After spending most of the 20th century in the shadow of compatriot Antarctic explorer Sir Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s star has risen in the past 20–30 years.
The incredible, against-all-odds survival of the 27 men under his direct command in the Weddell Sea has become legendary. Shackleton’s resilience, emotional strength and adept, dynamic decision-making in the midst of peril, after disaster compounded disaster, have been heralded as a best-practice case study of leadership and crisis management. He had fierce loyalty to his men, a warm empathy and an insightful understanding of how to balance their varied personalities to unite and motivate them as a crew. He managed to keep them focused, occupied, mentally prepared and able to cope with their dire and at times desperate predicament in the long dark months of uncertainty on the ice.
Shackleton’s ‘never-having-lost-a-man’ reputation is, however, somewhat difficult to reconcile with the organisation, adventures and fate of his equally loyal Ross Sea Party; yet entirely consistent with his renowned personal charisma, warmth and reputation for risk-taking.
Poorly resourced, with limited funds, supplies and equipment from the very start of the expedition, the Ross Sea supply crew doggedly pursued their depot-laying sledging journeys. Living hand-to-mouth, they laid provisions for the leader who would never come, resulting in the deaths of three among them, including leader Captain Aeneas Mackintosh.
Nonetheless, exhibiting that much-heralded commitment, persistence and loyalty, Shackleton was there with Captain John King Davis on the Aurora relief voyage in the Ross Sea to witness and assist the rescue of the surviving men in January 1917 and to see the failed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition to its logical conclusion.
Kenneth Branagh as Sir Ernest Shackleton in the 2002 two-part film. Image: Channel 4
While Shackleton’s leadership, teamwork and goal-setting attributes have been the subject of publications, documentaries, and business school study programs worldwide, including at Harvard University, the practical achievements of his rescue bid have also been widely celebrated in popular culture. Examples include a wide-screen epic film in 2000 and a television drama from 2002 with Northern Irish actor Kenneth Branagh in the lead role.
In addition, Shackleton’s bold 1,500-kilometre sail to South Georgia and treacherous climb across its uncharted interior have been a magnet to adventurers intent on pushing emotional and physical boundaries, with several re-enactments of both in the past 20 years.
Some expeditions have purportedly been about the drama and experience of the physical challenge of these short chapters in Shackleton’s original harrowing and drawn-out epic, with little pretence to authenticity. Others have projected themselves into Shackleton’s world for this experience and to attempt to understand his motivations and actions and to pay homage to Shackleton, a man now perceived as an embodiment of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration – a daring, caring, resolute explorer pushing into the unknown. He is today seen as a modern man, a leader among men, whereas a century ago his star faded in a world preoccupied with war. His story resonates today in the centenary years of both events as the world looks for heroes.
Tim Jarvis and Barry Gray on the mountain crossing, South Georgia. Photograph: Paul Larsen, Shackleton Epic Pty Ltd
In 2013, a group of modern-day explorers – Anglo-Australian environmental scientist Tim Jarvis and his Shackleton Epic crew – built a lifeboat, a replica James Caird, with a few modern nods to safety and marketing imperatives, including camera batteries for ballast.
Jarvis selected five specialist crew: bluewater sailor Nick Bubb; world speed sailor Paul Larsen; survival expert, mountaineer and Royal Marine Baz Gray; Royal Naval engineer Seb Coulthard; and cameraman and mountaineer Ed Wardle. They were supplied with the clothes and equipment of a century earlier. With the patronage of the Honourable Alexandra Shackleton, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s granddaughter and patron of the James Caird Society, the lifeboat was christened Alexandra Shackleton.
Alexandra Shackleton and the towering landscapes of the southern ocean. Photograph: Jo Stewart, Shackleton Epic Pty Ltd
In this little boat the crew re-enacted the ‘Shackleton Double’ – the sail from Elephant Island to South Georgia, after which Jarvis and two of his crew climbed the island. These were incredible physical trials in such an extreme landscape, albeit with a support boat and without the lengthy 16-month prelude of deprivation while marooned in the ice.
The published materials flowing from the Shackleton Epic expedition brings into focus the physical challenges – being thrown around for 12 days in the tremendous seas, soaked through, balancing to use the sextant or light the stove, eating pemmican and snatching sleep while cramped down below. They also highlight the technical sailing and navigational skill of Worsley and the original, desperate crew. The re-enactment documentary film programs especially give life to the words of three of the original six crew who recorded them: navigator and Endurance’s Captain Frank Worsley, carpenter Henry ‘Chippy’ McNish and of course Sir Ernest Shackleton himself.
Below deck on the Alexandra Shackleton. Barry Gray, Tim Jarvis, Seb Coulthard and Nick Bubb. Photograph: Ed Wardle, Shackleton Epic Expedition Pty Ltd
It’s not only that those sepia men of Hurley’s photographs were possibly made of sterner stuff back then, but that today’s urbanised men can do it too. Perhaps today’s modern urbanised women also can (as she could possibly have done back then), although Jarvis’s re-enactment philosophy precluded women taking part. Tantalisingly, we ask if perhaps we could match up? And beyond the physical, re-enactments like this also offer valuable insights into decisions taken and team dynamics in those extreme conditions.
