April 6, 2022 • 38 mins
After Shackleton’s team abandoned the Endurance to the ice, they faced a harrowing journey over the ice of Antarctica. Meanwhile, the support team aboard the Aurora was also faced with a grueling and treacherous race for survival.
Research:
- LeBrun, Nancy. “Survival! The Shackleton Story.” National Geogrpahic. Via YouTube. 1991. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgh_77TtX5I
- "Ernest Shackleton, Sir." Explorers & Discoverers of the World, Gale, 1993. Gale In Context: U.S. History, link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1614000271/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=b93f5648. Accessed 14 Mar. 2022.
- Savours, Ann. “Shackleton, Sir Ernest Henry.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 9/23/2004. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/36034
- "Patience and Endurance; Underwater archaeology." The Economist, 12 Mar. 2022, p. 69(US). Gale OneFile: Business, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696334375/GPS?u=mlin_n_melpub&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=e2fe8a81. Accessed 14 Mar. 2022.
- Falkland Maritime Heritage Trust. “Endurance 22.” https://endurance22.org/
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Ernest Shackleton". Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Feb. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-Henry-Shackleton. Accessed 15 March 2022.
- Tyler, Kelly. “Shackleton's Lost Men.” Shackleton: Voyage of Endurance. Nova. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackleton/1914/lostmen.html
- Roisman-Cooper, Barbara. “Part I: Polar dreams, polar disappointments.” British Heritage. Jun/Jul99, Vol. 20 Issue 4, p32.
- Roisman-Cooper, Barbara. “Part 2: Polar dreams, polar disappointments.” British Heritage. Oct/Nov99, Vol. 20 Issue 6, p52.
- Schultheiss, Katrin. “The Ends of the Earth and the “Heroic Age” of Polar Exploration: A Review Essay.” Historically Speaking, Volume 10, Number 2, April 2009, pp. 14-17. https://doi.org/10.1353/hsp.0.0026
- Alexander, Caroline. “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.” With the American Museum of Natural History. Knopf. 1998.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our episode on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica.
(00:23):
I would only recommend starting with this one if you
really like your story, is to just start in Media's race,
because where we left off, Shackleton had traveled to Antarctica
aboard the Endurance and he was trapped there on the ice.
The team had abandoned ship. Another team that we have
not talked about much at all had also traveled to Antarctica.
(00:43):
They were aboard the Aurora and their job was to
lay the supply depot that Shackleton's party was going to
need on the second half of their trip across the continent.
We will be catching up with the Aurora again later First,
we will talk about the extraordinary survival of Shackleton's team
if you missed last time. Also, there are some deaths
(01:04):
in this episode, including some animal deaths. Losing the Endurance
meant that there was no way Ernest Shackleton's team could
attempt to trek across Antarctica. A six person team was
supposed to be making that crossing, not all of the
twenty people who were with him. Aside from that, the
ice pack had been drifting the whole time. The endurance
(01:25):
was stuck, so they were about five hundred seventy miles
from where they had first become trapped. They had been
moving in a roughly northwesterly direction toward the Antarctic Peninsula,
so their new plan was to cross the ice until
they got to water and then make for one of
the islands at the end of that peninsula by boat.
Shackleton thought Paulit Island was a good bet. It had
(01:47):
shelter and supplies that were left by an earlier expedition,
and that was roughly three hundred fifty miles away. The
team camped on an ice flow about a hundred yards
from the wrecked ship, and they salvaged as as much
as they could from the wreckage. They called this spot
where they were basically dropping stuff off their dump camp,
and their preparations to leave that camp involved some difficult decisions.
(02:10):
Shackleton wrote in his journal, quote this afternoon, Sally's three
youngest pups, Sues Serious and Mrs Chippy, the carpenter's cat,
have to be shot. We could not undertake the maintenance
of weaklings under the new conditions. Macklin, Crane and the
carpenter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly.
(02:30):
This wasn't the first time that dogs had to be
shot during this In other cases, though the dogs had
been really sick or hurt. The expedition was supposed to
have a dog handler. The dog handler was supposed to
have de worming medicine, but he didn't wind up joining
the expedition, and they lost a lot of dogs because
of intestinal worms. They also needed to cut down what
(02:51):
they were carrying as much as possible. Everyone was allowed
only two pounds of personal possessions, with a few exceptions.
Leonard Hussey was allowed to bring his banjo for the
sake of everyone's morale. Shackleton set the example himself, discarding
his watch, his silver brushes, and other personal items in
front of the rest of the crew. This included a
(03:14):
Bible that Queen Alexandra had given him before departing. He
pulled some passages from it first, though one was the
twenty third Psalm, which begins the Lord is My Shepherd
I shall not want. He also kept part of chapter
thirty eight 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
(03:36):
a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
Shackleton and photographer Frank Hurley also had to make decisions
about the expedition's pictures and film. Hurley had already braved
the ship's wreckage while it was taking on water, and
he had gotten everything he could get out of the
dark room. But now they had to decide what to
(03:58):
keep and what they were going to have to leave behind.
Keeping in mind that the advanced sale of his work
had helped pay for the expedition, Hurley wound up leaving
most of his glass negatives, along with a lot of
his equipment, but keeping film and a book of printed photographs.
We have mentioned Shackleton's efforts to minimize divisions and foster
(04:20):
a sense that things were being handled equitably. That was
the case in these preparations as well. For example, they
had two types of sleeping bags. Some were made of
reindeer for and they were much warmer, and the others
were made of wool. Although lots were drawn to decide
who got which one, many of the higher ranking men
stayed out of it. They took a wool bag for themselves,
(04:42):
and they left the better bags for everyone else. Shackleton
knew that crossing the ice is going to be difficult,
so he sent an advanced party to try to clear
a path. This path would need to accommodate dogs and
sledges and men who were hauling the Endurances three lifeboats,
but soon it became obvious that this was just not
(05:02):
going to work. The ice was far too uneven and irregular.
The boats probably would not even be seaworthy by the
end of it if they got dragged over all that,
so Shackleton revised his plan again, this time to continue
drifting along with the ice and so wait for it
to break up, hopefully with them being close enough to
(05:24):
paull At Island to make it there. In the boats,
they established a new camp, which they called Ocean Camp,
about a mile and a half away from the wreck
of the Endurance. Shackleton kept working on morale, including assigning
the men who were hard to get along with to
the same tent, which was also where he slept. He
had really tried to select people for this expedition based
(05:45):
on their skills and their temperament, but even so, this
kind of stress and isolation and months of unending darkness
were really hard. He also eventually had Quartermaster Thomas ord
Lee's sleep with stores instead of an a tent with others.
He was generally anxious and very focused on how short
they were on everything and how much more likely that
(06:07):
made it that they would all die. His journal has
stuff in it where it's like he almost grasps that
his demeanor was upsetting people, because he would say things like,
Shackleton seems to understand that we might not live, but
he doesn't want us to talk about it because it
(06:27):
might upset the sailors, and I'm like, dude, he'd rain
it in a little bit. The weather continued to warm
as summer progressed into November, but in some ways that
made things worse. On ice flow, everything became slushy and gross.
People could just never get dry, and yet the ice
(06:48):
blow was not breaking up in the way that they
hoped it would. On November twenty one, the endurance sank.
Shackleton noted in his journal quote at five pm, she
went down by the head. The stern, the cause of
all the trouble, was the last to go underwater. I
cannot write about it. After this tension started to flare,
(07:10):
teams kept going back to the dump camp to bring
back more stuff that they could salvage from it, but
that became increasingly dangerous. Shackleton started having trouble with sciatica,
and for a while he was in so much pain
that he could not get out of his sleeping bag
without help. That made it hard for him to stay
connected with what was happening with the rest of the
camp and head off any morale issues that were brewing.
