JAMES CAIRD SOCIETY SHACKLETON NEWS

CENTENARY OF THE NIMROD EXPEDITION

Following his return from thw Dicovery expedition in 1904 and several years as Secretary to the Royal Scottish Geographical Association in Edinburgh, Ernest Shackleton purchased the Nimrod - an old Scottish sealer which had been used in Newfoundland - on a trip to Norway. She was an old ship, almost the same age as Shackleton himself, built in Dundee some 40 years earlier. He paid an initial £5,000 for her, and spent a further £7,000 in refitting her for the "British Antarctic Expedition". The Captain of the Nimrod was to be Rupert England; and the First Mate, John King Davis. He relied heavily on private sponsorship, bank loans and a large number of individual creditors.

Professor Douglas Mawson, who would later lead his own Antarctic Expedition, joined the ship in Australia, and the Australian government offered a further grant of £5,000 and the New Zealand government, £1,000. In return, it was understood that the Nimrod would undertake oceanographic work between Australia and Antarctica. Nimrod also carried two men recommended to Shackleton by his friend William Bruce, who had commanded the recent expedition aboard the Scotia (1902-4): James Murray was a biologist from Glasgow; and Alistair Forbes Mackay signed on as the Nimrod's second doctor/surgeon.

On July 30, 1907, the Nimrod sailed from London's East India Docks for Torquay. Having diverted back to Cowes for inspection by His Majesty King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, the Prince of Wales (later George V), Princess Victoria, (later Edward VIII) Prince Edward and the Duke of Connaught on Sunday 4 August, the Nimrod sailed from Torquay on 7 August 1907. After calls at the isle of St. Vincent and Cape Town, she proceeded to Australia and New Zealand. Her final port was Lyttelton, in South Island. Thereafter, for five months she was escorted under tow by another ship, the coal-fired Koonya, supplied by the New Zealand Government, which left Nimrod at 4 p.m. on 1 January 1908 as she entered the ice. Conditions proved harsh and around 20 of the party, notably Marshall, Mawson and Pristley, were appallingly seasick.

The Nimrod skirted the Barrier until finally on 25 January Shackleton gave up all hope of reaching his planned destination, King Edward VII Land. The pack-ice was too thick as well as being interspersed with giant icebergs. It seemed impossible to reach land, and the shortness of coal, the leaky condition of the ship, and the absolute necessity of landing all the stores and putting up the hut before the vessel left them made the situation extremely anxious for Shackleton.

Given the heavy and unstable pack ice affecting Barrier Inlet and also the Bay of Whales, and fearing becoming trapped in the ice with limited coal supplies and a leaking ship, Shackleton could see no alternative to steering west towards McMurdo Sound, where Scott had also been based, thus breaking a written agreement he had recently made with Scott and earning Scott's extreme displeasure, causing a temporary breach between the two men. The Nimrod stayed some sixteen miles offshore: Shackleton established his base not at 'Hut Point' but on Cape Royds, on Ross Island, where Shackleton's hut (now on the list of the World Monuments Watch's 'hundred most endangered sites') was erected, some 20 miles north of Scott's hut. Within a month (the start of February 1908)it was possible to unload supplies as the sea ice receded. The ponies and a motor car were unloaded, although the horses were in very poor shape and one, "Nimrod", had to be shot. The Nimrod left the landing party and headed back towards New Zealand on 22 February.

The party proceeded to winter over in preparation for the South Pole attempt the following Antarctic summer (January-March 09). Scientific experiments and observations were begun, and a six-man party Including Mawson) succeeded in the first ascent of the nearby Mount Erebus, the active volcano on Ross Island rising to over 13,000 feet (4,023 metres), and measuring the crater before descendeing rapidly by sliding down the 5000 feet in four hours). The others pursued their special interests: Adams wound the chronometers, checked instruments and did other meteorological work; Marshall, the surgeon, tended to medical needs and exercised the ponies; Wild, the storekeeper, issued food to the cook, opened the cases of tinned food and dug the meat out of the snowdrifts (penguin, seal or mutton); Joyce fed the dogs and trained them for sledge-pulling; David spent time on geological studies; Priestley and Murray worked at dredging; Mawson studied the Aurora Australis, ice structures and measured atmospheric electricity. (for a fuller version of their activities, see the useful account at www.south-pole.com, from which some of these details are derived).

Attention now focused on the South Pole. The main plan was that four men, Shackleton, Adams, Marshall and Wild, would make for the South Pole. Because of poor success with dogs during Scott's 1901–1904 expedition, Shackleton arranged to use Manchurian ponies for transport. In advance of the main group a second party consisting of Edgeworth David accompanied by Mawson and Mackay, would set out on the somewhat shorter journey to reach the Southern Magnetic Pole, a round trip of 1,260 miles. These three men left on 25 September 1908 and despite considerable privations achieved the Magnetic Pole, the first men ever to do so, by 15/16 January 1909.

