Shackleton

Incredibly calm seas since last evening, sunshine all day long, very nice lunch topped with a smashing chocolate dessert… and we are getting paid while we enjoy this, go figure!

This does not mean we are lying in the sun, far from it. All the weights have been installed in the working deck, and we have had another work meeting.

Cheers to former Platuxa crew Bernardo and Santi, who unfortunately did not make it this year. Gonzalo has told us the dove is an Eurasian collared dove, and Eva, in charge of the CTD this year, has found out that the bird was ringed in Hiddensee, Juan confirms there is an Ornitological Station there. We mailed yesterday the Spanish Ornithology Society and they sent us a website where we will register the bird. 

Give me that horizon...

The working deck ready for the assault

But today this blog is dedicated to Sir Ernest Shackleton. May 2016 marks the 100^th anniversary of the most amazing seamanship feat known and although we missed the day by a couple of weeks I cannot let it go quietly.

Polar exploration in the late 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th is a truly fascinating subject. I have a decent collection of books on it, mostly travel accounts written by expedition members, biographies, even photography books. I started reading them after catching the “Antarctic bug” from my friend Alex, while we studied Biology. There is a number of very remarkable expeditions and explorers, but my all-time favourite by far is Shackleton.   

Shackleton was the most amazing polar explorer ever. He devoted most of his active life to Antarctic exploration, and he actually died in South Georgia, on board his ship Quest and on the way to the continent in his third expedition under his command. He never managed to actually achieve his expedition goals, but –and here is the catch- he never lost a man. In his first expedition, which aimed to reach the South Pole, he turned around at less than 200 km from his goal. Pressing for it would have surely meant missing the Nimrod, which had to sail for New Zealand in March to avoid being trapped in the ice for the whole winter. Trying to reach the pole could have also meant loosing one or more team members, as they were running low on food and pulling very heavy sledges, in that Victorian fashion of ignoring the knowledge of ice-bound cultures considered to be less advanced than theirs.

Because if you look at an Antarctica map, you may imagine a thick layer of ice smoothing the landscape in most places, but that is a very wrong impression. There are huge mountain ranges, where 4000 m peaks are not uncommon, such as Mount Vinson. Besides, there are the frozen seas. When the sea freezes, the currents continue at work underneath, which means that the ice breaks and piles up, creating pressure ridges that can be impassable. In the continent there are glaciers as well, full of crevasses. Now imagine getting dressed on several layers of thick clothes and pull a sledge weighting several hundred kilos with everything you may need in three months. This is what these men did.

Anyway, Shackleton returned a hero from his first expedition in 1909, and soon organised the widely known Endurance expedition, aiming to cross Antarctica since the South Pole had been already reached by Amundsen in 1911. They left England in August 1914, and made for South Georgia, where they spent one month in the Norwegian whaling station getting ready for the next leg of the expedition. They sailed to the Weddell Sea in December, reached their farthest south in late January and then the Endurance became trapped in the ice. She drifted with the ice until late November, when the pressure crushed her.

By then, the men had already been camping on the ice for weeks, and they stayed there, drifting on a floe until April. Then they had to take to the three salvaged lifeboats, the largest of which, the James Caird –about 7 m long-, had been reinforced and improved to make it more seaworthy.  Eight days later they arrived to Elephant Island, and it was clear that if they wanted to be rescued they would have to fetch the rescuers themselves, because no one knew they were there.

The 24^th of April Shackleton and five carefully chosen men left for the tiny speck South Georgia is, 600 nm away from Elephant Island. They were wet all the time. They could not lie down, stand up, or sit comfortably. The weather was horrendous, and they could take their position only occasionally and in very bad conditions, through the clouds and from their unsteady boat. At some point they had to get rid of a thick layer of ice formed on the boat that menaced with capsizing it. They made it through a hurricane that sank a 500 t ship and finally set foot on South Georgia the 10^th of May. They were, however, on the wrong side of the island, and had to cross it to reach the Norwegian settlement of Stromness because the boat was in no condition to go to sea again. The interior of the island had not been mapped yet and nobody knew what lay there, except for the fact that it was crisscrossed with mountain ranges. They covered about 150 km in 36 hours, taking great chances. They only had a rope. When Shackleton found his men too tired to continue he told them to sleep for an hour, then woke them up five minutes later and told them the time was up. They felt rested and did not risk dying of hypothermia. Finally, they heard the sirens of the factory calling the employees of the morning shift.

The first people they met were a few kids that run away at their sight. Then they made it to the manager’s house, but that is another story. Enough to say that 100 years ago, Shackleton managed to cross the Southern Ocean in a seven meters boat to save his 27 men.

For the very curious, the Shackleton biography I like the most is Roland Huntford’s. For the very curious without time to read several hundred pages there is this very nice little book my good friend Beatriz gave me recently, called “Shackleton’s boat. The story of the James Caird”.

Here’s to Shackleton, the best polar explorer in the 100^th anniversary of the most epic ocean crossing. Ever.