(07:33):
With the ice flow staying stubbornly intact, but the ice
itself seeming a little more passable, Shackleton decided to try
hauling the boats to open water again. The ship had
three small boats named after their biggest financial backers, the
Standcomb Wills, the Dudley Docker, and the James Cared. They
planned to have a Christmas celebration on Midsummer Day, December
(07:56):
twenty two, and then set out the day after that,
hauling the Dudley Docker and the James Cared and leaving
the Stankham wheels behind. When they tried to do this,
the going was very, very slow. Shackleton had hoped to
pull the boats about sixty miles, but it was immediately
clear that they were never ever going to make it
that far. People's nerves started to fray as there were
(08:20):
second guessing of whether leaving Ocean Camp had been the
right decision. Eventually they hid an impassable stretch of ice
and they had to backtrack, only for a crack to
open up where they had been trying to make camp.
People were understandably deeply frustrated that they left behind a
lot of gear and supplies, and now they were in
a worse position than they had been before, having made
(08:43):
really almost no progress. They established yet another new camp,
this one called Patients Camp. By mid January, the food
supply was low enough that it could not sustain both
the men and the dogs, and all but two of
the sled teams were shot. Both Shackleton and second in
command Frank Wilde wrote that this was the worst job
(09:04):
of their lives. Shortly after this, the two remaining sledge
teams made a run back to Ocean Camp, and they
came back with about nine hundred pounds of stores. Then
they sent another team to retrieve the standcom Wills. They
were still low on food, and they were low on
blubber to be used as fuel, but Shackleton resisted sending
(09:26):
people out on hunting expeditions. It's not totally clear why
he had really shown plenty of willingness to change his
decisions in the face of changing circumstances or new information,
but in this case he just kept maintaining that they
had plenty. A lot of people felt like they did
not have plenty. Some of the men who were keeping
journals through this period became increasingly frustrated and cynical in them.
(09:50):
By March, they were about seventy miles from Paul Island,
and they could feel the movement of the ocean under
the ice. They kept themselves ready to move quickly if
the ice flow finally broken away that let them get
to open water instead. When they finally passed Paulette Island,
they were still separated by far too much ice to cross.
(10:11):
The island was about sixty miles away, but in Shackleton's
words quote, it might have been six hundred for all
the chance that we had of reaching it by sledging
across the broken sea ice in its present condition. On March,
the team had to shoot the last of the dogs,
and they ate meat from some of the younger ones.
By this point their diet was almost entirely meet, although
(10:34):
most of it was from seals and seabirds. In April,
their ice flow started moving very quickly, caught in strong currents,
and it was heaving enough that some of the men
got sea sick. One night, a crack opened directly under
a tent where two men were sleeping, and Shackleton rescued
fireman Earnest Wholeness by pulling him out of the water
(10:54):
by his sleeping bag. At this point, they could see
Elephant Island in the distance, and they were finally close
enough to water that they could get the boats there,
so they abandoned the ice flow on April nine. We'll
talk more about what happened after a sponsor break. Once
(11:19):
Shackleton and his men were in the life boats, things
became even more difficult and dangerous than they had been
back on the ice. The largest of the boats was
only about twenty two ft or six point seven meters long.
They were facing gale force winds and rough seas that
sometimes pushed them in the totally wrong direction, or they
(11:40):
blew the boats away from each other. They were also
surrounded by huge, treacherous chunks of ice and a whole
lot of orca. The men had also been on an
almost all meat diet for so long that their bodies
just had almost no energy to do anything. They were
at sea for four days, sheltering in the lee of
(12:01):
large ice chunks overnight. By the third day, morale was
pretty much broken. They were all completely exhausted. All of
the boats had been swamped to the men's feet were
soaking in freezing water. Some tried to row or get
out of the way of ice, while others tried to
bail out the boats, but everyone was dehydrated. Many of
(12:22):
them had seasickness or dysentery or both. Shackleton reportedly stayed
awake the whole time. They finally reached Elephant Island on
April fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, and they had hot food and
drink for the first time in days. But the spot
where they made landfall was far from ideal. They had
(12:43):
almost no shelter from the elements or the tides. A
lot of the men had frost bite. Percy Blackborough, who
had originally been a stowaway, was seriously ill, and First
Engineer Louis Rickinson also appeared to have had a heart attack.
A scouting team went to look for a better being
spot by boat, and they found an area with a
little more space and shelter. They relocated the camp by boat,
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but they had to leave some of their supplies behind
because they were simply too exhausted to move them. This
new location, though, was still fairly exposed. A blizzard ripped
up one of their tents and flattened others almost immediately,
and it was also a penguin rookery just covered in guano.
Shackleton's description of the state of things at this point
(13:28):
comes off as a little judgmental, especially given current understanding
of things like trauma and mental health. Quote. Some of
the men were showing signs of demoralization. They were disinclined
to leave the tents when the hour came for turning out,
and it was apparent they were thinking more of the
discomforts of the moment than of the good fortune that
(13:49):
had brought us to sound ground and comparative safety. The
condition of the gloves and headgear shown me by some
discouraged men illustrated the proverbial carelessness of the sailor. The
articles had frozen stiff during the night, and the owners
considered it appeared that the state of affairs provided them
(14:10):
with a grievance, or at any rate gave them the
right to grumble. They said they wanted dry clothes, and
that their health would not admit of their doing any
work only by rather drastic methods, where they induced to
turn to frozen gloves and helmets undoubtedly are very uncomfortable,
and the proper thing is to keep these articles thawed
(14:31):
by placing them inside one's shirt during the night. In
addition to its shortcomings in terms of protection from the
elements and so much bird poop, the camp on Elephant
Island wasn't near any kind of shipping lanes, so there
was just about no chance that the men would be
spotted and rescued. So Shackleton announced that he and a
crew would take the James Cared, which was the biggest
(14:53):
of the lifeboats, to South Georgia Island to get help.
South Georgia Island was roughly eight hundred miles a They
spent the next few days making repairs and adjustments to
the James cared, both to repair some damage and to
make it at least slightly more suitable for the journey.
They salvaged lumber to make it more seaworthy, and they
(15:14):
made a makeshift decking out of canvas that they had
to thaw out in sections before they could sew it together.
They made ballast for the boat by filling blankets with
shingle from the island, and they supplemented that with boulders.
Shackleton chose five other men to accompany him, Frank Worsley,
captain of the Endurance, second officer Thomas Crane, carpenter Henry McNish,
(15:38):
and seaman Timothy McCarthy and John Vincent. He selected these
men both for their skills and for their attitudes, although
not necessarily because he thought that they would be pleasant
to have a long McNish, for example, was a highly
skilled carpenter, but he also butted heads with Shackleton and
other authority figures, and he may have been selected just
(15:59):
out of year that he would cause unrest among the
men if he were left at Elephant Island. They left
on April, both to take advantage of a break in
the weather and to try to get ahead of a
band of ice that was freezing along the coast. They
rode the James carried out past the reef, while other
men ferried their food and equipment to them aboard the
Stand gum Wills. Purley was taking photos of all of this.
(16:23):
He had done that the whole time they were on
the ice. He would continue to take photos on Elephant Island.
One of his most dramatic ones shows the James Cared
as it was leaving. This photograph originally also showed the
Stand gum Wills coming back from its last ferry run,
but the standcomb Wills was scratched out of the negative
to show only the James Cared. Shackleton left his second
(16:44):
in command, Frank Wilde, in charge of the camp, giving
him a letter that started, quote, in the event of
my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia, you'll
do your best for the rescue of the party. Wild
tried to carry on Shackleton's efforts of focusing on the
men's morale. In his own account, one of the more
pessimistic men said, quote that's the last of them. As
(17:06):
the James Cared sailed away, and quote I almost knocked
him down with a rock but satisfied myself by addressing
a few remarks to him in real lower deck language.
