Chasing Shackleton Read online

  Elizabeth, the boys, and I were by now house-sitting our friends Tamsin and Tom’s farmhouse in England’s West Country. I’m not sure what I had in mind, but I somehow thought it would be a hideaway where we could blend time as a family with my work on planning the expedition. In reality the two blended like oil and water. I’d commandeered the home office, above the old barn and away from the main house, as expedition HQ. It was a glorious spot but one where I’d already had some of my most stressful days, staring out beyond the old Tudor farmhouse to the rolling green hills of Gloucestershire. I would switch the phone off in the early hours of the morning with e-mails and messages still coming in from all over the world and reluctantly on again five hours later to see what the night had brought with it.

  The Alexandra Shackleton needed to be finished and on board Polar Pioneer in Gdynia, Poland, by early September for her departure on the 20th. Our tall ship support vessel was due to start her journey south about a week later. Initially I had been charmed by the romance of using the tall ship, but for the past few months alarm bells had been ringing loudly for me, and for many serious reasons. The decision to make no changes to her schedule of traditional overseas sailing races in the immediate lead-up to her proposed departure date for Antarctica had left her way behind schedule and was indicative of how little her management appreciated the enormity of the task ahead.

  To make matters worse, her skipper and his number two quit unexpectedly. There was also disagreement about fuel requirements and how to refuel safely, escalating costs, ambiguity as to how many berths were available for us to sell, and doubts over the adequacy of the clothing on board for Antarctic conditions. Having independently recruited and paid for an ice pilot and an expedition team leader, I also had to ask my good friend and polar logistics expert Howard Whelan to help the tall ship’s management sort out various things I thought they should have been on top of. I couldn’t help but feel they were becoming a burden I could ill afford spending time or money on. But I was committed, having invested a lot of my own money in backing their involvement. Still, I suspected that as good as they were at what they normally did, they weren’t up to this challenge physically or organizationally, despite their assurances to the contrary. I had to focus on other things, though, so I gave them a schedule of tasks that needed completion before further payments would be made and turned my attentions to getting the Alexandra Shackleton to Poland for her journey south.

  Men of the sea: Dr. Robert Goodhart (left) and Philip Rose-Taylor.

  Courtesy of Scott Irvine

  Up in expedition HQ above the barn, I received a disturbing e-mail from Polar Pioneer: the frame supplied to transport the Alexandra Shackleton south on board Polar Pioneer was too big for the space set aside for her and needed to be reduced in size or she couldn’t go. I swore loudly. Seb had used up some favors and $4,000 of hard-won expedition funds to get the easy-to-disassemble, color-coded frame made at the last minute to specific dimensions, and now it would need to be chopped up and adjusted when it arrived in Poland.

  A few days earlier, I’d received a message asking when our expedition representatives would arrive in Poland to supervise the unloading and reloading of the Alexandra Shackleton onto the ship. What expedition representatives? Most of the team as it currently stood was based in Australia and working on funding, legal contracts, or selling berths aboard our support boat. Meanwhile, Howard and I were grappling with the logistics of fuel placement for the support ship, while Seb and the volunteers in Weymouth were working around the clock on finalizing fittings on the Alexandra Shackleton. I also had my own very long list of face-to-face meetings around the UK. Because the price tag for getting the boat to Poland on a flatbed truck was comparable to hiring a London cab to tow her there, I’d foolishly assumed the drivers could at least coordinate offloading her quayside from their truck and onto the ship without the need for us to be there. Apparently not.

  We needed help, and luckily a supporter, Dr. Robert Goodhart, and Philip Rose-Taylor, a traditional sailmaker, were able to go in our stead. Two more trustworthy and capable people you’d be hard pressed to find, and, given the twinkle in Philip’s eye as he left, I got the impression they loved the idea of a road trip to Europe. I just hoped these two old seadogs wouldn’t be reprising some of the stuff Philip used to get up to in his youth traveling the world’s oceans.

