The Lost Men, page 21
By all accounts, the Beardmore would be impossible to miss. “The glacier which we now saw must be the largest in the world; it is 30 miles in width & we can see over 100 miles of its length, beyond that must be the Great Plateau,” wrote an awestruck Frank Wild, who was at Shackleton’s side on the polar journey. The Ross Sea party struggled to relate the map to the vast landscape around them. It transcended all human notions of scale and proportion. The peculiar Antarctic atmosphere distorted the perception of distance and foreshortened geographical features, crowding the horizon with hundreds of unnamed mountains and glaciers. If they chose wrongly, a mistake would mean a costly diversion when the ration amounts had been cut so very fine.
Food was not the only limited commodity. The men’s stamina was rapidly eroding. The day after leaving the 82° Depot, Spencer-Smith admitted that his limbs ached more each morning. Mackintosh, too, was wincing as he hobbled along on his lame knee. Joyce feared that both men were too debilitated to march all the way back to Hut Point. If their health continued to deteriorate, they would have to be dragged on sledges. Regardless of their condition, Joyce was adamant: the party could not turn back before laying the last depot. On January 21, he had sighted a mountain that answered to Shackleton’s description of Mount Hope.
Up ahead, in a low line of snowy peaks, he spied a red summit, about 3,000 feet high. Joyce guessed it was thirty miles away, two or three days’ march at their current pace. The cumbersome ritual of stopping every few hundred yards to build cairns had acquired a mechanical rhythm, and the mileage had been climbing steadily for a week. In spite of a lowering sky and a stinging wind, Joyce ordered an early start. By noon, they had dashed ahead six miles, crossing 83° south. It was far too strenuous for Spencer-Smith. “Nearly fainted at 11 a.m. and had to tell at lunch how weak I am,” he wrote, still feverish. “Heart rather ricked, I fear, and knees bad—swollen like a great bruise above and below knee, especially the right.” After the two parties joined forces, his arrhythmia had worsened, a fact he carefully concealed from the others. The stiffness and pain in his knees he attributed to frostbite, since his trousers had worn through and exposed patches of bare skin. He marched doggedly onward, keeping pace with the other men, yet letting his traces slacken. That night, the party camped at 83°05’ S 171°05’ E. They decided to lay no depot there, instead depositing as much as they could carry at Mount Hope.
On the march the next morning, Spencer-Smith staggered and collapsed. He confessed that he could go no farther. Joyce and Richards decided to leave him there in a tent to recover his strength while the party moved south, to which the chaplain readily agreed. They urged Mackintosh to stay and care for Spencer-Smith, but he would not yield to persuasion. He insisted that he was duty-bound to ensure that every depot was laid. Until then, he had accepted Joyce’s inroads on his authority in the name of achieving their goal, but staying behind seemed a breach of his solemn oath to Shackleton. “A weak character,” Richards called him, but he had not recognized the “will of iron” that Shackleton had seen. Joyce and Richards realized that, “short of restraining him,” they could not prevent Mackintosh from marching south to meet the Boss.
Hurriedly, the five men erected a tent. “I should be all right bar loneliness and disappointment (probably merited)” Spencer-Smith wrote forlornly. Mackintosh and Wild settled him into his sleeping bag and arranged provisions within reach. They meant to return in under a week, homeward bound. In little more than an hour, “they rattled off at a tremendous pace; with the dogs scrapping en route,” as the melancholy Spencer-Smith watched the caravan recede into the distance.
After advancing eleven miles for the day, the party camped. With five bodies crammed into a three-man tent, it was a restive night. Joyce overslept and emerged from the tent disoriented. Impenetrable fog cloaked the landscape, blotting out the cherished sight of the mountains. By afternoon, a blizzard shut down visibility entirely. Joyce reluctantly called a halt for the day. The storm roared through the night and the following day. “Nothing doing. Can’t see,” recorded Wild.
Wild’s thoughts were elsewhere. He had not expected that Shackleton, accompanied by his brother Frank, would be delayed so long. It was still possible that the two parties would meet in a few days’ time. There was another possibility: The delay may have meant that Shackleton’s party had met with disaster. Too doggedly optimistic to contemplate the worst, Wild wrote a letter to his brother.