The men left behind on Elephant Island made more durable
shelters out of the boats and whatever else they could salvage.
But the first night they were buried in a blizzard
(17:26):
that revealed a lot of cracks in their shelters. They
stuffed those up with a torn up sleeping bag. Every
day they would stow their equipment so that they would
be ready to leave if rescue arrived. They also tried
to divide up the little pleasures they had access to,
like rotating through the closest seat to the stove at
meal time so everyone had a turn. They were still
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eating almost nothing but meat, but every once in a
while Wild would break out some kind of treat from
their stores, like barley or jam. They also still had
Hussy's banjo, and they made up various songs about the
predicament they were in. But as the days got shorter
and shorter, the men spent more and more time in
their sleeping bags. A lot of them became increasingly ill,
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and some had injuries that were truly dire. Blackborrow, for example,
developed gangering in his feet, and that forced the surgeon
to amputate his toes in a makeshift operating room that
was as clean as they could make it, But considering
that they were on an island covered in bird poop,
working with gear that had been repeatedly swamped by the ocean,
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not that clean. Meanwhile, conditions aboard the James Cared were terrible.
In Shackleton's words, quote, the tale of the next sixteen
days is one of supreme strife amid heaving waters. The
stretch of ocean they needed to cross was notoriously stormy.
At one point, they were nearly capsized by a wave
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so big that Shackleton mistook its foamy crest for a
break in the clouds. With light shining through their reindeer skin,
sleeping bags started to shed, so they were prickly hairs
all over the inside of the boat. The men had
to sit or lie on the rocky, water logged ballast.
They were increasingly wet, frost bitten, and burned from their stove.
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Worthily wrote of their situation in Shackleton's behavior, quote, two
of the party at least were very close to death. Indeed,
it might be said that he kept a finger on
each man's pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed
extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another drink
of hot milk to be prepared and served to all.
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He never let the man know it was on his account,
lest he become nervous about himself. On May fourth, they
had a break in the weather, so they were able
to get a little bit of a break and dry
some of their clothes and sleeping bags, But there was
so much cloud cover that they couldn't accurately determine their position.
Their first real indicator that they were getting closer to
(20:00):
land was on May seven, when they spotted some kilp.
They ran out of fresh water before they got to
the reef that ran alongside South Georgia Island, and then
it took them multiple tries to get over the reef.
By the time they finally made landfall, they were too
tired to drag the boat out of the surf. They
had to take turns hanging onto it so they wouldn't
(20:21):
lose it, and they nearly did lose it at one
point during the night. In the morning they ate some
fledgling albatross is something that might seem weird if you
have read the rhyme of the ancient mariner, but really
it was not all that unusual. In fact, someone on
the endurance had a copy of that poem, and they
had used it to entertain themselves while trapped on the ice.
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In Shackleton's words quote on reading the Ladder, we sympathized
with him and wondered what he had done with the albatross.
It would have made a very welcome addition to our larder.
Although they had gotten to South Georgia Island, they were
basically on the wrong side of it. To get to
the whaling station at grit Vickin, they were going to
have to cross over the island, which was mountainous, uncharted,
(21:05):
and considered to be uninhabitable. They also had no mountaineering equipment,
just a rope and a carpenter's ads. If they were
going in a straight line, they would need to travel
twenty two miles or thirty five kilometers, but this obviously
was not going to be a remotely straight line. It
took a few days for them to recover, work out
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their gear, and prepare to leave. Mcneiche and Vincent were
too sick to make the journey, so McCarthy stayed behind
with them in a hut that they made from the boat.
While Shackleton, Worseley, and Crane crossed the island. They got
very little rest along the way. They did not have
a tent or sleeping bags with them, and if they
had fallen asleep for any length of time, they probably
(21:48):
would have died. Then, at one point they got to
a mountain face that they didn't have a way to
get down, and so they had to slide down it
on their coiled up rope. Having done all that, after
about thirty six hours, they made it to the whaling station,
just ahead of a gale that probably would have killed
them if they had taken any longer. Shackleton gave this
(22:09):
description of his meeting with Mr. Sorrel, manager of the
whaling station, after they had crossed the mountains. Don't you
know me? I said, I know your voice, He replied, doubtfully.
You're the mate of the daisy. My name is Shackleton,
I said. Immediately, he put out his hand and said,
come in, Come in. Tell me when was the war over?
(22:30):
I asked. The war is not over, he answered, millions
are being killed. Europe is mad, the world is mad.
That so what happened next after another quick sponsor break.
After Shackleton, Worsley, and Crane ate and recovered a little bit,
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Worsley went with a relief boat to get the three
men that they had left on the other side of
the island. Those three were sent back to England while Shackulty, Warsley,
and Crane started trying to find a ship that could
rescue the twenty two people who were still left on
Elephant Island. This turned out to be difficult. It was winter,
and as Shackleton had just learned, the world was still
(23:18):
at war. First, they tried aboard the Southern Sky, which
could not make it through the pack ice. The Southern
Sky took Shackleton to the Falkland Islands, where he was
able to send a cable to Britain to let everyone
know he had survived. While people were pleased to hear that,
they were also really preoccupied with the ongoing war. Shackleton
(23:39):
was advised to seek help from nations in South America
to relieve his stranded crew. That still took a while.
He faced a whole series of breakdowns and ice jams
and other disappointments before finally getting to Elephant Island. Aboard
the Chilean steamer Yelcho. This was a small boat. It
was not at all built for this kind of purpose.
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They arrived at Elephant Island on August nineteen sixteen. Shackleton
was on deck looking through binoculars, alarmed to see what
looked like a flag at half staff, but then he
saw that there were twenty two men present on shore.
In Worsley's words, quote, he put his glasses back in
their case and turned to me, his face showing more
(24:23):
emotion than I had ever known it to show before.
Crane had joined us and we were all unable to speak.
It sounds trite, but years literally seemed to drop from
him as he stood before us. From Wild's point of view,
I'm seeing the ship from the island quote. I felt
jolly near blubbing for a bit and could not speak
(24:43):
for several minutes. The survival of all twenty eight men
from Shackleton's expedition aboard the Endurance was truly astonishing, and
it made headlines. But World War One had stretched on
the whole time they had been gone. It had been
so painful and demoralizing that people didn't really see this
dramatic rescue as much of a relief. There was even
(25:04):
some criticism that everyone involved should have been part of
the war effort that whole time they were gone. Also,
this relief of the men at Elephant Island was not
the end of the saga for the Imperial trans Antarctic
Expedition or Shackleton's efforts to get all of his men
to safety. As the Endurance was trapped in the Sea
(25:24):
Ice and the Wettle Sea. The Ross Sea Party had
been facing its own ordeal if you recall, that was
the party that had arrived on the Aurora to lay
the supply depots that Shackleton's team would need. The Ross
Sea Party was under the command of a Eneas McIntosh,
who had been part of Shackleton's expedition aboard the Nimrod
(25:45):
and had lost an eye in an accident during that expedition.
Others also had experience in Antarctica, but many of the
crew aboard did not have any polar experience. Their money
and supplies were even more hectically cobbled together than the
Endurance teams was, and they were also operating under a
totally unnecessary deadline. Shackleton had originally hoped to cross Antarctica
(26:10):
in the summer of nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen, and
he had realized that was not going to work before
setting sail from South Georgia Island, but before he left
he did not send any kind of word to McIntosh
about the schedule change. On top of that, once Shackleton
realized their crossing wasn't going to happen at all, there
(26:31):
was no way to let McIntosh know. So the Rossy
Party Number one was trying to plan for an expedition
that was running a year late, and then number two
had no idea that Shackleton's team wasn't coming, but they
thought if they didn't get their job done, Shackleton was
going to die. The ross Sea Party had arrived at
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McMurdo Sound in January of nineteen fifteen and started laying
supply depots on January, but that was extremely slow going.