  The next day we received an e-mail from Polar Pioneer asking for paperwork to show we had applied the biological cleaning agent Virkon to the Alexandra Shackleton in order to eliminate any nasties that might contaminate Antarctica. Seb immediately arranged this, making good use of his army of volunteers who were applying finishing touches to the boat at the British Navy’s historic dockyard in Portsmouth following our sea trials a few weeks earlier. Philip and Robert, meanwhile, were armed with the appropriate documentation to take to Poland, along with a letter I’d been asked to provide guaranteeing that the Alexandra Shackleton would be offloaded at Chile’s Antarctic base, Eduardo Frei, on King George Island, although this had not yet been formally authorized. In the absence of something official from the Chilean authorities, I provided a confirmation document on expedition letterhead, knowing I had a month up my sleeve to get this signed off. At least I had the assurances of our fixer Alejo, who worked at the Frei base, that all would be well and that he would be there to take delivery of our boat. This, it turned out later, meant very little.

  But we were heading in the right direction. Earlier we’d been told the boat was going to be too big and heavy for the Polar Pioneer. The exact dimensions had been provided to the ship’s owners on a manifest from Seb indicating that the Alexandra Shackleton was 2.2 meters wide, not the 2.1 meters I’d told them previously. A few days prior, the Polish government had decided to load an additional shipping container, so space on the 1,000-tonne ship was now down to centimeters. I knew the slipup was mine. I hadn’t realized how tight on space and weight they were on board. Luckily Polar Pioneer’s crane could cope with the extra weight, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered and I didn’t want to test the friendship. Aurora and the crew of Polar Pioneer were doing us a huge favor transporting the Alexandra Shackleton south. Without them we’d be sunk before we got in the water.

  Next Robert and Philip rang to say the captain of Polar Pioneer had asked to see our permits before setting sail the next morning. I broke into a cold sweat; it was another potential deal breaker. We needed five permits: a Section 3 Expedition Permit and Section 5 Ship Permit under the UK Antarctic Act, and three permits from the South Georgian authorities for ship activity, landing on South Georgia, and crossing it. All of these were still several months away. I explained to Polar Pioneer’s captain that we were applying for the permits and that they were all in hand but not yet finalized. The fact that he saw we were embarked on the process and speaking to the right people in accordance with the right laws put his mind at ease, but he would have been justified in refusing to let the Alexandra Shackleton on board. Perhaps it was the enormity of what we were trying to accomplish and how difficult it was that got us across the line.

  I stared out of the barn window at the old farmhouse and could see Elizabeth and the boys in the kitchen eating without me, as had become the norm. I felt guilty that I was subjecting them to all this stress. Money had dried up and shaking the tin in the UK yielded little, so I had been eating into our mortgage for some time now, funding everything myself to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a month. I was being as transparent as I could about it to Elizabeth while trying not to burden her unduly, but she knew me well enough to see how stressful it had become. She could also see our declining bank balance online but chose to be supportive and trust me, for which I am eternally grateful.

  Loading the Alexandra Shackleton onto her mother ship, Polar Pioneer, for the 10,000-mile journey south from Gdynia, Poland.

  Courtesy of Rob Goodhart

  When we’d arrived at the farm, I’d insisted on our friend Tom telling me
what jobs needed doing around the place while he was away. Reluctantly he’d mentioned a large fallen tree that needed cutting up. At one point I went into the barn and looked at the modern chainsaw that could dispatch the tree in less than a day. But in the shadows lay a rusting, heavy, blunt ax. With gladiatorial flourish I took up the ax and used it over the course of several days to batter not only the tree but also my problems into submission. Some days the pile of logs I chopped was the only tangible evidence of having made any progress; it kept me going.

  I was getting tired of new problems presenting themselves each day. To (badly) paraphrase the Dalai Lama: “There are two types of problems: the ones you can overcome, in which case don’t worry, and the ones you can’t, in which case don’t worry.” I tested this philosophy to the limit most days.

