The Lost Men, page 12
The following day, Mackintosh set up a theodolite, a sort of calibrated telescope, to record the depot’s position. At their farthest south depot, Mount Hope, they would deposit maps with notes and bearings so Shackleton could locate the depots. Using the theodolite in freezing temperatures was maddeningly difficult. Mackintosh’s whiskers froze to the cold metal and the lightest breath clouded the sight with a web of frost. In the end, the accuracy was doubtful; the clamp of the scope refused to hold level, the metal parts contracting in the cold at different rates so they no longer fitted together properly. In the meantime, Joyce and Wild built snow mounds every half mile to guide Shackleton to the depot, surmounting every other cairn with a flagged bamboo pole. The line of cairns would extend five miles to the east and west, crosswise to the route. If Shackleton strayed off course, even in a storm, he would likely to stumble across the transverse chain of signposts stretching ten miles across his path.
Five miles out from the depot, the party labored over the eastern-most cairn, a grand construction fifteen feet high with notes on the bearings and course for the next depot in a tin tied to a pole. The main depot itself stood ten feet high, topped by twenty-five feet of bamboo pole festooned with banners. “Shackleton’s party cannot fail to find this,” Joyce wrote with evident pride. Before they could extend the cordon to the west, a blizzard closed in. There was no alternative but to wait out the storm. The dogs coiled into tight balls as the blowing snow buried them. The three men lay in their bags, shivering and unable to move around the tent enough to generate warmth. Joyce and Wild braved the storm to tend the nine dogs only to find that the familiar mounds had disappeared. The snow was accumulating fast and compacting hard, threatening to seal the breathing holes and suffocate them. After two hours of excavation with frostbitten hands, Joyce and Wild finally liberated the team.
Joyce stewed silently over Mackintosh’s decision to take the dogs south. His worst fears were realized when the storm subsided. “To my sorrow discovered two of them had succumbed,” he wrote on February 23. Briton had been flagging for some time, but the death of Tug, a mainstay of the team, was a shock. The survivors were weak, and devouring anything in reach: canvas, leather, and even the brass of their harnesses. A few days before, Mackintosh had cut their food by a third to make the supply last longer.
The animals were wasting away. Even the full daily ration of Spratt’s or Thorpe’s brand dog biscuits, weighing a pound and a half in total, was grossly inadequate. Spratt’s was the first commercial dog food, patented in 1862 by American James Spratt on the same basic recipe as his food for hogs, cats, and poultry. His concoction of boiled livestock carcasses and charcoal mixed with 75 percent flour and vegetables baked into dry cakes replaced table scraps or horseflesh as the food of choice for bourgeois pets in Victorian England. While it was arguably a healthier choice for parlor canines, the biscuits were grossly inadequate for sledge dogs. The daily biscuit ration was deficient in both quantity and quality, providing a fraction of the necessary calories and insufficient protein and fat. The dogs were also dehydrated in the dry, frigid climate, which increased their susceptibility to kidney damage. To conserve fuel, snow was only melted for human consumption. Ordinarily, huskies obtain sufficient water by eating a high-fat diet for sledging, notably fresh seal. Eating only dry biscuits, the dogs had to rely on snow for hydration, risking hypothermia in the non-Northern breeds.
Too little and too late, the men slipped scraps of their own rations to the starving animals. The stamina of the seven survivors was difficult to judge. The dogs howled dolefully as they were hitched for the final task at the 80° south depot, laying the western cairns. “My heart aches for them,” Joyce wrote. “I don’t know how I’ve refrained from giving Mack a bit of my mind, will have to keep that in until we get back. He will have enough to think about.” In the snowy spindrift, visibility was dropping. After only a mile, it became “thick as a hedge,” as Joyce put it, and impossible to push on. Mackintosh had no choice but to order a halt until the weather cleared. They stalled in the tent until February 24, when Mackintosh abandoned the cairn-laying and ordered a start north in the mist. “What a place, still, what else can we expect? It’s all happened before and we knew it would be so before we came so we must grin and bear it,” Mackintosh lamented.