They faced deep snow and impassable ice ridges. Their sledges
were overloaded, and eventually they had to divide the supplies
and carry them in a relay. This took four times
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as long and they had to travel four times as far,
so soon they were exhausted and they were low on rations.
The sledge dogs became so hungry that they started trying
to eat their own harnesses, and as the dogs died,
the men had to haul more and more of the
load themselves. To add to all of that, there were blizzards,
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extremely low temperatures, frost bite, snow blindness, and sleeping bags
that froze solid during the day and then melted when
they were exposed to people's body heat at night, so
the team was just constantly cold and wet. Eventually McIntosh
and the sledge teams had to return to the base
for the winter. They got there on March to find
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the Aurora and almost all of the rest of the
short team gone. They took shelter in a it that
Robert Falcon Scott had left behind in nineteen o two,
and then waited for the McMurdo Sound to freeze over
so they could walk to their planned winter quarters on
Cape Evans. There they found the rest of the shore party,
but the Aurora was gone. It had been blown off
(28:16):
its moorings in a gale, and everyone assumed it had sunk.
Most of what was supposed to sustain the shore team
over the winter had not yet been unloaded when the
aurora disappeared, including their winter clothes. They had only what
they were wearing. Robert Falcon Scott could not object to
their use of that hut's because at this point he
(28:38):
had died trying to return from the South Pole. The
Aurora team made it through the winter, though, and as
the weather got warmer in October of nineteen fifteen, they
got back to work, now with makeshift gear and sledges,
and with only nine men and four surviving dogs to
do the work. And this phase was even worse than
the first one. They started out with three teams and
(29:01):
each team had its own stove, but when one of
the stoves failed, that team had to go back to base.
Then the second stove failed, so the two remaining teams
had to consolidate and move together. That slowed their progress
way way down. They again faced scurvy and snow, blindness
and hunger, reaching a point where each man's daily ration
(29:24):
was eight lumps of sugar and a biscuit. Arnold Spencer
Smith became so ill he had to be left behind,
and when the team returned for him, both he and
McIntosh had to be loaded onto sledges and pulled on
their journey home. Their situation was so dire that they
were living on tea and dog food and having to
take supplies from the depots that were supposed to be
(29:45):
for Shackleton, again not knowing that Shackleton was not coming,
and thinking that if they took too much, his party
would be doomed. Arnold Spencer Smith died of scurvy on
March eight, and as the team was trying to make
their j ning back to the base, McIntosh became so
weak that he could not even stay on the sledge
he was being pulled on. More than once he fell off,
(30:09):
and the team had to backtrack for him after they
realized he was gone. The surviving team made it back
to Hut Point, and in May McIntosh announced that he
and VG Hayward were going to walk across the ice
to the base camp at Cape Evans. The rest of
the team tried to dissuade them, thinking that the ice
was not deep enough to be safe yet. McIntosh and
(30:30):
Hayward left anyway, and a blizzard started not long after.
A search party went to look for them once the
storm had cleared and found their trail of footprints, which
stopped suddenly at some freshly frozen ice. Eventually, the last
of the sledging party crossed back to Cape Evans and
met up with the rest of the team that had
stayed there. Once authorities knew about Shackleton's survival, funds were
(30:55):
finally approved for a relief expedition for the Ross Sea Party.
Shackleton left for New Zealand in October of nineteen sixteen
to join that party, and the ships sent to retrieve
them was the Aurora. Now it was under the command
of Captain John King Davis. Unbeknownst to anybody who had
been on the shore, the Aurora, after getting blown off
(31:17):
its moorings, had spent ten months drifting in the pack ice,
and then had gone to New Zealand for repairs once
it was freed. The Aurora arrived in Antarctica on January tenth,
nineteen seventeen, and Shackleton learned about the deaths of McIntosh,
Hayward and Spencer Smith, and the fact that the party
had traveled fifteen hundred miles in a hundred and sixty days,
(31:39):
laying their supply depots as planned. They looked for the
bodies of McIntosh and Hayward and took the seven men
who had been stranded ashore back to New Zealand. Yeah,
there was no sign of their bodies. They almost certainly
fell through the ice or we're on an ice flow
that broke away and they couldn't get off of it.
Shackleton again and worked with Edward Saunders to write a
(32:02):
book about all of this. It was titled South The
Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition nineteen fourteen to nineteen seventeen.
This is in the public domain now, along with a
lot of his other work. You can read it online
for free. Just one note if you do this, one
of the Rossy Party sledge dogs is named a racist slur.
Most of the men who had survived this expedition went
(32:22):
into active service during the remainder of World War One,
but Shackleton had trouble finding a post. He seems to
have struggled during this time, drinking excessively and spending most
of his time with the woman that he was having
an affair with. The Foreign Office sent him to South
America in late nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen on what
(32:44):
was described as a propaganda mission to raise morale. He
went to Russia with the British Expeditionary Force in nineteen nineteen.
That same year, Frank Hurley released a silent film called
South Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition. After the war
was over, Shackleton tried to plan another expedition to Antarctica,
(33:05):
this one aboard a ship called the Quest. It had
a crew of eighteen, seven of whom had been aboard
the Endurance. They arrived at grit Vickin Harbor on South
Georgia Island on January fourth Nino. The next day, Shackleton
died of a heart attack at the age of forty seven.
Many sources attribute this to damage from the extreme stress
(33:28):
and difficulty of the Endurance expedition. Although plans were made
to return Shackleton's body to his wife at her request,
he was buried in a cemetery on a hill above
the whaling station at South Georgia Island. His obituary in
the Geographical Record began quote with the death of Sir
Ernest Shackleton, Britain loses one of the most brilliant explorers
(33:51):
of modern days, and in his ninety three book The
Worst Journey in the World, about Robert Falcon Scott's ill
fated nineteen ten expedition to the South Pole, absolute Cherry
Gerard wrote, quote for a joint scientific and geographical piece
of organization, give me Scott for a winter journey, Wilson
(34:11):
for a dash to the Pole, and nothing else Hammondson.
And if I am in the devil of a hole
and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton
every time. And of course the Falkland Maritime Heritage Trusts
Endurance twenty two expedition found the Endurance on March nine
using remotely operated submarines. It was in water one thousand
(34:35):
sixty five fathoms or three thousand eight meters deep, about
six kilometers from where Frank Worsley had recorded the ship's
last position. It's reportedly in surprisingly good condition considering the
circumstances of its sinking and the conditions of the Wettle Sea,
and really full of all kinds of fascinating sea life.
(34:57):
Yeah there's a crab in particular that a big time Yeah.
So yeah, that's that's Shackleton's Endurance. Now that the shipwreck
has been found, we'll talk. We have various feelings about
of all this, about all of this, and we will
talk about them in the behind the scenes. And I
have listener mail from Celeste, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
(35:20):
I love your podcast. I am constantly entertaining friends and
family with the things I learned there. I've been meaning
to share this for quite some time, and your recent
podcast on William APIs reminded me to do so. I'm
the director of the Cumberland Public Library in Rhode Island.
My library is a former monastery situated on five fifty acres.
(35:40):
There are a number of trails here, but one of
them leads to a monument called Nine Men's Misery. It
is said to be the oldest veterans memorial in the country.
I've attached a document created by a long ago eagle
scout that details the history of King Philip's War and
how the monument came to be there. Ten men were
dispatched from a regiment during a skirmish called Pierce's Fight,
(36:03):
where fifty two soldiers and eleven Native Americans died. These
ten were supposedly ambushed by Native Americans and only one survived.
Their bodies were buried in a mass grave here on
the future monastery grounds, and a cairn built over them.
When the monks came here in the early nineteen hundreds.
