Culture

So, Was Ernest's Union Suit a Wool Blend?
The definitive exhibit on the achievements of a legendary explorer draws "Shacolytes" from all over By Colin Moynihan

The tenth of this month marks a special date for anyone who has been involved in America's raging cultural affair with the legend of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the dashing Anglo-Irish explorer who led three expeditions to Antarctica between 1908 and 1921 and whose resurgent popularity now merits its own sobriquet: Shackletonmania. As a capstone to the publication of more than a dozen books focused on the explorer's achievements, New York's American Museum of Natural History is offering an exhibit documenting the ill-starred 1914 odyssey of Shackleton's 144-foot barkentine, Endurance. Based on Caroline Alexander's book of the same name and featuring more than 150 photographs of the trip, several brief films, and a small but evocative collection of roughly 20 objects from the voyage, it is sure to lure viewers from far and wide. Few, however, will have logged quite so interesting a voyage to West 79th Street as a forester, gardener, and beekeeper who lives in County Cavan, Ireland, and who is perhaps the keenest Shackleton aficionado on either side of the Atlantic.

Jonathan Shackleton, 47, is in fact a second cousin of Sir Ernest, and he says it was the stories about his famous relative, told to him as a child by his Aunt Kitty, that inspired him to "keep the torch burning, at least on the Irish end of things." He has fulfilled this mission by giving his seventeenth-century house over to a collection of Shackleton arcana that includes, among many other objects, an 11-foot sledge used by Sir Ernest during his 1908 Nimrod voyage, a rare recording of the explorer describing the trip he led aboard that ship, and a piece of limestone chipped from a rock in Antarctica that is named after Sir Ernest. Jonathan has also become something of a hierophant to whom Shackleton devotees can turn for answers to their burning questions. A few months ago, he received E-mail from two women calling themselves "The Tea Ladies," who wanted to know what sort of tea Sir Ernest imbibed during his journeys. (So far, Jonathan hasn't been able to turn up an answer, but he's working on it diligently.)

In February, Jonathan followed in his cousin's footsteps, hopping aboard a converted Russian icebreaker to visit the spot on South Georgia Island where Sir Ernest was buried in 1922. After that, he was slated to travel to London to meet Sir Ernest's granddaughter, Alexandra Shackleton. Together they'll fly to New York for the opening of the exhibit, which runs through October 10. "I wouldn't miss it for anything," Shackleton says. "Sir Ernest is probably the most successful failure of the century among explorers. He never made it to the South Pole, but he never lost a man, either."