The Ross Sea Party — three men died laying depots for a crossing that never came

Summary

The Ross Sea party was the forgotten half of Ernest Shackleton's 1914–17 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton attempted to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea, this second party, operating from the opposite Ross Sea coast under Captain Aeneas Mackintosh, was to lay a chain of supply depots southward across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, so that Shackleton's crossing team would have food and fuel for the final stretch to McMurdo Sound. The depots were laid. The crossing never came: Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed in the Weddell Sea pack before his party ever set foot on the continent. Three men of the Ross Sea party died completing depots for a journey that no one would ever make. Of the men stranded on the Antarctic side, seven survived and three did not.

The party's ordeal was compounded by the loss of its ship. On 7 May 1915 a gale tore the Aurora from her moorings off Cape Evans and drove her out to sea, locked in the pack, leaving ten men ashore with minimal supplies, clothing and equipment. Marooned, under-provisioned, and unaware that the crossing party would never come, those men nonetheless judged that lives depended on the depots being laid. They sledged south through two seasons, improvising clothing and gear, hauling loads in temperatures and conditions that broke their health, and completed the depot chain to Mount Hope at the foot of the Beardmore. The cost was severe: scurvy, frostbite, snow-blindness and exhaustion ground the men down on journeys lasting months.

Arnold Spencer-Smith, the expedition's chaplain and photographer, collapsed with scurvy on the return from the farthest depots and died on the ice on 9 March 1916, carried on a sledge to the end. Two months later, on 8 May 1916, Mackintosh and Victor Hayward walked out from Hut Point toward Cape Evans across newly formed, unstable sea ice during a blizzard, against advice, and were never seen again — almost certainly drowned when the ice broke up. The survivors were rescued in January 1917 by the refitted Aurora, with Shackleton himself aboard. They learned that the depots they had nearly died to lay had been needed by no one. It remains one of polar history's bleakest demonstrations of effort and sacrifice rendered futile by a failure half a continent away.

Timeline

The far side of an expedition split in two

Shackleton's plan for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was geographically immense: a single party would cross the entire Antarctic continent on foot, from the Weddell Sea coast, over the Pole, to the Ross Sea on the opposite side. No party could carry enough food and fuel for so long a march. The scheme therefore depended on a second, supporting expedition working from the Ross Sea end — laying a line of well-stocked depots southward across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier, so that the crossing party, arriving exhausted and short of supplies, would find food waiting all the way back to base. Without them, the crossing party would starve in its final hundreds of miles.

That supporting role fell to the Ross Sea party, carried south aboard the Aurora under Aeneas Mackintosh. It was, from the start, the poorer cousin of the expedition: funding thin, the men less experienced than Shackleton's hand-picked Weddell team, the equipment inadequate. Ten men were to be put ashore on Ross Island to do the sledging while the Aurora wintered at her moorings as a floating base. The whole structure assumed two things that did not hold: that the ship would stay put, and that there would be a crossing party to feed. Neither assumption survived 1915.

The dependency ran one way and blind. The Ross Sea men could not know what was happening to Shackleton across the continent, and he could not tell them that his own ship had been beset and crushed before his party even landed. So the depot-layers worked on, in good faith, toward a rendezvous that the Weddell disaster had already cancelled — pouring their strength into a lifeline for men who were not coming.

The ship blown away and the depots laid in extremity

The first blow was the loss of the Aurora. On 7 May 1915 a severe gale tore the ship from her moorings off Cape Evans and drove her out to sea, frozen into the pack. She would drift for months before breaking free and limping, damaged, to New Zealand, unable to return. Ashore, ten men were left marooned — without much of their clothing, food, fuel and equipment, which had been aboard or never properly landed — expected to lay depots across hundreds of miles of ice shelf using whatever they could scavenge from the huts and caches of earlier expeditions.

They chose to do it anyway. Reasoning that the crossing party's lives depended on the depots, the men sledged south through the 1915–16 season on punishing journeys, the longest lasting some six months on the trail. They man-hauled and drove dogs across the Ross Ice Shelf, improvising gear, eating into reserves of strength they could not replace, and pushed the depot chain all the way to Mount Hope at the foot of the Beardmore Glacier — the precise point Shackleton's plan required. By the measure of the task assigned, the Ross Sea party succeeded completely.

The success destroyed the men who achieved it. Months on the ice with an inadequate diet brought on scurvy; the cold brought frostbite and snow-blindness; the labour brought a deep, cumulative exhaustion. On the long return from the southern depots, the chaplain Arnold Spencer-Smith — who also served as photographer — grew too weak to walk. His companions loaded him onto a sledge and hauled him north, themselves scorbutic and failing, for weeks. On 9 March 1916 he died on the ice shelf and was buried where he fell. He was the first of the three.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The Ross Sea party returned to a world that had eyes only for Shackleton's Weddell Sea epic — the loss of Endurance, the camp on the ice, the boat journey to Elephant Island, and the open-boat crossing to South Georgia in which all 28 men survived. Against that miracle of survival, the Ross Sea story was grim and unredeemed: three dead, the survivors broken in health, and the entire enterprise revealed as futile. For decades it remained the overlooked half of the expedition, its men largely uncelebrated.

History has since restored some of their due. The depot-laying was a feat of endurance and discipline equal in hardship to anything on the Weddell side, accomplished by a marooned, ill-equipped party that nonetheless did exactly what was asked of it. The deaths of Spencer-Smith, Mackintosh and Hayward are now recorded among the costs of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, and the relief voyage of the salvaged Aurora, with Shackleton aboard, closed the expedition's books. What endures is the particular cruelty of their sacrifice: men who gave their lives, faithfully and well, to lay supplies for travellers who were never coming, on the far side of a continent from the disaster that had already made their work meaningless.

Lessons

References

• Ross Sea party WIKIPEDIA
• Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition 1914–17 (Aurora) SCOTT POLAR RESEARCH INSTITUTE
• The Tragic Story of Shackleton's Stranded Ross Sea Party HISTORY HIT
• Ernest Shackleton — The Ross Sea Party (1915–17) ANTARCTIC GUIDE