In a corner of Herbert Ponting’s old darkroom at Captain Scott’s hut on Cape Evans, Ross Island, conservators from New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust found a small box of cellulose nitrate negatives frozen into a solid clump. Once separated and printed, they gave up 22 images nobody had seen for about a century: photographs taken by Ernest Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party between 1914 and 1917. The Trust announced the find in late December 2013.
The Ross Sea Party: Shackleton’s depot-laying team
The Ross Sea Party was the second half of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. While Shackleton sailed on Endurance to the Weddell Sea, intending to cross the continent on foot, a second team under Aeneas Mackintosh was to land on the opposite side and lay a chain of food and fuel depots across the Great Ice Barrier (today’s Ross Ice Shelf) towards the Beardmore Glacier.
The party’s ship, SY Aurora, left Sydney on 15 December 1914 and reached Ross Island on 16 January 1915. The men set up their shore base in Scott’s Terra Nova hut at Cape Evans, and used his older Discovery hut at Hut Point as a staging post for journeys south.
Stranded at Cape Evans when the Aurora drifted away
On the night of 7 May 1915 a gale tore Aurora from her moorings off Cape Evans. Locked into the pack ice, the ship drifted north for months and only broke free on 12 February 1916, finally reaching New Zealand on 2 April. Ten men were left ashore with little of the equipment and food that was still on board.
They laid the depots anyway, improvising clothing and gear from what Scott’s expedition had left in the huts. The sledging was brutal. The Reverend Arnold Spencer-Smith, the party’s chaplain and photographer, died of scurvy and exhaustion on the Barrier on 9 March 1916. On 8 May 1916 Mackintosh and Victor Hayward set out across the sea ice from Hut Point to Cape Evans and were never seen again. Aurora returned on 10 January 1917 and carried the seven survivors back to New Zealand.
What the recovered photographs show
The Trust identified people and landmarks around McMurdo Sound in the prints. They include:
- Alexander Stevens, the Scottish geologist who served as the party’s chief scientist. He stayed at Cape Evans during the 1916 sledging season to keep weather records and watch for the ship.
- Big Razorback Island and Tent Island in McMurdo Sound.
- The view south along Hut Point Peninsula.
- Mount Erebus seen from the west, and sea ice afloat in the Sound.
The photographer is not known for certain. The Trust suggests Spencer-Smith, the expedition’s official photographer, took at least some of them.
Conserving century-old nitrate negatives
Cellulose nitrate film was standard in the early 20th century, and it is fragile: it shrinks, sticks together and decays, and it is flammable. The Cape Evans box had spent decades frozen in the hut, which slowed the decay but fused the sheets into a single block. The negatives were taken to New Zealand, where conservators carefully separated and cleaned the sheets and made prints from them. The stains and torn edges seen in the images are damage to the film itself.
“It’s an exciting find and we are delighted to see them exposed after a century,” said Nigel Watson, the Trust’s executive director, when the photographs were released.
The find is part of the Trust’s long-running work to conserve the expedition huts of Scott and Shackleton on Ross Island, which still hold thousands of original objects. Read more in our account of the recovered Antarctic negatives, and for a modern family journey across the same continent, watch An Education.
Related reading
- McMurdo Sound: Ice, Wildlife and Antarctic Research
- Kalle Ljung’s Antarctica Film: A Sailing Journey Seen from Above
- Martin Bailey’s Antarctic Icebergs: Natural Forms and Imagined Buildings
- Blood Falls, Antarctica: Iron-Rich Brine at Taylor Glacier
- Gentoo Penguins at Neko Harbour: When a Glacier View Changes Scale
- West Antarctic Glacier Retreat: What the 2014 Research Actually Found
- Antarctic Condition 1 Weather: The View through a Station Door
- Antarctic Icebergs in Motion: Drift, Collapse and Meltwater
Sources
- Antarctic Heritage Trust: Ross Sea Party photos
- Wikipedia: Ross Sea party
- NPR, 30 December 2013
- Photographs: Antarctic Heritage Trust; expedition photographer uncertain.
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