Just before Christmas 1915 Shackleton tries again to get his men west. They drag two boats leaving the third behind at Ocean Camp along with much equipment, food and clothing.
The surface is atrocious, the ice treacherous in summer’s warmth. Exhausted and disappointed, on 30 December they look for a solid floe to establish a new camp. In the distance the scattered remains of Ocean Camp can still be seen.
“My 5th Xmas in Antarctica …
The 1st escaped wrecking
2nd nearly starved
3rd Blizzard
and today driving dog teams & hauling Boat for dear life.”
Hurley
Patience Camp
“Waiting
Waiting
Waiting”
“… drifting past land we could not reach. The ice too broken to march over, yet not open enough to launch our boats.”
Shackleton, 26 January 1916
Parties of men negotiate the decaying floes back to Ocean Camp, returning with food, small comforts, books and the all-important third boat. But Patience Camp tries more than their patience. The boats are packed ready to launch the moment a lead through the ice opens: yet still the ever shifting pack allows no release. The weather is wretched, dense wet fogs, snow, gales. There’s nothing to do. Their floe shrinks. Seals, essential for fuel and food, are becoming scarce. The dogs are hungry. Companions, workers, but no longer of use, they are shot.
The prospect of another winter on the pack ice appalls.
Few images record these long months.
“The ice breaks up and Party take to the Boats” Hurley
Approaching the open ocean the pack heaves and jostles, opens and shuts.
James calculates, in this the sixth month of their journey, that they have drifted north on the floes 490, but probably closer to 1000 miles, “taking our windings into account …”
9 April 1916, mid-morning, their floe splits diagonally,
“right under where our tent had been … a hurried lunch, boats were got into the water and loaded … 2.30 we were in very open pack … whales blowing all around.”
James
At last they are free. Heading for whichever land they can reach.
“first night on a swaying floe … cracked in halves.
Rest of the dismal dark night shivering … tension & anxiety – on a par with the ship’s destruction.
Next night on an isolated floe … prayed to God it would remain entire … third … drifting … boats tethered together. Wet.
Achingly cold … fourth … well nigh unbearable … fifth – hope all but died.
Most could row no more … never do I wish to endure such a night … Dawn … a glimpse of land!”
Hurley
Elephant Island, uninhabited, ice-hung.
George Marston’s paintings represent the departure and first nights of the journey in the three small boats, April 9 – 11, 1916.
A start made. Glass plate negative, S0013752
‘first night on a swaying floe … tension and anxiety’. Celluloid negative, S0026050
“… the pack had drifted down on top of us and we were … prisoners … in the midst of a heaving mass of close pack.”
James
Image credit: The second night. Glass plate negative, S0026052
“Elephant Island reached” Hurley
“solid earth … conceive our joy.”
Hurley
“April 15th 1916. The first land … since December the 5th, 1914.”
Shackleton
Half-delirious, men stagger, laugh and cry. Then sleep, dead, dreamless sleep.
But their beach is insecure. Getting back in the boats they row in a blinding gale to a new camping place. Rough, bleak, inhospitable.
“Atrociously cold … blizzard fury hurled gravel & ice splinters, ripping tents to shreds … not a square inch of shelter.”
Hurley
“A bad time … a boat journey in search of relief … necessary … no chance at all of any search being made for us on Elephant Island.”
Shackleton
24 April 1916, Easter Monday, the James Caird with Shackleton, Worsley and a crew of four depart. The aim – to sail 750 miles across the wildest ocean to South Georgia to get help.
Frank Wild is left in command of the marooned men.
“In the event of my not surviving the boat journey … you will do your best for the rescue of the party.”
Shackleton
Preparing to launch the James Caird. Celluloid negative, S0000966
‘Shackleton with five others setting out for relief to Sth Georgia’. The James Caird enters the water. Celluloid negative, S0000833
Loading fresh drinking water to take out to the Caird. Glass plate negative, S0000139
Shackleton being rowed out to the Caird. The Stancomb Wills preparing to deliver Shackleton, seated in the rear, to the James Caird. Celluloid negative, S0011651
“Shackleton sets off for our relief” Hurley
“Then the questions. Will they make it?”
William Bakewell
“How to feed ourselves? How to house ourselves?”
Lees
The two remaining boats are overturned, rested on rock walls either end and the sides closed with the canvas remains of their tents.
“Awful squalor.”
Food, watchfully shared out from expedition supplies, is boosted with whatever they catch; penguins, seals, small birds.
“We are just as hungry after meals as before.”
Hurley
Fuel to cook meals, melt ice for drinking water and provide minimal light comes from seal blubber and penguin skins.
12 May 1916.
“Daily hope of the Relief ship ... What kind of ship will come for us?”
Alexander Macklin
“Cape Wild, Elephant Island, where we lived” Hurley
Hurley photographs all except Blackboro, confined to his sleeping bag.
Nine months ago Hurley photographed Shackleton with his men under the bow of Endurance.
