Tim Saunders
South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration by Charles Ferrall (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 324pp, $50
In December 1909, Robert Falcon Scott hired a young man named James Mackintosh Bell to join his planned expedition to Antarctica aboard the Terra Nova. It was a dream job for Mackintosh Bell, who had just secured a position with the New Zealand Geological Survey in Wellington. He was a man who sought adventure, with plans to travel the world and experience everything life had to offer. Even his recent marriage wasn’t going to stop him.
Mackintosh Bell had married Katherine Mansfield’s sister Vera in September. It was not an easy engagement—several people tried to warn him to pull out before it was too late, citing his future sister-in-law’s reputation. But the wedding went ahead, and within months Mackintosh Bell was planning to leave his wife in New Zealand as he travelled south to the great unknown. There are claims that Mackintosh Bell is the unnamed protagonist in Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘A Dill Pickle’, first published in 1917 before appearing in her collection Bliss and Other Stories in 1920. It portrays Mackintosh Bell as egocentric, a man more interested in his ego and adventures than his romantic obligations.
As it was, the New Zealand government blocked Mackintosh Bell’s appointment aboard the Terra Nova, on the grounds that his geological knowledge was needed more at home than abroad. Had he sailed with Scott, Mackintosh Bell would have witnessed one of the greatest stories to emerge from Antarctic exploration’s Heroic Age, and he would have been one of a handful of New Zealanders directly involved in the golden era of exploration. It is these New Zealanders, whose stories have been largely eclipsed by the British explorers and their exploits, that Charles Ferrall brings to life in South by South: New Zealand and the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration.
South by South examines how New Zealand’s involvement in Antarctic exploration was driven primarily by geography and a thirst for adventure. The Heroic Age, which stretched from Scott’s expedition aboard the Discovery in 1901 to Shackleton’s death aboard the Quest in 1922, encompassed a period when New Zealand was beginning to develop its own national identity. Explorers were the celebrities of the day, treated like pop stars wherever they went. As Ferrall points out: ‘New Zealand, the most remote of the British colonies, was the closest country to the Antarctic. Supporting, even feting, the explorers was one way in which New Zealanders could affirm both their British identity and privileged location.’
It seemed the country could not get enough of the explorers from England—a large proportion of Christchurch travelled to Lyttelton in 1901 just to step aboard Scott’s Discovery and experience the intrepid explorers firsthand. Many more put their hands up to join the crew. This desire for adventure and excitement was a trait that would ingrain itself into the national character, and tragically lead to thousands of young New Zealanders being killed in World War I just a few years later.
The exploration frenzy captured the imagination of ordinary New Zealanders from all walks of life. Shackleton received more than 500 applications across New Zealand and Australia to join the crew of the Nimrod in 1907, with 60 arriving in a single day from New Zealand alone. Not everything went well for New Zealanders—naval rating William Weller returned home from Scott’s Discovery expedition only to attempt suicide by poison, while many others reported personality clashes and leadership problems across the expeditions. Ferrall’s research has uncovered personal letters that contradict the official versions of events, providing a fascinating account of what really happened.
It is not easy to write a book about the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration these days without repeating what has been written before. The exploits of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson fill countless tomes, often based on hearsay and myth. But in researching South by South, Ferrall—an associate professor at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington—has approached the subject from a uniquely New Zealand perspective. An academic who specialises in early twentieth-century British literature, Ferrall was researching Katherine Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, when he came across a series of letters between Murry and Joseph Kinsey, a Christchurch-based shipping magnate and photographer. This discovery led to a trail of correspondence between Kinsey and explorers such as Scott and Shackleton, letters that fired Ferrall’s imagination and strengthened his belief that New Zealand’s role in the history of Antarctic exploration deserved to be told.
As Ferrall writes: ‘Antarctic history has been told from the point of view of Britain. But most of the ships left and returned to Lyttelton, and it’s from the point of view of that port and other towns like it that this story is written.’
Joseph Kinsey worked tirelessly in New Zealand to facilitate many of the expeditions of the Heroic Age. The stories we are familiar with—the polar adventures that Apsley Cherry-Garrard referred to as ‘at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised’—would not have been possible without Kinsey, and Ferrall has at last brought him out of the shadows.
