Sailor on Ice: Tom Crean with Scott in the Antarctic 1910-1913

By David Hirzel

There are more famous names than Tom Crean’s from the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration, but there are few stories as compelling as his. The Antarctic is a harsh place of bitter cold and darkness, where only the strong and resourceful can hope to survive. Crean was such a man. Time and again he was one of three--at times the only one--whose courage in the face of insurmountable odds saved the lives of his companions.
Had he weakened and failed the lives of all might well have been lost, and their stories remained untold. He left no diary or book; his few letters speak modestly of his exploits, if at all. Sailor on Ice: Tom Crean tells the story of a common man in uncommon circumstances, who met every challenge as it came with steadfast purpose. If he knew fear, he never showed it. Sailor on Ice goes with him from England to the Antarctic plateau, and back. We share his trials as they happen—the thrill of discovery, the danger of the sea-ice, the terror of extreme isolation, the tragedy of the deaths of his closest friends.
Tom Crean was not most renowned of the explorers during those early years of Antarctic discovery. For that, the palms go to Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott, with the names of other leaders not far behind. Other men, better educated and connected, would publish the stories of hardship and adventure that astonished the world. Crean’s name is occasionally mentioned in these works, as it should be; his was a distinguished career of service, not as a leader, but as a seaman. His story is not one of trial and privation leading to a tragic end, because without one man’s endurance and unflinching resolve in the face of hopeless adversity, there would be no survivors. The familiar names belong to those who claimed to lead, but those who lead are nothing without those who come a few steps behind, hauling the gear, pitching the camp, walking the long walk, steadfast, enduring. Without them, there would be no leaders. There would be no survivors, and no story to be told.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Hirzel
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780988701915

David Hirzel

David Hirzel has known the name of Tom Crean since first reading the young adult abridgment (Shackleton’s Valiant Voyage) of Alfred Lansing’s Endurance about the age of ten. He began writing Tom Crean’s story in 1995, and eventually in 2011 published Sailor on Ice about Crean’s adventures with Scott’s Terra Nova expedition. Hold Fast is a continuation of that story. During the course of researching these books, Mr. Hirzel has become the leader of the Hyde Street Living History Players at San Francisco Maritime National Park. He currently writes from Sky Ranch overlooking the sea in Pacifica CA where he designs energy-efficient houses.

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Sailor on Ice:

Tom Crean With Scott in the Antarctic

by David Hirzel

Copyright © 2012 David Hirzel

First eBook Edition 2012

All rights reserved

Published by Terra Nova Press at Smashwords

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Pacifica CA 94044

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ISBN: 978-0-9887019-1-5

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This book is also available in print from most online retailers.

for Alice Cochran, the light of my life

without whose constant and energetic encouragement

this book might never have come to print

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One: Another Departure

Chapter Two: The Gale

Chapter Three: Landing at Cape Evans

Chapter Four: Trial on the Sea Ice

Chapter Five: Roughing It—Life at Hut Point

Chapter Six: Winter Quarters at Cape Evans

Chapter Seven: The South Polar Trail

Chapter Eight: The Glacier

Chapter Nine: The Long Walk Home

Chapter Ten: Another Winter

Chapter Eleven: The Search

Appendix One: Crew List

Appendix Two: Glossary

Appendix Three: Bibliography

Author's note regarding the use of quotations in this book:

Every effort has been made to tell Tom Crean's story truthfully, but the present book is not to be taken for a work of biography. Spoken or written quotations attributed to individuals that can be sourced to published or unpublished accounts noted in the bibliography are shown in Italics between quotation marks.

In the interest of a more immediate narrative, some spoken words are attributed to individuals that are entirely imagined, derived from the author's understanding of the men and the context involved. Spoken words that can not be sourced to published or unpublished accounts are shown in —Italics between dashes—.

This book does not attempt to tell Crean's story for him. Only he could do that, and it is well understood that he never talked much about his Antarctic adventures, certainly not to journalists. Sailor on Ice does, however, relish the language and diction of spoken English current in the early years of the twentieth century. The author hopes his words have captured some of the flavor of that bygone era where science, duty, and honor were the driving forces in an explorer's life.

