Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Expeditions, Pt. 2

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. This is part two of our episode on Ernest Shackleton's expeditions to Antarctica. I would only recommend starting with this one if you really like your story, is to just start in Media's race, because where we left off, Shackleton had traveled to Antarctica aboard the Endurance and he was trapped there on the ice. The team had abandoned ship. Another team that we have not talked about much at all had also traveled to Antarctica. They were aboard the Aurora and their job was to lay the supply depot that Shackleton's party was going to need on the second half of their trip across the continent. We will be catching up with the Aurora again later First, we will talk about the extraordinary survival of Shackleton's team if you missed last time. Also, there are some deaths in this episode, including some animal deaths. Losing the Endurance meant that there was no way Ernest Shackleton's team could attempt to trek across Antarctica. A six person team was supposed to be making that crossing, not all of the twenty people who were with him. Aside from that, the ice pack had been drifting the whole time. The endurance was stuck, so they were about five hundred seventy miles from where they had first become trapped. They had been moving in a roughly northwesterly direction toward the Antarctic Peninsula, so their new plan was to cross the ice until they got to water and then make for one of the islands at the end of that peninsula by boat. Shackleton thought Paulit Island was a good bet. It had shelter and supplies that were left by an earlier expedition, and that was roughly three hundred fifty miles away. The team camped on an ice flow about a hundred yards from the wrecked ship, and they salvaged as as much as they could from the wreckage. They called this spot where they were basically dropping stuff off their dump camp, and their preparations to leave that camp involved some difficult decisions. Shackleton wrote in his journal, quote this afternoon, Sally's three youngest pups, Sues Serious and Mrs Chippy, the carpenter's cat, have to be shot. We could not undertake the maintenance of weaklings under the new conditions. Macklin, Crane and the carpenter seemed to feel the loss of their friends rather badly. This wasn't the first time that dogs had to be shot during this In other cases, though the dogs had been really sick or hurt. The expedition was supposed to have a dog handler. The dog handler was supposed to have de worming medicine, but he didn't wind up joining the expedition, and they lost a lot of dogs because of intestinal worms. They also needed to cut down what they were carrying as much as possible. Everyone was allowed only two pounds of personal possessions, with a few exceptions. Leonard Hussey was allowed to bring his banjo for the sake of everyone's morale. Shackleton set the example himself, discarding his watch, his silver brushes, and other personal items in front of the rest of the crew. This included a Bible that Queen Alexandra had given him before departing. He pulled some passages from it first, though one was the twenty third Psalm, which begins the Lord is My Shepherd I shall not want. He also kept part of chapter thirty eight from the Book of Job, out of whose womb came the ice and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen. Shackleton and photographer Frank Hurley also had to make decisions about the expedition's pictures and film. Hurley had already braved the ship's wreckage while it was taking on water, and he had gotten everything he could get out of the dark room. But now they had to decide what to keep and what they were going to have to leave behind. Keeping in mind that the advanced sale of his work had helped pay for the expedition, Hurley wound up leaving most of his glass negatives, along with a lot of his equipment, but keeping film and a book of printed photographs. We have mentioned Shackleton's efforts to minimize divisions and foster a sense that things were being handled equitably. That was the case in these preparations as well. For example, they had two types of sleeping bags. Some were made of reindeer for and they were much warmer, and the others were made of wool. Although lots were drawn to decide who got which one, many of the higher ranking men stayed out of it. They took a wool bag for themselves, and they left the better bags for everyone else. Shackleton knew that crossing the ice is going to be difficult, so he sent an advanced party to try to clear a path. This path would need to accommodate dogs and sledges and men who were hauling the Endurances three lifeboats, but soon it became obvious that this was just not going to work. The ice was far too uneven and irregular. The boats probably would not even be seaworthy by the end of it if they got dragged over all that, so Shackleton revised his plan again, this time to continue drifting along with the ice and so wait for it to break up, hopefully with them being close enough to paull At Island to make it there. In