South with Shackleton
One of the most famous people during the British Heroic Age of Polar Exploration
(1900 – 1917) was Ernest Shackleton. He took part in Scott’s expedition of 1902-4
but then led the Nimrod Expedition of 1907-9 and the famous Trans-Antarctic
Expedition of 1914-1917 when his ship, Endurance, was slowly crushed to pieces by
pack ice, leaving his team stranded on ice floes far from any vestige of civilisation or
hope of rescue. Their subsequent exploits and final escape with no loss of life made
Shackleton and his team the stuff of twentieth century legend. What is not so well
known today, however, is the part that people from Hull play in all stages of the
Shackleton polar story.
Ernest Shackleton was born in 1874. He did not do too well at school and went to
sea at the age of 16 as an apprentice on a square rigged sailing ship, the Hoghton
Tower. By the age of twenty he had voyaged to most parts of the world and was well
on the way to making a most skilled seafarer. During the 1890s he passed a series
of exams, becoming a First Mate in 1896 and in 1898 was certified as a Master
Mariner which allowed him to command British merchant ships. At the outbreak of
the Boer War in South Africa in 1899 he transferred to the troopship Tintagel Castle
where he struck up a friendship with Cedric Longstaff, a Hull-born soldier who was
travelling with his regiment to South Africa. Cedric’s father was Llewellyn Longstaff
an industrialist and philanthropist, owner of the Hull-based paint manufacturer,
Blundell Spence, who was the main financial backer to the British Antarctic
Expedition to be led by Captain Scott.
Afterwards, Shackleton was able to use his friendship with Cedric to obtain an
interview with Llewellyn with the intention of trying to get a place on the expedition.
Longstaff senior was certainly impressed by Shackleton and in turn used his
influence to ensure Shackleton got a berth on the expedition. Shackleton played an
important part in the first year of Scott’s expedition but was dogged by ill health and
was sent home early by Scott on the relief ship Morning on medical grounds.
Shackleton was mortified at what he perceived as a personal failure and determined
to make amends by mounting another expedition. He was relentless in pursuit of this
end and eventually managed to obtain sufficient backing and support to mount the
Nimrod expedition which returned to the Antarctic in 1907. When this expedition
sailed, at least three of the Nimrod’s crew were from Hull including the captain,
Lieutenant Rupert G. England, who had previously been second in command to
Captain Colbeck on the vessel Morning which been sent as relief to Scott’s
Discovery. Two other Hull crew members were A.E. Harbord, auxiliary second
officer, and Alfred Cheetham, third officer and Boatswain. Shackleton had got to
know Cheetham well when he had sailed back on the Morning to New Zealand from
Scott’s expedition.
The Nimrod initially sailed to Lyttelton in New Zealand and then set off for Antarctica
on the 1st January 1908, being towed for the 1,650 miles to the edge of the ice by the
Koonya in order to conserve coal. The ship found it extremely difficult to make its
way through the packed ice but Shackleton eventually established a winter base in
the McMurdo Sound. However, Captain England and Shackleton did not always see
eye to eye on the voyage out and England relinquished the captaincy after dropping
off the expedition and returning the Nimrod to New Zealand for the winter season.
Meanwhile, after wintering at Cape Royds, Shackleton and three other expedition
members set a new record for the furthest point south then reached, only ninety
seven miles from the Pole. They were also the first people to set foot on the South
Polar Plateau. The expedition also made the first ascent of Mount Erebus and three
of the team made a journey to successfully find the approximate location of the
South Magnetic Pole.
When the expedition returned to England in 1909 they were all hailed as heroes and
Shackleton was knighted. During the following years the Norwegian Roald Amudsen
became the first man to reach the South Pole in 1911. Captain Scott arrived there a
little later, although he and his companions lost their lives on the return journey.
Despite this, interest in all things Antarctic remained intense and Shackleton was
able to secure sufficient support to mount the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in
1914. The idea was to travel across Antarctica from one ship, the Endurance, and be
picked up by another, the Aurora, in the Ross Sea. Interest was intense and
Shackleton was inundated with applications – over 5,000 – for places on the
expedition. Eventually he whittled the numbers down to 56 people, half of whom
were to sail with him in the Endurance and half were to travel in the Aurora to the
Ross Sea.
The subsequent voyage and loss of the Endurance have become the stuff of legend
but what is not well known is that five of the ship’s twenty eight man crew, were born
or based in Hull. No other place supplied so many people. Shackleton, noted for the
quality of his teams, had turned to what he described as the ‘great seaport of Hull’ for
so many of his sailors.
The Endurance left Plymouth on the 8th August 1914, four days after the Great War
had been declared. On the outbreak of hostilities, Shackleton had put his ship and
expedition at the service of the country but had received the curt message ‘Proceed’
from Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship sailed south by way of
Buenos Aires and South Georgia but as she moved into the ice, the expedition
experienced conditions which were bad even by Antarctic standards. On the 17th
January 1915, when well into the Weddell Sea, the Endurance was firmly trapped in
the ice. Around a month later, with no sign of quick escape at hand, Shackleton
ordered the ship to be prepared for wintering. Long months were spent by the
expedition in the dark, encased in the freezing ice but the real danger came with the
return of the Austral spring. Towards the end of October 1915, the Endurance was
forced against an ice flow and badly damaged. Water flooded the vessel and within a
few days Shackleton ordered abandon ship. The party camped nearby on the ice
and transferred their provisions from the stricken ship. On the 27th November 1915
the Endurance finally slipped beneath the ice.
