A book from one of the first Antarctic explorers has been repatriated to Scott’s Discovery hut — carried there by some young explorers.
The journey was a chance for passionate New Zealanders, including cancer survivor Jake Bailey, to rediscover our past on the southern-most continent of Antarctica.
Bailey told 1News: “I don’t know if it’s possible to entirely kind of comprehend what that was going to be like for us, until we were there.
“It was a profoundly powerful experience,” he said.
Bailey was one of eight young Kiwi and Australian explorers, between the age of 16 and 35, tackling icy seas in Antarctica on a month-long voyage.
“You see 3/4 of a million penguins on a beach, and you try to comprehend that and put that into terms,” he said.
Canterbury Museum conservation technician Louise Piggin said: “You really feel that stepping back in time.”
The group followed in the footsteps of pioneers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott as they repatriated some special cargo.
The artefact — a fragile adventure novel, a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas — was gifted to the Antarctic Heritage Trust by an anonymous donor.
The book was a little worse or wear, originally published in the mid-1800s.
It is missing its cover and a few pages and has fingerprint smears and the trust said it “smells strongly of the seal blubber that fuelled stoves and lamps used by the heroic era explorers.”
The young explorers have now officially returned it to the hut.
“I think when it comes to the huts, in particular, and the history down there … it’s the first time I’ve really understood what it means to talk about a weight of history,” said Bailey.
Piggin agreed.
“It’s an incredibly unique experience because you kind of step through the door and you suddenly [have a] sensory overload [on the] kind of smells and sights and how the air feels.”
“And you suddenly feel there’s a place of shelter away from this kind of extreme environment outside,” Piggin said.
She was no stranger to artefacts examined and seen in a museum.
“I was working in a conservation lab and you kind of see items in isolation because they come in for a specific treatment.”
But this intrepid experience has delivered a new perspective.
“It shows how important it is to know the stories behind individual items and the provenance behind it.”
“People talk about it as a time capsule that you step into those places and it’s like stepping back in time and it really did feel like that, in a way that, I think, is hard to often create maybe in a gallery or in a museum setting.”
