The South Polar Expedition

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 13, 1 April 1909, Page 489

The South Polar Expedition

One sultry summer day a poet sighed : — ' O for an iceberg or two at control ! . . . O for a pleasure trip up to the pole ! ' It reminds one of Henry- Kirke White's longing for consumption : — ' ' Gently, most gently, on' thy victim's head, Consumption, lay thine handl — let me decay Like the expiring lamp, unseen away, And softly go to slumber with the dead.' But the romance of consumption passes ' like a snowflake on the river ' as soon as swarms of tie microscopic poisoners set their grip upon lung-tissue. In like manner, the near presence of 'an iceberg or two ' in the far, far north or .in the far, far south would, in all probability,speedily disperse all desire for a closer acquainance; arid a journey to the pole — whether north or south — would be anything like a picnic or a pleasure trip. Certainly Lieutenant Shackleton' s perilous journey over' the icefields towards the south pole was not the soi-t of thing that the poet or the~~ arm-chair traveller would long for to any great extent. The story of that trying expedition is one of dire toil and of hunger and exposure such as would have severed the partnership of soul and body in men of lesser courage and endurance. Thus, in one of the terrible forced marches over the crevassed ice-fields, the party covered only sixteen miles in twenty-two lours. ' Half an hour before we came to camp,' said Lieutenant Shack)e-

ton, ' Adams fell in liis harness, . but directly he had recovered a little he went on again pulling. J They suffered agonies from dysentery the while, they had to toil and travel 126 days on 92 days' food rations, and from the middle of November till February 3, they had only two ' square ' meals. 'At Chinaman depot,' adds the narrator, 'we loaded' with horse"=meat, and digging down in the snow, found the frozen blood of the horse; this we added to our stock of food, the daily ration now consisting of (for the 'whole day) one pannikin of half-cooked'horse-meat [they had to shoot their ponies], with bloody and four- biscuits, two pannikins of tea, and lialf a spoonful of cocoa per man.'

The expedition discovered the Magnetic Pole in what has been provisionally estimated as the latitude of 72 degrees 25 minutes and the longitude of (approximately) 154 degrees; they . trekked through blizzards* and over great broken ice-fields to within ninety-seven . miles of the South Pole; and they added greatly to our store of geographical, geological, and other scientific knowledge of the great lone land in the far south. "We lift our hat to Lieutenant Shackleton and those that were with him on his perilous journey, and welcome them back from the-ice-fields and the snow.