The Aurora’s Unknowing Race

By 1916 there were still men unaccounted for: on the far side of the continent, the Ross Sea party had been laying depots for a crossing that never came.

On 27 October 1915, ten men stood on the ice foot at Cape Evans and watched their ship disappear. The Aurora, which had been torn from its moorings in a gale in May 1915, had remained visible for months—a dark smudge on the northern horizon, ice-bound but intact, a promise that the ocean still existed beyond the frozen shore.

Now the pack had begun to move, and the smudge was vanishing, sliding northward into the Ross Sea.

The men had no wireless. They had no way of knowing whether the ship would break free or whether she would be crushed. They had no way of knowing that eight thousand miles away, on the other side of the Antarctic continent, twenty-eight men were watching their own ship die in the Weddell Sea pack ice.

The Endurance had been crushed on 27 October 1915—the same day, though none of them knew it. The two halves of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition were experiencing their darkest hour in perfect, terrible synchronization.

The symmetry was exact and cruel. Shackleton’s men were preparing to abandon their crushed vessel, dragging boats and stores onto the floes, facing an uncertain march northward toward open water. The Ross Sea party had already been abandoned, though they did not yet understand it. They stood on the shore at Cape Evans with the clothing on their backs and the contents of the hut that Captain Scott had built a decade earlier. No ship remained to them, no radio, no news. Their mission was to lay supply depots from the edge of the Great Ice Barrier to the Beardmore Glacier—a chain of food caches that would allow Shackleton’s transcontinental party to complete the crossing. What they could not know was that Shackleton had never landed, that the crossing was already impossible, that their work was for nothing.

The Aurora had carried the Ross Sea party south from Hobart in December 1914, under the command of Captain Æneas Mackintosh. The ship’s company included veterans of earlier expeditions—men who knew the Antarctic coast and the peculiar horrors of sledging on the Barrier. John King Davis, a veteran of Mawson’s recent Australasian expedition, had turned down Shackleton’s offers in 1914 of the command of either Endurance or Aurora. Davis understood the risks of the Ross Sea in ways that Shackleton, focused on his Weddell Sea assault, perhaps did not. The Aurora was an old whaler, sturdy enough for the ice but not built for the kind of battering that the Ross Sea could deliver. She had arrived at McMurdo Sound in January 1915 and begun the work of establishing shore bases and unloading stores.

Mackintosh had decided that the depot-laying must begin immediately. The original plan called for the main depots to be laid during the 1915-1916 summer season, ready for Shackleton’s arrival from the Weddell Sea in February or March 1916. But Mackintosh, a man whose sense of duty exceeded his judgment of conditions, believed that Shackleton might attempt a crossing during the first season. He decided that the first two depots had to be laid without delay—one at 79°S near Minna Bluff, a prominent Barrier landmark, and another at 80°S. The timing was disastrous. It was January, late summer, and the surface of the Barrier was already softening. The dogs were untrained. The men were still organizing their equipment. Mackintosh ordered the sledging parties out anyway.

The first depot-laying journey was a preview of suffering. Three parties set out on 24 January 1915, dragging sledges across the Barrier surface in temperatures that hovered near minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The snow was soft and the sledges sank. The dogs struggled. The men, hauling in harness alongside the dogs, found their boots breaking through a crust of ice into the powder beneath. They covered twelve miles on the first day and woke the next morning to a blizzard that held them in their tents for four days. When the weather cleared, they pushed on. They laid the depot at 79°S on 4 February and returned to Hut Point exhausted, frostbitten, and demoralized. The dogs had performed poorly. The men had performed worse. Mackintosh, whose eyes had been damaged by snow blindness, could barely see.

The Aurora, meanwhile, had been caught in the ice. The ship had sailed from Cape Evans on 17 February 1915, intending to return to New Zealand and come back the following summer with additional supplies. But the pack ice in McMurdo Sound had closed around her before she could reach open water. She drifted with the ice, trapped, as the autumn darkness descended. On 7 May 1915, a gale struck. The wind shifted the pack, and the ice around the ship began to move. The Aurora was wrenched from her moorings—carried away from the shore with most of her stores still aboard. The ten men who had been left on shore watched her go. They could see her masts above the ice for days, then weeks, then months. She was drifting north, away from them, and they could do nothing to stop her.

The shore party now faced a calculus of survival. They had the hut at Cape Evans, with its stores of food and fuel. They had the equipment that had been landed before the Aurora’s departure. But they lacked the supplies that had remained aboard the ship—critical stores of clothing, sledging rations, and equipment. They had no way to communicate with the outside world. They had no way to know whether the Aurora would survive or whether rescue would ever come. They were alone.

Mackintosh made his decision. The depot-laying would continue. The plan called for a chain of depots from Hut Point to the base of the Beardmore Glacier, a distance of nearly four hundred miles across the Barrier. These would be stocked with food and fuel, placed at intervals along the route that Shackleton’s party would take when they crossed from the Weddell Sea. The work had to be completed before the winter of 1916, when Shackleton was expected to arrive. What Mackintosh did not know was that Shackleton had never reached the continent, that the Endurance had been beset in the ice before she could even reach her landing site, that the crossing was impossible. He only knew that he had a duty.