the boats, they established a new camp, which they called Ocean Camp, about a mile and a half away from the wreck of the Endurance. Shackleton kept working on morale, including assigning the men who were hard to get along with to the same tent, which was also where he slept. He had really tried to select people for this expedition based on their skills and their temperament, but even so, this kind of stress and isolation and months of unending darkness were really hard. He also eventually had Quartermaster Thomas ord Lee's sleep with stores instead of an a tent with others. He was generally anxious and very focused on how short they were on everything and how much more likely that made it that they would all die. His journal has stuff in it where it's like he almost grasps that his demeanor was upsetting people, because he would say things like, Shackleton seems to understand that we might not live, but he doesn't want us to talk about it because it might upset the sailors, and I'm like, dude, he'd rain it in a little bit. The weather continued to warm as summer progressed into November, but in some ways that made things worse. On ice flow, everything became slushy and gross. People could just never get dry, and yet the ice blow was not breaking up in the way that they hoped it would. On November twenty one, the endurance sank. Shackleton noted in his journal quote at five pm, she went down by the head. The stern, the cause of all the trouble, was the last to go underwater. I cannot write about it. After this tension started to flare, teams kept going back to the dump camp to bring back more stuff that they could salvage from it, but that became increasingly dangerous. Shackleton started having trouble with sciatica, and for a while he was in so much pain that he could not get out of his sleeping bag without help. That made it hard for him to stay connected with what was happening with the rest of the camp and head off any morale issues that were brewing. With the ice flow staying stubbornly intact, but the ice itself seeming a little more passable, Shackleton decided to try hauling the boats to open water again. The ship had three small boats named after their biggest financial backers, the Standcomb Wills, the Dudley Docker, and the James Cared. They planned to have a Christmas celebration on Midsummer Day, December twenty two, and then set out the day after that, hauling the Dudley Docker and the James Cared and leaving the Stankham wheels behind. When they tried to do this, the going was very, very slow. Shackleton had hoped to pull the boats about sixty miles, but it was immediately clear that they were never ever going to make it that far. People's nerves started to fray as there were second guessing of whether leaving Ocean Camp had been the right decision. Eventually they hid an impassable stretch of ice and they had to backtrack, only for a crack to open up where they had been trying to make camp. People were understandably deeply frustrated that they left behind a lot of gear and supplies, and now they were in a worse position than they had been before, having made really almost no progress. They established yet another new camp, this one called Patients Camp. By mid January, the food supply was low enough that it could not sustain both the men and the dogs, and all but two of the sled teams were shot. Both Shackleton and second in command Frank Wilde wrote that this was the worst job of their lives. Shortly after this, the two remaining sledge teams made a run back to Ocean Camp, and they came back with about nine hundred pounds of stores. Then they sent another team to retrieve the standcom Wills. They were still low on food, and they were low on blubber to be used as fuel, but Shackleton resisted sending people out on hunting expeditions. It's not totally clear why he had really shown plenty of willingness to change his decisions in the face of changing circumstances or new information, but in this case he just kept maintaining that they had plenty. A lot of people felt like they did not have plenty. Some of the men who were keeping journals through this period became increasingly frustrated and cynical in them. By March, they were about seventy miles from Paul Island, and they could feel the movement of the ocean under the ice. They kept themselves ready to move quickly if the ice flow finally broken away that let them get to open water instead. When they finally passed Paulette Island, they were still separated by far too much ice to cross. The island was about sixty miles away, but in Shackleton's words quote, it might have been six hundred for all the chance that we had of reaching it by sledging across the broken sea ice in its present condition. On March, the team had to shoot the last of the dogs, and they ate meat from some of the younger ones. By this point their diet was almost entirely meet, although most of it was from seals and seabirds. In April, their ice flow started moving very quickly, caught in strong currents, and it was heaving enough that some of the men got sea sick. One night, a crack opened directly under a tent