So Shackleton and his men and the ponies pulled a sledge across the ice you see below us now, much thicker then of course, and uniform, and flat. But we have been flying at a hundred kilometers an hour now for nearly an hour, and there is no end in sight; even the tall Transantarctics are still under the horizon ahead of us, and will not appear for a couple hours more. It took those men weeks to haul their sledges across this space below us, as you can imagine.
Then when they made their landfall they discovered the Beardmore Glacier, the Great Glacier as they first called it so much more finely, pouring out of the mountains for as far uphill as they could see. Up the Great Glacier the four men hauled their sledge, going tremendously better than Scott and Wilson and Shackleton had gone in 1902.
But they were cutting every aspect of things right to the bone. And up on the high polar plateau they began to break down. They were starving to the point of illness, and to save weight they had left behind a great deal of their clothes, so that they were wearing only long underwear, overpants, sweaters, and jackets; this left them so cold that when Marshall the doctor tried to take their temperatures, no one but him registered higher than the thermometer’s minimum of 94.2 Fahrenheit. They were cold!
Yet they hauled their sledge over the polar cap until they were only one more week’s walk away from the South Pole. After two months of hauling, and two years of preparation, only a week more to go.
But they had run too low on food. The amount they had been able to haul was not enough to sustain them at the pace they were keeping. They fell short by about five percent of what they needed. If they had started from the Bay of Whales; if they had learned to ski; who knows. But not on this trip.
Shackleton recognized this, up there on the polar cap; he did the calculations, and saw clearly what they meant. And yet he was wild for the Pole, he did not want to turn back. He knew Scott would get the next chance, with the route found, and a large group of men to make the try. He knew this would be his only chance.
But it became clear they could not reach the Pole and survive. As a consolation, in the last week Shackleton fixed on reaching to within a hundred miles of the Pole. The clever Marshall did what he had to as navigator to convince Shackleton that they had done this. But still, in the end it was Shackleton who decided to turn back, when he was ninety-seven miles away. His men’s lives were in his hands, as his life had been in Scott’s six years before. In the tent he wrote in his diary “I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me.”
And so they turned back. They took a final day trip to get as far south as they could before the return, then turned back. What latitude did they reach? I don’t remember.
But for sure the return journey was a close enough thing to prove that Shackleton had needed to turn back. A half-dozen times on that return they missed death by a hair, and in the end Wild and Shackleton had to make a dash for the Discovery Hut and a hasty return to save Marshall and Adams, an effort that lasted for Shackleton some hundred consecutive hours, this after suffering a complete collapse just two weeks before at the upper end of the Great Glacier. Marshall had saved them during that collapse, and Adams and Wild had carried on throughout, complaining vociferously in their coded diaries about all the others, but persisting, enduring all—growl and go, grin and bear it. And on one of their last desperate nights, as Huntford points out to us, the failing Wild wrote in his diary that Shackleton had that morning “privately forced upon me his one breakfast biscuit, and would have given me another tonight had I allowed him. I do not suppose that anyone else in the world can thoroughly realise how much generosity and sympathy was shown by this: I DO by GOD I shall never forget it. Thousands of pounds would not have bought that one biscuit.” And every word of the entry was underlined.
And in the end they lived. But they could not have added two more weeks to their trip, no, not two more days, not two hours! It was cut very fine indeed.
Shackleton returned to England a hero. Some people made note of the presence of mind and sense of values involved in turning back when so close to one’s goal, and they commended the shen-yun of such an act. Most applauded the achievement itself, of ascending the polar ice plateau and getting so far south. At that time it was the closest anyone had been to either of the Poles. As for Shackleton himself, when he got home he said to his wife, “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” And she agreed.
Later, in his own final tent, it is possible that Scott reversed this formulation, and decided that it was better to be a dead lion than a live donkey. Certainly the world at large often seems to think so. Of course it is impossible to say for sure if Scott ever thought anything like this. The British mind is an inscrutable thing.
black white
rock ice
The Transantarctic Range is unique—not in its rock, which is the same sort of igneous array found in other mountains—but in its ice. In effect the entire range serves as a dam or a dike, holding back the polar cap. Flying over the range X could see this just as clearly as if looking down at a diorama designed to illustrate the situation. It was a Dutchman’s nightmare: against the south side of the range pressed a sea of white ice, submerging the range nearly to its full height; directly on the other side of the range lay the Ross Sea, ten thousand feet lower; and at every dip in the range the ice was pouring down to the sea, ripping away rock like water tearing open breaks in a levee, until some of the gaps in the range were huge floods of ice, rivers ten and twenty and thirty miles wide. The half-dozen biggest glaciers in the world were all down there one after the next, slicing through the shaved black rock walls and spires that remained above the flood. And as they flew farther south, X saw that sections of the range in the distance were entirely submerged, the ice pouring over and down in a smooth white drop that extended for scores of miles, the dike entirely overwhelmed. Ice Planet at its iciest.
Their little Twin Otter flew into the gap torn by one of the great ice rivers, and flew up it. This one was the Shackleton Glacier—not as big as the Byrd or the Beardmore or the Nimrod, but very substantial nevertheless. One of the dozen largest glaciers on Earth, and no doubt it would have torn its channel even wider and rivalled the Byrd and the Beardmore for size, were it not for the presence of a rock island blocking the head of the glacier, like a cork sucked into place by the flow and nearly plugging it entirely.
This rock island was Roberts Massif. As they flew over it X looked out his little side window, fascinated by the rusty bumpy wasteland, a pocked humpty-dumpty shatter of dolerite, dominated by a single transverse ridge that stood above the scraped red rock and smooth bluish ice surrounding it. The massif was about twenty kilometers wide and twenty kilometers long, and on its polar side the ice came rolling in like a high tide, creating several ice bays in the shoreline.
As their plane descended the smooth curves of the ice ravished X’s eye, as did its bluish tint, which glowed as if the sky’s color had seeped into the white ice and stained it all through. And as the plane landed on a narrow snowplowed airstrip like a long strip of carpet, he suddenly felt happy, for the first time in a long time. Aesthetics as ethics; that was X’s new motto. Whatever was beautiful had to be good.
From the airstrip the plane taxied bumpily toward an ice bay indenting the shore of the massif, under a fluted red-and-white peak named Fluted Peak. One side of the bay sported a small dock, standing on squat pylons. On the rock shore above this dock clustered a small settlement of solar habitats, like metallic-blue mobile homes—less than a dozen buildings all told. The settlement was no bigger than some of the beaker outposts X had helped to open during Winfly, which was a comfort to him. Surely such a small operation could not be doing any great harm.