The two decades before the war were a golden age of heroes.
They roamed Africa, India, the Polar Regions, explorers and adventurers.
Some of those who went to the ends of the earth were Robert Scott, Roald Amundsen, and...
Ernest Shackleton.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War bio special about Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic,
and the Great War.
As the war clouds gathered over Europe in 1914, Ernest Shackleton was planning his Imperial
Trans-Antarctic Expedition from Britain.
This would involve two ships; the Endurance and the Aurora.
The planning and financing of the trip had been going on for over a year, but there was
criticism of it going ahead with possible war on the horizon, and Shackleton offered
to cancel it on principle.
He was assured that if war came, it would not last long.
War, for Britain, began August 3, 1914, but first Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill
directed the Endurance to ship out, and it did August 8th.
Several members of the crew had, by then, already left the expedition and enlisted,
and others would return to Britain to join the war effort after the Endurance docked
in Buenos Aires.
The rest of the expedition left Buenos Aires October 26th, having heard the news that the
Russian steamroller was in gear and the war was expected to last fewer than six more months.
The last news they heard before leaving the known world and heading into Antarctica was
at South Georgia Island, the most southerly outpost of the British Empire, on December
4th.
Another ship arrived there with a captain and crew that were pro-German and the news
they had was all about British and French defeats.
And so they ventured off into the vast, remote solitude of the Antarctic.
There would be no lines of communication in either direction for the duration of the expedition.
The crew of the Aurora, which was the supply ship and was based in the Ross Sea, ran into
trouble in 1916 and managed eventually to cable for assistance, and Winston Churchill,
the man that had bade the expedition go on its way, gave this written response, “When
all the sick and wounded have been tended, when all the impoverished and broken homes
have been restored, when every hospital is gorged with money, and every charitable subscription
is closed, then and not till then will I concern myself with these penguins...”
The expedition, the men on it, and the age of heroes had been truly forgotten.
As for the men on the Endurance, after 18 months of perilous adventure, which involved
losing their ship, being cast adrift on ice floes, successfully landing on Elephant Island,
making the dangerous crossing to South Georgia Island, and then the equally dangerous trip
across the island, Shackleton and five of his crew were finally reunited with humanity
at Stromness Bay Whaling Station May 20th, 1916.
When Shackleton met station manager Mr. Sorlle and introduced himself, his first question
to Sorlle was, “Tell me, when was the war over?”
Sorlle replied, “The war is not over.
Millions are being killed.
Europe is mad.
The world is mad.”
The next day, after learning from Sorlle how the war had progressed, Shackleton wrote in
his diary, “We were like men arisen from the dead to a world gone mad.
Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless
courage and unimagined slaughter... of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast to the
frigid whiteness we had left behind us...
The locking of the armies in the trenches, the sinking of the Lusitania, the murder of
Nurse Cavell, the use of poison gas and liquid fire, the submarine warfare... stunned us...
I suppose our situation was unique.
No other civilized men could have been so blankly ignorant of world-shaking happenings...”
Shackleton and what remained of his crew returned to England.
Many had still been stranded on Elephant Island and Cape Evans, but they were rescued and
of the 53 surviving members of the expedition, nearly all of them joined the armed forces.
Three would die in service, one went missing, and five others would be wounded in action.
Most of the crew of the Endurance served on minesweepers while nearly all of the Aurora’s
crew joined the New Zealand Field Forces.
Shackleton himself suffered from a heart condition, made worse by his voyages, but he volunteered
for the army.
He repeatedly requested posting at the front lines in France, but that wasn’t to be.
He was by this time drinking heavily, which should surprise exactly no one.
In October 1917, he was sent to Buenos Aires to try to persuade Argentina and Chile to
join to the war with the Allies.
He returned home in April 1918 and that summer was sent to Spitzbergen to establish a British
presence there under the guise of a mining mission, but on the way he was taken ill in
in Tromsö, possibly of a heart attack.
Eventually he returned to Britain, and just after the war served in the Northern Russia
Expeditionary Force in the Russian Civil War under General Edmund Ironside.
After northern Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, Shackleton was discharged in October 1919,
with the rank of major.
When Ernest Shackleton had set sail in 1914 he anticipated returning to Britain as a hero,
after planting the Union Jack, which was personally given to him by King George, at the South
Pole.
But upon his actual return in 1917, the horrors of the war had made his and his crews’ sufferings
seem trivial, and his postwar shows in 1919 and 1920 at the Philharmonic Hall in which
he retold his calamities were poorly attended and seemed of little interest to a war weary
public.
The Age of Heroes.
Sounds very romantic and very noble.
I loved reading stories from the period when I was a boy.
They were truly tales of adventure.
We know today, of course, that much of that adventuring was endemic with racism, corruption,
and exploitation, but there WERE many real heroes.
People who did things and went places undreamed of, and they were indeed the stuff of childhood
wonder and fantasy.
But that age came crashing to an end in 1914; just another sad victim of the Great War.
I’d like to thank Scott Buchanan for the research for this episode.
Scott and I actually knew each other back in the early 90s when we had some of our own
adventures in Eastern Europe and ran part of a chain of illegal youth hostels, and though
I bet that got your attention, it is a tale for another day.
Thanks, Scott, nice to be back in touch with you.
If you want to learn more about the adventures of the SMS Möve, a famous German Merchant
Raider, click right here to check out our episode.
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