Shackleton's Stowaway Read online

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

  NORMAN TUTTLE ON THE LAST FRONTIER, Tom Bodett

  THE CONVICTS, Iain Lawrence

  MAHALIA, Joanne Horniman

  HAVELI, Suzanne Fisher Staples

  RUMBLE FISH, S. E. Hinton

  TEX, S. E. Hinton

  QUIVER, Stephanie Spinner

  THE LAST SNAKE RUNNER, Kimberley Griffiths Little

  KIT'S WILDERNESS, David Almond

  For Sylvia and Oliver, who will stow away somewhere, sometime, and for Sue and Tom, who will let them

  ~V.M.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank the family of Perce Blackborow for sharing their memories: his daughter Joan Randle; his son James Williams, and his wife, Rose; and his youngest brother, Reginald, and his wife, Grace. For sharing not only memories but their lovely home, warm hospitality, and the history of Wales, special thanks to Perce's grandson John Blackborow and his wife, Jacquie.

  Thanks to Elizabeth A. Rajala, Billy Bakewell's daughter, who provided me with generous conversation, handwritten pages of her own recollections, and her father's memoirs.

  Special thanks to Robert Stephenson of Antarctic-Circle.org, who shared his vast knowledge, steered and connected me to innumerable sources, answered countless questions, and placed his fantastic personal library at my disposal.

  I am grateful to my agent, Kathy Anderson, for making it all seem so easy and to my editor, Joan Slattery, for making the thorny thrust of great editing always feel like a bouquet of posies.

  CONTENTS

  Shackleton's Stowaway

  Map

  Author's Note

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Timeline

  Members of the Expedition

  Further Reading

  June 15, 1916

  I am warm. How amazing to feel this way. Not just not cold but actually warm. The little stove is glowing. Whenever someone throws in another penguin skin, I can hear it crackle and hiss. It isn't a proper stove, of course, but it is so warm now, I can open my sleeping bag. It isn't a proper sleeping bag anymore either, just a soggy piece of reindeer skin, so worn out that I have poked my finger through it a couple of times. It's no worse than any other, though, and better than some. The really bad thing is that they shed. The air is always full of little reindeer hairs. We pick them out of our food and brush them out of our eyes. We breathe them in and sneeze them out. But it isn't the worst thing. Not by far.

  It's hard to say what exactly is the worst thing when you are stranded on a narrow scrap of rocky beach on a tiny island in the coldest place on earth. We have been here two months now. We may never leave.

  Some people would say it isn't fair that a fellow has survived two shipwrecks before the age of twenty. The way I see it, it would have been a whole lot more unfair if I didn't! For right now, I am still alive. That's pretty good, considering.

  I haven't written so much in this journal lately, but I want to tell something more now while I have a chance. Only it's hard to concentrate. It's just so nice to be warm for once. It's hard to describe the cold of Antarctica. It gets so cold here, you can't smile or your teeth will crack. If you take your mittens off for one minute, your fingers freeze. Even wrapped up, you can't keep away the frostbite. Noses, ears, and feet, they get it worst.

  The fire is smoky, but we're used to that. And I suppose it stinks too—burning penguin skins can't smell good. But there are so many worse smells here. If someone from the outside world walked in just now, they would probably start gagging. For one thing, there are twenty-two men crowded in here and no one has taken a bath or washed clothes for over a year. Unless you count getting dunked in the sea or splashed by waves.

  Besides that, the ground beneath our hut has started to melt. It isn't actually a hut at all, just our two wooden lifeboats turned upside down on top of some rocks. We have piled up more rocks all the way around and hung what was left of old tents to keep out the wind. We call it the snuggery. When all of us are packed inside, it's very snug indeed. But the ground is mostly ten thousand years of frozen penguin guano. Guano is a science word for what comes out of a penguin. We sailors have some other words. Call it what you like, it still stinks. The ground oozes with it. When the others walk around, you can hear it squish. So no, we can't be smelling too good. But I don't care. I am warm. It must be fifty degrees in here now! The doc wants it even warmer so the chloroform will vaporize. Chloroform is a kind of anesthesia. Doc Macklin is about to cut off my toes. Bad enough frostbite kills the flesh. That's what happened to my feet. Nothing to do now but amputate.

