Endurance Read online

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Tim Griffiths 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 154 0

  eISBN 978 1 92526 773 0

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover design: Christabella Designs

  Cover photographs: Frank Hurley, ‘The Returning Sun’, 7 August 1915, nla.pic-an23478574, National Library of Australia; photosoft/Shutterstock.com

  To Jenny

  Contents

  PRELUDE

  PART I

  1 GLEBE AND LITHGOW, 1898–1910

  PART II

  2 WITH MAWSON, 1911

  3 TERRE ADELIE, 1912

  4 SOUTH MAGNETIC POLE, 1912

  5 BACK TO ANTARCTICA, NOVEMBER 1913

  6 AUSTRALIA, 1914

  PART III

  7 WITH SHACKLETON, 1914–1916

  8 76 DEGREES SOUTH

  9 OCEAN CAMP

  10 ELEPHANT ISLAND

  11 RESCUE, SEPTEMBER 1916

  12 LONDON, NOVEMBER 1916

  PART IV

  13 MENIN ROAD, SEPTEMBER 1917

  14 PASSCHENDAELE, OCTOBER 1917

  15 EGYPT AND PALESTINE, DECEMBER 1917–MARCH 1918

  16 LONDON, MAY 1918

  17 SYDNEY, 1918–19

  18 MELBOURNE, JANUARY 1920

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Prelude

  I awake in darkness to the sound of canvas flapping. Fresh squalls come across the spit and the drumming on the roof intensifies as snow and sleet beat down on our makeshift home. My bedding is damp, my feet are lying in water and my ribs ache from the shingle floor, but I do not want to move just yet. There are twenty-two of us survivors trying desperately to be warm and keep breathing under this upturned lifeboat. My wretched companions are greedy for their miserable lives. With nostrils clogged by soot from burning seal and penguin blubber, and despite their numerous afflictions, they produce a cacophony of wheezing, snuffling and snorting. They are worse when they are awake.

  It is the better part of a year since we abandoned ship and it is four months we have been marooned on this piece of rock, but our sojourn must now be coming to an end. Our stores are virtually gone and there are but a dozen cartridges left for the rifle. In another month there will not be even a trace of our existence. The ocean will see to that. My photographs and cinefilm will never be found. Our story will be unknown to the world. We will be unknown.

  I am disturbed by a body shuffling past me, I don’t know who. Nothing is said. There is no light under the lifeboat. I will have to move soon but better to wait till I can see.

  There is a conflict coming in our little group. Some will want to go and some are incapable of going. There will be unpleasantness. I will not stay. We are crammed in here like sardines and the more crowded it is the more alone I feel.

  To perish like this without any record does not seem much of an adventure. Fame is so elusive and to get anywhere I have had perforce to throw in my lot with others. There is still time to pray to God but I am untrained and not good at this. Yet I admire our creator’s wild beauty that entraps us here.

  Each day on this rock passes much like the other. It is mostly impossible to stay outside in the bitter cold for any length of time. I have plenty of time to wonder how I came to be here. There is nothing I could or would change. I do wonder if Pa is watching. Does he know where I am? I am determined to stay calm and not be overborne by circumstance like those around me.

  If only my photographs could be rescued, then people could see and believe what has happened to us.

  Part I

  1

  Glebe and Lithgow, 1898–1910

  Pa was forty-eight years and five foot six. I was thirteen and already five foot ten. The look on his face I won’t forget. And his slurred speech ringing in my ear, ‘You rude ungrateful bastard!’

  We were both in shock.

  ‘Hit your own father, would you?’ he growled, and came at me again.

  My punch was instinctive, though there was plenty of anger there too. He’d been drinking, and this time when I connected he stumbled and fell badly. He’d tried to throw me to the ground. He’d done it before only this time he was struggling, and now he was down. There was blood on his face and he was nursing his arm and swearing at me. ‘Get the bloody hell out of my house!’ He stayed on the floor. Ma was screaming at me for what I’d done. Little Eddie and Doris were in tears.

  I grabbed shoes and a coat from the boys’ room. Before I reached the front gate my dear mater seized my arm. ‘Stay away, Jamie!’ she said. James was my first name. ‘Send me a letter with where you are,’ she said. And I knew she meant it ’cause she gave me Pa’s cap and five shillings. ‘Stay away,’ she said again, and ran back inside.

  I’ve never told this to anyone before, not anyone. I didn’t like to dwell on it. Fact is I was always treated as the troublemaker. So I just cropped it from the story of my childhood. Even now people ask how a boy from Glebe came to live by himself in Lithgow at such a tender age. Of course I give a good story. I tell them I was expelled from school for playing truant once too often and had to leave home to find work.

  It could easily have been the truth. There was certainly no way the teachers at Glebe Public School could control me. There were too many of us street urchins. I pretty much did what I wanted, came and went as I pleased. They passed a law to stop truancy, but we were doing them a favour by staying away. If all the pupils turned up at the same time, they wouldn’t have had enough desks for us. At school I learned to play the fool and act the goat. I didn’t mind getting into trouble. ‘Grow up, Hurley,’ my teacher would say. I guess I never did. I was always playing tricks at school and for some reason I never stopped.

