The Lost Men, page 32
His literary output tailed off to countless anonymous letters to London newspapers signed “An Interested Observer.” “Whilst crossing the Western Ocean,” wrote a supposed passenger on a Cunard ship, “we on board had the pleasure of listening to one of the finest lectures that I have ever heard. The lecturer was the famous Polar Explorer Ernest Mills Joyce.” Inevitably, the letters digressed into a recounting of “the world’s greatest polar effort” and the litany of his accomplishments.
There was still a living to be earned for himself and his wife. Among other ventures, scuttlebutt put him at the helm of a rumrunner on the Thames, which, true or not, the raffish Joyce would have relished. But it was his post as concierge for London’s Eccleston Hotel that paid the bills. Every new guest was a fresh audience, and they could not fail to be amazed by the stories he had to tell. Sobered by the workaday life, he mellowed from the swashbuckling Joycey into a “middle-aged, stockily built, grey-haired and quiet-spoken man,” as one newspaperman reported. Joyce attended the annual dinners of the Antarctic Club, relishing the reunion with other polar veterans, many now laureled with knighthoods and academic honors, and savored the limelight when it chanced his way.
“At 64, He Still Wants to Explore,” read a May 1939 headline. The reporter found the forgotten explorer in an autumnal mood. “Given the chance to join an expedition, I’d be off like a shot,” Joyce declared. “I suppose I shall have to be satisfied with my memories.” He watched the Antarctic exploits of Mawson, Wilkins, Byrd, and Ellsworth from afar, keeping his scrapbooks assiduously up to date. In the early days of a wet London spring, Joyce fell ill with bronchitis, complicating his battle with emphysema. On May 2, 1940, his heart failed as he lay in bed in his basement flat at the Eccleston, tucked up in his old reindeer fur sleeping bag.
“Not a rotter in my book,” said Richards. “‘Warts and all’ I liked old Joycey.” Theirs was an unlikely friendship, forged by necessity and tested by hardship. The tolerant, steady Richards was unfazed by his mate’s bumptious temperament, as he explained, because he believed everyone has “plenty of faults if one goes looking for them & very few haloes.”
Despite their bond, their lives diverged after the expedition. Richards remained in Australia and Joyce returned to England in 1920. “After the trouble with my heart, my health was never the same,” said Richards. “My days of travelling were over.” However, life brought other fulfillment. Richards had found his calling as a science teacher and, like his fellow Australians, Jack and Gaze, he was flattered by the honors and recognition that followed the expedition, but had no desire to dwell on the past. Letters came from Joyce, inviting him to join one scheme or another. Richards always declined, gently. Joyce’s yearning for the Antarctic was unfathomable to Richards. Neither could he imagine anyone else returning to the continent. “We did think strongly [in 1917] that we were going to be the last people that were down there,” he recalled. “The Pole has been found and the transcontinental journey may have been accomplished or may not have been accomplished, but nobody is going to send down another expedition.”
At first, his prediction seemed prescient. A decade after their rescue, no exploring expedition had ventured into McMurdo Sound. It was not until 1928 that American Richard Byrd sailed into the Bay of Whales, where Amundsen had once established his base. His main ship was a traditional wooden sealer, but a steel-hulled vessel followed in its wake bearing three airplanes, snow vehicles, and a battery of communications gear. Byrd’s team became the first to fly over the South Pole, ushering in a new era of technological exploration in the Antarctic which promised to shift the advantage to humankind in the hostile polar environment.
“What is left for exploration?” asked the Daily Mail in 1933, lamenting the end of “exploration in the large old sense which inspired the Elizabethans and Victorians.” When the United States launched Operation High Jump in 1946, the aims were strategic. The U.S. Navy dispatched an invasion force of thirteen ships, thirty-three aircraft, amphibious tractors, and 4,700 personnel to Antarctica. The modern explorers regarded the huts with curious wonderment. For all the seeming impermanence, the weathered wooden buildings appeared unchanged since the survivors of the Ross Sea party rushed to meet the Aurora three decades before. At Hut Point, their last meal of seal meat sat in a skillet on the stove, and the sledging biscuits were still edible. Outside the Cape Evans hut, the preserved body of a chained dog stood frozen upright. Nearby, the newcomers found the copper tube containing the scrawled epitaph of Mackintosh, Spencer-Smith, and Hayward tumbling over the slopes.
