Shackleton in Antarctic gear 

After walking through some more of the Museum, we wandered up the street to the Royal Geographic Society. Even though Nan wasn’t that interested, I dragged her there to see the statue of one of my favorite great explorers, Ernest Shackleton. The Geographic Society wasn’t much to see, but the statue was one of the highlights of my trip to London.

In 1912 Shackleton set out from England to cross Antarctica on foot. Before reaching the continent, his ship was trapped in the ice pack. The crew spent a winter in the ship locked in the ice, eating penguins and seals. Finally the ice broke the ship up and it sank. The crew then dragged the liferafts to the edge of the ice shelf and sailed across the frigid sea in these open boats to a tiny island in the middle of the sea.

Once there, Shackleton and his crew figured out where they were, and he led a small party in one of these open air boats, sailing 800 miles (or something like that) to another tiny island that was inhabited intermittently by whaling ships. They had to sail mostly be instinct since they couldn’t see the sun or the stars most of the time, and when they could, the boat was rocking too violently to get a good reading. Nevertheless, they made it through, but because of the weather, they were forced to land on the wrong side of the island. The party had to cross the icy, mountainous, and totally unfamiliar island on foot to get to the whaling village. None of the whalers would go to the first island, so they sailed to Chile. Nobody there believed that the men he left on the first island would be alive, but he got a Chilean navy ship to go pick up the remaining crew members a year later. Miraculously, virtually everyone had survived, although they were all very tired of eating penguin.

As cool as the written version of the story is, incredibly enough, the expedition had brought along a photographer, who took photos of it all, including some in color. Although the color is a little faded, they look like pictures from the 1960s! I saw the pictures in an exhibition at the University of Washington, and they’re probably traveling somewhere around the world right now.

Anyway, that’s enough about Shackleton.