For generations, stories have been told of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard the Endurance. Shackleton, who set sail from British waters in 1914, planned to land in Antarctica at the Weddell Sea and then traverse the continent via the South Pole to the Ross Sea. Since he and his team could not carry sufficient supplies for the entire distance of their journey, they depended on support from the Ross Sea Party, whose mission was to sail on the Aurora to the opposite side of Antarctica and sledge along the final quarter of Shackleton’s route, strategically placing vital depots of food and fuel for the Shackleton Party.

Although Shackleton and his audacious yet ultimately failed mission was widely acclaimed, the heroic efforts of the Ross Sea Party faded into obscurity. Until now.

With Marion Starling Boyer’s poetry collection Ice Hours, the Ross Sea Party receives the attention it deserves. Poems in the voices of seven of the men who comprised the Ross Sea Party are balanced by personal messages to the Aurora Commander from his wife, as well as by eerily unexpected poems from Antarctica herself. The result is as stunning as the climate that tested, broke, and in three instances, killed members of the Ross Sea Party. Their stories are impossible to forget.

Boyer begins with a poem in the voice of Antarctica in “Perhaps I Was Eden.”

I was tropical once. Warm,
with the warming effect of clouds.

My lands were fern-forests.
Araucaria trees rose high,
baobabs grew fleshy-fat with water

and rains came and drifted and came.
Warmth transported me.
Slow rivers spooled soft.

Antarctica’s voice—as a rain forest that slowly evolves into a frozen tundra—challenges the reader to enter a very different, very strange world. Once lush and warm but now barren and unspeakably cold, this poem tethers us to a complex story in which happy endings are not guaranteed. As Antarctica says and as the Ross Sea Party learns “(m)y days are a season long; / night lasts half the way around our star.” (“Perhaps I Was Eden”)

Before the crew fully understands the meaning of this unrelenting darkness, they must apply for and be accepted as members of a seafaring expedition whose mission promises extreme hardship and privation. As indicated in the December 29, 1913, job notice in the Times of London:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold,
long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe
return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.

(“One Audacious Idea”)

Although that advertisement is hardly a ringing endorsement for a grand adventure, many men vied to join the Ross Sea Party. They ranged in age from 21 to 39 and included the son of a Scottish indigo planter (Commander Aeneas Lionel Acton Mackintosh—“Mack”), a Scotsman from a prosperous shipbuilding family (First Officer Joseph Russell Stenhouse), two Royal Navy seamen (Ernest Edward Joyce and Harry Ernest Wild), a newly engaged accounts clerk from London (Victor George Hayward), an Episcopal priest (Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith), and an Australian physics teacher (Richard Walter Richards).

They begin their journey with the spirited enthusiasm of people who do not fully grasp the challenges that lie ahead. In “Southing,” the seven men reflect on the voyage during its early stages, with Boyer linking them together by using the crown of sonnets sequence—one sonnet for each man. For example, Hayward notes that he has “absolute faith in Mack” while Joyce picks up the thread with a comment that he has “more doubt than faith” in Mack. Richards comments that the sails “iced so they’ve been furled and stowed,” leading Stenhouse to observe that the sails were “iced stiff as metal.” Their viewpoints—often at odds with each other—foreshadow how the men will individually grapple with obligations to fulfill their mission versus the urgency of survival.

And survival does become increasingly urgent as the months pass and summer gives way to a winter that seizes the Ross Sea Party and holds it in an unbreakable grip. A pivotal point arrives when “(m)asses of ice ram” the Aurora and send it spinning to the northwest with the “Cape Evans hut / disappearing in whirling snow” (“The Red Comet”). When this occurs—when the Aurora snaps her moorings, breaking free from anchors that kept her connected to the land—the seven crew members working on the continent are stranded. The Reverend Spencer-Smith is the first to see that “(o)ur ship’s been swept away. With everything.” (“Cape Evans Hut”)

With no method for communicating with the crew who remained onboard, they do not know their or the ship’s fate. It is May 6, 1915—just five months into their journey. Winter is closing in, and they are alone.

One month after that crushing blow, Ernest Wild—hired as storekeeper of the Aurora—gives insight into daily life in these incredibly harsh circumstances.

Plum pudding and tobacco, potted beef tongue
and songs. Prizes for relay race winners.

We found a bounty of flour and jam, lovely
bottled fruits left years before by Scott.

(“Midwinter’s Day, Cape Evans”)

Life on Antarctica may be grim, but it is not untenable in the short term. It is the long term that raises questions. Should they sledge deeper into the continent to leave stores of food and fuel that Shackleton will need? Even more important, will the Aurora return in the summer, as Mack predicts?

Mack answers the first question by making plans to move “4ooo pounds of stores to Safety Camp / on the barrier, twenty-three miles away” (“We’ll Do Our Damnedest”). He schedules the first sledging journey for September with an additional four trips slated to begin in October and end in March 1916. What Mack and the others do not know is that their plans are for naught. Shackleton’s Endurance is fated to sink before it reaches Antarctica.

The second question will be answered in January 1917, when the Aurora finally returns to rescue them. In the intervening months, the men endure bitter cold, brutal snowstorms, loneliness, and despair. They also must come to terms with the continent’s unforgiving environment, juxtaposed against its wild beauty. In the poem “The Cold, Quiescent Eye,” Antarctica recognizes both:

In the still air
between the ice sheet
and clouds

diamond dust sifts down
and particle by particle
adds to a weight

so colossal
it deforms the sphere of Earth.

There is a grief arid as this,
antisepticnumb

Airglow, dim constellations,
moonlight, and the Milky Way—

all eclipsed. In absolute dark
the ice dome, like a great cornea,

stares outward, unmoved.

Then, in much the same way that a mother might name her children, Antarctica names the different kinds of ice that exist on the continent in the poem “All My Flowers.” Candle ice. Pack ice. Pancake ice. Cat ice. Young ice. Fast ice. Grease ice. Like the men in the Ross Sea Party, we are compelled to pay attention to the environmental reality that is Antarctica when she says that “(a)ll my hours are ice hours. / (a)ll my flowers are ice flowers.”

Eventually, winter gives way to spring, and the men finally see the sun again:

First, the perpetual gloaming—
greens and purples bruise the sky.

Then, reds, the hard orange glow;
smoke haze from a hundred forest fires,
the blaze of a hundred battlefields.

At last, from behind the mountains,
the suite of colors bursts, delivers
the galvanizing golden sun

and we stand mute on the ice
as this holy thing is born.

(“After Four Months, Dawn”)

During their dark and desperate days, the Ross Sea Party men—seven and then six and then five and then four—have become a part of Antarctica. Her Northern lights. Her ice. Her storms. Her gales of wind. They have been transformed.

With the publication of Ice Hours—winner of Michigan State University’s Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize and called “new and noteworthy” by Poets & Writers—Marion Starling Boyer brings a long-forgotten sliver of history into the light. Boyer—author of six poetry books and an active part of the Lit Youngstown and Lit Cleveland communities—has given the Ross Sea Party their due.

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