Richards watched avidly as this new era of exploration unfolded. “The modern Antarctic adventurer receives a very substantial salary, is covered by insurance, and has all the blessings of the Welfare State in leave credits of various kinds,” he noted with bemusement. Henceforth, Antarctic exploration would be dominated by national enterprises rather than driven by the vision and will of one man. Government-backed expeditions launched calculated assaults on all sides of the continent, mapping the coastline and plunging deeper into the uncharted interior than ever before. Though strategic goals were ever present, scientific research once again came to the fore. In 1955, the United States founded a permanent research base at Hut Point called McMurdo Station. In 1957-58, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) focused on Antarctica. As part of the effort, Everest pioneer Edmund Hillary and scientist Vivian Fuchs fulfilled Shackleton’s dream and made the first crossing of the Antarctic continent. Scientists from sixty-seven countries participated, founding fifty bases on the continent, including one at the South Pole. Not far from where the Ross Sea party routinely clambered from Ross Island onto the Barrier, New Zealand founded a scientific station called Scott Base.
Some of the newcomers were mesmerized by the past. They rummaged through the huts, sifting the relics of the bygone era they called the Heroic Age. The traces of the Ross Sea party’s time there were omnipresent but enigmatic, their story obscure beside the legendary exploits of Scott and Shackleton. Some sought out Richards to hear the story. He had by then retired as principal of the Ballarat School of Mines and Industry and he welcomed the chance to reminisce. The outward evidence of the experience was gone, save for eccentricities like his lifelong aversion to frozen foods. He had forgotten what had lured him to Antarctica in the first place, but memories surfaced as he was plied with questions. Remembering was not always easy. “Cape Evans was ‘home’ to us, but I never recollect Hut Point without a touch of mental distress,” he once said. More happily, he was moved to renew his correspondence with the other survivors of the shore party: Jack, Gaze, and Stevens. Unlike Stevens, Jack and Gaze never regretted joining the expedition. Jack kept the poetry he wrote in the Antarctic, inspired by “the beauty untold” he felt privileged to have seen, even in adversity. Gaze’s enthusiasm was undimmed since the day in 1915 when, at the end of a day of backbreaking labor, he wrote,
I don’t wonder at people’s being drawn back and back to the place in spite of the hardships and risks—there’s a fascination about the life that would appeal to most anybody. It’s astonishing too, how one forgets about the outer world. No doubt there are times when one simply longs for civilization again with its attendant comfort and luxury but these fits don’t last and you thank your lucky stars that you’re down here, living a real life.
Richards was inspired to write a book, The Ross Sea Shore Party 1914-17. The slim volume told the story plainly in forty-four pages. It was as modest as Joyce’s chronicle was flamboyant, and without bitterness. Richards was untroubled by disappointed hopes. After a lifetime of reflection, “weighing the credits and debits—and there were very weighty debits,” he, too, had “no regrets.” Richards never regarded the struggle as futile. “It was something that the human spirit accomplished,” he said. “It was something you tried to do.” He died on May 8, 1985 at ninety-one, the last of the men who laid Shackleton’s depots to Mount Hope.
Epilogue: “The Brotherhood of Men Who Know the South”
THE SHORE PARTY
Ernest Wild
Wild dreamed of manning the bar in his own English country pub, but he put his aspirations on hold until after the war. Back among his kindred Jack Tars in the Royal Navy, serving as a petty officer aboard a minelayer in the Mediterranean, he seemed unaffected by his Antarctic ordeal. His breezy good nature endeared him to his new mates and his outstanding performance impressed his superiors. In February 1918, he was struck down by a raging fever. The unmistakable symptoms of typhoid followed. An aggressive vaccination campaign had fortified troops against the deadly contagion, but Wild, arriving late to battle, had not been vaccinated. He died on March 10, 1918, and was buried with full naval honors in Malta, where his shipmates contributed a marble cross in his memory.