  The doc wants a lot of light for the operation, so they have lit every lamp. These aren't proper lamps, of course, just lumps of seal fat in old sardine cans. (They also stink.) Usually we just light one or two, but now there are a dozen, and it's nice and bright. That's another thing I miss—light. It's the middle of the winter here in Antarctica, and the sun only comes up for about six hours. But there are usually storms or thick clouds, so we don't see much of even that. I can't remember the feel of sun on my face. I have not been out of this hut in two months.

  Our lives are now measured in terms of what they are not. When our not-quite sleeping bags are not-so wet we are happy, or at least not-so miserable. We live in not-exactly a hut with not-really a stove and we are not-quite starving. And not-yet dead.

  Eighty degrees now, says Doc. The water is boiling on the stove. He drops the instruments in the pot to sterilize. The clink of metal gives me a sick feeling. I try to think positive, and I would never say it to the others, but honestly, I don't know if I can go on much more. It would be different if we knew rescue was coming, but we don't know. The boss, Mr. Shackleton, went off two months ago to try and get help. He took five men in the third lifeboat. It's a small boat, hardly bigger than the ones that make our hut. They have to cross eight hundred miles of the roughest ocean in the world and find one small island. The ordinary wind here is like a hurricane, and the waves can be higher than a castle wall. They need to see the sun to navigate, and the sky is cloudy almost all the time. The chance of landing on that island is about the same as throwing a pebble from shore and hitting a leaf floating in the middle of a great lake.

  Doc says of course he'll make it. Any day now, Shackleton will be sailing up in a good strong ship, and what a feast we'll have. Bread and jam and cakes. We think about food all the time, especially sweets. No one is actually starving, but all we eat is penguin. Penguin for breakfast, penguin for dinner. Penguin boiled, penguin stewed, penguin fried in penguin fat. I think I would let them chop off both feet for a piece of bread and butter!

  I feel bad for Doc. It's kind of worse having to do it, cut off someone's toes. To Mom and Dad, Harry, Teddy, Jack, Charlie, and William, if I don't see you again, know I love you and had a grand adventure down here. I'm glad I did it.

  chapter one

  Two years earlier—1914

  As far as shipwrecks go, the first one was not so bad. “Piece of cake,” Billy Bakewell declared as he swung his duffel bag up onto his shoulder. “Why, I got shipwrecked once in the South Pacific—now there was trouble! Island crawling with cannibals. Poisonous snakes in every tree. And this after we floated for six days on bits of wood just to get there!”

  “And the hurricane—” Perce Blackborow added with a quiet smile as he cinched his own bag tight. “And the sharks swimming all around.”

  “How'd you know there was a hurricane?”

  “Any story you're telling must have at least a hurricane or two.”

  Billy threw a playful swing at him, and Perce ducked. The ferry eased up to the dock. The gate opened, and the crowd began to squeeze up the narrow gangplank. It was
only two days ago that their own ship, the Golden Gate, had wrecked in the river Plate near Montevideo. It was not such a big deal as shipwrecks went, except to the owner, of course, and the captain, who had failed to keep her off the rocks. The anchor had dragged at night during a storm. For the sailors on board, the wreck was a bit of a bump and tumble, no more. They were close to shore, and it was little trouble to get everyone off and most of the cargo too. But it was soon clear that the Golden Gate would not be sailing anywhere soon. Billy and Perce had to find another ship. They heard there was more opportunity in Buenos Aires and decided to take the ferry over.

  “True, though, you've never been shipwrecked before,” Perce said as the two flowed slowly off with the crowd.

  “Naw,” Billy admitted. “But close. Many times. More times than I can count.”

  “That's very impressive,” Perce said. “Considering this was only the second ship you've been on in your life!”

