Shackleton's clothes - February 17, 2012

It really is feeling a lot like spring. I know I keep saying that but when you spend a mid-February day without a hat on, and wearing your less-than-a-parka coat, well... it feels like the early end of spring. I walked Anya this morning and again tonight.

We'll get more snow, I'm sure, but we're getting as much sunlight now as we did a just before Halloween. Now hang on, I thought the "cross quarters" were around the first of the month. Groundhogs Day/Candlemas. And we're 2 weeks past that now. Well, 365 day/4 = 91.25 days in a season, or about 46 in a half-season. 46 days after December 21 is February 4. So we split the difference....

We (Daniel and I) went to see the Omnitheater movie about Ernest Shackleton and his heroic resolution of the disastrous expedition to Antarctica. I won't repeat the story: go read one of the great books about it if you don't know the story. It was a good movie, better than the usual MacGillivray Freeman bombast (and we saw the MacGillivray Freeman cave movie right after, and that was filled with bombast. Whatever).

The story of the Shackleton Expedition tends to be told with a lot of quite true emphasis on morale and the human spirit. It is an amazing story. But as I've been reading and writing about winter clothes, I wondered: did Shackleton dress his expedition better than, for example, Robert Falcon Scott, whose expedition perished only a couple years previously. The comparisons between Scott and the simultaneous (and successful) Amundsen expedition have been examined in detail (nice summary here), and one of the elements is that Scott dressed his party in waterproof outers and wool, while Amundsen dressed his party in furs.

What about Shackleton? a few years later, as he was involved in an operation against newly Bolshevik Russia,

Shackleton's official job description was "Staff officer in charge of Arctic equipment". In all actuality, he was a glorified storekeeper. He had done most of his work in London and the outfits he now provided were doubtful; his own expeditions had been struggles against poorly designed equipment and clothing. The American troops in the region discarded the Shackleton clothing and boots and reverted to their own. -from South-Pole.com, by the American Society of Polar Philatelists

And this article on changing polar-expedition clothing patterns (which is fascinating in itself) says Shackleton had the same bad judgment during the 1900-1904 Antarctic expedition. (really a great reference to stumble across: nice section on Inuit clothing, and even a bibliography).

Shackleton's own 1920 book on the expedition, South, doesn't seem to talk about clothing details at all, that I can tell, though it is a good read.

The question remains: what were Shackleton and his men wearing, and how did they all survive in it?