Irvine Gaze
After reuniting with his family in Melbourne, Gaze sailed for England to join the Royal Flying Corps. Aerial warfare had come into its own since 1914, and the RFC had grown from sixty-three to twenty-two thousand aircraft. Though lionized by the public, fighter pilots led a precarious existence. During “Bloody April” 1917, when Gaze was deciding to join, the life expectancy of a front line pilot was eleven days. Gaze was flying over occupied France on October 13, 1918, when his Bristol fighter was shot down. Only slightly injured, he and his crew were taken prisoner by German soldiers. Summoned for interrogation, Gaze was asked what his Polar Medal signified, and when Gaze said he had been a member of Shackleton’s expedition, the adjutant exclaimed that he had attended Dulwich College with the explorer. He invited Gaze to dinner with the squadron, where Gaze met flying ace Hermann Göring.
Eleven days later, armistice was declared. Gaze remained in the RAF in England into 1919 and married Freda Sadler of the Women’s Royal Air Force. They returned to Australia to settle in Melbourne and raise two sons, both of whom later became RAF pilots. Dubbed “the local millionaire” by the Ross Sea party for his ever-ready cache of unlikely luxury items, he proved to be a natural in business. Gaze enjoyed a prosperous career as a footwear company executive and later tried his hand at farming. He cherished lifelong friendships with his Australian mates from the expedition, Jack and Richards. He died on April 22, 1978, at the age of eighty-eight.
Andrew Keith Jack
In June 1917, Jack took charge of the Guncotton and Nitric Acid Section of the Commonwealth Cordite Factory in Maribyrnong, Victoria. After the war, he devoted himself to his family and continued his career as an industrial chemist in munitions, ultimately rising to senior assistant manager of the Maribyrnong facility during World War II. From 1944 to 1946, he was the Australian munitions representative to Britain. At his retirement in 1950, he was chief safety officer and secretary of the Operational Safety Committee of the Australian Department of Supply and Development. He was a fellow of the Institute of Chemistry and the Royal Australasian Chemical Institute.
After the expedition, Jack carefully preserved the scientific notebooks of the Ross Sea party but did not publish any results. Jack later shared the data with meteorologist Fritz Loewe. In 1961, Loewe published a paper on Jack’s tide ablation experiments in the Journal of Glaciology, and later authored the first publication of the Ross Sea party’s meteorological results. Loewe’s analysis provided fresh corroboration and notable contrasts with the results from earlier expeditions to the Ross Sea region. Jack died on September 26, 1966, at eighty-one.
John Lachlan Cope
While serving as commandant of the British American Overseas Hospital in 1917, Cope married Norah Robinson, daughter of Lord and Lady Rosmead and granddaughter of the First Baron Rosmead, Sir Hercules Robinson, who was during his illustrious career the governor of Hong Kong, Ceylon, New South Wales, New Zealand, and South Africa. The following year, Cope resigned his post and joined the Royal Air Force. After the war, he lectured on his polar exploits and worked as a teacher and journalist. In 1919, he launched the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition. Cope’s extravagant program dwarfed Shackleton’s effort in both scope and cost. Sailing on Scott’s old ship, the Terra Nova, with a sixty-strong crew, including Joyce and Larkman, he planned to circumnavigate the continent for five years, establishing multiple scientific stations with a view to future commercial enterprises including mining and whaling. The ship would also be equipped with a plane, intended for reconnaissance and a first flight to the South Pole.
When he failed to garner establishment support and funding, his grand plans collapsed. There was no ship and no plane, and the crew dwindled to four men. Cope arranged passage on a whaling vessel sailing into the Weddell Sea in 1921 to disembark his party on the Antarctic Peninsula. One man, George Hubert Wilkins, quit the expedition on reaching Antarctica. Cope decided to return home to drum up more funds and persuaded Maxime Charles Lester and Thomas Wyatt Bagshawe, the latter aged nineteen, to stay in Antarctica until he could return. The two young men spent a year making scientific observations, until early 1922, when a whaling captain returned to pick them up.
