Michael Nolan/SplashdownDirect/Rex Features
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Mayday in the Antarctic
By Shirley Streshinsky, September & October 2008
On Thanksgiving night 2007, the M.S. Explorer struck ice and sank—forcing her 91 passengers, most of them 50 and older, into lifeboats in the frigid waters. This is their story
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Thursday had been a long day; up early, Lynne and Pete D’Angelo had climbed into a Zodiac inflatable dinghy and dodged icebergs, had approached the very place on Antarctica’s Elephant Island where, early in the 20th century, the explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton had left his men to go for help, then returned four months later to rescue them. Now, at day’s end, the D’Angelos were tired. As they said their good nights, someone teasingly called out, “Sunrise is at 3:41.” Pete laughed and told them not to count on him to see it. That was one of the details he would remember. That the sun would rise at 3:41.
Sleep did not come easily. Their cabin was in the belly of the boat, half of it below the water line. Pete was distracted by the sound of bits of ice scraping along the hull. Brash ice, he thought it was called. He lay there thinking about all the different names for ice in the Antarctic—pack ice, fast ice, growlers—until he sank into a fitful sleep. Then a sharp noise, a bang against the side of the ship, and a gurgling sound seeped into his drowse, water running down a drain somewhere near his head, above and behind. He should wake Lynne, ask her about the sound. He touched the wall. Dry. Good. Then he dropped an arm over the side of the bed to the floor.
Wet.
Bolting upright, he called out to his wife and, in one long motion, hit the red emergency button on the wall between their beds, and began pulling on clothes. “Our eyeglasses,” he reminded her as she grabbed their Wellington boots and threw a coat over her nightgown. He opened the door to the passageway and ran into a crew member; a few steps behind was the ship’s sturdy Swedish captain, who blurted, “My God, we’re sinking.”
It was early last November when the 91 adventure travelers—most in their 50s and 60s—who had signed on for the “Spirit of Shackleton” cruise began to head down the long spine of Argentina to its southernmost port, Ushuaia. There, they were to board the M.S. Explorer and venture into the icy wastes at the bottom of the world: Antarctica. For 19 days the ship, owned by G.A.P., a Canadian adventure-travel company, was to trace a sector of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 191416 expedition, one of the world’s great survival stories (see box “Shackleton’s Rescue,” below).
They joined a crew of 54, along with 9 guides, who were to lecture on the marvels of a continent beyond anyone’s imagination, then guide them ashore in the Zodiacs, to see for themselves, up close.
At first, the engines were able to pump out water. Then the power failed.
Lynne D’Angelo, a newly retired dietitian, and her husband, Pete, 61, a retired engineer, had set out from their home in Oakland, California, to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary by adding the last notch on the list of continents they had visited. Among their fellow travelers were 12 other Americans. Plus, there were contingents from England, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia, and at least ten other countries. A twentysomething honeymoon couple came from San Diego; a retired schoolmaster, from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Also boarding that day was a Danish couple, Mette Larsen, 29, and Jan Heikel, 42; he planned to propose when they actually set foot on Antarctica, late in the trip.
All the passengers had been certified as fit by their doctors. Kay Van Horne, 64, a retired Denver middle-school teacher and an inveterate trekker, spoke for many of her fellow passengers when she offered her reason for signing on: “I love adventure.”
LeeAnn Moulton—called Lee—had made this trip two years before. “I came back realizing the huge impact we have on this fragile continent,” says the 50-year-old critical care nurse from England. “I felt very strongly that if more people could visit Antarctica, we would see a greater change in the attitudes in society.” She particularly wanted her partner, Andy White, 51, to experience it. An avid sailor since age 11, he had required little coaxing. Andy’s first impression of the M.S. Explorer—affectionately known to a tight little circle of Antarctic partisans as the Little Red Ship—was that it “looked very small to be taking on the southern ocean.”
In fact, the Explorer was the first cruise ship built expressly for the Antarctic. Commissioned in 1969 by Lars-Eric Lindblad, a pioneer in adventure travel, the ship had a reinforced hull to midships—meaning it was designed to withstand contact with submerged ice.
