An adventure to the South Pole (Inn)

16 January 2015 - 18:07 By © Richard Holmes
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Richard Holmes raises a glass in a pub once owned by one of the world's greatest polar explorers

January 18 1915 was not a good day aboard the ship Endurance. Today, 100 years ago, the ship on which Sir Ernest Shackleton was sailing to Antarctica for his ambitious Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition became trapped in the shifting pack ice.

For another nine months, Endurance would drift in the ice before being crushed and sinking into the depths of the Weddell Sea.

Shackleton's expedition may have failed there, but his epic journey from the pack ice to uninhabited Elephant Island, followed by a desperate passage across the Southern Ocean to the whaling station on South Georgia, was to become one of the most celebrated acts of survival in history.

At his side throughout was an Irishman named Tom Crean.

Taking part in three of the four major Antarctic expeditions of the 20th century, "few men made a greater contribution to the annals of Antarctic exploration than Tom Crean, and few were more highly respected by his celebrated fellow explorers than the unassuming Kerryman," writes biographer Michael Smith.

After two trips with Robert Falcon Scott, who famously perished in his tent after being beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen, and an Antarctic odyssey with Shackleton, Crean remains an unsung hero of polar exploration.

Born in the County Kerry village of Annascaul in 1877, Crean's name is immortalised on maps of the deep south. Mount Crean rises to 2630m in Victoria Land, Antarctica, while the 6km Crean Glacier runs into Antarctic Bay off the island of South Georgia.

And then there's the South Pole Inn (pictured below).

 

Which is why I find myself driving along the Dingle Peninsula on my way to one of the most famous pubs in Ireland, a country never short of a watering hole. The landscape is as far removed from Antarctica as you could imagine and, on a drizzly autumn day, this southwestern corner of Ireland is living up to every postcard cliché. The land is a giant chessboard of green pastures with stone walls separating one sheep-filled field from the next. To my left, the Slieve Mish Mountains that form the backbone of the Dingle Peninsula soar into the clouds.

It is a staggeringly beautiful place that Tomás Ó Croidheáin left behind, squeezing into a borrowed suit to run away to sea at the age of 16. When he returned in 1920, he'd had his fill of ice and sea, so found a wife and set about running a pub.

"Tom Crean had this pub built on the existing foundations of a much older pub that was falling down," says Eileen Percival, who grew up in the village and returned 15 years ago to run the South Pole Inn, leased from a distant relative of Crean's. "Although really, it's more of a museum than a pub."

Photos of Crean's craggy face stare out from the rough stone walls and dozens of images document his exploits.

There, above the fireplace, HMS Endurance is stuck fast in the ice. And there is Crean alongside the pony named Bones, which he led on a 650km trek across the Great Ice Barrier on Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.

Another image shows the cramped and crowded conditions on the ship Discovery, a reminder that in the early 1900s, Crean was essentially a second-class citizen under the British class system.

The Polar Medals he earned for his exploits are today displayed in the Tom Crean Room at the Kerry County Museum in the town of Tralee, along with the silver teapot Shackleton sent Crean as a wedding gift. A more fitting tribute is hung on the walls of the inn, the lyrics to The Ballad of Tom Crean, a popular folk song.

Sitting at a cosy corner table in the warm convivial pub, it's not hard to imagine it as the sort of place Crean would have dreamt of during the cold dark Antarctic winters. While today Crean is hailed as a local hero, when he returned from the ice he made little mention of his adventures. He packed away his medals and rarely spoke of his time in the south.

"People would travel some distance to visit the pub and discuss his exploits over a pint of stout, but Crean would not be drawn," writes Smith.

Instead, he would pass his days on the stone bridge a few steps from the pub, chatting with locals. Today, a statue of the explorer holding a clutch of husky puppies stands in a small memorial garden across the road from the inn and he lies buried with his wife and young daughter in the family tomb in the hills just above Annascaul.

After he'd dodged glaciers, pack ice, frostbite and starvation, in the end it was a simple infection from appendicitis that killed Crean in July 1938, at the age of 61.

The Ballinacourty burial ground is a peaceful spot beneath the Slieve Mish Mountains. A few steps from his grave, the Annascaul River flows down the hill, past the South Pole Inn and out to sea.

"Home is the sailor, home from the sea," reads the inscription on Crean's tomb.

There's no shortage of fine pubs in Ireland, but few have as charming a history as the South Pole Inn.

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