Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ated by dead reckoning beggars belief. He concluded his story, 'I often recall with proud affection
memories of those hours with a great soul.'
Tom Crean, a petty officer in the navy, was in charge of the 'kitchen'. He was obliged to light
the primus stove while bent double and jam it between his and another man's legs to keep it steady.
There was no room for anyone to sit upright and eat their hoosh, the standard Antarctic meal of
a dehydrated meat protein mixture dissolved in hot water. It was usually followed by a sledging
biscuit, some Streimer's Nutfood and a few sugarlumps. By the third day everything, with the ex-
ception of matches and sugar in watertight tins, was irredeemably soaked. The men's feet and legs,
immersed almost constantly, were already frostbitten and swollen. They had rations, water and oil
for thirty days. Apart from that, they didn't have much, except methylated spirits for the stove, a
tin of seal oil, six reindeer-hair sleeping bags, a small sack of spare clothes and one chronometer.
There wasn't enough room for them all to lie down at once, so they took it in turns to crawl on
their chests and stomachs over sharp stone ballast, Shackleton directing the in-out operation, into
a hole seven feet long and five feet wide. Then they slid into saturated sleeping bags which after
a week began to smell of sour bread. The air was bad in there, and stifling, and sometimes they
woke suddenly with the feeling that they had been buried alive.
By the fifth day John Vincent, able seaman and a bully, was experiencing severe pain in his legs
and feet. He lost his appetite for the fight after that. It was the psychological cramp that did for
him, not the physical kind. He had worked on North Sea trawlers too, so he was no stranger to
hardship.
By the seventh day their faces and hands were black with soot and blubber. They needed calor-
ies, so they drank the seal oil. Two of the sleeping bags were proclaimed beyond redemption and
tossed overboard, lifted briefly against the blanched sky.
On the eighth day the ice on the boat grew so thick that they were obliged to take to the
James
Caird
with an axe. It was agonisingly painful work. Their thighs were inflamed by the chafing of
wet clothes, and their lower legs turned a spectral white, and numb. The painter snapped, the sea-
anchor was swept away and the white light of fear flashed through six souls as the biggest wave
they had ever encountered crashed over the little boat. But by the eleventh day Worsley calculated
that they had crossed the halfway mark. Two of the men found tobacco leaves floating in the bilges
and laboriously dried them and rolled them into cigarettes with toilet paper. By the thirteenth day
frostbite had skinned their hands so frequently that they were ringed like the inside of a tree-trunk.
Then they discovered that the remaining water was brackish.
As sunlight leaked into the sky on the fifteenth day, someone spotted a skein of seaweed. The
hours ticked by. If they had missed South Georgia, they were lost. Then, at half-past twelve, as in
a vision, the turban of clouds unravelled on the pearly horizon and revealed a shining black crag.
It was land. It was in fact Cape Demidov, the northern headland of King Haakon Sound on South
Georgia. What they didn't know, as they celebrated, was that the worst was not behind them. It
was still to come.
A gale got up. The wind and current were against them, forcing the
James Caird
almost on
to the rocks. It began to snow, and roaring breakers shattered into the mist. It looked hopeless.
They steered, pumped and bailed, lying to each other with encouraging phrases. Their mouths and
