DEAN HONOURS EXPLORER

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 76, Issue 111, 13 May 1933, Page 10

DEAN HONOURS EXPLORER

SHACKLETON’S LONELY GRAVE. FIRST VISIT BY A 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 tho Daily Mail from the Very Rev. Harold IT. 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. Lusdale took up his present post in February, 1932, and his district includes the South Georgia, South Shetland, South Orkney, and South Sandwich Island, 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 tho 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 little cemetery lies at the foot of these .mountains, and Shackleton’s grave with its stone stands out from the rest.”