where two men were sleeping, and Shackleton rescued fireman Earnest Wholeness by pulling him out of the water by his sleeping bag. At this point, they could see Elephant Island in the distance, and they were finally close enough to water that they could get the boats there, so they abandoned the ice flow on April nine. We'll talk more about what happened after a sponsor break. Once Shackleton and his men were in the life boats, things became even more difficult and dangerous than they had been back on the ice. The largest of the boats was only about twenty two ft or six point seven meters long. They were facing gale force winds and rough seas that sometimes pushed them in the totally wrong direction, or they blew the boats away from each other. They were also surrounded by huge, treacherous chunks of ice and a whole lot of orca. The men had also been on an almost all meat diet for so long that their bodies just had almost no energy to do anything. They were at sea for four days, sheltering in the lee of large ice chunks overnight. By the third day, morale was pretty much broken. They were all completely exhausted. All of the boats had been swamped to the men's feet were soaking in freezing water. Some tried to row or get out of the way of ice, while others tried to bail out the boats, but everyone was dehydrated. Many of them had seasickness or dysentery or both. Shackleton reportedly stayed awake the whole time. They finally reached Elephant Island on April fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, and they had hot food and drink for the first time in days. But the spot where they made landfall was far from ideal. They had almost no shelter from the elements or the tides. A lot of the men had frost bite. Percy Blackborough, who had originally been a stowaway, was seriously ill, and First Engineer Louis Rickinson also appeared to have had a heart attack. A scouting team went to look for a better being spot by boat, and they found an area with a little more space and shelter. They relocated the camp by boat, but they had to leave some of their supplies behind because they were simply too exhausted to move them. This new location, though, was still fairly exposed. A blizzard ripped up one of their tents and flattened others almost immediately, and it was also a penguin rookery just covered in guano. Shackleton's description of the state of things at this point comes off as a little judgmental, especially given current understanding of things like trauma and mental health. Quote. Some of the men were showing signs of demoralization. They were disinclined to leave the tents when the hour came for turning out, and it was apparent they were thinking more of the discomforts of the moment than of the good fortune that had brought us to sound ground and comparative safety. The condition of the gloves and headgear shown me by some discouraged men illustrated the proverbial carelessness of the sailor. The articles had frozen stiff during the night, and the owners considered it appeared that the state of affairs provided them with a grievance, or at any rate gave them the right to grumble. They said they wanted dry clothes, and that their health would not admit of their doing any work only by rather drastic methods, where they induced to turn to frozen gloves and helmets undoubtedly are very uncomfortable, and the proper thing is to keep these articles thawed by placing them inside one's shirt during the night. In addition to its shortcomings in terms of protection from the elements and so much bird poop, the camp on Elephant Island wasn't near any kind of shipping lanes, so there was just about no chance that the men would be spotted and rescued. So Shackleton announced that he and a crew would take the James Cared, which was the biggest of the lifeboats, to South Georgia Island to get help. South Georgia Island was roughly eight hundred miles a They spent the next few days making repairs and adjustments to the James cared, both to repair some damage and to make it at least slightly more suitable for the journey. They salvaged lumber to make it more seaworthy, and they made a makeshift decking out of canvas that they had to thaw out in sections before they could sew it together. They made ballast for the boat by filling blankets with shingle from the island, and they supplemented that with boulders. Shackleton chose five other men to accompany him, Frank Worsley, captain of the Endurance, second officer Thomas Crane, carpenter Henry McNish, and seaman Timothy McCarthy and John Vincent. He selected these men both for their skills and for their attitudes, although not necessarily because he thought that they would be pleasant to have a long McNish, for example, was a highly skilled carpenter, but he also butted heads with Shackleton and other authority figures, and he may have been selected just out of year that he would cause unrest among the men if he were left at Elephant Island. They left on April, both to take advantage of a break in the weather and to try to get ahead of a band of ice that was freezing along the coast. They rode the James