Stromness. More miraculous than the man-made structures, though, was the sight of tiny figures going about their everyday business. Apart from their comrades, these were the first human beings the three men had laid eyes upon in a year and a half.

After a few more miles of marching, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley presented themselves quietly at the door of one of the buildings. A Norwegian by the name of Anderson found them first and was so shocked by their appearance—and their claim to have walked across the island—that he left them on the doorstep while he went to find his boss.

The man who came next was Thoralf Sorlle, who had entertained Shackleton and his party all those months before. There was no recognition on his face as he beheld the three wild men, who looked as if they’d emerged whole and breathing from some ancient past. Shackleton would later recall their first exchange.

“Well?” said Sorlle.

“Don’t you know me?” I said.

“I know your voice…you’re the mate of the
Daisy
.”

“My name is Shackleton,” I said.

Sorlle put out his hand at once. “Come in, come in,” he said.

 

Arrangements were quickly made to collect McCarthy, Vincent and McNeish from King Haakon Bay, but it was not until late August that it was finally possible to return for the 22 men on Elephant Island. Several attempts were made, but the pack-ice drove the rescue ships back each time.

Shackleton, Crean and Worsley were aboard the steamer
Yelcho
when it made the successful trip from Punta Arenas, in Chile, to that desolate rock where the lost souls sat patiently awaiting whatever fate would choose to deliver.

Once they were within sight of the island, Shackleton and Crean climbed aboard a cutter as it was lowered over the side of the ship and rowed over to the beach. When they were close enough to be heard over the breaking waves of the surf, Shackleton shouted out: “Are you all well?”

Back from the beach came the reply the leader had hoped with all his heart to hear, and done everything in his power to ensure.

“We are all well, Boss!”

The achievement of Shackleton, Crean and Worsley has never been equaled, let alone surpassed. They survived months aboard the trapped
Endurance
, then led 25 men across the Southern Ocean in open boats to Elephant Island, before setting out with their three colleagues to complete a further 800 miles of sea crossing. All of this was done in the worst possible conditions and with wholly inadequate and unsuitable clothing and equipment. And after all that, they managed a forced march across 40 miles of uncharted glaciers, ice fields and mountains in the interior of South Georgia in order to bring help to their comrades.

The crew of their support ship
Aurora
had not been so fortunate. Knowing nothing of the plight of Shackleton and the rest of the men aboard the
Endurance
, the 10-man team had battled tremendous hardships of their own. Ill-equipped and faced with appalling weather conditions throughout, they had struggled to complete their assigned task of marching into Antarctica’s interior to lay the supply dumps for the planned second leg of their comrades’ journey past the Pole. Unbeknownst to them, they were risking everything for a journey that would never even be attempted, let alone completed. Three of them died in the attempt, and yet such was the furor that greeted the reports of the survival of Shackleton
and his first team that the bravery of the “Ross Sea Party” was all but overlooked by history.

And so to that fourth soul sensed by Shackleton, Crean and Worsley as they crossed South Georgia. It would be easy to say that three men in such a predicament, weakened by malnutrition and exhausted to the point of collapse, might be subject to hallucinations. It wouldn’t be the first or last time that men pushed to the limits of their physical and mental strength have been tricked by their own imaginations as their minds fought for survival.

But the fact remains that while the phenomenon was not acknowledged, far less discussed by the men at the time, both Shackleton and Worsley later wrote about it in their accounts of the expedition.

In
South
, for example, Shackleton noted:

I know that during that long and racking march of 36 hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, “Boss, I had a curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.” Crean confessed to the same idea. One feels “the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible, but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our hearts.

 

There can be no rational explanation for what those men experienced on their march to save their comrades. Crean would later say simply that God had watched over them and brought them home. Maybe he was right. God certainly seemed absent from the war in France, where millions of boys and men were fighting, killing and dying. There was a time, and that time is not now, when British men took the presence of God for granted. Their belief is part of
the explanation for why, and even how, they did the things they did.

The voyage of the
James Caird
and the crossing of South Georgia is, anyway, a story not of gods but of men. Most fitting of all was the comment made by one of the whalers as they gathered around the grateful trio in their club-room on the night they arrived at Stromness. These were tough individuals all, hardened by years of physical labor in the toughest environment on earth, yet every one of them was desperate to shake hands with the pilgrims in their midst.

Out of the tobacco-smoke haze stepped one old man, a veteran of four decades or more on the Southern Ocean. In all his years, he said, he had never heard the like of the tale he’d just had from Ernest Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley. It was an honor he said, a real honor to know fellows such as these. And then, having all but run out of words, he gestured flamboyantly at the dazed newcomers.

“These—are men!” he said.

The scale and significance of what they’d done was not lost on the Boss. By the time they had reached that whaling station at Stromness, they had thrown away their stove and adze. Their last obstacle had been a waterfall and the rope, securely tied to a rock at the top, had to be left behind when all three reached the bottom. They brought out of the Antarctic only the clothes they wore. After all, wrote Shackleton:

That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich.

 

In trying to give words to his feelings, he turned to lines by the poet Robert Service in “The Call of the Wild”:

We had pierced the veneer of outside things.

 

We had “suffered, starved and triumphed, groveled down yet grasped at glory, grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.” We had “seen God in his splendours, heard the text that Nature renders.” We had reached the “naked soul” of man.