Introduction

Some men are born for the sea. They run away to it early in life, and it shapes their adolescence and young manhood, their view of themselves and the world, and everything that follows. Tom Crean was such a man.

A sailor’s world is defined by the boundaries set by the rail of his ship. Beyond that rail, at an indeterminate distance, he sees but cannot reach the endless circle of the horizon dividing the blue water below from the blue sky above. It appears the same wherever in the world his ship may be, afloat on the heaving swells of any one of the seven seas. The sky and water may not always be blue. They may be gray, white with driving foam and fog, obscured by night, defined by stars, the water calm and flat as a mirror glass or risen in waves beaten by ceaseless gales. It is always so—changeless and ever changing, the same and never the same.

This is in part the allure of the sea, this placement of man against nature—defined by nature, overwhelmed by nature. If he comes home to tell the tale, he finds himself in some small measure triumphant against forces far greater than his limited power.

The call of the ice is not so different from the call of the sea. The horizon is much the same, the sky above as blue while the ice below has taken the place of water as far as the eye can see. The ice can assume many colors other than the expected white; descriptions of it are full of words like azure, lemon, topaz, aquamarine. But its apparent end is still a horizon always out of reach, its undulations and sudden motions as treacherous as a rogue wave to the unwary traveler. Some men are born with a love of this.

The sound of brash ice scraping along the side of the ship with a sound like broken glass shaken in a box is a lullaby to their ears, a familiar song they know long before the first time the hear it. The ever present knowledge that their ship might be gored by a floe and sink without a trace only serves to heighten their desire. When he said What the ice gets, the ice keeps, Shackleton was referring to more than just the doomed Endurance splintering under the irresistible pressure of sea-ice in motion.

Sir Ernest Shackleton had known the siren call of the unbroken plain of the Barrier ice, of the slow-motion rapids of the glacier, the bleak white desert of the plateau, the coldest place on earth. A host of other explorers had also followed the call of the ice and come home with tales of wonder and suffering, as though the two experiences were somehow unalterably linked.

Tom Crean heard it too. He had chosen the path of the sea as a lad, and when a chance opportunity arose to follow it a little farther south, on a whim he took it. That decision changed his life forever. He was later seduced by the ice, as many before him had been, and many yet to come. One voyage to the Antarctic was not enough. A second ended in tragedy and the loss of two of his best and dearest friends, but even that was not enough to keep him away. The third finally released him, not through tragedy, but through triumph enough against all odds to last him till his final breath.

Tom Crean was a man whose life as an explorer shows, by his actions, what the finest measure of a man can be. If he knew fear, he never showed it; if he grew weary on the trail, it never slowed his step. If there was a difficult job to be done, he took it on. His story is told in the early years of the twentieth century before the age of radio communication and motor transport, when poorly understood concepts of survival doomed travelers in the bitterly cold and desolate landscape of the Antarctic to malnutrition, scurvy, and the very real possibility of death by exposure. In Edwardian Britain, many men were called by the strange lure of this forbidding life, by a romantic notion of heroism through suffering and the ultimate reward attached to the quixotic goal of being first to set foot at the earth’s South Pole.

Crean joined the Royal Navy in 1893 at the age of fifteen, as a Boy 2nd Class. For a young man of his background and station, scion of Ireland’s rocky Atlantic coast, it was the best opportunity that had yet appeared to make something of his life. The storm-tossed seas he’d chosen swept away the ties that might have bound him to the land or kept him a fisherman along the stony cliffs of the Dingle. He’d yielded to a different calling, one of the few open to an Irish lad of otherwise dim prospects. His stock was not invested in the land or the meager rewards of the fishing-life, but in the wide blue sea he’d come to live on, the gray-blue sea he’d chosen, the restless changeful sward of the sea he’d come to plough.

