The Antarctic Journals, Chapter Twenty-three, On the Wild Seas

If the men of the Endurance though they had it rough when they had to abandon their dying ship and spend months on the pack ice of the Weddell Sea, they must have revised their definition of “rough” after their first day at sea in the life boats.   The small boats are less than 23 feet long, with no enclosure to escape the wind and waves and spray and blizzards common to this area.

All afternoon they dodge floes of ice meant to crush their tiny boats until finally, as darkness approaches, they tie up to a seemingly stable floe and drag themselves onto the ice to rest.  They go to their wet and freezing sleeping bags after a hot meal cooked over the blubber stove.

Ernest Shackleton is exhausted also, but he gets out of his bed and walks about the encampment.  “Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent about 11 p.m. that night and glance around the quiet camp.  I started to walk across the floes in order to warn the watchman to look carefully for cracks, and as I was passing the men’s tent the floe lifted on the crest of a swell and cracked right under my feet.”

The crack quickly runs under a tent and dumps two men in the water.  One pulls himself from the icy water.  Shackleton grabs the other man, still in his sleeping bag, and yanks him onto the ice before it slams together again.  There is no more sleep that night.

Men huddle around the blubber stove for warmth and listen to the killer whales prowling and blowing around their small floe.  They have spent months worrying about leopard seals attacking them on the ice.  Now they wonder if killer whales will prey on them.

They make progress.  Then a gale blows up and drives them back 30 miles east and 11 miles south.  Shackleton worries that the drift will force them between the islands of the Antarctic Peninsula into the open southern Pacific.

There is no more camping on the ice because they cannot find stable ice.  Instead, the men suffer all night long in the boats, cold, wet, exhausted, and hungry.  Many are sick with dysentery.  Blisters from rowing break and are irritated by the salt water.  Their mouths are swollen and lips bloody, and painful boils erupt on their skin.

The Stancomb Wills is in danger of sinking from gale force winds that blow wave after wave into the boat, drenching the stores and men.  It is too much for some of the men.  Some cry, some sit in silence.   

Finally, dawn reveals Elephant Island ahead of them, but it is dusk when they near and Shackleton decides to delay landing until first light.  The Dudley Docker disappears during the night during a heavy snow squall, and Shackleton despairs.   The small boat reappears in the morning.

This Frank Hurley photo taken with a Kodak Vest Pocket camera shows men of the Endurance landing on Elephant Island, the first ground they have set foot on in 497 days.

They make a treacherous landing across a reef in the morning.  Shackleton decides to give Perce Blackborow, the young stowaway who has acquitted himself well, the honor of setting foot on land first, but he does not move.  Shackleton helps Blackborow over the side only to see the young man sit down in the surf.   Then he remembers the boy’s feet are frostbitten badly.

Eventually, all the men get to shore.   Many suffer temporary aberrations from their torments, reeling about the rocky beach, shaking with palsy, or stumbling out of control.  One man writes in his diary that half the men are insane.

The island is uninhabited, but penguins and seals are plentiful.

“They had spent seven frightful days at sea in open boats…at the beginning of an Antarctic winter; 170 days drifting on a floe of ice with inadequate food and shelter, and not since Dec. 5, 1914—497 days before—had they set foot on land.”*

It is April 15, 1916.  They are alone and no one in the outside world knows where they are or even if they are alive.

The green line ends at Elephant Island.  Now what, Shackleton asks himself.

* As quoted in "The Endurance" by Caroline Alexander

***

As we leave the former whaling station of Grytviken on South Georgia Island and sail south-southeast, I think about the reindeer that are to be eradicated from the island to preserve plant species.  At least the meat will be salvaged and given to residents of the Falklands, where fresh meat is difficult to obtain.

The rodent elimination  also begins this year.  Helicopters will spread poison bait, with the rodents expected to perish in their dens after consuming it.   The South Georgia Heritage Trust believes that many bird species will return to nest on the island after the rodents are destroyed, and eggs and chicks no longer preyed upon by the rats.

