Hold Fast: Tom Crean with Shackleton 1913-1916

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. Had he weakened and failed somewhere along the way of his adventurous life, 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. Hold Fast 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. He left England with Shackleton’s “Endurance” expedition in August 1914, expecting to be the first to cross the Antarctic continent and come home to lasting fame.
Things didn’t work out according to plan. From the moment his ship “Endurance” was caught in the ice and crushed, throughout the long sojourn of the shipwrecked sailors on the floating ice floe, he took every setback with casual aplomb, as though he did this sort of thing every day. When twenty-eight men were forced to take to sea in three small boats, he took the helm of one of them. To save those men, Crean was one of six who crossed the stormy southern ocean in an open boat, to land on an inhospitable shore.
The journey was not over yet. Three men must cross the glaciers guarding the forbidding interior of South Georgia to get help. Tom Crean was one of them. We share his trials as they happen—the thrill of discovery, the danger of the sea-ice, the terror of extreme isolation.
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: Mar 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780988701939

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.

Book preview

Hold Fast:

Tom Crean with Shackleton’s

Endurance Expedition 1913–1916

— by —

David Hirzel

for Alice Cochran, the light of my life

without whose constant and energetic encouragement

this book might never have come to print

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013 David Hirzel

First Smashwords Edition 2013

Terra Nova Press, P. O. Box 1808, Pacifica CA 94044

All rights reserved.

Print editions available from Terra Nova Press and www.amazon.com

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

The Author may be contacted at [e-mail]

* * * * *

Also by David Hirzel:

Sailor on Ice: Tom Crean with Scott in the Antarctic 1910-1913 2011

Sea Sonnets 2011

Table of Contents

Introduction

Prologue

Chapter One: "A New Adventure

Chapter Two: Departure from South Georgia

Chapter Three: To the Ice Again

Chapter Four: New Land

Chapter Five: Winter in the Ice

Chapter Six: Trapped

Chapter Seven: "Shipwreck

Chapter Eight: On the Floe

Chapter Nine: In the Boats

Chapter Ten: Cape Wild

Chapter Eleven: The Boat Journey

Chapter Twelve: Landing on South Georgia

Chapter Thirteen: Crossing the Island

Chapter Fourteen: Relief

Appendix One: Crew List

Appendix Two: Glossary

Appendix Three: Bibliography

List of Figures

Pack Ice from the Masthead

Endurance Track Map

Shackleton Gap from Peggoty Cove

The plain at Stromness Bay

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 that are attributed to individuals 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—.

Tom Crean didn’t leave behind many words of his own. His story must be gleaned from the published and unpublished accounts of those who travelled with him. Occasionally those accounts conflict with each other in minor details, or mention details of geography later corrected by the work of subsequent expeditions. In the event of such conflicts, the author has made liberal use of the most exciting of the possibilities, with a view to telling Crean’s story in the most compelling manner. We know no more than he himself of the world beyond his sight, or of the future.

This book does not attempt to tell his story for him. Only he could do that. It is well understood that he never talked much about his Antarctic adventures, certainly not to journalists. Hold Fast 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. After Captain Cook’s circumnavigation of the supposed Antarctic continent in 1773-1774 a host of explorers had gone there in his wake and come home with tales of wonder and suffering, as though the two experiences were somehow unalterably linked. 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 he hears 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. During the years 1901-1904 he had been one of the first to explore it from Robert F. Scott’s ship Discovery. Tom Crean had been there with him, and heard the call. Shackleton had answered it again in 1907, and Crean in 1910, both to risk their lives attempting to reach the world’s most empty, hostile place—the South Pole. Barely failing in that goal, Shackleton was driven to come back again to make it his own for good.

Tom Crean heard it too. He had chosen the path of the sea as a lad, and when the first 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, scion of Ireland’s rocky Atlantic coast, it was the best opportunity to make something of his life that had yet appeared. 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 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 King’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 unbeatable 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 tested 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. Dr. Joseph Hooker on that voyage tried to describe it all:

". . .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 day. 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 was a sailor on the continental ice with Scott’s two expeditions, but Shackleton’s doomed Endurance expedition never reached that land. His ship was crushed in the floating pack in 1915, and from that time forward he was truly on the sea. Hold Fast goes with him to face the raging gales and murderous waves of the Southern Ocean from the tossing shell of a frail wooden boat. There more than ever he must look certain death in the eye and, never flinching, hold fast.

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. 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 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, Taff Evans, Bill Lashly. Alf Cheatham, George Marston, Tom Crean.