He was a sailor in the Queen’s Navy in late 1901, a seaman on board a gunboat in the Pacific Squadron, when an opportunity arose to try something a little different. The sailing ship Discovery was in New Zealand, looking for a few good men. She was going south on the largest, most thoroughly equipped polar expedition that had ever been mounted. Crean volunteered, was accepted, and changed his life forever. The Navy gave him a job, the ship gave him a sailor's true home on the sea, but the ice gave him a destiny.

He was a man who was quick to volunteer for almost anything. When the very first party ventured over the Great Ice Barrier for an overnight and a record for farthest South, he was in it. Whenever a hand was needed to row ashore or unload a ship or set out on the first push into the wilderness of ice, he was there. At the end of his two years’ service with the Discovery, he’d so impressed his commanding officer that Captain Robert F. Scott kept him close for years as his personal aide, his Captain’s Coxswain. In this position he was already chosen in 1910 to go south again with Scott in the Terra Nova to complete the unfinished work of the Discovery expedition.

Later, when Ernest Shackleton bought the sailing ship Endurance and determined to make his Antarctic crossing in 1914, he knew Crean would be indispensable. He was right. Crean proved himself the man to pull through against the most unbearable odds. Here again he was one of three, upon whom the survival of all would depend.

When the Discovery expedition left for the Antarctic in 1901, nearly everything known about the place had been derived from James Clark Ross’s voyages in 1840-1842 seeking the magnetic pole that was known to exist somewhere in the far south. Nothing was known of the Antarctic save that it was girdled with impenetrable ice that would crush any wooden ship that came within its grip. Ross had led the expedition from his ship Erebus; Francis Crozier, his Irish second-in-command, was captain of the Terror. With nothing more than sail-power fearless determination and the seamanship of their true British tars, the two ships pushed right into the frozen pack that barred the way south.

Some of the sailors on that voyage might have had tattooed on the backs of their fingers the letters H-O-L-D F-A-S-T. This common admonition was directed as much to the Almighty who directed the course of all events as to the sailor aloft whose hands—one for the ship and one for himself—must never relinquish their hold, whatever trial might test his grip. It spoke also of a tradition of that quality of Royal Navy seamen which so impressed Nelson’s Spanish opponents at Cape St. Vincent. Each man knows his comrades will be driven by the sacred law of mutual support, and knows with absolute certainty that in no matter how fearful the crisis of the moment, he will not be deserted.

Sailing south into the midnight sun, Ross's two ships discovered and explored an ironbound unknown coast. Calling it Victoria Land after their queen, they applied names to its salient points as they went along: Cape Adare, Mount Sabine, Coulman Island, Cape Washington. Watching their magnetic instruments with the greatest of care, they located the elusive South Magnetic Pole in the highlands beyond. No one could say what else lay ahead, none could know whether any ships would ever return once locked in the icy grip. Still, no one doubted for one second that if any ship on earth could unlock these last secrets of the earth, it would be an English ship.

The view of this strange new world unfolding before them revealed an extravagantly compelling beauty that not for the first time would challenge the capacities of the English language:

". . .the sun never setting, among huge bergs, the water and sky, as blue or rather more intensely blue than I have ever seen in the tropics, and all the coast one mass of beautiful peaks of snow, and when the sun gets low they reflect the most brilliant tints of gold and yellow and scarlet; it is a sight far exceeding anything I could imagine and which is very much heightened by the idea that we have penetrated far farther than was once thought practicable, and there is a sort of awe that steals over us all in considering our total insignificance and helplessness."

There is something about this newness, this isolation and desolation, this hardship bending only to the most determined ambition, which infects some men’s souls and calls them back again and again. The work gives an inexpressible meaning to their lives, a bond with those who have shared the hardships, a story to tell to those who can only imagine. Its subtle grasp takes hold and many a man once in its grip is so seduced as to give all his livelihood over to it, to find in it his life’s work. So it was with Tom Crean.

He was not the most famous or the most renowned of the explorers during the so-called heroic era of Antarctic exploration. Other men, better educated and connected, would write the stories of these expeditions in the stately measured diction of the era. Crean’s name is occasionally mentioned in these works, as it should be; his was a distinguished career of service, not as a leader, but as a seaman.

