Ice Captain: The Life of J.R. Stenhouse E-Book

Stephen Haddelsey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Much has been written on Antarctic explorer, Ernest Shackleton. This is the story of the Endurance expedition's other hero, Joseph Russell Stenhouse (1887-1941) who, as Captain of the SS Aurora, freed the ship from pack ice and rescued the survivors of the Ross Sea shore party, deeds for which he was awarded the Polar Medal and the OBE. He was also recruited for special operations in the Arctic during the First World War, became involved in the Allied intervention in Revolutionary Russia, and was later appointed to command Captain Scott's Discovery. Stenhouse was one of the last men to qualify as a sea captain during the age of sail.

Leseprobe

For my nieces, Anna and Rachael

The vast terraqueous Globe I’ve rambled o’er,

But in myself retir’d discover’d more.

The Life and Errors of John Dunton

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Preface

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

1 The Apprentice in Sail

2 South with Shackleton

3 Arrivals and Departures

4 Adrift in McMurdo Sound

5 Prisoners of the Pack

6 Aurora Redux

7 The Mystery Ships

8 War in the Arctic

9 The Syren Flotilla

10 Discovery

11 Oceans Deep

12 The Final Season

13 Pieces of Eight

14 Treasure Island to the Cap Pilar

15 Thames Patrol

16 With His Boots On

Notes and Sources

Select Bibliography

Copyright

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

All photographs reproduced courtesy of Patricia and Sarah Mantell.

1. The Steam Yacht Aurora of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition’s Ross Sea Party.

2. Members of the Ross Sea Party land stores.

3. Climbing from the sea ice to the Great Barrier, summer 1916.

4. Aurora during her ten-month drift in the ice floes.

5. Shackleton’s last search for Aeneas Mackintosh, January 1917.

6. Damage to Aurora’s stern-post.

7. Aurora during her emergency refit, April–December 1916.

8. Surviving members of the Ross Sea Party and their saviours on board Aurora, January 1917.

9. The ‘mystery ship’, PQ-61.

10. Officers and men of the Syren Flotilla, Lake Onega, 1919.

11. RRS Discovery, under full sail.

12. Officers and scientific staff of the National Oceanographic Expedition of 1925–7, on board the RRS Discovery, 1924.

13. Stenhouse on the bridge of RRS Discovery.

14. On board Discovery, December 1925.

15. Stenhouse and his bride, Gladys, on their wedding day, 2 October 1923.

16. Hut inhabited by the members of Treasure Recovery Ltd, Cocos Island, September–October 1934.

17. Stenhouse and other members of the treasure-hunting expedition, Cocos Island, 1934.

18. Frank and Jean Worsley.

19. Stenhouse on board HMS Lucia, August 1941.

20. Probably the last studio photograph of Stenhouse, Bedford, 1940.

21. Stenhouse’s medals and decorations.

LIST OF MAPS

Map 1. The Drift of SY Aurora, 6 May 1915–12 February 1916

Map 2. North Russia, 1918–19

Map 3. Lake Onega, 1919

Map 4. The Voyages of the RRS Discovery September 1925–September 1927

Map 5. Massawa, 1941

PREFACE

Ever since news of its astonishing fate broke upon a war-weary world nearly a century ago, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance Expedition has been considered one of the supreme examples of polar exploration and survival against the odds. In that incredible story it is generally acknowledged that one of the most dramatic episodes is the epic 800-mile small-boat voyage across the storm-lashed Antarctic Ocean, from Elephant Island to South Georgia. It is less well known, however, that the expedition gave birth to not one but two heroic feats of seamanship, with matters of life and death hinging upon each in equal measure. This book tells, for the first time, the story of the man responsible for that other, less celebrated but equally remarkable odyssey: Joseph Russell Stenhouse.

Shackleton’s trial began in the Weddell Sea; but, on the other side of the frozen continent, the expedition’s second ship, the Aurora, suffered a fate which closely paralleled that of the Endurance. Torn from her moorings and driven out to sea by a ferocious gale, she, too, became trapped in pack-ice which, for ten months, sawed relentlessly at her wooden hull. Although the ice lifted the 600-ton ship from the water like a toy and strained her timbers and joints to breaking point, she, unlike the Endurance, eventually escaped its grip. With her rudder smashed and water cascading from her seams, under Stenhouse’s command, the Aurora then embarked upon her own extraordinary and desperate voyage to reach safe harbour. That she survived at all was, in the words of Frank Worsley, entirely due to her captain’s ‘superb seamanship’. And Worsley knew what he was talking about: as master of the Endurance, it was he who had navigated the ship’s whaleboat, the James Caird, to South Georgia.

But Stenhouse’s command of the Aurora was just one episode in a career packed with extraordinary adventures. As with so many of his fellows, the Antarctic undoubtedly became the linchpin of his career. Unlike some, however, upon his return from the frozen south in 1917 Stenhouse did not experience any debilitating sense of anti-climax or bathos. In particular, the war offered him an opportunity to excel, both at sea and on land, and to build upon an already firmly established reputation for courage and daring. During its course he earned the Distinguished Service Cross for sinking an enemy submarine and the Distinguished Service Order and the French Croix de Guerre for his part in the Allied struggle with Bolshevism in Murmansk and Archangel. These, when added to the Order of the British Empire and the Polar Medal, which he received for his Antarctic service, made him one of the most highly decorated of all Heroic Age explorers. He also embraced the opportunity to return to Antarctic waters, not with the poorly conceived and goalless Quest Expedition which fell apart after the death of Shackleton in 1922, but as master of Captain Scott’s Discovery, on which he shared responsibility for one of the most detailed and comprehensive surveys of the world’s oceans ever undertaken.

