Shane Murphy 4320 E Beaver Creek Road, Rimrock, AZ 86335
Illustration from the
Buenos Aires Herald, 17 October, 1914.
Who was Elsa? Hurley’s diary entry for 14 January, 1915, includes this: Feeling very tired & wondering how the good Mater, family & Elsa are at present. Elsa?? This bothered me for years, until Hurley’s daughters visited me and I took them to the library and put the microfilm of his original diary on the screen. They had never read the diary and we spent an hour scrolling through it. They were going along, enjoying themselves to the full-up, when the passage suddenly presented itself. “Oh, Elsa,” ejaculated Toni, “I haven’t seen her in years! She was dad’s fiancée! He left home for that expedition engaged to her and came back married to someone else—our mother!”
How many photos did Hurley save from the wreck?
This is another way of asking how many images survived the expedition. However, the two questions have different answers.
First... On 2 November, 1915, Hurley recorded, [Walter] How & myself went down to the wreck. Hacked out the sides of the [walk-in] refrigerator [which served as Hurley’s darkroom] to try & salve negatives & bared from head to waist probed for same below the mushy ice. The cases, zinc-lined & soldered & containing the negatives in galvanised tins, I located & hauled out. Practically all are intact. The first point I want to make about the surviving negatives and cine film is that, according to his original diary—not the edited typescript—Hurley did not ‘dive beneath the ice’ as he later claimed in the New York Times (see below) and which went on to be overly dramatized in movies, TV shows and such. This notion is supported by his previous day’s entry: Endeavoured to rescue negatives. Alas! Covered by 3 ft. water beneath the mushy ice.
Hurley’s next entry concerning the saved negatives occurs 9 January, 1916: Selected the pick of my negatives & owing to the necessary drastic reduction in weight had to break & dump about 400. About 150 I resoldered up.
So: about 150 negatives were saved from the wreck while about 400 were discarded.
Over 500 photos of the expedition are known to exist. Where did the remaining 350 images originate?
22 November, 1915: Pack album in brass case & find blubber makes an excellent flux for soldering. The album Hurley refers to here is today held at SPRI. P66/19, the “Green Album” as it is called, contains 286 photos.
About 150 + 286 = about 436. In his time, Hurley was an undisputed master in the darkroom. I surmise he discarded negatives on 9 January, 1916 because he already had hard copies of many of the discarded negatives preserved in his personal album. From these he could make new—printable—negatives.
And here is where the story makes a untoward turn. According to Orde-Lees on Elephant Island, 12 August, 1916: Sir Ernestʼs bag is a fine old solid leather suitcase in which are locked up all the papers connected with the Expedition and other sundries. I put a small roll of my Brownie film in the case and as [my film] cannot now be found I am louder than ever in my wails about it.
I wonder where that film went? That aside, Alexander Turnbull Library holds a small, rare and unique set of Orde-Lees expedition photos, including a postal card, none of them found elsewhere on the planet.
Also persisting is folklore that, after his large format cameras and cine apparatus were discarded, Hurley was left with only a small VPK (Vest Pocket Kodak) and three rolls of film, or 36 exposures. I just did a count of the images held at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), taken almost certainly after Hurley’s other cameras were gone. My rough total was 60 images. This count ignored all other after-the-wreck pictures from private collections and archives like Mitchell Library, the State Library of New South Wales.
About 150 + 286 + about 60 = about 496.
This rough total does not include 18 surviving Paget colour plates exposed before the ship was crushed (I’m not counting the 1917 South Georgia Paget’s here), and other rare, one-of-a-kind photos from the Wordie archives on South Georgia Island, in private collections such as once belonging to Reginald James, or in period newspapers or present-day archives.
The New York Times — Sunday, 8 March, 1923
By Captain Frank Hurley …In the hold of the derelict, beneath fifteen feet of pea-soupy ice, were two small, hermetically sealed cans of treasure worth a kingʼs ransom. Nearly $100,000 had been advanced on the motion picture rights to help finance the expedition at the outset, and the two cans contained the picture negative representing the results of twelve monthsʼ labors. I had tossed up my gold mascot coin with Seaman How to determine who should dive into the black, icy waters of the wreck. The mascot had failed me on the spin, but rewarded the issue into which it precipitated me. Hence my unattractive attire, my frostbitten body and the two ice-encrusted cases that lay on the ice and indicated that the desperate chance had been rewarded.
DIVING FOR FILMS. It was a decidedly shivery situation diving into the ʻsoupy,ʼ freezing water which filled the splintered hold of the wrecked vessel, held up from sinking into 1,000 fathoms by frail ice tongues forced through her side. Groping blindly and numbly about in the dark, freezing waters, directed only by the feel of familiar objects, it needed all my will power to prevent me from becoming ‘cold-footedʼ and giving up. It necessitated several dives to locate the cans of negative. The second can had just been passed up to Seaman How when the eerie stillness was broken by the icefields tightening their crushing grip on the wreck; to the warning of creaking and splintering timbers we dashed up from the bowels of the vessel to the safe outside almost into the arms of the leader. Thereafter those two cases and myself became inseparable.
THAWED WATER. The unique film I secured was developed at once to avoid possible deterioration. I rigged up a tent darkroom near the wreck, kept up the temperature with a Primus kerosene stove and set to work to develop 1,000 feet of film in ten foot lengths in a washbasin! Every drop of water had to be thawed from ice and as the outside temperature was well below zero, the task was one that still brings shivers to my memory. In order to dry the film I had to festoon it at the apex of the tent to where the feeble heat ascended. Frequently the top of a loop would be dry and the bottom frozen! My fingers split badly with the chemicals and cold—but it was worthwhile, for the fingers soon healed and the film stirred the whole British Empire… The expression and incidents were actualities, and when it is taken into consideration that the camera man was just as susceptible to the physical agonies as the rest of the party, and still continued to crank his handle when most were so physically emaciated by starvation and hardship—although I say it personally—he accomplished something.
Endurance blueprints — where are they?
At the whaling museum in Sandefjord, Norway. The museum has a good collection of Endurance blueprints but there is no reference to them on the site; you will need to write and request information on Polaris blueprints and understand the Norwegian language once you get the list. If you manage to purchase a page of the refrigerator blueprint, please—please—send me a copy!
Photo by Rob Stephenson
When did Hurley first meet Shackleton?
In 1907 Ernest Shackleton and the British Antarctic Expedition (1907-1909) Nimrod arrived in Sydney to be overhauled before its outbound voyage to Antarctica. While there, Shackleton, Nimrod and some of the expedition dogs were photographed by local postcard makers. Hurley produced at least three retail cards of the BAE; the initials “J.F.H.” are found on these cards. With thanks to Alasdair McGregor; I always thought the cards were produced in 1909 as the Queenie citation would seem to indicate...