The first day out from Ushuaia, all the travelers gained their sea legs, went through the required safety briefing and drill, donned life jackets, and appeared at designated muster stations—assigned places on the ship where each passenger was to report in case of emergency. They became familiar with the ship and with one another, and settled into the routine. They learned that on days when they would attempt a landing (always depending on the capricious weather), they would rise at 5:30 for an early breakfast, then climb into the Zodiacs, to be ferried ashore. On “at sea” days there would be morning lectures on ornithology, geology, and climate change, more lectures in the afternoons, and a movie after dinner.
The ship steamed toward the Falkland Islands (a British territory still called Las Malvinas by Argentina), stopping first at one of the outer islands, where the land was spongy underfoot and the fields were splashed with yellow gorse. Black-browed albatross sailed through the air, and the travelers got their first good look at the aptly named rockhopper penguins. Then on to Stanley, the capital of the Falkland Islands. November is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, when temperatures can be expected to rise into the 50s. But the Antarctic spring of 2007 was colder than usual. Pete D’Angelo noted that the tulips had arrived on schedule, only to have to push up through the snow.
The days fell into an exhilarating rhythm; the adventurers toured old whaling stations and wandered among the detritus of an age fueled by whale oil. Sometimes the group was greeted by great flocks of penguins, none in the least perturbed by the humans in their midst. There were Magellanics, Gentoos, and Adélies. And there were elephant seals, as well. In the water were whales, and in the air, the great wandering albatross, with its 11-foot wingspan. The birders onboard were on the lookout for the pure white snow petrel. Seen only in places of ice and snow, it is called the Angel of Antarctica.
As the ship pushed south, the temperature began to drop and icebergs appeared. The travelers entered a translucent world that slipped from bright white to pearl to a deep slate. The late-spring sun never quite set; midnight was a twilight gray. With mountains cloaked in ice, it is a silent place, at once cruel and magnificent. “The Antarctic is a whole different world,” says Kay Van Horne, struggling for the right words. “There is no color at all, and then when the sun shines, there’s that wonderful blue. I can’t describe it—it’s not mournful exactly, but spiritual.”
Shackleton's Rescue
Trapped on the ice for 20 months, his crew survived. Their tale is one of the most inspiring episodes in the history of exploration
In December 1914, three years after the Norwegian Roald Amundsen beat the British to the South Pole, the Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and a handpicked crew set out to claim another first—a walk across the entire continent of Antarctica. They billed it as “the greatest Polar journey ever attempted.” The attempt failed, but it became one of the most amazing survival stories in the annals of human exploration.
H.M.S. Endurance, a new sailing ship “specially constructed for Polar work,” was to deliver the men and five dog teams to a base on the coast of the unexplored Weddell Sea. “The presence of so many bergs was ominous…,” Shackleton wrote in South, his account of the expedition. Within a month the ship became locked in pack ice, some 250 miles from land.
For ten months, through incessant gales and blizzards, the men lived on the embedded ship. They killed seals and penguins to supplement rations, exercised the dogs on mile-square ice floes, played hockey and football to lift spirits. Temperatures plummeted to 33 degrees below zero; the men were besieged by frostbite, snow blindness, hunger, and bouts of despair.
Enormous pressures began to build within the ice; in its grip, the Endurance was crushed and sank, leaving them all on a giant floe. They remained on open ice for another four months, and then, on March 30, 1916, the remaining dogs were killed for food. A week later the men were able to launch the whaleboats, managing to land on Elephant Island, but Shackleton knew they would not survive another winter. He decided to go for help; with a crew of five, he took to sea in a 22-foot whaler, the James Caird. First mate Frank Wild was left in charge.
For 16 days Shackleton and his crew suffered gale-force winds and snow, once nearly drowning as a gigantic rogue wave tossed them into a “seething chaos of tortured water.” Shackleton wrote: “A thousand times it seemed as if the James Caird must be engulfed, but the boat lived.”
Shackleton and his crew rowed 800 miles to South Georgia Island, then marched 36 hours more before they at last reached Stromness Whaling Station. “We had pierced the veneer of outside things,” he wrote. “We had seen God in His splendours, heard the text that Nature renders. We had reached the naked soul of man.” It took four attempts and the help of a Chilean Navy ship before all 22 men were rescued from Elephant Island.
