Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys by Oliver Neil

Author:Oliver, Neil [Oliver, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

Our minds accustomed themselves gradually to the tales of nations in arms, of deathless courage and unimagined slaughter, of a world-conflict that had grown beyond all conceptions, of vast red battlefields in grimmest contrast with the frigid whiteness we had left behind us.

It was 1917 before Shackleton made it back to Britain. He was 42 and officially too old to join any of the armed services. He made numerous offers to get into the fray on behalf of King and Country, but all were rejected. Weakened by all he had put his body through—hard drinking not the least of it—he finally died of a heart attack on January 5, 1922. He was back on South Georgia when the moment came, still exploring, still looking for something out there just beyond his reach. His body was put aboard a ship bound for England, but when word reached his wife, Emily, she had it turned back. If Shackleton had ever belonged to another human being—and that seemed doubtful—it had not been her, or their children. Shackleton’s was a vagabond heart and it belonged not at home, but on the journey. He was duly returned to South Georgia and there buried among whalers and mariners in one of the loneliest graveyards on Earth.

Of the rest of his men—both those of the Weddell Sea and the Ross Sea teams—no fewer than 30 joined the fighting of the Great War. By the end of it all, five of them lay dead on the battlefields, drowned in the seas or lost to illness.

But those fates lay in the future, beyond the imaginations of those who lived out their lives in the years before 1914.

Back on the Antarctic ice of 1904, Scott was coming to the end of his first cradling in those frigid arms. After a second winter on the ice at Hut Point, the Discovery expedition came to a close in the February of that year. This time two ships, the Morning and the Terra Nova, had been sent south by the worried folks back home—and again Scott was infuriated at being ordered to return to Britain. This time there was no escaping the inevitable. By the end of the month all three ships were heading north, arriving back in the harbor at Lyttelton around Easter time.

Scott and the crew of the Discovery eventually sailed into Stokes Bay between Southsea and the Isle of Wight at around 11 o’clock on the morning of September 10, 1904. They arrived in Portsmouth harbor later the same day and the ship was instantly surrounded by boats of all sizes, their passengers desperate to catch a glimpse of the men aboard. Boy sailors in the rigging of Nelson’s Victory added their voices to the cheering.

Like astronauts returning from another world, they were hailed as heroes—and their achievements had been immense. They had after all been the first travelers to explore and survey the Great Ice Barrier, first to discover the polar ice cap and first to lay the groundwork that would eventually fix the position of the South Magnetic Pole.

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