Aurora’s polar adventures Aurora’s polar adventures  

SY Aurora, built 1876, was a timber whaling ship turned Antarctic explorer whose legacy spans sealing, science, survival, and ultimate sacrifice.

Explore its extraordinary story.

The 50-metre, 580-ton barque Aurora was built for the ice in 1876.

Alexander Stephen & Sons built the ship for their whaling fleet, which sailed annually from Scotland to the Arctic fisheries to hunt seals and whales for oil, bone and skins.

In 1894, the ship was based in St John’s, Newfoundland, under a new owner.

The industry was in rapid decline due to over-hunting. In addition, seal and whale oil were being superseded by other oils and electricity for lighting, industry and soap.

The days of the sailing ship were ending. In 1910, Aurora was sold for adventures at the other end of the earth.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

James Fairweather commanded Aurora from 1883 to 1888. He joined the Dundee fleet as ship’s boy in 1867.

Amid declining catches, Fairweather moved to general trade in 1893 and over the next 20 years sailed the world, including to India and Australia.

Fairweather retired in 1913, but the following year the outbreak of World War I called him back, as Lieutenant Commander RNR.

In 1916 he was given command of the veteran polar vessel Discovery to the Southern Ocean to rescue the marooned men of Ernest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition.

Fairweather had to turn for home in Montevideo, Uruguay, after learning of their rescue by the SS Yelcho.

 

In 1884, ship’s surgeon David Moore Lindsay sailed in Aurora with Captain Fairweather. He chronicled the operational detail of a vital industry in its time, which was later viewed as slaughter.

The ship sailed to St John’s, Newfoundland, with 65 Scottish crew. There they built a between deck, replaced the whaleboats with punts and took on an extra 240 local sealing men known as ‘sweilers’.

North in Labrador Sound they captured 28,000 seals. Returning to St John’s, Fairweather offloaded the seals and sealing men, refitted the whaleboats and set off for the whale hunt in the ice further north.

From May to August 1884, Aurora’s crew killed ten right and three bottlenose whales.

In 1910, geologist Douglas Mawson bought Aurora for his first Australasian Antarctic Expedition. After 36 years in Arctic waters, the vessel sailed south.

From 1911 to 1914, the vessel, under Captain John King Davis, carried Mawson’s expeditioners as they charted new lands and waters and collected specimens and data across the frozen wilderness.  

Tragedy struck Mawson’s sledging party in 1912 leaving him the sole survivor. Today, the expedition is remembered as a testament to human resilience as much as scientific accomplishment. 

Even in summer, fierce blizzards, high winds and a sharp coastline made finding a safe place to anchor very difficult. In January 1912, Aurora lost three anchors and hundreds of metres of cable while battling severe conditions in Commonwealth Bay. During the winter, Aurora sailed north for further voyaging.

Aurora was key to exploration. Captain Davis took regular depth soundings and recorded meteorological, coastline and oceanographic information. Scientists collected specimens, ran experiments and made detailed observations.

The findings from Aurora’s five voyages contributed to 22 research reports, highlighting the ship’s key role in the expeditions’ scientific achievements. 

In summer of 1912–13, Mawson undertook his most difficult mapping expedition, a far-eastern sledging journey with Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz, towards Victoria Land.  

They had three sledges and 16 dogs.

After 34 days and 507 km of treacherous terrain, tragedy struck when Ninnis disappeared deep into a crevasse with his dogs and a sledge loaded with most of the team’s food.  

Mawson and Mertz ate their dogs to survive, but it was not enough: Mertz died 160 km from safety. Mawson carried on alone, returning the day his ship sailed, missing it by hours and being forced to spend another winter on the ice with the six men left by Captain Davis to search for him.

In Sydney Harbour before Shackleton's expedition.

Aurora returned to Australia in 1914 but was soon re-enlisted for polar action – this time by Anglo-Irish adventurer Ernest Shackleton, who aimed to be the first to cross Antarctica.

Shackleton needed Aurora to carry sledging parties to drop vital supplies across the ice to the Beardmore Glacier, for his party crossing from the Weddell Sea by way of the South Pole.

In late 1914, Shackleton on Endurance sailed towards the Weddell Sea. Aurora left Hobart for the Ross Sea.

Within the year, both ships were trapped in ice in different parts of Antarctica. Only one survived.

 

 

Aurora was to spend the winter of 1915 in McMurdo Sound and not sail north to safer waters. It was wartime and resources were stretched; this proved to be a fateful decision.

In May, the ship broke its moorings in a blizzard. Aurora became trapped in the ice, carrying away 18 men and most of the provisions, leaving the land party stranded.

On the other side of Antarctica, Shackleton’s party on Endurance was also trapped.

Aurora, under First Officer Joseph Stenhouse, drifted north in the ice with a broken rudder. After nine months and some 2,000 km, it broke free, raised steam and limped to New Zealand, arriving on 3 April 1916.

All on board survived.

Shackleton sold SY Aurora immediately after the relief voyage.

By April the ship was in Stockton, New South Wales, loading coal, and open to visitors to raise funds for the war effort.

Under Captain RJ Reeves, Aurora sailed with coal for Iquique, Chile, on 20 June 1917. This was its second attempt; a leak in late April had forced a return to Sydney for repair.

Aurora did not arrive in Chile, and no word was heard from the vessel. By November, fears for its safety grew.

On 5 December 1917, six months later Aurora’s departure, Captain Petrie of SS Coombar plucked one of its lifebuoys from the seas off northern New South Wales.

The lifebuoy was put on display in Sydney.

While theories about the ship’s loss emerged, no new evidence came to light. On 2 January 1918, Lloyd’s listed the ship as missing.

This lifebuoy is all that was recovered from the vessel’s last days in Australian waters. Captain Reeves and his 20 men, including boatswain James ‘Scotty’ Paton, were lost with the ship.

With the ship’s name in ghost lettering on its rim, and the initials of both its famous Antarctic expeditions – ITAE, for Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, and AAE, for Australasian Antarctic Expedition – the lifebuoy acts as link to all whose lives, toils and achievements were entwined with it.

In the 1930s, the lifebuoy was presented to Sir Lionel Hooke, general manager and later chairman of AWA (Amalgamated Wireless Australasia).

The young Lionel had served on Aurora as wireless operator in the Ross Sea Party after his employer AWA, then a new company, fitted the ship’s wireless. Hooke’s technical brilliance was widely applauded when he rerigged the ship’s aerial to increase broadcast range to signal its survival during the Ross Sea Party entrapment and drift in 1916.

From its beginnings in Arctic industry, SY Aurora touched lives and keynotes from early Antarctic exploration and Australia’s part in it, with names such as James Fairweather, Sir Douglas Mawson, John King Davis and Sir Ernest Shackleton woven into its history. Described by Mawson as a stout polar ship, Aurora’s expeditions built expertise and experience which contributed to Australia’s territorial claim to more than 42 per cent of the continent from the 1930s, a claim ratified in the Antarctic Treaty of 1959.