Shackleton's sledge and flag from south pole expedition to stay in UK
A sledge and flag that shine light on one of Britain’s greatest adventure stories – Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod expedition to the south pole – have been kept in the UK.
It was announced on Wednesday that the National Heritage Memorial Fund had provided a £204,700 grant to help buy objects which would otherwise have gone abroad.
The 11ft sledge will go the National Maritime Museum (NMM) in Greenwich and the sledging flag to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. Both organisations have hardly any objects from one of the most important chapters in British polar history.
“The Nimrod expedition is a story we struggle to tell because we have so little,” said Charlotte Connelly, curator at the Polar Museum in Cambridge. Greenwich only has a lamp bracket and the institute has a flag, food and clothing which is more “but not really enough to get in to why this expedition was so important, how it paved the way for something which came later”.
Shackleton and his small team set out in 1907 to try to reach the geographic south pole. They failed in that but were the first to reach the magnetic south pole and to scale the volcano Mount Erebus.
They also got closer to the south pole than anyone before them – within 100 nautical miles before having to turn back. “They wouldn’t have made it otherwise, they had already extended their rations multiple times to get as far as they did,” said Connelly.
In 1910 Captain Robert Falcon Scott led his team on the same route, successfully getting to the south pole but discovering Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten him. Scott and his team died on the journey home.
Connelly said Nimrod was often forgotten but its achievements were remarkable, adding: “The interior of Antarctica had not been explored before, they were going in to completely unknown territory.”
The sledge itself was quite a simply made thing meant to be pulled by ponies who would be put down at certain points, the meat stored to be consumed on the way back.
The poor ponies could not cope with a lot of the land they encountered so the majority of the journey was the men hauling the sledges themselves. “It was a tough, tough expedition all round,” said Connelly.
The sledge and flag were kept by Eric Marshall who served as surgeon, surveyor, cartographer and photographer. He later donated them to his old school, Monkton Combe in Somerset, which put them up for auction in 2018.
They sold at Bonhams to an overseas buyer, leading to an export bar because of their national importance. The sum needed was £227,500 with the bulk coming from the National Heritage Memorial Fund.