This is why we remember Shackleton where Mawson, arguably the greatest polar explorer of the age and certainly the most successful, is only known in his native Australia and by those of us to whom the heroic age of polar exploration is an obsession. Mawson’s achievements are legion, Shackleton’s were failures but it was his ability to cope with, to lead out of and to demonstrate huge love for his men that makes him so remembered today.
IIncidentally, the decision not to award McNish the Polar Medal wasn’t roundly approved of: Alex Macklin, the atypical Scottish surgeon and a man who had more in common with McNish culturally than most on the expedition wrote in 1919: “"I was disheartened to learn that McNish, Vincent, Holness and Stephenson had been denied the Polar Medal". He continued "of all the men in the party no-one more deserved recognition than the old carpenter.. .1 think too that withholding the medal from the three trawler men was a bit hard.
They were perhaps not very endearing characters, but they never let the expedition down".
And what of Harry McNish? Well, he doesn’t appear to have held any open bitterness to Shackleton for not getting the medal. Tto a man like McNish, who’s measure of a man’s worth was entirely in his actions and not in his trinkets, a medal may not have held great importance but it must have smarted somewhere. There’s no evidence that it did, and there is no evidence that after the mutiny on the ice McNish ever questioned Shackleton’s leadership or authority again. Indeed, if anything, Shackleton’s incredible achievement of keeping the men together appears to have galvanised the carpenter who demonstrated nothing but respect for the man from then on. There have been attempts, by a Member of the Scottish Parliament, no less; to have McNish posthumously awarded the Polar Medal. However, those of us who know the story can see the extraordinary skill and courage of this man as much as we recognise the genius of Shackleton himself.
Harry McNish spent the next years back at sea. He secured a job as a carpenter with the New Zealand Shipping Company and made five round trips to New Zealand before deciding to settle there in 1925 after being offered a job by the same company in Wellington.
McNish was plagued with ill health, he complained that his joints had never recovered from the years of hard work in the biting cold on the Endurance Expedition and he never shook hands because of the arthritic pain he had in his right hand this together with his, personality, never the most engaging upon first meeting with his ‘wire hawser rasp’ and his dour Calvinism can’t have endeared him to many socially.
When he was 60, he suffered an accident at work that crippled his back. Unable to work be became increasingly destitute, he may have been living rough in the Wellington docks.
Frank Wild, 2nd in command and in charge of the Elephant Island party. Wild, a Yorkshireman from near Whitby. another who's genuis came through in extremis but who was ill equiped for 'normal' life, would have had no problem managing McNish and Vincent, Shakleton took them because they were seamen, not because they were 'troublemakers'.
Green, the irrepressible expedition cook, came across McNish in Wellington:
“I gave some lectures in New Zealand. They asked me to go on the radio there. When I returned to the ship next morning I found I’d got a visitor –McNish! He was in hospital in Wellington and had heard my broadcast on the Radio. When it came to the bit in the lecture about the boat journey from Elephant Island to South Georgia, I said to Mac, “Will you come on the platform ?” Mac stepped up and he took over the lecture and told them all about the boat journey. It is about the only one that’s ever been given - apart from Shackleton, himself. It is a wonderful story. I don’t repeat it because I was not there. I only talk about the part that I’ve been on. I don’t repeat other men’s yarns.”
This doesn’t sound like the behaviour of a man who bore a grudge about not getting a medal, having said that, NcNish would have respected Green utterly for his courage and ability to perform in adversity, he would not have wanted to let Green down and Green clearly had great affection for the carpenter.
However, it appears McNish never forgot that Shackleton had ordered Wild to shoot his cat, he related the story to the polar historian Baden Norris when he met McNish in the late 1920’s.
McNish’s health further deteriorated and he was eventually found a place in the Ohiro Nursing Home where he lived until he died in 1930 aged 56 years. New Zealand honoured him, HMS Dunedin (the Gaelic name for Edinburgh) was in Wellington and an honour guard of sailors volunteered from the ship as well as a party of Petty Officers to escort the gun carriage through the streets of the New Zealand capital as his adopted country gave him a state funeral and it is apt that sailors, escorted one of their own, a true man of the sea to his final rest. McNish would probably have though it all a bit over the top and it would have rankled his Free Kirk appreciation of the spartan.
42.