By Emma Cowing
IN a quiet corner of Karori cemetery, tucked away in a suburb of the New Zealand city of Wellington, a bronze cat lounges on a grave in the sunshine. Tail curled over one back paw, head pointed upwards, it looks as though it is awaiting the return of its master, or possibly just dinner.
For here lies Harry McNish: Antarctic explorer, forgotten Scot, and a man whose devotion to his beloved cat cost him the Polar Medal.
While many believe that McNish, a Port Glasgow carpenter nicknamed Chippy, was instrumental in saving Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition from certain death, he died penniless and alone more than 10,000 miles from home, and for many years lay in a pauper’s grave without a headstone.
On the centenary of Shackleton’s death, a new search is under way to find the wreck of the Endurance, the ship in which both men sailed, and almost died.
Endurance 22, a team of scientists and explorers assembled by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust, will search the area of the Weddell Sea off the Antarctic Peninsula where the Endurance sank in 1915. If they succeed, it will be one of the most extraordinary wreck recoveries in recent history.
But Endurance’s last resting place is not the only unresolved tale from Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition. More than 80 years after his death, questions still remain about why McNish was never properly recognised for his achievements both on board the Endurance, and in the challenging months on the ice afterwards.
For unlike the vast majority of the 28 men in the crew, McNish was not recommended for, and never received, a Polar Medal, the highest honour that can be bestowed upon a Brit who has traversed the ice at the world’s furthest and most inhospitable edges. Why? Because he and Shackleton did not get on.
In 2018 the explorer Robert Swan, the first man to walk to both the North and South Poles and an admirer of McNish, described him as a ‘crucial cog in what is still one of the greatest human endeavours’ and argued that he should be posthumously awarded the medal. ‘It is accepted that Shackleton and McNish did not see eye to eye, but it’s surely time for the Royal Geographical Society to give him, and his descendants, the recognition he deserves,’ he said.
‘I have a Polar Medal... I can see no reason why Chippy shouldn’t have one too.’
Others agree. The New Zealand Antarctic Society has long campaigned for McNish’s recognition, while in 2011 Michael McNish, Harry’s great-nephew, said he was ‘horrified’ to learn that McNish had been denied the Polar Medal ‘due to what seems to be a personality conflict’.
‘It’s a total tragedy,’ says Malcolm Rennie, who in 2019 played McNish in a one-man play about the explorer’s life entitled Shackleton’s Carpenter, and travelled to New Zealand to research his final years.
‘The man was completely marginalised and had nothing to fall back on after the expedition was over, unlike other crew members who came from higher social classes.
‘I think that within himself he must have been hurt that he didn’t get the Polar Medal. But despite that, he had the great satisfaction of knowing that had it not it been for him, they might never have come back.’
At 40 years old, McNish was one of the oldest members of the crew on the Endurance, which set sail for the Antarctic from Plymouth on August 6, 1914. Regarded by his peers as odd and uncouth, he came from lower down the social scale than the privately educated Shackleton and much of his crew.
BORN in Port Glasgow in 1874, McNish was the son of a shoemaker, and the third of 11 children. A socialist and a man of strong faith who disliked swearing, he was the epitome of the dour Presbyterian Scot, a working class Glaswegian who smoked a pipe and came complete with a sizeable chip on his shoulder.
A merchant seaman for much of his life, why he joined the expedition is unknown, although it could be that he spotted Shackleton’s famous advertisement: ‘Men wanted: for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. Sir Ernest Shackleton.’
McNish was often grumpy, and suffered from rheumatism in his legs as well as piles, but his carpentry skills were never in doubt, and in his first months on the ship he was put to work doing everything from constructing a false deck to building a chest of drawers for Shackleton.
Most of the crew tolerated McNish and his moods, while Shackleton wrote in letters home that McNish was ‘the only man I am not dead certain of’ and described him as ‘a very good workman and shipwright, but does nothing I can get hold of’.
McNish’s cat, on the other hand, whom he had acquired from friends back home in Cathcart, in Glasgow, was much more popular on board.
A tiger-striped tabby initially assumed to be female, it was thus bestowed the tongue-in-cheek name Mrs Chippy before the discovery that he was actually a tom. At the time, ships’ cats were not unusual and Mrs Chippy made himself useful as an expert mouser that kept the Endurance’s supplies safe from vermin.
Captain Frank Worsley wrote about Mrs Chippy’s habit of climbing the rigging ‘exactly after the manner of a seaman going aloft’, while the ship’s meteorologist, Leonard Hussey, was amused at his habit of taking provocative walks along the roofs of the dogs’ kennels.
In fact, the crew were so fond of him and his antics that when Mrs Chippy fell overboard one freezing night in the South Atlantic six weeks after the ship set sail, they turned round to rescue him.
As supply officer Thomas Orde-Lees later recalled in his diary: ‘An extraordinary thing happened during the night. The tabby cat – Mrs Chippy – jumped overboard through one of the cabin portholes and the officer on watch, Lieutenant Hudson, heard her screams and turned the ship smartly round and picked her up.
‘She must have been in the water ten minutes or more.’
Mrs Chippy lived to fight another day. But months later, the Endurance got stuck in the ice. The men were eventually forced to abandon ship and initially spent time in a makeshift camp hoping the ice would move them to open water.
When that didn’t work Shackleton made the decision to drag the three lifeboats to open water instead. He ordered all unnecessary baggage to be jettisoned. The ‘baggage’ included Mrs Chippy. He, along with some of the dogs, was to be shot.
McNish was devastated. During the abandonment of the Endurance McNish had worked hard to build makeshift huts from timber salvaged from the vessel, and had played a key role in prising open some of the deck timbers so that provisions could be retrieved. Now, he felt betrayed.
‘It rankled all his life,’ says Rennie. ‘It was his cat, he had brought it on board, and I think McNish blamed Shackleton for killing the cat more than he blamed him for anything else. Nothing Shackleton did led to any loss of life apart from shooting the cat and I don’t think McNish could forgive him for that.
‘He believed he could have kept him and he would have been OK on the boats. He was very annoyed, and with some justification.’
F
ROM there, Shackleton’s relationship with McNish deteriorated. Forced to pull the boats across the ice – something he disagreed with anyway – McNish refused to take his turn in the harness as his rheumatism was playing up. It was a direct rebellion.
When challenged, McNish declared that since the ship had been destroyed he was no longer under any obligation to follow orders. There is little record of the incident – it was later struck from the ship’s log – but some say that Shackleton ordered McNish to be shot, others that he read him the rules of the ship and made it clear he was still obliged to follow his orders.
McNish finally relented, although he was vindicated when Shackleton eventually gave up on the plan, and returned to waiting out the ice.
In the following brutal months before their return, McNish continued to play a key role in the crew’s