Thursday, November 22, was Thanksgiving Day, a fact that went unnoticed by all but the U.S. passengers. On this 12th day of the cruise, the D’Angelos were up at 5:30, in time to pull on the layers of clothes required for the trip to Elephant Island, site of the rescue of Shackleton’s men. Pete found himself transfixed by the scene out the window: a study in black and white, with clouds rising on a landscape at once pristine and foreboding.
He and Lynne boarded the Zodiac and approached Cape Wild, named for Shackleton’s first mate, Frank Wild, who had been left in charge of the 21 men who waited there for Shackleton. “It looked forlorn,” Pete remembers. “There were chinstrap penguins on the snow—there should have been bare ground at this time of the year.” The winds were whipping off the glacier at some 60 miles per hour, preventing any chance of landing.
That evening in his regular briefing, Captain Bengt Wiman reported that the ship was heading into heavy ice. After dinner the D’Angelos went to their cabin early. Lee, the British nurse, stayed up to watch the movie, while Kay played cards with couples from the Netherlands and England. “The ice kept getting tighter and tighter,” Kay remembers. “At one point I said that maybe we should be watching Titanic.”
Kay and her 39-year-old niece, Lisa Paisola, who were traveling together, decided to go up on the bridge. “You could see the captain and first mate straining to see the ice,” Kay says. Then she adds, “I felt uneasy when we finally went to our cabin. I said maybe we should put on our long johns, that it was going to be a long night. Then there was a thump.”
In her cabin, Lee also heard the sound of splintering ice and the shudder of the ship. Something wasn’t right, she told Andy; she thought they should go up on deck. A sharp bang sent them to a window, and they watched as a large piece of ice went by with a red stain on it. “Is that blood?” Lee asked. “No, not blood,” Andy answered. “Paint.” Gouged from the Little Red Ship. Not long after, the general alarm sounded three times, and the voice of the captain came over the loudspeaker: “This is a real emergency. Go to the muster stations.”
On the bottom deck, Pete D’Angelo scooped up a two-gigabyte memory card from his camera, containing the pictures he had taken so far, and tucked it into his pocket. Now the water was ankle-deep in one end of the cabin. He picked up a tennis shoe, then watched as the other floated under the bed. When it washed back out again, he grabbed it. A voice on the loudspeaker said to bring Arctic wear, so he snatched his and Lynne’s thermals, fleece liners, and Gore-Tex jackets.
It was a solemn group that gathered up top. The tension was palpable, yet there were no hysterics—no one lost control. Captain Wiman, speaking in measured tones, explained that a mayday had been sent, that two ships were on their way but were six to ten hours away. Every ten minutes or so the group was updated: Something had punctured a fist-size hole in the hull. The engines were pumping out water. Like most ships, the Explorer had been designed with watertight doors, which could be sealed off if a hole was punched in a compartment. But if several compartments were affected, if a seam gave way or a crack developed, the flooding might not be contained. At this point the captain knew everyone would need to leave the ship, but he hoped they could stay onboard until the rescuers arrived. Cell phones came out; calls home were made; messages left: “Don’t worry....Rescue ships are on their way.... I’ll be fine.” And then, just in case, a quivering “I love you.” After that, there was nothing to do but wait and hope.
Then the engines faltered and the lights went out. Without power the engines could not continue pumping out the seawater, could not maneuver to avoid scraping up against a large iceberg that had appeared on the starboard side. By now the Explorer was listing noticeably. The phrase "righting moment curve" came into Andy’s mind. It refers to the ability of a ship to remain upright and stable; “I knew that at some further angle of list, the righting moment would go negative and the ship would roll over and sink.” It was critical to get the lifeboats launched while there was time. Suddenly the captain’s words shattered the gathering dread: Abandon ship. Abandon ship. Abandon ship.
