Clear Water Revival – a map of the Antarctic rediscovered

I have been researching and cataloguing an impressive collection of antique maps for Chiswick Auctions’ next sale of Books and Works on Paper, which takes place on 28th March. Looking rather lost within it was a small, informally sketched map of the Antarctic, a small area on the edge of the vast continent of Antarctica, drawn on a slightly worn sheet of headed note paper. If I say that the letterhead is of the Discovery Antarctic Expedition 1901, you might begin to see why my interest was piqued. If I add that the top edge of the sheet has pasted onto it a cut signature, clearly authentic, of E.H. Shackleton, you will probably start to share my excitement.

If you go straight to lot 549 in the sale catalogue to see the eventual outcome of my enquiry into this map’s origin, I can tell you now that it actually came about by sheer luck and the kindness and interest shown by an archivist I turned to for help. But what I want to share are both the process, often overwrought, through which I might try to pin down what I have in front of me and, if all goes well, the joy of learning a great deal more about something otherwise only superficially understood. Without a label telling me all I needed to know, and the whole collection came from a deceased estate, so I couldn’t ask the erstwhile owner where he’d acquired it, the starting point is to sift the evidence in front of me.

The sheet carries the signature of the great explorer, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874-1922). But a cut, or clipped, signature means just that. It has been cut from the document to which it was originally appended, a technique well known to autograph hunters wanting to compile albums of such trophies or, as might be the case here, to enhance an association between the famous signer and an object, very often a book, by pasting it in. So, my first note of caution to self was ‘Shackleton hasn’t actually signed this actual map, so look deeper’.

The annotation on the map of the Antarctic is unsophisticated in its execution, including spelling and grammatical errors, but is mostly capitalised and the whole thing seemingly quite informally executed, and who knows under what extreme conditions. So it couldn’t necessarily be taken as typical of the author’s hand. Straightforward searches of auction databases and the wider web produced no results for Shackleton with the map’s title or any combination of associated words. All the more frustrating now in hindsight when I reveal the simplicity of the eventual discovery. I asked map experts more knowledgeable and experienced than I, who in turn asked equally experienced dealers they knew, and I even asked a descendant of Shackleton’s who takes a keen interest in anything floating onto the market, but none of them recognised it or could offer any significant suggestions. I should also mention that on the back of the map was written in a later ballpoint pen what I could only presume to be the name and address in Dundee of a previous owner. My hopes were raised when an internet search found it in a current phone directory, only to be frustrated that the number was withheld. I wrote a letter addressed to the name or current occupant, but received no response.

Only two things related to Shackleton presented themselves for comparison on the internet, a sketch of a penguin, and a very crude and simple map of Antarctica, sketched on the back of a menu by him as he discussed plans for his ill-fated expedition of 1914 with a potential donor at a formal dinner.

The obvious next port of call was the extensive and fascinating archives held by the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. The vast amount of scientific data and survey material, along with the diaries and notebooks of the team members, would surely provide something comparable. I remember passing this small but elegant building many times in my student days, never dreaming that one day I might have occasion to conduct my own research there. You have to plan your visit and book a desk some time in advance, and the bitter cold of the Beast from the East, doing its worst on the day of my visit, only added to my sense of conducting my own polar research. But the archivists, Naomi Boneham and Laura Ibbett could not have been more helpful in narrowing down my search.

The Discovery Expedition of 1901 fired the starting gun for the 20th century race to the South Pole and the conquest of Antarctica. It included a quick succession of British expeditions, all on a scale of heroism that seems almost beyond credibility today. This first one was headed by career naval officer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912), with ex-merchant seaman Ernest Shackleton as the third officer. Looking first through a succession of Shackleton’s manuscript material, hoping for similarities between his letters and numerals and those appearing on this map, I was overwhelmed by the human story that leapt off the pages. Along with Scott and the team’s doctor, Edward Wilson (1872-1912), the trio ventured further south than had ever been reached before. But it was at the cost of losing all their dogs, due to shortcomings in their supplies, and of their own health, with Wilson suffering temporary snow blindness and Shackleton falling prey to scurvy.

