Tom Crean Antarctic hero

An expedition to find the wreck of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship ‘Endurance’, long lost in Antarctic ice, successfully located the vessel, wondrously preserved 3,000 metres deep.

When ‘Endurance’ was trapped in ice in 1915, the crew managed to travel in three small boats to nearby Elephant island.

From there, Shackleton and two others sailed across 800 miles in an open boat, in some of the worst weather in the world, before arriving in South Georgia and raising the alarm.

The help they obtained there led to the successful rescue of the entire crew. Central to that mission was the heroic Tom Crean, from Anaschaul in Kerry’s Dingle peninsula.

Tom Crean was an accidental polar explorer.

He had joined the Royal Navy and 1901 found himself on naval duties in New Zealand. At that time, Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ship ‘Discovery’ was heading south on a reconnaissance mission.

While docked for repairs in New Zealand, a member of Scott’s crew deserted and the Captain saw in Crean some of the qualities needed for the arduous challenges ahead.

Some years later Crean was among the party that accompanied Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole, although he was not chosen to form part of the group for the last push to the Pole.

Scott, of course, discovered that the Norwegian Amundsen had got there first. When Scott’s return was delayed, Crean led the group that found Scott and his colleagues dead in their tents.

When Shackleton came to make his own expedition he already knew the admirable qualities of the Kerryman. Even after their terrifying voyage in mountainous seas to arrive on South Georgia, these seamen had to become mountaineers, for they discovered they had to cross a mountain range over 6,000 feet high to get to the whaling station.

When they eventually arrived, they were barely recognisable as human beings.

When Shackleton came to write of that episode he recorded that he had the strange feeling that there were not three men on that journey, but four.

He said nothing to the other two, but one of them remarked to him, ‘Boss, I had the curious feeling on the march that there was another person with us.’

And apparently the third man said the same thing.

The Old Testament book of Psalms includes a cluster of ‘Songs of Ascents’, songs sung by pilgrims ascending to Jerusalem for Passover.

The most famous of them celebrates God’s guardian care, and includes the promise, ‘The sun will not harm you by day nor the moon by night’(Psalm 121;6).

The peril of sunstroke in the blistering sun is obvious enough, but the reference to the moon may refer to mental distress, for it is from the word for moon that we derive the word ‘lunacy’.

In any event, the reference is to God’s comprehensive care, by day and night.

It was something which Shackleton’s beleaguered companions found to be true.