The voyage of the James Caird was a journey of 1,300 kilometres (700 nmi) from Elephant Island in the South Shetland Islands through the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, undertaken by Sir Ernest Shackleton and five companions to obtain rescue for the main body of the stranded Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917. Many historians regard the voyage of the crew in a 22.5-foot (6.9 m) ship's boat through the "Furious Fifties" as the greatest small-boat journey ever completed.
In October 1915, pack ice in the Weddell Sea had sunk the main expedition ship Endurance, leaving Shackleton and his 27 companions adrift on a floe. They drifted northward until April 1916, when the floe on which they were camped broke up; they made their way in the ship's boats to Elephant Island. Shackleton decided to sail one of the boats with a small crew to South Georgia to seek help. It was not the closest human settlement but the only one that did not require them to sail into the prevailing westerlies.
Of the three boats, the James Caird was deemed the most likely to survive the journey (Shackleton had named it after Sir James Key Caird, a Dundee philanthropist whose sponsorship had helped finance the expedition). Before its voyage, the ship's carpenter, Harry McNish, strengthened and adapted the boat to withstand the seas of the Southern Ocean, sealing his makeshift wood and canvas deck with lamp wick, oil paint and seal blood.
After surviving a series of dangers, including a near capsizing, the small crew and boat reached the southern coast of South Georgia after a 17-day voyage. Shackleton, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley then hiked across the island's mountains to a whaling station on the north side. Here they organised the relief of the three men left on the south side of the island and of the larger Elephant Island party. Ultimately, the entire Endurance crew returned home, without loss of life. After the First World War, in 1919, the James Caird was moved from South Georgia to England. Since 1922 it has been on regular display at Shackleton's alma mater, Dulwich College.
On 5 December 1914, Shackleton's expedition traveled via the ship Endurance from South Georgia for the Weddell Sea, on the first stage of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. They were making for Vahsel Bay, the southernmost explored point of the Weddell Sea at 77° 49' S, where a shore party was to land and prepare for a transcontinental crossing of Antarctica. Before reaching its destination, the ship became trapped in pack ice, and by 14 February 1915 was held fast, despite prolonged efforts to free her. During the following eight months the crew stayed with the ship as she drifted northward in the ice until, on 27 October, she was crushed by the pack's pressure, finally sinking on 21 November.
As his 27-man crew set up camp on the slowly moving ice, Shackleton's focus shifted to how best to save his party. His first plan was to march across the ice to the nearest land, and try to reach a point that ships were known to visit. The march began, but progress was hampered by the nature of the ice's surface, later described by Shackleton as "soft, much broken up, open leads intersecting the floes at all angles".
After struggling to make headway over several days, they abandoned the march; the party established "Patience Camp" on a flat ice floe, and waited as the drift carried them further north, towards open water. They had managed to salvage the three boats, which Shackleton had named after the principal backers of the expedition: Stancomb-Wills, Dudley Docker and James Caird. The party waited until 8 April 1916, when they finally took to the boats as the ice started to break up. Over a perilous period of seven days they sailed and rowed through stormy seas and dangerous loose ice, to reach the temporary haven of Elephant Island on 15 April.
Elephant Island, on the eastern limits of the South Shetland Islands, was remote from anywhere that the expedition had planned to go, and far beyond normal shipping routes. No relief ship would search for them there, and the likelihood of rescue from any other outside agency was equally negligible. The island was bleak and inhospitable, and its terrain devoid of vegetation, although it had fresh water, and a relative abundance of seals and penguins to provide food and fuel for immediate survival. The rigours of an Antarctic winter were fast approaching; the narrow shingle beach where they were camped was already being swept by almost continuous gales and blizzards, which destroyed one of the tents in their temporary camp, and knocked others flat. The pressures and hardships of the previous months were beginning to tell on the men, many of whom were in a run-down state both mentally and physically.
In these conditions, Shackleton decided to try to reach help, using one of the boats. The nearest port was Stanley in the Falkland Islands, 570 nautical miles (1,100 km; 660 mi) away, but was made unreachable by the prevailing westerly winds. A better option was to head for Deception Island, 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) away at the western end of the South Shetland chain. Although it was uninhabited, Admiralty records indicated that this island held stores for shipwrecked mariners, and was also visited from time to time by whalers. However, reaching it would also involve a journey against the prevailing winds—though in less open seas—with ultimately no certainty when or if rescue would arrive. After discussions with the expedition's second-in-command, Frank Wild, and ship's captain Frank Worsley, Shackleton decided to attempt to reach the whaling stations of South Georgia, to the north-east. This would mean a longer boat journey of 700 nautical miles (1,300 km; 810 mi) across the Southern Ocean, in conditions of rapidly approaching winter, but with the help of following winds it appeared feasible. Shackleton thought that "a boat party might make the voyage and be back with relief within a month, provided that the sea was clear of ice, and the boat survive the great seas".
The South Georgia boat party could expect to meet hurricane-force winds and waves—the notorious Cape Horn Rollers—measuring from trough to crest as much as 18 m (60 ft). Shackleton therefore selected the heaviest and strongest of the three boats, the 22.5-foot (6.9 m) long James Caird. It had been built as a whaleboat in London to Worsley's orders, designed on the "double-ended" tradition. Knowing that a heavily laden open sea voyage was now unavoidable, Shackleton had already asked the expedition's carpenter, Harry McNish to modify the boats during the weeks the expedition spent at Patience Camp. Using material taken from Endurance's fourth boat, a small motor launch which had been broken up with this purpose in mind before the ship's final loss, McNish had raised the sides of the James Caird and the Dudley Docker by 8–10 inches (20–25 cm). Now in the primitive camp on Elephant Island, McNish was again asked if he could make the James Caird more seaworthy. Using improvised tools and materials, McNish built a makeshift deck of wood and canvas, sealing his work with oil paints, lamp wick and seal blood. The craft was strengthened by having the mast of the Dudley Docker lashed inside, along the length of her keel. She was then fitted as a ketch, with her own mainmast and a mizzenmast made by cutting down the mainmast from the Stancomb-Wills, rigged to carry lug sails and a jib. The weight of the boat was increased by the addition of approximately 1 long ton (1 tonne) of ballast, to lessen the risk of capsizing in the high seas that Shackleton knew they would encounter. Worsley believed that too much extra ballast (formed from rocks, stones and shingle taken from the beach) was added, making the boat excessively heavy, giving an extremely uncomfortable 'stiff' motion and hampering the performance for sailing upwind or into the weather. However, he acknowledged that Shackleton's biggest concern was preventing the boat capsizing during the open-ocean crossing.