They built a better cairn cemented together, which you can
(36:25):
see today. Later in nineteen seventy six, the Veterans Group
placed a marker there. Needless to say, local residents believe
it's haunted and that one can hear groans coming from
the earth. I've walked there many times and haven't heard anything,
but you never knew. Keep up the wonderful podcast. I'm
attaching a photo of my rescue Sadie, who is an
Australian cattle dog, Celeste. Thanks so much for sending this
(36:48):
Celeste number one. Kind of cool to have a public
library that is in a former monastery site. I find
that very interesting. I also, having done uh you know,
episodes about Kings Phillips war um a couple of different times,
I had never heard about this particular fight um at,
(37:10):
which of course is its own very complicated story beyond
the context of just this email. UM. Also, what a
good dog. Uh So, thank you again to the list
for sending this email. If you would like to send
us a note, We're at History Podcast at I heeart
radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed
(37:30):
in History. That's where real fund our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and wherever else you like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
(37:51):
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is
part two of our episode on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica.
(00:23):
I would only recommend starting with this one if you
really like your story, is to just start in Media's race,
because where we left off, Shackleton had traveled to Antarctica
aboard the Endurance and he was trapped there on the ice.
The team had abandoned ship. Another team that we have
not talked about much at all had also traveled to Antarctica.
(00:43):
They were aboard the Aurora and their job was to
lay the supply depot that Shackleton's party was going to
need on the second half of their trip across the continent.
We will be catching up with the Aurora again later First,
we will talk about the extraordinary survival of Shackleton's team
if you missed last time. Also, there are some deaths
(01:04):
in this episode, including some animal deaths. Losing the Endurance
meant that there was no way Ernest Shackleton's team could
attempt to trek across Antarctica. A six person team was
supposed to be making that crossing, not all of the
twenty people who were with him. Aside from that, the
ice pack had been drifting the whole time. The endurance
(01:25):
was stuck, so they were about five hundred seventy miles
from where they had first become trapped. They had been
moving in a roughly northwesterly direction toward the Antarctic Peninsula,
so their new plan was to cross the ice until
they got to water and then make for one of
the islands at the end of that peninsula by boat.
Shackleton thought Paulit Island was a good bet. It had
(01:47):
shelter and supplies that were left by an earlier expedition,
and that was roughly three hundred fifty miles away. The
team camped on an ice flow about a hundred yards
from the wrecked ship, and they salvaged as as much
as they could from the wreckage. They called this spot
where they were basically dropping stuff off their dump camp,
and their preparations to leave that camp involved some difficult decisions.
(02:10):
Shackleton wrote in his journal, quote this afternoon, Sally's three
youngest pups, Sues Serious and Mrs Chippy, the carpenter's cat,
have to be shot. We could not undertake the maintenance
of weaklings under the new conditions. Macklin, Crane and the
carpenter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly.
(02:30):
This wasn't the first time that dogs had to be
shot during this In other cases, though the dogs had
been really sick or hurt. The expedition was supposed to
have a dog handler. The dog handler was supposed to
have de worming medicine, but he didn't wind up joining
the expedition, and they lost a lot of dogs because
of intestinal worms. They also needed to cut down what
(02:51):
they were carrying as much as possible. Everyone was allowed
only two pounds of personal possessions, with a few exceptions.
Leonard Hussey was allowed to bring his banjo for the
sake of everyone's morale. Shackleton set the example himself, discarding
his watch, his silver brushes, and other personal items in
front of the rest of the crew. This included a
(03:14):
Bible that Queen Alexandra had given him before departing. He
pulled some passages from it first, though one was the
twenty third Psalm, which begins the Lord is My Shepherd
I shall not want. He also kept part of chapter
thirty eight 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
(03:36):
a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
Shackleton and photographer Frank Hurley also had to make decisions
about the expedition's pictures and film. Hurley had already braved
the ship's wreckage while it was taking on water, and
he had gotten everything he could get out of the
dark room. But now they had to decide what to
(03:58):
keep and what they were going to have to leave behind.
Keeping in mind that the advanced sale of his work
had helped pay for the expedition, Hurley wound up leaving
most of his glass negatives, along with a lot of
his equipment, but keeping film and a book of printed photographs.
We have mentioned Shackleton's efforts to minimize divisions and foster
(04:20):
a sense that things were being handled equitably. That was
the case in these preparations as well. For example, they
had two types of sleeping bags. Some were made of
reindeer for and they were much warmer, and the others
were made of wool. Although lots were drawn to decide
who got which one, many of the higher ranking men
stayed out of it. They took a wool bag for themselves,
(04:42):
and they left the better bags for everyone else. Shackleton
knew that crossing the ice is going to be difficult,
so he sent an advanced party to try to clear
a path. This path would need to accommodate dogs and
sledges and men who were hauling the Endurances three lifeboats,
but soon it became obvious that this was just not
(05:02):
going to work. The ice was far too uneven and irregular.
The boats probably would not even be seaworthy by the
end of it if they got dragged over all that,
so Shackleton revised his plan again, this time to continue
drifting along with the ice and so wait for it
to break up, hopefully with them being close enough to
(05:24):
paull At Island to make it there. In the boats,
they established a new camp, which they called Ocean Camp,
about a mile and a half away from the wreck
of the Endurance. Shackleton kept working on morale, including assigning
the men who were hard to get along with to
the same tent, which was also where he slept. He
had really tried to select people for this expedition based
(05:45):
on their skills and their temperament, but even so, this
kind of stress and isolation and months of unending darkness
were really hard. He also eventually had Quartermaster Thomas ord
Lee's sleep with stores instead of an a tent with others.
He was generally anxious and very focused on how short
they were on everything and how much more likely that
(06:07):
made it that they would all die. His journal has
stuff in it where it's like he almost grasps that
his demeanor was upsetting people, because he would say things like,
Shackleton seems to understand that we might not live, but
he doesn't want us to talk about it because it
(06:27):
might upset the sailors, and I'm like, dude, he'd rain
it in a little bit. The weather continued to warm
as summer progressed into November, but in some ways that
made things worse. On ice flow, everything became slushy and gross.
People could just never get dry, and yet the ice
(06:48):
blow was not breaking up in the way that they
hoped it would. On November twenty one, the endurance sank.
Shackleton noted in his journal quote at five pm, she
went down by the head. The stern, the cause of
all the trouble, was the last to go underwater. I
cannot write about it. After this tension started to flare,
(07:10):
teams kept going back to the dump camp to bring
back more stuff that they could salvage from it, but
that became increasingly dangerous. Shackleton started having trouble with sciatica,
and for a while he was in so much pain
that he could not get out of his sleeping bag
without help. That made it hard for him to stay
connected with what was happening with the rest of the
camp and head off any morale issues that were brewing.
(07:33):
With the ice flow staying stubbornly intact, but the ice
itself seeming a little more passable, Shackleton decided to try
hauling the boats to open water again. The ship had
three small boats named after their biggest financial backers, the
Standcomb Wills, the Dudley Docker, and the James Cared. They
planned to have a Christmas celebration on Midsummer Day, December
(07:56):
twenty two, and then set out the day after that,
hauling the Dudley Docker and the James Cared and leaving
the Stankham wheels behind. When they tried to do this,
the going was very, very slow. Shackleton had hoped to
pull the boats about sixty miles, but it was immediately
clear that they were never ever going to make it
that far. People's nerves started to fray as there were
(08:20):
second guessing of whether leaving Ocean Camp had been the
right decision. Eventually they hid an impassable stretch of ice
and they had to backtrack, only for a crack to
open up where they had been trying to make camp.