In the difficult postwar years, Stenhouse, with so many others, experienced periods of unemployment and he became involved in a variety of money-making schemes. Some, such as his hunt for pirate gold on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, smacked of romance and desperation in equal measure; others, such as his attempt to pioneer Antarctic tourism in the 1930s, based upon an altogether more robust premise. But, be they fantastical or rational, he brought to every occupation the same levels of determination and resourcefulness that had enabled him to bring the crippled Aurora back to safety.

Almost as extraordinary as the range of Stenhouse’s activities is the remarkable survival of the record of his adventures. He was both a diarist and a regular letter-writer and many of these documents have been preserved by his family. Inevitably, some items have been lost or destroyed in the decades since his death, but the residue constitutes what must be one of the most comprehensive archives of any Heroic Age Antarctic explorer in private, or, perhaps, even in public hands. It allows us to observe Stenhouse in a range of circumstances and environments, before, during and after the Endurance Expedition. We see him as an apprentice, lashed with spume and spray as his first ship rounded Cape Horn in a tempest; sledging across the Antarctic sea-ice of McMurdo Sound to break into the time capsule of Scott’s Discovery hut; dodging the bullets of Bolshevik soldiers among the pine forests of the Kola Peninsula; and fighting to salvage ships crucial to the Allied war effort in the Red Sea. These glimpses combine to reveal a man whose courage, resourcefulness and resilience impressed themselves indelibly on those who served with him and earned for him their respect, admiration and enduring affection.

And yet Stenhouse also suffered from prolonged and debilitating bouts of depression and, in certain circumstances, he could demonstrate an inclination to brag, a willingness to strike first and ask questions later and so rigid an adherence to shipboard discipline that he sometimes resembled a martinet of the old school. Operated upon by different pressures and different personalities, the balance of his multifaceted character could shift and change, and the very qualities that enabled him to save the Aurora in 1916 led to disastrous discord and disunity on board the Discovery in 1927. The fact that these conflicts and inconsistencies can be observed against an ever-changing backdrop of adventure and action, and that they are described in Stenhouse’s own words with all the immediacy of felt experience, has made his life fascinating to research and – I can only hope – to read.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I first became familiar with the career of J.R. Stenhouse when researching that of his friend, the equally daring Heroic Age explorer, Frank Bickerton. The lives and adventures of both men have struck a chord with practically everyone I have contacted during the course of my years of research but, while every facet of Bickerton’s life had to be pursued with the tenacity of the most dedicated detective, the vast bulk of the material used in preparing this biography was made available to me after only one or two telephone calls and letters. Practically every document upon which this biography is based, including diaries, letters, notebooks, photographs and memoranda, lies in the hands of Stenhouse’s family – in particular, in those of his only daughter, Mrs Patricia Mantell, and his granddaughter, Sarah Mantell. To Mrs Mantell and to Sarah, therefore, I should like to offer my most sincere thanks for all their support, encouragement and hospitality. Without their generosity and enthusiasm this book could never have been written. Furthermore, by preserving such an expansive archive, they have not only ensured that there is hardly a single gap or ambiguity in Stenhouse’s remarkable story, they have also done a great service to the history of Antarctic exploration.

I should also like to express my gratitude to the following individuals whose assistance and encouragement have been vital in enabling me to plug the few gaps in the Mantell family archive: Mr and Mrs Charles Stenhouse Martin, for kindly sharing their memories of Stenhouse, as well as for allowing me access to Mr Martin’s unpublished biography of his uncle, and to the letters and other documents relating to Stenhouse’s career in their possession. Mrs Elisabeth Dowler, daughter of Aeneas and Gladys Mackintosh and stepdaughter of Stenhouse, for once again providing a wealth of anecdotes and stories; and her daughter, Mrs Anne Phillips, for her continued help with and interest in my work. Mr Pat Bamford, for his hospitality and for allowing me access to his archive of material relating to Stenhouse’s greatest friend, Commander Frank Worsley. Mr John Thomson, biographer of Worsley, for his valuable help in researching the friendship of Stenhouse and Worsley. Mr John Hooke, for allowing me access to the Aurora diary of his father, Lionel Hooke. Mr Falcon Scott, for permitting me to quote from the papers of Kathleen Scott held at the Scott Polar Research Institute. The Hon. Alexandra Shackleton, for allowing me to utilise the Shackleton papers in the Scott Polar Research Institute. Mrs Margaret Marshall for kindly copying portions of the diary of her late husband, Dr E.H. Marshall, surgeon on the RRS Discovery. Mrs Pippa McNickle for her assistance in tracing the wartime friendship between Stenhouse and her father, Lieutenant-Commander L.M. Bates. Mr Mark Offord for the research undertaken on my behalf at the National Archives in Kew. Mrs Rosalind Marsden and Mrs Ann Savours Shirley for sharing with me their research into the National Oceanographic Expedition. Mrs Jane Seligman, for sharing her memories of Stenhouse’s connection with the voyage of the Cap Pilar. Mr James Campbell, for information relating to the friendship of his father, Major Walter Campbell, with Stenhouse.

Of course, a variety of institutions and their staff have been of immeasurable help; in particular, I should like to thank the following both for their generous assistance and for permission to quote from materials in their collections: the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), Cambridge, and its archivist, Ms Naomi Boneham; the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Southampton, and its erstwhile librarian, Ms Pauline Simpson; the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch, New Zealand; Mr Martin Beckett of the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; The National Archives (TNA) at Kew in London; the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London; the Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand; and the Bodleian Library (BL) in Oxford. This list is not, indeed cannot, be comprehensive and I hope that those who have not been named individually will not think that their help is any the less appreciated. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and I should like to crave the indulgence of any literary executors or copyright holders where these efforts have been unavailing.