It felt surreal. This group of unseasoned Arctic explorers was about to climb into open lifeboats and be lowered into one of the most treacherous stretches of water in the world. The passengers shut their minds against it. They lined up quietly at their stations. No panic—no pushing or shoving. They slipped on the tilting deck, grabbed onto one another, and did what they could to stay upright. One by one, they climbed in, breathing in the cold air, cramming close together, some 30 to a boat—“knee to knee and eye to eye”—and watched as the crew struggled with the releases that would lower them all into the sea.
Pete D’Angelo, tall and lanky, was the last into the first boat; though he managed to get his feet in, there was no space for the rest of him. The others pushed together to make room, and he squeezed in next to Lynne. At first the motor didn’t start; when finally it did, Pete felt a huge sense of relief. If they could maneuver, he felt they would be all right. On the Titanic, he remembered, those in the lifeboats had been saved. But breathing in the fumes from the engine, rolling with the boat as the sea swells lifted and dipped, he began to retch and then to shiver. He concentrated on the sound of the motor. As long as the core body was warm, he recalled from Boy Scouts, hypothermia would be kept at bay. He and Lynne had their fleece liners and their Gore-Tex jackets, but their legs and feet were wet and cold; he wished he had grabbed rain pants. Still, he was certain they would be rescued.
Others were not so sanguine. The sea was choppy, with growing swells and spray spattering onto them. The temperature hovered near freezing, and it was getting colder. Lynne, sitting close by her husband, worried that a wave would wash over them, or that the weather—notoriously fickle here—would change.
Back on the doomed Explorer, Lee and Andy climbed into a lifeboat and moved to the bow. The ship was listing over them—if it capsized, they would be rolled under. They sat there for what seemed to Andy like ages. When their lifeboat was finally lowered, it began to drift directly beneath a forward lifeboat hanging in the air, ready to be lowered. That boat’s motor was already turning, only feet above their heads. Somehow the passengers in the drifting boat managed to use oars to push off from the ship’s side, then rowed feverishly until they were clear. It was the first of a series of harrowing escapes that would plague the lifeboats—some with working motors, others without—as they spread out in the open water. Zodiacs manned by crew members began to herd the four other lifeboats, skittering around and looping lines to pull them away from perilous floating ice shelves.
Andy stretched out a tarp behind his back to deflect the four-to-six-foot waves that now and again washed over the bow of the boat. He reminded himself to smile. He was thinking about Frank Wild, Shackleton’s first mate, who had remained cheerful throughout his long ordeal, never showing doubt that the crew would be rescued. Lee, too, sensed that her survival was very closely linked to her state of mind: “I stayed positive, looking neither forward nor back,” she says.
Included in the lifeboats’ equipment was thermal protection gear—a sort of zip-up sleeping bag made of a light fabric with a foil liner. The travelers helped one another into the bright orange bags, intent now on conserving every trace of heat. Kay’s niece, Lisa, sure they would not survive, was making a video to leave behind a record for their family. Kay sank into the heavy-duty down jacket she had bought at the Goodwill store in Denver for five dollars and held it close against the sleet that was beginning to fall. And she assured the German woman facing her that she didn’t need to apologize one bit for throwing up on her.
Within minutes of the mayday an all-out rescue effort had been launched. The Argentine Coast Guard and the Chilean Navy were alerted; the latter had a military base about 50 miles away, on King George Island. From opposite directions, two ships—the National Geographic Endeavour, about the size of the Explorer, and the much larger Norwegian M.S. Nordnorge, were steaming full ahead toward the lifeboats. Halfway through its own cruise, the Norwegian ship was some 80 nautical miles—about five hours—away when Captain Arnvid Hansen received the mayday. Because his ship was carrying about 220 passengers, well below its capacity of 691, it was designated as the rescue ship.
In the lifeboat, Pete D’Angelo watched the sun rise. “It was a small, round, golden orb that came out of a gray sea and disappeared into a gray sky.” He knew it was 3:41; that meant they had been in the water for a little over an hour.
The four lifeboats wallowed in the swells; frigid water lapped over the sides to soak trousers and seep into boots. An attempt at a joke foundered; someone began singing “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall...,” but the song faded before they reached 90. A cold gray silence settled over the boats. Lee and Andy touched foreheads. “The hardest moment was when both Andy and I thought at the same moment that we might not see our kids again,” says Lee. “We looked at each other and just knew what the other was thinking.”