The familiar names belong to the leaders of these expeditions, but those who lead are nothing without the men who come along right behind them hauling the gear, sailing the small boat over the raging sea, 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 —

—My God, Tom! What are we to do?—

—Why, we’ll do just as we have been. Aren’t we all still here?—

A fresh draft of water entered the boat, slopping over the gunwale and this time nearly filling her to swamping. Rickenson and McIlroy, still alive to the danger, swore in the darkness. The others had succumbed to the cold already; they neither swore nor bailed. But the sounds of the few voices he heard brought a measure of cheer to Tom Crean. As for the other two boats, the Dudley Docker and the James Caird, they had not been seen or heard from since sunset. The Stancomb Wills was all alone in the dark, out on the open sea.

Each curse volleyed forth unabated, smoking blue in the bitter cold, and with it another pannikin of cold saltwater emptied into the sea. Their hands were numb now, everyone’s were, but senseless fingers still grip when bidden by desperate minds. Without them there would be no hope at all.

Crean had long since given up the notion of hope. Whatever solace it might have allowed to doomed men had long since been eroded away by the long weary sojourn on the floating ice. Now these seven men in a very small boat had mere inches of freeboard to keep away the slurry and chop of the worst of the southern ocean. Neither men nor boats were made to take this assault, yet here they were. Time, chance, and ill-considered ambition had brought them all to this place. No amount of complaining would change that, just as no amount of hope would save them.

They had all started out strong men, brave and true, but between the sinking of the Endurance, the months afloat on the ice, and these five days tossing about in a 20’6" open boat, their bodies had failed them. Hudson’s saltwater boil had grown to enormous size. It was no use having a surgeon on board. Dr. McIlroy had neither lancet, scalpel, anesthetic, nor a clean and quiet place to work. There was nothing to be done here that could make the problem better, and so like every problem on board it grew more deadly with every passing hour. The infection had spread, gone through his blood into his brain. Addled, he mumbled to himself when he was awake. No longer able, Hudson had yielded the command of the Wills to Crean. Blackborow’s frozen foot would not come around until it could be rendered warm and dry, and that was not to happen this night if it was to happen at all. Neither cried out in pain. Their pain only added to the misery all seven men suffered and were not likely to survive.

Their boat was not likely to remain afloat. Every time her gunwale rose from the sea it bore a thin sheet of water that instantly froze, adding a little more weight with every passing swell. That weight alone would pull her under in time, regardless of how ardently the bailers worked. The oars, so vital to the task of keeping head to wind, had grown in size to thick cylinders of ice around a wooden core, heavy and near useless for their appointed work. Complaining about it all was of no use, except to relieve the men of their pent-up fury at the fates that had brought them to this pass. But complain they did, and bitterly. It may have done each some little good, and in the event that was better than no good whatever.

Crean had always been one of the men, but this night, with Hudson curled like a baby in his sorrow and his pain in the bottom of the boat, Crean was above them. He was in charge here, and his men like all men looked toward their leader to guide them. It would not do for him to swear too loudly, lest they get a sense of despair that in truth was not in him. He had been in many a tight corner before. This night was but another.

At sundown the bold cliffs of Elephant Island had been in plain view, a mere six miles away. Only one more night tossing in an open boat and they would all be landed there with a foothold on solid ground after so many months adrift. The night—the fifth in this accursed boat, on this accursed sea—was the worst of any yet endured. Cold was one thing, the wet another. But to these was added thirst. The last sip of freshwater had been sucked ice the day before yesterday, and never a drop of it since. For all the water swirling outside and inside the boat, none of it could quench or sustain. Each man had known cold and wet, taken often together like this. Crean himself had, for certain. But always before there was hope—that word again—of relief at the end of the passage. But this night sudden death, an overturning of the boat and the final release of all struggle, was the only end in view. Was it really worth the fight?

In the black night, the swearing and the intermittent splash of water into the sea reassured him that for some, at least, it was. Crean’s own hands, numbed and curled around the handles of the oars, kept the cutter Stancomb Wills head to sea, as nearly as he could judge. Luckily the wind had died. From out of the darkness somewhere over the water came Worsley’s call from the Docker: Are you all well? If not well, they were at least still here.

"All well, sorr!" What else could he answer?

