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♪
(Snow crunches)
Exploration has been the greatest driving force in my life, since I was young.
♪
And exploring this alien landscape of Antarctica
is a challenge unlike anywhere else on Earth.
Over 100 years ago, Antarctica was more than just a challenge.
It was the very limit of human knowledge and scientific understanding.
The last unexplored continent on Earth.
It's the beginning of the 20th century,
the heroic era of polar exploration.
These are the astronauts of their time,
and Antarctica was their moon.
DISTANT VOICE OF CONTROLLER: Lift off, we have a lift off!
Explorers from around the world,
pit themselves against the immense wilderness of Antarctica,
in search of glory and discovery.
But this is a vast, cold, isolated and entirely unforgiving place.
(Loud rumbling)
What do you do when it all goes horribly wrong?
The journals and film recorded by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27,
answers that very question.
AS SHACKLETON: The story of our attempt, is the tale of the white warfare, of the south.
The struggles, the disappointments and the endurance of this small party
of Britishers,
make a story which is unique, in the history of Antarctic exploration.
I ask myself, 'why on earth one comes to these parts of the earth?'
(Loud crashing)
(Radio chatter)
I think we all have a sense of adventure in us,
and it manifests in different ways with different people.
Life's true adventure is understanding what the meaning of it all is,
and I think that drives medical research, it drives artistic self expression,
it drives people's desire to cross ice caps or climb mountains.
That has burnt brightly in me since childhood, and I've never grown out of it.
I've always just had that desire to keep on discovering.
And it's seen me go to the far limits of human endurance
and to the ends of the world as a means to do that.
VARIOUS NARRATIONS: Environmental scientist Tim Jarvis.
Australian explorer Tim Jarvis lost more
than 50 pounds of body weight,
recreating the journey of Sir Douglas Mawson.
In doing the expeditions the old way, essentially disadvantaging yourself
by using 100 year old equipment, you get about as close as you can
to experiencing that which they experienced 100 years prior.
At least I could honestly say that I've
been served up the same sorts of conditions as he had.
REPORTER: Explorer Tim Jarvis is the only man
to have ever recreated the harrowing journey of Ernest Shackleton,
using the same inadequate clothing and equipment as they had back in 1913.
There have been many instances
along the way, some falls in the mountains,
where you do wonder whether it'd be the last move you make.
♪
I'm so excited about getting down here, I mean,
I feel I really come alive when I'm in a place like this,
you get much closer to the spirit of the great man if you're following
in his footsteps, but also you get closer to this more resourceful version of you
that emerges when you find yourself in these places.
They've been the theater for so many
fascinating journeys in the past that you can't help but be inspired.
We are 830 nautical miles southeast of the Falkland Islands,
headed to the whaling island of South Georgia
where Shackleton began his imperial trans antarctic expedition.
SHACKLETON: There remained but one great main object
of antarctic journeyings, the crossing of the south polar continent from sea to sea.
The distance will be roughly 1,800 miles,
and the first half of this,
from the Weddell Sea to the pole, will be over unknown ground.
Every step will be an advance in geographical science
and this report will prove of great scientific interest.
An expedition of this scale would require a budget of millions in today's money.
To fund his dreams of the South,
Shackleton would rely on his ability to convince people of the cause.
Shackleton had this way of getting people
excited about what they were going to know.
He offered them things that money couldn't buy.
So if you were a wealthy benefactor
thinking about maybe putting money into a polar expedition Shackleton could
name a mountain range or a coastline after you and you had immortality guaranteed.
So it was a clever way of doing it.
♪
This wasn't Shackleton's first attempt to make history.
In 1907, he was hired to lead the Nimrod expedition to the Antarctic.
The mission was to be the first to reach the south pole.
Although they set a new record for the most southerly point ever reached,
they were forced to turn back just 97 nautical miles short of their target.
Shackleton and his men, starving and exhausted,
returned to base inspired by what they'd seen,
but frustrated with how close they'd come.
It would take Shackleton almost seven years to raise the funding and plan this expedition,
personally putting everything on the line this time.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
SHACKLETON: Long days of preparation were over, and the adventure lay ahead.
I gave the order to heave anchor at 08:45 a.m.
on December 5 1914,
and the clanking of the windless broke for us, the last link with civilization.
(Dogs barking)
The fate of the expedition
now rested on the shoulders of the 28 crew of the Endurance.
Shackleton was a consummate leader of men
in those days on those early expeditions, a leader of people.
And he got about 3,000 applicants for the 27 places on the expedition team.
And his recruitment process involved interviews that involved him throwing
really curly, interesting questions at people, just to see how they would react.
And if there was someone who was too rigid in their thinking,
perhaps again they weren't the kind of person who had the capacity for lateral thinking
and problem solving ability that he was looking for.
He always wanted people who saw a positive in any situation,
and you need that for successful expeditioning, or indeed, life.
And in the end, how relevant those skills turned out to be.
The crew seemed a strong one,
and as I looked at the men, I felt confidence increasing.
(Birds squawking)
The Weddell Sea was notoriously inhospitable,
and already we knew that its sternest face was turned towards us.
What welcome was the Weddell Sea preparing for us?
♪
To navigate these southern waters,
timing is everything.
In the relative warm months of summer, the sea is less frozen
and large lanes of open water, provide passage to the continent.
I'm just staring out on a scene of brash ice and pancake ice.
Pancake ice is when the surface just
starts to freeze over, and that's what we're starting to see.
And it's the beginning of the formation, of course, of pack ice.
As Endurance went south, they, of course,
started to experience pack ice, initially probably very much like this,
and then, of course, became thicker and thicker and thicker.
Worsley on board Endurance was a wonderful
skipper and Shackleton was no slouch himself.
So between them and some of the other sailors on board,
they knew what they were doing in terms of getting through pack ice,
but you're really pushing through leads, which are the gaps between
the bits of larger pack, and you try to force the ship through there,
push the pack ice apart.
(Cracking)
Expedition cameraman Frank Hurley, recorded the efforts of the crew
as they navigated their way through the ice.
The fearless Australian would perch himself
almost anywhere, to capture the dynamic imagery he was so famous for.