  There was another school, a newer one, nearby at Forest Lodge. That’s where the toffs went. They were scared of us Glebe Public boys. We’d give them a beating as soon as look at them. Douglas Mawson went there but I didn’t know him then.

  The school didn’t miss me but I thought my ma would. I was angry she had said that to me, to stay away. Like they couldn’t handle me and didn’t want me at home. It made me fierce to run away as far and as long as I could. I wanted her to suffer. I know Ma regretted it. Years afterwards, when I had my first big chance to go with Mawson, she tried to make up for it and almost caused a disaster—but more of that later.

  I ran straight down Bridge Road to the docks at Pyrmont. I knew what to do. I had watched other fellows do the same, though they were older. I bought a loaf of bread and wandered down to the railway yards alongside Darling Harbour. The railway crews had finished work and as darkness descended with no one around it was more than a little creepy. It was cold, too, though I didn’t seem to feel it then; I had conceived an epic plan which would save me fr
om both a severe beating at home and the boredom of school. I’d never had the guts before to jump a freight train. But now I had a good reason. Consequences just didn’t come to mind.

  I picked out a goods wagon near the end of a long freight train. As soon as it creaked forwards I walked alongside then, seizing the moment, I jumped up on the wagon and squeezed under its tarpaulin cover.

  In my grand plan it was warm under the goods wagon tarpaulin. But within an hour my body was shivering. I hadn’t factored in that it was midwinter. A few more hours and the train started climbing on its way up the Blue Mountains. At times the train slowed to a halt. Then with a loud clanking of wagons it would take up its weight, jerking my head back and forth and keeping me awake.

  As the train climbed the temperature dropped. It dropped way below what I’d experienced. I guessed it was below freezing. I was sitting on wrought iron, which sucked the warmth out of me. Later in life I would get quite used to being cold. In those extreme conditions I found being able to tough it out depended on whether things were looking up or if things were grim. Thinking back now to that journey I don’t remember feeling anything at the time, just a naive sense that somehow I could escape, that there would be a way.

  Hours later the train was running downhill into the town of Lithgow. I stepped off just before it reached the siding but my legs were numb and I fell heavily. I was exhausted and could barely stand so stiff were my limbs. It was still dark as I walked into the town of which I knew nothing except men went there for factory work.

  Running away had seemed a grand idea but the reality was that I was petrified and totally knackered, and remorse was creeping in.

  I saw light from the side entrance to a bakery. The pungent aroma of fresh baked bread turned my stomach inside out. The baker took one look at me standing in the doorway and, without a word, broke a steaming loaf in two and gave me one of the halves. I dug my fingers inside the crust and pulled out a handful of scalding hot, doughy bread which tasted better than anything I could imagine. He told me to sit inside near his oven till the shop opened. I sat down and promptly passed out.

  When I woke it was light. The baker told me which way to head for the ironworks. I doubt I remembered to thank him. In the weak sunlight my sense of wellbeing returned. It was still a grand adventure. Although there was no one I could tell.

  Within the hour I was having my first job interview.

  ‘Name?’

  ‘Frank Hurley, sir.’ I had decided to use my middle name to thwart any enquiries.

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Sixteen, sir.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be putting up your age to get more money, would you?’

  ‘No, no sir.’ I was glad I had Pa’s cap; it made me feel older, ‘And I’m happy to do anything on account of me having no experience.’

  He gave me a long look, and said, ‘Alright then, Frank Hurley, eh?’ You can start tomorrow as a fitter’s assistant. Be here at eight.’

  ‘Thank you, sir . . . and sir, my wages—would they be a pound?’

  ‘What, a week? You’ve got no idea, sonny. You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘And you don’t have lodgings, do you, son? Try here.’ He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper. ‘Tell them you’re at Sandford’s and you’ll have some pay next week.’

  I did as he suggested and soon enough I had my lodgings, sleeping on the floor in a room with two other ironworks boys. They were older. When they returned to the boarding house that evening they filled my head with names of machines I’d never heard of and warned me who to steer clear of. They told me the only reason Sandford’s was hiring was because the other fitters’ assistants had fallen into vats of molten steel and burned to ashes. I didn’t sleep much that night.

  I was scared by the stories from my fellow lodgers of what the next day held. Lying awake I couldn’t quite believe the turn my life had taken. I had often dreamed of running away, but I always expected I would be sent back home. I was surprised at my success and the distance I had travelled. Ma would be expecting me to be staying at one of my haunts around Glebe. She’d be thinking I’d turn up the next day like a bad penny. Little did she know I was on the other side of the Blue Mountains and had a big person’s job. I was full of self-pity, half wishing I might wake up at home. Then again, there was no telling if I’d broken Pa’s arm and what he would do to me. I just didn’t know how long away I could last.