  I needed a break and made plans to spend three days visiting my godchildren in Brussels. It was quite something to think we were about to board a train that would take us under the English Channel while 100 meters above us, at exactly the same time, the Alexandra Shackleton would be on a Channel ferry. I hadn’t planned it that way but that’s how the dates had fallen. And I was now looking forward to having no phone reception for the half-hour tunnel journey. Just minutes before I was due to drive our vehicle onto the train, my phone rang. It was Seb. “French customs won’t let the bloody boat onto the ferry and it’s boarding in fifteen minutes!” “Why the hell not?” I snapped. Apparently they needed final ownership details, including my UK National Insurance number, expedition bank account, and expedition company particulars. Sensing my frustration, Seb launched into a tirade about our cross-channel neighbors, beginning with our victory at Agincourt. I cut him short, knowing I had less than eight minutes before I lost phone reception. “Wait for my call and keep the line free.”

  I hung up, asked Elizabeth to drive, and jumped into the passenger seat, rummaging for my laptop, which was buried under kids’ toys and holiday bags. I found the bank account details and could for some unknown reason remember my UK National Insurance number even though I’d not used it for many years. It was 10 p.m. in Australia and with three minutes until boarding time, Ramona, my PA who had been helping me out on planning issues, was my only hope. Her Canadian burr reassuringly came down the phone line, but she said it would take a couple of minutes for her to fire up her laptop and find what I needed. Elizabeth drove onto the train but mercifully it remained motionless as Ramona quoted the necessary numbers and letters to me. I called Seb and gave him the information as the train set off, hanging up seconds before we entered the tunnel. We emerged half an hour later and I turned on my phone immediately. A text message popped up saying, “All fine.” It wasn’t really—it was incredibly stressful—but somehow I’d got used to it.

  When Polar Pioneer finally set sail with the Alexandra Shackleton on board, I was relieved beyond compare. Now I could turn my attentions to our support vessel. With just over a week to go before sailing south herself, she still needed to have an upgraded satellite communication system installed and her fire alarm system repaired, not to mention repairs to a big dent in her side obtained when a bow wave from a passing ferry caused her to break free of her moorings. Plus we still had to negotiate for 13,000 liters of diesel to be made available for her journey home from South Georgia and they had no space for the spare Zodiac I told them they needed (nor had they even purchased one). I was feeling very uneasy, but finally she left the UK bound for the Caribbean en route to Punta Arenas, Chile. Relations with her team had been strained for the past few months as we bickered over whether I was behind on payments to them or they were behind on delivering what was required in order to justify me paying them. Churchill famously said about the end of the Second World War, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” I for one felt as if I’d been in a war of attrition, and the end of the relationship was nigh.

  3

  WOODEN BOATS

  On the high seas: jib and mainsail up at sunset.

  Courtesy of Magnus O’Grady

  “They traveled in wooden boats but were iron men.”

  Anonymous

  The reincarnation: our replica boat, the Alexandra Shackleton, at Portland.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  The onboard camera showed the gravity-defying sight of bilge water eerily snaking up the wall as the boat turned through ninety degrees, the test mannequin’s neck slumping awkwardly to one side. Within seconds the same water was pooling on the ceiling and the mannequin was dramatically launched upward to join it. From our vantage point, we could see the little boat sitting improbably on her side until, ten degrees beyond vertical, she flipped suddenly onto her topside, her hull left sitting out of the water, glistening in the sun. Gunning its generator, the crane now pulled the Alexandra Shackleton back onto her side until her deck was not quite perpendicular to the water. In a split second she rolled back to normal-looking as a boat should.