carried out past the reef, while other men ferried their food and equipment to them aboard the Stand gum Wills. Purley was taking photos of all of this. He had done that the whole time they were on the ice. He would continue to take photos on Elephant Island. One of his most dramatic ones shows the James Cared as it was leaving. This photograph originally also showed the Stand gum Wills coming back from its last ferry run, but the standcomb Wills was scratched out of the negative to show only the James Cared. Shackleton left his second in command, Frank Wilde, in charge of the camp, giving him a letter that started, quote, in the event of my not surviving the boat journey to South Georgia, you'll do your best for the rescue of the party. Wild tried to carry on Shackleton's efforts of focusing on the men's morale. In his own account, one of the more pessimistic men said, quote that's the last of them. As the James Cared sailed away, and quote I almost knocked him down with a rock but satisfied myself by addressing a few remarks to him in real lower deck language. The men left behind on Elephant Island made more durable shelters out of the boats and whatever else they could salvage. But the first night they were buried in a blizzard that revealed a lot of cracks in their shelters. They stuffed those up with a torn up sleeping bag. Every day they would stow their equipment so that they would be ready to leave if rescue arrived. They also tried to divide up the little pleasures they had access to, like rotating through the closest seat to the stove at meal time so everyone had a turn. They were still eating almost nothing but meat, but every once in a while Wild would break out some kind of treat from their stores, like barley or jam. They also still had Hussy's banjo, and they made up various songs about the predicament they were in. But as the days got shorter and shorter, the men spent more and more time in their sleeping bags. A lot of them became increasingly ill, and some had injuries that were truly dire. Blackborrow, for example, developed gangering in his feet, and that forced the surgeon to amputate his toes in a makeshift operating room that was as clean as they could make it, But considering that they were on an island covered in bird poop, working with gear that had been repeatedly swamped by the ocean, not that clean. Meanwhile, conditions aboard the James Cared were terrible. In Shackleton's words, quote, the tale of the next sixteen days is one of supreme strife amid heaving waters. The stretch of ocean they needed to cross was notoriously stormy. At one point, they were nearly capsized by a wave so big that Shackleton mistook its foamy crest for a break in the clouds. With light shining through their reindeer skin, sleeping bags started to shed, so they were prickly hairs all over the inside of the boat. The men had to sit or lie on the rocky, water logged ballast. They were increasingly wet, frost bitten, and burned from their stove. Worthily wrote of their situation in Shackleton's behavior, quote, two of the party at least were very close to death. Indeed, it might be said that he kept a finger on each man's pulse. Whenever he noticed that a man seemed extra cold and shivered, he would immediately order another drink of hot milk to be prepared and served to all. He never let the man know it was on his account, lest he become nervous about himself. On May fourth, they had a break in the weather, so they were able to get a little bit of a break and dry some of their clothes and sleeping bags, But there was so much cloud cover that they couldn't accurately determine their position. Their first real indicator that they were getting closer to land was on May seven, when they spotted some kilp. They ran out of fresh water before they got to the reef that ran alongside South Georgia Island, and then it took them multiple tries to get over the reef. By the time they finally made landfall, they were too tired to drag the boat out of the surf. They had to take turns hanging onto it so they wouldn't lose it, and they nearly did lose it at one point during the night. In the morning they ate some fledgling albatross is something that might seem weird if you have read the rhyme of the ancient mariner, but really it was not all that unusual. In fact, someone on the endurance had a copy of that poem, and they had used it to entertain themselves while trapped on the ice. In Shackleton's words quote on reading the Ladder, we sympathized with him and wondered what he had done with the albatross. It would have made a very welcome addition to our larder. Although they had gotten to South Georgia Island, they were basically on the wrong side of it. To get to the whaling station at grit Vickin, they were going to have to cross over the island, which was mountainous, uncharted, and considered to be uninhabitable. They also had no mountaineering equipment, just a rope and a carpenter's ads. If they were going in a straight line, they would need to travel twenty two miles or thirty five kilometers, but this obviously was not going to be a remotely straight line. It