“Anyone want a hand warmer?” Lisa called out. Andy smiled ruefully; his gloves were thoroughly wet, and there was nothing he would like better than to have warm hands again, but he had to hold up the tarp that protected four of them from the spray to their backs. He tried to smile as he turned down the offer. That was when he noticed that Lee, next to him, had started to shiver uncontrollably, one of the first signs of hypothermia.
At that moment they heard a soft whirring noise, which became a shuddering roar, as a bright orange Chilean Air Force helicopter appeared and circled above them. It was proof that the Outside World was aware of them, that help really was on the way. They had been told all of these things by crew members, but the tiny orange aircraft circling above somehow made it more real. A collective sigh seemed to rise from the scattered boats; they could hope again. A few began quietly to cry.
Sometime in that long night, Jan, the young Dane, proposed to pretty, blond Mette right there in the lifeboat, and she said yes.
To the 154 souls who had endured nearly five hours in open boats on a freezing ocean, the M.S. Nordnorge appeared first as reflected light, almost an apparition. Then it was looming above them, seven beautiful decks’ worth. The National Geographic Endeavour arrived at almost the same time and would stand by as the larger ship took onboard each of the Explorer’s travelers. It was 6:30 in the morning. Some could not feel their feet, and their bodies were stiff. Several were in the early stages of hypothermia. The transfer to the ship would be their last challenge.
Most could not climb a rope ladder, so the Nordnorge lowered one of its big, sturdy lifeboats, and the Zodiacs maneuvered each of the Explorer’s lifeboats alongside. Some of the rescued were able to move on their own into the larger lifeboat, crawling or jumping, while others needed help. “Don’t drop me, don’t drop me,” one woman cried as her boots fell into the ocean. Finally, the able sea crew managed to wrestle all the passengers into the Nordnorge lifeboat, which was then lifted to an upper deck. In the last moments of the rescue, the cell phone in Andy’s pocket beeped; it was a message from his dentist’s office, reminding him about a checkup.
All 154 Explorer travelers and crew members were shepherded into a lounge and given blankets and warm drinks. Passengers on the Nordnorge had donated piles of clothing—underwear and shoes and shirts. The stunned and weary newcomers sank into the chairs, faces wan and strained, on the edge of shock.
Some crowded around the window to look down on the M.S. Explorer in her death throes. She was moving toward pack ice; soon she would be locked in its embrace, and a few hours later would slip under the sea. Some wept openly; each was trying to grasp how they had survived in such an unforgiving place. Andy credited the Explorer’s Captain Wiman and a crew that had performed superbly, but the weather gods played an important role by providing a period of calm in a sea passage known for its tempests: “A few hours before the shipwreck,” Andy would later write, “it was blowing 40 knots [46 miles per hour] of wind and a few hours after, it was blowing 40 knots. We were in a part of the planet where the strongest winds on earth blow and the roughest seas rage. For a short time the seas were calm and the winds light. And into that weather window sailed a Viking rescue ship.”
The bad weather would come: it delayed the travelers’ transfer to Chile’s Eduardo Frei Montalva Air Force Base on King George Island. It would be yet another day before it was clear enough for the big transport planes to fly in to carry them to Punta Arenas in Chile, where they were met by consular representatives from their various countries, who would smooth the way with necessary travel documents. The G.A.P. Adventures representative was there to supply cash and emergency clothing, and to assist in arranging flights home. Each would be reimbursed for a cruise that had proved altogether too adventurous.
On their last morning on King George, Andy, Lee, and Kay sat together at breakfast. Andy mentioned that in times of trouble, birds had always been a symbol of hope to him, and he told them about seeing a snow petrel—the Angel of Antarctica. Kay answered, “It’s always been rainbows for me. I can tell you, sometime in the next few days there’ll be a rainbow.”
The three walked outside, and as if on command, an arc of color awaited them. Andy raised his camera to take a picture of Kay dancing under the rainbow, which seemed to follow as they boarded the bus that would take them to the airplane. They could still see that spectral radiance from the window as they took off for the long journey home.
Shirley Streshinsky is a journalist, novelist, and travel writer based in Kensington, California.
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