Feature
In the Wake of the Endurance - James L. Carter
It all started with
a small advertisement torn from a magazine. A voyage to Antarctica
was being organized for the fall of 1999 for persons interested in
retracing the historic voyage of the explorer ship Endurance.
By chance, Sarah Rajala, a daughter of Elizabeth Rajala
of Munising, had been given the ad by a friend who knew of the family's
interest in the Antarctic. Sarah gave it to her mother. The adventurer
in Elizabeth prompted her to take up the offer. The voyage was being
organized by Marine Expeditions, Inc., of Toronto, and would be a
one-time-only offering.
"I thought it would be the opportunity of a lifetime,"
Elizabeth said during a recent interview at her home in Munising perched
on a hillside overlooking beautiful Munising Bay and Grand Island.
The retired Marquette County schoolteacher, who recently
has moved to Munising after living for many years on her family's
farm at Dukes, had good reason to be excited. Her father, the late
William Bakewell, had been a member of the Shackleton Expedition bound
for Antarctica aboard the Endurance—the only American to take
part in the historic odyssey which began in 1914. It ended two years
later, after the shipwrecked crew had endured tremendous hardships—and
yet survived.
Spry and spunky at age seventy-two, Elizabeth began making
plans for the trip. Two of her daughters, Sarah, of Carey, North Carolina,
and Nina, of Juneau, Alaska, decided to join her. Sarah is associate
dean of the School of Engineering at North Carolina State University
- Raleigh, and Nina is a supervising nurse at a Juneau hospital. Both
are married with families.
All three departed Miami for Buenos Aires, Argentina,
on November 23rd. The last leg of their flight took them to Ushuaia
in Argentina. It's the southernmost city in South America, located
on the southern coast of Tierra del Fuego, the big island at the tip
of the continent shared by Argentina and Chile. It is the closest
point of departure for Antarctica. The tour group stayed behind for
several days in Buenos Aires, while Elizabeth and several other descendants
of Shackleton's expedition were flown on ahead to Ushuaia where they
were interviewed by George Butler, a producer for the Public Television
program "Nova." The entire group then reassembled for their
Antarctic departure.
At Ushuaia, a tourist center of some 45,000
inhabitants, Elizabeth, Sarah and Nina joined with fifty other travelers
on board a Russian ship, the Akademik Shuleykin, a Finnish-built craft
made for travel in waters where ice is present, but not of the icebreaker
class. It had an all-Russian crew of twenty-five. They departed for
the Antarctic on November 26, which, in an unusual coincidence, was
William Bakewell's birthday.
"The ship was very comfortable and well-run,"
Elizabeth noted. "The food was good and the menu was what you'd
expect on any American-operated ship, although we were given one meal
of Russian food. The captain and crew didn't speak much English, but
they were very friendly and we got along fine. There was a lot of
visiting, mainly over dinner, and we had many interesting lectures
on the places we were visiting."
Six passengers were direct descendants of persons on the
Shackleton Expedition— Elizabeth and her two daughters; the Hurley
twins of Australia, Toni and Adelie, daughters of the Endurance's
photographer, Frank Hurley, both over 80, and Jonathan Shackleton
of Ireland, a descendant of Sir Ernest Shackelton. Nine persons were
members of the Marine Expeditions staff—including lecturers and
a hotel manager, and a camera crew focusing on the Hurley twins for
Australian television. Others were interested persons from the U.
S., Canada, and Great Britain, representing many occupations and professions.
All aboard were seasoned travelers, in a wide range of age from the
30s into the 80s. The ship would take them to the Antarctic continent,
and to Elephant Island, the tiny speck of rock rising some 2,000 feet
above the surface of the frigid South Atlantic just off the end of
the Antarctic (Palmer) Peninsula—a long finger-like promontory
of land pointing to South America. It was here that her father and
twenty-one others spent nearly five months awaiting rescue—after
trekking across ice floes and crossing the rough waters of the Weddell
Sea in lifeboats to reach the island after the Endurance had been
trapped by the grinding ice, crushed and sunk.
The voyage also would take Elizabeth nearly 800 miles
across some of the stormiest stretches of ocean waters in the world—in
the Scotia Sea—to South Georgia, a former whaling station island
that figured prominently in the rescue of the Endurance crew. All
told, Elizabeth traveled some 3,298 miles retracing that epic voyage
before returning December 12.
