My Slack Moment in Shackleton’s Shadow

by Jim Freund

© 2022

            Early this month, a team of scientists and adventurers finally located what remained of the British expedition ship, HMS Endurance, at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. The ship’s 1915 sinking led (as reported in The New York Times) “to one of the greatest tales of leadership and survival in exploration history.”

            The Endurance, under the command of Ernest Shackleton, had set out to make the first crossing of the Antarctic continent. But after poking its way gingerly through the the Weddell Sea ice (and here I’m quoting from a documentary on the subject), “a northerly gale pressed the pack hard against the land and pushed the floes right against each other. Suddenly there was no way forward, nor any way back. Endurance was beset – in the words of one crew-member, “frozen like an almond in the middle of a chocolate bar.”

             There was no way out. The ship was crushed and sank into a watery grave. The crew then set out on Shackleton’s amazing adventure across the South Atlantic that ended up a year-and-a-half later with all hands successfully rescued.

             Well, right about now I can almost hear many of you muttering, “Why is Jim telling us all this?” Here’s why. Because, believe it or not,  66 years ago I had my own rendezvous with Endurance’s destiny – except that as contrasted with the heroism of Shackleton and his crew, the role I played was marred by a serious dereliction of duty on my part that still vexes me today. I initially revealed the guts of this debacle in my 2020 memoir, The First 85 . . . . – but even for those of you exposed to it there, I consider the recent discovery of the HMS Endurance’s remains at the bottom of the Weddell Sea a sufficient enough pretext to make my tale worth retelling.

             So return with me now to the winter of 1956-1957, when I was a recently commissioned Ensign in the U.S. Navy, assigned to the USS Staten Island AGB-5 – not a ferry (as the name might imply), but a real-life icebreaker.

            Back then, icebreakers were called upon to do just what the name implies – break through the pack ice to reach a blocked destination. In our case, the goals were usually to deliver supplies and such to one of the American bases in the Arctic and Antarctic, often shepherding in a much larger cargo ship that wasn’t able to transit the ice by itself.

            Our ship, with a complement of 250-plus officers and enlisted men resembled a squashed destroyer – shorter in length, wider in width. It had virtually no keel, which made it susceptible to pronounced oscillations even in not-so-rough water – we liked to say, “It rolls in wet grass.” And when the sea did get rough, its crew often experienced alarming, seasick-causing gyrations.  

            The ship broke the ice by amping its diesel engines to full throttle and riding up onto the floes, creating a pathway through the ice by the sheer weight and thrust of the icebreaker’s bow. The Staten Island had been launched during World War II and promptly turned over to the Russians for their use in Siberian and other far-north waters. It was returned to the U.S. in the late ’40s. 

            My first cruise was to the Arctic, starting shortly after I graduated from Princeton in 1956. On Arctic cruises, which lasted several months during the summer, we traveled up to and around northern Alaska to resupply the DEW-line outposts that stretched across Alaska from Point Barrow into Canada, serving as a Cold War tripline to give early warning of a Soviet aircraft or missile attack on the U.S.

            A new Captain of the ship had just taken over the helm. (Let’s call him by his nickname among the crew, “Jumbo.”) The more experienced officers spent a lot of time trying to figure Jumbo out, but I was too far down the executive ladder to have much direct contact with him. I did sense from our minimal encounters that he held me in low regard – “one of those pampered Ivy League kids they sometimes send us,” he was probably thinking. I reciprocated by being on the lookout for Captain Queeg-like tendencies in him – shades of The Caine Mutiny, a favored fiction of the day.

            The highlights (and low points) of my Naval experience were two Antarctic voyages of five to six months each, the particulars of which gave rise to most of my enduring Navy memories.  These cruises featured alluring scenery, some sunny days (albeit cold as hell) and a paucity of dark nights, lots of penguins, and several interesting cities we visited on the way there and back.

            We were part of something called Operation Deep Freeze. Its goal was to complete building sturdy bases around the Antarctic continent that would be used by scientists during the International Geophysical Year 1957-58 and subsequent periods. Our presence down there came in the Antarctic summer (North America’s winter), but the bases would be manned throughout the cold and dark Antarctic winter, when there was minimal contact with the outside world.

            For our first cruise south in 1956-57, we were part of a 3,500-man contingent in twelve ships, plus air support. The Staten Island’s particular mission was to enable a base to be built from scratch in the Antarctic’s most treacherous and remote oceanic area, the Weddell Sea. We were quite aware of the fact that this was where Ernest Shackleton suffered his watery disaster four decades earlier – HMS Endurance breaking apart in the tenacious grip of the ice. The Weddell Sea was known as the “hellhole of the Antarctic,” and information about it was scanty. Our task was to lead into that hellhole the USS Wyandot – a cargo ship that had crammed in her holds 5,600 tons of the material and equipment needed to build and stock the base.

            The last segment of our voyage – from Punta Arenas, Chile at the tip of South America to the Antarctic – was through frigid seas whipped into a frenzy by severe wind gusts. Our no-keel design wasn’t made for such conditions, and life became decidedly uncomfortable. At meals, the officers had to strap themselves into seats at the wardroom table, snagging bites of food from gyrating individual trays. I can recall playing a pump organ in the crew’s mess hall for a church service one Sunday morning with the ship rocking like crazy; fittingly, each stanza of the chosen hymn seeking God’s protection ended with the words, “For those in peril on the sea.”