The second season of depot-laying began in October 1915. The ten men were divided into two parties. Mackintosh would lead one group, and Ernest Joyce, the expedition’s veteran dog-driver and a veteran of both Scott’s and Shackleton’s earlier expeditions, would lead the other. Joyce had argued against the timing. He knew the Barrier in winter. He knew what the cold could do. But Mackintosh insisted. The depots had to be laid.

The journey south was a descent into cold that no human should endure. The temperatures on the Barrier in early spring can fall below minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. The wind strips the flesh. The air freezes the moisture in the lungs. The men walked in a landscape of white on white, where the horizon vanished into the sky and the ground beneath their feet was indistinguishable from the air around them. They navigated by compass and by dead reckoning, counting their paces, estimating their positions. Joyce kept a diary. He recorded the temperatures, the distances, the condition of the dogs. He recorded the suffering.

The depot at 80°S was laid on 20 November 1915. The depot at 81°S followed on 8 December. The depot at 82°S on 18 December. Each depot was a pile of bamboo poles and tins, a marker in the emptiness, a promise that someone might come. The men left caches of food and fuel, carefully sealed against the cold. They wrote notes for Shackleton’s party, explaining what they had done and where they had placed the supplies. They did not know that no one would ever use them.

The return journey was worse than the outward. The men were exhausted. Their rations were running low. The dogs were dying. Joyce’s diary recorded the daily struggle: the cold, the hunger, the fear. On 25 January 1916, the party reached the depot at 82°S and turned north. They had laid the final depot at 83°S, at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. The job was done. But the cost was already becoming clear.

Arnold Spencer-Smith, the expedition’s chaplain and photographer, had been struggling for weeks. His legs were swollen. His heart was failing. He could no longer pull his weight on the sledge. The men took turns dragging him on a makeshift sled. Joyce wrote in his diary that Spencer-Smith was very bad and that they were anxious about him. They pushed north, trying to reach the safety of Hut Point before it was too late.

Spencer-Smith died on 9 March 1916. He was thirty-three years old. The party had reached the depot at 82°S when he collapsed. Joyce and the others tried to revive him, but he was gone. They buried him in the ice, marking the grave with a bamboo pole and a cross made from sledge runners. They wrote his name on a piece of board and left it standing in the snow. Then they continued north.

Mackintosh was also failing. His eyes, damaged by snow blindness during the first season, had never fully recovered. His legs were swollen with frostbite. He could barely walk. Joyce took command of the party and pressed on. They reached Hut Point on 16 March 1916, after 122 days on the Barrier. They had laid every depot. They had completed their mission. But they were broken.

The ordeal was not over. The hut at Hut Point was a shelter, but it was not safe. The ice in McMurdo Sound was breaking up, and the men could not cross to Cape Evans, where the main base and its supplies were located. They were trapped on the wrong side of the sound. Mackintosh, impatient and restless, decided to attempt the crossing on the ice. Joyce argued against it. The ice was unstable. The weather was unpredictable. But Mackintosh insisted. On 8 May 1916, he set out across the sound with Victor Hayward, one of the expedition’s youngest members. They were never seen again.

Joyce and the remaining men waited. They searched the shoreline for days. They climbed the hills above Hut Point and scanned the ice for any sign of movement. They found nothing. The ice had opened, and Mackintosh and Hayward had vanished into the water. The diary of Ernest Joyce recorded the loss in stark terms: the Boss and Hayward were gone. They had searched everywhere but could find no trace of them. They must have gone through the ice.

The remaining men—Joyce, Richard Richards, Ernest Wild, and John Gaze—returned to Cape Evans when the ice finally allowed a crossing. They spent the winter of 1916 in the hut, surviving on seal meat and whatever stores had been left behind. Of Shackleton’s rescue of the Endurance men they knew nothing; of how the world had received their story they knew nothing; whether anyone would come for them they could not know.

The Aurora, meanwhile, had survived. After being torn from its moorings in May 1915, the ship had drifted with the pack ice for nine months. The crew had kept her alive, pumping water from her holds and repairing the damage that the ice inflicted. The rudder had been broken, and the propeller damaged. The ship was a floating wreck, but she held together. In February 1916, she broke free of the ice and limped northward. The captain, John King Davis, had taken command after the Aurora’s original master had been lost in the ice. Davis brought the ship to Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in April 1916. The crew were exhausted, but they were alive.

News of the Aurora’s arrival reached London in May 1916. The Admiralty and the Royal Geographical Society learned that the Ross Sea party had been stranded. They learned that Mackintosh and his men had been left on shore with no supplies and no ship. They did not know whether the men were alive. They did not know that three of them were already dead. The officials in London began to plan a rescue.

Shackleton, meanwhile, was fighting his own battle. He had reached South Georgia in May 1916 after the voyage of the James Caird. He had crossed the island’s mountains to reach the whaling station at Stromness. He had sent a boat to rescue the three men on the other side of South Georgia. He had tried three times to reach Elephant Island, where the rest of his men were waiting. Each attempt had been turned back by the ice. He had appealed to the Chilean government for help. He had been offered the use of a small steamer, the Yelcho. In August 1916, he had finally reached Elephant Island and rescued the twenty-two men who had been waiting there for four and a half months. He had brought them home without loss of life.

