A GRAPHIC pictorial account of the fight for survival during one of the greatest polar adventures in the history of exploration is to be sold in London next month.
Five previously unpublished paintings depicting the heroics of Irish born Sir Ernest Shackleton's trans Antarctic expedition of 1916-17 have surfaced from a private English collection after being unseen in public for nearly 80 years.
Nicholas Lambourn, of auctioneers Christie's topographical picture department, who expects the paintings to fetch up to £40,000 on September 27th, described the paintings as incredibly rare". "These paintings chart an extraordinary tale of courage and survival against the odds," he said.
The oil paintings are by George Marston, a member of the expedition, and illustrate the dramas which befell the team after its ship, Endurance, was frozen into an ice floe in January, 1915.
Having salvaged boats, provisions and sledges from the ship, which finally sank on November 21st, 1915 the 28 man crew found itself on cracking ice 350 miles from the nearest land across frozen ocean.
In April, 1916, after an exhaust ing journey by sledge and boat, they reached Elephant Island, from where Shackleton and five hand picked crew members set sail on a perilous voyage for help to South Georgia, 800 miles away. They crossed South Georgia on toot to raise the alarm at a whaling station. Back on Elephant Island, the remaining crew was rescued after camping beneath upturned boats for 102 days.
"Marston was a solid member of the team and his paintings are incredibly rare. They reflect one of the truly great polar adventures - less tragic than Scott's expedition, hut, equally daunting," the Christie's expert said.
One painting, from 1918 shows Endurance sheltering in the Weddell Sea shortly before being crushed by the ice. The four others depict events after Endurance was abandoned painting vivid pictures of the grim struggle for survival and of the forbidding wastes of the Antarctic landscape.
Shackleton (1874-1922), who was born in Kilkee, Co Clare, accompanied Scott's expedition of 1901-1904 and on his own expedition of 1908-1909, in the Nimrod, got within 100 miles of the South Pole.