When the relief ship, the ‘Morning’, arrived from New Zealand in January 1903, to replenish the team’s provisions and pick up their reports and samples, Shackleton was told that he was medically unfit to continue and was to be sent home when the ‘Morning’ departed. His sense of devastation is tangible in his diary entries for the period. As he set off from the ‘Discovery’ across the 5 miles of ice, noted on our map, to board the ‘Morning’, he wrote “A beautiful day but a sad one indeed for me, for today I left my home and all those who are my chums as much as I ever will have anyone for chums”.

“Today we left our comrades, today we steamed away and at the edge of the obdurate ice which holds the ‘Discovery’ in an iron grasp we left them”

Two days later he wrote “Today we left our comrades, today we steamed away and at the edge of the obdurate ice which holds the ‘Discovery’ in an iron grasp we left them. Ah me, it was a sad parting. I took the photo of all our chaps before starting so that our people at home may have the last glimpse of their faces should we not succeed in getting out, or they succeed, I mean”. This attitude of seemingly calm acceptance of the extremely perilous nature of their venture, may have been the inspiration for what is now generally accepted to be an urban myth, the advertisement supposedly placed by Shackleton a few years later to raise recruits for his famous 1914 expedition, “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success”. One last, for me touching, quote from his diary of the following days as they delicately negotiated the icebergs of the southern seas was that “it was like steering a bicycle through a graveyard, steering the ship through them”.

Although I felt hugely privileged to be not only reading Shackleton’s personal account, but to be actually holding his diaries in my hand, I still hadn’t found any conclusive evidence that the map in question was his or not. It was in browsing through a far more mundane, though scientifically important, ledger of daily seawater saline content and density reports, for which Shackleton was responsible, that I thought I made a breakthrough. Suddenly the handwriting changed, and suddenly there appeared to be the hand I sought. A set of initials on a pasted-in bookmark led me to Hartley Travers Ferrar (1879-1932), the young geologist who had only graduated from Cambridge that summer, and soon the story unfolded of how this task passed to him once Shackleton was sent home. Now requesting to review Ferrar’s diaries and notebooks, I was able to glean a fuller picture of daily life at that end of the earth, and of the relationship between these two men. Not only that, but they are peppered with annotated sketches, diagrams and even a large manuscript map, all of which bore, to my eyes at least, a closer comparison with the map I am investigating. Ferrar talks often of collaborating with these reports before taking over full responsibility for them, of Shackleton carrying on working in Ferrar’s cabin so he was obliged to retreat to the mess to stretch out and rest.

There are almost daily accounts of shooting skuas, at first overly friendly and easy prey, but later much scarcer and, unsurprisingly, far more elusive. Ferrar also describes the visits to and from the crew of the ‘Morning’, including frequent dinners and rounds of bridge late into the night. But in detail he mentions Scott’s offer in mid-February to any men who felt they could not endure another year, that they could return on the ‘Morning’ when it departed, though he makes no mention of any takers. Then, on the 20th of February, the shock announcement to Shackleton of his being declared unfit and to be sent home compulsorily. So, it was no surprise that Ferrar wrote of being amongst the small party of the ‘Discovery’ crew who accompanied Shackleton on this last trip to the ‘Morning’, on the 1st of March, for what was obviously going to be quite a send-off. And the small annotation next to the position of the ‘Morning’ on my map, “Open water, March 2nd”, which I’d hoped might provide a clue in its specificity, suddenly did find resonance in Ferrar’s entry for the morning of the 2nd of March, “Breakfast in relays at 10.30am. After the sledges were packed and all was ready we got over the side onto the ice and the ‘Morning’ steamed off amid cheers. It was a very pretty sight for the edge of the ice was quite sharp and the water was clear of ice”.

So I felt it had been a day well spent. The handwriting in Ferrar’s diaries and notebooks, including the scientific ledger he took over from Shackleton, as well as the numerous sketches of landscapes and geological features, along with a large folding map, suggested his possible authorship of this present map. The Shackleton association introduced by the cut signature, presumably pasted on by a later owner, is reinforced by the internal evidence and both men’s diary entries, that the map marks Shackleton’s sad departure from the Discovery Expedition in March, 1903.

