Elephant Island, 24th April 1916, the members of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition stood on a desolate storm swept promontory. They had arrived on the island 10 days earlier, the first dry land they had stood on for 18 months. The expedition was the brainchild of its leader, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Britain’s most famous living polar explorer. Following the death of his great rival, Robert Falcon Scott, in his attempt to become the first to reach the South Pole, Shackleton devised what he thought was the last great polar expedition: a trans-Antarctic journey to cross the continent. Two ships would travel to the continent. Aurora under the command of Aeneas Mackintosh would head for the Ross Sea and lay depots between McMurdo Sound (the coast) and The Beardmore Glacier (the midway point to the South Pole). Meanwhile Endurance would carry the main party to the Weddle Sea and this party would cross the continent, via the pole, living off the Aurora party’s depots on the 'other side ' of the pole. The project was ambitious on paper. However, events transpired that drastically altered the priorities of the Endurance party never made it to land. Caught in the pack ice the Endurance was trapped for 10 months from January 1915, she drifted north until she was crushed in October. Shackleton’s goal had now changed from the original plan to getting all his men home safely. They were 1000 miles from habitation, in the Southern Ocean, the roughest and most storm wracked sea on the planet, with three boats, some stores, some sledges and the dogs. The men camped and drifted on the ice for another five freezing months until the terrifying embarkation as the ice and their camp broke up and they took to the boats, 6 days later they arrived at Elephant Island. Over the last 10 days the men had prepared the James Caird, the largest of the three boats for a sea voyage. Shackleton had decided to take some men and set forth on a rescue attempt. They would sail to civilisation and then, with a rescue vessel, they would sail back to Elephant Island to get the shipwrecked men. The next 2 weeks saw one of the most extraordinary boat journeys in history as Shackleton and five of the professional seamen in the party sailed 800 nautical miles across the storm swept ocean to South Georgia and rescue. There are many comprehensive histories of the voyage and the expedition including Shackleton’s own account in ‘South’ but we are not here to re-tread that path but to look, instead at the James Caird, the 22 ½ foot (now 23’6”) lifeboat, why she was built the way she was and why the Endurance had been mandated, by law, to carry her.
The 'James Caird'
We’ve enlisted the help of explorer Seb Coulthard to help us tell the story of the James Caird. Seb was an expedition member of Shackleton Epic 2013 recreation of the voyage of the Caird and crossing of South Georgia. The voyage was made in the Alexandra Shackleton, a replica of the James Caird by six men wearing the same type of sledging clothes (unsuitable for wet sea voyages) and eating the same hoosh – a high calorie hoosh of pemmican. Seb was Expedition Bosun in charge of designing and fitting out the Alexandra Shackleton. When they returned, Seb went back to his day job as an aviation engineer for the Royal Navy but the bug had bitten him and he couldn’t get the idea of building a second, James Caird replica but this one would be an exact replica. As a result, Seb has done a great deal of research on the Caird, he hasn’t relied on the accounts but has gone back to the evidence, to first sources, to the diaries and logs and to the original builders of the Caird and the legislation that resulted in her being built the way she was.
Above: Seb Coulthard, RN, Aviation Engineer
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Below: Edwardian Polar Explorer
The J.Caird, to date, the most accurate replica of the James Caird
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