Finally, I should like to pay tribute to my wife, Caroline, for her incredible forbearance and for her unflinching support and encouragement, without which this book would never have been completed.

Stephen Haddelsey

Southwell, Nottinghamshire

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the diaries and letters quoted in this book were written in circumstances of extreme stress and hurry which, inevitably, resulted in an array of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. For purposes of clarity and ease of reading, spelling has been corrected; punctuation has also been adjusted where absolutely necessary. Any words inserted by the author for clarity of meaning are identified by the addition of square brackets.

1

THE APPRENTICE IN SAIL

On a late summer’s morning in 1904, two figures might have been seen making their way along the crowded quaysides of South Shields, on the north-eastern coast of England. Followed by a porter pushing a conspicuously new-looking trunk on a handcart, they had made their way from the railway station, negotiating the squalid streets of poor housing that tumbled down towards the docks and which, for all South Shields’ prosperity, were inhabited by wretched-looking children, filthy and shoeless. The shorter of the two pedestrians, middle-aged and well-built, strode with confidence among the cables, crates and assorted impedimenta of the busy port. He seemed impervious to the stench of the herring fisheries, wafted by an inshore breeze from North Shields, and cast quick, appraising glances at the vessels crowding the harbour. The other, for all his powerful, loose-limbed build and 6ft 1½in, looked altogether less self-assured, as might be expected of a boy only just approaching the threshold of manhood. Andrew Stenhouse, engineer for Vickers & Maxim, the great shipbuilder and armaments manufacturer, and his 16-year-old son, Joe, had just travelled by train from Barrow-in-Furness, the latter nervously clutching a letter he had received a fortnight before from the offices of the Andrew Weir Shipping & Trading Company. The crumpled paper advised him that ‘we have arranged for you to go in our Barque Springbank’ and that he should hold himself ‘in readiness to join her in the Tyne’.1

Only a few weeks earlier, Joseph Russell Stenhouse had been employed as a clerk in the Barrow offices of Lloyds Register of Shipping. Having left Barrow’s Higher Grade School,2 aged 14, for two years the muscular and square-jawed youth had perched upon a high stool in an airless room, slaving at his duties and proving himself, according to his employer’s glowing reference, ‘willing, obliging and attentive’. But he had found it impossible to settle for a life of pen-pushing drudgery and, with each passing month, what he would later call the ‘strange, strange call’ of the sea had sounded ever more resonantly in his ears. That he should be receptive to this siren call was not, perhaps, particularly surprising, as his family had a long established connection with the sea. His grandfather, also called Joseph, had started life, like his father before him, as a ship’s carpenter but, by 1875, his ability and drive had resulted in his taking over his employer’s shipbuilding yard, and in his founding the firm of Birrell, Stenhouse & Company at Woodyard, Dumbarton.

It was at Woodyard, on 15 November 1887, that the patriarch’s namesake had been born. And here also, on 17 May 1889, that he had watched the launching of the firm’s last great sailing ship, the Elginshire. A near-drowning, which left the child black in the face and full of foul water, failed to instil any fear and the constant proximity of sailing ships, both in Woodyard and in Barrow, where his family moved when he was 2 years old, left an indelible mark on the boy’s soul. The culmination of these influences had been a decision to abandon his desk at Lloyd’s and to sign on for a four-year apprenticeship with whichever shipping company would have him. Andrew Stenhouse attempted to dissuade his son from the daring step he now seemed determined to take, but his arguments rang rather hollow and, after dutiful consideration, they were ignored. It was, as Andrew himself must have been well aware, a predictable case of ‘like father, like son’. For he, too, had once fallen victim to the lure of the ocean, and had served as an apprentice at sea3 before becoming a manager with the family firm, a position he continued to hold until Birrell’s bankruptcy and the decline in demand for sailing vessels forced him to seek employment with Vickers.

Now, the Springbank lay before them and her 282ft length and 43ft beam would mark the boundaries of the young Stenhouse’s world for many long months to come. She was, as the newest member of her crew later admitted, distinctly unprepossessing in appearance: her iron hull streaked with rust and the water surrounding her made almost metallic by the pollution of fish scales and oil. Originally built for the nitrate trade and launched in Glasgow in September 1894, Springbank had spent the last decade ploughing the world’s oceans carrying cargoes consisting mostly of timber and coke. Four-masted and jubilee-rigged, she now sat low in the water, her Plimsoll line tickled by the unctuous swell.

Announcing their business, father and son received permission to come aboard and, followed by the shiny trunk, they crossed from shore to ship. A brief tour of inspection followed, during which Andrew Stenhouse cast an expert eye around his son’s new berth, taking in her bluff bows and her stump topgallant masts with their square rig, and the fine run aft which gave such promise of excellent sailing qualities. The unexpectedly pungent atmosphere of the claustrophobic afterdeck lavatory, however, brought the tour to a sudden halt – followed by a hasty disembarkation of the retching engineer. His son followed sheepishly, acutely aware of the impression that their rapid departure must have made on his shipmates-to-be. They exchanged farewells on shore; Andrew memorised a last message for Joe’s stepmother4 and 18-year-old sister, Nell, left in Barrow, and then the new apprentice returned to his ship. The Springbank’s cargo of coke and general goods had already been loaded and within a few short hours she put to sea, bound for San Francisco via the Cape Verde Islands and Cape Horn. The boy standing on her deck and the anxious parent watching her departure from the shore each knew that a year or more must pass before the Stenhouse family would be reunited.

