1912 by Chris Turney Page A

his expedition, and it was all largely down to luck.

    Setting forth under the banner of the British Antarctic Expedition, the Nimrod headed south from the New Zealand port of Lyttleton on 1 January 1908 with a team of twenty-three men. Shackleton was still short by £20,000: everything depended on the success of the expedition and the hope that future funding would eventuate. With Shackleton unable to pay for the coal required to sail the Nimrod all the way to Antarctica, the New Zealand government and the Union Steamship Company agreed to help cover some of the costs by towing the expedition ship 2430 kilometres through the stormy South Ocean, to the edge of the sea ice. With the ever-present threat of floundering, the crew were called night and day to station, keeping the pumps going and hoping the ten-centimetre-diameter steel cable between the ships would hold. The journey took fifteen days.
    Shackleton was probably the closest thing polar exploration had to a warrior poet, and he relished the challenge. David recalled later that, when conditions were particularly bad, ‘Shackleton, in lulls between the fiercer gusts, could be heard reciting Browning—always a danger signal. He knew much of Browning and George Meredith’s poetry by heart, and livedin their higher sentiments in moments of extreme danger.’
    When the impoverished flotilla finally reached the northern edge of the Ross Sea ice, two weeks later, the lifeline between the two vessels was cut and the tow ship departed for New Zealand. On board were letters from the expedition members for loved ones back home, including an epistle from David to his wife—who was apparently strong-willed and less than pleased about David’s presence on the expedition—announcing his decision to stay the full year.
    Starting out relatively late from New Zealand did have advantages. Exposed to continuous sunlight, the sea ice that had built up in the Ross Sea over winter was now melting, allowing the Nimrod to make quick work of breaking through what remained and reach the Great Ice Barrier just a week after being released from the towline. But it was far from plain sailing. The Great Ice Barrier, at the other end of the Ross Sea, is not a stagnant block. Ice moves towards the sea at a rate of about a metre a day and, at the ocean margins, large pieces can break off to form flat-topped icebergs sometimes many kilometres wide.
    Shackleton later recalled fondly in his book of the expedition, The Heart of Antarctica : ‘About 3 am, we entered an area of tabular bergs, varying from eighty to one hundred and fifty feet in height [around twenty-five to forty-five metres], and all the morning we steamed in beautiful weather with a light northerly wind, through the lanes and streets of a wonderful snowy Venice…A stillness, weird and uncanny, seemed to have fallen upon everything when we entered the silent water streets of this vast unpeopled white city.’
    Reaching the Great Ice Barrier, Shackleton pushed east, at pains to stand by the agreement with Scott and establish a base at Balloon Bight. When he brought the Nimrod alongside the bay he was shocked to see the coastline had changed drastically; it was no longer recognisable as the one the British had flownabove in a balloon. Instead, Shackleton found hundreds of whales inhabiting a markedly different bay, which suggested the area was highly unstable. It was too risky to base his efforts there. Renaming the spot the Bay of Whales, Shackleton probed the Barrier beyond, towards King Edward VII Land, but realised he now risked trapping the ship in the ice—and with it the success of the expedition. To get the ship home that season, he had to establish a base before the short summer ended.
    Shackleton resolved to cut his losses and return to McMurdo Sound. There was consternation among those on board, but Shackleton had limited time and funds. It was already the end of January and the Nimrod had