The last 250 miles had been through close pack,
alternating with fine long leads and stretches of open water.
Under the boughs and alongside, great slabs of ice were being turned over
and slid back on the flow, or driven down and under the ice or ship.
In this way, the Endurance would split a two foot to three foot flow
a square mile in extent.
(Cracking)
It was important that we should make
progress towards our goal as rapidly as possible.
(Wind whistles)
In order to keep the expedition on schedule,
Shackleton had to make land before the ocean froze over for winter.
When the pack ice starts to form on the surface of the sea,
ultimately it forms an apron around Antarctica, which actually almost doubles
the size of the continent, which is incredible when you think of it.
The ice can be anything from 20 cm thick
all the way through to three or 4 meters thick.
And of course, the further south you go,
the thicker it gets,
and it comes a point where you need
to make a judgment about whether you're prepared to keep the engines running
and push further south, or try and push further south
into this incredibly thick ice,
all the while thinking, how are we going to get home at the end of this?
I was anxious, for certain reasons, to winter the Endurance in the Weddell Sea.
But the difficulty of finding a safe harbour might be very great.
It was as though the spirits of the Antarctic were pointing us
to the backward track, the track we were determined not to follow.
Our desire was to make easting as well as southing,
so as to reach the land, if possible,
east of Ross's, farthest south and, well east of Coats Land.
The unusually abundant sea ice, ground their progress to a crawl,
with the rapidly freezing seawater trapping them time after time.
The ice was only getting thicker and open water
was slowly disappearing.
They were reaching dead ends,
having to turn around, chip their way through the ice, sit and wait it out sometimes,
when they became completely stuck,
for the ice to open up again, break up and move.
And it was a pretty torturous process trying to get through.
♪
The name of the game was to keep pushing south as best one could,
and sometimes open leads of water in amongst the pack ice,
would force you to go left and right,
not doing much in the way of southerly travel,
but you were constantly focused on trying to get south as best you could.
The situation became dangerous that night.
We pushed into the pack in the hope of reaching open water beyond,
and found ourselves after dark in a pool which was growing smaller and smaller.
Ultimately, they reached a dead end.
Pack ice closed in around the vessel,
and no more leads were opening up.
The weather was getting colder and it was
very clear that that was where they would remain.
I could not doubt now that the Endurance was confined for the winter.
The abandonment of the attack was a great disappointment to all hands.
The men had worked long hours without thought of rest, and they deserved success.
But the task was beyond our powers.
The land showed still in fair weather on the distant horizon,
but it was beyond our reach, now.
(Metal whirring)
(Wind blowing)
Much like the endurance,
we've reached as far south as the ice will allow us.
When it's clear, the Endurance is not going to go any further south,
it was one of those real defining moments of the expedition where I think you're
hopeful, always right to the end,
that you could just push, find a lead,
push far enough to actually make landfall on the continent and set up your winter camp,
to be prepared for the land crossing of the continent the following summer,
so the decision to ultimately stop short and set up winter camp on the ice
must have been a really difficult moment.
Life is all about playing a bad hand of cards well,
and I think that sums it up fairly accurately.
You've got to look positively at any situation you find yourself in.
In many people's minds,
many of the expedition team felt, well, that's it, that's the expedition gone,
the rest is all about survival.
And Shackleton managed to keep them motivated through a sort of combination
of suggesting that things could still improve,
the ice might break up,
there might be an opportunity to push south, as the ice began to thaw.
But in the meantime he had them doing
language lessons and gathering food and playing soccer matches on the ice.
And these are all sort of things that you don't do, if you're expecting to die.
And it was clever because the men felt that Shackleton had the measure
of the circumstances in which they found themselves.
The flat flows and frozen leads
in the neighbourhood of the ship, made excellent training grounds.
Hockey and soccer on the flow were our chief recreations,
and all hands joined in many a strenuous game.
Worsley took a party to the flow on the 26th,
and started building a line of igloos, and dog loos around the ship.
The dogs seemed heartily glad to leave the ship,
and yelped loudly and joyously, as they were moved to their new quarters.
The sun, which had been above the horizon for two months,
set at midnight on the 17th.
And although it would not disappear until April,
its slanting rays warned us of the approach of winter.
Pools and leads appeared occasionally,
but they froze over very quickly.
♪
Psychologically, the unending nature of Antarctica is always difficult to deal with
but more so when you've got the darkness of winter to deal with,
so the sun disappears, quite literally for,
when you get further, further south to the pole itself,
six months of the year you're in brutally low temperatures,
and complete darkness.
More important than that, psychologically,
your whole world shrinks back into that little area of light around
the stove at night.
Or candles or blubber stove lit fires that you could keep going.
And it would be very difficult in that situation to think positively about
the journey ahead.
You're there, it's cold,
the chances of your survival are low.
And the chances of you sailing out when
the ice is getting thicker and thicker rather than the other way around.
It would have been a very bleak time for many of them.
Trapped on the frozen surface of the sea,
isolated and cut off from the world,
they may as well have been on the surface of the moon.
The disappearance of the sun is apt to be a depressing event in the polar regions.
But the Endurance's company refused to abandon their customary cheerfulness
in strange contrast with the cold, silent world that lay outside.
Shackleton knew they had no control over the situation they were in.
So he focused the men's attention on the things they could control.
All crew, regardless of rank, were required to clean the ship.
Ongoing scientific research was collected and catalogued.
The sharing of duties kept everybody on an even keel.
It made all of the men, regardless of their position,
feel that everyone was in this together.
Shackleton had a genius,
it was neither more nor less than that, for keeping those about him in high spirits.
We loved him.
The men had felt the cold, that is true,
but he had inspired the kind of loyalty which prevented them
from allowing themselves to get depressed over anything.
And they had stood up to the hardships
inseparable from antarctic exploration,
without a murmur.
A form of midwinter madness has manifested itself.
All hands being seized with the desire to have their hair removed.
It caused much amusement.
We are likely to be cool headed in the future, if not neuralgic.
During the night, I took a flashlit photograph of the ship beset by pressure.
(Explosive sound)
This necessitated some 20 flashes...
...one behind each salient pressure hummock
to satisfactorily illuminate the ship herself.