Under grey skies, the Springbank slipped out of the Tyne and into the North Sea, round the coast of East Anglia and down into the English Channel, before pushing her nose out into the deep, open waters of the North Atlantic. Stenhouse had been given his first job within hours of boarding: being sent aloft to reef the jigger-masthead flag halliards, high above the deck. He later recorded that ‘although I had no fear, when I hauled myself clear of the futtock rigging and found no ratlines beyond the topmast rigging, I began to feel the strain.… Eventually, after a great effort, I reached the masthead pole, and with beating heart, and legs and arms clutching the mast and backstays, I rove the end of the halliards through the truck, overhauled them and started to come down.’5 He reached the safety of the deck totally exhausted, with his palms flayed by an unintentionally precipitate descent down the backstays but also with a chest expanded with a sense of achievement. His shipmates, however, quickly disabused him of any notion that the minor victories, the opinions or the comfort of a ‘first voyager’ carried any weight in the ship. Of the seven apprentices aboard, three, including Stenhouse, were complete novices and, as such, the more experienced hands considered them worse than useless. It must have been a galling realisation for a boy who had grown up with sailing ships, whose grandfather had built and launched many vessels such as the Springbank, and in whom family pride waxed strongly.

Mercifully, the routine of the ship allowed little time for introspection. The hours were long and the work arduous, particularly for one who, despite his stature and bodily strength, possessed little experience of such intense labour. Of course, the first voyagers were chosen for the least skilled and most tedious tasks. These included all the cleaning duties, from filling the captain’s bath to scrubbing the bilge; striking the bell with the regularity of clockwork; and hauling on a sheet or clewline whenever the demands of the moment required unskilled muscle to be applied.

Undertaking these and a hundred other tasks, inevitably Stenhouse found that he was thrown together a good deal with his fellow apprentices. These residents of the half deck proved to be a mixed bunch including three Englishmen, two Scots, one Australian and one Belgian, but they quickly bonded into a tight-knit group. They had little choice, as they found themselves the butt of every joke. Stenhouse proved no exception to the rule and, in his diary, he recorded one trick that a wiseacre among the crew attempted to play on him. ‘We are painting our house,’ he noted, ‘and are consequently sleeping on deck at night and I was awakened by my mattress being drawn from under me as I slept on the main (No. 3) hatch this morning. I didn’t know what was the matter at first, but when I saw my mattress going aloft at the end of a rope I made a dive for it and managed to get hold of it and cut it adrift in time to save it from being sent up to the main yard.’6 With the assumed wisdom and condescension of an old hand, he concluded his entry with the remark that ‘This is a common trick at sea and also is [sic] the tying of a man to the nearest fixture; Douglas, one of the Port watch being tied to the ring bolts, on the hatch casements.’7

Gradually Stenhouse came to know his other shipmates as well, though they seldom allowed him to forget his lowly position in the shipboard hierarchy. The able seamen generally treated the apprentices with a rough kindliness not far removed from contempt. Then came the three mates and, at the apex of the social pyramid, the dour, red-whiskered captain, who saved his smiles for his cabin and for the young wife and baby daughter who sailed with him. But Stenhouse seldom had anything to do with the captain who, so far as the apprentices were concerned, remained as aloof and remote as Ahab. Having agreed to take them, however, the ‘old man’ felt obliged to make some attempt to educate the boys as seamen and prospective officers and so, sometimes, Stenhouse and his companions would be made to stand on the poop staying the ropes and boxing the compass. But, for the most part, they remained in blissful ignorance as to the ship’s course and speed. When writing his diary, Stenhouse often left space to record latitude and longitude but he seldom obtained sufficient information to fill these gaps and the unspoken assumption was that he and his fellows would learn by hard labour, by emulation and by observation – or not at all.

Towards the end of October, the atmosphere on board changed as the crew became engaged in a variety of bizarre activities, apparently more akin to a child’s birthday party than to the backbreaking toil of a working merchant vessel. Mature and experienced seamen, usually taciturn and scruffy to the highest degree, now laughed like schoolboys as they dyed their old slops or laboured like fashionable Parisian hairdressers to create wigs and false beards. The cause of their hilarity and industry was the proximity of the Equator. Ancient tradition demanded that ‘crossing the line’ should be marked with an uproarious ceremonial during which those who had never before passed between the northern and southern hemispheres were subjected to a rough, if usually good-humoured, initiation. And they left Stenhouse and the other first voyagers in no doubt as to their role in the forthcoming proceedings. The older sailors winked at them and laughed among themselves, while the second voyagers taunted them with stories of rough handling, near-drowning and humiliation before the assembled crew.

The preparations, which provided a welcome break from the routine of shipboard life, continued for three weeks until, on the morning of 19 November, thirty-three days out from South Shields, the Springbank crossed the line. At 8.30 a.m., as Stenhouse swallowed his last mouthful of breakfast, a whistle sounded, ‘that being the Sergeant’s signal to his four policemen to come and lay hold on some first-voyager’. Stenhouse had already decided on his course of action:

As soon as I heard the whistle I put some biscuits in my pockets and made a dash for the poop, meaning to go down the sail locker and hide from the policemen, but I met the Mate and he sent me down on deck again. Running into the half-deck again I jumped into the clothes locker and one of the second-voyagers shut [the] door on me. After about a quarter of an hour one of the policemen came into the half-deck and searched everywhere, clothes locker as well, even putting his hand on my shoulder, but did not see me. After another short lapse of time another sergeant came, this time he got me and blowing a whistle in rushed four men in blue, armed with belaying pins, the sergeant himself having a wooden dagger, with which he probed me when I refused to come out of the locker. After about five minutes struggling, during which I got a few cuffs on the head and other parts with the pins, they got me out and carried me forrard, kicking all the while, and dumped me head first into the port WC …8

