Elephant Island
“Lash up and stow boys, the Boss might come today,” said Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton’s right-hand man. He said it every morning when he awoke in the rancid little hut that he and his 21 companions called home – two overturned boats on a meager rock wall – on the naked, wind-swept, sea-raked coast of Elephant Island. A toehold of land beneath vertical ice and rock. We took measure of that place today; of the pluck and spirited Frank Wild instilled in those men. Our eyes drank up the scene: the brash ice and swell, the chinstrap penguins and pintado petrels, the glacier with its blue towers and cold veins, all taking our stares and turning them back on us; the gray skullcap sky and strangely Stalinesque statue of Captain Luis Pardo, alone, the only evidence that once upon a time something significant happened there. And it did. Twenty-two men waited for four long months for Shackleton’s return; waited with little complaint through the austral winter, April to August, 1916; waited through an ordeal we can scarcely imagine, only to return to a world at war, with trench-fighting and poisonous gases and aerial dogfights and Zeppelin and submarine attacks. None of those men pined to return to Point Wild, but eight of them did, six years later, in 1922, at the end of the Quest Expedition. Shackleton had died of a heart attack on the Island of South Georgia, and his old shipmates came by Elephant Island for one last look. They shared stories but didn’t dare land. It gave them the chills.
It gave us the chills as well, out in our Zodiacs. But it warmed us as well, to think of the indomitable human spirit, that men can have so much faith in each other, and trust each other, and set off across the great southern ocean in a small boat while others wait and wait... and wait. It called to mind an old New Zealand school fight song that Frank Worsley shared with Shackleton: “Never for me the lowered banner; never the last endeavour.”
“Lash up and stow boys, the Boss might come today,” said Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton’s right-hand man. He said it every morning when he awoke in the rancid little hut that he and his 21 companions called home – two overturned boats on a meager rock wall – on the naked, wind-swept, sea-raked coast of Elephant Island. A toehold of land beneath vertical ice and rock. We took measure of that place today; of the pluck and spirited Frank Wild instilled in those men. Our eyes drank up the scene: the brash ice and swell, the chinstrap penguins and pintado petrels, the glacier with its blue towers and cold veins, all taking our stares and turning them back on us; the gray skullcap sky and strangely Stalinesque statue of Captain Luis Pardo, alone, the only evidence that once upon a time something significant happened there. And it did. Twenty-two men waited for four long months for Shackleton’s return; waited with little complaint through the austral winter, April to August, 1916; waited through an ordeal we can scarcely imagine, only to return to a world at war, with trench-fighting and poisonous gases and aerial dogfights and Zeppelin and submarine attacks. None of those men pined to return to Point Wild, but eight of them did, six years later, in 1922, at the end of the Quest Expedition. Shackleton had died of a heart attack on the Island of South Georgia, and his old shipmates came by Elephant Island for one last look. They shared stories but didn’t dare land. It gave them the chills.
It gave us the chills as well, out in our Zodiacs. But it warmed us as well, to think of the indomitable human spirit, that men can have so much faith in each other, and trust each other, and set off across the great southern ocean in a small boat while others wait and wait... and wait. It called to mind an old New Zealand school fight song that Frank Worsley shared with Shackleton: “Never for me the lowered banner; never the last endeavour.”