— Chapter One —

A New Adventure

Chatham Navy Yard. December 1913

Tom Crean unfolded the telegram and read it over again, just to be certain. The message between Ernest Shackleton’s few brief lines was clear. —Tom, old chap: Join us. I need a second officer. I need a man I can count on to the end. We’ll have a damned fine time of it, up and over the plateau to the Pole and down the Beardmore on the other side. For Science! For England!—

Sir Ernest was at it again. He was getting up yet another Antarctic expedition, this one to claim title to the last great challenge of the earth, and had given it a grand name in keeping with its epic mission: the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The South Pole had been discovered—twice—but it was only the center of the ice-covered southern continent. The route from the Ross Sea to the Pole itself had been already explored to the death. Crean knew it better than anyone. Under Captain Robert F. Scott’s command he’d given his own mite to the knowledge of man. Now he was being asked to do it again.

Scott had given his all. He had been more than the leader of a great and noble expedition with the twin goals of geographical discovery and the advancement of science. Another man had made it to the pole first. Scott lost his life on the way back from the pole, but he gave the world much more of value than the mere location of a point of land. Other men had died along the way with him. Crean had lost five good shipmates to that long march, among them his best friend in all the world—Taff Evans. Throughout all the murmurings and whisperings that followed, Crean’s loyalty to his leader never wavered. It is all, as he often said, for the good of science.

To hear Shackleton’s trumpeting now, there was more work to be done, a vast wilderness of ice to be crossed before it could properly be said to be conquered. It was almost as though he still felt the need to prove himself a better man than Scott. Or perhaps he just wanted to take another trip to the frozen desert that had in its way claimed them all.

—For Science! For England!— Well, Crean wasn’t likely to fall for that old claptrap. He’d had enough of glory, enough for any man’s lifetime. Glory was not the siren song it once had been, calling him away from this pleasant and untroubled life he now led. With the world at peace—mostly—and the Empire secure, Navy life at Chatham was easy. No excitement there, no great hope of advancement, but it offered a steady paycheck and a warm dry berth at night. He was already thirty-eight years of age, his time in the service of the King nearly done. Soon he could go home on leave to County Kerry and pursue his courtship of Nell Herlihy and with any luck make her his bride. Why throw it all in now, with only a few more years to his pension from the Navy?

—We’ll have a damned fine time of it!— Shackleton had the gift of blarney, and the few words of his telegram were a reminder of an older, more insistent voice. Crean had heard that voice before, whispering across the level plain of the Great Ice Barrier. Now he heard it again—the call of the great white south, the whistling gale’s snow-spoken voice now keening in his mind’s ear —Come, come—

It was a call he’d not expected to hear again. It had been silenced by the sad ending to Scott’s last expedition, by the deaths of good friends on the Barrier and the seeming pointlessness of such sacrifice for a heartless, bloodless goal. The only sounds here at Chatham were the muffled shouts of men at work on the proud gray warships moored at the quay close by, the hoots of the white ferries crossing, the gurgle of the churning River Medway sucking at the rocks below his feet. Across the water the rusting black hulls of the collier hulks lined the shore, silent, ready to serve.

—Come, come— sang the familiar voice. Crean heard, or thought he heard, and answered.

—One more time before I die— he thought —I’d like to step out on the trail, snug up inside the green tent with a mug of hoosh and a pipe right after, in the company of other men like me— There would still be time enough for a wife and kiddies, a real hearth and home. Perhaps a pub, the South Pole Inn he’d long spoken of, as though the naming of it would be enough to ensure its existence. Some day, some day.

Held safe within the strong grip of his calloused fingers, the yellow paper of the telegram seemed to tremble in the cool breath of a late autumn breeze. Shackleton’s words, written out in the neat cursive script of some nameless company clerk, were not entirely unexpected. Sir Ernest—the Boss— was as voluble and public a personality as ever. His comings and goings, his dreams and ambitions were frequently noticed in the press and gossiped over by the wide circle of his Antarctic comrades. The lure of the South Pole had only grown since Scott’s tragic end on the Barrier, at least for those who’d once known its expansive, empty wastes. The idea of another expedition had needed only the passage of time and a bold man’s energy to come to fruition, and the time had arrived for its launch.

Shackleton’s new plan was to mount an expedition to cross the continent, climbing to the polar plateau across unexplored frozen wastes from the Weddell side to McMurdo Sound where another ship would pick it up. All that was really known of the route was that part of it that lay from the Pole north, down the crevasse-riddled Beardmore Glacier to the huts on Ross Island. For Crean and Shackleton that second leg would be familiar territory, little more than a pleasant jaunt down a country lane. In truth, no one in this world knew better than they the folly of such a conceit; in that lay its appeal. There was even more to the ambitious plan. After the ship dropped them all off at Vahsel Bay she would chart the unknown coast of Graham Land on her way north, and a wintering party would explore east and west from the landing place come spring. By the time it was all