Ross Sea Party
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Ross Sea Party refers to the supply ship Aurora and its crew that supported the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Ernest Shackleton.
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[edit] Voyage
In the late summer and early autumn of 1914, on the eve of the Great War, two ships sailed from London. The Endurance carried Ernest Shackleton and his twenty-eight men to their rendezvous with the Weddell Sea pack ice. Another ship transported the second part of the expedition to Sydney, Australia, where the men boarded the Aurora for its journey to Ross Island. Under the command of A.L.A. Mackintosh, the Aurora pushed through the ice to Hut Point, the site where Robert Falcon Scott's storage hut from the Discovery Expedition stood abandoned.
[edit] Expedition
On January 21, 1915, twelve men from the Aurora landed with dogs and supplies. The men planned to sledge food and fuel to (80° S) during the summer and build a food depot for Shackleton's trek across the continent from the Weddell Sea. More depots as far south as the Beardmore Glacier would be established during the 1915 to 1916 season.
On January 24, 1915, Joyce, Gaze and Jack left the ship with a load of supplies. Mackintosh, Spencer-Smith and Wild left the next day. They were followed by 6 more men with the motor sledge which soon failed. Mackintosh drove the overloaded dogs mercilessly, against Joyce's objections, but Mack worried that Shackleton might need supplies this first season. By February 18, 1915, they had reached (80° S). Six of the 12 had been sent back during the trek, so the final party only included six men.
During the sledging the men suffered from harsh weather, starvation, frost bite, illness and the deaths of 16 of the 18 dogs they had taken.
[edit] Stranded
On May 7, 1915, ferocious wind roared around Cape Evans and the Aurora lost its moorings; four hours later, the pack ice and the ship with a small crew of 18 left aboard had disappeared, blown out to sea by the tremendous force of the wind.
Mackintosh and his 1st depot party (Aeneas Lionel Acton Mackintosh, Ernest Edward Joyce, Andrew KEITH Jack, John Lachlan Cope, Harry Ernest Wild and Vincent George Hayward)were still on the Barrier when the Aurora, unable to return, was blown away.
The Aurora, under Stenhouse's command had been the party's headquarters and only minimal supplies had put put ashore.
Four men (geologist Alexander Stevens, chaplain and photographer Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, Australian physicist Richard Walter Richards and Irvine Owen Gaze) had been left in the Terra Nova hut for scientific observations, but most of their personal gear and almost all of the supplies, fuel, food and clothing needed for the party's survival AND Shackleton's depots were gone with the Aurora. They had only the clothes on their backs, and almost no food; much of the winter clothing was being used by the ships crew; only a small amount of the biscuit, tea and cocoa for the depots had been landed from the ship.
The first depot party had completed laying depots (only a few hundred pounds at the 80 degree Bluff depot) in late February but had been able to return only as far as the uninsulated Discovery hut. The only way to reach the larger hut at Cape Evans on foot was to cross McMurdo Sound and that could only be done when the sea was solidly frozen. The six men had no choice but to wait in the smelly, dirty, cold hut until the ice was solid. At last they returned on June 2, shocked to find the Aurora gone. The depot-laying was not even half-completed, and the marooned men left ashore fully believed the lives of Shackleton's polar party depended on the depots being properly laid in place.
The party believed that Shackleton was heading their way from the other side of Antarctica and, if they failed to place the depots from Safety Camp to the Mount Hope depot near the Beardmore glacier, Shackleton & his men would die on the Barrier. How could they themselves survive, much less lay the needed depots?
They were forced to make do with what had been left, both supplies and refuse, by Scott and Shackleton's earlier parties, some of these items over 10 years old. They hand-stitched clothing from a huge spare canvas tent left by Scott. They pulled worn finnesko from trash piles and stitched them together or made them from tattered discarded sleeping bags. Wild made shoes from a horse collar.
Most of the men were smokers and they had been left little tobacco. They smoked "Hut Point Mixture" of tea leaves, coffee, sennagrass & sawdust that Wild had created.