♪
Half blinded by the successive flashes,
I lost my bearings amidst hammocks bumping shins,
against projecting ice points
and stumbling into deep snow drifts.
♪(Triumphant music)
SHACKLETON: All cheered, by the indication that the end
of the winter darkness is near, 79 days after our last sunset.
All the winter, the drifting pack changes,
grows by freezing, thickens by rafting, and corrugates by pressure.
If finally in its drift it impinges on a coast such as the western shore of the
of the Weddell Sea,
terrific pressure is set up, and an inferno of ice blocks,
ridges and hedgerows results,
extending possibly for 150 or 200 miles offshore.
The effects of the pressure around us, were awe inspiring.
Mighty blocks of ice, gripped between meeting flows,
rose slowly, till they jumped like cherry stones squeezed between thumb and finger.
The pressure of millions of tons of moving ice,
was crushing and smashing inexorably.
If the ship was once gripped firmly, a fate would be sealed.
(Rumbling)
We could see from the bridge,
that the ship was bending like a bow under titanic pressure.
The onslaught was all but irresistible.
Well, the noise of thousands and thousands
of tons pushing in around the beams of a ship,
creaking and groaning and
desperately trying to withstand that pressure would have been like
the final death throes of an animal, or a person,
and indeed, I think that's the way they tended to think of it,
it was this guttural kind of roars
and almost pleas for help coming from the vessel as it trying to withstand
this pressure,
because these sort of unseen forces are closing in around them
and it must have been a really hellish kind of situation to find themselves in.
(Creaking)
The roar of pressure could be heard all around us.
Almost like a living creature.
She resisted the forces that would crush her.
But it was a one sided battle.
Millions of tons of ice pressed inexorably upon the little ship,
that had dared the challenge of the Antarctic.
The men were listening to the structural damage for weeks,
as the pressure of the pack closed in around the hull.
Fearing the ship was not going to take them home,
they were powerless to do anything.
It must have felt hopeless.
The plans for abandoning the ship in case of emergency had been made well in advance,
and men and dogs descended to the flow and made their way
to the comparative safety of an unbroken portion of the flow, without a hitch.
It was a sickening sensation to feel the decks breaking up under one's feet.
She is crushed and abandoned after drifting more than 570 miles during the 281 days,
since she became locked in the ice.
It is hard to write what I feel.
The attack of the ice reached its climax at 04:00 p.m.
The flows, with the force of millions of tons of moving ice behind them,
were simply annihilating the ship.
The men were left with, quite literally a pile of driftwood.
The images Hurley captured are dramatic.
Everything above the hull just fell to pieces,
leaving a collection of cables and wires,
ropes and split timber on the ice.
It was barely recognizable as a vessel.
The task is to reach land with all the members of the expedition,
and to that I must bend my energies and mental power and apply every bit
of knowledge that experience of the Antarctic had given me.
♪
The task was likely to be long and strenuous,
and an ordered mind and a clear program are essential,
if we were to come through without loss of life.
Once the Endurance had sunk and they hadn't obviously managed to make landfall
on the continent, the original expedition goal was off.
And so this required a complete reframing.
And as Shackleton famously said, 'a man must adjust to a new mark directly
'the old one goes to ground.'
And it was all about then looking positively at the changing circumstances.
And this is where I think there was just a critical,
kind of inflection point, really, where he said, 'look,
'the original goal of crossing Antarctica is not possible.
'The new goal is saving ourselves,
'but the good news is that even though our mission has changed.
'our vision of doing something memorable together,
'surviving, testing ourselves, pushing ourselves beyond the limits
'of human endurance to, in this case, now save ourselves
'rather than cross Antarctica, as was the original goal,
'will still allow us to come home as heroes.
'We will achieve our vision.
'It's just that the mission has changed.'
And I think this was really a kind of masterstroke, in the way that he managed
to reframe and reposition the direction of the whole endeavour.
Essential supplies had been placed on the flow about 100 yards from the ship,
and there we set about making a camp for the night.
Now it's a case of anything we take off the ship, we've got to carry.
So weight was critical,
and Shackleton said, each man has two pounds, two pounds of gear.
And he set a wonderful example here
by basically discarding a whole series of things that might, in the normal world,
be perceived as valuable things like watches and rings and jewelry,
and chucked them down on the ice and said, 'none of this matters.
'We need to just take what we need to survive.'
And indeed, the guitar made it,
just a masterstroke in thinking about what really makes somebody tick.
And it made the men feel that, again,
at some level, he had circumstances under control.
They're taking a musical instrument.
What a thing to take.
We are now 346 miles from Paulet island,
the nearest point where there is any possibility of finding food and shelter.
I mustered all hands and explained the position to them briefly,
and I hope clearly, and have stated that I propose to try to march with equipment
across the ice in the direction of Paulet Island.
I thanked the men for the steadiness and good morale they have shown in these
trying circumstances and told them I had no doubt that provided they continued
to work their utmost and to trust me, we will all reach safety in the end.
The first thought was, the ship's gone down.
We have these lifeboats, let's take a couple of them.
And with the 28 men, we have 14 men to a boat,
pull them like a sled and see if we can find our way to the continent.
And that was the original plan.
It was with the utmost difficulty that we shifted our two boats.
The surface was terrible,
like nothing that any of us had ever seen around us before.
We were sinking at times up to our hips and everywhere
the snow was 2ft deep.
And this they pursued for a couple of days
until they realized it was just completely futile.
In fact, it started to erode away people's morale very, very quickly,
just the physical effort of pulling these heavy,
heavy 22-and-a-half foot keelless whale boats through the,
through the ridges of ice.
In 2007 I dragged a wooden sled across Antarctica
in a bid to honour Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, and it almost killed me.
Taking on such a physical challenge
really is a race against time to achieve your goal.
The sled you're dragging is carrying all the food and fuel you need to survive.
But the energy just to move that weight,
to make those miles, it can exceed your daily rations.
You can easily run out of food.
Mentally, there's lots of places you go to when things are really tough.
Sometimes you're able to really appreciate
the grandeur of what it is you're undertaking.
Other times, you retreat back into just
the routine of doing things in a really kind of robotic way.
Anything that helps you take the next step.