He went south on a whim, a chance opportunity to visit some part of the world that most men never get to see, to satisfy this yearning that calls some men away from the land, sure and known, to the sea. He knew no more than that he would find there something new, something to tell the folks at home. That whim, that chance, would change his life forever. Crean would spend the next sixteen years in the Antarctic, or heavily involved in planning a return there, or hanging on by the merest thread to his chances to escape it.

More than once he would find himself one of three, and then the only one, upon whose determination in the face of the most appallingly insurmountable obstacles, the fate of his companions would ultimately rest. He was a man who, as long as he had strength to place one foot before the other and ground to put it on, never stopped moving. Never. Without that singular endurance, he and all of those whose very survival bore upon that abiding perseverance would have all succumbed to the bitter snows and breathed no more.

Some men are lured deeper and deeper into the white desert, past the limits of their endurance. Others make it out alive, but barely. Many times, they return—again, again. Some of the names are familiar: Franklin, Ross, Scott, Shackleton, Amundsen. Others are not: Frank Wild, Ernest Joyce, Taff Evans, Bill Lashly, Tom Crean.

The familiar names belong to those who claimed to lead, but those who lead are nothing without those who come a few steps behind, hauling the gear, pitching the camp, walking the long walk. Steadfast, enduring. Without them, there would be no leaders. There would be no survivors, and no story to be told.

Prologue

The Great Ice Barrier. February 18, 1911

Although it was risky for Crean to set out alone on this last thirty miles, his odds were better than the certain death that would come to the three men had they all remained in camp. Two companions waited in the tent pitched on the Barrier ice fifteen miles back. They had walked with Crean the whole long way almost to the South Pole and back until, bereft of strength after three months on the trail, they had reached the limit of their common endurance. Barely a crumb of food remained for them, and only the merest glimmer of oil for the lamp. Of the three, one was almost dead from scurvy, unable to walk another inch. Left alone in the tent, he would surely, and quickly, die. The other two were almost equal in the last remnants of their waning strength. Together they might have made it in, but neither would agree to leave the third behind to die alone.

The Hut was only thirty miles farther on. Someone might be waiting there, ready with the dog teams to come out to meet them, to help them in. Just as likely, the Hut might be empty. At last report the Polar parties had been going strong, and would need no help to make it home under their own steam.

The reports were wrong. Out on the Barrier, the Last Supporting Party in their diminishing marches knew the truth of the matter—the whole long walk, thirteen hundred miles of it to the Pole and back, was more than any man could bear.

Now, of the three, one man must go forward to get what help there may be, or die trying. For Crean and Lashly, it had mattered little who drew the short straw and who the long—who died on the trail and who in the tent with Lieutenant Evans. Thirty more miles to the hut required more strength than either of them could muster. One man would go forward, thirty miles over the windswept icy plain, and bring back aid or die in the attempt.

Crean drew the short straw. He made his farewells—they might well have been his last—to Bill Lashly the stouthearted stoker and Lieutenant Evans, too sick to come to the tent’s door to wave good-bye. Two sticks of chocolate and two biscuits in his pocket, that was all he took. Whether or not it was enough he would find out, but it mattered little. There was not another ounce of food to be taken for the journey. Nothing to shelter himself from the blizzard but his windproofs and jacket, the jumper next to his skin and his scapular’s two strips of stained and faded linen hung like sails before and aft his neck to steady his course. The priest said long as he wore this, his brown scapular, he need not fear death. Not that he ever had.

He stopped, as he supposed, at the halfway point. Fifteen miles on, fifteen more to go. The chocolate in his outer pocket was frozen hard as a brick, broke up like sand in his parched mouth. It was the last food in his pocket, the last thing he might ever eat. He sat down on the snow to rest his legs.