People were understandably deeply frustrated that they left behind a
lot of gear and supplies, and now they were in
a worse position than they had been before, having made
(08:43):
really almost no progress. They established yet another new camp,
this one called Patients Camp. By mid January, the food
supply was low enough that it could not sustain both
the men and the dogs, and all but two of
the sled teams were shot. Both Shackleton and second in
command Frank Wilde wrote that this was the worst job
(09:04):
of their lives. Shortly after this, the two remaining sledge
teams made a run back to Ocean Camp, and they
came back with about nine hundred pounds of stores. Then
they sent another team to retrieve the standcom Wills. They
were still low on food, and they were low on
blubber to be used as fuel, but Shackleton resisted sending
(09:26):
people out on hunting expeditions. It's not totally clear why
he had really shown plenty of willingness to change his
decisions in the face of changing circumstances or new information,
but in this case he just kept maintaining that they
had plenty. A lot of people felt like they did
not have plenty. Some of the men who were keeping
journals through this period became increasingly frustrated and cynical in them.
(09:50):
By March, they were about seventy miles from Paul Island,
and they could feel the movement of the ocean under
the ice. They kept themselves ready to move quickly if
the ice flow finally broken away that let them get
to open water instead. When they finally passed Paulette Island,
they were still separated by far too much ice to cross.
(10:11):
The island was about sixty miles away, but in Shackleton's
words quote, it might have been six hundred for all
the chance that we had of reaching it by sledging
across the broken sea ice in its present condition. On March,
the team had to shoot the last of the dogs,
and they ate meat from some of the younger ones.
By this point their diet was almost entirely meet, although
(10:34):
most of it was from seals and seabirds. In April,
their ice flow started moving very quickly, caught in strong currents,
and it was heaving enough that some of the men
got sea sick. One night, a crack opened directly under
a tent where two men were sleeping, and Shackleton rescued
fireman Earnest Wholeness by pulling him out of the water
(10:54):
by his sleeping bag. At this point, they could see
Elephant Island in the distance, and they were finally close
enough to water that they could get the boats there,
so they abandoned the ice flow on April nine. We'll
talk more about what happened after a sponsor break. Once
(11:19):
Shackleton and his men were in the life boats, things
became even more difficult and dangerous than they had been
back on the ice. The largest of the boats was
only about twenty two ft or six point seven meters long.
They were facing gale force winds and rough seas that
sometimes pushed them in the totally wrong direction, or they
(11:40):
blew the boats away from each other. They were also
surrounded by huge, treacherous chunks of ice and a whole
lot of orca. The men had also been on an
almost all meat diet for so long that their bodies
just had almost no energy to do anything. They were
at sea for four days, sheltering in the lee of
(12:01):
large ice chunks overnight. By the third day, morale was
pretty much broken. They were all completely exhausted. All of
the boats had been swamped to the men's feet were
soaking in freezing water. Some tried to row or get
out of the way of ice, while others tried to
bail out the boats, but everyone was dehydrated. Many of
(12:22):
them had seasickness or dysentery or both. Shackleton reportedly stayed
awake the whole time. They finally reached Elephant Island on
April fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, and they had hot food and
drink for the first time in days. But the spot
where they made landfall was far from ideal. They had
(12:43):
almost no shelter from the elements or the tides. A
lot of the men had frost bite. Percy Blackborough, who
had originally been a stowaway, was seriously ill, and First
Engineer Louis Rickinson also appeared to have had a heart attack.
A scouting team went to look for a better being
spot by boat, and they found an area with a
little more space and shelter. They relocated the camp by boat,
(13:07):
but they had to leave some of their supplies behind
because they were simply too exhausted to move them. This
new location, though, was still fairly exposed. A blizzard ripped
up one of their tents and flattened others almost immediately,
and it was also a penguin rookery just covered in guano.
Shackleton's description of the state of things at this point
(13:28):
comes off as a little judgmental, especially given current understanding
of things like trauma and mental health. Quote. Some of
the men were showing signs of demoralization. They were disinclined
to leave the tents when the hour came for turning out,
and it was apparent they were thinking more of the
discomforts of the moment than of the good fortune that
(13:49):
had brought us to sound ground and comparative safety. The
condition of the gloves and headgear shown me by some
discouraged men illustrated the proverbial carelessness of the sailor. The
articles had frozen stiff during the night, and the owners
considered it appeared that the state of affairs provided them
(14:10):
with a grievance, or at any rate gave them the
right to grumble. They said they wanted dry clothes, and
that their health would not admit of their doing any
work only by rather drastic methods, where they induced to
turn to frozen gloves and helmets undoubtedly are very uncomfortable,
and the proper thing is to keep these articles thawed
(14:31):
by placing them inside one's shirt during the night. In
addition to its shortcomings in terms of protection from the
elements and so much bird poop, the camp on Elephant
Island wasn't near any kind of shipping lanes, so there
was just about no chance that the men would be
spotted and rescued. So Shackleton announced that he and a
crew would take the James Cared, which was the biggest
(14:53):
of the lifeboats, to South Georgia Island to get help.
South Georgia Island was roughly eight hundred miles a They
spent the next few days making repairs and adjustments to
the James cared, both to repair some damage and to
make it at least slightly more suitable for the journey.
They salvaged lumber to make it more seaworthy, and they
(15:14):
made a makeshift decking out of canvas that they had
to thaw out in sections before they could sew it together.
They made ballast for the boat by filling blankets with
shingle from the island, and they supplemented that with boulders.
Shackleton chose five other men to accompany him, Frank Worsley,
captain of the Endurance, second officer Thomas Crane, carpenter Henry McNish,
(15:38):
and seaman Timothy McCarthy and John Vincent. He selected these
men both for their skills and for their attitudes, although
not necessarily because he thought that they would be pleasant
to have a long McNish, for example, was a highly
skilled carpenter, but he also butted heads with Shackleton and
other authority figures, and he may have been selected just
(15:59):
out of year that he would cause unrest among the
men if he were left at Elephant Island. They left
on April, both to take advantage of a break in
the weather and to try to get ahead of a
band of ice that was freezing along the coast. They
rode the James carried out past the reef, while other
men ferried their food and equipment to them aboard the
Stand gum Wills. Purley was taking photos of all of this.
(16:23):
He had done that the whole time they were on
the ice. He would continue to take photos on Elephant Island.
One of his most dramatic ones shows the James Cared
as it was leaving. This photograph originally also showed the
Stand gum Wills coming back from its last ferry run,
but the standcomb Wills was scratched out of the negative
to show only the James Cared. Shackleton left his second
(16:44):
in command, Frank Wilde, in charge of the camp, giving
him a letter that started, quote, in the event of
my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia, you'll
do your best for the rescue of the party. Wild
tried to carry on Shackleton's efforts of focusing on the
men's morale. In his own account, one of the more
pessimistic men said, quote that's the last of them. As
(17:06):
the James Cared sailed away, and quote I almost knocked
him down with a rock but satisfied myself by addressing
a few remarks to him in real lower deck language.
The men left behind on Elephant Island made more durable
shelters out of the boats and whatever else they could salvage.
But the first night they were buried in a blizzard
(17:26):
that revealed a lot of cracks in their shelters. They
stuffed those up with a torn up sleeping bag. Every
day they would stow their equipment so that they would
be ready to leave if rescue arrived. They also tried
to divide up the little pleasures they had access to,
like rotating through the closest seat to the stove at
meal time so everyone had a turn. They were still
(17:49):
eating almost nothing but meat, but every once in a
while Wild would break out some kind of treat from
their stores, like barley or jam. They also still had
Hussy's banjo, and they made up various songs about the
predicament they were in. But as the days got shorter
and shorter, the men spent more and more time in
their sleeping bags. A lot of them became increasingly ill,
(18:11):
and some had injuries that were truly dire. Blackborrow, for example,
developed gangering in his feet, and that forced the surgeon
to amputate his toes in a makeshift operating room that
was as clean as they could make it, But considering
that they were on an island covered in bird poop,
working with gear that had been repeatedly swamped by the ocean,
(18:33):
not that clean. Meanwhile, conditions aboard the James Cared were terrible.
