Voyage of the James Caird

Alf Cheetham shouts, crack, and all hands tumbled out to see two cracks across the flow.

They hauled the James Caird free.

By then, the crack down the center had widened out to 20 feet in some places and could be seen slowly working back and forth under the influence of the swell.

The flows split apart under the James Caird, and after five and a half months on the ice, it's time.

Three open boats, 28 men, and the most dangerous waters on earth.

Can you imagine? Put yourself in that situation.

It was almost unbelievable.

The pack had done a complete about-face.

By April 1916, the ice was breaking up around them, and the flow on which they were camped was shrinking.

On the 9th of April, the ice opened enough for them to launch the three lifeboats, which they had named after the expedition's sponsors, the James Caird, the Dudley Docker, and the Stankham Wills.

The 28 men crowded into the open boats and set out through the loose ice and freezing sea.

The next six days were among the worst of the whole ordeal.

Shackleton knew that if they waited there to be rescued, they would all die.

Someone had to go for help.

The voyage of the James Caird The nearest inhabited place that could be reached with the prevailing winds was South Georgia, where the whaling stations were.

But South Georgia was some 800 miles away across the Southern Ocean, the stormiest sea on Earth, in the depths of the approaching Antarctic winter.

Shackleton very quickly realized if they'd stayed on that what they call gruesome rock, they would sooner or later all perish.

So he took his best boat, the James Caird, and he headed off for the closest place was the Falklands, actually.

But he went to South Georgia instead because it was downwind.

And the story progressed from there.

But it was the only chance, and Shackleton took it.

He selected five men to accompany him and chose the sturdiest of the three lifeboats, the James Caird, named for one of the expedition's sponsors, which the ship's carpenter, Harry McNish, modified as best he could for the voyage, raising the sides and improvising a partial deck to give some protection against the seas.

On the 24th of April, 1916, Shackleton and his five companions launched the James Caird from Elephant Island and set out into the Southern Ocean, leaving the remaining 22 men behind on the island under the command of Frank Wilde to wait and hope for a rescue that might never come.

The voyage of the James Caird is one of the greatest small boat journeys ever made, an epic of seamanship and endurance that beggars belief.

for some 16 or 17 days.

The six men sailed their tiny boat across the most dangerous ocean on the planet.

That he brought the tiny boat across 1,300 kilometers of open ocean to land precisely on the target of a single small island is one of the great achievements of navigation in the history of seafaring.

In the conditions the six men endured on that voyage defy easy description.

Um, uh, he was, um, an Antarctic explorer.

He went to the Antarctic on three expeditions, two with Scott and one with Shackleton, and he was in the open boat journey, the, the James Caird, 22 and a half foot long, across South Georgia.

Um-

Ah.

I mean...

on this sea voyage 800 miles or something to South Georgia how he did it I mean because I did it later you know we followed his footsteps in a very nice tiny little ship but a tiny little boat how was that oh it was it was bumpy it was and every time I looked out at the sea I thought how could he be in that because I've seen I've seen the James Caird and I've seen it and it's teeny tiny I think how, how on earth did that man do that? And his book is wonderful because it is about that journey and it's about the failed trip to the pole the time he went with Scott and all about his, you know, in his life.

And it's just remarkable.

You describe him beautifully.