EXPLORER HONOURED

Southland Times, Issue 22013, 12 May 1933, Page 8

EXPLORER HONOURED

SHACKLETON’S LONELY GRAVE. FIRST VISIT B YA PRIEST. A burial service performed over the grave of Sir Ernest Shackleton the famous Antarctic explorer, in the lonely British South Atlantic island of South Georgia more than ten years after his death there, is described in a letter received by the Daily Mail from the Very Rev. Harold E. Lumsdale, Dean of Stanley, Falkland Islands.

Sir Ernest Shackleton died on board the Quest at South Georgia on January 5, 1922, four months after sailing from London on his fourth expedition to the Antarctic. Mr Lumsdale took up his present post in February 1932, and his district includes the South Georgia, South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich Islands, and any British possession southward to the South Pole.

Mr Lumsdale writes:—“ln December I crossed the South‘Atlantic in a trawler, some 850 miles, to minister in South Georgia. No priest had visited there before, and since Shackleton had only been buried by a layman I felt it my duty to say the Office for the Dead, and added the words of committal. “On Saturday, December 17, at five in the afternoon, we set out for the grave. Large numbers of the whalers, Norwegian as well as English, .were there. The sun was shining brightly on the lofty brown mountains, which Were streaked with snow on the sides and capped with snow for hundreds of feet, for they are 6000 ft to 8000 ft. high. The Ijttle cemetery lies at the foot of these mountains, and Shackleton’s grave with its stone stands out from the rest” •