took a few days for them to recover, work out their gear, and prepare to leave. Mcneiche and Vincent were too sick to make the journey, so McCarthy stayed behind with them in a hut that they made from the boat. While Shackleton, Worseley, and Crane crossed the island. They got very little rest along the way. They did not have a tent or sleeping bags with them, and if they had fallen asleep for any length of time, they probably would have died. Then, at one point they got to a mountain face that they didn't have a way to get down, and so they had to slide down it on their coiled up rope. Having done all that, after about thirty six hours, they made it to the whaling station, just ahead of a gale that probably would have killed them if they had taken any longer. Shackleton gave this description of his meeting with Mr. Sorrel, manager of the whaling station, after they had crossed the mountains. Don't you know me? I said, I know your voice, He replied, doubtfully. You're the mate of the daisy. My name is Shackleton, I said. Immediately, he put out his hand and said, come in, Come in. Tell me when was the war over? I asked. The war is not over, he answered, millions are being killed. Europe is mad, the world is mad. That so what happened next after another quick sponsor break. After Shackleton, Worsley, and Crane ate and recovered a little bit, Worsley went with a relief boat to get the three men that they had left on the other side of the island. Those three were sent back to England while Shackulty, Warsley, and Crane started trying to find a ship that could rescue the twenty two people who were still left on Elephant Island. This turned out to be difficult. It was winter, and as Shackleton had just learned, the world was still at war. First, they tried aboard the Southern Sky, which could not make it through the pack ice. The Southern Sky took Shackleton to the Falkland Islands, where he was able to send a cable to Britain to let everyone know he had survived. While people were pleased to hear that, they were also really preoccupied with the ongoing war. Shackleton was advised to seek help from nations in South America to relieve his stranded crew. That still took a while. He faced a whole series of breakdowns and ice jams and other disappointments before finally getting to Elephant Island. Aboard the Chilean steamer Yelcho. This was a small boat. It was not at all built for this kind of purpose. They arrived at Elephant Island on August nineteen sixteen. Shackleton was on deck looking through binoculars, alarmed to see what looked like a flag at half staff, but then he saw that there were twenty two men present on shore. In Worsley's words, quote, he put his glasses back in their case and turned to me, his face showing more emotion than I had ever known it to show before. Crane had joined us and we were all unable to speak. It sounds trite, but years literally seemed to drop from him as he stood before us. From Wild's point of view, I'm seeing the ship from the island quote. I felt jolly near blubbing for a bit and could not speak for several minutes. The survival of all twenty eight men from Shackleton's expedition aboard the Endurance was truly astonishing, and it made headlines. But World War One had stretched on the whole time they had been gone. It had been so painful and demoralizing that people didn't really see this dramatic rescue as much of a relief. There was even some criticism that everyone involved should have been part of the war effort that whole time they were gone. Also, this relief of the men at Elephant Island was not the end of the saga for the Imperial trans Antarctic Expedition or Shackleton's efforts to get all of his men to safety. As the Endurance was trapped in the Sea Ice and the Wettle Sea. The Ross Sea Party had been facing its own ordeal if you recall, that was the party that had arrived on the Aurora to lay the supply depots that Shackleton's team would need. The Ross Sea Party was under the command of a Eneas McIntosh, who had been part of Shackleton's expedition aboard the Nimrod and had lost an eye in an accident during that expedition. Others also had experience in Antarctica, but many of the crew aboard did not have any polar experience. Their money and supplies were even more hectically cobbled together than the Endurance teams was, and they were also operating under a totally unnecessary deadline. Shackleton had originally hoped to cross Antarctica in the summer of nineteen fourteen and nineteen fifteen, and he had realized that was not going to work before setting sail from South Georgia Island, but before he left he did not send any kind of word to McIntosh about the schedule change. On top of that, once Shackleton realized their crossing wasn't going to happen at all, there was no way to let McIntosh know. So the Rossy Party Number one was trying to plan for an expedition that was running a year late, and then number two had no idea that Shackleton's team wasn't coming, but they thought if they didn't get their job done, Shackleton was going to die. The ross Sea Party had arrived at McMurdo Sound in January