Half an hour later, as he waited to be dragged before his judge, another first voyager opened the door – and he made a second bid for freedom. This time the unwilling neophyte climbed up into the rigging. He smiled to himself at the surprise of his jailers when they found that ‘the bird had flown’, but his escape was only temporary. Soon his pursuers spotted him on the topgallant yard and, when he refused to descend, the Mate who throughout the proceedings had evidenced his firm belief in tradition, ordered him to return to the deck. Immediately his feet touched the planking, the policemen blindfolded him and then dragged him, still struggling, before Neptune who sat in state on a box covered with a Union Jack. Asked his age, Stenhouse forgot himself so far as to attempt a reply:

I opened my mouth to speak, when the Soap Boy, who was rigged with a fancy head piece of rope yarns and reddened on his face with red lead, shoved in some pills, which the Doctor had made of soap, etc. Then came the tarring, after being stripped to my waist, I was tarred with a brush and then scrubbed with a broom. This was repeated again and again and then I was shaved with a wooden razor, the blade of which was about two feet long. Then they dumped me in the bath and kept my head under long enough to make me think I was drowning.9

Still undaunted, as soon as he surfaced, Stenhouse grabbed a tar brush and tried to belabour one of the policemen, but his tormentors quickly overpowered him and made him submit to another shave, before finally handing him his hard-earned certificate for crossing the line.

Although he resisted such indignities with all his might, and received a sound cuffing in reply, Stenhouse’s strength and courage earned him the respect of many of his shipmates. Unfortunately, these qualities, his unwillingness to suffer in silence beneath a slight, whether real or perceived, and his refusal to ‘turn the other cheek’ also led him into direct conflict with his superiors. But, as he would later state, ‘a man without pride is no man at all’10 and, despite his avowed respect for authority, any offer of violence would be instantly and vigorously reciprocated. Still only 16 years old and on his first voyage, this bullish attitude resulted in a bout of fisticuffs with the belligerent second mate. One watch, this Irishman, ‘hefty as a bullock’ and impatient of any impertinence or slackness, took exception to the unusually musical manner in which the young apprentice struck six bells [at 11 p.m.]. When he asked Stenhouse to explain himself, he took further umbrage at what he took to be the boy’s insolent response and, rather than debate the issue further, he resorted to his fists. Fortunately for Stenhouse, his own length of reach made him a match for the mate’s greater bulk, and within seconds they were locked in a clinch which only the appearance of the enraged captain brought to a close. An act of insubordination which, on a ship of the Royal Navy would have ended in the direst consequences, resulted in nothing worse than the loss of an hour’s sleep in each watch below, during which Stenhouse paced the flying-bridge between the poop and the after deck-house, with a heavy capstan-bar balanced on each shoulder. Such lessons proved salutary and an unbending demand for discipline at sea, gradually and unconsciously imbibed, would become second nature. In later life, indeed, and in conditions of both war and peace, men under his command would learn that Stenhouse would have no truck with indiscipline, that he could be a martinet altogether more exacting even than the Springbank’s officers.

He learned other lessons as well: the most potent of all being love of the ocean and of the sailing ships that plied their trade across its ever-changing surface. Even before taking to the sea, Stenhouse possessed a strong feeling of family pride: pride in the three – now four – generations who had made the sea their trade; pride also in the vessels which his family had launched and which he occasionally recognised in the ports and harbours visited by the Springbank. Now he added to these feelings a deep and enduring love of the ships’ grace and beauty under sail, qualities made all the more poignant by his realisation that he was witnessing the nadir of the sailing ships’ fortunes, as steam and the internal combustion engine pushed them ever closer to extinction. Even in the carelessness of youth, he knew that, by serving his apprenticeship on such a ship, he had become forever bound to a way of life that stood on the brink of annihilation. His appreciation of the beauty that he saw about him, and which made his heart beat perceptibly faster every time a similar vessel came over the horizon, was already tinged with nostalgia and regret. This love and this wistfulness would mark him for life.

As the Springbank plunged ever southwards, he saw the Atlantic Ocean in all its moods: from smiling serenity to wave-whipped fury. South of the line, she picked up the south-east Trade winds and made steady progress. Dolphins leapt and danced in the ship’s bow-wave, seemingly in constant danger of being run down but miraculously avoiding harm. Flying fish, too, broke the surface at regular intervals, skimming the waves for perhaps a hundred yards, the sun glinting on their silver scales and outstretched bony fins, before they returned to their natural element. Sometimes, they would land flapping on the deck and the crew dived upon them, as a welcome and God-given supplement to their otherwise monotonous diet. And once, in the stillness of the night, when the mastheads whirled like skaters in skies dotted with a thousand stars, Stenhouse witnessed a more unusual phenomenon: the fiery passage of a comet, ‘its tail which was like a streak of lightning’ remaining visible for nearly 10 minutes after its passing.

As they entered the South Atlantic, conditions changed for the worse. He remembered that ‘Off the River Plate we were struck by a Pampero; lightning, thunder, cold driving rain, and a howling gale of wind broken by squalls that would have lifted the sticks out of her if she had not been shortened down in time.’11 As they approached Cape Horn, where the waters of the Atlantic and the Pacific tumble and churn in violent confusion, the weather grew colder and more uncertain. On 12 December, he noted that:

When we turned out, at 12 midnight, found the ship scudding along on fore and main topsails and mizzen lower topsail and foresail. Blowing hard today and the vessel, tho’ she rides the water like a duck, is shipping a lot of water, so much so that, when at 12 o’clock noon, all hands were forward pulling on the weather fore brace a sea came over and washed us away from the brace. Before I knew what was happening I found myself on my back, full of water, and with two other chaps on top of me. However we went to the brace again, and again got filled. After another sea came, which washed two men into the scuppers, the Captain sent us to haul the braces tight to leeward.12

The crew rigged lifelines fore and aft, both port and starboard, to prevent men being washed overboard and everyone prepared to do battle with some of the most turbulent waters on the face of the earth. The sky turned leaden and black clouds, caught in the wind’s gripe, swept past at seemingly impossible speeds.