♪
Considering how little result we had to show
for all our strenuous efforts of the past four days,
it would be impossible to proceed for any great distance.
Taking into account also the possibility of leads opening close to us and so of our
being able to row northwest to where we might find land,
I decided to find a more solid flow
and their camp until conditions were more favourable for us to make
a second attempt to escape from our icy prison.
We call this 'Ocean Camp',
this floating lump of ice,
about a mile square at first, but later splitting into smaller
and smaller fragments, was to be our home for nearly two months.
The consoling feature of the situation, was that our camp was safe.
We could endure the discomforts.
(Dogs barking)
Having only travelled 4 miles from the crushed Endurance,
dog teams were sent back to the wreckage
to salvage timber, rope, fuel, and the third lifeboat.
When the weather permitted,
pieces of the ship and her cargo were ferried across to Ocean Camp,
where the men set about building a supply depot,
and even a kitchen.
But this is a precarious existence.
There's not enough food to survive unless
they can find seals or penguins.
At any time, the ice on which they camped could break up.
A storm could wipe away their little tented encampment on the ice.
These are miserable conditions for the 28 men.
Our meals had to consist mainly of seal and penguin.
And though this was valuable as
an antiscorbutic, so much so that not a single case
of scurvy occurred amongst the party,
yet it was a badly adjusted diet,
and we felt rather weak and innovated in consequence.
The cook deserves much praise for the way
he has stuck to his job through all this severe blizzard.
His galley consists of nothing but a few
boxes arranged as a table, with a canvas screen erected around them on four oars,
and the two blubber stoves within the protection afforded by the screen is only partial,
and the eddies drive the pungent blubber smoke in all directions.
We live well, but perhaps it's that hunger that's the best condiment.
Even the fact that our seals and penguins are full of internal parasites
of the nastiest or most loathsome kind does not deter us.
The collection of food was now the all important consideration,
owing to this shortage of food
and the fact that we needed all that we could get for ourselves.
I had to order all the dogs to be shot.
It was the worst job that we had had
throughout the expedition, and we felt their loss keenly.
This evening, as we were lying in our tents,
we heard the boss call out, 'she's going, boys!'
There was our poor ship, a mile and a half away,
struggling in a death agony.
It made the scene even more desolate and depressing.
Weeks turned into months.
Of all the dangers these men faced,
the cold, starvation, the unfathomed depths beneath them
loss of morale was the greatest threat of them all.
There were 28 men on our floating cake of ice, which was steadily dwindling under
the influence of wind, weather, charging flows and heavy swell.
I confess that I felt the burden of responsibility sit heavily on my shoulders.
Loneliness is the penalty of leadership.
Shackleton took on a lot of the responsibility for keeping men's morale up,
in normalizing the circumstances
and always seeming to have a plan for what would happen next.
It was always a next step.
It wasn't all going to end here and now with their death on the ice as failures.
The boss would sort something out.
And all would be well.
Rather than sitting in ocean camp any longer with nothing but time to think,
Shackleton organised another march towards the peninsula.
Another march meant abandoning a significant amount of their provisions.
For the lifeboats and sleds to travel over this now heavily distorted surface,
they would have to travel as light as possible.
Extra food, timber, fuel, even their tent, canvas flooring would all be left behind.
at Ocean camp.
I informed all hands that I intended to try and make a march to the west
to reduce the distance between us and Paulet Island.
I could not but hope that this time the fates would be kinder to us than
in our last attempts to march across the ice to safety.
♪
At this rate, it would take us over 300 days
to reach the land away to the west
as we only had food for 42 days.
There was no alternative, therefore but to camp once more on the flow,
and to possess our souls with what patience we could.
Our new home which we were to occupy for nearly three and a half months,
we called Patience Camp.
They must now sit and wait, helplessly, as their camp drifts slowly north.
Seals and penguins have disappeared, leaving the men low on food and blubber.
All they could do was hope
the warming Weddell Sea, was pushing them closer to land.
The flow had become our home.
During the early months of the drift, we had almost ceased to realise that it
was but a sheet of ice floating on unfathomed seas.
Our drifting home had no rudder to guide it, no sail to give its speed.
We were dependent upon the caprice of wind and current.
We went whither those irresponsible forces listed.
The longing to feel solid earth under our feet filled our hearts.
Now our home was being shattered under our feet.
(Cracking)
The warmer water that was taking them closer to land,
had reduced their ice flow to a thin sheet.
The tents, the lifeboats, and the crew
could easily disappear into the one degrees Celsius water.
♪
Some intangible feeling of uneasiness made me leave my tent
about 11pm that night,
and glance around the quiet camp.
I started to walk across the flow in order
to warn the watchman to look carefully for cracks.
And as I was passing the man's tent,
the flow lifted on the crest of the swell, and cracked right under my feet.
The men were in one of the dome shaped tents
and had began to stretch apart as the ice opened.
Peering into the darkness, I could just see the dark figures on the other flow.
I hailed Wilde, ordering him to launch the Stancombe wills.
The only thing they could do was jump into their lifeboats and start paddling.
The spring thaw was destroying the solid sea ice, and time was running out.
(Motor whirring)
This is brash ice.
This can be anything from the size of a car down to the size of a basketball.
Trying to paddle through this stuff would have been really difficult.
They were just desperate to make landfall wherever they could.
And of course, tantalizingly, they could see the peninsula close by,
but they would have been prevented to get there from the sea of this kind of stuff,
plus the currents that were pushing them up into the open ocean.
It must have been pretty desperate to see salvation so close.
They knew from their compass readings that they were drifting,
perhaps 20 miles a day.
What awaits you, is the storm tossed southern Ocean,
and if you don't get it right and find somewhere to land,
you've got thousands and thousands of miles of nothing in every direction
and certain death.
♪
These rowboats were not built to withstand an open ocean crossing.
They were designed to take someone from ship to shore.
All three lifeboats were keelless,
prone to capsize, and they are in some of the roughest oceans known to man.
♪
(Birds squawking)
A strong easterly breeze was blowing,
but the fringe of pack lying outside
protected us from the full force of the swell, just as the coral reef
of a tropical island checks the rollers of the Pacific.