In Shackleton's words, quote, the tale of the next sixteen
days is one of supreme strife amid heaving waters. The
stretch of ocean they needed to cross was notoriously stormy.
At one point, they were nearly capsized by a wave
(18:54):
so big that Shackleton mistook its foamy crest for a
break in the clouds. With light shining through their reindeer skin,
sleeping bags started to shed, so they were prickly hairs
all over the inside of the boat. The men had
to sit or lie on the rocky, water logged ballast.
They were increasingly wet, frost bitten, and burned from their stove.
(19:18):
Worthily wrote of their situation in Shackleton's behavior, quote, two
of the party at least were very close to death. Indeed,
it might be said that he kept a finger on
each man's pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed
extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another drink
of hot milk to be prepared and served to all.
(19:39):
He never let the man know it was on his account,
lest he become nervous about himself. On May fourth, they
had a break in the weather, so they were able
to get a little bit of a break and dry
some of their clothes and sleeping bags, But there was
so much cloud cover that they couldn't accurately determine their position.
Their first real indicator that they were getting closer to
(20:00):
land was on May seven, when they spotted some kilp.
They ran out of fresh water before they got to
the reef that ran alongside South Georgia Island, and then
it took them multiple tries to get over the reef.
By the time they finally made landfall, they were too
tired to drag the boat out of the surf. They
had to take turns hanging onto it so they wouldn't
(20:21):
lose it, and they nearly did lose it at one
point during the night. In the morning they ate some
fledgling albatross is something that might seem weird if you
have read the rhyme of the ancient mariner, but really
it was not all that unusual. In fact, someone on
the endurance had a copy of that poem, and they
had used it to entertain themselves while trapped on the ice.
(20:41):
In Shackleton's words quote on reading the Ladder, we sympathized
with him and wondered what he had done with the albatross.
It would have made a very welcome addition to our larder.
Although they had gotten to South Georgia Island, they were
basically on the wrong side of it. To get to
the whaling station at grit Vickin, they were going to
have to cross over the island, which was mountainous, uncharted,
(21:05):
and considered to be uninhabitable. They also had no mountaineering equipment,
just a rope and a carpenter's ads. If they were
going in a straight line, they would need to travel
twenty two miles or thirty five kilometers, but this obviously
was not going to be a remotely straight line. It
took a few days for them to recover, work out
(21:25):
their gear, and prepare to leave. Mcneiche and Vincent were
too sick to make the journey, so McCarthy stayed behind
with them in a hut that they made from the boat.
While Shackleton, Worseley, and Crane crossed the island. They got
very little rest along the way. They did not have
a tent or sleeping bags with them, and if they
had fallen asleep for any length of time, they probably
(21:48):
would have died. Then, at one point they got to
a mountain face that they didn't have a way to
get down, and so they had to slide down it
on their coiled up rope. Having done all that, after
about thirty six hours, they made it to the whaling station,
just ahead of a gale that probably would have killed
them if they had taken any longer. Shackleton gave this
(22:09):
description of his meeting with Mr. Sorrel, manager of the
whaling station, after they had crossed the mountains. Don't you
know me? I said, I know your voice, He replied, doubtfully.
You're the mate of the daisy. My name is Shackleton,
I said. Immediately, he put out his hand and said,
come in, Come in. Tell me when was the war over?
(22:30):
I asked. The war is not over, he answered, millions
are being killed. Europe is mad, the world is mad.
That so what happened next after another quick sponsor break.
After Shackleton, Worsley, and Crane ate and recovered a little bit,
(22:54):
Worsley went with a relief boat to get the three
men that they had left on the other side of
the island. Those three were sent back to England while Shackulty, Warsley,
and Crane started trying to find a ship that could
rescue the twenty two people who were still left on
Elephant Island. This turned out to be difficult. It was winter,
and as Shackleton had just learned, the world was still
(23:18):
at war. First, they tried aboard the Southern Sky, which
could not make it through the pack ice. The Southern
Sky took Shackleton to the Falkland Islands, where he was
able to send a cable to Britain to let everyone
know he had survived. While people were pleased to hear that,
they were also really preoccupied with the ongoing war. Shackleton
(23:39):
was advised to seek help from nations in South America
to relieve his stranded crew. That still took a while.
He faced a whole series of breakdowns and ice jams
and other disappointments before finally getting to Elephant Island. Aboard
the Chilean steamer Yelcho. This was a small boat. It
was not at all built for this kind of purpose.
(24:02):
They arrived at Elephant Island on August nineteen sixteen. Shackleton
was on deck looking through binoculars, alarmed to see what
looked like a flag at half staff, but then he
saw that there were twenty two men present on shore.
In Worsley's words, quote, he put his glasses back in
their case and turned to me, his face showing more
(24:23):
emotion than I had ever known it to show before.
Crane had joined us and we were all unable to speak.
It sounds trite, but years literally seemed to drop from
him as he stood before us. From Wild's point of view,
I'm seeing the ship from the island quote. I felt
jolly near blubbing for a bit and could not speak
(24:43):
for several minutes. The survival of all twenty eight men
from Shackleton's expedition aboard the Endurance was truly astonishing, and
it made headlines. But World War One had stretched on
the whole time they had been gone. It had been
so painful and demoralizing that people didn't really see this
dramatic rescue as much of a relief. There was even
(25:04):
some criticism that everyone involved should have been part of
the war effort that whole time they were gone. Also,
this relief of the men at Elephant Island was not
the end of the saga for the Imperial trans Antarctic
Expedition or Shackleton's efforts to get all of his men
to safety. As the Endurance was trapped in the Sea
(25:24):
Ice and the Wettle Sea. The Ross Sea Party had
been facing its own ordeal if you recall, that was
the party that had arrived on the Aurora to lay
the supply depots that Shackleton's team would need. The Ross
Sea Party was under the command of a Eneas McIntosh,
who had been part of Shackleton's expedition aboard the Nimrod
(25:45):
and had lost an eye in an accident during that expedition.
Others also had experience in Antarctica, but many of the
crew aboard did not have any polar experience. Their money
and supplies were even more hectically cobbled together than the
Endurance teams was, and they were also operating under a
totally unnecessary deadline. Shackleton had originally hoped to cross Antarctica
(26:10):
in the summer of nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen, and
he had realized that was not going to work before
setting sail from South Georgia Island, but before he left
he did not send any kind of word to McIntosh
about the schedule change. On top of that, once Shackleton
realized their crossing wasn't going to happen at all, there
(26:31):
was no way to let McIntosh know. So the Rossy
Party Number one was trying to plan for an expedition
that was running a year late, and then number two
had no idea that Shackleton's team wasn't coming, but they
thought if they didn't get their job done, Shackleton was
going to die. The ross Sea Party had arrived at
(26:53):
McMurdo Sound in January of nineteen fifteen and started laying
supply depots on January, but that was extremely slow going.
They faced deep snow and impassable ice ridges. Their sledges
were overloaded, and eventually they had to divide the supplies
and carry them in a relay. This took four times
(27:13):
as long and they had to travel four times as far,
so soon they were exhausted and they were low on rations.
The sledge dogs became so hungry that they started trying
to eat their own harnesses, and as the dogs died,
the men had to haul more and more of the
load themselves. To add to all of that, there were blizzards,
(27:34):
extremely low temperatures, frost bite, snow blindness, and sleeping bags
that froze solid during the day and then melted when
they were exposed to people's body heat at night, so
the team was just constantly cold and wet. Eventually McIntosh
and the sledge teams had to return to the base
for the winter. They got there on March to find
(27:54):
the Aurora and almost all of the rest of the
short team gone. They took shelter in a it that
Robert Falcon Scott had left behind in nineteen o two,
and then waited for the McMurdo Sound to freeze over
so they could walk to their planned winter quarters on
Cape Evans. There they found the rest of the shore party,
but the Aurora was gone. It had been blown off
(28:16):
its moorings in a gale, and everyone assumed it had sunk.
