ICY GRAVES - LAID TO REST

The manuscript of Icy Graves: Exploration and Death in the Antarctic is now with my publisher, The History Press, and is due for release as a hardback in June 2018.

It's been a fascinating book to research and write, combining as it does, a range of stories from all periods of Antarctic exploration, the earliest being from Carsten Borchgrevink's Southern Cross Expedition of 1898-1900, and the most recent from 1982, the year of the Falklands War. I've also sought to represent the experiences of explorers from as many nations as possible, including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Some of the challenges of inclusion were expected - most obviously those of language and physical access - but others were totally unanticipated. I was astonished, for instance, to be told by the South African National Antarctic Programme that they retain very few expedition records for longer than five years! The complex history of US exploration - with ownership being divided between private individuals, the US Navy, and, more recently, the US Antarctic Program - has also resulted in a wide dispersal of records. Indeed, this dispersal has been so comprehensive that, when I asked USAP for a list of all US casualties, with dates of death, causes and locations, I was told that they held no list - and that they would be grateful if I could provide them with one once my research was complete.

Despite these challenges, I'm delighted with the range of the stories that have come to light. Inevitably, given that my focus has been on Antarctic fatalities, many of the episodes I've researched are tragic - but there are also tales of extraordinary heroism, determination, and survival as well. Just as importantly, many are almost entirely unknown - and I shall be delighted if the book helps to bring them to wider public notice. The stories are arranged thematically, with chapters on cold, fire, sea ice, motor vehicles accidents, air disasters, and mental illness and suicide. In the introduction, I also examine the reasons for the surprising obscurity of some of the accidents. Why are they so little known given their intrinsic drama?
 

ICY GRAVES: EXPLORATION & DEATH IN THE ANTARCTIC

Ever since Captain Cook first sailed into the Great Southern Ocean in 1773, mankind has sought to push back the boundaries of Antarctic exploration. The first expeditions tried to demark Antarctica’s coastline, but then the Sixth International Geographical Conference of 1895 posed a new challenge: conquest of the South Pole. Following Amundsen’s success in 1911, yet more objectives were defined, some geographical, some scientific, and some territorial.  

Though the loss of Captain Scott’s Polar Party remains the most famous, many of these expeditions suffered fatalities. Men drowned when the sea ice beneath their feet disintegrated; others fell into bottomless crevasses; yet more froze to death. The advent of new technologies did much to speed the pace of exploration, but aeroplanes and motor vehicles introduced new dangers, with whole groups of men killed in a single event.

Each of the fatalities described in this book is dramatic and its background story compelling, from the suicide of Arthur Farrant on Deception Island in 1953 to the drowning of an international party of explorers whose tracked vehicle plunged over the edge of the ice face during a blinding ‘whiteout’; from the deaths of Scott’s polar party from malnutrition and cold to the catastrophic crash of a US Navy flying boat on Thurston Island in December 1946; from the death by fire of eight soviet scientists when their base burned to the ground to the loss of three British sledgers when a storm smashed the sea ice on which they were travelling.

 For the first time, Icy Graves uses a selection of these tragic losses to plot the forward progress of Antarctic exploration and to tell, often in their own words, the stories of the men and women who have fallen in what Sir Ernest Shackleton called the ‘White Warfare of the South’.

ICY GRAVES will be published by The History Press in June 2018

Operation Tabarin: Britain's Secret Wartime Expedition to Antarctica, 1944-46

In 1943 Winston Churchill's War Cabinet met to discuss the opening of a new front, fought not on the beaches of Normandy or in the jungles of Burma but amid the blizzards and glaciers of the Antarctic.

As well as setting in train a sequence of events that would eventually culminate in the Falklands War, the British bases secretly established in 1944 and 1945 would go on to lay the foundations for one of the most important and enduring government-sponsored programmes of scientific research in the polar regions: the British Antarctic Survey.

Operation Tabarin tells the story of the only Antarctic expedition to be launched by any of the combatant nations during the Second World War and one of the most curious episodes in what Ernest Shackleton called 'the white warfare of the south'.

Available from The History Press, priced £16.99 ISBN 978-0-7509-6746-4

Frozen in Time

Somewhere approximately 270 miles inland from the edge of the Filchner Ice Shelf and close to the Whichaway Nunataks a time capsule lies buried beneath the snow and ice of Antarctica’s high Polar Plateau. Undisturbed for 54 years, the capsule consists of an aluminium-framed hut of just 16-feet-square. Furnished by Morris of Glasgow and with its equipment and stores still intact, for nine long months, this hut, known as ‘South Ice’, was home to three members of the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1955-58: Hal Lister, team leader, Ken Blaiklock, surveyor, and Jon Stephenson, geologist and assistant glaciologist.

The hut was finally abandoned on 6 January 1958, when a four-man RAF contingent departed to complete the first aerial crossing of the continent made with a single-engine aircraft. The land party, including Lister, Blaiklock and Stephenson had left long before to take part in the expedition’s main vehicle crossing. When the RAF party left, they closed the door behind them and left the hut to be swallowed by the swirling snow. It has remained untouched ever since – and, as the RAF party could not carry unnecessary weight, they left almost everything behind in the hut.

Of the three base huts built for the TAE, only South Ice remains fundamentally unchanged. The main hut used by the Crossing Party was lost when the Filchner Ice Shelf calved in the 1970s. The New Zealand base, built at Pram Point on Ross Island, still serves as the headquarters for all New Zealand activity on the continent but only the mess hall from the original base survives. South Ice is, therefore, a unique survival – and a monument of international importance. Its design was enormously strong – so strong, indeed, that Lister joked that it could have been air-dropped into position and survived the fall. There is, therefore, every hope that it remains intact – just waiting to be rediscovered. Volunteers wanted....