On January 25, the snow and mist cleared to reveal a stunning tableau. The mountains glowed ocher in the morning sun. The earthy color of the low summit was a balm after months of gazing upon the antiseptic landscape. After weeks of doubt, they stood transfixed by the sight. Just as Shackleton had described, a pass lay to the west of the peak, looking for all the world like his description of the so-called Golden Gateway. Joyce guessed it was some twenty miles away.
The men hitched the team and altered course slightly to the west, aiming straight for the pass. By noon, they had sprinted eight miles south. In the afternoon, the going became more arduous. They realized they were traveling up and down a series of hills. Like mounded swells in a frozen sea, the undulations were a sign of a major disturbance in the flat expanse of the ice shelf. Laboring up the ridges of ice, Mackintosh remembered Shackleton’s caution about crevasses near the Gateway’s entrance. As they drew closer to the mountains, colossal slabs of ice heaved skyward in fantastic shapes, separated by deep gashes in the surface, some narrow fissures, others broad chasms. It would be no easy task to find safe passage through the chaotic terrain. After advancing seventeen miles, they camped in the tumult, waking to sounds like pistol shots as the ice was riven by unseen pressure.
Only the great Beardmore Glacier could have created such enormous pressure, Joyce reasoned. The mighty glacier surged around Mount Hope like rapids eddying around a boulder. If the party was on course, the terrain would only get worse as they ascended the offshoot toward the main body of the glacier. “A fearful mess,” Frank Wild had called it as he struggled upstream through the Gateway with Shackleton in 1908, plunging into crevasses so deep that he felt certain both he and Shackleton “were going straight to hell.”
Rather than risk leading the entire party into a treacherous series of blind alleys, Joyce decided to make a reconnaissance journey. Roped to Mackintosh and Richards, he led the way into the labyrinth of crevasses. “All around us was such a scene as one sees in a Pantomime, but cannot imagine in real life,” he later marveled. “We seemed to be in the centre of a vortex of ice, churned into caves, all of blue appearance, dark and light.” They peered into an abyss, seeing no bottom, as Joyce insistently pulled the rope. Solid ground was illusory; the sloping cat-walks were snow bridges. Joyce eased forward, catching his breath for a moment after each hesitant step in anticipation of freefall. The plunges followed all too often. Richards and Mackintosh hauled him back up, time after time. Searching for a path, he spotted a ramp of ice that seemed to correspond with Shackleton’s description of “a long slope of about 2 miles in length & a rise of 2000 feet.” As they ascended, Richards spied something odd in the snow nearby. Moving closer, they made an electrifying discovery: a pair of upended sledges, likely abandoned by Scott’s last expedition en route to the Pole.
Finally, Joyce was certain. With Mackintosh and Richards in tow, he headed for the saddle west of Mount Hope. The ice underfoot was like polished quartz as they “climbed the glacier on the slope & saw the great Beardmore Glacier stretching to the south.” The Beardmore glinted in the sunlight, snaking over a hundred miles long on the broad plain of the interior plateau. Here, at its terminus, the glacier tumbled down to the Ross Ice Shelf in a cataract of ice twelve miles wide. Below, bands of pressure flared for miles, like mammoth frozen ripples in a pool at the foot of a waterfall.
When Shackleton saw his “open road to the South,” for the first time, he thought it might not be seen by human eyes again. Now Joyce, Mackintosh, and Richards joined the privileged circle of living men to look upon the deepest interior of the Antarctic continent. After a year of thankless work, they were no longer laborers but explorers. “A most wonderful sight,” Joyce wrote in awe. Perched on a granite outcrop, Richards trained his binoculars on the southern vista. His heart quickened as he fixed on a dome-shaped blot in the distance. Focusing, he realized it was not a tent but a boulder. Shackleton’s party was nowhere in sight. Mackintosh had long cherished the improbable hope of meeting Shackleton there or awaiting his arrival; now to linger even an hour was unthinkable.
