The Inland Sea of Mountains

What lay ahead was a journey across an interior that no chart had ever recorded.

On 8 May 1916, on the opposite side of the Antarctic continent, Mackintosh and Victor Hayward of the Ross Sea party decided to walk across the unstable sea ice of McMurdo Sound to Cape Evans, were caught in a blizzard and were not seen again. The Ross Sea party had already lost three men to the ice and the cold; now two more vanished into a whiteout, leaving their companions to wait at Hut Point, not yet knowing that the crossing they had suffered to supply would never happen.

Shackleton could not know this. What he knew was that the James Caird lay on the shingle at King Haakon Bay, her timbers strained past the limit of another voyage, her crew worn to the bone. The whaling stations lay somewhere to the north-east, on the far side of a glaciated interior that no surveyor had ever penetrated.

The decision came to him in the stillness of the camp they had named Peggotty, after the boat-house in Dickens—a shelter of up-turned boat and rocks, cramped and reeking of blubber smoke. Shackleton had moved the James Caird to a shingle beach near the head of the bay, beaching her and up-turning her hull to make a roof. Vincent and McNish were unfit to travel further; the carpenter’s hands were swollen and useless, the seaman’s strength exhausted by the sixteen-day crossing.

That left three men for whatever came next: Shackleton himself, Tom Crean, and Frank Worsley.

The boat could not round the island. The coast between King Haakon Bay and Stromness offered no safe harbour, only headlands and reefs where the westerly swell broke with killing force. To wait for rescue was to abandon the twenty-two men on Elephant Island to a death by inches. The only way forward lay across the spine of South Georgia.

Shackleton’s order to cross was recorded in his own account with characteristic brevity: the decision was made, the party selected, the departure set for the first clear weather.

But the terrain they faced had no name on any chart. South Georgia rose from the Southern Ocean in a wall of glaciated peaks, a spine of mountains running north-west to south-east, cut through by passes that might or might not exist. The island was less than a hundred miles long, but its interior was a chaos of ice and rock, crevassed glaciers hanging between jagged ridges, the whole swept by winds that could pick a man off his feet and hurl him into a chasm. The whalers who worked the stations on the north coast had never gone more than a few miles inland. They called the interior desolate, impassable, a place where no man had reason to go and none had returned from. The map showed a blank.

The contrast between the decision and the terrain framed the gamble. Shackleton proposed to walk across an uncharted mountain range in thirty-six hours, with no mountaineering equipment, no map, and no certain knowledge of a route. He would take Worsley, the navigator whose dead-reckoning had brought the James Caird to South Georgia against impossible odds, and Crean, the Irish petty officer whose endurance had been tested on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition and proven on the march to Elephant Island. Three men. Three pairs of boots. A coil of rope, an adze, a primus stove, and four days’ rations.

The preparation took place at Peggotty Camp over the days following the landfall. The arrival of the James Caird at King Haakon Bay had been followed by a period of rest and recuperation, while Shackleton pondered the next move. The populated whaling stations of South Georgia lay on the northern coast. To reach them would mean either another boat journey around the island or a crossing of the interior.

As the party recuperated, Shackleton realized that the boat was not capable of making a further voyage to reach the whaling stations, and that Vincent and McNish were unfit to travel further. He decided to move the boat to a safer location within King Haakon Bay, from which point he, Worsley and Crean would cross the island on foot, aiming for the station at Stromness. On 15 May the James Caird made a run of about six nautical miles to a shingle beach near the head of the bay. Here the boat was beached and up-turned to provide a shelter. The others would remain at Peggotty Camp, to be picked up later after help had been obtained from the whaling stations.

A storm on 18 May delayed their start. The wind howled through the camp, driving snow against the up-turned hull, and the three men who would make the crossing waited in the cramped darkness, checking and rechecking their improvised equipment. They had no crampons, no ice-axes, no proper clothing for mountaineering. What they had was what they could make: screws from the James Caird driven through the soles of their boots to give grip on ice, a rope borrowed from the boat’s stores, a carpenter’s adze to cut steps. Worsley worked over the route in his head, trying to estimate distances and directions from the fragmentary knowledge they had of the island’s geography. The whalers at Stromness Bay, if they could reach it, would know nothing of the interior. No one did.

By two o’clock on the morning of 19 May, the weather had cleared. The wind dropped to a moderate breeze from the north-west, and the stars came out, cold and brilliant over the mountains. Shackleton gave the order to move.

They left Peggotty Camp in the dark, climbing from the shingle beach up through a valley that led toward the interior. The ground underfoot was loose scree and patches of snow, and they moved slowly, testing each step, the adze passing from hand to hand as the slope steepened. Crean took the lead, his long stride finding a rhythm that the others matched. Shackleton followed, then Worsley, the navigator’s eyes fixed on the terrain ahead, already calculating the bearing they would need to hold.