Ice bergs along South Georgia.

With 900 miles to go, we leave the protection of Cumberland Bay and, still in the lee of the high mountains, encounter massive icebergs.  The Fram sails close-but-not-too-close between them.  It is a taste of what is to come.

The weather is glorious,warm and sunny with little wind.  Passengers go out on the decks to photograph the bergs in the bright sunlight.

 

A berg off South Georgia island.

Note the tiny sailboat the bottom left of this berg.

 

Our route from the Falklands to South Gerogia, the hard right turn south to South Georgia during the storm, and now on the way to King George Island in the Antarctic Peninsula.

Rounding the southern tip of the island that evening, we run into near gale force winds, and our newly-educated sea legs become necessary again.  Though the winds and waves are nowhere near what we experienced on our northern approach to South Georgia, one elevator car is taken out of service and access to open decks is restricted.

Cape petrels following the Fram.

I see wave spray as high as Deck Five and sea birds return and surf the air currents just off the water.  The winds and waves increase in strength as we push westward.   By the second day at sea, the winds are near gale force at 30 km per hour with waves near 15 feet.

Photo taken from Deck Six.

We wake to snow.   For some of the Filipino crew, it is the first time they have seen this frozen white rain.

 

There are lectures and information about Antarctica to attend, meals to enjoy, and temptation all along the dessert aisle at lunch and dinner.  

Beef steak, pasta and veggies.

Baked apples.

 

 

 

I see the ship’s officer in the companionway outside my cabin.  He is laughing.

“I have never seen a ship full of passengers like this before,” he says.   How’s that, I ask him.

“After all you have been through, you’re still smiling.”  I tell him I think we’re just happy to be alive still.

Attending a briefing.

This woman was pitched into the cabinets at right when she stood up from her chair.

And then, half way to the Antarctic Continent, the long arm of Argentine politics reaches out and grabs us, and the proverbial monkey wrench arrives.   In a show of power, the transportation minister declares a 24-hour strike for Tuesday, Nov. 20.   

What this means to us at this time is unknown.  Our program managers are busy with e-mails and calls trying to determine how this strike might mess up our carefully planned itinerary.  Our reservations call for us to fly out of Ushuaia, Argentina, to Buenos Aires on the 20^th and overnight there.

Many of us signed up for various shore excursions, and Kathy and I chose a trip to the southernmost national park in the world, Tierra del Fuego National Park, but the strike involves bus drivers.  Everything’s up in the air.

Meanwhile, back on the ocean, Capt. Hårvik has three engines pushing the Fram against near gale force 30 knot winds and 15 foot waves.  Fram’s speed is only 9 to 11 knots, and we are a half day behind schedule as a result.

Word goes around the ship that we will miss our first scheduled landing in Antarctica.  This is not good news.  We have come a long way just for this part of the trip.

Three and a half days at sea, we approach our first landing in Antarctica.   Fram drops anchor in a quiet bay on King George Island and within a few minutes, the Polarcirkle boats are buzzing around the ship like mosquitoes.

And our arrival in this distant place does not go unnoticed.

The Antarctic Journals, Chapter Twenty-two, Grytviken

March 23, 1916:  Ernest Shackleton spots land to the west, the first they have seen in more than a year.  Hurley says they could reach land in a day if the pack ice relents and they could find open water.

The ice does not relent, and near the end of the month, Shackleton realizes they have drifted so far north there might not be reachable land ahead.

March: 30:  The last of the dogs are killed, the younger ones eaten.  The men lie in their sleeping bags and feel the swell of the ocean beneath them.  Lees suffers from seasickness.

April 7:  The tall peaks of Elephant Island are seen ahead in the far distance, but the ice shifts again and again, sometimes putting the island out of reach, sometimes making it seem a possibility.

The floe on which they are camped becomes smaller and smaller, until it is a 90 by 100 by 120 yard triangle.   A crack opens in the disintegrating ice and dumps the James Caird into the water.   The next afternoon, after a substantial meal, Shackleton and the men take to the boats.