Shackleton and his men then spent a couple of months camped on an ice floe in the
hope that it would drift towards Paulet Island some 250 miles away. Later, they tried
sledging towards their destination then attempted once more to set up camp on a
moving ice floe. Although they had edged closer to Paulet Island it was evident that
their way was blocked by more ice. It became clear that they were drifting
northwards and past the island and on the 9th April 1916 their ice floe broke into two.
Shackleton then ordered his men into their three lifeboats which they had dragged
along with them. After seven days at sea, the three tiny craft arrived at Elephant
Island. It was land, but what an inhospitable place, far from the shipping lanes and
from any hope of rescue.
In order to save the day, Shackleton and five others set out in the lifeboat, James
Caird, for South Georgia, some eight hundred miles away. Although they modified
the vessel for the trip, the James Caird was still a tiny craft only seven metres in
length and her voyage through some of the worst seas in the world was an epic.
Amongst the crew chosen to accompany Shackleton was John Vincent, a Hull
trawlerman. Although some have said that Shackleton chose Vincent because it was
thought he might cause trouble if left on Elephant Island, he was in fact one of the
strongest men in the party and thus ideal as an oarsmen. They encountered huge
waves and constant ice but finally made it to South Georgia after fourteen days. The
navigation skills of Frank Worsley were crucial for if they had missed the island then
all would have been lost.
However, they still faced an overland journey across peaks of Alpine proportions in
order to reach the whaling stations and safety on the other coast of South Georgia.
Shackleton and thee companions made the journey and were the first people to
cross the island. They were successful, finally staggering into the manager’s office at
Stromness. No one else was to cross South Georgia until 1955.
It took Shackleton several attempts before he finally got through to his party left on
Elephant Island aboard the Chilean Navy tug Yelcho in August 1916. All were
rescued after 105 days on the island. Despite their ordeal and adventures, everyone
in the Endurance party returned safely to Great Britain. Ironically, not all were to
survive the war which was then still raging. Alfred Cheetham was amongst who lost
their lives before the war ended in November 1918. His ship was torpedoed in
August 1918.
Despite their traumatic experiences, all the other Hull based men seem to have gone
back to the sea. John Vincent returned to Hull and skippered trawlers, apparently
also sailing on merchant navy vessels during the inter-war years. He also worked for
some time as a pilot and fishing instructor to the Finnish government before moving
with his wife to Grimsby where they brought up their family. Although he was nearly
sixty when the Second World War broke out, he joined the Royal Naval Reserve and
was given command of the armed trawler, Alfredian, operating in the North Sea. He
developed pneumonia whilst on patrol and died in hospital in Grimsby on 19th
January 1941, aged sixty one.
William Stephenson, the chief stoker, was also a Hull trawlerman and after returning
to Hull he seems to have gone fishing again. He died of cancer in hospital in Hull in
1953, aged 64. Ernest Holness, the other fireman, also returned to Hull and married
Lillian Rose Bettles in June 1917; they subsequently had three children. He returned
to trawling and was washed overboard from the trawler Lord Lonsdale off the Faroe
Islands on the 29th September 1924.
Perhaps the best known local in later years was Charles Green, the expedition’s
cook. When he returned home in 1916 he found that his parents, having not heard
anything of him for two years, had presumed him dead and cashed in his life
insurances. His girlfriend had also married someone else. In 1918, however, he
married Ethel May Johnson in Hull and the following year returned to the merchant
navy. Shackleton had requested he join his later expedition but his unexpected
death put paid to this. Charles Green voyaged across the world in merchant navy
during the 1920s but retired from the sea when his wife was taken ill in 1931 and
took a job on the night shift in a Hull bakery, looking after his wife by day.
Ethel died in 1936 and during the Second World War Charles became a fire watcher
during the worst of the blitz. He also lost his own house and at one point lived in an
air raid shelter for over two weeks. Shackleton had given him a set of magic lantern
slides of the expedition and in later years Green engaged many people in Hull and
beyond with over a thousand lectures. He lived long enough, not only to attend the
commissioning of the new Antarctic Survey ship, HMS Endurance at Portsmouth in
1968, but also to attend the reunion of the survivors of Shackleton’s expedition
aboard HMS Endurance in 1970. He died in hospital at Beverley in 1974.
Such is the story of the Hull people who went south with Shackleton. The man,
known to his team as ‘The Boss’ himself, of course, had returned south on board the
Quest at the end of 1921, intending to circumnavigate the Antarctic. He died of a
heart attack on board his ship in Cumberland Bay, South Georgia in January 1922
and his grave at Grytviken, little more than a stone’s throw from the ex-Hull steam
trawler Viola, is now visited by thousands of visitors from Antarctic cruise ships each
Austral summer.
Select Bibliography
Marjorie Fisher, Shackleton (UK: Barrie 1957)
Ernest Shackleton, The Heart of the Antarctic (UK: Heineman, 1910)
Ernest Shackleton, South: the story of Shackleton’s last expedition 1914 – 1917 (UK:
Heineman, 1919)
Bernard Stonehouse, Encyclopaedia of Antarctica and the Southern Oceans (USA:
John Wiley and Sons, 2002)
Frank Worsley, Shackleton’s Boat Journey (UK: Folio Society 1974)
Frank Worsley, Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure (UK: 1931 republished
W.Norton & Co., 2000)
On-line References
http://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica fact file/History/Ernest Shacklet
on_Trans-Antarctic_expedition.htm
Sir Ernest Shackleton 1874 – 1922. Trans-Antarctica Expedition 1914 – 1917
http://www.metacritic.com/video/titles/endurance
Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition: The 2001 Documentary