It was late in the day, and the job was yet to be done. Joyce guided his roped companions down the slope and through the icefalls, sure-footed now that the trail had been blazed. They arrived back at camp at
three o’clock in the afternoon, ravenously hungry after the twelve-mile journey. The five men hastily broke camp and packed the lightened sledge. Mackintosh was visibly pained by every step. Reaching Scott’s old depot three hours later, the party set up the tent again. Joyce chose Hayward and Wild to accompany him to lay the depot, leaving Mackintosh in camp with Richards.
The Gateway was a moderate climb for fit men, but these were not fit men. They plodded up the slope in a pained crawl. The loaded sledge, down to about 150 pounds per man, was an onerous burden in their condition. In a narrowing of the pass, Joyce ordered a halt. They had reached the journey’s end. He had chosen “a place which could not be missed by anyone coming from the S[outh].” They built a snow cairn, fifteen feet high, and marked it with one of Scott’s sledges and a flag. The depot was stocked with one week’s worth of provisions for six men, seventeen pounds of extra biscuits, an extra ten days’ worth of fuel, a few books, and the list of bearings for the lifeline of depots spanning the ice shelf. Wild quietly slipped his letter to his brother into the depot.
“As I said when we started sledging I would do this & so with the help of 2 good pals we carried it out,” Joyce declared on reaching camp at 10:30 PM. He was utterly spent, the only man to have made both trips, well over twenty miles in one day. Mackintosh was elated. The fears and anxieties of the past eighteen months had been banished, the burden of the lives of Shackleton and his men lifted from his shoulders, and he had Joyce to thank for it. “The Skipper telling us how good it was of us to bring him along. This is his first acknowledgment of the work we done,” Joyce wrote, more in ill temper than truth. “Still I don’t want his praise all I wanted to see was the work carried out what men are depending on.”
On January 27, the Ross Sea party turned north. “We are now Homeward Bound 360 miles to go I think with the help of Good Old Providence we ought to be in by the 27th of February,” wrote Joyce. Snowblind again, both eyes bound, he was unbowed. “Hanging on to the harness for guidance but pulling my whack,” he scrawled in his diary in a sightless haze. The worst seemed over. Their duty to Shackleton done, they had only to look after themselves.
12
“Homeward Bound”
JANUARY 25-MARCH 18, 1916
As Joyce guided the party into the icefalls below Mount Hope, Spencer-Smith lay in his tent at latitude 83°12’ south on the trail, his optimism undimmed. “A year ago to-day we set off from the ship on our first journey—all clothes new and clean; a team of 9 dogs and high hopes,” he remembered on January 25. “Only the last remain and even they should be accomplished by the O.M. and Wild by now.” After the party left for Mount Hope, he spent most of his time inside the tent, save for short forays to collect snow for melting into water. In a matter of days, the tent neared collapse under the drifting snow. In the hushed cocoon, he lay in his sleeping bag, dozing fitfully and waiting. “Dreamt that we met Sir Ernest and Frank Wild with one motor and one dog sledge—both clean and neat,” he wrote, flushed with excitement. In his waking hours, he read novellas, composed sermons in French, and wondered where he was, performing elaborate computations to try and fix his position and that of the rest of the party, assuring himself at first that their return was imminent, and then that the delay did not mean disaster.
By necessity, the rations left for him were minimal. As the food dwindled, Spencer-Smith cut back to two meals each day. They had also left him a bottle of lime juice extract, from which he took precise doses with meals, “in case my complaint is some form of scurvy—which I doubt altogether.” The prescribed dosage of a quarter ounce per day provided half a milligram of vitamin C at most, when he would have needed at least twenty times that amount to keep scurvy at bay. The extract could do nothing to check the disease, which, in fact, already held Spencer-Smith in its grip.
The onset had been insidious. The first signs—muscle stiffness, lassitude, and weakness—seemed the inevitable result of overexertion. All the while, the latent disease stole a march inside his body. Depleted of vitamin C, the connective tissue throughout his body began to break down. He hemorrhaged internally as the walls of his capillaries weakened and burst. The joints and surface membranes of bones began to bleed, and the scar tissue knitting old wounds deteriorated. New wounds refused to heal. By the time the chaplain’s symptoms became severe, his swollen limbs purpling from the internal bleeding, the disease was already well advanced. On his seventh day alone, he could no longer summon the strength to stand. “Felt very rotten this morning,” he wrote, ashamed of his weakness.