Shackleton and his three comrades left in bright sunshine a month later, on 29 October 1908, equipped with ponies. Their route took them up a vast glacier, subsequently named after their sponsor, the Greenwich-born Scottish ship builder William Beardmore (1856-1936), later a pioneer in armaments manufacture during the First World War. (Beardmore's Arrol-Johnston company also supplied the car used by the expedition). However although they took food for 91 days (3 months), rations on the journey were meagre and the four men soon became hungry. On 5 November Wild, Adams, Marshall and the pony "Grisi" were all rescued from crevasses (Marshall twice). Three days later Marshall and Wild pitched their tent right next to an unseen crevasse. The next day another pony slipped into an abyss and was narrowly saved from death. They shot "Chinaman", the weakest pony, on 21 November 21; part was eaten, part preserved in crucial supply depots for the return. Adams, unable to sleep for days from a toothache, let Dr. Marshall extract it without the use of tooth-pulling equipment. On 26 November 1908 they passed the previous 'Furthest South' point achieved by Scott, Shackleton and Wilson in 1902.In early December two more ponies were shot. Shackleton, with his soft heart for animals, believed he heard the last pony, "Socks", whinnying "all night for his lost companions. On 7 December he too was lost in a crevasse, and the four began man-hauling. They were by now eating pony maize.

It was by now Christmas and Shackleton records that the four of them enjoyed a memorable Christmas celebration at 9,500 ft and still 250 miles from the Pole, with 'plum pudding, brandy, cigars and a spoonful of creme de menthe.' By two days later they had arrived at the Polar Plateau, some 10,000 feet up, with blizzards blasting them, and suffering from a lack of food (just 3 weeks' supply of biscuits) and frostbite. Shackleton was aware of their limited time and the men's worsening physical state. They battled southwards into the wind; blizzards and white-outs sometimes kept them in their sleeping bags all day. On 30 December they made just four miles in a blizzard.

By 2 January, 1909, Shackleton was near the breaking point. "I cannot think of failure yet. I must look at the matter sensibly and consider the lives of those who are with me...man can only do his best..." Two days later he wrote, "The end is in sight. We can only go for three more days at the most, for we are weakening rapidly". They fought through a blizzard on 4, 5 and 6 January. On 7 January, only 100 miles from the pole, a howling blizzard kept them in their sleeping bags all day. It was the same next day. The end of their southern journey began at 4 am on January 9. They left the sledge, tent and food at the camp and took only the Union Jack, a brass cylinder containing stamps and documents to mark their farthest south, camera, glasses and a compass.

Finally at 9 a.m. on 9 January they reached their Furthest South point - 88°23'S, 162°E, just 97 miles from the South Pole. Once a flag had been planted and the appropriate photographs had been taken, the four men turned and headed for home. It was a tough and brave decision by Shackleton to forsake the prize and turn about when so awesomely close to their goal. I thought you'd think, my dear, he wrote to his wife Emily, "that a live donkey is better than a dead lion." She agreed. On the return journey with the wind behind them and a sail erected they once (on 19 January) made 29 miles in a single day. By the morning of 26 January they had only tea, cocoa and a little pony maize left. But the carefully laid depots supplied them with a wealth of food and horsemeat. That same day they travelled 16 miles over "the worst surfaces and most dangerous crevasses we have ever encountered". On 27 February 27 Shackleton decided to leave Marshall, who was suffering badly from dysentery, and Adams behind while he and Wild took off for Hut Point. The two reached Hut Point on 28 February just in time to catch the Nimrod, still sheltering close by, but on the very point of sailing (a message warned them it had intended to sail on 26th). A fire signal summoned the boat and the pair were safely aboard by 11 a.m. At two in the afternoon Shackleton led a rescue party to recover Marshall and Adams. At 1 a.m. on March 4, all four of the Southern Party were at last safe on board the Nimrod.

As the Nimrod made its way past Cape Royds, Shackleton wrote: "We all turned out to give three cheers and to take a last look at the place where we had spent so many happy days. The hut was not exactly a palatial residence...but, on the other hand it had been our home for a year that would always live in our memories...We watched the little hut fade away in the distance with feelings almost of sadness, and there were few men aboard who did not cherish a hope that some day they would once more live strenuous days under the shadow of mighty Erebus".

While the Nimrod expedition did not make it to the pole, largely because it was defeated by the appalling weather and blizzards which allowed only pitifully slow progress, played havoc with their schedule and dangerously used up their rations, Shackleton, Adams, Marshall, and Wild covered (as Shackleton recorded) precisely 1,755 miles and 209 yards, and were the first humans to traverse the Trans-Antarctic mountain range and set foot on the South Polar Plateau. They also located and pioneered the Beardmore Glacier route into the interior.

Upon his return to the United Kingdom in summer 1909 Shackleton was hailed as a hero and was knighted by the king. A government grant helped defray some of the large outstanding costs of the expedition.

The Nimrod party consisted of:

Sir Ernest Shackleton: Expedition Leader
Jameson Boyd Adams: Expdition Second in Command, Meteorologist (also on Furthest South)
Lt Rupert England, RHR: Ship's Master
John K Davis: First Officer
Aeneas Lionel Acton Mackintosh: Second Officer (also captained Aurora)
Alfred Cheetham: Third Officer and Boatswain (also on Endurance)
Henry J L Dunlop: Chief Engineer
Edgeworth David: Director of Scientific Staff, Geologist
Sir Philip Lee Brocklehurst: Assistant Geologist, i/c Sea Current Observations
Prof. Douglas Mawson: Physicist
James Murray: Biologist
Raymond E Priestley: Geologist
Dr. Alistair Forbes Mackay: Assistant Surgeon
Dr. William Arthur Rupert Michell: Surgeon
Dr. Eric Stewart Marshall: Surgeon, Cartographer (on Furthest South)
George Edward Marston: Official Artist (also on Endurance)
Bernard Day: Electrician and Motor Mechanic
Ernest Joyce: Storeman, Dogs, Sledges, Zoological Collections
Frank Wild: i/c Provisions (also Deputy Leader on Endurance)
William C Roberts: Ship's Cook
Bertram Armitage