They worked tirelessly, not without personal conflicts, through the dark winter to gather and organize enough supplies to deliver to depots on the Barrier all the way to the Beardmore glacier. They ate sparingly of the civilized food, seal meat their usual diet and blubber their usual fuel.
In September they tried to start moving supplies from Cape Evans to Discovery hut with little success. Richards and Gaze labored heavily to get a motor sledge working, also without success. Mackintosh's plan was to leave the dogs behind but Joyce believed they offered the only real hope of success. As it turned out, the dogs were heroes - Oscar, Gunner, Con, and Towser would save their lives.
Nine left the safety of the huts on October 9 with four dogs, with Stevens, the least hardy of the party, left at Cape Evans. They had 3 sledges and tried pulling them all together but soon split into in three 3-man parties.
Initially they had to make several trips from the hut up to Corner Camp and One Ton Depot just to get the needed supplies into place for the final haul. Because Shackleton had put Mackintosh in charge of the party, but had told the experienced sledger, Joyce, that he was to command the depot-laying expedition, there were strong disagreements about how to proceed. Joyce tented with Richards and Cope, Jack was with Hayward and Gaze while Mack led Wild and Spencer-Smith, Stevens waiting at Cape Evans for the Aurora. Just after New Year's Day, when one of their Primus cookers began to fail, Cope, Jack and Gaze returned to Cape Evans from near 81 degrees while the other 6 continued south with months of sledging ahead.
Mackintosh insisted on man-hauling and his team suffered for it. Spencer-Smith, a minister as well as photographer was called "Padre" by the others. The heavy sledging and poor diet began to weaken him about halfway to the Beardmore. One-eyed Mack suffered from snow-blindness and the poor diet as well. For these three their last fresh food had been in October.
Still, they battled through, laying the depots Shackleton would need to survive, keeping only a minimum of tea, pemmican, and biscuit for themselves. Joyce insisted that the dogs be fed as well as possible, warm food every other day.
As they neared the final depot at the base of the Beardmore at 82° 30', Spencer-Smith collapsed, unable to proceed on Jan 21. The others left him alone in the smaller tent and went the remaining 35-40 mile march to lay the last depot on January 26, hoping that rest would help Spencer-Smith improve. Since he was suffering from scurvy, rest did not help and they found him barely able to move in the tent on Jan 29.
They began their return journey almost immediately, with the suffering but uncomplaining Spencer-Smith carried on sledge as Mackintosh staggered alongside, bent over and unable to pull. Eventually both men were placed aboard sledges to be towed. Fighting for each step, the party slogged past the 82°, 81° and 80° depots. They took enough food for a week from the 80 degree depot, but after 5 days..."Their agonizing progress was checked by a blizzard, forcing a cut in rations to postpone starvation. By February 22, each man's ration was only eight lumps of sugar and half a biscuit. The suffering Mackintosh pleaded to be left behind to die. In desperation, Joyce, Richards and Hayward went ahead to retrieve food from a depot about 10 miles away on the 24th, leaving the invalids in Wild's care. All of the men were now seized by scurvy, and Hayward collapsed the next day. Fighting 80 mph winds, the dogs had to go 3 days without eating, while the men subsisted on tea and scrapings of dog food." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackleton/1914/lostmen.html
Joyce, Richards and Hayward and the dogs, blasted by cold, blinding snow and high winds were forced to camp twice on the 10 mile trip. Amazingly, they were able to find the large depot in the blizzard. They first fed the starving dogs and then fed their shrunken stomachs with thin oatmeal. They rested the dogs for a day and mended their shredded tent and worn out finnesko.
Finally they were able to return with supplies from the depot (still no fresh food to allay the scurvy) after a week had passed. Wild, who had nursed the very weak Padre and Mack but had only some tea and Bovril cubes and 2 biscuits for food during that time. Seeing the others returning, Wild came out of the lonely tent and put on his harness to come help pull the sledge, an act that brought tears to Richards' eyes. Mackintosh was unable to stand up straight but crawled out to thank Joyce's party for saving their lives.