With high seas, biting winds and snow flurries, conditions on board rapidly deteriorated. The seawater, as it broke over the rail, proved no respecter of people, bunks or possessions and it seemed that the crew would never again be dry or warm. Such conditions took a physical toll, particularly on Stenhouse and his fellows, whose flesh had never before been subjected to such a penetrating dampness. Oilskins chafed their gooseflesh and saltwater boils swelled on their wrists and necks; while between their fingers and in the palms of their hands cuts and abrasions, opened wide and made excruciatingly sore by cold and saltwater, refused to heal. In this misery, the crew celebrated Christmas off the Horn, with ‘Currant Bread for breakfast and Duff for dinner’. The captain’s wife also gave the apprentices ‘a large plateful of sweets and nuts and in the evening the mate brought in his guitar and we sang a few carols.’13

The Springbank rounded the Horn in a howling gale, her decks awash and the sea around her a swirling, deadly maelstrom. She ran the gauntlet with two stout men handling the bucking wheel and every member of the crew stretched to breaking point in their desperate attempts to avoid being blown too far south. Having once negotiated South America’s rocky tip, however, the ship and her exhausted crew could at last head north into the blue waters of the Pacific. Passing through the Roaring Forties, each mile covered took them further from the blear, gunmetal skies of the South Atlantic and closer to warmth and sunshine. They entered the tropics again and, exchanging pea jackets for bare torsos, allowed the sun to play on their pallid skin, while their thoughts raced ahead to the pleasures of ’Frisco.

The captain and his mates, meanwhile, turned their attention to the condition of their battered vessel. Under their watchful eyes, the crew repaired rigging, buffed dull brasswork to a splendid lustre and gradually patched up the wounds inflicted by weeks of unremitting storm. Stenhouse, as befitted a first-year apprentice, found himself responsible for a particularly unpleasant job: cleaning the freshwater tank. It was a foul task, demanding no skill but considerable powers of endurance, and to be completed in stifling heat and in a dark, claustrophobic space, soon made even more unpalatable by the stink of two sweating men. ‘To get at the tank bottom,’ he noted in his diary, ‘we have to crawl in thro’ a small hole, onto the timber hatches and lay on our backs as the space between the tank’s bottom and the limber hatches is only about 2ft deep. This is hot work for the Tropics, especially as there are two lamps burning near to us.’14 But, between watches, he quickly forgot the unpleasantness of such duties, as the whole crew, young and old, veteran and novice, talked excitedly of their coming landfall.

With the bitterness of long experience, Stenhouse later claimed that the soaring expectations entertained by every deep-water man regarding his next port were inevitably dashed by the reality they found ashore. But, to a youth of seventeen who had not set foot on dry land for 155 days, San Francisco offered no such disappointment. In his mind’s eye, indeed, the Golden Gates were not far removed from the gates of Paradise itself: they promised new faces, a break from the routine and drudgery of shipboard life, fresh food and drink and, not least in the catalogue of desired objects, new adventures.

This was San Francisco before the great earthquake and fire of 1906, well acquainted with crime, licentiousness and violence and nowhere more so than on the city’s waterfront, known ominously as the Barbary Coast. Here a confusion of cheap saloons, brothels, theatres and opium dens pandered to the needs and tastes of sailors who, after voyages of many months, found themselves cast ashore with a handful of dollars in their pockets and a finely honed desire for alcohol, amusement and fornication. Led by a couple of second voyagers, who had visited ’Frisco once before, and therefore considered themselves expert guides, Stenhouse and his peers launched themselves into the tawdry streets and alleyways, bent on pleasure, the single dollar allowed to first voyagers burning a hole in their pockets. They dined on chocolate and cakes, and then paid 10 cents to enter a vaudeville theatre, with sawdust-strewn floors and an atmosphere thick with tobacco smoke, sweat and the fumes of cheap beer and whisky. The product of a middle-class Scottish upbringing, Stenhouse found the show disgusting: full of obscenity and innuendo, and his discomfort was made even more acute by the insistent ribaldry of the prostitutes in the audience, keen to ply their trade among the fresh-faced and gullible young sailors.

But the night was still young and, having once extricated themselves from the increasingly strident attentions of the drunken whores, Stenhouse and his fellows sought refreshment at one of the many noisy and crowded saloons. Made conspicuous by their swaggering, if skin-deep, assumption of self-confidence and their fastidiously clean shore-going rig, the Springbank’s apprentices soon found themselves attracting more unwanted attention: this time from a set of pugnacious Scandinavian sailors or, as Stenhouse called them, ‘yah-for-yes men’. Jests were directed firstly at the boys themselves and then, more dangerously, at their country of origin. Stenhouse had little of the pacifist in his make-up; an insult should be resented, a slight must be rebuffed: ‘As a spark to the tinder so is an insult to an Englishman or so it should be, and so the fight began. In a moment the saloon was a mass of flying glasses, arms and legs. The wise ones made for the door. In the midst of that wild fighting mob our little party of five surged to and fro across the saloon floor, fighting our way to the door. We stuck together, which cramped our style but gave us weight, and as we burst out into the night air we heard the cry of cops. That did not sound so good.’15 And so, after five months at sea, Stenhouse’s first night on dry land ended in a police cell, in company with cut-throats, thieves and pimps, followed, after hours of intense uncertainty, by a judge’s caution and merciful release. It could have been far worse. They had got off with some cuts and bruises, a ticking-off from a worldly judge and, when they returned to their ship, a sound berating from an irate captain.

