Wordie team reach South Pole

A team featuring members of the family of James Wordie, the St John’s alumnus who was geologist and chief scientific officer on Shackleton’s ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-1917, have reached the South Pole, completing their ancestor’s unfinished expedition to the frozen continent. 

The group of 12, led by noted explorer David Hempelman-Adams, walked and skied the final leg of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s intended route to the South Pole, arriving on 17 December, 100 years and two days after Shackleton hoped to do so himself.

The achievement means that funds will be raised to digitise Wordie’s diaries along with relevant papers belonging both to him and other members of the Endurance Expedition.  This digital legacy will be made available for public research with the help of St John’s College, Cambridge, where Wordie was a student, Fellow and later Master; and the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. 

The works that the project aims to digitise include Wordie’s Weddell Sea diary, which he kept whilst aboard Shackleton’s ship, Endurance.

The project, named “Endurance 100”, was conceived by Tim Holmes, head of Cambridge property company Endurance Estates, and his wife, Alice, who is Wordie’s granddaughter.

“In walking the last 100 miles to the South Pole, this completes some unfinished family business, but it was also a way to understand the hardships and to remember the heroism of those who set out 100 years ago,” Mr Holmes said.

“As a team we feel that one of the best legacies of our trip would be the creation of an archive covering Wordie and the other members of the Endurance expedition, so that their narrative can be available to anyone interested in polar science, its history, and climate change”.

For more information, visit: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/endurance-descendants-mark-centenary-completing-ancestor%E2%80%99s-unfinished-business

Find out more about the Endurance 100 project via: http://endurance100.org/