            All that turbulence let up when we finally entered the Weddell Sea. No waves there to toss us about – just an abundance of ice floes; and although it was a bit bumpy when the ship was breaking through a frozen field, this was much more manageable.

            But what wasn’t at all manageable was the increasing pressure of the ice through which Staten Island and Wyandot had to travel on our way to the section of the Antarctic coastline where the base was supposed to be built. Each day, the icebreaking become more difficult, until finally – somewhere in the middle of the Weddell Sea – both ships were no longer able to move.

            It was early in January when the two ships became beset – literally frozen in the ice, about a thousand yards apart. The intense ice pressure prevented Staten Island from getting any closer to the cargo ship, even through we were anxious to do so. The massive ice floes were gashing in Wyandot’s thinner hull, causing serious damage that we might well have been able to ameliorate if we could have come alongside.

            The stalemate went on day after day – no movement at all. Things grew increasingly tense; this was, after all, Shackleton territory. The pressured grip of the ice was intense – so tight that it actually lifted our ship several feet  out of the water – and it showed no signs of easing up. Although USS Staten Island was presumably of a sturdier build than HMS Endurance, we began to have nightmares about whether we might meet a fate similar to that fabled craft. And we knew there was no way to rescue our ship if we couldn’t make it out of the Weddell Sea on our own, especially once the Antarctic winter began.

            A perturbing week passed. The duty officers still stood regular four-hour watches on the bridge day and night, but with the ship stuck in the ice, there was little to do. And so one evening, when I had the watch, I avoided the frigid temperatures on the open bridges outside the wheelhouse and plunked myself down indoors in the “Captain’s chair,” immersed in trying to memorize a favorite poem, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach.

            A movie was being shown for the officers in the wardroom that evening. When it ended, the Captain, as was his habit, came up to the bridge for a brief visit before retiring to his cabin for the night. Anticipating his arrival, I mouthed a final    “. . . on a darkling plain,” stashed the poetry book, stood up from his chair, and saluted as Jumbo entered the wheelhouse. After mumbling a few words, he went out onto the open wing of the ship’s bridge to survey our static situation.

            “Freund!” came his sudden shout, “Get the hell out here!” I hurried out to the frigid open bridge, took a look around, and couldn’t believe my eyes. The pack ice that had held the ship so tightly in its grip for a week had abruptly eased off. Blue water was visible alongside the side of the vessel, and the outline of a narrow channel appeared between us and Wyandot.

            “When did this happen?!” Jumbo roared at me. I was speechless – I hadn’t gone outside to take a look for at least an hour, probably more.

            The Captain dismissed me with a snort and turned his attention to the situation. He was all business – ordering that the engines be made ready to get underway, setting an operational watch of the crew, signaling Wyandot that we were on our way to relieve the pressure on her hull. He ignored me completely, and I – awash in chagrin – just tried to stay out of the way.

            But alas, Jumbo’s energetic attempt to rectify the stalemated situation was to no avail. As swiftly as the ice pressure had eased, it quickly returned; and before we could even get underway, we were once again locked in tight.

            Although it was never determined whether or not, had I sounded an earlier alarm, we would have been able to reach Wyandot before the ice pressure resumed, the Captain was furious at me for my dereliction of duty – and rightly so. My relations with Jumbo now went from mediocre to much worse. To him, I was just a preppy Princetonian, not fit to serve our country. 

Finally, after eleven days frozen in place near Wyandot, the ice pressure mysteriously eased. It had something to do with tides or currents, but the mystery was never resolved. We gained enough leeway to reach the Wyandot and lead her out of the pack. The ice remained heavy – so tough to get through that we broke a blade on one of our propellers doing so – but we finally located a section of the ice shelf which extended from the coast that would permit offloading.  

            The Staten Island now acted like a bulldozer, using its prow to trim the ice shelf and knocking away rough edges so as to fashion an unloading pier. Then all of us on both ships worked around the clock to get the base built and up-and-running. Ellsworth Station came into being in just 12 days, after which we set off for home. It was quite an achievement – even my cynical self back then had to admit that we’d accomplished something worthwhile.

            But I remained haunted by my failure to perform when the chips were down. Even today, 66 years later, I can’t help comparing myself unfavorably to Ernest Shackleton. What if he, faced with similar peril, had cashed in his chips and sat off in a corner of the doomed HMS Endurance, memorizing irrelevant verse? Not a chance; his men depended on him to save them, and he did so admirably. Jumbo and our crew depended on me to do nothing more taxing than to take an occasional look at conditions outside the wheelhouse, and I let them down.

            The sole redeeming feature of this sorry episode is the lesson I learned: Never assume a damn thing! Don’t take anything for granted – including, but not limited to, the consistency of pack ice pressure. You can never tell what’s around the corner. Just when you think you’re so damn smart – so full of yourself and the facile assumptions you make, the shrewd inferences you draw – life throws you a helluva curve ball. This became a byword for me in both my legal career and personal life, serving me well and often through the years.

            Anyway, at this point in life when I’ve occasionally been known revisit some of my past glories, I just felt like sharing with you this unsettling tale . . . .