to hardship, cold, and foul weather. By sheer force of personality, Shackleton kept the camp from breaking up into utter chaos. His legacy is famous in the annals of history, but he could not have pulled it off without the steadying influence of men like Tom Crean and Frank Wild in his crew. The first plan was to try to reach the nearest known land by dragging the boats over the ice, but after three days of backbreaking work, they had only made it a paltry l3/4 mi les. At that pace, they would run out of food long before reaching terra firma. Instead, they waited it out and let the drifting pack ice carry the camp north to open water. From there, they would then sail the three open boats to the nearest solid ground before sending a select smaller party to search for help. Once Endurance finally sank on 21 November 1915, Shackleton and his men were marooned on a broad pan of floating ice, and the current swept the camp northwards until its once-solid ice floe had been wh ittled away to a small triangular piece 150 feet on its longest edge. On 9 April 1916, it finally broke apart and the men rook to the water in the three boats they had salvaged from Endurance. "Water" is hardly the appropriate word to use where the pack ice disintegrates en route to the open ocean, and, at that point, the ice became more of a threat than a refuge. The nearest land, desolate and unexplored, lay forty miles distant. The three boats, not designed to carry twenty-eight men and all their supplies, would require rhe utmost seamanship to safely carry them through the icy tumultuous seas to dry land. At 22 feet 6 inches, the fames Cairdwas the largest and heaviest of the three boars. Her sides, and those of the Dudley Docker, had been reinforced and raised for the openwater journey, but rhose of the Stancomb Wills had not. With seven men and their gear aboard, the Stancomb Wills showed mere inches of freeboard. Not until the boats were launched from the ice and fully loaded did the men know just how deeply the Wills would ride-not an encouraging sign for a boat about to cross forty miles of storm-tossed Antarctic seas.
Crossing the Open '\%ter As hazardous as the Stancomb Wills appeared, there was no better way to distribute the weight, and much would depend on Crean's 32
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Map ofAntarctica showing Ross Island, the Weddell Sea, Elephant Island and South Georgia Island. Ross Island served as the base camp for Scott's Terra Nova expedition. Shackleton's expedition in Endurance got caught in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea. With Shackleton, Crean made both open boat journeys-to Elephant Island with the fall crew and then on to South Georgia with Shackleton and four others. skill as coxswain to survive rhe open-water leg to shore. Nor long after she was in the water, a wave broke through the protective arm of the pack ice and nearly swamped her. Only Crean's cool-headed command of his oarsmen and the tiller saved the boat and irs crew in that first test. By the end of their first day in the water, the boats were still near enough to the pack to find a floe on which to camp for the night, but for the next four days and nights, the men would suffer rhe approaching Antarctic winter afloat in rhe open boats. Elephant Island's deserted shore was still a long way off with only rhree oars and a small rag of a lugsail to drive them to it. The Wills was in constant danger of filling and sinking from the steady slopping of green water over the gunwale. With no shelter but their clothing, the men would awaken in the morning sheathed in ice. After the second day, the boat's first officer became incapacitated by the cold, and it was up to Crean to keep the men in the Wills from following suit. He led by example;
if he knew fear, he did not show it. The men obeyed his quiet commands to trim sail in a shift of wind or to bail when a sea had come aboard. As the days and nights passed, the men in the boars became severely weakened from exposure and debilitating thirst. Conditions in the Stancomb Wills had become desperate, but by noon of rhe sixth day, rhe three boats made landfall on a low beach on Elephant Island. Though it was the first solid ground the men had srood upon in seventeen months, they soon realized they could not stay there. It was clear that this beach would be swept by waves ar high tide come the next big gale. Many of the men were delirious, broken down by fear and exposure, and unwilling to board rhe boats again. Tom Crean, Frank Wild, and a handful of others in the Docker pushed off again in search of a safer, dryer landing place, returning after dark with good news of a better beach farther along the shore. All the men had survived thus far, but
SEA HISTORY 142, SPRING 2013