Polar Crusader by Michael Smith

Author:Michael Smith [Smith, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857904911
Publisher: Birlinn

Fuchs took a more prosaic view, which more accurately reflected the dangerous finale of the trip. He declared that the 1929 expedition had been a ‘memorable baptism of ice’. Wordie stuck to the official line.

CHAPTER 16

HOPES DASHED

WORDIE’S LINKS WITH SHACKLETON WERE RESURRECTED IN THE early 1930s. Among the young men who approached Wordie for advice about Arctic exploration was Shackleton’s son, the 22-year-old Edward Shackleton, who was following his father’s footsteps onto the ice. Edward, an Oxford graduate, initially wanted to take a small party to Spitsbergen and went to Cambridge to see Wordie. Wordie told him that several other expeditions were expected in Spitsbergen that summer and urged him instead to switch his attention to Ellesmere Island (then known as Ellesmere Land) in the Canadian Arctic, where chunks of the territory were still unexplored. Shackleton gladly accepted the advice and sailed north in the summer of 1934. Unusually for university expeditions of the time, Shackleton’s party over-wintered in the region and returned in 1935 after a successful trip. ‘On an expedition,’ he wrote, ‘the mind is stimulated to a degree which in civilisation it may never attain.’

The Arctic was buzzing with activity in 1934, with Britain alone sending four separate expeditions, including a team under Martin Lindsay, which was crossing Greenland. Wordie, too, was heading north for the seventh time.

His reputation was now at its zenith and his expeditions and expertise begun to attract more attention. In the early 1930s his reputation on the international stage was confirmed when the respected McGill University of Montreal approached Wordie to become Vice-Chancellor. It was a tempting offer but Wordie turned down the opportunity to work abroad. Peter, his fifth child, was born in 1932 and Wordie always insisted that his children should be educated in Britain.

The 1934 expedition was somewhat untypical for Wordie. It was an uncharacteristically high-profile event, it afforded lavish advance press coverage and was followed closely at home through a series of regular despatches wired back from the ice. At five months, it was also likely to be the longest of his series of journeys to the Arctic. But it was also a disappointingly lacklustre affair, which was thwarted by poor weather and excessive ambition. Another feature was that it contained the lowest proportion of Cambridge men of any of his expeditions. Only five of the nine-man party – Baird, Paterson, Dalgety, Ritchie and Wordie himself – were associated with the university.

The geographical aims of the 1934 voyage were also a little more vague than his earlier expeditions, although the project did include a large programme of scientific work, ranging from geology and mapping to archaeology and ornithology. Wordie, characteristically precise and well-prepared, described the expedition’s overall plans as ‘an open programme’.

The expedition, perhaps more than any other led by Wordie, was a gamble from the start. For the first time he planned to explore the west coast of Greenland, past the northerly settlements at Upernavik and on to Cape York in the treacherous Melville Bay. One key

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