Wonder whether anyone else is excited about the Endurance having been located – and in ridiculously fine nick! – 3000 metres down at the bottom of the Weddell Sea after more than a century? For me, it means more than the Titanic.
I'm a bit of a polar exploration buff. It's one of my private obsessions. And Shackleton is one of my very few heroes in life. Because he did something heroic which doesn't look like it, and those are always the gestures that impress me the most.
Well before Scott (and Amundsen) he got to within 112 miles (180 kms) of the south pole, in 1909. He sat down and did the careful calculations, and realised that although he could lead his party to the south pole, and thus be the first human beings ever to set foot there, they wouldn't make it back, because they just didn't have the provisions. So he ordered them to turn back. In a letter to his wife, he wrote “I thought you'd prefer having a live donkey to a dead lion”.
I often quote that. That, to me is deep heroism. Thinking about your wife, thinking about your men. Rather than thinking about your glory.
Of course, everybody knows about his journey of nearly eight hundred miles across some of the worst seas in the world, with a small crew and an open boat to South Georgia, getting help, and then going back to save the whole crew from the Endurance.
If anybody is interested in the other party – Scott's – I strongly recommend Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. And no, he wasn't talking about the trek out to the south pole, which he was sent back from about halfway, as the youngest member of the party. He was talking about another trip he had to make in the polar winter on that same expedition. He and his companions survived by a kind of miracle of resourcefulness. Cherry-Garrard, by the way, fought in the trenches in Flanders in ’14-’18 war. He said that, by comparison with what he had experienced in Antarctica, the trenches were a picnic. Makes you think.
I read a book about Amundsen's race with Scott. I need something of a counterbalance to it, because it was strongly pro-Amundsen, and almost described it as though it were a ( admittedly very arduous) cross-country skiing trip for the Norwegian and his companions. Whereas the Brits of course had to do it with unnecessary heroism, using Siberian ponies which all died, and then hand-hauling really heavy sledges all the way back from the pole. Everybody died, of course, although tragically, Scott got to within 11 miles of One Ton Depot out on the Ross Ice Shelf, but didn't realise it because they were basically in a white-out. He was found dead in the tent by a search party the following spring. Captain Oates's body was never found.
I've travelled on every continent, but not Antarctica. It's been my dream to set foot on the Antarctic peninsula, but I don't suppose it'll ever happen. Probably not a bad thing. There are too many people going there these days. I met somebody who'd been twice, as a flora and fauna tutor on the ships that go out there, and he told me that there was lichen growing on the peninsula, where there had been none on his previous trip about fifteen years before. The world is changing, and the signs are clear.
By the way, if anybody doesn't know them (and is as nerdy about this stuff as I am), the Australian photographer Frank Hurley's photos of the Endurance expedition are just astonishing. Of course, it was all done using plate photography. There is a wonderful book which I own which shows all of them. Hurley was quite a character in himself and is, I believe, something of a hero to the Australians.