Resolute in his ambition to become a doctor, Cope resumed his medical studies while supporting his family, a formidable effort with four young children at home. Twenty years after he had been forced by finances to withdraw from his medical courses at Cambridge, he qualified as a general practitioner in 1933. He practiced in London until the outbreak of World War II and then moved to the Midlands. In March 1947, his wife Norah died, and eight months later, John Lachlan-Cope passed away in his sleep at the age of fifty-four.
Alexander Stevens
After completing his wartime service with the Royal Engineers, Alexander Stevens returned home to Scotland. In 1919, he joined the Scottish Spitsbergen Syndicate as a geologist and traveled to the Arctic islands of Norway for field research. Afterward, he married and retreated to the still waters of academic life, resuming his post at the University of Glasgow. Stevens took on the challenge of developing a geography department at the university, becoming its first professor when the chair was established in 1947. Graduate students could be intimidated by his “brittle sharpness of intellect and trenchant criticism,” but discovered in time that the austere, blunt Scotsman could be an amiable adviser. They often found him in his office late at night, peering at documents by the dim illumination of a blue light bulb—necessitated, he explained, by the damage done to his eyes by snow-blindness in the Antarctic. In 1953, he lost his sight entirely. He retired that year and lectured at St. Andrews University and Johns Hopkins University. Stevens died on December 20, 1965, at the age of seventy-nine. His notebooks lost in the sinking of the Medina in 1917, he left no record of any geological work in the Antarctic, published or otherwise, though he had contributed to the surviving meteorological reports.
SELECTED MEMBERS OF THE AURORA’S COMPANY
Joseph Stenhouse
As he himself would have put it, Stenhouse had a good war. With Stenhouse as gunnery officer and Frank Worsley in command, mystery ship PQ61 cruised the Irish Channel, accompanying merchant vessels as a decoy to flush out German U-boats. On September 26, 1917, PQ61 forced UC33 to surface with a combination of strategy and sheer audacity, then rammed and sank the submarine. Worsley was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), and Stenhouse received the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) and command of the HMS Ianthe, where Leslie Thomson joined him as first lieutenant. In October 1918, Stenhouse reunited with Worsley and Shackleton in Murmansk with the North Russian Expeditionary Force. By armistice, Stenhouse had been decorated again, this time with a DSO, and he was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1920. The sojourn in Arctic Russia sparked a business enterprise, Stenhouse, Worsley and Company, a shipping concern established for trade with the Baltic states. Their assessment of the market proved overly optimistic, and business dwindled. Stenhouse left to join an expedition in Brazil.
Stenhouse was deeply affected by the tragic plight of Mackintosh’s widow and two young daughters. In 1923, he married Gladys, and their daughter, Patricia, was born the following year. From 1925 to 1927, he sailed in command of the Royal Research Ship Discovery as scientists studied whaling and fishing grounds and conducted oceanographic surveys in the South Atlantic and the Antarctic.
When his time on the Discovery ended in 1928, he tried his hand at a series of entrepreneurial ventures, including a sealing company and an Antarctic passenger cruise line. His motivation was not merely wanderlust. After a brief respite of postwar prosperity, the European economic downturn of the late 1920s depressed trade and curtailed opportunities in the mercantile marine. In the dismal climate of the Great Depression, all of Stenhouse’s enterprises foundered. In 1934, he rejoined Worsley in a new adventure, sailing for Cocos Island in the Pacific in search of pirate treasure. Like Mackintosh before them, they failed to find the booty. Casting about for work, he outfitted a sailing ship for a wealthy adventurer’s round-the-world cruise and served as nautical adviser to the 1937 British film Mutiny of the Elsinore, doing a turn in front of the camera as well. In 1938, he reunited with Worsley to form a sailing cruise company with the yacht Westward. He also wrote a rollicking account of his days as a young apprentice in sail, Cracker Hash.
During World War II, Stenhouse served with the Royal Navy in the Gulf of Aden. In 1940, he risked his own life to rescue one of his crew when his ship struck a mine, killing half of the crew. During operations aboard the Tai Koo on September 12, 1941, Stenhouse was killed when his ship was sunk after an explosion, presumably caused by a mine.