Much has been written about the expedition to Antarctica
organized by Sir Ernest Shackleton as the "Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition," which left Plymouth, England, on August 8, 1914,
just as World War I was beginning. His goal was to be the first to
cross the Antarctic continent on foot. The most recent surge of interest
in his expedition was sparked by a book by Caroline Alexander, Endurance:
Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition, published in November
1998, and another last year, Shackleton: The Antarctic Challenge,
by Kim Heacox. An article by Alexander, based on her book, later appeared
in National Geographic magazine. It was her second book on Shackleton's
expedition. Alexander had contacted Elizabeth Rajala for information
in writing the book, and presented her with a complimentary copy upon
publication.
The reason for Elizabeth's life-long interest
in Shackle-ton's journey was, of course, because her father was a
central part of it. William Bakewell was an extraordinary man by any
account, and during his younger years, an adventurer. He had moved
his family from Joliet, Illinois, to Dukes in 1945 where he became
a diary farmer. After a tornado blew the roof off his barn in 1953,
he became one of the first in the area to raise sheep. His neighbors
in the Skandia-Dukes area knew him as a hard-working, quiet family
man who was strong and agile for someone who stood only five feet,
five inches and weighed an average of 130 pounds. He remained active
on his farm until age eighty-two, when, just short of his eighty-second
birthday, he died in 1969. He is buried in the Lutheran Cemetery in
Skandia. Elizabeth was his only child.
Born in Joliet, Illinois in
1888, William Lincoln Bakewell ran away from home at age twelve to
work on a ranch in Missouri.
"It wasn't because he didn't have a good home, but he was so
eager for adventure his parents couldn't keep him home," Elizabeth
notes.
By the age of fifteen he had gone north to the lumber
camps of the Upper Peninsula, near Grand Marais. Taking a liking to
the country, he decided that someday he'd return. But the itch to
move on prompted him to head farther north into Canada, working his
way west with a railroad construction crew. He then returned to the
U. S., working as a cowboy on a ranch in southern Montana.
While on a trip to San Francisco in 1912 at age twenty-four
he saw ships destined for ports around the world, and decided to go
to sea. Hiring aboard the British full-rigger the Philadelphia, he
sailed for two years to ports in South America, Europe, the Mediterranean
and Africa before joining the crew of the Golden Gate, headed for
South America. At Montevideo, Uruguay, his ship ran aground on the
harbor breakwater and was damaged. Not wanting to be stranded, Bakewell
crossed the Rio de la Plata River to Buenos Aires, Argentina, looking
to join another ship's crew. He saw the Endurance and "fell in
love with her."
The Endurance had entered the Argentine capital's port,
and Shackleton was looking for two new crew members to replace two
he'd fired. He had replaced one by the time Bakewell applied for the
job. After a personal interview by Shackleton—to assess not only
his ability as a seaman, but also characteristics that would allow
him to withstand the rigors of the Antarctic expedition—he was
hired. The crew was made up entirely of British subjects, so Bakewell
had presented himself as a Canadian. Aboard the Golden Gate, Bakewell
had made close friends with Perce Blackborow, a seventeen-year-old
Welshman who also wanted to ship out aboard the Endurance. But, because
he was under twenty-one, Shackelton refused to hire him. So Blackborow,
with the help of Bakewell and seaman Walter How, came aboard as a
stowaway. Before long he was discovered and made ship's steward, winning
Shackleton's respect as a capable worker, who got along well with
others. Shackleton would later say of Bakewell, in a book he wrote
on the expedition in 1919, that he was a cut above the rest of the
seamen, who Shackleton regarded as quite rough and "unlettered."
Said Shackleton: "...there is one brilliant exception, Bakewell,...of
some refinement, who is always respectful as well as being self-respectful."
Another account called him, "...one of the staunchest and hardest-working
members of the expedition."
"The Endurance had an outstanding library on Polar
explorations, and before the ship sank Dad said he had read every
book," Elizabeth notes. "He only had a grade school education,
but he was self-taught and was always an avid reader."
The next stop for the Endurance was South
Georgia, an isolated British island outpost used mainly as a whaling
station by Norwegians, which would be Shackleton's point of departure
for Antarctica. After a short stay at Grytviken, its main station,
the Endurance left on December 5, 1914 across the stormy waters of
the South Atlantic headed toward the Weddell Sea and Antarctica. Norwegian-built,
the 144-foot ship was well-equipped for its voyage. Bow timbers of
the three-masted sailing vessel were of oak, four-feet thick; it had
a seven-foot-thick keel. Other timbers were of fine Norwegian fir
and greenhart, a particularly dense and hard wood.