But the Ross Sea party was still missing. Shackleton knew that he had to go back. The men on the other side of the continent were his responsibility. They had been sent to lay depots for his crossing. They were waiting for him. He could not leave them there.

The rescue of the Ross Sea party would require another ship, another voyage, another confrontation with the Antarctic ice. Shackleton began organizing the effort within weeks of his return to civilization. He worked with the governments of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. He secured the use of the Aurora, which had been repaired and refitted in New Zealand. The ship would sail south in December 1916, under the command of John King Davis. Shackleton would accompany her, but he would not be in command. The Admiralty and the Australian government had insisted on that. They had lost confidence in his judgment.

The Aurora left New Zealand on 20 December 1916. She carried supplies for a year and a crew of experienced ice navigators. She reached the edge of the Ross Sea pack in early January 1917. The ice was heavy, but the ship pressed southward. On 10 January 1917, she broke through into open water near McMurdo Sound. The men on shore saw her masts on the horizon. They did not know whether she was friend or enemy—a whaler, perhaps, or a ship from another expedition. They watched as she approached. When they saw the British flag, they knew.

The reunion at Cape Evans was a moment of terrible clarity. Shackleton stepped ashore and met the survivors of the Ross Sea party. He learned what they had done. He learned that they had laid every depot, exactly as planned. He learned that Spencer-Smith had died on the Barrier, that Mackintosh and Hayward had vanished through the ice, that three men were gone. He learned that the survivors had endured months of starvation and suffering, waiting for a rescue that they did not believe would come. He learned that they had never known the truth: that the crossing was impossible, that the Endurance had never landed, that their work had been for nothing.

Joyce and the others did not blame Shackleton. They understood that he had not known. They understood that the plan had been broken by the ice, not by design. They had done their duty. They had laid the depots. They had survived. The fact that the depots were never used did not diminish the accomplishment. The fact that three men had died did not make the sacrifice meaningless. The Ross Sea party had performed an act of loyalty in the face of a voided purpose. They had walked hundreds of miles across the Barrier in temperatures that should have killed them. They had placed food and fuel in positions that no one would ever visit. They had done it because they had been told to do it. They had done it because they believed that someone was coming.

Shackleton eventually led his men to safety, but the transcontinental march did not take place and the Ross Sea party’s depots were not required. The Ross Sea party remained stranded until January 1917, when Aurora, which had been repaired and refitted in New Zealand, returned to rescue them. The survivors—seven men out of the original ten—boarded the ship and left Antarctica. They carried with them the bodies of their dead comrades, recovered from the ice where they had been buried. They carried the diaries and records of the expedition. They carried the knowledge of what they had done.

The Aurora sailed north on 17 January 1917. The continent receded behind her, a white line on the horizon, a blank page on which so much had been written and erased. The men on board had survived; they had completed their mission; they had lost three of their number to the ice. How the world would receive them they did not yet know—whether their sacrifice would be honored or questioned, whether their story would become a footnote to the greater saga of the Endurance: a parallel tragedy running alongside the main narrative, invisible and unknown until its survivors emerged to tell it.

The cost of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition had been high. On the Weddell Sea side, twenty-eight men had survived the loss of their ship, months on the ice, and an open-boat voyage of eight hundred miles. On the Ross Sea side, three men had died and seven had survived. The grand design of a continental crossing had fractured into two separate ordeals, each marked by isolation and grim endurance. The men had been tested by an environment that allowed no margin for error, where every decision carried the weight of life or death. They had survived not because of brilliant decisions, but because of discipline, loyalty, and the stubborn refusal to accept defeat.

The ship of men—the expedition as a social vessel—had held together even after the physical ships had been lost. The Weddell Sea party had maintained its cohesion through months of drifting ice, through the open-boat voyage, through the long wait on Elephant Island. The Ross Sea party had maintained its cohesion through the brutal sledge journeys, through the loss of their ship, through the death of their comrades. The bonds forged in the ice had persisted beyond the expedition itself. The men had trusted each other with their lives. They had kept faith with a plan that had become meaningless. They had endured.

The Aurora reached New Zealand in February 1917. The survivors disembarked and began the long process of returning to civilization. They would face inquiries and investigations. They would have to explain what had happened, why the depots had been laid, why three men had died for a crossing that never took place. The authorities in London would want answers. The families of the dead would want explanations. The public would want heroes.

Shackleton stood on the dock at Wellington and looked at the men he had rescued. He had brought home the Weddell Sea party without loss. He had rescued the survivors of the Ross Sea party. But three men were still on the ice—Mackintosh, Hayward, and Spencer-Smith, buried in the frozen wasteland that had claimed them. Their bodies would remain there forever, preserved in the cold, monuments to a plan that had failed. The depots they had laid would remain there too, slowly buried by snow, waiting for travelers who would never come.

The expedition was over. The reckoning was about to begin.