At least now, the party was homeward bound. Hut Point lay 150 miles north. “Our trouble is that we are going back with ten days’ provisions, so it means shoving on for all we are worth,” Mackintosh wrote. At their usual pace of five to eight miles per day, it would take at least three weeks to reach the hut—assuming conditions were always clear for travel. The record was not promising on that score. Of the thirty days since Mackintosh had left the ship, his team had spent six tentbound. He had tried to conserve food by cutting back to one meal a day when they were immobilized. Reluctantly, he decided to take back ten days’ worth of food from the depot in case of emergency. After sledging barely four miles, the blizzard forced them to camp again, this time for three days. “A rotten miserable time,” Mackintosh called it.
“I could not refrain from remarking that in this degree of latitude no human being has known the weather to be calm,” Joyce observed, recalling the foul conditions that had beset previous expeditions in this region. The reason lay to the southwest, where glacial valleys in the Transantarctic Mountains funneled cold, dry air from the high interior plateau down the Byrd Glacier to blast Minna Bluff. The raging blizzards spawned by polar depressions had plagued Scott and Shackleton. The Ross Sea party cut a path directly through this unsettled region at a peak time of year for the storms.
By the time the weather eased on February 27, Mackintosh had reached the painful conclusion that it would be necessary to return to the Rocky Mountain Depot again and plunder still more provisions. Joyce was deeply discouraged, writing, “It seems hard after depôting stores to rob it again . . . Mack is feeling the strain.” The next day, the three men watched the sun dip below the horizon for the first time since the Ross Sea party’s arrival in Antarctica, tinting the sky the color of burnished copper. The days of perpetual daylight had ended. In less than two months, the heart of the Antarctic continent would be shrouded in perpetual darkness. With the failing light came the autumn cold, sharpened by a stiff breeze. The dogs were oddly silent as they slogged through deep drifts and hardly touched their food, even when Joyce doled out double portions. To save their strength, the men rigged a sail on the sledge with bamboo poles and the tent canvas, but the burden was still too great. “Pat stopped behind so I expect he is done for,” Wild recorded impassively. Joyce released him from his harness. In the next few hours, two other dogs collapsed and they, too, were left behind. In desperation, Mackintosh gave orders to camp early for the night to give the animals a chance to regain their strength. To his relief, two dogs caught up to the camp, but Pat never reappeared.
The night was sheer misery, minus twenty degrees. Joyce was suffering badly from snowblindness after leading the sledge in the glare day after day. Wild could not bring himself to write up his journal, noting simply “too cold.” Back on the march in the morning, they donned reindeer-fur boots called finneskoe to keep warm. The soft boots insulated far better than the canvas ones but were a poor fit with ski bindings, causing the men to flounder awkwardly. Before long Shacks began staggering in the traces, as if punch-drunk, destined for “no better reward than to be left behind, now that he has given us of his best,” in Mackintosh’s words. He feared that the entire team was failing. “We cannot expect much more from them. It is hard, but this is a cruel part of the world,” he wrote on March 2. The events that unfolded were harrowing nonetheless:We went off fairly well for half an hour, then Nigger commenced to wobble about, his legs evidently giving under him. We let him out of his harness and let him travel along with us but he has given us all he can, and now poor brute can only lay down. After Nigger my friend Pompey collapsed . . . After Pompey—the bachelor and quite one of the best dogs—Major fell down, and followed in the tracks of the others, then the last but one Scotty. They are all lying down in our tracks; one thing they have a painless death, for they lie curled up in the snow and fall into sleep from which they never wake again.
A lone dog survived, Pinkey, an indifferent puller. The three men labored to take up the slack, grappling with the unwieldy sledge as the wind billowed into the sail. Caught off balance by a fierce gust, Mackintosh fell and the sledge lurched over his body. He conceded the day and called a halt. Longing to see the dogs trotting along behind, he looked back and saw dark forms lying motionless along their path.
“We shall have to call this the Dead Dog trail,” pronounced Ernest Wild in his typical bald fashion. His black humor concealed a grave fear: he had lost virtually all feeling in both feet. Peeling away his sodden woolen socks, he saw that his toes were soot-colored, a sure sign of advanced frostbite. Joyce’s efforts to revive the circulation failed. Only time would tell if living tissue survived under the hardening carapace on Wild’s toes, or if the damage would progress to gangrene.