  The following day I entered a world like no other. Sandford Ironworks was some miles outside Lithgow in the middle of a broad valley. Along the upper edges of the valley were rocky cliff sentinels, so steep they looked impossible to climb. I could see Sandford’s in the distance as I walked the stretch of dirt and puddles that was the main road. There were huge warehouses and high chimney stacks in what once had been farmland. Smoke and steam clouds billowed above it all, carrying the stale smell of coal fires and, worst of all, the foul odour of sulphur. There were stockpiles of coal and iron ore with rail trucks, wagons, vats, pipes and hoses cluttering the dirt yards outside the factories. It was a bleak manmade scene on a damp and freezing morning.

  I walked through the ironworks gates wearing the same clothes I had worn out the front door of my home in Glebe. In a detached corrugated iron office I gave my Lithgow address and signed my name with a flourish, the one thing I had practised at school. I was issued with gloves and goggles and told to report at the entrance to the main furnace room.

  My dear mater had often questioned me about what I would do after leaving school. I’d had no clue. How could I? I only knew what I didn’t want to do: I didn’t want to do what my pa did. He’d learned a trade as a typesetter with Fairfax and Sons, then with the Government Printers. Now he was head of the union, the Printing Trades Federation, I would usually be in bed by the time he came home from the pub. Ma said it was the only place the union could get their members together for a meeting. She was always making excuses for him. When he was home we had to tiptoe around him; Ma said he had a lot of worries and I had to stop being so noisy. A lot of time too he’d be away in the country for meetings. Anyhow all he did now was meetings, talking and drinking with people and carrying on. He didn’t think much of my skylarking and when he was under the weather he’d tell me I wouldn’t amount to much. I could not see any way of reconciling with my pa. His temper was matched by my stubbornness. Of course at that age you assume your parents will always be there. I little thought this might not be the case.

  After my first day as a fitter’s assistant at the Sandford Ironworks I knew I had found what I wanted to do. It was glorious. I got to see inside the whole ironworks and all the furnaces. The main steel furnace made all sorts of useful things. Molten metal was poured into moulds for spikes, points and crossings for the railways across all of New South Wales. There was a rolling plant from which workers with giant tongs pulled out great lengths of extruded red-hot iron. And there was a new blast furnace which was like looking into hell itself. Steel poured out white-hot. There were large steaming vats that galvanised the iron. Winches and cranes could raise and suspend massive pieces of iron and equipment that a man could never lift. There were all sorts of engines, flywheels and lathes that drilled and cut and welded.

  My large clumsy hands, which had let me down at rugger and cricket, seemed to revel in operating tools, fixing equipment and doing the routine factory jobs doled out to me. The more things I mastered the more I was asked to do. I prided myself on not leaving till my jobs were finished. I learned the importance of caring for my tools and equipment and getting the best out of them.

  After the idleness of schooldays and playing truant around Glebe, hiding from both teachers and police, my days at Sandford’s were full and exhausting. My curiosity about steel-making had me reading all the manuals and books I could find. I drove the bosses up the wall with my questions. But if there were big jobs on, they always asked for me. One of the foremen took me under his wing. He was known to everyone at
Sandford’s as Big Bill. He was one of the best. Bill would say, ‘Near enough is not good enough.’ Pretty soon I was working with Big Bill on most of his jobs.

  That first week I came home from work, ate the dinner cooked by my landlady and fell asleep straight after. I didn’t write home. On the Sunday I started writing to Ma but something made me stop. I wanted her and Pa to stew. They didn’t want me at home and here I was with a job and lodgings all successful like. They would be worried like hell.

  There was a lot that I wanted to remember, though, and tell someone about each day, so with my first pay I bought a leather-bound 1898 diary with lined pages, half price it was. That night, I started writing down everything that had happened to me. The diary was better company than the other lodgers who, being older, would disappear after dinner. They didn’t ask me to come with them and that didn’t worry me.

  By my third week, however, I started feeling things were not the way they should be. I cried at night for no reason at all and it must have showed at work. It was Big Bill who told me I was suffering from homesickness. When he heard I hadn’t written home he gave me a talking-to. He said the police would be after me and that I would be a ‘missing person’. Being a ‘missing person’ did not seem like a good start to a career and I didn’t want the police knocking on my landlady’s door, so that night I wrote a short letter to Ma, told her I was alright and was working and gave her the address of my lodgings. That was all. I really wanted to hear first from her.

  Four days later, when I got home from the ironworks, my landlady handed me my first-ever letter. I took it straight to my room. It was from my mother.

  Dear Jamie,

  Your pa and I have been worried sick about you. I prayed to God you were safe. Your pa is sorry for what happened and we are both sad you are so far away.

  Ma asked me to write to her about my work and lodgings. She didn’t ask when I might be coming home. I lay awake a long time that night, well after the other lodgers had come in.