Evil Water

Shackleton, Creen, and Worsley after their arrival (and first shower and change of clothes) in Stromness.

May 20 1916, Stromness–Ernest Shackleton was in charge of an expedition aiming to be the first to cross the entirety of Antarctica.  His ship, the Endurance, left Britain on August 8, 1914, just five days after the start of the war.  Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, gave Shackleton permission to depart.  The last contact the ship had with anything resembling civilization was on December 5, when she departed South Georgia.

The Endurance would end up being trapped in pack ice off of Antarctica, slowly being crushed.  The crew abandoned her on Shackleton’s orders in late October 1915, and from there they rode the ice for several months, and when their floe broke up, they took their lifeboats to Elephant Island, which they reached in mid-April 1916.  Knowing they would not be rescued there, Shackleton and five other men set off on April 24 in the most sturdy of the lifeboats, the James Caird, for the 830-mile journey back to South Georgia.  

The James Caird arrived on South Georgia successfully three weeks later, but on the wrong side of the island.  Unable to make the journey around in the heavy seas, Shackleton and two of the men crossed the mountains and glaciers of South Georgia in only 36 hours.  They arrived in the whaling station of Stromness on May 20, their first contact with the rest of the world since 1914.  Although their top priority was to rescue the rest of the crew (which took several more months), they also found out that war, contrary to their expectations, was still continuing.  After his return to Britain the next year, Shackleton repeatedly attempted to volunteer for service in France, but his poor health precluded it.