The South Pole – Reaching explorers’ Holy Grail

IF ALL goes to plan, and hopefully it will, a group of Irish adventurers will today safely reach the South Pole, an achievement that once represented the Holy Grail for generations of explorers.

It was once a challenge suffused with mystery, national pride, stiff upper lips and physical challenges with the potential for the most lethal consequences. Less than a century later the circumstances surrounding polar travel are completely different.

Today’s small group — including Dr Clare O’Leary, who will become the first Irishwoman to walk to the South Pole should the group’s ambitions be realised — completed an arduous trek of 1,100km over 55 days while man-hauling a sledge weighing 150kg.

The Beyond Endurance exhibition has the relative luxury of satellite phones and the internet to communicate with support services. These reassuring facilities would have made one of the most famous and heroic voyages of polar exploration unnecessary.

In April, 1916 Sir Ernest Shackleton, Captain Frank Worsley and four companions — including Munstermen Tom Crean and Tim McCarthy — made the epic open-boat voyage of 1,480 km from Elephant Island to South Georgia. The objective was to organise a rescue party for the stranded crew of the Endurance.

They were forced to confront some of the most dangerous seas in the world — without even basic radio — after the Endurance sank in the pack ice of the Weddell Sea in November of 1915. Over the next four months, the men camped on the sea ice as the currents drew them ever northward.

Although Shackleton and his crew manoeuvred the three boats across the frigid waters to nearby Elephant Island, they were still far from civilisation and in grave danger of succumbing to the harsh Antarctic climate.

Today’s adventures are not likely to be so imperilled, a call on the satellite phone and the rescue party is on the way. Not quite a Baywatch rescue party in vivid but sparsely worn red, but not 1,480km across raging, freezing seas in an open boat either.

Though technology has taken the great risks of old from very many fields of human endeavour, today’s travellers can do no more than confront and try to conquer the circumstance they find themselves in. Those who do are to be congratulated, but it does, once again, ask an unavoidable question: are there any great challenges of exploration on land left to test the contemporary adventurers’ courage and endurance?