As a bristling polar wind shrieked off the bay, accelerating the velocity of three overflying skuas, I experienced an intense aura emanating from a headstone hewn from Edinburgh granite in Grytviken cemetery. Watched by a doe-eyed baby fur seal scratching against a tombstone, I felt a synthesis of everything I love about travelling: the power of a journey to transform your senses and the exultation of achieving a lifelong dream. In my reverie I fumbled in my jacket pocket, pulled out a silver hip flask of whiskey and, as custom dictates, raised a toast under South Georgia’s leaden skies: “To the Boss,” I mouthed. “To Sir Ernest Shackleton.”
It’s been 100 years since the explorer died on South Georgia in 1922. He’d returned to this gritty sub-Antarctic island, 1,300km north of Antarctica, for one final polar hurrah with old expeditionary chums, but on arrival he succumbed to a heart-attack, aged 47. South Georgia had been central to one of history’s most inspiring escapes when ‘the Boss’ led his crew to safety after their ship, Endurance (recently rediscovered sunken in the Weddell Sea), was crushed by ice.
Inspired by Shackleton’s life, I had long craved to see South Georgia. It had always hovered on my horizon like some faraway mythical place – a Shangri-La with penguins – so it was with some excitement that I joined the Greg Mortimer, a 104m-long ice-strengthened ship in Punta Arenas, Chile. First, we would sail south to Antarctica before looping northwards to South Georgia, following in the wake of Shackleton’s legendary 1914-16 Trans-Antarctic Expedition, one of the last gasps of the Heroic Age.
THE JOURNEY BEGINS
As we cast off into the Chilean fjords, I thought of the heading out in 1914, just as World War I was breaking out across Europe. Yet this part of the planet just has a way of drawing you back into the present. Nature here exerts a pull even more magnetic than that of the South Pole, and I soon lost myself watching
