Free Shackleton's Heroes by Wilson McOrist

AUTHOR’S PREFACE
    T HERE IS NOTHING quite like sitting at a table in the deathly silent Archives Room of the Scott Polar Research Institute Library in Cambridge, wearing white gloves, with a grimy, seal-blubber-oil-splattered diary, reading words that were written by one of your own heroes; words that were written in Antarctica in 1915–16.
    My ‘heroes’ are six men who were in a support party placing food depots for Shackleton’s planned crossing of Antarctica in 1915. I call these six men the ‘Mount Hope Party’ because their most southerly depot was placed at Mount Hope, 360 miles onto the continent from their base at McMurdo Sound.
    The rough, handwritten scrawl of their diaries often required a number of readings to ensure the words written were interpreted correctly. Did he write ‘heavy’ or was the word ‘leaving’? Did he simply describe yet another day of hauling a sledge through waist-deep snow as ‘worse than awful’? Did he really write that they ate half a biscuit and drank one cup of weak warm tea, for the entire day? He mentions his toes – does he not realise his toes are frostbitten, and they may need to be amputated? Does he have any idea that the blizzard will continue for another five days? Or that his colleague will die in two days? Such was my life, on and off, for six years as I researched the diaries of the men of the Mount Hope Party for this book.
    Over this time I badgered the staff at various institutions for any diary,document, letter or journal related to the Mount Hope Party: the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, the James Caird Library at the National Maritime Museum in London, the Royal Geographical Society in London, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington and the Federation University in Victoria (formerly University of Ballarat).
    I searched for more details of the six men: Mackintosh, Joyce, Wild, Spencer-Smith, Hayward and Richards. I spent time with Anne Philips, granddaughter of the leader of the party, Aeneas Mackintosh, and she gave me even more background information on him. I tracked down Ernest Joyce’s original diary (in private hands in the USA) and the owner, Betsy Krementz, obligingly sent me a complete copy of it for my work. I visited obscure places like the tiny village of Eversholt, the home of Ernest Wild. I met the late Michael Weaver, archivist at Woodbridge School in Suffolk, who was also entranced with the exploits of a past pupil, A. P. Spencer-Smith. I wrote to hundreds of people named ‘P. Hayward’ before finding Peter Hayward, the grand-nephew of Victor Hayward, who shared with me the history of his family. I had tea and biscuits in Adelaide with Dick Richards’s daughter, the most charming nonagenarian, Patricia Lathlean.
    We can hardly imagine what life was really like in Antarctica in the early 1900s, so I travelled there on the Heritage Expeditions ship Spirit of Enderby to try and gain a better understanding of the Antarctic environment, and the conditions under which the men lived. Invercargill in New Zealand was our starting point at latitude 46° S and our destination was McMurdo Sound in Antarctica, latitude 77.5° S. Day after day the ship rolled its way across the Southern Ocean, covering no more than a few degrees of latitude each day. We encountered wild weather and rough seas. We saw our first icebergs drifting up from the south. Like past explorers we were stopped by pack ice. After ten days at sea we could see Antarctica, highlighted by the ice cliffs of the Great Ice Barrier. In the distance we could see the Trans-Antarctic Mountains, a range of mountains that went southward into Antarctica. We were in the hallowed ground of Scott and Shackleton. We had reached McMurdo Sound.
    We stood silently by bunks at the Cape Evans hut (abandoned by CaptainR. F. Scott’s expedition of 1910–13) that the men of the