On March 4, the temperature fell to minus twenty-eight degrees at sundown, the lowest yet recorded on the journey. Wild’s feet worsened, and by March 6, he was riding on the sledge with Pinkey, both too debilitated to walk any longer. Before the day was out, Pinkey died. As another blizzard gathered force outside, the mood in the tent was desolate. “On Polar Journeys the dogs are almost human, one never feels lonely when they are around,” Joyce wrote. “I am more than sad about it, this could have been avoided if common sense had been shown.”
At long last, Joyce sighted the Bluff Depot through the binoculars on March 10. They hastened to the depot and broke into the food stores. The campsite seemed eerily unchanged since they left, bound for 80° south, on February 11. Mackintosh was alarmed to find that none of the other parties had returned with more supplies for the depot. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that some mishap had prevented them from carrying out orders. He had little time to dwell on his worries when he realized that Joyce had built the depot in the wrong place. Mist had obscured landmarks when he had checked the bearings, and it was roughly four miles east of its intended location. The three men would have to dismantle the depot and move it to the bearings Shackleton had specified. Long after nightfall, they were still trundling loads to the new position: 78°52’ S, 169°05’ E. After fourteen hours on the march, they finished the task just as a blizzard began, stalling them yet again.
Hut Point was about seventy-five miles north. Mackintosh was unwilling to borrow more than a week’s worth of provisions from the Bluff Depot to supplement their dwindling supplies. The raided depots seemed a cruel mockery of their labors. By March 13, about ten days of food remained and they had only plodded about five miles closer to the hut. Mackintosh continued his policy of one meal per day during blizzard days laid up in the tent to conserve food, so they would go hungry until they were on the move again. “Having been without a meal since yesterday evening one’s insides soon begin to feel hollow,” he wrote, resolute in the face of his own misery.
Their predicament was a painful repetition of Shackleton’s wretched starvation march in 1909. Although Shackleton had intended to use the new sledging diet devised by nutrition expert Wilfred Beveridge, the provisions packed into the hold of the Aurora varied little from the inadequate diet used on earlier expeditions. In the chaotic days before departure in 1914, Shackleton only shipped enough of the special Beveridge rations for his own depots. The Ross Sea party reverted to the traditional polar field diet staples of pemmican, biscuits, chocolate, and oatmeal. On full rations, Mackintosh and his men consumed about 4,300 calories per day, some 30-50 percent less than required for heavy manual labor in extreme cold. They were dehydrated as well.
Temperatures plummeted as the Antarctic winter drew inexorably closer, ranging in the minus thirties. The seasonal transition was not gradual. As sunlight diminished in March, the continent began a precipitous descent into intense cold, the so-called coreless winter, which would last from April to September. The men were becoming frostbitten as they lay in their sleeping bags at night. Ten pounds at the outset, each sleeping bag weighed about thirty pounds, the fur inside “a mass of ice, congealed from my breath,” as Mackintosh recorded. By day, the wet clothing froze into heavy armor, and a thicket of ice clung to their beards and mustaches.
“We are 3 old crocks,” Joyce wrote. Their faces were swollen by frostbite, the fluid in the blisters freezing hard. Wild’s face, hands, and feet were so blighted that his companions rubbed his body nightly to revive some deadened part. As well as painful frostbite around the socket of his missing eye, Mackintosh suffered from a toothache, which Joyce attempted to medicate with the denatured alcohol used to prime the stove. Due to its low freezing point, the liquid had reached the temperature of forty to fifty below zero. Mackintosh screamed in sheer agony as the lining of his mouth sloughed away to raw tissue. He tried to fortify the morale of his men, but privately he brooded. “I ask myself—is it worth the candle?” he wrote on March 18, swearing that he would never again return to the Antarctic.
