"Better a live donkey than a dead lion." Kerryman Mike Barry knows better than most now how Sir Ernest Shackleton must have felt when he wrote these words to his wife almost a century ago. Shackleton was within 97 miles of becoming the first man to reach the South Pole when he and his companions were forced to retreat on January 8th,1909.
Barry, who completed that journey late last month, believes that both Shackleton and Kerryman Tom Crean would have succeeded in their respective attempts if they knew they had to go no further on reaching their target. "We didn't have to retrace our steps, whereas they had no choice," a diffident and slightly embarrassed Barry told The Irish Times, shortly before Tralee Urban District Council honoured his achievement as the first Irishman to walk to 90 degrees South.
"Back then, they would have had far inferior clothing, food and gear, no satellite navigation, and no prospect of a plane to fly them out when they reached their destination. At that time, it was a much more serious undertaking," Barry says. Yet the physical challenge would have been much the same, and the Kerry climber didn't have the benefit of a nice dry bed on reaching the Amundsen-Scott Research Station after his 51-day trek.
"We got a tour of the base - now being rebuilt - and we had a cigarette or two, and then we pitched our tents outside. You can understand it. The scientists have work to do, and they can't be entertaining visitors all the time." As if they get that many callers. The Kerry climber and wind energy consultant was a member of one of a handful of international groups attempting the trek across to the South Pole from Hercules inlet in west Antarctica over the past couple of months. He estimates that he lost almost a stone-and-a-half weight during the 730-mile hike, led by the US/Canadian female explorer Matty McNair.
Apart from satrugis, or wind-sculpted snow columns, blizzards, high winds and general deprivation, the five-strong group had to put up with each other's company a very close quarters. Barry believes he was able to "hold his own" in conversations with his three British colleagues, where recurring themes were "Monty Python, Rowan Atkinson and military manoeuvres. . ." The Irish climber may not have made too much of his own manoeuvres - up high mountains, including Everest and Aconcagua, and most recently the Lemon Mountains in Greeland - and across Antarctic waters during the 1997 South Aris endeavour. Led by sailor Paddy Barry (no relation) and climber Frank Nugent, South Aris attempted to retrace the famous Shackleton/Crean rescue across the Southern Ocean after Shackleton's ship became trapped in pack ice on his transantarctic attempt in 1915.
Mike Barry was one of the crew on board the tiny replica lifeboat, named Tom Crean, which capsized three times in storm force conditions before the skipper had to take the reluctant decision to abandon the sea venture and focus on the land trek across South Georgia.
Barry's fellow adventurer Frank Nugent was already embarking on his own personal journey on their safe return. This time it didn't involve hauling out charts, plotting routes and packing fish barrels and rucksacks for major expeditions. Nugent and his wife, Carol, decided to devote time to researching the lost history of some of this island's great adventurers - several of whom have already been put back on the map by the maritime historian Dr John de Courcy Ireland.
"I suppose I had been reared like so many others to believe that the Irish who travelled abroad - or were exported - from this island were navvies and the like," Nugent explains. As he records in his book Seek the Frozen Lands, there were several very practical reasons for Irish involvement in polar exploits in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, as the challenge was still open to find a navigable sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, now known as the North-West Passage, and to reach the South Pole and traverse the "last" pristine continent.
Nugent notes that a northerner, Arthur Dobbs of Carrickfergus, Co Antrim (1689-1765), was the first Irishman to make a significant contribution to Arctic exploration by initiating and supporting two voyages in search of the North-West passage.
Edward Bransfield of Ballinacurra, Cork, was one of the earliest to put his name on a map, literally, when he became the first man to sight part of mainland Antarctica.
Francis Crozier of Banbridge, Co Down was to become commander of the HMS Terror, which discovered Mount Erebus in Antarctica in 1841 - and named an island after the Irish hydrographer Francis Beaufort, associated with the famous wind measurement scale. Crozier's last voyage was a second-in-command on the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find that elusive North-West Passage in 1845.
Irishmen Robert McClure from Wexford, Leopold McClintock from Dundalk, Co Louth, and Tipperary-born Henry Kellett were all involved in searches for Franklin, Crozier and crew, and Nugent has traced many more records of Irishmen involved in such exploits. Will he have to do an update?
"No, Shackleton's death in 1922 seemed like the natural conclusion,"he says. "So many people are going off on trips now that it is far more difficult to classify genuine exploration."
Seek the Frozen Lands: Irish Polar Explorers 1740-1922, by Frank Nugent, is published by the Collins Press, and the author is currently giving a slide show and lecture tour, which continues next Monday, February 16th, in Tralee Public Library at 8 p.m., hosted by the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society; in Limerick on Thursday, February 19th (venue to be confirmed); in Waterford Sailing Club, Dunmore East, on Friday, February 20th at 8 p.m.; and in St Kevin's Church, Hollywood, Co Wicklow, on Friday, February 27th, at 8 p.m.