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Joseph Kinsey is not a name many of us know – or not as well as we know the name Robert Falcon Scott. But from his base in Christchurch, Kinsey – book and art collector, philanthropist, science enthusiast, businessman – forged deep connections with the Antarctic expeditions and the explorers themselves through his tireless work as the agent for various expeditions. Two other New Zealanders also formed close friendships: Charles Bowen, a former politician, and Wellington lawyer Leonard Tripp, to whom Shackleton declared: ‘I love you as David and Jonathan loved.’
South by South tells the story of New Zealand’s role in ‘the Heroic Age’, that wave of exploration beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in which men set out to traverse the continent of Antarctica and, if they survived, to bring home their findings. The members of this New Zealander triumvirate were all believers in the British Empire, but the southern voyages were to an uninhabited land.
South by South brings to light many letters, newspaper articles, and pieces of official correspondence, much of which has not been published before, during the five expeditions of 1901–1916: the Discovery, Nimrod, Terra Nova, Aurora, and Endurance. In particular, Scott’s letters to Kinsey and Shackleton’s to Tripp tell of their hope, despair, exhaustion, and deep gratitude for their friendship. What they and the explorers wrote was influenced by nineteenth-century adventure stories which conveyed the Imperialist ideals of the time. If the impending conflict of 1914–18 was a very ‘literary war’, this was a very literary exploration.
Charles Ferrall is an associate professor at Te Herenga Waka–Victoria University of Wellington. Among his books are Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics (2001); The Trials of Eric Mareo (2002), co-written with Rebecca Ellis; East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination (2006), co-edited with Paul Millar and Keren Smith; Juvenile Literature and British Society 1850–1950 (2009), co-written with Anna Jackson; Henry Lawson in New Zealand (2012); How We Remember: New Zealanders and the First World War (2014), co-edited with Harry Ricketts; and Remembering Gallipoli: Interviews with New Zealand Gallipoli Veterans (2015), co-edited with Christopher Pugsley.
Cover photograph: The ship Discovery leaving Lyttelton Harbour, 1901. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
Cover design: Spencer Levine