But, although I thought perhaps it had, the story doesn’t quite end there. A passing question to the very helpful archivist, Naomi, who had guided me towards the material most likely to be useful, revealed there might be more to be gleaned by contacting the Discovery Museum in Dundee, birthplace and current resting place of the famous vessel that took these heroic adventurers to this terra incognita, remained locked in the ice for the duration of their exploration, and then brought them all safely home again. So I dropped them an email with an image of my map of the Antarctic, and my suggestion it might be the work of Ferrar, to see if they had anything comparable, and perhaps had knowledge of the identity of that local name and address written on the back. In the meantime, I revised my catalogue description and started to compose this account of my experience in researching it. But, just as the catalogue deadline arrived, forcing me to commit myself to some sort of attribution, two things happened in quick succession that sent me first crashing through the floor and then floating up to the ceiling.

The first was an incredibly helpful and engaged response from Ali Gellatly of Dundee Heritage Trust, who oversee the RRS Discovery museum there, telling me they weren’t previously aware of my map of the Antarctic or of the name and address on the back, but that they had a near-identical one themselves, clearly produced by the same unknown hand. Their’s even contained the same details relating to the position of the ship Morning, and the note of clear water on 2nd March, 1903. But the crushing disappointment was that she had shown both maps to a descendant of Ferrar, who ruled out any association with the geologist. She also pointed out what I had been trying to ignore or excuse for so long (more fool me) that the unsophisticated hand was unlikely to be that of an educated and literate scientist.

However, just at the point of despair at realising, through tears and gnashing teeth, that I now had no time to conduct further research before the catalogue went to print, another email arrived, this time from Cambridge. It was Naomi Boneham again, writing that she had come across a random item in their inventory that lacked the purchase information to complete their record of it. In looking up the original printed auction catalogue (not available online, I’ve checked since!) from the Christie’s sale where they purchased it back in 2002, there in the same catalogue was my map of the Antarctic! Having been consigned to them by a living vendor, there also was its back story. It had been sent by the ship’s carpenter, Frederick Ernest Dailey (1873-1961), therefore quite plausibly also its author, to the foreman carpenter at the shipyard in Dundee, and it had been passed down his family, doubtless of the address written on the back of the map, until offered for sale at Christie’s.

Dailey had been an apprentice carpenter at Devonport Dockyard for several years before joining the navy. He was then recruited, in 1900, to join Scott’s planned expedition to the Antarctic. The RSS Discovery was eventually commissioned from the Dundee Shipbuilders Company, as the cost of around £4 million in today’s money was deemed better spent in a British yard than in the Norwegian alternative. The design, too, had almost followed the Norwegian lines of Nansen’s ship, Fram. But that had not had to negotiate traversing the globe first, so a more ocean-going compromise, more akin to a whaling ship, was chosen instead. This was also one of the few remaining yards with the capability to build a wooden ship on this scale, which was also deemed essential for strength, ease of repair and lack of magnetic interference during polar research. Scott sent Dailey to Dundee to oversee the final stages of construction and fitting, and he then sailed with her to the Isle of Wight for the expedition’s departure in August, 1901.

So this epic voyage was to be her first effective sea trial, meaning a long stop-over in New Zealand while Dailey attended to numerous repairs before they could continue to McMurdo Sound. Once there, in December the same year, the Discovery safely frozen into ice by design, a large hut built on shore for additional space, it seems inevitable the crew and expedition members would merge into one team. Scott and others wrote very highly of Dailey’s involvement. The close copy of this map of the Antarctic, held by the Dundee Heritage Trust, has the additional, and very poignant, detail of locating the spot where the young able seaman George Vince slipped to his death in March, 1902.

Dailey went on to serve with distinction through the First World War and when he died in 1961, was believed to have been the last survivor of the great Discovery Expedition. That was also the year I was born, a minor observation not lost on me as I felt a tremendous sense of connection with what had previously always seemed a faraway age of heroism about which I knew very little.