On Thursday 18 September at Unity Books Wellington we launched South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, the latest book from Charles Ferrall, an associate professor at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington. South by South offers fresh insights into Scott and Shackleton's Antarctic expeditions, with correspondence that shows the explorers' unique relationships with key figures from Aotearoa New Zealand. Managing Editor Ashleigh Young and author and academic Harry Ricketts spoke about South by South. Transcripts of their speeches are below.
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The Wonderful Charles Ferrall signing copies of his new book South by South
Kia ora koutou and a very warm welcome to this launch of South by South – a work of great scholarship and great storytelling – by the wonderful Charles Ferrall. My name’s Ashleigh Young and I’m an editor at Te Herenga Waka University Press, and I had a small hand in bringing this book into being. I think of Charlie as being the lead dog pulling the great sled through the snow whereas I am one of the smaller dogs somewhere in the middle of the pack, mostly just barking, and the first to be eaten.
I think sometimes when we think of Antarctic explorers – Scott, Shackleton, Mawson, Wild – we imagine them to be half human and half bear, grimy and grizzled, bearded and solitary, their toenails black, their hearts iced over. So deep into the past, and bracing themselves against such unimaginable conditions, that they are like the dummies you might see in one of those replica museums – more ideas and artefact than people. And yes. A number of the accounts and the photographs in South by South bear out that these were unusual men – unusually driven, unusually hardy, all with some variation on the thousand-yard stare. But in this rich, various, incredibly lively account of New Zealand’s involvement in the five expeditions of the early 1900s, Charles not only points to the moments of affection, delight, warmth and love shared between the explorers and with the New Zealanders supporting them, he also sheds light on what might’ve moved the explorers to their impossible endeavours, the cultural forces, including literature, that might’ve sparked some fire in them.
But greatness doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Great explorers need project managers. A big part of this book is the story of Joseph Kinsey, Charles Bowen and Leonard Tripp, working to keep the show somewhat on the road as blizzards pressed in, as there were broken legs and frostbitten hands and sudden deaths. They were liaising with the government, sorting out the fundraising, the publicity, the crucial stocking of the ships, figuring out many logistical details, and writing beautiful comforting letters. Charlie writes: ‘The behind-the-scenes work of the triumvirate of Bowen, Kinsey and Tripp almost rivalled in magnitude and complexity the actual adventures on the ice.’ I sometimes feel the same way about editors. This is a story about work – the beauty of this daily, diligent work that is folded into history and that allows greatness to happen. Drawing from letters, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, manuscripts, official correspondence, Charlie brings to life – in all its richly ordinary and strange daily detail – this momentous period of Antarctic and New Zealand history.
—Ashleigh Young
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Harry Ricketts waxing lyrical about the age of heroic exploration
Tēnā koutou tēnā koutou tēnā koutou katoa. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to be asked to launch this latest book by my friend and former colleague Charles Ferrall.
Up to now, when I thought of Antarctica in a literary context, I would think first of Irish poet Derek Mahon’s brilliant 1985 villanelle, ‘Antarctica’, which uses Oates’s famous exit line as its springboard and one of its refrains. Mahon’s poem opens:
‘I’m just going outside and may be some time.’
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous the sublime.
Closer to home, I would think of two wonderful local poetry collections: Chris Orsman’s South (1996) and Bill Sewell’s Erebus (1999). Now, I must add the book we’re launching today, Charlie’s South By South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $50). Here are some of the reasons you should all buy and read this fascinating book.
First, its subject matter. South By South expertly and compellingly chronicles the five British Empire Antarctic expeditions in the opening years of the last century. Just to remind you, these were: Scott in 1901–1904 on the Discovery; Shackleton in 1907–1909 on the Nimrod; Scott again in 1910–1913 on the Terra Nova; Mawson in 1911–1913 on the Aurora; and Shackleton again in 1914–17 on the Endurance. Mawson? Who was he? Read Charlie’s book and find out. So, if you have an interest in what one might call ‘extreme exploration’, this is the book for you. Climbing mountains is hard, but that’s a doddle to hauling a sledge for weeks over endless monotonous frozen wastes, getting frostbite, falling down crevasses, breaking bits of yourself, being unable to sleep, suffering mental distress, becoming a walking skeleton. They were bonkers!