  We stood watching the capsize test, our feet firmly planted on the quayside of Portland marina in March 2012. At least we now knew the boat could go beyond vertical on its side before capsizing and didn’t need to be quite vertical to roll back over from being fully inverted. In other words, she would reright more easily than she would be knocked down. That was, of course, until one realized that the waves that would help with this would find it difficult to gain purchase on the smooth, rounded hull once she was upside down. Plus the mast and sails would be vertical in the water, anchoring the boat into position. Having no keel was the issue, and capsize along with man overboard were the things we were most worried about. Basically, if the Alexandra Shackleton went over she would be very difficult to right. There would be no keel for a man in the water to grab on to, and even the combined weight of five men below deck would not be enough to do the job. In the meantime, any man exposed to the icy water would lose his ability to swim in as little as ten minutes, his muscles becoming paralyzed by the cold. Nature would have to be our savior with another big wave helping to right her, and that was down to luck.

  Ninety degrees from vertical during a capsize test; water improbably snakes up the right wall of the Alexandra Shackleton.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  These rerighting difficulties were because the Alexandra Shackleton, like the James Caird before her, was a whaler—a narrow, symmetrical boat with a prow and stern shaped identically, allowing it to be pulled in any direction by a harpooned whale. On such boats, the eight to ten men on board would then row the whale to shore or to a bigger whaling ship, the harpoon trace tied around the sternpost. It seemed fitting that the James Caird should take Shackleton’s men to South Georgia, the home of Antarctic whaling, like a homing pigeon returning to the roost.

  The James Caird was built in July 1914 by W. & J. Leslie, boatbuilders of Coldharbour Lane, near West India Docks in London. Commissioned by Frank Worsley, her skipper, and completed to his exact specifications, she was a double-ended whaler, with carvel planking of Baltic pine. This created a flush outer surface as opposed to clinker planking, where the planks overlap. Her stem and sternposts were English oak.

  However, she really only became the James Caird we know from Shackleton’s journey after the phenomenal efforts of Henry “Chippy” McNeish, carpenter on the Endurance and “a splendid shipwright.” Helped by others among the crew after Shackleton and his men took to the ice, McNeish raised her gunwales by some thirty-five centimeters, using wood salvaged from the Endurance’s by-then defunct motorboat and nails from the Endurance herself. Shackleton knew very early on that they would have to undertake a sea voyage at some point, so he had McNeish construct whalebacks at each end and fit a pump made by photographer Frank Hurley from the casing of the ship’s compass. It was something that would prove invaluable in the journey ahead.

  The same scene viewed by the team standing safely outside.

  Courtesy of Tim Jarvis

  Because the James Caird was lightly built
so as to remain “springy and buoyant” as specified by Worsley, Chippy McNeish knew he had to strengthen her spine to prevent the middle of the boat from bending up and down with the full force of the Southern Ocean, movement that could snap her in half and sink her. To do this he removed the main mast from one of the other lifeboats, the Dudley Docker, and bolted it to the keel of the James Caird to prevent her hull from “hogging and sagging” at sea. Revealing his concerns about the structural integrity of the whaler, McNeish wrote in his diary, “I am putting chafing battens on the bow of the James Caird to keep the young ice from cutting through as she is build of white pine which wont last long in the ice [sic].” All seams were caulked with lamp wick and “paid” with seal blood and artist’s oil paint donated by expedition artist George Marston. This was the first recorded use of artist’s paints as a form of caulk for boat seams.

  At Elephant Island, Alf Cheetham and Tim McCarthy created a deck over the boat by stretching canvas over a lattice frame made by McNeish from four sledge runners and packing-case lids nailed together. Worsley recalled how, “frozen like a board and caked with ice, the canvas was sewn, in painful circumstances” by the two men whom he admiringly described as “two cheery optimists.” The bow of the boat had the strongest and most watertight section of deck created by McNeish’s “whaleback,” which extended as far as the main mast. It was masterful work by the carpenter and regardless of his curmudgeonly nature, everyone knew what a fantastic job he had done and how indebted they were to him. Even those who found him most objectionable admitted he had worked “like a Trojan.”