ENDURANCE
Grytviken, South Georgia Island, Antarctic Ocean. It’s a shame I can’t transmit pictures where I am, but at least I can send this text for Miko to post on TTP. Then again, there are no pictures that could do this place justice, for you can’t put awe into a photo. That’s something you can only experience first-hand.
There is no place on earth I know of with more spectacular geology, geography, and jaw-dropping scenery, combined with such a hyper-abundance of wildlife it puts Africa’s Serengeti to shame, than South Georgia. Add to this one of history’s most heroic sagas, the perseverance of one man to overcome odds that are beyond belief, which can serve to inspire us to surmount the travails our country faces today.
It is considered the most impressive accomplishment in the history of exploration. Let me tell you the story – and the lesson we can learn from it.
Although South Georgia is at the same latitude as Cape Horn, it is an Antarctic island as it is south of the Antarctic Convergence, where the current of the Antarctic or Southern Ocean that sweeps clockwise around the Antarctic Continent (and thus around the world) meets the warmer waters of the southern Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans.
The island is a mountain ridge about 100 miles long by 24 miles wide at its widest point, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. Actually, it is a visible part of a submerged ridge that runs from the tip of South America in a huge arc to the Antarctic Peninsula. Other visible parts are the volcanoes of the South Sandwich Islands, and the South Orkneys and Shetlands (I can’t post a map, but it’s easy to see this on Google Earth or any Atlas).
Geologically, this arc, and the Scotia Sea which it encompasses, is a recent development. 150mya (million years ago), there was no Atlantic Ocean. South America, Antarctica, Africa, and Australia were all joined together in a super-continent geologists call Gondwana. As continental drift began their separation, the widening Mid-Atlantic Ridge created the Atlantic Ocean – slowly.
As the Atlantic floor spread (and continues to now), it did (and does) at the expense of the Pacific, forcing the Pacific Plate to dive under the South American Plate (a process called subduction). The edge of the South American Plate buckled and rose up like crinkled paper to create the Andes Mountains. By 50mya, the Andes formed a land bridge connecting South America with Antarctica. By 30mya, the land bridge split apart and the subduction thrust eastward to create the Scotia Sea
In the process, a block of old Gondwana broke off from the tip of South America and was pushed out to the northern rim of the Scotia Sea – South Georgia. Thus there are mountains here, such as those towering above the north side of Drygalski Fjord, that are as old as the Jurassic, more than 150 million years old. The island is a fascinating geology lesson, as you can see subsequent folded and uplifted sedimentary layers, from 80mya to 3mya.
It wasn’t fascinating, however, to the first explorers to come here. They looked upon the sheer rock faces of the mountains rising straight up from the sea to heights of 9,000 feet, covered with permanent snow, with gigantic glaciers spilling off them and tumbling into the ocean, as worthless and lifeless. The first man to land on South Georgia was Captain James Cook in 1775, who took possession of it for Britain and named it after King George III.
The coast repelled him, while, Cook wrote, "The inner parts of the country was no less savage and horrible. The wild rocks raised their lofty summits ‘til they were lost in the clouds, while the valleys laid buried in everlasting snow. Not a tree or a shrub was to be seen, no, not even big enough to make a toothpick."
What attracted attention, however, was Cook’s comment that fur seals were "pretty numerous" around the island. By 1786, American and British sealing ships were prowling South Georgia’s shores and waters, and by 1825, having taken 1, 200,000 pelts, the fur seals were almost extinct. The next target was the vast number of massive elephant seals, whose blubber could be rendered into valuable oil. And by the early 1900s, large whaling stations had been set up, such as at Stromness and here at Grytviken, to process up to 40,000 whales a year into whale oil, animal feed, and whale meat.
The early 1900s was also the "Golden Age of Polar Exploration," with millions of people in the US, Europe, and elsewhere avidly following the exploits of polar explorers and their Race to the Poles. One of the most well known was an Englishman named Ernest Shackleton.
In 1908, he led an small expedition to try for the South Pole. The closest anyone had come before then was Robert Scott’s expedition (of which Shackleton had been a member) in 1901, that had reached 82áµ’17" south, 463nm (nautical miles, 532 sm/statute miles) from the Pole at 90South. Shackleton and three companions made it to within 97nm (111.55sm) of the Pole, or 88áµ’23" degrees – and just barely made it back alive.
His achievement made him famous, a hero of the British Empire, knighted by his king, decorated by a dozen countries, and lionized everywhere he went on a lecture tour in Europe and the US. But before he could mount another polar race, American Robert Peary reached the North Pole, 90North, on April 6, 1909, while Norwegian Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, 90South, on December 14, 1911.