South by South is the first major account of New Zealand’s role in the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration since Leslie Quartermain’s excellent books of the 1960s. Ferrall has meticulously studied the politics of the time to convey the obstacles created by both government and individuals, as well as the difficulties of provisioning expeditions with food and supplies sourced from New Zealand. Through diaries, newspapers and letters, South by South offers a snapshot of the Heroic Age’s attitudes, and it is the personal stories of those involved that make the book such a fascinating read. There are accounts of people who have never been written about in detail before, such as Arthur Sawyer, who was stranded on Macquarie Island by Mawson to establish a radio base capable of providing meteorological information to New Zealand. Then there is Clarence Hare, who worked as an office boy before running away to sea and joining Scott’s Discovery expedition. These intimate histories, alongside many other New Zealanders Ferrall has researched, offer a completely new angle on stories we thought we knew.
In South by South, Ferrall also examines the influence of literature on the expeditions, exploring the significance of books to the mindset of the sailors and scientists. Britain’s literacy rates had risen in the late 1800s, after education became compulsory up to the age of 14, and many of those who went south wrote in their diaries about what they were reading.
If the First World War was a ‘very literary war’, then the Heroic Age was a very literary exploration. Shackleton wrote poetry and was fond of quoting Robert Browning at functions … On one sledging expedition, New Zealander Eric Webb records that one of their number had been ‘deep’ in the first western, Owen Wister’s Virginian, another had just finished A Christmas Carol, and as they were sledging, one of them was ‘spouting Kipling all the way’.
Literature was important to the explorers, a source of escapism and inspiration. Victor Campbell, first officer on Scott’s Terra Nova, wrote of the books and papers they took on sledging expeditions, despite the critical importance of keeping sledges light: ‘Recreations consisted of lectures and the reading aloud of our two books David Copperfield and Life of Stevenson.’ The memorial cross on Observation Hill erected for Scott’s Polar Party is inscribed with lines from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: ‘To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ Kinsey was especially interested in literature, and hosted authors such as Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw at his house.
With no other form of entertainment on the ice, books and skit performances became a way to boost morale. Ferrall has also researched the poems and parodies polar explorers composed to fill the long and tedious hours of sunless winter, or while sledging across barren ice. These songs and ditties provide a fascinating insight into the mental state of the explorers, and reveal a side of exploration that is usually ignored. Most of the poems roasted and lampooned other members of the crew, often in darkly comic ways—a form of gallows humour not uncommon among people facing danger.
These writings were always comic, a form of entertainment, and much like the diaries, never delved into the kinds of psychology that such of their contemporaries as Joyce and Woolf were beginning to explore. This was the territory of the working-class music hall, of middle-class operetta (such as Gilbert and Sullivan), and the light verse so popular at the time. It also resembled the songs, often obscene, that would soon be sung in the trenches of the First World War.
Following the Heroic Age, New Zealand continued to play a significant role in Antarctic exploration. Richard E. Byrd and Lincoln Ellsworth launched their aircraft expeditions from Dunedin and Wellington, and Sir Edmund Hillary would eventually drive a tractor to the pole. The Heroic Age was superseded by the Mechanical Age, and the romantic notion of battling against nature and the Earth gave way to expeditions designed to advance scientific knowledge. The continent that had once been a site of international rivalry became a place where nations worked together. The end of the Heroic Age marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
Yet Antarctica remains a place haunted by the past. I once asked Sir Edmund Hillary what attracted him to Antarctica. He thought for a moment, the hubbub of voices and clinking glasses thick in a crowded room. ‘The silence,’ he said. ‘And the ghosts.’
South by South is a book steeped in ghosts. The Big Ice, with its bare landscape and gale-force winds, seems to summon spirits. Many people speak of visiting the explorers’ huts and feeling their presence, as if they had only just popped outside and might return at any moment. Shackleton’s crew spoke of a mysterious funeral chant as the Endurance was crushed and sank below the ice, and Shackleton himself wrote of a strange visitation while trekking to safety across the mountains of South Georgia.
Perhaps the ghosts are trying to remind us of lives shaped and lost on the frozen continent. That beneath the big stories lie many little stories lost in the noise. Charles Ferrall has reclaimed these stories, and finally given the ghosts a voice.
TIM SAUNDERS has had poetry and short stories published in Turbine | Kapohau, takahē, Landfall Tauraka, Poetry NZ Yearbook, Headland and Flash Frontier. He won the 2018 Mindfood Short Story Competition and was shortlisted for the 2021 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He was joint winner of the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize in 2023. His books include the memoirs This Farming Life and Under a Big Sky.
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