ANTARCTIC HERO

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 133, 8 June 1942, Page 4

ANTARCTIC HERO

STENHOUSE MISSING

VOYAGE OF AURORA

(By J.C.)

A world of seafarers who knew not Stenhouse of Antarctic exploration has arisen in the last grand combat of our sailors with the wildest of oceans as well as against the most desperate of sea-fighters. The briefest of cablegrams announced that Commander J. R. Stenhouse, R.N.R., who commanded Sir Ernest Shackelton's Aurora in the Antarctic expedition of 1914, had begn reported missing, presumably drowned in the Middle East. He had been awarded the D.S.O. and many other decorations. Gallant Stenhouse was one of the glorious company of hard battlers who fought even a harder enemy than the human gunners and riflemen. It was his supreme joy, as it was that of many an Antarctic warrior before him, to pit himself against the most bitter weather that ever this old globe raised in icy wrath against mortal men. He earned numerous decorations in wartime, in the command of comparatively small craft. He was one of the band of which Scott, Amundsen, Shackelton, Worsley and Mackintosh were the most prominent. Worsley is the last survivor.

I think the greatest exploit of all for which Commander Stenhouse should be remembered was his performance with the crazy old barquentine in 1916. I remember vividly that voyage of the Aurora, because I followed it closely in the news and wrote of it from intimate accounts given by those who fought so strenuously for their lives in that tough and ancient voyager. The Aurora had been built a long time before for Polar work and she was one of the oldest vessels called in for Vntarctic adventure. Oak-lined and soaked through and through with protective oil like a whaling-ship, she was acquired for use by Captain Aeneas Macintosh in the Shackelton Antarctic expedition of 1914-16. Mackintosh's party, which was to play an important part in Shackelton's scheme of exploration, had no better luck than his chief's expedition, which came to grief in the Weddell Sea. Worsley was with Shackelton in that glorious failure and its following series of heroic adventures.

Rudder Adrift in Gale The Aurora broke away in a blizzard off the Ross Sea Barrier and left Mackintosh and most of his comrades on shore. Then began the hazardous voyage which I began to relate. The little ship, square-rigged forward like many an auxiliary screw and sail vessel in the Polar adventures of old, was batted for many weeks by the Antarctic gales until her rudder, strong as its fastenings were, broke adrift in' a terrific gale. But the rudder itself was not lost, and Commander Stenhouse and his small crew stuck to the desperate job of taking the ship to New Zealand. She drifted "by guess and by God" through a ceaseless succession of gales all the way to the southern New Zealand coast. Her crew worked as no other crew, let us believe, can have toiled before or since.

One day in March, 1916, after reporting at Stewart Island, she sailed bravely up to the Otago coast, after endless victories over the bitter seas of the ceaseless roll round the world. All those weeks the crew battled with the rudder as well as the weaiher. It was an exhibition of supreme seamanship. I do not think there is a more splendid example. Stenhouse and his men lowered a jury rudder into the sea and worked it by means of ropes from each side of the vessel. Again and again gales interfered with this duty, but the crew stuck to it. The seas in that worst part of the Southern Ocean can be terrific.

The skipper of a small topsail schooner, the Jessie Niccol, sailing from the Bluff for Macquarie Island, told me that he had had many stormy episodes in his well-pickled career as a sailor, but there was nothing to approach his taste of the Antarctic. 'i ne schooner was hove-to for 25 uays; nothing but the oil-bags saved her from being overwhelmed. The Aurora was a oigger vessel, but the seas she fought were such as are only to be found on that area of the ocean's surface. She used both steam and sail, but her stout canvas on the fore was her standby.

The Relief Voyage Safe in port at last, these salted sailors, after hard voyaging, in which everyone of them had not one but fifty escapes from death, had no long rest. There were their comrades left temporarily marooned on the ice of the Ross Barrier She must go and fetch them. She was repaired, and the shipwrights expressed their wonder at the strength of the construction Out into the Antarctic, refitted and adequately supplied, she sailed again faced all those oitter gales, butteu out into the Southerlies again—she at least had them behind when she was emerging from the wind factory of Antarctica. She found his men, she o\ 8 tH Joy , ully enough from that hell of the gales. Shackelton himself was in her then, in 1917.

It is a pity perhaps to have to o?d°shiD \n Serab ! le end of a s rand Oict ship. ISO sea beauty, but a nerm , rainbow of imagination settles about her memory. There being no sold f V r tho Auroi ' a - she was. . old. The veteran oi grim vovatrint? dispatched from hidlf W u a cai 'g° of tallow and America 1 ' She tmT 1 coast . of South Ainenca. bhe did not arrive Some where out in the Pacific lies the ship that responded so well to Stenhouse and many another sailorman bur carry tallow to n VaS! Un§e sooner ' than Callao Valparaiso or hides to