The Naked Soul of Man - Terra Incognita - page 48

and picked up a slim volume of Browning's poetry. 'I throw away trash', he said, 'and am rewar-
ded with golden inspirations.'
For five months, then, the twenty-eight drifted on ice floes for two thousand miles, tents and all,
and when the chance came they travelled for six days in the three small lifeboats from the Endur-
ance until they reached Elephant Island, an outpost of the South Shetlands. On this brutal journey,
Shackleton did not sleep for a hundred hours.
Even then he spoke of the beauties of the sea, and of anxieties dwindling to nothing amid those
splendours.
When they landed on Elephant Island, Frank Hurley, the expedition photographer, recorded that
they were more dead than alive, and that many of them could no longer row. Later Shackleton,
whom they called the Boss, wrote in his topic South , 'The smiles and laughter, which caused
cracked lips to bleed afresh, and the gleeful exclamations at the sight of two live seals on the beach,
made me think for a moment of that glittering hour of childhood when the door is open at last and
the Christmas tree in all its wonder bursts upon the vision.'
The southern winter was already upon them, and Perce Blackborow, the man who had joined
the Endurance as a stowaway, had his frostbitten toes amputated. 1 The men took to referring to
their prison as 'Hell-of-an-Island'. There was no hope of a chance rescue, so no alternative but to
send one of the lifeboats to the whaling stations on South Georgia 700 miles away. From there,
a vessel could be found to fetch the stranded men. Before the Endurance sank, its captain, Frank
Worsley, a New Zealander and an officer in the merchant navy, had worked out the courses and
distances from the South Orkneys and Elephant Island to South Georgia, the Falklands and Cape
Horn. Of the three battered lifeboats, the James Caird offered the least horrifying option, and they
finished caulking the seams with Marston's artist's paint and seal blood, stripping the two other
wretched boats for parts. These new additions included an extra sail, which brought the total to
three. The James Caird , named after the expedition's main sponsor, was twenty-two feet long and
her height above the water was two feet two inches: not a great deal higher than a bath. She had
been built to Worsley's specifications in Popular, East London, from Baltic pine, American elm
and English oak. After the Endurance went down, the shipwright fitted the little boat with a pump
made from the casing of the ship's compass, and two men laboured over a blubber stove with can-
vas and needles to fashion a cover for the makeshift cabin.
Six of them went, and Worsley was at the helm. Before they left, Shackleton issued instructions
to Frank Wild, the leader of the stranded party, to the effect that if relief had not arrived in six
months, when the whaling station opened on Deception Island, Wild was to assume the boat had
gone down and set out himself.
Worsley recorded in his diary that on the first evening, with the Southern Cross overhead,
Shackleton sent the rest in to sleep and the two of them 'snuggled close together all night', re-
lentlessly inundated by waves and 'holding north by the stars that swept in glittering procession
over the Atlantic towards the Pacific . . . While I steered, his arm thrown over my shoulder, we
discussed plans and yarned in low tones. We smoked all night - he rolled cigarettes for us both, a
job at which I was unhandy.' They had one compass, and it was faulty. Shackleton confided that if
any of the twenty-two perished, he would feel like a murderer. Worsley's account of how he navig-