of nineteen fifteen and started laying supply depots on January, but that was extremely slow going. They faced deep snow and impassable ice ridges. Their sledges were overloaded, and eventually they had to divide the supplies and carry them in a relay. This took four times as long and they had to travel four times as far, so soon they were exhausted and they were low on rations. The sledge dogs became so hungry that they started trying to eat their own harnesses, and as the dogs died, the men had to haul more and more of the load themselves. To add to all of that, there were blizzards, extremely low temperatures, frost bite, snow blindness, and sleeping bags that froze solid during the day and then melted when they were exposed to people's body heat at night, so the team was just constantly cold and wet. Eventually McIntosh and the sledge teams had to return to the base for the winter. They got there on March to find the Aurora and almost all of the rest of the short team gone. They took shelter in a it that Robert Falcon Scott had left behind in nineteen o two, and then waited for the McMurdo Sound to freeze over so they could walk to their planned winter quarters on Cape Evans. There they found the rest of the shore party, but the Aurora was gone. It had been blown off its moorings in a gale, and everyone assumed it had sunk. Most of what was supposed to sustain the shore team over the winter had not yet been unloaded when the aurora disappeared, including their winter clothes. They had only what they were wearing. Robert Falcon Scott could not object to their use of that hut's because at this point he had died trying to return from the South Pole. The Aurora team made it through the winter, though, and as the weather got warmer in October of nineteen fifteen, they got back to work, now with makeshift gear and sledges, and with only nine men and four surviving dogs to do the work. And this phase was even worse than the first one. They started out with three teams and each team had its own stove, but when one of the stoves failed, that team had to go back to base. Then the second stove failed, so the two remaining teams had to consolidate and move together. That slowed their progress way way down. They again faced scurvy and snow, blindness and hunger, reaching a point where each man's daily ration was eight lumps of sugar and a biscuit. Arnold Spencer Smith became so ill he had to be left behind, and when the team returned for him, both he and McIntosh had to be loaded onto sledges and pulled on their journey home. Their situation was so dire that they were living on tea and dog food and having to take supplies from the depots that were supposed to be for Shackleton, again not knowing that Shackleton was not coming, and thinking that if they took too much, his party would be doomed. Arnold Spencer Smith died of scurvy on March eight, and as the team was trying to make their j ning back to the base, McIntosh became so weak that he could not even stay on the sledge he was being pulled on. More than once he fell off, and the team had to backtrack for him after they realized he was gone. The surviving team made it back to Hut Point, and in May McIntosh announced that he and VG Hayward were going to walk across the ice to the base camp at Cape Evans. The rest of the team tried to dissuade them, thinking that the ice was not deep enough to be safe yet. McIntosh and Hayward left anyway, and a blizzard started not long after. A search party went to look for them once the storm had cleared and found their trail of footprints, which stopped suddenly at some freshly frozen ice. Eventually, the last of the sledging party crossed back to Cape Evans and met up with the rest of the team that had stayed there. Once authorities knew about Shackleton's survival, funds were finally approved for a relief expedition for the Ross Sea Party. Shackleton left for New Zealand in October of nineteen sixteen to join that party, and the ships sent to retrieve them was the Aurora. Now it was under the command of Captain John King Davis. Unbeknownst to anybody who had been on the shore, the Aurora, after getting blown off its moorings, had spent ten months drifting in the pack ice, and then had gone to New Zealand for repairs once it was freed. The Aurora arrived in Antarctica on January tenth, nineteen seventeen, and Shackleton learned about the deaths of McIntosh, Hayward and Spencer Smith, and the fact that the party had traveled fifteen hundred miles in a hundred and sixty days, laying their supply depots as planned. They looked for the bodies of McIntosh and Hayward and took the seven men who had been stranded ashore back to New Zealand. Yeah, there was no sign of their bodies. They almost certainly fell through the ice or we're on an ice flow that broke away and they couldn't get off of it. Shackleton again and worked with Edward Saunders to write a book about all of this. It was titled South The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition nineteen fourteen to nineteen seventeen. This is in the public domain now, along with a lot of his other work. You