Unknown to Shackleton, the Antarctic summer was to be
one of the coldest on record. Just two days sailing southeast of South
Georgia into the Weddell Sea they encountered pack ice. It soon became
heavy, but they continued their progress toward the Antarctic continent
until a short distance off the coast they became entrapped by the
ice. It was January 18, 1915.
The ship and its twenty-seven-man crew drifted northerly
with the current in the Weddell Sea, somewhat parallel to the Antarctic
Peninsula, for some 1,500 miles in 281 days—locked in the ice.
They lived rather comfortably aboard ship, with adequate food, and
kept busy with chores and other activities, games on the ice, training
the sixty sled dogs, and whatever else Shackleton found necessary
to keep them fit and in good spirits. He set a good example for the
men and knew how to handle their various personalities and temperaments.
Although, as a seaman, Bakewell did a variety of jobs
aboard ship, his agility allowed him to be a natural for work requiring
climbing the mast. "Dad said in rough seas he sometimes was out
over the ocean when up doing work in the rigging because the ship
was pitching and rolling so much," Elizabeth said.
However, the ice pressure became so great that the ship
had to be abandoned on October 27, 1915, as it was beginning to break
up. Less than a month later, on November 21, the Endurance sank. With
the loss of the vessel, the real hardships of the men began. Living
in a makeshift camp on the ice, they continued to drift north on ice
floes. They had managed to save an odd assortment of food and other
items from the sinking ship, including three life boats for use when
open water was reached, or in case of a breakup of the ice. Eventually
the dogs had to be shot; the last ones killed were eaten. The men
then subsisted mainly on penguin and seal, with the blubber providing
their only fuel. Bakewell's 30-30 Winchester rifle, which Elizabeth
still has, came in handy.
Finally, on April 9, the ice breakup began, and the three
boats were launched. After a week heading northward in gale-whipped
seas, with white killer whales surfacing nearby, and dodging the ice,
the men reached Elephant Island on April 15, an in- hospitable spit
of land with a rocky beach just large enough for a landing and a campsite,
with shelter made under their overturned boats. It was the first time
they had set foot on land since leaving South Georgia, 497 days earlier.
Shackleton knew that they never would be rescued from
this isolated speck of land far off any navigation route. So a week
later, on April 24, he and five other seamen set out again in the
twenty-two-foot James Caird for South Georgia, some 800 miles to the
northeast, across some of the world's most treacherous waters.
"Dad did much of the sewing on the makeshift canvas
sails for the James Caird," Elizabeth notes. She still has the
leather palm protector with a metal seating that he used to protect
his hand when forcing the needle through the thick canvas.
Bakewell stayed behind with the men on Elephant Island.
It took the James Carid seventeen days—until May 15—to reach
the whaling outpost—most of the time battling gale-force winds.
They had to land on the uninhabited west side of South Georgia's main
island—or risk being swept by the winds around the north tip
of the island and out into the vast expanse of the South Atlantic.
Forced to wait four more days until the weather cleared,
Shackleton took two of the men for the twenty-nine-mile trek (longer
by their route on foot) across the snow of the unmapped interior of
the mountainous island whose peaks were upwards of 10,000 feet. Finally,
exhausted, they stumbled into Stromness Station on May 20.
The astounded Norwegians welcomed the men and sent a boat
around the island to pick up the James Caird and the rest of the crew.
Shackleton immediately began efforts to reach Elephant Island to rescue
the remaining crew. Pack ice around the island made the first three
attempts unsuccessful. The Chilean Navy had given Shackleton the use
of the Yelcho, a small former lighthouse tender fortified with a steel
hull, to make a fourth try. On August 30, 1916— nearly five months
after Shackleton had left for South Georgia, the Yelcho reached Elephant
Island, and within an hour everyone was aboard ship. All of the Endurance's
crew had been rescued. In spite of their ordeal, all were in relatively
good health except Perce Blackborow who had a badly frostbitten foot,
but who went on to fully recover—minus several toes. They had
survived on penguin, seal, and soup made from seaweed—and indomitable
courage and grit. (In 1922, Shackleton returned to South Georgia to
launch another Antarctic expedition. He died suddenly in Grytviken
of a heart attack on January 4, and is buried there.)