“Life on the island under two boats” Hurley
Optimistic predictions that Shackleton will arrive any day to rescue them mix with uncertainty and fears.
Winter comes “hard upon us” with darkness, little to do, nowhere to go. Days of heavy snow confine all to their bags. Gales sweep down the glacier threatening the hut.
“Bored to distraction” they go through the old rounds of songs, jokes, celebrate another Midwinter’s day with a concert and toasts. But proximity oppresses, repetitive habits, personal noises.
Ice covers the sea, clears, moves back in, clears again. Still - no ship.
If the James Caird has not survived this most risky of journeys no-one will know they are here, in this desolate place.
15 June 1916. The doctors Macklin and McIlroy amputate the frostbitten toes of Blackboro’s left foot. Banished from the hut during the risky operation, the men shelter in the cave, passing the time cutting each other’s hair.
'James Caird' and South Georgia
In their small 22 foot boat battling with winds, weather, the relentless swells, meals gulped as they crouched beneath the decking, sleep snatched lying on the hard ballast boulders, constantly wet, thirsty – uncertainty rules their every hour.
Achieving South Georgia is one of the great acts of navigation, and endurance.
But having rested, fed off albatross chicks, another journey must be made across the mountains and glaciers to the whaling station on the other side of the island. Leaving McNish, McCarthy and Vincent under the overturned Caird, Shackleton with Worsley and Tom Crean do it, in 36 hours.
No-one has crossed the island before.
When during the journey all seemed lost, Worsley remembered saying to himself
“What a pity. We have made this great boat journey and nobody will ever know.”
But now - they can start arrangements “for the relief of our people.”
News reaches London
Shackleton carries Hurley’s image of the listing Endurance, wrapped tightly against sea water, through the desperate days and nights on the James Caird, the crossing of South Georgia, and the first, failed, attempt to reach Elephant Island in a rescue ship. On 31 May he arrives in the Falkland Islands.
At last he can send cables to the outside world. Contracted to give all Expedition news to the London Daily Chronicle, Shackleton’s exclusive reports of his “wonderful adventures” appear from 2 June. Hurley’s photograph of the embattled Endurance arrives in London by post to be published 10 July, establishing a dramatic symbol of raw adventure and immediate need.
A second attempt to rescue the marooned men departing 10 June fails, the third - departing 12 July - struggles with impossible conditions.
July 1916. On Elephant Island winter blizzards confine everyone to their bags. Talk revolves around food, the war, tobacco, anxiety about ‘Sir E’, the filthy state of the hut, snoring.
“The Rescue” Hurley
August comes, light returning, some warmth. But food and fuel are running short.
26 August 1916: dense pack ice fills the bays either side of the spit then briefly clears.
Watching for a relief ship alternates with speculation about what to do if no ship appears.
30 August: lunch of boiled seal carcass is interrupted by Marston calling the magic words – “A ship.”
“ … we just hurtled out of that hut … with some boots on, some off … waved … and shouted.”
James
Shackleton desperately anxious to get away without a moment’s wait, loads men and baggage.
“ … we had to take our chance and jump ... came alongside the Yelcho … an ocean going tug … clamber aboard … and started off.”
Macklin
Marooned men: now, suddenly they are back. The war news appals.
“The world has altered much”.
On board, they find the London newspapers, supplied by Shackleton. There on the front page of The Daily Mirror is the photograph of Endurance listing. In just over seven weeks this newspaper has travelled from London to the tip of Chile to Elephant Island, where they have been totally cut off from everything happening everywhere else in the world.
Macklin, departing South America:
“we … are going home to take part in this awful war”
Shackleton to his wife Emily from Punta Arenas, 3 September 1916:
“I have done it ... not a life lost & we have been through Hell”
“It was Nature against us the whole time” Shackleton
Believing they must establish depots for Shackleton’s Transcontinental Party in the first season, Ross Sea Party members struggle heroically to start getting supplies south. But in May 1915 their ship Aurora breaks from her moorings to drift locked in the ice, leaving men ashore to face the winter and a second summer of effort to lay supplies.
Aurora manages to reach New Zealand on 3 April 1916.
Having rescued his men from Elephant Island Shackleton must focus on this second set of marooned men: not knowing what he will find.
Shackleton’s cable of 6 February 1917 reporting the disaster to the Ross Sea Party is published in "every paper in the Kingdom". Hurley, about to leave for South Georgia:
“Shackleton never has had such notoriety before.”
Seven survivors have been picked up. But three of the Expedition are dead.
“Arrived Cape Evans … Jan. 10. Relieved seven survivors of the Shackleton Expedition - Stevens, Joyce, Cope, Wild, Richards, Gaze, and Jack. On March 9 last A.P. Spencer-Smith died of scurvy on the Barrier. Captain Mackintosh and V. G. Hayward perished in a blizzard on May 8 last, while attempting to cross from Hut Point to Cape Evans ...”