Elephant Island was the nearest land
but it lay outside the main body of pack.
And even if the wind had been fair,
we would have hesitated to face the high sea that was running in the open.
A big flow berg resting peacefully ahead caught my eye
and half an hour later we had hauled up the boats and pitched camp for the night.
Everyone was in need of rest after the troubles of the previous night
and the unaccustomed strain of the last 36 hours of the oars.
But it was not as safe as it looked.
Your prospects, if you were drifting out
into the deep South Atlantic blown by the winds and the currents on a piece
of ice like this one, no one would ever find you,
your home would melt beneath your feet and you'd be condemned to the sea forever.
As each swell lifted around our rapidly dissolving berg,
it drove flow ice onto the ice foot, reducing the size of our camp.
I made up my mind that we should try to reach Deception Island.
No longer were we drifting helplessly,
at the mercy of wind and current.
The men paddled for almost four days.
Worsley took the first navigational site
the overcast skies had allowed, and determined their progress.
It was a grievous disappointment.
Instead of making a good run
to the westward we had made a big drift to the southeast.
We were actually 30 miles to the east of the position
we had occupied when we left the flow on the 9th.
To us, it was a day that seemed likely to lead to no more days.
We could hear the killers blowing.
Their short, sharp hisses, sounding like sudden escapes of steam.
(Hissing)
The killers were a source of anxiety,
for a boat could easily have been capsized by one of them coming up to blow.
Shipwrecked mariners might appear on closer examination,
to be tasty substitutes for seal and penguin.
Got a pod of orca off the ship here, which is incredible to see.
For Shackleton, of course, the orca were something to be feared.
We didn't really understand much about them.
They called them killers, of course, killer whales.
And they talked of the hissing noises they'd make,
and the fact they were being stalked by these creatures.
And it created this real sense of unease.
They really regarded them as something to be feared.
(Blowing)
I think the killer whales circling Shackleton and his men
as they headed towards Elephant Island
was just a continuation of a sort of recurring theme,
which is that Antarctica respects no person, really.
It's just this untamed wilderness where
you are just a bit player in the scheme of things.
If you are not fit enough or mentally or
physically well prepared enough, you won't survive.
If you're seen to be a food source for an animal,
you know, it's just the way of nature.
We are not above it, we're just part of it.
And I think Antarctica teaches you that, when you go there.
The men were left with only one choice.
Their drift meant they could no longer reach the islands
inside the relative shelter of the pack ice,
they were going to have to brave the open sea.
Obviously, we must make land quickly,
and I decided to run for Elephant Island.
Our way was across the open sea,
and soon after noon, we swung round the north end of the pack.
(Waves crashing)
Immediately, our deeply laden boats began to make heavy weather.
The ship's sprays, which are freezing as they fell, covered men and gear with ice.
(Loud crashing of waves)
It seemed that the general discomfort of our situation,
could scarcely have been increased.
But the land looming ahead, was a beacon of safety.
We had now had 108 hours of toil,
tumbling, freezing and soaking with little or no sleep.
Progress was slow.
Gradually, Elephant Island came nearer.
All this time, we were coasting along beneath towering rocky cliffs and sheer glacier faces,
which offered not the slightest possibility of landing anywhere.
♪
(Birds squawking)
You can tell just what the conditions can get to here.
I mean, we've got about 30 or 40 knots of gusts at the moment,
but the wind speeds, of course, can get two or three times that.
The trouble here is that you get not only the winds coming off the ocean,
but you get the Katabatic winds, the cold, dense,
masses of air pouring down off the high ground in the interior of the island.
And so you get it from both sides,
and when the wind is blowing in the same direction,
you've got the wind coming off the land and the wind from the sea,
you can really end up with hurricane force winds.
What we're looking at here is Cape Valentine, where Shackleton first arrived.
They landed here and realized they
couldn't hope to survive with the prospect of all the ice and rocks tumbling down
on them from above, and so were forced to move further around the island.
Wilde, Worsley and Hurley accompanied me on an inspection of our beach.
The outlook we found to be anything but cheering.
Obvious signs show that at spring tides,
the little beach would be covered by the water right up to the foot of the cliffs.
The interior of the island, was quite inaccessible.
We climbed up one of the slopes and found
ourselves stopped soon by overhanging cliffs.
The rocks behind the camp were much weathered,
and we noticed the sharp, unworn boulders that had fallen from above.
Clearly there was a danger from overhead.
We must move on.
Shackleton managed to find just about
the only place you could land,
which is a place called Point Wild, which is just over there
between that small triangle of rock on the right
hand side and the face on the left hand side.
In between those two is a shingle beach that they managed to land.
At 09:30 a.m.,
we spied a narrow, rocky beach at the base
of some very high crags and cliff and made for it.
Another stage of the homeward journey had been accomplished
and we can afford to forget for an hour the problems of the future.
Life was not so bad.
We got a Weddell seal basking in this sub zero temperature just
behind me, and the men were forced to bludgeon these seals
and eat them both for the meat they provided,
but also for the blubber which they rendered down and used to power their stoves.
Not very palatable, not too good for the seal, either.
Trying to survive on Elephant Island would have just been a brutal experience.
You're living in a space between two glaciers really,
really just eking out what existence you can.
And we've got a glacier behind us here,
a snow slope in the middle there,
with a steep rock cliff behind it, and another glacier in the distance.
They couldn't go more than 50 meters in one direction,
and perhaps 100 meters in the other direction,
before that was the end of their world.
They were literally stuck and trying to eke out its existence
in this tiny, tiny area in the middle here.
It was heavy work, carrying our goods over
the rough pebbles and rocks to the foot of the cliff.
When the work was done, we pulled the three boats a little higher up on the beach,
and turned gratefully to the hot drink that the cook had prepared.
In order to provide shelter for the men,
we turned the Dudley docker upside down
and wedged up the weathered side with boulders.
A consideration that had weight with me was that there was no chance at all of any
search being made for us on Elephant Island.
A boat journey in search of relief was necessary and must not be delayed.
That conclusion was forced upon me.
The nearest inhabited land to Elephant Island,
is South America or the Falkland Islands.