Both victories were mired in controversy. Peary’s claim was widely disputed (many refute it to this day), while Amundsen’s was ruined by British envy. The Brits were rooting for one of their own, Robert Scott, to beat Amundsen – but when Scott and his 4 companions did make it to the very bottom of the world on January 18, 1912, there stood the black tent of the Norwegians’ as stark evidence they lost the race – by 35 days.
Heartbroken, sick with scurvy, feet turning gangrenous with frostbite, one by one of Scott’s team died trying to make it back, until Scott himself succumbed. The British couldn’t stand it that Amundsen was a consummate professional who succeeded brilliantly while Scott was a bungling amateur who failed and died. They vilified Amundsen as some kind of villain, worshipped Scott as a tragic hero – and longed for another polar champion.
Shackleton stepped forward to propose the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. "We (British)," he wrote, "have been beaten at the conquest of the North Pole and beaten at the conquest of the South Pole. There now remains the last great Polar journey that can be made, greater than the journey to the South Pole and back – the crossing of the entire continent" from one end to the other via the Pole itself.
He then placed the now-legendary classified ad in the London Times which read:
"MEN WANTED for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success. Ernest Shackleton."
He was inundated by over 5,000 applications. He selected 27, the nucleus of whom were veterans of his or other previous Antarctic expeditions. Donations poured in, enabling him to purchase the finest wooden polar ship ever made, a 144-ft 3-masted barkentine named Polaris – which Shackleton rechristened as Endurance – in keeping with the motto of his family, Fortitudine vincimus, "By endurance we conquer."
By July, 1914, everything was prepared, stored, and ready to sail. Then Britain declared war on Germany. His expedition ruined, Shackleton wired the Admiralty placing his ship at the disposal of the government. The First Lord of the Admiralty was Winston Churchill, who sent a one-word telegram in reply: "Proceed."
The Endurance arrived here at the Grytviken whaling station in South Georgia in early November, 1914. The men spent a month here, while Shackleton visited the nearby station of Stromness to learn about the ice conditions from the factory manager Thoralf Sørlle and the whaling captains there. On December 5, the ship sailed for Antarctica. The goal was to skirt the pack ice on the east side of the huge Weddell Sea and hope to reach the ice-free coast of Vahsel Bay, where the trans-continental trek would begin.
By January 15 (1915), they were 200 miles away from Vahsel Bay when the ice closed in. The Endurance was stuck, a crewman wrote, "like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar." It would never get out. They lived on the ship, enduring the darkness of the Antarctic winter, for nine months, until at the end of October, the ice crushed the ship and they moved to live in tents on the ice floes.
They would live on the floes as the pack moved north, until the ice broke apart over five months later in early April. They scrambled to store everything in their three 22 ft-long open whaleboats to row and sail out of the ice and into the giant waves of the stormy, freezing sea. They would row without sleeping for days, fighting utter exhaustion, starvation, thirst, and frostbite, to miraculously land – all together – on a tiny spit of land of an island no one had ever been able to reach the shore of before, Elephant Island. It was the first piece of earth they had set foot on in 497 days.
As soon as Shackleton had set up a camp, upending two of the whaleboats for shelter, he announced that he and five others would sail the remaining whaleboat, dubbed the James Caird after one of the expedition’s benefactors, to South Georgia on a rescue mission. Everyone knew this was hopeless – crossing almost a thousand miles of the stormiest ocean on the globe in a tiny open boat to find a speck of land beyond which there was nothing until Africa.
Yet they knew their situation on Elephant Island was equally hopeless. They prepared and stored the James Caird as best they could, decking it over with canvas, and a little after noon on April 24, 1916, the 22 remaining men on the shore waved goodbye as the little boat sailed away into the Scotia Sea.
Shackleton’s crossing of the Scotia Sea in the James Caird, 16 days through Antarctic blizzards, 90mph hurricanes, and 50-ft giant roller waves called Graybeards for close to a thousand miles to safely reach a tiny cove on South Georgia’s uninhabited west coast is considered one of the most epic feats in the history of navigation.
All six were alive and well – but they were trapped. The only way to reach one of the whaling stations on the east coast was to cross the unknown, unmapped glaciers and mountains of South Georgia’s interior. Selecting two of his crew, Tom Crean and Frank Worsely, to accompany him, Shackleton set off. Reaching the crest of the ice mountains three times only to find sheer precipices on the other side, he found the fourth crest a razor so sharp he could straddle it with his legs.