Shackleton
“Mr Hurley’s … photographs … tell better than any word-picture … the experiences which befell the expedition ...” Buenos Aires Herald
Arriving in London, 11 November 1916, Hurley hands over his film to the Expedition’s agent Ernest Perris at the Daily Chronicle offices. The film needs animal life before it can be marketed. Fully alert to the power of moving images in the commercial exploitation of expeditions, Hurley agrees to return early in 1917 to South Georgia. Newspaper exclusives, books, photographs, lantern slides, the lecture circuit, the film of the Expedition - all will provide crucial funds to cover debts.
Eager to expand his career as adventure cameraman and presenter, Hurley works closely with Perris. He orders albums of selected glass plate negatives, dictates a typed version of his diary, arranges a successful exhibition of his Paget colour plate Antarctic images, some sized at 25 feet. This splendid epic of extraordinary adventures and hardships requires the dramatic powerful images that Hurley has created; but also dramatic text. Perris’ instincts are for additions and adjustments. Hurley’s image of the whole party farewelling the James Caird becomes the moment of rescue, celebratory compared with the three quick exposures captured at the time. His original diary account of saving his negatives from the drowning Endurance, choosing some and destroying the majority, becomes a more dramatic rescue, with selection assistance from Shackleton.
In August 1917, back from South Georgia, Hurley goes to France as official photographer to the Australian Imperial Forces. Appalled by the brutality and waste, this “frightful prolonged massacre”, Hurley creates searing immediate images. His vision of the suffering Endurance - its mangled death - seemingly a precursor of the war he had no knowledge of. In turn, Hurley’s war scenes seem to reference the desolation, isolation, destruction, of the Weddell Sea; and the comradeship of men under extreme pressure.
“… now so lonely and desolate … one feels as if death alone dwells there”
Hurley
His courage and determination in Antarctica to go anywhere and do anything to achieve what he considered the true depiction of reality becomes even more intense on the Western Front. But Hurley’s passionate argument that it was
“impossible to secure full effects of this bloody war without composite pictures”
- two or more negatives used to print a single photograph - gets him into trouble. Hurley’s combative approach, his obsessive passion for his vision, receives a kind of satisfaction with an exhibition of Australian war pictures at the Grafton Galleries, London, in May 1918.
“Many of the pictures are being enlarged up to 20 feet by 12 feet … Looks magnificent”.
In November 1918, Hurley returns home to Australia.
Attempt to Escape is the fifth part of a series of online exhibitions drawing on content from the Society’s exhibition Shackleton’s Legacy and the Power of Early Antarctic Photography, displayed in the Society’s Pavilion from 7 February to 4 May 2022.
Exhibition guest curated by Meredith Hooper, with supporting contributions from Alasdair MacLeod and Jools Cole. Digital exhibition created by Hania Sosnowska.
About the curator
Meredith Hooper is a lecturer, historian, Antarctic expert and full time writer of non-fiction and fiction for children and adults.
She grew up in Australia and after graduating in history from the University of Adelaide, she came to the UK to do a postgraduate history degree at Oxford.
Meredith was selected by the Australian Antarctic Division to visit Antarctica as a writer in 1994 and was also selected by the US National Science Foundation to visit Antarctica as a writer in 1998-1999 and 2001-2002, on their Antarctica Artists Writers Program. As well as being shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, her work has appeared on TES Information Book and Australian Children’s Book of the Year shortlists.
Meredith researched, wrote and curated the exhibition The Enduring Eye: the Antarctic Legacy of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley from original source material in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, whilst also drawing on information provided by descendants of some of the 28 men on the expedition. The original exhibition, now incorporated within Shackleton’s Legacy, toured the UK from 2015-2018 and was also shown at the Bowers Museum, California, from 2017- 2018.
A selection of the Society's images featured in this online exhibition can be purchased from the RGS Print Store.
For more information on how to access and use the Society's Collections please visit our website.
Text © Meredith Hooper
Images © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) unless stated otherwise
Credits and acknowledgements
The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) would like to thank the following organisations and individuals:
Exhibition curators: Meredith Hooper and Dr Jan Piggott
Physical exhibition designers: Sarner International Limited
Sponsored by:
The Shackleton Company | The James Caird Society | The Folio Society | South Georgia Association | Devon and Cornwall Polar Society
Supported by:
The United Kingdom Antarctic Heritage Trust | Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 | British Antarctic Territory | Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands | Rolex (for its support for the Society's Picture Library and contribution towards conservation of its Collections) | The National Heritage Lottery Fund
The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, FRGS | Mr Jan Chojecki | Dr Jan Faull | Mr John James | The late Mr Henry Worsley, FRGS
Associated Newspapers Limited | Bridgeman Images | British Antarctic Survey | The British Film Institute | The British Library | Buenos Aires Herald | Christie’s | The Daily Mirror | Dulwich College | Illustrated London News/Mary Evans | Museum of London | The Royal Albert Hall | Scott Polar Research Institute | State Library, New South Wales, Australia | State Library, Victoria, Australia | Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand | USGS, NASA, National Science Foundation