  Billy laughed. In many ways the two could not have been more different, yet they had become good friends at sea. William Bakewell was a bold and carefree American who seemed like he could get along anywhere and do just about anything. He was twenty-six and had indeed sailed on only two ships. But one of those had taken him around Cape Horn, about the roughest passage a ship could make. Before that he had worked as a lumberjack, driven cattle in Montana, and worked on the railroads. He was a small man, just five and a half feet tall, and lean as beef jerky. Although he was fond of the tall tale (he had not been to the South Seas and certainly never seen a cannibal), he didn't really have to exaggerate his life very much. He had left home at the age of twelve, with nothing but adventure ever since.

  Perce Blackborow, on the other hand, knew little of the world. He was from a small neighborhood in the city of Newport, in Wales. He was only eighteen. He had gone to sea full-time at fourteen, but he had worked only on merchant ships around England before this. The Golden Gate had been his first ocean crossing. Perce was only two inches taller than Billy but had a stockier build, with broad shoulders and strong arms built from rowing and lifting cargo. His face was tanned and toughened by the outdoors. His brown hair was cut short and not very well. Barbering wasn't exactly high on a sailor's list of skills. He had pale blue eyes, as blue as a glacier, according to Billy. Perce had never seen a glacier, so he didn't know about that.

  The two friends wove their way through the crowd, trying not to bump people with their sea bags. Perce had never seen so many different people. Short, brown-skinned people with glossy black hair carried huge bundles tied up in cloth. Indians, he guessed, bringing goods to market. The cobblestones clattered with passing carriages and carts, wheelbarrows, bicycles, and burros. There were merchants and sailors, tradesmen with their tools, peddlers with carts of fruit, children with shoeshine boxes or trays of sweets to sell. They all went about their business and ignored the two. Sailors were common enough in a port city.

  “Come on,” Billy said. “There's bound to be an inn nearby, and we can start asking about ships.”

  An experienced sailor shouldn't have trouble finding a new ship in a port like Buenos Aires. Except that after the wreck of the Golden Gate, there were nearly a hundred of them trying. Billy started down the dock. He acted as if every day he was dropped suddenly into an exotic new country on the other side of the world where he couldn't speak the language and had no way home. Perce didn't feel quite so nonchalant. There were too many people and too much noise. The colors seemed too bright. And the smells! No more fresh sea breeze. The air was hot, thick, and dusty. Tar and fish mixed with tobacco and sweat. Through it all floated the perfume of manure from the donkeys and horses and dogs. Then a delicious aroma of roasting meat drifted through the sour air. Billy and Perce followed the smell and found a man squatting beside a little iron pot of hot coals. On top of the pot was a grate, and on the grate were strips of beef on sticks. They had skipped breakfast in order to catch the ferry, and Perce was very hungry.

  “Come on, Baker boy.” He grabbed Billy's arm. “My belly's howling.”

  They only had a few local coins and weren't sure what they were worth. The man at the grill said something in Spanish and held up two fingers. Perce looked at the coins in his palm.

  “Give him a big one,” Billy suggested. “He can give us change.”

  “What if he cheats us?”

  “Go on—it smells so good, I don't care if he does. Besides, if you act like you know what you're doing, people usually think you do.”

  That simple it was. Perce handed over a coin, and the man gave them back some other coins, then handed each a stick of grilled meat. It glistened with fat and sparkled with little red flecks. The man pointed to a bottle. It was filled with red sauce. Ketchup! Perce did like ketchup. It wasn't as thick as Heinz ketchup back home, but this was Argentina after all. He poured the red sauce all over his meat. He took a big bite. Then his mouth exploded. His tongue was on fire, and his eyes flooded with tears. Water poured out of his nose and his eyes. It was like someone had run barbed wire up his nose and his tongue had been stung by a thousand bees.

  The meat vendor smiled and nodded. “Ah, bueno!” he said. “Muy picante, eh?”

  Billy took a bite of his meat. He had skipped the red sauce.

  “Not bad. Not bad at all,” he said. “Tastes kind of like the spiced monkey you get in Borneo.” (He hadn't been to Borneo either.) Perce coughed and took deep breaths, trying to cool his mouth. The man at the grill pointed to a little building down the street.