But the strong winds and currents of the Southern Ocean,
made reaching those places impossible.
Their only hope was to sail with the wind
back to the whaling stations of South Georgia
over 800 nautical miles away.
South Georgia was over 800 miles away,
but lay in the area of the west winds.
And I could count upon finding whalers
at any of the whaling stations on the east coast.
The hazards of a boat journey across 800 miles of stormy
sub Antarctic ocean were obvious.
But I calculated that at worst,
the venture would add nothing to the risks of the men left on the island.
There would be fewer mouths to feed during the winter,
and the boat would not require to take more than one month's provisions for six men.
For if we did not make South Georgia in that time, we were sure to go under.
Shackleton decided to take five of the men in the most seaworthy lifeboat,
The James Caird.
I told Wilde at once he would have to stay behind.
I relied on him to hold the party together while I was away.
The men who were staying behind made a pathetic little group on the beach
with the grim heights of the island behind them.
But they waved to us and gave three hearty cheers. (Men cheering)
There was hope in their hearts and they
trusted us to bring the help that they needed.
I had all sails set, and the James Caird quickly dipped the beach
and its line of dark figures.
I decided to run north for at least two days,
while the wind held and so get into warmer weather
before turning to the east, and being a course for South Georgia.
The tale of the next 16 days is one of supreme strife amid heaving waters.
A sub Antarctic Ocean, lived up to its evil winter reputation.
(Waves lapping)
♪
Southern Ocean is the roughest ocean in the world.
This is typical Southern Ocean weather we're facing here.
We've got about 40, maybe 50 knot gusts of winds and quite big sea states.
We're heading up towards South Georgia.
You've got the Pacific basically draining into the Atlantic from west to east.
And when the wind blows in the other direction
you get big standing waves...very, very tough conditions.
(Waves crash loudly)
We're in 110 meters, ice strengthened ship here
and Shackleton and his 22 and a half foot keelless rowboat
in these kind of conditions, sitting only a foot and a half above the surface of the sea,
very intimidating, noisy, rough waves crashing in, soaking you, threatening to sink you.
Survival time if you go in here, sub, ten minutes,
but frankly, in rough sea state like this, two or three.
You'd freeze, you'd lose the ability to tread water and down you'd go.
Shackleton's boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia is widely
considered the most dangerous and difficult ocean crossing ever attempted.
In 2013, I had the brilliant idea to recreate the journey using the same
inadequate clothing and tiny robot that they had.
I wanted to experience it for myself.
It's the hardest physical and mental endeavour I've ever been involved in.
I remember being borderline hypothermic,
with prospects stalking us all in amongst these sorts of conditions,
down in the dips between one set of waves and the next,
waves crashing in.
Standing in one degree celsius seawater.
Charts.
I have lasting memories of how that felt from our journey.
Deep seemed the valleys when we lay between the rain and sea.
High were the hills when we perched momentarily on the tops of giant combers.
Nearly always there were gales.
So small was our boat and so great were the seas, that often our sail flapped idly
in the calm between the crests of two waves.
Then we would climb the next slope and catch the full fury of the gale,
where the wool like whiteness of the breaking water, surged around us.
We were a tiny speck in the vast vista of the sea,
the ocean that is open to all, and merciful to none.
When you're down in amongst it in a keelless rowboat,
believe me, it's eh...
...it's a very interesting experience.
It's all part of my therapy, coming back here and experiencing this.
Get it out of my system.
The living conditions inside the boat were also challenging.
The six men were living off a hot drink called 'hoosh',
a delightful mixture of animal fat and cereal.
Their reindeer sleeping bags were so constantly wet, they began to fall apart,
sending the prickly hair all throughout the boat,
getting into their clothing, food and drinking water.
Our water had long been finished.
The last was about a pint of hairy liquid
which we strained through a bit of gauze from the medicine chest.
Their only means of navigation was by the sun.
Using a sextant and compass.
Worsley, new South Georgia island sat on the 54th degree latitude.
They only need to travel north to that point,
then allow the strong Southern Ocean current to push them east.
I think most of us had a feeling that the end was very near.
The morning of May the 8th broke thick and stormy with squalls from the northwest.
We searched the waters ahead for a sign of land,
and though we could see nothing more than had met our eyes for many days,
we were cheered by a sense that the goal was near at hand.
We gazed ahead with increasing eagerness,
and at 12:30 p.m. through a rift in the clouds,
McCarthy caught a glimpse of the black cliffs of South Georgia.
It was a glad moment.
Thirst ridden, chilled and weak as we were,
happiness irradiated us, the job was nearly done.
Incredibly, after 16 days at sea,
the men had survived 800 miles of 30 foot waves,
and hurricane force winds,
in a 23 foot rowboat.
Well, the sensation Shackleton had as he approached South Georgia,
must have been one of pure relief, after 17 days at sea in the James Caird,
much of it, not expecting to make it at all.
It's a pretty emotional feeling to actually be back here.
It's just exciting again to be following close on his heels.
We've got a big king penguin colony
with hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs in the foreground here.
And that's the thing about South Georgia,
you smell it before you can see it.
You can smell the stench of urea coming off the king penguins.
It's quite something, you never quite get used to it,
and you certainly don't get it out of your clothes.
Millions of penguins and seals crowd the beaches of South Georgia.
These are some of the densest concentrations of wildlife on the planet.
The most spectacular place in the world, South Georgia.
It's hundreds of thousands of breeding pairs of king penguins.
It's just teeming with life.
It's just spectacular.
Never ceases to amaze.
(Penguins squawking)
I think seeing all these animals on the beach would have been a welcome sight frankly,
after the conditions down in the Antarctic and
in the final analysis, you can eat them
and would have been sustenance for Shackleton.
(Growling)
There were hundreds of sea elephants lying about.
And their anxieties with regard to food disappeared.
Meat and blubber, enough to feed our party for years, was in sight.
A sea elephant provided us with fuel and meat
and that evening found a well fed and fairly contented party at rest in Peggotty Camp.
Abundant meals of sea elephants, steak and liver increased our contentment.
The men were grateful for the safety of land and the abundance of food.
However, they still needed to reach the whaling station, on the other side of the island.
The James Caird was badly damaged after the crossing.