In the late afternoon of January 29, a muffled chorus of yelps announced the arrival of the sledgers. “It is strange but cheery to hear men and dogs again,” wrote Spencer-Smith, elated to learn that the party had accomplished their mission. His companions were horrified by his wrecked condition. The chaplain was helpless, unable even to crawl from his soaking bag. As they peeled away his wet clothing, they discovered his legs had turned dusky black from the hip down and his joints had swelled. But Joyce refused to accept it. “It may be scurvy but I do not think so as his gums & eyes do not shew it,” he wrote, dismissing Mackintosh’s alarm as “his usual panic.”
Joyce had tried to protect his party by breaking their journey with spells at the hut when he pressed them to eat seal, and by packing some fried meat when they left the hut for the last time on December 13. Mackintosh’s party had subsisted on the inadequate sledging rations the longest. Their last sojourn at Hut Point had ended October 29, eighty-four days before Spencer-Smith’s breakdown. Tellingly, Mackintosh seemed not much better than the chaplain, his knees sore and ankles grotesquely swollen to twice their normal size. Although Joyce, Richards, Hayward, and Wild were stronger, it was only a matter of time before the entire party was as disabled as Spencer-Smith. A continuous intake of vitamin C is needed to ward off deficiency, and their diet was devoid of it.
No explorer cared to dwell on the possibility of injury or death, and Shackleton was no exception. “Where would you be with a sick man on your hands?” demanded the president of the Royal Geographical Society when Shackleton presented his plans for the expedition. Shackleton replied, “It is up to him, when he knows he is too bad to go on, isn’t it?” It was vital that each member understood, and admitted, his limitations. There was a fine but critical line between doing one’s duty and rash heroics that endangered the welfare of the entire group.
Acknowledging an incapacitating injury presented a new set of problems. The natural human impulse was compassion. As Shackleton told the RGS, “We would put him on a sledge.” At a certain point, though, the ethical dilemmas became thornier, when the distances and the burdens were too great, threatening the lives of the entire group. Faced with a hypothetical crisis at the South Pole, Shackleton could only surmise how he would cope. “I would go on as I could, and it is up to him to do what is right,” he supposed. “As regards disaster, they each have their two tablets of morphia.” For Scott, the dilemma was real. As hope dissolved on his doomed homeward march from the Pole, he offered his men the choice of a merciful end, handing each man thirty opium tablets. The medical kit of the Ross Sea party, too, was equipped with opium.
For the Ross Sea party, the decision needed no debate. Spencer-Smith would be loaded onto a sledge and dragged back to Hut Point, although the addition of nearly two hundred pounds to the load would undoubtedly slow their pace. More time in the field meant more food consumed, and the rations were already short. Originally, only one three-man party had been intended to sledge beyond latitude 82° south to Mount Hope. Joyce’s decision to push on with a team of six meant that an extra 120 to 130 pounds of supplies had already been consumed. There were reserves at each depot for the Ross Sea party, roughly enough to keep them supplied for five days between each depot without cutting into Shackleton’s stores. The Bluff Depot was overstocked with an even greater surplus. If they made the 240 miles to the Bluff at a good clip, they could rest more easily.
To Joyce, that meant longer hours to cover at least thirteen or fourteen miles each day, starting immediately. Less than an hour later, he had the camp struck and Spencer-Smith wrapped in a dry sleeping bag. With the chaplain strapped securely on top of the rear sledge, Joyce led the caravan northward at full tilt. There were only four men heaving at the sledge: Joyce, Wild, Hayward, and Richards. Mackintosh was in such pain that he limped along with a slack trace. By the next day, a blizzard closed in, making travel unthinkable. The party was pinned down in the sagging tents, subsisting on short commons again. Only the hairs molting from the worn sleeping bags seemed in ample supply in the hoosh pot.
