London Letter: Shooting shots of rum for noble purposes

I mentioned last week that I am slowly ticking off the wish-list of things I plan to do in Britain, with a visit to the National Maritime Museum being one of them.

The other is a pilgrimage to Sir Ernest Shackleton’s boat, which was originally at the museum, but now has been moved to his old school, Dulwich College in South London.

Shackleton’s saga in the Antarctic is one of the greatest adventure yarns ever told. Most of you will know it, so I’ll be brief.

In 1914 he planned to lead the first expedition to cross the frozen mainland. However, his ship was wrecked and he and his 28 men spent a torrid winter camped on floating sea ice.

When summer arrived, the men escaped the melting floes in three tiny lifeboats, arriving at the uninhabited Elephant Island 100km away in the teeth of a polar storm.

As his men were starving, frostbitten and in some cases half-crazed, Shackleton had to move fast. He set sail on a desperate 1 300km voyage in the James Caird, a 22ft open boat, to the whaling station on South Georgia.

After crossing the roughest ocean in the world, he and his five crew landed on the wrong side of the island. As three of the men were near death, Shackleton and the other two, Tom Crean and Frank Worsley, hiked across a 1 400m mountain range. After 48 hours of scrambling in lethal blizzards, they reached safety.

Shackleton’s expedition was a dismal failure, but his indomitable will so touched the world that the crew were feted as heroes.

I told this story to my brother-in-law Lawrence Anthony and he was so enthralled we decided that when he was next in London we would go and pay homage to the James Caird.

All you have to do is phone the school and they’ll let you in to view the boat. Apparently to see it is unbelievably humbling as it is inconceivable that such a tiny craft could have sailed the world’s most vicious seas.

Indeed, Shackleton tells of one night when he looked up to see a white ‘crack’ and thought it was a cloud – only to discover it was the frenzied foam of a freak wave. He yelled ‘hang on lads’ as the flimsy boat went for the surf of its life.

Tribute

Lawrence and I planned to drink a tot of rum to the great man and say well done on an adventurous life. Sadly, Lawrence is no longer with us, so I have recruited management to take her brother’s place and the trip is now on.

My tiny tribute is one of thousands each year, but for Shackleton the greatest accolade was not medals or fawning tributes from armchair wonders like me. Instead it came from a group of hardy Norwegian sailors based at South Georgia.

The story goes that the night after he, Worsley and Crean stumbled unrecognisable as humans into the whaling station, they were hosted by a group of veteran Vikings. The three men were led into a ship’s saloon which Worsley said was ‘full of captains and mates and sailors and hazy with tobacco smoke’.

The room fell silent. Then one gnarled skipper stepped forward. He said he had spent 40 years in the turbulent Southern Ocean and had never heard of such a ‘wonderful feat’. He said it was an honour to meet Shackleton and his comrades and finished with a dramatic gesture: ‘These are men!’

One by one the Norwegians stepped forward and solemnly shook their hands.

For the three men, this was their finest moment; a granite tribute from the toughest of the tough. Worsley spoke for them all when he said: ‘I think we enjoyed this more than any honour bestowed upon us afterwards.’

Shackleton also spoke of his satisfaction in winning the esteem of men who sailed these ‘sullen and treacherous southern seas’.

My tribute will be far more humble. The only problem is that management is convinced that this is just a flimsy excuse for me to shoot a shot of rum in the middle of London.

The thought of it!