  “Cantina,” he said, laughing. “Cerveza!”

  A cantina turned out to be a tavern, and cerveza was beer. So now they knew four words in Spanish—tavern, beer, and very spicy. It was eleven o'clock in the morning, but the cantina was busy. Sailors with only a short time in port didn't waste any time going after fun, and for most of them, fun was getting drunk. Perce had been drunk once and didn't like it. He had felt stupid during and terrible afterward. Mostly he didn't like it because he was afraid he might miss something.

  “That's because you're just a pup,” Billy ribbed him. “Puppies always find everything exciting. Wait until you get stuck at some rotten dull job in some rotten dull place working for some rotten bad boss. Then see how friendly the whiskey can be!”

  Perce had begun working on the docks of Newport when he was twelve years old. He had seen his father trembling with exhaustion at the end of a fourteen-hour day. He knew about hard, dull work. That was especially why he wanted more out of life.

  There were a couple of men at a table nearby who had obviously made close friends with a bottle of whiskey. One was snoring with his face on the table; the other was talking to a woman who was trying to sweep the floor, but he was so drunk, he slurred his words.

  Just then the door swung open and a frowning man peered into the dark interior. He looked sea-roughened, but not like a common sailor. Someone with rank. A bosun at least, maybe an officer. When he saw the two drunkards, he strode up to their table.

  “You buggers! I've better things to do than search all over the docks for you.”

  “Ah, Mr. Greenstreet!” The talkative one smiled stupidly. “Come and join us for a pint!”

  “You were gone all night. You missed your watch.”

  The sleeping man picked up his head and squinted at the daylight.

  “You're both sacked,” Greenstreet went on. “You can come pick up your kit until three. After that I'll have it put out on the dock.”

  “Oh, come on, sir, you wouldn't short a man his wee bit of fun.” The talkative man was almost whining. “We've been two months at sea!” The other man just glared silently.

  “See Mr. Cheetham to get paid off.”

  “Paid off, eh?” The second man pulled himself slowly up from the table. He was over six feet tall and looked like he could pull up whole trees with one thick arm. He let out a string of curses. Perce hoped the woman sweeping the floor didn't understand English. The big man threw a punch. It was fast but sloppy. Greenstre
et ducked most of it. Chairs scraped and glasses clinked all over the cantina as men cleared back out of the way.

  “Should we help him out?” Perce asked tentatively. Perce didn't want his friend to think he was shy of fighting.

  “Well, let's give the man his chance.”

  “But it's two on one, and they're twice his size.”

  “Watch. He might know what he's doing.”

  Billy was right. This man Greenstreet knew how to let a man blow off a bit and not get crazy and not get anyone hurt. It turned out to be hardly a fight at all. A little shoving, a lot of swearing. Then two Spanish men came out from behind the bar. One had a stick, the other a sock with lead pellets in the toe. The two drunk sailors backed off. Everything went back to normal.

  “Don't bother the others when you come for your things.” Greenstreet gave them a disgusted look and left.

  “Come on.” Perce grabbed his duffel bag.

  “Where you going? I haven't finished my beer.”

  “Didn't you hear the man? There's two places just opened on a ship!”

  “Well, for a raw pup you've got some wits after all,” Billy said as he gulped the last swallow. Perce and Billy grabbed their kit and hurried outside. The man walked fast and was half a block away before they caught up to him.

  “Sir—Mr., uh, Greenstreet—sir,” Billy called out. The man turned.

  “I'm William Bakewell. This is Perce Blackborow. We lost our ship in Montevideo. She ran aground,” he added in case the man might think they had been fired themselves. “You'll be needing some new hands.”

  Greenstreet gave them a quick look-over. “Experience?” Bakewell explained that he had experience with both sail and steam. No navigation to speak of, but he could keep a course. He mentioned his two last ships, craftily avoiding the fact that they were his only two ships.

  “And you?” Greenstreet turned to Perce. Next to Billy, he had little to offer. There were a hundred men within shouting distance with more skill and experience.