The Lost Men (SOLD)

mixed media, 2013

6.5” x 6.5” x 2

Years ago, after seeing the series ‘Shackleton’, I was gifted an equally inspiring book, ‘The Lost Men’, by Kelly Tyler-Lewis. This small piece was the result of my first reading. It will not be the last.

In 1914, as Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed on the Endurance to undertake the first crossing of Antarctica, a second crew sailed for the opposite side of the continent. This unsung crew landed with a mission to lay supply depots for Shackleton’s planned crossing of the continent. On May 7, 1915, their ship, the Aurora, was pulled from its moorings and disappeared in a severe winter gale. Stranded with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, these heroic men fulfilled their shattering task – trekking a total of 1,356 miles with loaded sledges to lay the needed depots for Shackleton’s party. The privations they endured – starvation, snow-blindness, loss of sled dogs, scurvy, frostbite, blizzards – were paralyzingly hopeless. That they completed their impossible task is unimaginable.

That they have been forgotten by history is unforgivable.

The men of the Ross Sea party: Aeneas Macintosh, Ernest Joyce, Arnold Spencer-Smith, Irvine Gaze, Alexander Stevens, Richard Richards, John Lachlan Cope, Keith Jack, Victor Hayward, Ernest Wild

The men of the Aurora: Joseph Stenhouse, Leslie Thomson, Alfred Larkman, C. Donnelly, James Paton, Clarence Mauger, Sydney Atkin, Arthur Downing, William Kavanagh, “Shorty” Warren, Charles Glidden, Harold Shaw, S. Grady, William Mugridge, Howard Ninnis, Lionel Hooke, Emile d’Anglade, Edward Wise