not doing well. Vincent and McNeish were weak from exhaustion and frostbite. Shackleton ordered McCarthy to stay and look after them. The waves were far too rough to consider venturing out into them again, even if the boat had not been leaking and made fragile by the constant battering. Shackleton knew that he had been fortunate to survive the extraordinary journey. So instead of trying to sail around South Georgia to the north side, he made a decision to cross the island on foot. It was a risky choice. The island had never been explored and no one knew what lay in the interior. Shackleton set off with Captain Worsley and Second Officer Crean on Friday 18 May.
The James Caird
Courtesy of the author
These three men crossed the mountain range of South Georgia, walking doggedly on with the fate of the twenty-two on Elephant Island and their three boat companions on their shoulders. They walked and climbed to the point of complete collapse, but kept going. Shackleton asked nothing more from the others than he gave himself and, by his uncomplaining endurance, inspired the others to the same.
On the morning of 20 May 1916, they climbed the last ridge and sighted the whaling station below. They had marched for thirty-six hours, though they had barely recovered from the sea journey. Yet the odyssey was at an end. Pausing only to shake hands, the three men climbed down a frozen waterfall to get close enough to signal the astonished whalers. Filthy and bearded, they were not recognised at first by those who had met them on the way out.
They picked up the three on the other side of the island, as well as the James Caird that had brought them so far. Yet winter had come again – and the sea to the south had begun to freeze into the same pack ice that had trapped and crushed Endurance. Shackleton made four attempts to reach the men on Elephant Island, but each one was defeated by savage winter conditions.
In August 1916, the sea ice began to break up once more – and Shackleton set out in a small steamship he had borrowed from the Chilean government. The ice had thinned enough for him to get through and he reached Elephant Island at last, desperate for some sight of those he had left behind.
When the waiting men saw the ship, they lined up on the shore. On board, Shackleton counted them aloud in joy, one by one. They had four days of food left and had been so certain ‘The Boss’ would return that for weeks they’d begun each day by rolling up their kit for a quick rescue. They had never lost faith that Shackleton would come for them – and he did.
In 1917 they returned to a world that was still at war – and a world that had discovered how terrible war can be. Most of his men signed up to fight and, of course, some of them did not make it home again.
Shackleton was brutally honest and blunt about the expedition being a failure. Yet the rescue of his men is still one of the great tales – of endurance, courage and honour. He did not let them down.
Shackleton wrote his account of it in the book that forms the main source for this chapter, still in print as South: The Endurance Expedition. He gave the copyright of that book to his creditors to pay debts and tried to live simply with his wife. Yet he was unhappy in the real world, away from the ice. It was not long before he was planning a return.
In 1921, Shackleton sailed back to the southern continent as commander of the Quest scientific expedition. With Antarctica in sight, he had a heart attack and died. When news reached his wife, she sent back the instruction ‘Bury him where he was happiest.’ His grave is on South Georgia, where he knew at last that he had reached civilisation – and saved his men.
As a postscript, the James Caird lifeboat was brought back to England. Shackleton gave it to an old school friend in exchange for him sponsoring the Quest expedition. It was then donated to the school both men had known: Dulwich College in London. It can be viewed today, with prior appointment, on any Tuesday. It is a small, frail boat that has known the howling gales and vast swells of the Antarctic oceans.
Left. Ivan Vdovin/Alamy Stock Photo; Right. Simon Evans/Alamy Stock Photo
Each generation loses some old knowledge – and learns something new. Along with death and taxes, this is one of life’s certainties. Over passing centuries or millennia it can lead to great shifts in ‘general knowledge’. What was once known to all can become the knowledge only of specialists – or lost for ever.
Our task is not to preserve the past for its own sake. There are many thousands of books and plays that refer to the pre-decimal coinage of Britain. We include a brief sampler here of those coins. It would not feel quite right if no child today knew that there were once twelve pennies in a shilling, or two hundred and forty pennies in a pound.
The first coins to circulate in Britain were gold staters from ancient Gaul, imported around 150 BC. The designs suggest they were influenced by Macedonian coins of King Philip II, father to Alexander the Great. Coin production in Britain began some fifty years later, around 100 BC. These ancient coins, like those of Rome, were made of gold, silver or bronze. The three metals seem to form the basis of all ancient coin systems. Gold is eternal – it does not rust – so has always been a symbol of perfection and high value in almost every human society. Silver is attractive, but goes black very easily. Like bronze, however, silver has a relatively low melting point and is easy to mine and work. That probably explains its popularity, along with tin and copper. Those metals are all soft enough to be hand-stamped with a hammer. In the early British coins, the images stamped on them were very varied. They included horses, helmets, faces, stags, wreaths and a host of other pictures without words. Most people could not read, after all.
From the first Roman invasion in 55 and 54 BC, Britain came into the orbit of the Roman world. After AD 45, Roman coins circulated as well as native ones. The metal itself had value, so could be exchanged for others with a different design or origin. The Cantii tribe in Kent produced their own coins, as did the Trinovantes, the Catuvellauni and the Iceni in Norfolk under Boadicea, who led an uprising against the Romans in the 1st century AD.
The Roman empire produced many coins – not only for all its emperors, but also to mark military successes and key festivals. As well as gold aureus coins, they issued silver denarius coins (denarii in the plural: den-ar-i-eye) and sestertius coins (sestertii: sest-ur-tee-eye) in silver or brass. There was also a bronze coin called an as.
After the Roman legions left Britain and their last officials were expelled in AD 410, coins were still minted north and south – the silver penny became virtually the sole coin in common use for at least five centuries. It was still referred to as a ‘denarius’, or ‘d’ for short. Though it became a copper coin in later centuries, the habit of labelling a penny as ‘1d’ continued right up to decimalisation in 1971.
Rulers of small kingdoms such as Mercia or East Anglia would issue their own silver coins, as did established Viking invaders around York. By the 10th century, King Æthelstan, the first king of England and Scotland, organised the mints and closed down a lot of fake coin shops.
After 1066, King William of Normandy maintained the Anglo-Saxon regional mint system, but over time it became more centralised. Coins that could be cut into halves and quarters were a brief experiment, but not popular. In 1180, Henry II put his name ‘Henricus’ and ‘Rex’ (king) on his coins, though it did not become standard practice for his sons Richard and John.
Short-cross coin of Henry II, issued 1180–1189
AMR Coins
By the 13th century, under King Edward I, the minting of coins had become a royal