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The Land of the Ice and Snow: Ernest Shackleton and the Lure of the South “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of Heaven, who hath gendered it? A variation on the desert island scenario: If you were to sail the southernmost seas for two years, antipodal to home and family, what personal items would you take? If your ship was beset and gripped by the ice, what would you save as the pressure of a vast frozen sea cracked its oaken ribs? If, abandoning the splintering wreck for a march across the bleak landscape, you could only carry two scant pounds' worth of your possessions—about the weight of a hardcover book, each ounce meaning one less of food—what would you take? On October 30, 1915, Ernest Shackleton stood before his 27 men on the floating pack-ice of Antarctica's Weddell Sea and tore two pages out of his Bible: the flyleaf, which had been inscribed by the Queen of England when she had given him the book, and a page from the Book of Job—“the wonderful page of Job,” he later called it—containing the above quotation. The rest of the Bible he dropped in the snow, as if to say their prospects for survival lay beyond the hand of God, and lay now in their own hands alone. Shackleton had set out nearly a year before in the Endurance from a whaling station on South Georgia Island, a desolate land of glaciers and impassable mountains and the southernmost possession of the British Empire, at the head of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. It was his ambition to be the first to traverse the Antarctic continent, but that goal was abandoned when the ship had become beset by the ice within sight of land, and he and his crew had already spent a polar winter drifting with the pack-ice, in the comfort of their ship, reading aloud those inspiring romantic epics, Tennyson's Ulysses and Coleridge's The Rime of an Ancient Mariner . The ship, though, was eventually crushed by the immense pressure of the ice and they were alone on the frozen sea.
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lost myself in glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank places on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up, I will go there.'” Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
In the early 20 th century, Antarctica was still Terra Incognita, the largest blank spot on any map, and therefore the glories of exploration were that much greater. Shackleton had returned a national hero from his 1909 expedition, which brought him “Furthest South”—within 97 miles of the pole—before he turned back from lack of food. “I thought you would rather have a live donkey than a dead lion,” he wrote to his wife. This was the golden age of Antarctic exploration, an era of polar heroes. Since the continent had been discovered in 1820 there had been only sporadic expeditions. America was exploring her own blank places, and Europe was preoccupied with colonies and revolution. Yet starting just before the turn of the century, massive national expeditions were mounted nearly every year, breaking off only after World War I was underway. These were scientific expeditions, but it wasn't meteorological or geographic observations that made heroes; it was conquest. The greatest aim of these explorers was to be the first man to stand on the Earth's southern pole, transfixed by the invisible axis about which the globe spins. Two years after Shackleton reached his Furthest South, the pole was attained. When Robert Falcon Scott—who had led Shackleton on Antarctica many years before—reached the pole after walking across the continent, he found a tent already there with the Norwegian flag flying. Roald Amundsen had beaten him by a month. Scott was also beaten in the race for safety, and he and his small party died as they struggled back from the pole. Ever devoted to science, Scott dragged 35 pounds of geological specimens with him to the end. Shackleton planned to visit the pole in his Endurance expedition, but he would do one better than Amundsen and Scott by continuing across the entire frozen continent. “Beyond this flood a frozen continent We are now in a minor renaissance of polar interest, and every year brings a handful of books on the heroes of polar exploration. The recent importance of climate change has sparked some of the attention, as have the increasing number of private and commercial expeditions to the poles. But just as science doesn't make Antarctic heroes, it also isn't what captures the imagination. As the renowned scientist and explorer Douglas Mawson, a contemporary of Shackleton's, said, “We came to probe the Antarctic's mysteries, to reduce this land in terms of science, but there is always the indefinable which holds aloof yet which rivets our souls.” I saw this firsthand speaking with Jim McCarthy, Harvard professor of biological oceanography and master of Pforzheimer house, who has been to both poles and on many Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. “There is something magical about the poles,” he said over dinner. “I just find the Arctic and Antarctic fascinating almost beyond words.” McCarthy was wearing a tie spotted with small polar bears, and his lips drew into a soft smile, half hidden behind his distinctive white beard, as he spoke of the continuous light of a polar summer, where the midnight sun dances sinusoidally around the horizon. “It is anything but a vast white nothingness. There is such a sense of