can read it online for free. Just one note if you do this, one of the Rossy Party sledge dogs is named a racist slur. Most of the men who had survived this expedition went into active service during the remainder of World War One, but Shackleton had trouble finding a post. He seems to have struggled during this time, drinking excessively and spending most of his time with the woman that he was having an affair with. The Foreign Office sent him to South America in late nineteen seventeen and nineteen eighteen on what was described as a propaganda mission to raise morale. He went to Russia with the British Expeditionary Force in nineteen nineteen. That same year, Frank Hurley released a silent film called South Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance Expedition. After the war was over, Shackleton tried to plan another expedition to Antarctica, this one aboard a ship called the Quest. It had a crew of eighteen, seven of whom had been aboard the Endurance. They arrived at grit Vickin Harbor on South Georgia Island on January fourth Nino. The next day, Shackleton died of a heart attack at the age of forty seven. Many sources attribute this to damage from the extreme stress and difficulty of the Endurance expedition. Although plans were made to return Shackleton's body to his wife at her request, he was buried in a cemetery on a hill above the whaling station at South Georgia Island. His obituary in the Geographical Record began quote with the death of Sir Ernest Shackleton, Britain loses one of the most brilliant explorers of modern days, and in his ninety three book The Worst Journey in the World, about Robert Falcon Scott's ill fated nineteen ten expedition to the South Pole, absolute Cherry Gerard wrote, quote for a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott for a winter journey, Wilson for a dash to the Pole, and nothing else Hammondson. And if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time. And of course the Falkland Maritime Heritage Trusts Endurance twenty two expedition found the Endurance on March nine using remotely operated submarines. It was in water one thousand sixty five fathoms or three thousand eight meters deep, about six kilometers from where Frank Worsley had recorded the ship's last position. It's reportedly in surprisingly good condition considering the circumstances of its sinking and the conditions of the Wettle Sea, and really full of all kinds of fascinating sea life. Yeah there's a crab in particular that a big time Yeah. So yeah, that's that's Shackleton's Endurance. Now that the shipwreck has been found, we'll talk. We have various feelings about of all this, about all of this, and we will talk about them in the behind the scenes. And I have listener mail from Celeste, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy, I love your podcast. I am constantly entertaining friends and family with the things I learned there. I've been meaning to share this for quite some time, and your recent podcast on William APIs reminded me to do so. I'm the director of the Cumberland Public Library in Rhode Island. My library is a former monastery situated on five fifty acres. There are a number of trails here, but one of them leads to a monument called Nine Men's Misery. It is said to be the oldest veterans memorial in the country. I've attached a document created by a long ago eagle scout that details the history of King Philip's War and how the monument came to be there. Ten men were dispatched from a regiment during a skirmish called Pierce's Fight, where fifty two soldiers and eleven Native Americans died. These ten were supposedly ambushed by Native Americans and only one survived. Their bodies were buried in a mass grave here on the future monastery grounds, and a cairn built over them. When the monks came here in the early nineteen hundreds. They built a better cairn cemented together, which you can see today. Later in nineteen seventy six, the Veterans Group placed a marker there. Needless to say, local residents believe it's haunted and that one can hear groans coming from the earth. I've walked there many times and haven't heard anything, but you never knew. Keep up the wonderful podcast. I'm attaching a photo of my rescue Sadie, who is an Australian cattle dog, Celeste. Thanks so much for sending this Celeste number one. Kind of cool to have a public library that is in a former monastery site. I find that very interesting. I also, having done uh you know, episodes about Kings Phillips war um a couple of different times, I had never heard about this particular fight um at, which of course is its own very complicated story beyond the context of just this email. UM. Also, what a good dog. Uh So, thank you again to the list for sending this email. If you would like to send us a note, We're at History Podcast at I heeart radio dot com and we're all over social media. Missed in History. That's where real fund our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and wherever else you like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. 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