True to his adventurous spirit, William Bakewell wasn't
finished with the Southern Hemisphere. After being taken aboard the
Yelcho to Punta Arenas, the major port in southernmost Chile, the
crew continued on to Buenos Aires before going their separate ways.
They were publicly honored and the center of much attention in both
cities. But Bakewell stayed on in Argentina, accepting an offer to
manage a sheep ranch in the wide open spaces of Patagonia.
Although he did very well on the sheep ranch, Bakewell
once again got the itch to move on—this time he joined the British
Merchant Marine for the remainder of World War I, and was twice rescued
from ships sunk by German torpedoes. After the war he hired aboard
shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, then sailed for a short time on
merchant freighters while waiting for his U. S. citizenship papers
to be put in order so he could re-enter the country through the port
of New York. He returned to Joliet and married his wife Merle in 1925
at age thirty-seven, where his daughter, Elizabeth was born.
Finally settled down, Bakewell worked as a towerman for
the Rock Island Railroad until midway through World War II when he
quit to help build diesel locomotives at nearby LaGrange, Illinois,
until the war's end in 1945. That year, at age 57, the long-held desire
to return to the Upper Peninsula prompted him to pull stakes in Illinois
and relocate on the farm at Dukes.
Traveling the route of her father's epic voyage was an
experience Elizabeth will never forget. "I'm convinced that it
was Divine Providence that kept my father and the others alive during
their ordeal. There's no other way they could have survived so long
under such terrible circumstances," she said.
She calls Elephant Island one of the bleakest places on
Earth. "I can describe it as a jagged rock sticking some 2,000
feet out of the ocean, but you can't realize how barren and hostile
it is until you actually visit it. There's nothing but rock, ice and
snow, and howling winds. The only inhabitants are seals and penguins
and they don't stay there year around. There's absolutely no vegetation."
The visitors couldn't land on the small "beach"
where the men had encamped in a shelter walled with stone under an
overturned lifeboat. The seas were too rough. So they landed on another
small area on the opposite side of the island.
Altogether, they made two landings: on Elephant Island,
the Antarctic continent, South Georgia and some small nearby islands.
The Akademik Shulykin anchored off each location and four Zodiac pontoon-type
crafts, each carrying fifteen passengers, and powered by 40-HP motors,
made the trip to shore.
"Besides our warm Antarctic gear, we had to wear
waterproof outer clothing because the seas were so rough we would
get wet," Elizabeth said. "We sat on the inflated sides
of the craft, holding on to the gunnel ropes, and everybody had life
jackets."
Getting into the Zodiacs was difficult because of the
rough seas, she notes, and stepping from the ship's gangplank onto
the small platform in the Zodiac had to be done quickly when they
were lined up. The seaman in charge told the passengers, "When
I tell you to move—move!" "We did what he said and
there weren't any mishaps—even the Hurley twins managed it okay,"
Elizabeth recalls.
In the same manner they visited the Brazilian research
station and Brown's Bluff on the Antarctic Peninsula—two of the
most dangerous of the two landings. A planned visit to the Polish
station was canceled because of extremely rough seas. The temperature
never got above the low 30s during the trip in what is the Antarctic
spring.
The scenery in the Antarctic is spectacular in its way,
but very bleak and forbidding, Elizabeth notes. "Seeing green
tussock grass when we approached South Georgia was one of the most
welcome sights on the trip." The grass, which grows in bushel-size
clumps several feet high, is the only vegetation on South Georgia,
which also has some large glaciers in its mountainous interior. Here
they visited Griyviken, the nearly-abandoned former Norwegian whaling
station and point of departure for the Endurance, which is now home
to just one family—a husband and wife who are world travelers
and who have just authored a beautifully-illustrated volume on the
island. Here, also, is Shackleton's grave, and just around the bay
is a small military station maintaining the British presence on the
island. Nearby they landed at Albatross Island and climbed on a short
stream to waterfalls and a nesting area for the albatross.
"The wildlife is very tame in the Antarctic, and
have no fear of humans," Elizabeth says. "Regulations require
that no one can go closer than fifteen feet to any penguin, seal,
or other creature, unless they come closer to you, so they don't have
reason to fear you." The fur seals can be aggressive, but the
other types of seals don't pay much attention to visitors. They also
saw many skua birds—the scavengers of the Antarctic region—and
terns and petrels were often sighted flying around the ship.