The timing was desperately close. Mackintosh had instructed Stenhouse to return with the Aurora to Hut Point to pick up the sledging parties on March 20. By March 19, the party had only reached Corner Camp, thirty-one miles from the hut. They could only hope that Stenhouse had delayed sailing. Food, fuel, and matches were running low. Four days later, the single meal consisted of biscuit crumbs and cocoa powder, and by March 24, they finished the crumbs. Two hours later, Joyce spotted the Safety Camp flag. Inside the depot was a note from Spencer-Smith reporting that the other parties were safe. With any luck, Mackintosh’s party would join them on board the ship that night.
Hours later, they reached the Barrier edge to find McMurdo Sound glazed with young ice, too thin to bear weight. They roved around the edge of the Ross Ice Shelf, looking for a route onto the Hut Point Peninsula. The ice cliffs were impossible to negotiate, so they reluctantly camped. It was a “woe begotten night,” as Joyce called it. In the morning, they ditched the sledge and Joyce guided them to a place he remembered called Pram Point, which sloped up to the heights above Hut Point. Atop the steep volcanic hills, they could see the hut below, well over a mile away. Exhausted and aching with hunger, they threw caution to the wind and glissaded down the slope on the seats of their pants. As they trudged the last few hundred yards toward the hut, they realized that the Aurora was nowhere in sight.
7
Hut Point
MARCH 25—JUNE 2, 1915
They were stranded at Hut Point, but they were not alone. Cope, Hayward, and Jack had reached the coast on March 14, only to find a letter from Stenhouse informing Mackintosh that the ship had anchored there three days before, just long enough to land some stores and pick up Spencer-Smith, Gaze, Ninnis, Hooke, Richards, and Stevens. The Aurora had “not had a rosy time,” according to Stenhouse. The advancing season had brought an onslaught of storms. Buffeted by hurricane-force winds, the ship dragged anchor time and again, forcing Stenhouse to rove McMurdo Sound in search of safe anchorage. With the hazards of the coast often obscured by blizzard, the Aurora was rarely out of peril as Stenhouse dodged the loose pack ice and bergs crowding the sound. Already low after charging the pack in January, the coal bunkers were severely depleted from constantly maneuvering out of harm’s way. The remaining supply was just sufficient to keep the engines going for about three weeks. Stenhouse worried that it would not be enough for the return voyage to Australia. He decided to make one last run at Hut Point on March 11, then moor the ship at Cape Evans and shut down her engines for the winter. He knew then that it would be impossible to return on March 20 as he had originally agreed with Mackintosh.
Mackintosh accepted Stenhouse’s decision equably. In his written orders, he had instructed his chief officer to “look after the ship, above everything else.” The first priority was finding a suitable place for winter moorings; steaming back to Hut Point to pick up the sledging parties was secondary. Though he had not anticipated that the ship would be moored before his return from sledging, Mackintosh had advised Stenhouse to “be prepared for all eventualities” and trusted his judgment. In any event, it had always been possible that the sledgers would return late, and, missing the ship, be forced to wait until McMurdo Sound froze solidly enough to cross on foot to Cape Evans.
Still, a long sojourn in the hut was a bleak prospect for men in their condition. The first sight of Mackintosh’s party shocked Hayward. “I cannot describe their ghastly appearance, the Skipper looks dazed,” he wrote in his diary. Wild’s condition seemed the worst, his feet “raw like steak” and his right ear tinged green and oozing viscous fluid. The frostbite damage had almost certainly progressed to gangrene. Joyce’s hands, nose, and feet were beyond feeling, and his fingers were bloated and misshapen. Mackintosh’s face was disfigured into a swollen mass of mottled, livid flesh. The socket of his missing eye was badly stricken. Cope tended their injuries, although his clinical practice had thus far been limited to performing a postmortem on a dog with a copy of Modern Surgery at hand. He amputated one of Wild’s toes and part of his ear.
The first night of their reunion was appalling. The group had only three sleeping bags between them, so sodden and worn that Hayward called them “indescribable unless Dante’s Inferno would meet the case.” The six men shared the bags, sleeping and pacing by turns as the temperature fell to seventy below zero. “We are still alive this morning, so must be thankful,” wrote Hayward.
