Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
68
crow's-nest of the Nimrod, the great, white, wall-sided bergs stretched east, west and
south, making a striking contrast with the lanes of blue-black water between them.
A stillness, weird and uncanny, seemed to have fallen upon everything when we
entered the silent water streets of this vast unpeopled white city.
In hindsight, a rare, major breakout from the Ross Ice Shelf probably produced these
conditions, with the bergs disrupting the pack as they were blown through it by south-
erly storms.
By 3:00 P.M. on January 16, Nimrod was in open water, so she set a course southeast.
On the morning of January 23, “a low, straight line appeared ahead of the ship”: the Ross
Ice Shelf. The plan was to put in at a low point at Balloon Bight and build a hut for a base
on the ice shelf. But as the ship approached the location of what Shackleton remembered
to have been a narrow inlet in the ice shelf, he found a broad bay encompassing both Bal-
loon Bight and the inlet where Borchgrevink's party had landed, seven or eight miles to
the east. Because of the numerous sightings that day, Shackleton named this new feature
the Bay of Whales.
The fresh face of the ice shelf was too high to ascend, so Shackleton shifted to his
backup plan of establishing a camp in King Edward VII Land. A closing pack, however,
prevented the ship from approaching that land within fifty miles, so Shackleton had no
choice, if any eVective base were to be established, but to sail back to McMurdo Sound.
With expectations of reaching Winter Quarters Bay, the Nimrod was stopped twenty
miles short by fast ice on January 29. After a three-day sledge trip to Hut Point, which
found the Discovery hut well provisioned, Shackleton decided to build his winter quarters
at Cape Royds. Thereafter began an intense two-week period of unloading the ship, dur-
ing which all the men worked around the clock, catching a few hours' sleep only when
they no longer could continue. By February 18 almost all stores were safely on shore, and
the hut was built. After a severe blizzard that drove the Nimrod oVshore for three days,
the ship was emptied of a last load of coal and steamed back to the warmth of New Zea-
land for the winter.
Cape Royds was a happy choice for a base, because it is the location of an established
Adélie penguin rookery (Fig. 3.1). The hut was situated beside a small frozen lake across
from the rookery in a hollow that practically obscured the view of the mountains across
McMurdo Sound but appeared to oVer shelter from the wind. The steam-plumed sum-
mit of Mount Erebus towered fifteen miles behind the camp (Fig. 3.2). In contrast to the
Discovery hut (which was at the end of a peninsula twenty-five miles distant from the Ere-
bus summit and without a view unless one climbed Observation Hill), the hut at Cape
Royds was on the flank of the volcano with the summit looming behind.
As the final details of establishing the base were completed, discussion picked up on
what to do next: What would be the best, first goals of the expedition, and the scientific
endeavors? With an active volcano barely five leagues away and four geologists in camp
after taking on the Australians, there was a strong argument for investigating the geo-
logical phenomenon just up the hill.
The ascent of Mount Erebus became the first sledging venture of Shackleton's expe-
dition, including an advance and a support party consisting of three men each who would