Funny the thoughts that enter unbidden into a man’s head, like the words of a trollop shouted in passing. —Come love, let’s lie down awhile.— —No, I don’t believe I will. I’ve business to attend to.— —Come, lie down. No one would know.— —I won’t.— —It would be easy. I’ve a warm place for you.—

It would be easy for him to throw it all over, to lie down and rest. It’s been a long time now, since he let himself feel the comfort of a downy bed, since dreams of any kind but hunger’s nightmares had softened a night’s passing. But easy has no place here, it makes no sense, has no allure. He stood, looked back at the long straight line of his shadowed footsteps leading back to the tent, and forward at the empty snow-covered plain ahead. The well marked road on the level ice ahead had at its end the Discovery Hut and in it the promise of survival, almost within reach.

If he weakened and fell short on this final stretch, if he stopped to rest a moment and fell asleep, if a blizzard closed over him and blotted out the light one final fatal time, then so be it. Who was he to challenge God’s will? But it was Crean’s will now, and it was one foot in front of the other with only another fifteen miles left to go. What were they to the thirteen hundred out-and-back that lay behind?

No one walked beside him, but he was not alone. Two companions waited in the tent pitched on the Barrier ice fifteen miles back.

Chapter One

Another Departure

London. May 1910

"‘Ware open hatchways!"

Tom Crean had his hands full squiring lower-tier dignitaries about the ship, all of them sweating freely in their black tweed suits. King Edward VII had just died, and no one who was anyone would be seen abroad clad in anything but mourning dress, no matter how hot the sun, how stifling the late May air of the waterfront. Crean, mindful of the impressions to be left upon his charges, led them politely around the cluttered decks of the polar expedition ship Terra Nova loading for departure.

By sheer coincidence his two stout wooden ice-ships lay within shouting distance of each other in East London’s Victoria Dock. His first, Discovery, was looking a little weather-worn ten years on. Although that ship had left the Antarctic-exploration business, she was still pursuing her icy destiny, now loading a season’s supplies for the fur trade in northern Canada. Crean’s own present billet was aboard the venerable Dundee whaling barque Terra Nova now abustle with the urgent comings and goings of agents, stevedores, dignitaries, the press, well-meaning individuals whose presence only added to the confusion.

Ever since he’d signed on with Captain Scott, his daily routine hadbeen one of unending toil. He didn’t mind it much. Any sailor can get bored with the excess of time the Royal Navy seems to want to give each man for every little chore. Scott’s newest expedition was a private affair, to be conducted with too little money on too tight a schedule. It was enough to drive a good man to show what he was made of, and what he hoped to gain.

Captain Robert Falcon Scott had made a name for himself in 1901 as the leader of the Discovery’s successful foray into the then-unknown wastes of the Antarctic continent. In his seaman’s manner, so had Crean. His name had not found fame in the larger world, but he had impressed his captain enough to land a good berth in the new expedition. A wise leader knows he’ll get nowhere at all without good men behind him every step of the way. Scott was lucky—he had the support of stouthearted bluejackets like Crean and Taff Evans and Bill Lashly in the Discovery, and he was wise enough to return their loyalty and ask them to join him now in the Terra Nova.

Tom Crean had been his Captain’s Coxswain for three years. There was not much extra money in the job, but there was honor in heading the oarsmen on the captain’s barge, and in serving as his personal attaché, steward, bodyguard. In all that time spent in company, bound by a sort of professional intimacy, Crean and Captain Scott had shared remarkably little in the way of conversation. They were separated by rank and class, and each man knew by birth and training his place and its limits. More to the point, they had come to know each other’s strengths and faults and facility of expression so well, that there was almost no need of idle talk. The details of naval administration were neither the interest nor concern of the seaman. A discerning aide-de-camp, he knew which of his captain’s words he was not intended to hear, and quite reliably failed to hear them. Seldom did a word between the two men transcend the ordinary business of the day. In some ways Crean came to know the man better than his own wife did. She would not have seen him under the duress of command or shared with him the life of the sailor, the code of the sea.

* * * * *

The work of that first Discovery expedition between the years 1901 and 1904 was not yet complete. It had done much of great value in science and discovery—located and named coasts and mountain ranges, determined the elevation and nature of the high plateau of solid