Having unshipped her cargo of coke, the Springbank’s hold was partly filled with Oregon pine. She then made her way rapidly northwards to complete her loading of timber in Vancouver. After the febrile atmosphere of San Francisco, ostensibly at least, Vancouver had little to offer in the way of excitement or adventure. Writing to his father, Stenhouse described the town as ‘just like a big mining camp, wooden houses and badly made roads, but [it] is a far nicer place than ’Frisco. We are laying opposite to N. Vancouver. It is composed of a few Siwash Indians’ huts surrounded by hills and lumber but it is still going to be the residential place of future Vancouverites.’16 Nicer than San Francisco, perhaps, but still prone to the noise, disruption and danger seemingly inseparable from waterfront life. If murder and assaults were commonplace in old ’Frisco, violence often lurked just beneath the surface even in ports altogether less notorious.

One morning, in the most ragged of his ocean-going slops, Stenhouse stood on a platform swung out over the ship’s side, adding a fresh coat of paint to the Springbank’s weather-stained hull. His work was disturbed by the activity on board another rather scruffier vessel, the Liverpool-registered Senator. The barking of orders and the rapid movement of sailors about her decks revealed that she was preparing to weigh anchor, bound for home. From his precarious perch, Stenhouse could see in the Senator’s shadow a small dinghy, its owner seemingly bent on nothing more than some idle sightseeing. And then, quite suddenly, the scene burst into unexpected and violent action. In quick succession, and without a cry, two men threw themselves, or fell, from the rails of the Senator straight into the dinghy below, nearly causing it to capsize. As the boat rocked, the sounds of a heated altercation drifted across the waters of the bay and one of the jumpers could be seen wresting the oars from the dinghy’s owner. As the Vancouver Daily Province reported:

‘Here you – gimme those oars and be d––d quick about it,’ sang out one of the unexpected and unwelcome visitors just as the owner of the boat collected his wits sufficiently to gather that the visitors were escaping sailors. He gave up the oars.

Then commenced a race for the shore. The man at the oars had not taken two strokes before a head was poked over the rail of the ship, followed by a rifle on which the sun glinted in a way that was most disconcerting to the owner of the boat. A hoarse command that the boat should return went unheeded by the escaping sailors.

‘Phug––szip.’

It was the rifle that spoke, and the shot hit the water near the rowboat and then glanced and skipped over the water.… It was followed by half a dozen in quick succession. None of them hit the mark, but they were at last becoming sufficiently close to scare the deserters. They gave up, and rowing back to the ship, clambered aboard.17

Not so very long before, the wharves and jetties of Vancouver had resounded to the footsteps of gold prospectors hopefully making their way to the Klondike, and the town was no stranger to brawling and even murder. In reporting the incident that Stenhouse witnessed, the Daily Province reminded its readers that a similar incident had occurred only eighteen months earlier and one man had been shot and wounded. Suitably impressed by this exhibition of bloodthirsty lawlessness, Stenhouse cut the account of the fracas out of the newspaper and sent it home, so that his father might ‘see from the enclosed that there are bears, whales and fights around here’.18

In fact, desertion was commonplace, though the lengths to which the Senator’s officers were prepared to go to prevent it were rather less so. The Springbank enjoyed no immunity and she had lost a large portion of her crew among the brothels and rookeries of San Francisco, with the result that Stenhouse found ‘that the work comes on us pretty heavily’. For the apprentices, however, the desertion of the more experienced members of the crew brought some compensations. For long months they had been regarded as little more than supercargo, hardly trusted to undertake the most menial job without supervision; now the reduction in the numbers of able seamen meant that, as well as more work, more responsibility came their way. This recognition proved something of a watershed in Stenhouse’s career. Still less than a year into his four-year articles, he had taken the crucial first step towards being acknowledged as a capable and useful sailor. He had also proved himself to be tough, strong-willed and independent: qualities essential to any budding officer.

Over the next few months, the Springbank sailed into the South Seas, hurried on her way by the north-east Trades. She anchored briefly at Penrhyn Island, where the islanders wandered all over the ship selling coconuts, corals and cod and then danced and sang to the accompaniment of the captain’s gramophone. She fought with a sail-splitting hurricane among the south-east Trades, skimmed across the Tasman Sea in fine style and, on the approach to Melbourne, all but grazed the basaltic rocks at the entrance to the Bass Strait, narrowly avoiding catastrophe. If Stenhouse thought British Columbia ‘a man’s country’, he found Australia the ‘happiest of all places’,19 a veritable home from home, where dances, picnics and ‘beautiful’ fights could be enjoyed in equal numbers. He also met for the first time his great-uncle Andrew, who had left Scotland’s shores a quarter of a century before to make his fortune. After a sojourn which breathed new life into the crew, the Springbank headed back towards northern waters and home. On reaching Cardiff, in a drizzling rain, the capstan span and the cargo was discharged and then, paid off, the crew dispersed towards their homes: to London, Dublin, Belfast and Barrow.