It would be too dangerous to sail around the coast.
They were going to have to cross the island on foot to Stromness Bay,
25 miles across the treacherous mountains and glaciers of South Georgia.
The interior of the island had never been traversed,
and with winds blowing down from the peaks at almost 3,000 meters high,
even for the most experienced mountaineer, this was an extremely dangerous prospect.
Shackleton decided to take the two strongest men,
Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, and attempt this final task.
Soon we were ascending a snow slope
heading due east on the last lap of our long trail.
After 2 hours steady climbing, we were 2,500ft above sea level.
We roped ourselves together as a precaution against holes, crevasses and precipices,
and I broke trail through the soft snow.
The central facet of Shackleton's leadership was
That he never asked someone to do something he wasn't prepared to do himself.
And indeed, he really demonstrated that at this stage of their journey.
Well, just come up Shackleton Gap From King Haakon Bay
where Shackleton landed more than 100 years ago.
Weather is beginning to deteriorate as is always the case in South Georgia.
You've got this incredible terrain behind you.
Just shows what the place is like.
We're heading off to the Trident mountains
through there where Shackleton, Crean and Worsley went.
And that's the access point to the interior of the island and the whaling stations beyond.
When Shackleton, Crean and Worsley passed this point,
no one had ever been into the interior of the island.
Their clothing was inadequate,
they had no real climbing experience,
one length of rope.
They were now faced with one of the most treacherous mountain crossings on earth.
The interior was broken tremendously.
High peaks, impassable cliffs,
steep snow slopes and sharply descending glaciers
were prominent features in all directions.
With stretches of snow plain overlaying the ice sheet of the interior.
The slope we were ascending mounted to a ridge,
and our course lay direct to the top.
I had hoped to get a view of the country ahead of us from the top of the slope
but as the surface became more level beneath our feet, a thick fog drifted down.
The moon became obscured and produced a diffused light,
that was more trying than darkness, since it illuminated the fog
without guiding our steps.
We noticed the thin beginnings of crevasses.
Soon they were increasing in size and showing fractures
indicating that we were travelling on a glacier.
♪
It's extremely dangerous travelling across glaciers.
Thin snow bridges across deep crevasses
are like hidden trap doors that at any moment could cave in.
The crevasses we are encountering are particularly bad,
but I suspect they've got worse here over time.
Had Shackleton, Crean and Worsley experienced these conditions,
I wonder how they would have fared.
♪
The key thing with crossing crevasses is that you don't want to fall in obviously,
and the best way to avoid that is to cross them at right angles.
So if you are going down a river of ice, which a glacier is
you're doing things kind of the right way
because the likelihood is the crevasses are going
to go from left to right in front of you across your path,
and you want to be sort. Of stepping over them.
What you don't want to be doing is following the length of a crevasse
where you give yourself lots and lots opportunities
to fall in the same thing.
If you see one, tighten the rope between you so that if somebody falls in
the other one will hold you.
And just hope to hell that two people don't fall in because if you're the one left,
on the surface you probably haven't got the strength to hold everybody
from falling in and injuring themselves or perhaps worse.
♪
We were tired, and the wind that blew down from the heights was chilling us.
We decided to get down under the lee of a rock for a rest.
Within a minute, my two companions were fast asleep.
I realized that it would be disastrous if
we all slumbered together,
for sleep under such conditions merges into death.
Shackleton would have stopped in a shelter very much like this one out of the wind,
and knowing really that to stop for more
than a small amount of time would have, would have spelt certain death.
You just cannot stop. Movement generates heat and heat is what you need obviously.
And to stop for too long spells disaster.
After five minutes, I shook them into consciousness again,
told them that they had slept for half an hour,
and gave the word for a fresh start.
Now, Shackleton was no mountaineer but he
had a lot of experience of the cold in Antarctica and he would
have known full well what would happen if he'd allowed the men to sleep any longer.
Around 20 hours into their crossing, Shackleton decided to head down towards
what he thought would be Stromness Bay, and the whaling station.
Our high hopes were soon shattered.
Crevasses warned us that we were on another glacier and soon we looked down
almost to the seaward edge of the great riven ice mass.
I knew there was no glacier in Stromness,
and realized this must be the Fortuna glacier.
The disappointment was severe.
The glacier Shackleton found filled the valley
and sheer ice cliffs fell into the ocean.
It was completely impassable
and forced the men back up into the mountains.
It must have been a moment that almost broke them.
We've just completed a survey of the same glacier,
and it's clear that this landscape has changed dramatically.
Here I am on the Turnback Glacier that Sir Ernest Shackleton and his
colleagues Worsley and Crean, famously tried to use to descend to the valley
beyond us, here to get ultimately to Stromness whaling station.
And look at what a hundred years of climate change have done.
This vast open space we're looking at here used to be occupied by glacier.
For them, the level would have been above the level we can currently see now
and if they were here and the ice were here,
we would see them trudging wearily across our eyeline,
about midway across this valley here,
only to reach a precipitous ice cliff that they couldn't negotiate,
causing them to have to go back up the valley and round another way.
Hence the name Turnback Glacier.
What a change there's been.
Ironically, the Turnback Glacier is no longer an insurmountable barrier.
And we can simply walk down the melting glacial front to the valley floor.
After 26 hours of continuous marching,
there was one more major obstacle in Shackleton's path...
...the Konig Glacier,
a feature that's virtually unrecognizable today.
♪
Back in Shackleton's day,
they saw the ice of the Konig Glacier reaching almost to the breaking waves.
A hundred years later,
we'll have to hike around 3 miles from the coast to the new glacial front.
♪
I've always been on two journeys really.
One is the literal one, crossing mountains, crossing glaciers,
and the other is more of a metaphorical one.
In other words, you see those big rivers of ice and how badly they've been affected
by climate change and realise they're a really good way of showing the problem.
They're like the litmus paper for what we're doing to the planet.
♪
The environment I'm standing on here looks like it's solid.
As you're stepping, you're sinking down quite a long way
and these big piles, rubble, again, they look quite solid,
but beneath them is ice
and the water is just eating into everything beneath.
As the ice melts, the water is just eroding away the base of all these piles.