They placed the two invalids on sledges for the journey home. Mackintosh was weak and delirious and slid unnoticed off his sledge twice but the party backtracked to retrieve him. Too weak themselves to continue hauling both invalids and with Hayward failing as well, Mackintosh was left alone in a tent. Joyce, Wild and Richards raced for Hut Point with Spencer-Smith and Hayward, who were rapidly failing. On the night of March 8, Spencer-Smith's heart gave way, and he died quietly, only days away from the fresh meat to be found at Hut Point. After burying him, the other four made for Hut Point, arriving on March 11. Richards wrote of his animal hunger to taste the blood of the first seals they found. After killing seals for food, they headed back without delay to retrieve Mackintosh. Finally, the five survivors were safe in the Discovery Hut.
Mackintosh, Joyce, Richards, Hayward, and Wild had survived, but now they were stuck in the miserable Discovery Hut, with seal meat and blubber for food and fuel. The ice was too thin for them to risk the final trip to Cape Evans. At length Mackintosh could stand it no longer and abruptly announced on May 8 that he and Hayward planned to walk to the more comfortable hut at Cape Evans. They departed, against the strenuous objections of their companions, and within the hour disappeared into a blizzard. The others went to look for them after the storm and found only tracks leading to the edge of the broken ice. Mackintosh and Hayward were never seen again. The either fell through the thin ice or were carried out to sea on an ice floe.
Richards, Joyce and Wild waited until the colder month of June to make the trip. Their passage over the ice of McMurdo Sound, past Glacier Tongue was hampered by an unexpected lunar eclipse. When they reached the other four at the Terra Nova hut they found no ship, no rescue, and no Mackintosh or Hayward. They felt wretched to have lost Mackintosh and Hayward after such a struggle to save their lives on the Barrier.
Completely unaware of Shackleton's fate on the Weddell Sea and the loss of the Endurance, they suffered through another Antarctic winter wondering if they would ever be rescued. Relief finally came on January 10, 1917. Richards, hunting for seals, saw a ship on the horizon. It was the Aurora. As three figures neared, Joyce recognized Shackleton, who immediately asked how many had survived. On learning of the three deaths, he and his two companions laid down on the ice, signalling the Aurora's captain about the lost men.
The Ross Sea Party holds the record for days spent on the ice. They were the final occupants of the Discovery and Terra Nova huts. These few brief paragraphs cannot begin to describe the agonies they suffered from temperatures as low as -50 °F, gale force winds, hunger, thirst, frostbite, snow blindness, scurvy, lack of sleep in miserable bags that were either soggy or frozen, torn tents and worn out footwear. And they endured these sufferings because of their sense of duty and because other people were depending on them.
The 4 dogs survived the trek as well. Sadly, Con, always an outsider of sorts, was killed by the others in fight before rescue came.
The huts remain, much as they left them, restored and protected by New Zealand. Richards' inscription on his bunk with a list of those lost can still be read there.
[edit] Rescue
After his legendary ordeal in the Weddell Sea sector, Ernest Shackleton arrived in New Zealand during December 1916. By that time the Aurora had been repaired and after discussion with the Aurora's captain, Shackleton immediately sailed to Ross Island to bring his men home. On January 10, 1917, the ship pulled alongside the pack ice near Cape Royds and worked its way to Cape Evans. One week later, Shackleton and the Ross Sea Party survivors were headed back to Wellington, New Zealand.
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Bickel, Leonard. (2000). "Shackleton's Forgotten Men: The Untold Tragedy of the Endurance Epic". Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-256-1
- McElrea, Richard. (2004). Polar Castaways: The Ross Sea Party Of Sir Ernest Shackleton, 1914-17. McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-2825-3
- Richards, R.W. (2002). The Ross Sea Shore Party 1914-17. The Erskine Press. ISBN 1-85297-077-4
- Tyler-Lewis, Kelly. (2006). The Lost Men : The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton's Ross Sea Party. Viking Adult. ISBN 0-670-03412-6