The first light came at around four o’clock, revealing the scale of what they faced. The valley rose ahead of them into a chaos of ice and rock, the glacier that filled its head gleaming dully under a grey dawn sky. Above the glacier, the peaks of South Georgia rose into the cloud, their summits hidden, their flanks scarred by crevasses and rockfall. There was no path. There was only the direction they had chosen—north-east, toward Stromness—and the hope that a pass existed somewhere in the maze.

Shackleton’s account and Worsley’s later narrative both describe the ascent in terms that emphasise the physical difficulty rather than the technical challenge. They were not mountaineers. They had no experience of climbing in the Alps or the Himalayas, no training in the use of rope or ice-axe. What they had was the experience of the ice: months on the drifting floes of the Weddell Sea, the boat journey through the pack, the landing on Elephant Island, the open-boat voyage to South Georgia. They knew cold, exhaustion, and the management of risk. They knew how to keep moving when stopping meant death. The inland sea of mountains was another environment, but the principles were the same.

The glacier forced a halt. The ice was broken into seracs and crevasses, the surface treacherous with hidden cracks masked by snow bridges. They roped together, Shackleton leading, probing each step with the adze handle before committing his weight. The rope was short, barely fifteen feet between each man, and they moved in a slow rhythm: step, probe, step, probe, the only sound the crunch of boots on snow and the wind moving through the ice towers. At one point, Crean broke through a snow bridge and dropped to his armpits before Shackleton hauled him clear. They rested for a moment, Crean shaking the snow from his clothes, then continued.

The ascent took hours. The sun rose higher, burning off some of the cloud, and they could see the ridge above them, a line of rock and ice that marked the divide between the west coast and the unknown interior. Worsley checked his bearing by the sun, estimating their position by dead-reckoning from the known point of King Haakon Bay. He had no map, no chart of the interior, only the shape of the coastline they had sailed along and the general direction of the mountain spine. The crossing was an act of navigation by inference, a guess at the shape of the land based on what they could see and what they knew of similar terrain elsewhere.

They reached the ridge at around midday. The view that opened before them stopped them in their tracks. Below lay a valley they had never seen, a glacier sweeping down toward a frozen lake, and beyond that, in the distance, the dark line of a fiord cutting into the mountains. Stromness Bay? Worsley thought so, but he could not be certain. The scale of the landscape was deceptive; distances that looked like miles might be ten miles or twenty, and the angle of the light made the terrain flatten into a two-dimensional image, the depth impossible to judge.

Shackleton made the decision. They would descend, following the glacier toward the lake, and trust that the bearing would bring them to the whaling station before their rations ran out. They had food for four days, but they could not afford four days of wandering. The crossing had to be fast.

The descent began well, a glissade down a snow slope that cut hours off the journey. They sat in the snow, legs outstretched, and slid, using their boots as brakes, the adze dragged behind to slow them if the slope steepened. The speed was exhilarating after the slow crawl of the ascent, and they covered ground fast, the glacier falling away behind them. But the slope changed character as they descended, the snow giving way to ice, and the angle increasing. Worsley, at the rear, saw the drop before the others. A crevasse opened below them, a black slit in the ice, and they were sliding toward it.

Shackleton dug in with his heels, the screws in his boots biting into the ice, and managed to stop himself a few feet from the edge. Crean, following, collided with him, and the two men lay gasping on the slope, the crevasse a dark mouth beneath their boots. Worsley came to a halt beside them, his face white. They had nearly gone over. The glissade had saved them hours, but it had nearly killed them.

They climbed down from the slope, picking their way around the crevasse, and continued on foot. The glacier levelled out, and they walked across the frozen lake, the ice hard under their boots. The sun was high now, and the temperature rose, the snow softening, the light blinding. They took off their outer layers, tying them around their waists, and pushed on, the rhythm of their steps the only sound in the vast silence.

The afternoon wore on. The terrain changed again, rising toward another ridge, and they climbed, slower now, their legs heavy, their breath coming in gasps. The altitude was not great—the highest peaks of South Georgia barely exceeded six thousand feet—but the going was hard, the ground broken by rock and ice, and every step required concentration. They had been moving for nearly twelve hours, with only short rests, and the exhaustion was beginning to tell. Frostbite touched the tips of their fingers, the cold seeping through their gloves, and Crean’s feet were swelling in his boots, the screws pressing into his flesh.

They reached the second ridge as the sun began to sink. The view to the north-east was clearer now, the fiord they had seen from the first ridge opening out into a bay, and beyond that, the glint of water. Worsley checked his bearing again, estimating the distance they had covered and the direction they had travelled. By his calculation, they were on course for Stromness Bay. But the light was failing, and the terrain ahead was unknown. They could continue, risking a fall in the dark, or they could stop and spend the night on the mountain.

Shackleton chose to continue. The night was clear, the moon rising, and they could see enough to walk. The alternative—bivouacking on a glacier at altitude, with no shelter and no heat—was worse. They ate a small meal, the last of their rations for the day, and started down.

