The Endurance and Shackleton

I braved a new (to me) hairdresser this morning. I didn’t feel I could justify the journey to Heaton now we are not needed in town to pick up the children and I got irritated with the chap’s chat, so Pat at book group recommended Laura in Morpeth. She is fast and a multi-tasker. A young girl washed my hair while Laura was cutting someone else the Laura cut mine and left another young girl to blow dry it after giving instructions, then she was back to finish it off. It cost the same but she’s happy to do a dry trim for £23 so that would be good unless I have something special to go to.

While was looking for a card to send to Jo for her birthday I found some old postcards I bought in the museum in Gritviken, South Georgia which is my collage today.

We walked the last bit of Shackleton’s route down to the whaling settlement and saw his grave where we toasted him in Guinness. When in Wellington NZ we paid our respects to one of the most valuable crew members he had, Chippy McNeish. Sadly Shackleton did not recommend him for the Antarctic medal that the others got, despite him having the idea of how to pull the lifeboats over the ice, to put nails in the boots to act like crampons for the icy mountain climb when they reached South Georgia and other useful stuff. It seems he was not only Chippy because he was the carpenter, but also he was Chippy by nature and perhaps challenged the Boss too many times.

We read a lot about Shackleton after we came back and admire how, despite their ship being crushed in the ice, and then them being marooned on ice before they got the 2 rowing boats to open water to row to the nearest land, Elephant Island, then leaving some of the men there while the rest rowed 800 miles to South Georgia, he didn’t lose a man. (The 22 men were on Elephant Island for 4 months before being rescued). It’s a wonderful story of leadership and endurance. Oddly enough the ship was called Endurance and recently has been found.
Top left on collage - pulling a lifeboat across the ice
Left - the Endurance in the ice before it was crushed and sank
Bottom - the James Caird (now in Dulwich school) being pushed off Elephant Island to head foe South Georgia
Right - me paying respects at his grave
He died in South Georgia en route for
another expedition in 1922. He was only 48.