Shackleton’s Epic: Recreating the World’s Greatest Journey of Survival - Tim Jarvis

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worst recession the world has seen. Despite this, three wonderful sponsors signed on in 2012—Intrepid Travel became our naming rights sponsor; Whyte & Mackay Scotch whisky supported us with both funds and whisky (actual replica bottles of the same Mackinlay’s whisky Shackleton had taken on his expedition); and St. George Bank ensured we would have enough funding to at least make the expedition happen.

      With this all finalized I returned to the UK in late July 2012 to “supervise” the still formidable list of tasks needed to keep the expedition on track. I was tired but undaunted at the prospect of what lay ahead with less than six months to go: final selection of our team’s sailors, sea trials, sea-survival courses and the South Georgian government’s environmental and expedition briefings, final fit-out of the Alexandra Shackleton, answering Discovery Channel’s questions, selling twenty berths aboard our support vessel, progressing the five sets of permits required for our expedition, reviewing legal aspects of contracts with sponsors and those traveling south with us, and media events in London and New York. It was a big list all right. We also had to ensure that the Alexandra Shackleton, on board Polar Pioneer, and our support vessel all left on time for their 10,000-mile journey to Antarctica. Clearly, there wasn’t going to be much time for watching the London Olympics on TV.

      Insurance for this whole operation, meantime, was morphing into a subject fit for a Ph.D. thesis: factors included age, level of risk exposure, and duration of that exposure on a journey that now involved two boats and thirty people re-creating the world’s greatest journey of survival in the roughest ocean in the world. Shackleton would have approved of the challenge and the nine weeks in which I had to sort it all out.

      Elizabeth, the boys, and I were by now house-sitting our friends Tamsin and Tom’s farmhouse in England’s West Country. I’m not sure what I had in mind, but I somehow thought it would be a hideaway where we could blend time as a family with my work on planning the expedition. In reality the two blended like oil and water. I’d commandeered the home office, above the old barn and away from the main house, as expedition HQ. It was a glorious spot but one where I’d already had some of my most stressful days, staring out beyond the old Tudor farmhouse to the rolling green hills of Gloucestershire. I would switch the phone off in the early hours of the morning with e-mails and messages still coming in from all over the world and reluctantly on again five hours later to see what the night had brought with it.

      The Alexandra Shackleton needed to be finished and on board Polar Pioneer in Gdynia, Poland, by early September for her departure on the 20th. Our tall ship support vessel was due to start her journey south about a week later. Initially I had been charmed by the romance of using the tall ship, but for the past few months alarm bells had been ringing loudly for me, and for many serious reasons. The decision to make no changes to her schedule of traditional overseas sailing races in the immediate lead-up to her proposed departure date for Antarctica had left her way behind schedule and was indicative of how little her management appreciated the enormity of the task ahead.

      To make matters worse, her skipper and his number two quit unexpectedly. There was also disagreement about fuel requirements and how to refuel safely, escalating costs, ambiguity as to how many berths were available for us to sell, and doubts over the adequacy of the clothing on board for Antarctic conditions. Having independently recruited and paid for an ice pilot and an expedition team leader, I also had to ask my good friend and polar logistics expert Howard Whelan to help the tall ship’s management sort out various things I thought they should have been on top of. I couldn’t help but feel they were becoming a burden I could ill afford spending time or money on. But I was committed, having invested a lot of my own money in backing their involvement. Still, I suspected that as good as they were at what they normally did, they weren’t up to this challenge physically or organizationally, despite their assurances to the contrary. I had to focus on other things, though, so I gave them a schedule of tasks that needed completion before further payments would be made and turned my attentions to getting the Alexandra Shackleton to Poland for her journey south.

      Men of the sea: Dr. Robert Goodhart (left) and Philip Rose-Taylor.

      Courtesy of Scott Irvine

      Up in expedition HQ above the barn, I received a disturbing e-mail from Polar Pioneer: the frame supplied to transport the Alexandra Shackleton south on board Polar Pioneer was too big for the space set aside for her and needed to be reduced in size or she couldn’t go. I swore loudly. Seb had used up some favors and $4,000 of hard-won expedition funds to get the easy-to-disassemble, color-coded frame made at the last minute to specific dimensions, and now it would need to be chopped up and adjusted when it arrived in Poland.

      A few days earlier, I’d received a message asking when our expedition representatives would arrive in Poland to supervise the unloading and reloading of the Alexandra Shackleton onto the ship. What expedition representatives? Most of the team as it currently stood was based in Australia and working on funding, legal contracts, or selling berths aboard our support boat. Meanwhile, Howard and I were grappling with the logistics of fuel placement for the support ship, while Seb and the volunteers in Weymouth were working around the clock on finalizing fittings on the Alexandra Shackleton. I also had my own very long list of face-to-face meetings around the UK. Because the price tag for getting the boat to Poland on a flatbed truck was comparable to hiring a London cab to tow her there, I’d foolishly assumed the drivers could at least coordinate offloading her quayside from their truck and onto the ship without the need for us to be there. Apparently not.

      We needed help, and luckily a supporter, Dr. Robert Goodhart, and Philip Rose-Taylor, a traditional sailmaker, were able to go in our stead. Two more trustworthy and capable people you’d be hard pressed to find, and, given the twinkle in Philip’s eye as he left, I got the impression they loved the idea of a road trip to Europe. I just hoped these two old seadogs wouldn’t be reprising some of the stuff Philip used to get up to in his youth traveling the world’s oceans.

      The next day we received an e-mail from Polar Pioneer asking for paperwork to show we had applied the biological cleaning agent Virkon to the Alexandra Shackleton in order to eliminate any nasties that might contaminate Antarctica. Seb immediately arranged this, making good use of his army of volunteers who were applying finishing touches to the boat at the British Navy’s historic dockyard in Portsmouth following our sea trials a few weeks earlier. Philip and Robert, meanwhile, were armed with the appropriate documentation to take to Poland, along with a letter I’d been asked to provide guaranteeing that the Alexandra Shackleton would be offloaded at Chile’s Antarctic base, Eduardo Frei, on King George Island, although this had not yet been formally authorized. In the absence of something official from the Chilean authorities, I provided a confirmation document on expedition letterhead, knowing I had a month up my sleeve to get this signed off. At least I had the assurances of our fixer Alejo, who worked at the Frei base, that all would be well and that he would be there to take delivery of our boat. This, it turned out later, meant very little.

      But we were heading in the right direction. Earlier we’d been told the boat was going to be too big and heavy for the Polar Pioneer. The exact dimensions had been provided to the ship’s owners on a manifest from Seb indicating that the Alexandra Shackleton was 2.2 meters wide, not the 2.1 meters I’d told them previously. A few days prior, the Polish government had decided to load an additional shipping container, so space on the 1,000-tonne ship was now down to centimeters. I knew the slipup was mine. I hadn’t realized how tight on space and weight they were on board. Luckily Polar Pioneer’s crane could cope with the extra weight, but it was the principle of the thing that mattered and I didn’t want to test the friendship. Aurora and the crew of Polar Pioneer were doing us a huge favor transporting the Alexandra Shackleton south. Without them we’d be sunk before we got in the water.

      Next Robert and Philip rang to say the captain of Polar Pioneer had asked to see our permits before setting sail the next morning. I broke into a cold sweat; it was another potential deal breaker. We needed five permits: a Section 3 Expedition Permit and Section 5 Ship Permit under the UK Antarctic Act, and three permits from the South Georgian authorities for ship activity, landing on South Georgia, and crossing it. All of these were still several months away. I explained to Polar Pioneer’s

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