euphoria, a sense of beauty that film absolutely fails to capture.” Listening to him talk, I could imagine how one could fall in love with this most bleak but most sublime of landscapes. The Antarctic brings out the poet in visitors: the combination of beauty and hardship imbues each word written about the place with a special significance. Of all the polar explorers, Shackleton has captured the widest and most varied interest. Kenneth Branagh played him in a recent film, trading in his usual pentameters for a parka and poetry of a different sort. An epic book-length poem on the Endurance expedition has just been published. An editor of the Wall Street Journal and an investment banker wrote an analysis of Shackleton's leadership style and its applications to the business world. The interest springs up even in the most unexpected of places: the father of a good friend, a member of the cabinet of Montana's governor, has spent the last two years writing a musical about Shackleton in his spare time. Shackleton's expedition is also one of the best documented by primary sources. Many of his men kept extensive journals, and the entire journey is illustrated by stunning photographs taken by Frank Hurley. But Shackleton's expedition was a failure, achieving none of its aims, but like Apollo 13 it was a “successful failure.” All of his crew survived and his tale became one of the greatest survival stories ever told. Nearly two years after he set out, Shackleton returned to South Georgia Island, having traveled in a massive circle through the most hostile climate in the world. Just north of Antarctica is a band of ocean girding the southern hemisphere. With no landmass in the way, the spinning of the globe rouses tremendous currents and hurricane-force winds. The treacherous southern latitudes have grown mythical names in maritime legend: the roaring forties give way to the furious fifties and the screaming sixties. After the loss of the Endurance , Shackleton and his men set out on foot, dragging three lifeboats with them until the pack ice was loosened and melted by the comparative warmth of summer. They found refuge on the desolate Elephant Island, and Shackleton set off to find help, navigating a small open boat to South Georgia, incredibly surviving and arranging the rescue of his companions. Shackleton returned to the exact whaling station where he had started, and later came back to England more famous than before, but all was different. World War I was still raging, and the age of great polar exploration had drawn to a close even while Shackleton was stuck on the ice. Many of his men later died in the war, and Shackleton dedicated his account of the expedition to “My comrades who fell in the white warfare of the South and on the red fields of France and Flanders.” “Who is the third who walks always beside you? After Shackleton miraculously found his way across 800 miles of open ocean to South Georgia , a further obstacle remained. He had arrived on the wrong side of the island, and the small boat which had carried him so far was rudderless and unfit for journey. They were at the very end of their strength; no-one had ever traversed the island before. First they had marched, then sailed, and now they completed the third impossibility, and climbed towards help. In South , Shackleton concluded his account of the journey by relating a physical encounter with the intangible and ineffable: “I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six 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'…One feels ‘the dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech' in trying to describe things intangible.” Shackleton, here quoting Keats' epic Endymion , was himself a frustrated poet and in the end was the inspiration for another great poet. Eliot remarks in the notes included at the end of The Waste Land that the lines beginning with, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” were, “stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” “We shall not cease from exploration Shackleton died the year The Waste Land was published. Drawn back to the white road, longing to feel “the wild calling” and “the silent wastes of the frozen south,” Shackleton planned another expedition, but had no clear aims in mind. He escaped London, that “unreal city,” for the final time, and returned to the effulgent Antarctic skies. He abandoned the madness of Europe laid waste, the decaying civilization described by Eliot, which had killed indiscriminately those men who had heroically fought for life with him in the south. One imagines this was a spiritual visit, a search for the phantom companion, recalling the abandoned Bible left on the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. Anchored off South Georgia, Shackleton suffered a fatal heart attack, and was buried on the island, the start and the finish of his previous expedition. At the end of all his exploring, he had arrived back where he started; he died in the place he knew best. Shackleton's wasn't a hero's death, and it is possible that his many near misses, as well as the death of his rival, Robert Scott, was on his mind during his final minutes. Scott had frozen to death returning from the pole. The penultimate line of Scott's diary, recovered when a relief party found his tent, captures with laconic intensity the agonizing beauty and tragedy of the Antarctic: “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”
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