Most of what was supposed to sustain the shore team
over the winter had not yet been unloaded when the
aurora disappeared, including their winter clothes. They had only what
they were wearing. Robert Falcon Scott could not object to
their use of that hut's because at this point he
(28:38):
had died trying to return from the South Pole. The
Aurora team made it through the winter, though, and as
the weather got warmer in October of nineteen fifteen, they
got back to work, now with makeshift gear and sledges,
and with only nine men and four surviving dogs to
do the work. And this phase was even worse than
the first one. They started out with three teams and
(29:01):
each team had its own stove, but when one of
the stoves failed, that team had to go back to base.
Then the second stove failed, so the two remaining teams
had to consolidate and move together. That slowed their progress
way way down. They again faced scurvy and snow, blindness
and hunger, reaching a point where each man's daily ration
(29:24):
was eight lumps of sugar and a biscuit. Arnold Spencer
Smith became so ill he had to be left behind,
and when the team returned for him, both he and
McIntosh had to be loaded onto sledges and pulled on
their journey home. Their situation was so dire that they
were living on tea and dog food and having to
take supplies from the depots that were supposed to be
(29:45):
for Shackleton, again not knowing that Shackleton was not coming,
and thinking that if they took too much, his party
would be doomed. Arnold Spencer Smith died of scurvy on
March eight, and as the team was trying to make
their j ning back to the base, McIntosh became so
weak that he could not even stay on the sledge
he was being pulled on. More than once he fell off,
(30:09):
and the team had to backtrack for him after they
realized he was gone. The surviving team made it back
to Hut Point, and in May McIntosh announced that he
and VG Hayward were going to walk across the ice
to the base camp at Cape Evans. The rest of
the team tried to dissuade them, thinking that the ice
was not deep enough to be safe yet. McIntosh and
(30:30):
Hayward left anyway, and a blizzard started not long after.
A search party went to look for them once the
storm had cleared and found their trail of footprints, which
stopped suddenly at some freshly frozen ice. Eventually, the last
of the sledging party crossed back to Cape Evans and
met up with the rest of the team that had
stayed there. Once authorities knew about Shackleton's survival, funds were
(30:55):
finally approved for a relief expedition for the Ross Sea Party.
Shackleton left for New Zealand in October of nineteen sixteen
to join that party, and the ships sent to retrieve
them was the Aurora. Now it was under the command
of Captain John King Davis. Unbeknownst to anybody who had
been on the shore, the Aurora, after getting blown off
(31:17):
its moorings, had spent ten months drifting in the pack ice,
and then had gone to New Zealand for repairs once
it was freed. The Aurora arrived in Antarctica on January tenth,
nineteen seventeen, and Shackleton learned about the deaths of McIntosh,
Hayward and Spencer Smith, and the fact that the party
had traveled fifteen hundred miles in a hundred and sixty days,
(31:39):
laying their supply depots as planned. They looked for the
bodies of McIntosh and Hayward and took the seven men
who had been stranded ashore back to New Zealand. Yeah,
there was no sign of their bodies. They almost certainly
fell through the ice or we're on an ice flow
that broke away and they couldn't get off of it.
Shackleton again and worked with Edward Saunders to write a
(32:02):
book about all of this. It was titled South The
Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition nineteen fourteen to nineteen seventeen.
This is in the public domain now, along with a
lot of his other work. You can read it online
for free. Just one note if you do this, one
of the Rossy Party sledge dogs is named a racist slur.
Most of the men who had survived this expedition went
(32:22):
into active service during the remainder of World War One,
but Shackleton had trouble finding a post. He seems to
have struggled during this time, drinking excessively and spending most
of his time with the woman that he was having
an affair with. The Foreign Office sent him to South
America in late nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen on what
(32:44):
was described as a propaganda mission to raise morale. He
went to Russia with the British Expeditionary Force in nineteen nineteen.
That same year, Frank Hurley released a silent film called
South Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition. After the war
was over, Shackleton tried to plan another expedition to Antarctica,
(33:05):
this one aboard a ship called the Quest. It had
a crew of eighteen, seven of whom had been aboard
the Endurance. They arrived at grit Vickin Harbor on South
Georgia Island on January fourth Nino. The next day, Shackleton
died of a heart attack at the age of forty seven.
Many sources attribute this to damage from the extreme stress
(33:28):
and difficulty of the Endurance expedition. Although plans were made
to return Shackleton's body to his wife at her request,
he was buried in a cemetery on a hill above
the whaling station at South Georgia Island. His obituary in
the Geographical Record began quote with the death of Sir
Ernest Shackleton, Britain loses one of the most brilliant explorers
(33:51):
of modern days, and in his ninety three book The
Worst Journey in the World, about Robert Falcon Scott's ill
fated nineteen ten expedition to the South Pole, absolute Cherry
Gerard wrote, quote for a joint scientific and geographical piece
of organization, give me Scott for a winter journey, Wilson
(34:11):
for a dash to the Pole, and nothing else Hammondson.
And if I am in the devil of a hole
and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton
every time. And of course the Falkland Maritime Heritage Trusts
Endurance twenty two expedition found the Endurance on March nine
using remotely operated submarines. It was in water one thousand
(34:35):
sixty five fathoms or three thousand eight meters deep, about
six kilometers from where Frank Worsley had recorded the ship's
last position. It's reportedly in surprisingly good condition considering the
circumstances of its sinking and the conditions of the Wettle Sea,
and really full of all kinds of fascinating sea life.
(34:57):
Yeah there's a crab in particular that a big time Yeah.
So yeah, that's that's Shackleton's Endurance. Now that the shipwreck
has been found, we'll talk. We have various feelings about
of all this, about all of this, and we will
talk about them in the behind the scenes. And I
have listener mail from Celeste, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
(35:20):
I love your podcast. I am constantly entertaining friends and
family with the things I learned there. I've been meaning
to share this for quite some time, and your recent
podcast on William APIs reminded me to do so. I'm
the director of the Cumberland Public Library in Rhode Island.
My library is a former monastery situated on five fifty acres.
(35:40):
There are a number of trails here, but one of
them leads to a monument called Nine Men's Misery. It
is said to be the oldest veterans memorial in the country.
I've attached a document created by a long ago eagle
scout that details the history of King Philip's War and
how the monument came to be there. Ten men were
dispatched from a regiment during a skirmish called Pierce's Fight,
(36:03):
where fifty two soldiers and eleven Native Americans died. These
ten were supposedly ambushed by Native Americans and only one survived.
Their bodies were buried in a mass grave here on
the future monastery grounds, and a cairn built over them.
When the monks came here in the early nineteen hundreds.
They built a better cairn cemented together, which you can
(36:25):
see today. Later in nineteen seventy six, the Veterans Group
placed a marker there. Needless to say, local residents believe
it's haunted and that one can hear groans coming from
the earth. I've walked there many times and haven't heard anything,
but you never knew. Keep up the wonderful podcast. I'm
attaching a photo of my rescue Sadie, who is an
Australian cattle dog, Celeste. Thanks so much for sending this
(36:48):
Celeste number one. Kind of cool to have a public
library that is in a former monastery site. I find
that very interesting. I also, having done uh you know,
episodes about Kings Phillips war um a couple of different times,
I had never heard about this particular fight um at,
(37:10):
which of course is its own very complicated story beyond
the context of just this email. UM. Also, what a
good dog. Uh So, thank you again to the list
for sending this email. If you would like to send
us a note, We're at History Podcast at I heeart
radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed
(37:30):
in History. That's where real fund our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the I heart Radio app and wherever else you like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
(37:51):
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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