It's quite a freaky experience being here.
This whole landscape is just dynamic and changing.
And what we're seeing today will not look like this tomorrow.
Using a drone to capture a 360 degree image
of the Konig Valley and the diary entries from Shackleton's crossing,
we can recreate the world those three men traversed.
What a difference 100 years can make.
This is just indicative of the way
that climate change has impacted the glaciers of South Georgia,
where over 90% of the glaciers here are suffering the same fate all in wide scale retreat.
For Shackleton, South Georgia was a very different world.
We were so stiff, we marched with our knees bent.
A jagged line of peaks with a gap like a broken tooth confronted us,
and our course eastward to Stromness lay across it.
A very steep slope led up to the ridge
and an icy wind burst through the gap.
But the worst was turning to the best for us.
Twisted, wavelike rock formations of Husvik Harbour,
appeared right ahead in the opening of dawn.
In intense excitement,
we watched the chronometer for 07:00, when the whalers would be summoned to work.
Right to the minute, the steam whistle came to us,
borne clearly on the wind, never had any one of us heard sweeter music.
It was a moment hard to describe.
Pain and ache.
Boat journeys, marches, hunger and fatigue,
seemed to belong to the limbo of forgotten things.
At 01:30 p. m. we climbed around the final ridge and saw a steamer.
Minute figures moving to and fro about the boats caught our gaze
and then we saw the sheds and factory of Stromness whaling station.
We had pierced the veneer of outside things.
We had suffered, starved and triumphed.
Grovelled down, yet grasped of glory,
grown bigger in the bigness of the whole.
We had seen God in his splendours,
heard the text that nature renders.
We had reached the naked soul of men.
That afternoon, Shackleton, Crean and Worsley walked into Stromness whaling station.
The factory would have been busy with teams of men processing huge whale carcasses
and the stench would have been thick in the air.
This was to be their first encounter with the outside world,
in 532 days.
We tried to straighten ourselves up a bit
for the thought that there might be women at the station,
made us painfully conscious of our uncivilized appearance.
Our beards were long and our hair was matted.
Three more unpleasant looking ruffians could hardly have been imagined.
Well, Shackleton finally arrives with Crean and Worsley at the whaling station.
They celebrate momentarily, but then Shackleton's focused on picking up
all the people he's left behind.
And this is just fraught with problems.
After retrieving the men left on the other side of the island
Shackleton sets off from South Georgia in a whaling ship
with the intention of rescuing the 22 men left behind on Elephant Island.
And they get turned back by the pack ice, which is just impassable.
They attempt this a second time,
and the same thing happens again.
Pack ice, too dense, driven back, unable to get any further south,
they resort to sailing to South America, where Shackleton raises the funds
for another ship to reach the men.
And that catches fire.
Back to South America, they go, tail between their legs.
On their fourth attempt,
they go south in a vessel called the Yelcho, a final rescue effort funded
by the Chilean government,
in what is essentially a tugboat.
This time, Providence favored us.
The little steamer made a quick rundown in comparatively fine weather.
Worsley's keen eyes detected the camp.
The men ashore saw us at the same time
and we saw tiny black figures hurry to the beach and wave signals to us.
I saw a little figure on a surf beaten rock
and recognized Wilde.
(Cheering)
I called out, 'are you all well?.
And he answered, 'we are all well, boss!'
Wilde had held the party together,
and kept hope alive in their hearts.
The men on Elephant Island had waited four and a half months for rescue
and were down to just four days worth of rations.
The crew of Endurance were finally about to return to civilization
for the first time in over two years.
Against all odds, Shackleton had managed to achieve the impossible.
All hands were rescued.
Not a single man perished.
Shackleton's story inspires me, especially when I'm in these remote
locations and faced with the reality of the situation.
I believe Shackleton's leadership can be applied to almost any mission,
any goal.
For me, that is correcting our climate trajectory.
The changes we've witnessed here in South Georgia are sobering
and I am compelled to use what I've learned from Shackleton, to make a difference.
I think the thing about glaciers is that they are tangible.
They're a physical thing.
You can't see 415 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere,
but you can see a melting glacier.
South Georgia is such a remote place and of course, Antarctica remoter still,
so not many people get to come here.
I think the work we're doing bringing these images back to people
is just crucial in communicating both the beauty of these places but the fragility of them
and the importance of doing something about climate change.
If Shackleton's leadership has taught us anything,
it's how to achieve the impossible.
And these are skills we can apply to mammoth tasks like solving climate change.
We need to reframe the mission.
We need to set milestones.
We need to break down the big picture into smaller, bite sized challenges.
We need to use emotional intelligence to convince everybody to pull together.
These are the skills that allowed
Shackleton to save all of his men from Antarctica.
Those same skills must now help us save Antarctica from man.
Our journey ends here at Grytviken whaling station,
where Endurance and her crew of 28 first set off to conquer the ice.
Grytviken and where we are would have been a harsh, harsh place hundred years ago.
Many whales hunted here subsequently ended up on the brink of extinction.
Humpback whales, blue whales.
And thankfully, we realized the error of our ways before it was too late
and managed to stop the whaling before we hunted them to extinction.
Fur seals are back at the numbers they were before we ever started hunting them.
Which tells us that if we take our foot off the throat of nature, she can recover.
Six years after their daring escape from the ice,
Shackleton, Wilde, Worsley,
and several other crew of Endurance,
returned to South Georgia, on another expedition to the south.
Before they could set off Shackleton
suffered a fatal heart attack and was laid to rest here on the island.
He just aspired to achieve something that was bigger than him.
He loved the whole romance and mystery
of attaining things on the largest of levels and the biggest of stages.
And he wanted to find out what he was capable of doing and what was out there.
And it was this kind of wonderful combination,
of geographical discovery, and finding out what lies within yourself
to enable you to do these things that really spurred him on.
I think we can all find leadership within ourself, you know?
It's not a case of being born with it.
It's a case of finding it within ourselves.
And I think Shackleton found it within himself
to save all his men from certain death,
and we can find it within ourselves.
It's just the issue is different. But we must.
We must find it within ourselves.
The key to our future, might lie 100 years in our past.
Truly making this the greatest story of survival.