If Barrow had not changed in the many months of Stenhouse’s absence, he had – almost beyond recognition. He had parted from his family a gawky if determined youth; he returned a man, bronzed and hardened by months of punishing physical exertion and by fights on ship and shore. His experience of mankind had been widened by contact with every species of humanity: from veteran whalers and deep-water men to semi-naked South Sea islanders; from foul-mouthed whores to knife-wielding toughs in ’Frisco’s ‘Barbary Coast’. A youthful and perhaps naïve passion for the sea had also been transformed into an abiding, deep-seated love, underpinned by a detailed knowledge of every rope and every sail necessary to a ship’s propulsion and her safety. But beneath the changed exterior and in spite of this new depth of knowledge and understanding, his affections remained unaltered. In Vancouver, he had pined for his family, ‘wondering how it is that I have received no letters from home’ and anxious that the photographs he had taken during his cruise ‘must have gone astray’.20 Now, once again, he dwelled, albeit briefly, in the bosom of his family: the centre of their attention and the hero of the hour. Andrew Stenhouse tried to dissuade his only son from returning to his ship, hoping perhaps that one round trip would have sated his appetite for seafaring, as it had his own, nearly thirty years earlier. But here, father and son differed. Stenhouse junior had determined that the sea was to be his profession, and he remained, if not unmoved, then unswayed by the arguments of his father and of his sister. When the call came to rejoin the Springbank, he answered.

This time, with a hold full of coal, the ship sailed from Cardiff to Antofagasta in Chile. She completed a speedy and trouble-free passage to Cape Horn, with Stenhouse even enjoying sufficient leisure to learn the art of wrestling from one of the Russian Finns on board. Rounding the Horn was a different matter entirely. For weeks, the boiling ocean tossed the 2,398-ton ship like a cork. Huge seas swept the decks and icy water foamed through hatches and doorways, soaking everything that stood in their way. The exhausted and drenched men floundered about the decks, struggling grimly with canvas that whipped and beat them as though possessed of a malign will of its own. Called from his bucking crib at 3 a.m. on the morning of 13 August 1906, Stenhouse noted that the ship was ‘Rolling heavily and shipping big seas to leeward.’21 As the Springbank lurched, one man ‘was taken by a sea against the galley and then under the spar. Had his head smashed in.’ Another ‘damaged his foot and two or three others mauled a bit. Deck full of water; galley fo’c’sle after-house, lamp locker and cabin flooded. Ventilator hatch on the forecastle head smashed, hen coop … broke adrift and was flying around the deck before it went to pieces.’22 He was, however, too busy to observe the fate of the unfortunate hens.

After seventeen days of bruising labour, the Springbank at last rounded the Horn but, his ship still beset by tempests, the captain had little choice but to run to the south. Stenhouse recorded that, by 10 September, they had been blown down almost to the parallel of 61°S, and still there was no respite:

The ship looked as if she were on a polar expedition, from truck to deck she was covered with snow and ice. The forecastle head was covered with ice; from all the rigging 18in icicles hung and to let go a rope from a pin, the ice had first to be knocked off it.

When wearing ship, which we did about twice every day, she would go under like a submarine boat and all hands would cruise round the decks under water making frantic efforts to grab something, even tho’ it were the leg of some fortunate who had managed [to] get on his feet …

To add to [the] joys of life all the houses were full of water. Our half-deck was as bad as on deck. The chests burst their lashings and while cruising round, capsized the table. All our gear, go-ashore clothes, etc, were full of salt water, ashes, and everything else which happened to be floating round.23

Having undergone such misery to reach Antofagasta, the crew must have been disappointed at what they found: a dreary, ramshackle frontier town, perched dolefully between arid hills on the one hand and, on the other, the sea. For all its grim appearance, however, arrival at this small Chilean town marked a turning point in Stenhouse’s career. The third mate, having completed his articles and anxious to forward his career, left the ship in Antofagasta, creating a vacancy. Stenhouse had grown in stature: having made one more voyage than any of his current cabin mates, he ranked as senior apprentice and his seamanship, courage and physical prowess all commanded the respect of his fellows. These facts had not gone unnoticed by the captain and, in need of an officer, he asked Stenhouse if he would ‘run a watch’. The answer, of course, was yes, and Stenhouse, though still within the period of his articles, became acting third mate.

Promotion meant that he moved out of the half-deck and said goodbye to his messmates. From now on he would eat with the other officers and berth with the second mate in their own cabin: an unheard-of luxury, but also a rather lonely one when compared with the rough and tumble companionship of the apprentices. But Stenhouse had no time now for nostalgia and, in the pride of his new rank, perhaps, little inclination for it either. If the loneliness of command beckoned him, it beckoned with a smiling face and he later remembered that, sometimes, ‘when the dignity of such sudden promotion became too much for me, I slipped into my cabin and laughed like a fool’.24 His current voyage would last for many more months yet, despite the fair winds that sent the Springbank flying on her way to Australia. And there would be years more of hard, grinding work and many thousands of miles of ocean to be crossed and recrossed before he clawed his way to the coveted posts of second mate, mate and master. But now, with dusty, flyblown Antofagasta receding into the distance, and the coast of Chile mingling with the loom of the land, Stenhouse knew that he had placed his foot firmly on the ladder. His apprenticeship in sail, if not his apprenticeship to Andrew Weir, was over.

2

SOUTH WITH SHACKLETON

For eight long years Stenhouse stuck manfully to his profession, not simply enduring but actually relishing the physical punishment and dangers inseparable from shipboard existence. And with every passing watch he added to his hard-won store of knowledge and experience: of men, of navigation and the age-old lore of the sea. His tall, thickset body grew harder and tougher, tested by the rigours of his chosen life; by a string of minor injuries, including a broken nose and cracked ribs; and by occasional illnesses caused by his exposure to the elements, from the constant drenching and icy cold of the Horn, to the broiling torpor of the doldrums.