But, second reason, these explorers were also extraordinary: extraordinarily gutsy, resilient, even high-minded. And this in part was because, as Charlie carefully, adroitly, teases out, these men – they were all men – saw themselves as belonging to the Empire family. Of course, most of us here, I imagine, feel that that was a very odd family indeed and not one we should now want to belong to or be associated with. But, as the famous opening of the novel The Go-Between has it, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ And Charlie’s book briefly teleports us to that particular foreign country and allows us to see a number of its inhabitants both in close-up and as part of a larger community, a community which to some extent saw itself as fired by heroic ideals and moved by what it saw as heroic sacrifice.
Third reason, and crucially for us, there is the New Zealand dimension. While the leaders of the expeditions were English in the case of Scott, Irish in the case of Shackleton and Australian in the case of Mawson, three absolutely key figures were New Zealanders: shipping magnate Joseph Kinsey, civil servant Charles Bowen and Wellington lawyer Leonard Tripp. All three played essential background roles in these expeditions, helping to raise money, influencing the powers that be, stirring up public attention and providing personal and municipal hospitality at the start and end of voyages. Amongst much else, this book gives us a vivid behind-the-scenes snapshot of early 20th-century New Zealand, its sense of itself and its sense of itself in the world.
Fourth reason, there’s page after page of amazing contemporary photographs, and these help to bring closer the central figures, their ships, all that ice. It’s a visual treasure trove.
Fifth, whatever impression we already have of main characters like Scott and Shackleton will definitely be enhanced and enriched. (Scott may well have been the casualty of bad blizzard luck rather than the poor planning sometimes attributed to him. Shackleton was definitely the better, more charismatic leader, but you wouldn’t want to lend him money.) However, I found myself just as intrigued by lesser known and unknown figures, several of whom were New Zealanders. These are revealed through liberal extracts quoted from letters, diaries and in some cases the books participants later wrote. For instance, there are the Robinson Crusoe-like comms oddballs on Macquarie Island, especially the Kiwi wireless-operator Arthur Sawyer.
There’s the day-dreaming Kiwi Leslie Whetter, whose own mother even warned Mawson not to take him on the Aurora expedition. There’s Shackleton’s captain, the better-known Frank Worsley, who wrote several books about the Endurance expedition and who should, Charlie claims, receive more credit than he's usually given for the remarkable rescue of the men left on Elephant Island. There’s the doggerel and parodies made up by the Kiwi Eric Webb and others.
The diaries contain boggling details. Lunch was at 5pm for those travelling for weeks on the ice to take measurements. Webb notes at the back of his diary what lunch comprised: ‘Butter 2ozs, chocolate 2ozs, Glaxo & sugar 3 ozs, whole biscuit 4½ ozs, (1 tea infusion)’. That’s it. Charlie comments that Webb’s diary ‘suggests that their daily intake was not much more than three thousand calories a day. On Ranulph Fiennes’s recent Antarctic expedition, which used tractors rather than man-hauling [sledges], it was estimated that each team member would require about six thousand calories a day.’ It’s a miracle any of them survived.
Sixth and last, though this list of prompts could go well into double figures, there are what I think of as Charlie’s interventions into the various narratives, as with that comment about the daily calorie intake. Much of the time he’s telling us the enthralling stories of these five main expeditions, although we do hear in passing about Amundsen’s Norwegian expedition (remember, he was the one who beat Scott to the Pole and got back to tell the tale); also about contemporary Japanese and German expeditions – as Charlie points out, a kind of imperial ‘scramble for Antarctica’ was going on, just as there was a ‘scramble for Africa’.
So, there’s Charlie’s narrative skill; his ability to distill huge amounts of information; to select telling extracts from letters, diaries and newspapers of the day; his interest in character-in-action; his bringing in of literary analogies and comparisons – Joseph Conrad’s novels, for instance and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – and there are also some lovely comic touches. So, of the Australian Mawson’s appeal to the New Zealand government for funding on the basis that his expedition would include a number of New Zealanders, Charlie dryly observes: ‘New Zealand did play second fiddle, but it was not quite as the dour New Zealand bridesmaid Madge to Australia’s Dame Edna.' After quoting the opening sentence of Frank Worsley’s book Shackleton’s Boat Journey – ‘The Weddell Sea might be described as the Antarctic extension of the South Atlantic Ocean’ – Charlie remarks: ‘possibly one of the dullest opening sentences ever written'.
So, those are just some of the reasons why you should immediately buy and read the entirely undull South By South, which will, I hope, become an indispensable book on the ‘heroic age of Antarctic exploration’. Well done, Charlie. Hoist anchor and set sail.
—Harry Ricketts
South by South by Charles Ferrall is available
here on our website and from all good bookstores.