This photo by Frank Hurley shows the 22.5 foot long James Caird after she was decked over.  However, at this point in our story, she is still an open life boat.

On the James Caird are Shackleton, Wild, and nine men.  The Dudley Decker holds Worsley and eight more men.  And finally, on the smallest boat, there are the remaining  eight men.

The ice moves crazily, constantly threatening to crush the small boats and finding open leads become an ordeal.  Wet, cold, and miserable, the 28 men had been trapped in the ice for fifteen months.

Now comes the hard part.

Shackleton's route now changes to green when the 28 men launch the three life boats as the ice disintegrates.

***

Try pot for rendering seal blubber.

Death has a strong presence here.

It haunts this place, this small bay set in nearly unparalleled, but stark, beauty.  High mountains like sharks’s teeth ring the bay while down below the spectre of death swaggers up the conveyors and swirls in the monstrous cookers and flows to the massive  tanks the color of old blood where the precious whale oil was stored.  Whale bones litter the beach and grounds.

The former whaling station of Grytviken in background.  Administration buildings are on the spit of land in the foreground.

The butchery that was rampant here a century ago and until the not-so-distant past now lingers in the trypots where seals were rendered for their oil.  This place, this place of death, is now a museum but the carnage and slaughter could still be taking place as I walk the beach behind the guide.  

We are in the long-abandoned Norwegian whaling station of Grytviken on South Georgia island, listening to the guide explain the workings of the machinery of death.  The Norwegian ship Fram, a bringer of tourists, bobs gently on her anchor in East Cumberland Bay, while the whaling ship Petrel, a deliverer of death until 1956, rots on shore in front of the museum that once was the station-master’s home.

The whaler Petrel.

“It was a different time, it was a different time,”  I silently repeat again and again, like a mantra that might somehow explain, but not excuse.  I lag behind farther and farther and turn my eyes away when my imagination becomes too vivid until, eventually, I can listen no longer.  I turn my back and wander away.

The pressure cooker where whale blubber was rendered into oil.  Slabs of blubber were loaded into the conveyor buckets  in front, lifted up and deposited into the cookers.

Relics of the whaling industry.  Try pot for rendering seal and penguin blubber in foreground.

Note all the seals on the beach in front of the administration and science buildings.

Former barracks.  Station ledgers show numerous orders of cologne.  Why?  Alcohol was forbidden here and cologne is mostly alcohol.

The white buildings at right are the former station manager's residence now converted into a museum and gift shop.  The church is an iconic landmark in Grytviken.

I look for life, instead. 

Around me, in this small, placid bay, elephant and fur seals were once slaughtered for their precious oil.  They now sleep unmolested but for the clicking of camera shutters, on the beaches, along the walking paths, beneath the bows of small boats.   

The administration buildings are barely visible behind the Fram.

A young male elephant seal offers me what I seek.

When fully mature, this male elephant seal can weigh up to 8800 lbs and measure 15 to 19 feet long.  He will be several times larger than female elephant seals.

The enormous proboscis of a mature bull elephant seal.  I'm still trying to orient what's what in this photo.  I think we are looking at this seal upside down, with the bottom of his head lying on the grass.
   That is his eye on the left of the proboscis and his whiskers and mouth on the right.  That is a cut above (below in the correct orientation)  the eye.

The King penguin with its fins up is trying to cool off.

Penguins in various stages of moult.

When he stops beyond another penguin, he provides a perfect shot of front and back.

Once aboard the Fram, the ship leaves this protected cove and heads east-southeast towards the southern tip of South Georgia, then into the open waters of the Scotia Sea once again.  They meet us with gale force winds, but this time we take the waves bow-on, rather than at the stern.

We have a two-day journey ahead of us before we see land again, all of it into the face of the prevailing westerly winds that whip unimpeded around the globe.

We will return to this place later in these journals (though not on our voyage).  It is here we will find the dénouement of the adventure that is Shackleton’s.

Remnants of skis used by the Norwegian whalers for recreation.