Antarctic Explorer Discovers South Pole Is A Good Place to Visit, But Wouldn't Want to Live There
On the disastrous, miraculous events of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
Michael Seaholm
Undergraduate/Computer Science
The following is a story that was originally related to me and the rest of a section of GEOL 102 by the ever-enthusiastic Professor Kent Syverson, who coincidentally is the faculty advisor for The Flip Side. I have embellished the dialogue and some additional details of the story for humorous purposes, but on the whole the historical aspects, people, and events involved are true and factual to the best of my knowledge.
Our story begins with Ernest Shackleton, a British Antarctic explorer whose exploits took the early 20th century world by storm. An expert mariner and all-around badass, Shackleton had the sort of chiseled features and personal magnetism that afforded him a firm handle on leadership and an innate ability to make ladies swoon on the spot, as the ladies of the 1910s, being disenfranchised and corseted most of the time, had a lot to faint about anyway. His life's dream was to be the first person to reach the South Pole, and he came pretty close during the poorly-named Nimrod Expedition, where he reached what was then the farthest south latitude ever ventured in 1909. Unfortunately, one of his crew members had to use the bathroom, and they were forced to turn back around 100 miles north of the South Pole. For his heroism and willingness to make decisions based on the stupidity of his crew, Shackleton was knighted upon returning to England, meaning that he could legally carry a sword with him wherever he went.
Unfortunately, that fucker Roald Amundsen, who isn't even British, made it to the South Pole in late 1911, so Shackleton decided to change his life's goal to something simpler: crossing the Antarctic continent from one end to another by way of the South Pole, probably so that he could piss on the remains of Amundsen's base camp as he traveled by. He quickly assembled a team of twenty-eight like-minded sailors and headed out toward Antarctica in late 1914 in the Endurance, a nice ship. Things were going well on the offset, since Shackleton had played a lot of Oregon Trail beforehand and knew how much of each supply he would need on such an arduous journey. It turns out that the most useful item during this trip was dogs, since they are good for morale and, in case of emergencies, are quite palatable.
Things started to get a little shaky when the ship entered the Weddell Sea, a body of water known for fucking up Antarctic expeditions. The pack ice that was floating in vast quantities in the region eventually got so bad that the ship became trapped in the ice. Everyone started to panic until Shackleton, never to lose his head in a crisis, shouted, “Chill out, homeys! Ima go all Allan Quatermain on this bitch.” It took 17 men to keep him from attacking the pack ice with his sword. Luckily for the crew of the Endurance, Antarctic gales were causing the ship and the surrounding ice to drift northward, where the ice would let up a bit and the ship could be dislodged. For the next nine months, the crew was holed up in the ship, staying busy with such activities as chess, card games, and preventing their collective sexual frustration from becoming full-blown homosexuality from living in such close proximity to twenty other guys.
Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse when the pack ice started to slowly crush the ship. Despite this rather disquieting turn of events, Shackleton kept his cool, due in part to the crate of amphetamines that he kept in his quarters. In order to bolster morale, Shackleton took it upon himself to grow a beard so that he looked even more badass than usual and was thus able to inspire heaps of confidence in his men. Even when the ship tipped over on the ice and was unsuitable as a living space, the hardy adventurer and his equally hardy crew set up tents on the ice like they were waiting for tickets outside the fucking Bijou. They survived largely by shooting leopard seals in the face and not freaking out about the constant danger that they were in. This went on until April of 1916, when the practicality of living on a giant floating ice cube was brought into question. In a stroke of brilliance, Shackleton directed his crew to take the row boats out of the capsized Endurance so that they could row to nearby Elephant Island. The crew would get a chance to step on tangible land for the first time in more than eighteen months.
It turns out that Elephant Island is a desolate hellhole inhabited by penguins and the stench of failure. Realizing that the much more awesome South Georgia Island was just to the east and readily accessible by 15 days travel, Shackleton and a handful of others crammed into the James Caird, which was little more than a bundle of sticks with a piece of string taped on to it. Using this rather poor vessel, they managed to reach the western shore of South Georgia Island on May 10, 1916. Their first view of the island was a series of inhospitable mountains that presented them no possible means of passage. “Holy living fuck,” an exasperated Shackleton reportedly exclaimed upon seeing the obstacle, but nevertheless he and his now seriously malnourished crew took it upon themselves to scale a series of goddamn mountains to reach a settlement on the other side of the island, using a series of rope and some tarp to get up one side and down the other. When they made it to the whaling office on the other side of the island, they were met by a bunch of people that had presumed them long dead. Needless to say, heads rolled at their apparent immortality and their pulses were checked again and again to make sure that they were actually alive.
Meanwhile, the rest of the crew literally chilled on Elephant Island, subsisting on penguins and then, when penguin populations dwindled, their highly edible dogs. After Shackleton and his fellows on South Georgia Island had satisfied their raging libidos, they sent a ship back to pick up the stranded crew. This was about four months after their departure, but Shackleton's remarkable leadership was such that those stranded were none too annoyed at him despite the serious malnutrition and frostbite they had suffered in his absence. The now reunited crew made their glorious return to England, where I am sure people on the street gave them high-fives for their accomplishments despite the strict high-fiving policies of the day that would normally prohibit such behavior. The expedition was a huge credit to Shackleton's leadership in that every one of his crew survived the two year journey in spite of the heavy setbacks that they encountered. Even to this day, the expedition stands as an incredible true story of survival, or alternatively the world's longest entry on FMyLife.com.