In terms of the physical embodiment of Shackleton’s daring spirit, the plucky 7-metre lifeboat the James Caird comes to mind, beyond the mirage of the wrecked Endurance several kilometres beneath the Weddell Sea ice.
Replica James Caird at Grytviken
Replica James Caird at Punta Arenas
Several replica craft of differing degrees of verisimilitude are held or displayed in museums, on South Georgia, in Punta Arenas in Chile and in 2015 at the Australian National Maritime Museum’s exhibition Shackleton: Escape from Antarctica.
The original James Caird was shipped back to the UK in 1916 and eventually deposited at Dulwich College, Shackleton’s alma mater, where it is displayed with pride.
The original James Caird on display at Dulwich College. Courtesy Dulwich College
The complexion of the remainding physical legacy of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is dispersed, varied and treasured, especially because so much was lost when Endurance sank.
The material culture – personal mementoes, critical equipment, documentation and the photographic record, including the magnificent work of Weddell Sea Party photographer Australian Frank Hurley – is spread among organisations from the UK to South Georgia, including North America. These include the Royal Geographical Society, Scott Polar Research Institute, and museums, libraries and private collections in Australia and New Zealand, especially the Canterbury Museum. The latter reflects those countries’ links with Antarctica, and with Aurora and the Ross Sea Party particularly.
These were manifest in the crews and scientists on the ITAE expedition, on the Aurora sailing from Sydney to Hobart and on the relief expedition with Captain John King Davis in command. Australia fielded scientists Richard Richards and Andrew Keith Jack, with Irvine Gaze, Aubrey Ninnis, wireless operator Lionel Hooke, Aurora’s second mate Leslie Thomson and engineer Adrian Donnelly. Endurance skipper Frank Worsley was a New Zealander, while Henry ‘Chippy’ McNish and storekeeper Thomas Orde-Lees subsequently settled there.
The sites are celebrated in geographical nomenclature and as landscapes: Point Wild on Elephant Island, the Shackleton trail over the glaciated mountains of South Georgia, the built heritage of the departure and end points of the Weddell Sea Party, the abandoned whaling stations of South Georgia – including the manager’s residence at Stromness and the church and settlement at Grytviken – and the three Ross Island huts on the opposite side of Antarctica, used by the Ross Sea Party during their two years marooned.
New Zealand manages the three huts used by the 1914–17 party – Cape Evans, built for Robert Falcon Scott in 1911; Cape Royds to the north, built by Shackleton for his Nimrod expedition 1907–9; and Hut Point, 25 kilometres to the south, a rudimentary stores hut built by Scott in 1902 closer to the ice shelf and Mount Hope, their sledging destination.
The adventurer Sir Ernest Shackleton himself is buried in the whalers’ cemetery at Grytviken, South Georgia, a place of tremendous significance to his Antarctic adventuring and ambitions, and where he died in January 1922, on his last expedition to the southern latitudes.
Grytviken, South Georgia
Sir Ernest Shackleton’s broader legacy and that of his son Edward, Lord Shackleton, an explorer, scientist and statesman, is nurtured through a scholarship program established after his death in 1994. The Shackleton Scholarship Fund finances academic study and cultural exchanges centring on the Falkland Islands and South Georgia.
Mel McKenzie on the ice shelf in Antarctica. Courtesy British Antarctic Survey
Since 1995 more than 90 scholarships have been awarded, including to Australian biologist Mel Mackenzie in 2013 to develop a collection management strategy for the islands and to study sea cucumbers collected by various groups from local waters and those around South Georgia. Mel had been to the Weddell Sea in 2012 with the British Antarctic Survey on the RSS James Clark Ross on the hunt for sea cucumbers, studying their microscopic fingerprints, diversity, numbers and ultimately their place in the food chain as a barometer of the health of life in Antarctic waters. Mel McKenzie said:
What I like about Shackleton is that he wanted to discover — he was really interested in finding new things, new places … and to me as a scientist that really appeals. The idea of going to Antarctica to this new frontier— it’s a really romantic ideal, but it’s actually just really exciting. And I think he managed to show that to other people, which made him a legend.
Mel Mckenzie, interview with Daina Fletcher at Museum Victoria, 30 January 2015
Mel Mackenzie at work on board the RRS James Clark Ross. Courtesy Pete Lens, British Antarctic Survey
Insights from both Tim Jarvis and Mel Mackenzie will guide visitors through a new exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Shackleton: Escape from Antarctica, running from 2 April to 29 November 2015.
It was a desperately ambitious trip — to make that crossing at the time … I think Shackleton was someone who was fantastic at crisis management, but perhaps his strength did not lie in the detail of the planning. He was a big picture person who was really excited by the enormity of a task — he was a great romantic, really. Perhaps he was a little remiss with some of the details: the finances and some of the logistics of the planning …
These days he’s taught at all the leading management schools for his ability to lead and manage teams, manage change — so many of the things that are important in our world today. His ability to get a very disparate group of men under his control — with all their differences, strengths and weaknesses — to move together to achieve a common goal. I think we need that Shackletonian approach to some of the issues we face today, as an environmental scientist …
– Tim Jarvis, interview with Daina Fletcher at Museum Victoria, 30 January 2015