The descent in the moonlight was eerie, the landscape transformed by the silver light into a world of shadows and contrasts. The snow gleamed, the rocks stood out black against the white, and the crevasses were dark slashes that opened without warning. They moved carefully, testing each step, the rope taut between them. The temperature dropped, and the wind picked up, blowing from the south, a cold stream of air that cut through their clothing. They had been moving for nearly twenty hours, and their bodies were crying out for rest, but they kept going, the rhythm of their steps a kind of trance.

At some point in the night, they heard a sound. It came from below them, rising through the still air: a steam whistle, blowing the shift change at a whaling station. The sound was unmistakable, a mechanical blast that echoed off the mountains, and it told them what they needed to know. They were close. Stromness Bay lay below, and the whaling station was there, operating its shifts, unaware that three men were stumbling down from the peaks above.

The whistle gave them a direction, a bearing to follow, and they turned toward it, their pace quickening. The slope steepened, and they began to glissade again, more carefully this time, testing the snow, avoiding the crevasses. The moonlight showed them a route, a line of white between the black rocks, and they followed it down, the sound of the whistle echoing in their ears.

The descent took hours. The terrain was broken, the glacier giving way to moraine, and they scrambled over loose rock, their boots slipping on the wet stones. The temperature rose as they lost altitude, and the snow turned to slush, then to meltwater, and they were walking through streams, their feet soaked, their boots heavy. They were nearly done. Shackleton’s legs were failing, the muscles trembling with each step, and Crean was limping, his feet swollen and painful. Worsley, the lightest of the three, seemed to find a reserve of strength, and he took the lead, guiding them down through the rocks.

They reached the valley floor as the first light of dawn touched the peaks above. Ahead of them, through a gap in the hills, they could see the water of Stromness Bay, calm under the morning sky, and beyond it, the buildings of the whaling station, smoke rising from the chimneys. They had crossed the interior. They had walked for thirty-six hours continuously, with almost no rest, over mountains that had never been mapped, and they had come out exactly where they intended.

The final mile was the hardest. Their bodies were past exhaustion, running on will alone, and every step was an effort of concentration. They could see the station, the boats drawn up on the beach, the men moving between the buildings, but they could not make themselves move faster. They walked, stumbled, walked again, the distance shrinking with agonising slowness.

They came out onto the shingle beach in front of the station at around seven o’clock on the morning of 20 May. The whalers saw them—three figures in rags, their faces blackened by exposure and accumulated blubber soot, their hair matted and wild, their clothes torn and stained—and stopped to stare. The station manager, Mr. Andersen, came out of his office to see what the commotion was about. He saw three men who looked like survivors of a shipwreck, which, in a sense, they were.

Shackleton stepped forward. “My name is Shackleton,” he said. The manager stared at him. “Ernest Shackleton?” he asked. Shackleton nodded. The manager’s face changed, disbelief giving way to recognition. Shackleton had been given up for dead, his expedition lost, his men presumed to have perished in the ice. And here he stood, on the beach at Stromness, with two companions, having crossed the interior of South Georgia on foot.

The whalers took them in, gave them food and hot tea, found them clothes and beds. They listened to the story—the loss of the Endurance, the months on the ice, the boat journey to Elephant Island, the voyage of the James Caird, the crossing of the mountains—with the incredulity of men who knew the sea and the ice and could hardly believe what they were hearing. The interior of South Georgia was a place they had never entered, a blank on their mental maps. That anyone had crossed it, in winter, with no equipment, seemed impossible.

But the evidence was before them. Three men, frostbitten and exhausted, who had walked out of the mountains with a story of survival that would become legend.

Shackleton’s first task, on arriving at Stromness, was to arrange for his three companions at Peggotty Camp to be picked up. A motor-vessel—the Norwegian whale catcher Samson—was despatched to King Haakon Bay with Worsley aboard to show the way, and by the evening of 21 May all six of the James Caird party were safe. But the rescue was only half complete. Twenty-two men remained on Elephant Island, waiting for a ship that might never come. Shackleton’s thoughts were already turning north, to the ports of South America, to the governments and shipping companies, to the vessels that might be chartered for what would become his fourth rescue attempt.

The crossing of South Georgia had been a feat of navigation and endurance, a traverse of an uncharted interior by three men who had no right to survive it. But it was only a step toward the final goal. The ice had held them, the sea had held them, the mountains had held them, and they had broken free. Now they had to go back.

The whalers at Stromness gave them what they needed: food, clothing, passage to the nearest port. Shackleton stood on the beach, looking out over the bay toward the open sea. The James Caird lay at King Haakon Bay, her voyage ended. The mountains rose behind him, their peaks hidden in cloud, their passes still unmarked on any map. He had crossed them once. He would not have to cross them again.

What lay ahead was not a voyage across mountains, but a voyage across the ocean, to bring back a ship for the men who waited. The whaling station was only a waystation, a place to gather strength and plan the next move. The real work was still to come.