Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
tongues were so swollen from thirst that they could barely swallow. At one point they were driven
so close to land that they had to crane their necks to look up at the top of the crag. Tension took
them, then, beyond speech. Worsley said later that for three hours they looked death square in the
eye, and he felt annoyed that nobody would ever know they had got so far.
The ordeal lasted for nine hours, and then they knew that they were going to live. The storm
subsided. On the seventeenth day they sailed on to the entrance of King Haakon Bay and got in. It
was dark by the time they spotted a cove. They carried the boat in and heaved themselves ashore,
eyes fixed on the glint of freshwater pools. Shackleton wrote later that they flung down the adze,
logbook and cooker. 'That was all, except our wet clothes, that we brought out of the Antarctic,
which we had entered a year and a half before with well-found ship, full equipment, and high
hopes. That was all of tangible things; but in memories we were rich. We had pierced the veneer
of outside things. We had “suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down yet grasped at glory,
grown bigger in the bigness of the whole”. We had seen God in all his splendours, heard the text
that nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.'
Still it wasn't over. They had hit South Georgia on the uninhabited south coast, not the north
coast where the whaling stations were located. They had to penetrate the perilous and unknown
interior.
Together with Worsley and Crean, Shackleton trekked for thirty miles over mountains and gla-
ciers no man had crossed. It took them thirty-six hours, and it was winter. To give the other two a
psychological boost at a critical juncture he told them they could have half an hour's sleep - then
woke them after five minutes without revealing how long they had rested. On 20 May 1916 they
arrived at the Stromness whaling station, 800 miles from Elephant Island. The terrified faces of
two lads who fled at their wild appearance and unguessed provenance was their first contact with
the outside world for seventeen months. Captain Sørlle, the manager of the station, had met Shack-
leton before, but he didn't recognise him.
'Who are you?' he asked.
The quiet reply came back, 'My name is Shackleton.'
Then, 'When was the war over?'
No betting man would have put odds on it. The Norwegian whalers, hard men even among sea-
farers, listened to the story of this journey later, and one of them came forward. He laid his hand
on Shackleton's arm, and in his halting English he said, 'These are men.'
'When I look back on those days', the Boss had said, 'I have no doubt that Providence guided
us . . . I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed moun-
tains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.' Worsley
and Crean, he said, confessed to the same idea of a fourth presence. 'One feels', he wrote, '“the
dearth of human words, the roughness of mortal speech” in trying to describe things intangible,
but a record of our journeys would be incomplete without a reference to a subject very near to our
hearts.'
It seems fitting that the Boss inspired a stanza in the greatest poem of the twentieth century. In
his notes to
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot wrote that an experience recounted by Shackleton had in-
spired these seven lines:
