Author shares untold story of Shackleton epic
Tom Dalton, Batesville Herald Tribune : The moment of truth for the “lost men” likely came soon after they were put ashore in Antarctica and returned days later to find their ship, the Aurora, was gone. It had broken loose from its moorings in a gale, leaving them stranded with few supplies in a desolate, frozen land.
The 10 men went to Antarctica in 1914 as part of the 28-man crew on a supply ship. They had come to help famed explorer Ernest Shackleton, who traveled separately on the ship Endurance, during his historic 1,700-mile crossing of the continent. But now, suddenly and unexpectedly, they had been cut off and faced their own fight for survival.
It was then that something extraordinary happened. Rather than worry about themselves, they worried about Shackleton.
“They had a meeting about it, and the men decided unilaterally” to continue their mission to set up food and fuel depots for Shackleton, said Kelly Tyler-Lewis, the Salem author of “The Lost Men: The Harrowing Saga of Shackleton’s Ross Sea Party.” “They just had this sense of honor and decency. They had promised to do this.”
A Maryland native who went to Harvard College, Tyler-Lewis and her husband have lived in Salem for more than a year. They moved here from England so she could be near her New York publisher, Viking Penguin.
A former visiting scholar at the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University in England, she won an Emmy award in 2003 as writer-producer of the television documentary “Shackleton’s Voyage of Endurance,” for the PBS series “NOVA.”
Tyler-Lewis worked on “The Lost Men,” her first book, for more than four years, traveling to Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. She searched school files, census records and genealogies. She was told there were only three known diaries from the 28 men aboard the Aurora and that most of the photographs had been destroyed. After a journey of thousands of miles and countless hours, she discovered 16 diaries and photos nobody knew existed.
In Port Chalmers, New Zealand, for example, she made a remarkable find in the most unlikely place — the Port Authority.
“They actually said, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s a cardboard box upstairs with glass lantern slides of the ship,’” she said. “And it was actually slides of the Aurora and the men when they came back to port.”
As she read the diaries and researched the lives, Tyler-Lewis said she felt this awesome responsibility to tell the story of the “lost men,” a tale that had never been told before, or at least not in this much detail.
“It was a real privilege,” she said, “to stumble into an unexplored corner of history.”
Tom Dalton writes for The Salem (Mass.) News.