It was late afternoon and getting dark. Fog was shrouding the view so they could not see below. Shackleton told Crean and Worsley they had no option but attempt to slide down the ice slope and pray to Providence. They coiled their one rope underneath them, sat together holding tight as a human toboggan, and pushed off.
Yelling and screaming, they sped like a blind rocket for 2000 feet down the ice to level out then crash – into a soft snowbank.. They laughed like giddy schoolkids, then resumed their trek, now in the light of the full moon. They reached the final crest, 4,000 feet above Stromness, carefully negotiated the ice-covered cliffs to near the bottom, then with the rope lowered themselves through a 25-foot ice-cold waterfall.
36 hours after departing their tiny cove, in the afternoon of May 20, 1916, Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley walked into Stromness. The children who saw them, with their bearded and smoky black faces, their matted hair down to their shoulders, their filthy ragged parkas and pants, ran screaming in fright. They approached a workman to request, "Would you please take us to the manager."
They were taken to the home of Thoralf Sørlle. When he opened the door, he recoiled at what he saw, and finally shouted, "Who the hell are you?" The man in the center said, "My name is Shackleton." Sørlle broke down and cried.
He, like everyone else on South Georgia and the world, thought that the Endurance, of which nothing had been heard of since late 1914, had been lost at sea with all its crew. Shackleton, however, after having his first bath and shave and real dinner for over a year, the next day sent Worsley in a whale-catcher boat around the island to rescue his three men in the tiny cove in King Hakkon Bay.
Then, less than 72 hours after arriving in Stromness, Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley set out in a large wooden whaler for Elephant Island. They had to return in a week due to impassable ice. Ten days later, Shackleton secured an Uruguayan ship for another attempt, which again failed to get through the ice. He then chartered a third ship, and the ice nearly sank her.
Finally, in early August, he got the Chilean government to loan him a beat-up barely afloat old sea-going tug called the Yelcho. On August 30, the 22 castaways on Elephant Isle sighted her on the horizon. When it got to within a few hundred yards of shore, a rowboat was lowered, into which they could see "The Boss" – Shackleton – clambering. As the boat got close, he called out, "Are you alright?"
"All well," they called back. The only casualty was that Perce Blackboro’s frostbitten toes on one foot had been amputated by the crew’s surgeon, James McIlroy.
And that is the most astounding fact in this astounding saga: Shackleton brought every one of his 27 crewmembers back alive. They all survived. Which is why there is a famous saying among explorers, taken from a eulogy at his funeral service:
For scientific discovery, give me Scott
For speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen
But when disaster strikes and all hope is gone
Get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton
In 1924, embarking on yet another Antarctic exploration, Ernest Shackleton died of a massive heart attack here in Gryvitken. He was 47 years old. From the comfort of my cabin in a modern icebreaker moored in King Edward Cove, I am looking out to Whaler’s Cemetery where he is buried.
The contrast between what he and his men endured and the comfort we on this ship enjoy is staggering. Yet this is what we humans are capable of – making one of the most frightening and dangerous places on earth into one that is enjoyable and memorable. The whaling and sealing ceased many decades ago, the whaling factories abandoned, and the only permanent inhabitants now are the wildlife.
Again, I wish I could post some of my photos just to give you a glimpse of what it is like to be surrounded by tens of thousands of king penguins, thousands of fur seals, dozens of giant elephant seals, in a cacophony of crying, chirping, squealing, barking, and bellowing, on a black sand beach with a massive hanging glacier suspended on top of a cliff above, and the snow-capped crags of the South Georgia Alps rising steeply in the distance.
There are a dozen, two dozen or more places on South Georgia like this, for it is the greatest breeding ground of wildlife on the planet.
The world we normally pay attention to is very far away from here. Yet you wonder what would Shackleton think of it. What would he think of the moral collapse and cowardice that characterizes American, British, and Western culture today? And you wonder if our culture as it is now is capable of producing men of such heroic stature as Ernest Shackleton?
Is it of any use today, when the Disaster of Zero has struck and hope seems gone, to get down on our knees and pray for a Shackleton?
Perhaps, though, those are not the right questions – for it is not that we need a Shackleton to rescue us. What we need is for his example to inspire each of us to persevere. Fortitudine vincimus, "By endurance we conquer." Shackleton’s motto can be ours. No matter what, Shackleton never gave up, never ceased trying to save his men.
America really is the last best hope of mankind, and the people running its government today are dedicated to destroying it. This is a disaster with infinitely greater consequences for mankind than the fate of a few men in Antarctica. Like Shackleton, we must never give up. We must never let the Disaster of Zero overwhelm us. We must endure. For if we do, then someday not far off, so shall America.