Shackleton's Last Voyage: The Story of the QuestWild, Frank
History
Shackleton's Last Voyage: The Story of the Quest
Wild, Frank
Antarctica -- Discovery and exploration -- British; Quest (Ship); Shackleton, Ernest Henry, Sir, 1874-1922
Thursday, January 19th, broke bright and clear. We were surrounded
on all sides by bergs, those in sight numbering more than a hundred.
Many of them were flat topped, evidently pieces which had recently
calved from the Great Ice Barrier and floated out to sea. Others were
more irregular in shape, with pinnacles, buttresses, and caves and
tunnels through which the water rushed with a roar. The imaginative
could see in them a resemblance to all sorts of things; churches with
spires, castles with heavy ramparts, steamships, human profiles, and
the figures of every conceivable kind of beast. Some were stained with
red-coloured mineral deposits, blue bottom-mud and yellow and brown
diatomaceous material. A few sloped towards the sea at such an angle as
to enable penguins, all of them of the ringed variety, to clamber up.
Some of the groups of penguins thus formed numbered as many as two or
three hundred.
There was a high following sea, and the deeply laden _Quest_ wallowed
in it heavily, dipping both gunwales and filling the waist with water,
which rushed to and fro with every roll. Smith was thrown off his feet
and swept violently across the deck, fetching up with considerable
force against the lee rail. He was much bruised and shaken.
During the day a number of soundings were taken with the Kelvin
apparatus, but no bottom was found with 300 fathoms of wire.
In the evening Worsley altered course to look at what appeared to be
a small half-submerged rock, but on approach it proved to be a heavily
stained piece of ice.
January 20th was another fine day. I saw Marr come on deck
wearing a fur cap, heavy sea-boots, and a belt from which hung a
ferocious-looking sheath knife. The scrubby promise of a thick beard
adorned his chin, and I had the greatest difficulty in associating the
kilted boy who joined us in London with this tough-looking sailor man.
If Hussey had been there he would have sung, “If only my mother could
see me now!” Indeed, I would have liked to have had for a short while
the use of a magic carpet and been able to transfer him exactly as he
stood to the bosom of his family.
Jeffrey, who had been confined to his cabin since leaving Rio de
Janeiro, returned to duty on this day.
We continued to pass through a sea filled with icebergs, which in the
sunshine stood out white and glistening against the blue-black of the
sea. Worsley saw what looked like a new island with high summit, but
even as he pointed it out a breeze flattened off its top, proving it
to be only a cloud. These little rebuffs on the part of Nature have no
influence upon Worsley, whose enthusiasm is unconquerable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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