Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
'Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
- But who is that on the other side of you?'
What T. S. Eliot did not know was that the whole fourth-presence story was a later fabrication
in order to add a dash of spirituality to the story before it went to press.
Shackleton eventually got his men out, after several agonising attempts. Leonard Hussey, the
meteorologist and one of the stranded, recorded in his diary that in the evenings they had occupied
themselves by reading out recipes from Marston's penny cookbook and suggesting improvements
and alternatives. It had been a testing time. They told Blackborow that they would eat him first,
if the seals and penguins stopped coming. Thomas Orde-Lees irritated everyone; they said he was
mean-spirited and tetchy. Even before Elephant Island, Shackleton had privately referred to him
as the Old Lady. He had been chosen primarily for his mechanical expertise, and had tested the
motor-sledges in Switzerland.
On a muggy Cambridge afternoon, under the beady eye of the archivist at the Scott Polar Re-
search Institute, I read his unpublished diary, scrawled in pencil between food lists in a small leath-
er bank pass-book. I had read so very many diaries by then, but when I held the tattered originals
I saw worlds in the cramped, unpunctuated, spidery handwriting, splashed with blubber and sea-
water. Orde-Lees' reputation as a quartermaster reached beyond the grave when I found a darning
needle - a precious commodity on Elephant Island - in the creased gutter of his diary. He noted,
'There is a clique up against me to whom Wild gives too much head. I am called a jew.' The diary
mostly concerns skinning penguins, but it leaps to life when the rescue vessel appears. The Old
Lady writes about the makeshift flagpole behind camp which jammed, with the result that Shack-
leton, standing on the deck of the ship and straining his eyes, thought it was at half mast, and that
someone had died.
On the long journey home to England Sir Ernest travelled free; kings and presidents entertained
him. He never let the crowds down: as Roland Huntford said in his biography, he had the instincts
of a showman. On another Cambridge day, this time assisted by the beady-eyed archivist, I found a
bunch of flimsy green and pink fliers printed in Los Andes, a town on the Chilean and Argentinian
border. The sheets read, in Spanish and English, 'Shackleton is the crystallisation of human en-
deavour, triumphing over the forces of nature, Hosanna! Together [with Wild] they make the sym-
bol of those lofty sentiments of Love for the Truth, of one's Country, of Science, and of Humanity,
which bears Mankind onwards with ardour towards its ideal, which places men above suffering,
above destiny, which makes them heroes . . . Hosanna!'
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