One of the most dramatic and impressive sights was the
big "B10A" iceberg which recently broke off the Ronne Ice
Shelf along the Weddell Sea. "Our ship went for some thirty miles
along the big, 200-foot-high iceberg which is the size of Rhode Island,"
Elizabeth said. It was huge, even though a big piece had broken off,
known as "B10B."
Returning from South Georgia to Argentina, the ship encountered
a "Force 12" hurricane which lasted for three days. "They
had to wet down the tablecloths to keep the dishes from sliding off,
and we all got a little seasick—but we didn't let it get us down,"
Elizabeth said.
"It was a great experience. Sarah and Nina enjoyed
it as much as I did. It's something we'll never forget."
Elizabeth, Sarah, Nina and a third daughter, Mary Severson
of Munising, had another memorable experience last April when they
were invited to New York City by the American Museum of Natural History
for a private pre-opening viewing of its new exhibit, "Endurance:
Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition," for which Elizabeth
had loaned several items of her father's, including his billfold,
palm protector and seaman's papers when he left the Golden Gate for
the Endurance. From the museum they were invited to a reception and
dinner at the prestigious Explorers' Club in New York. The exhibit
is now at the National Geographic Society's headquarters in Washington,
D.C.
Elizabeth also accompanied her father to London in 1964
for the 50th anniversary reunion of the survivors of the Shackelton
Expedition, sponsored by the British Antarctic Club. (Ironically,
Mrs. Bakewell didn't accompany her husband because she didn't like
to travel!) Here he received a specially-cast medal—an honor
from King George V, the presentation being delayed for some years
until Bakewell could be located and receive it in person in London.
In 1967 a singular honor came his way when an island just
off the Antarctic coast was discovered and named Bakewell Island.
It is located near a small peninsula on the southeast coast of the
Weddell Sea, not far from where the Endurance had come closest to
the continent.
Over the years, William Bakewell, and more recently, Elizabeth,
have continued to keep contact with several of the expedition's survivors
and their families—the Blackborows who live in Wales, the Walter
Hows in London, and the Lionel Greenstreets near London. Elizabeth
has hanging in her living room several outstanding colored sketches
of the expedition drawn especially for her by How, a talented artist,
shortly before he died in the early 1970s.
Elizabeth retired in 1986 after a long teaching career.
When the family moved to Dukes in 1945, that year she entered Northern
Michigan University, graduating with a math major in 1949, later receiving
a master's in elementary teaching and supervision from NMU in 1960.
Her first teaching job was at the old Lawson School where
she taught two years. In 1951 when several schools in southeastern
Marquette County were consolidated into the new Skandia Elementary
School, she taught there one year.
After taking a "vacation" for seven years when
her three daughters were born—when she continued to be a substitute
teacher—she went back to the Skandia school where she was a teacher
and principal. In 1963 she taught at the school at St. Lukes Hospital,
run by the Marquette Public Schools for hospitalized children, and
then joined the staff at Fisher School in Marquette where she remained
for 23 years until retirement.
Her husband, Waino, a native of Rumley, passed away in
1987. "He was a self-made man of few words, but an avid reader—and
he always encouraged the girls to get a good education," Elizabeth
notes. All three hold college degrees. Waino was an electrician, logger,
and worked at the Lake Superior & Ishpeming Ore Dock.
Elizabeth still owns the old Bakewell farmhouse and 60 acres in Dukes,
which she has rented for many years. The home she and Waino had on
an adjoining 20 acres is for sale.
Elizabeth likes to travel and continues to lead a busy
life in retirement. She and sister-in-law Bertha Elo of Munising left
for two weeks in the Caribbean and Panama at the end of January. But
1999 will be a year to remember, when her father's Antarctic adventure—which
was an epic experience of human endurance and survival—became
a much more vivid and personal experience for her, and for Sarah and
Nina.
Author's note: An article on William Bakewell,
"To the End of the Earth and Back to Dukes," by Tim Clancy,
which appeared in the October 1993 issue of Marquette Monthly, and
the article in the November 1998 issue of National Geographic, "Epic
of Survival: Shackleton," by Caroline Alexander, can be referenced
by readers for additional background and information.
Rights to the more than seventy-five surviving photos
taken by Frank Hurley, official photographer of the expedition, are
held by two British organizations: the Scott Polar Research Institute
in Cambridge, and the Royal Geographical Society of London. Publication
requires special permission. Although Elizabeth Rajala has a number
of these Hurley photos, including several of her father, in her private
collection, they are not reprinted here.
MM
