Shackleton's Aurora

Further to my last post re Greg Mortimer finding Mawson's food dump, here is a review of one of the books exploring the fate of Shackleton's Ross Sea party.

Shackleton’s forgotten Argonauts by Lennard Bickel
A handful of starving, half frozen wretches, marooned on the ice, made the most horrendous sledge march in polar history in a cause of the highest nobility and the utmost futility. The story of these 10 men and their feats was overshadowed by the saga of the “Endurance”, and their self-sacrifice became a footnote in history.
A local footnote is that the youngest team member was Dick Richards, born at Bendigo he was a teacher at the Ballarat Technical School.
Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition planned to cross the entire Antarctic continent. To achieve this goal, he needed a second party on the other side of the continent to lay supply depots which would be used by his “Endurance” team.

The Minna Bluff Depot, the major supply depot left for Shackleton

This “Aurora” team were committed to laying food depots across the Ross Ice Shelf to the foot of the Beardmore Glacier. Due to a blizzard, their supply ship “Aurora”, still with most of the provisions aboard, was swept out to sea and was unable to return. These castaway men had little more than the clothes they wore, were dependent on the discarded supplies from past expeditions, had faulty equipment and poor shelter. Yet they marched almost 2,000 miles and spent 10 months trekking, through 2 winters, on the ice laying supplies weighing thousands of pounds, which they badly needed for their own survival. They suffered the worst privations, and some suffered the ultimate fate.
The cruellest irony is that Shackleton’s team never arrived, so the precious supplies are still there today under the snow – waiting.