Spring arrived on Manhattan's Upper West Side last week in a burst of cherry blossom and pastel fashion statements. Opposite Central Park, however, a constant stream of zealots poured into a frigid, monochrome world re-created on the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History. Silently and reverently, they circled a modest wooden boat. "I have to touch it," a Lauren-suited woman whispered, softly tapping the gunwale once with an immaculately manicured nail.
The James Caird, almost 24 sturdy feet of Baltic pine, British oak and American elm, is accustomed to rougher handling. Between April 24th and May 10th, 1916, it completed one of history's most astonishing voyages, carrying Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew 800 miles from Antarctica's Elephant Island to South Georgia Island in appalling weather across the worst stretch of ocean in the world.
The crossing was one episode in a failed quest for the South Pole that has suddenly - and unexpectedly - captured the American imagination. Like Scott, Shackleton was formerly the darling of polar bores here who committed every detail of his feat to memory and recited it at will. This year, however, American trend forecasters solemnly pronounced the Anglo-Irish explorer a "phenomenon", elevating him above mere celebrity.
First detected by the Wall Street Journal last spring, Shackleton fever has spread to corporate executives, academics, writers and, inevitably, to Hollywood. Director Wolfgang Petersen of Das Boot fame, who is currently completing A Perfect Storm, will make the planned Shackleton film and Mel Gibson is reportedly being considered for the leading role. As you read this, the Gap is probably unpacking its "Shackleton Winter" collection.
"The museum is full of people who are obsessed," Gayle Gruber, communications assistant at the American Museum of Natural History observes as queues lengthen. The obsessed come to see more than the hallowed James Caird. "The Endurance: Shackleton' s Legendary Antarctic Expedition", running in New York until October 11th, is the most comprehensive presentation of the journey ever mounted and the most extensive display of the haunting photographs taken by a member of the expedition, Frank Hurley.
"Hurley is a warrior with his camera and would go anywhere or do anything to get a picture," First Officer Lionel Greenstreet wrote of the Australian desperado who plunged into four feet of icy water to retrieve his glass plate negatives when ice crushed the 300-ton Endurance, condemning Shackleton's men to a desperate existence on ice floes and rock for almost a year.
Over 150 of Hurley's pictures, printed from the original negatives, are displayed chronologically and, even though none of them shows individual agony or desolation, the cumulative effect is oddly disquieting. Embedded in pack ice, the Endurance sits like a toy boat on a meringue sea. Men harnessed like sled dogs haul the James Caird across a limitless white expanse. On South Georgia Island, a vast prairie of jagged ice glitters like broken glass.
Stunning as landscapes, Hurley's photographs are also palpably human. Blackborow, the Welsh stowaway, poses with Mrs Chippy, the ship's cat, on his shoulder. Tom Crean from Kerry wraps his arms around his shipmate, Cheetham. Several prints later, Blackborow, crippled by frostbite, sits on Elephant Island's rocky shore after an infernal journey to an infernal destination.
"Things have taken a terribly serious turn," Thomas Orde-Lees wrote in his diary when the Endurance crew abandoned ship in October 1915 to camp on ice floes, circled by killer whales. Like "Houston, we have a problem" and "A bit of bother in the Balkans," Orde-Lees's assessment is one of history's great understatements. It echoes when we watch Hurley's astonishing film footage of the break-up of the Endurance, her hull listing and masts snapping as the pressure builds. "What the ice gets, the ice keeps," Shackleton declared.
Liam Neeson's narration of Hurley's film is soothing but a far more ominous sound leaks from the last room in the exhibition where the James Caird is displayed. In this section devoted to navigation, a churning ocean, smudged sun and ominous clouds are projected onto three enormous screens while the sound of a roaring gale and thundering waves envelops cowed visitors.
"Looking out abeam," Shackleton wrote of the James Caird voyage, "we would see a hollow like a tunnel formed as the crest of a big wave toppled over on to the swelling body of water." Every few seconds the boat soared 50 feet or more before diving into a trough. The museum's attempts to replicate these conditions were abandoned when designers realised visitors would become violently sick. But standing at the bow of the James Caird, watching a wall of grey water rising to starboard, a terrifying vacuum yawning on the port side and the horizon turning into watery peaks is impressive enough.
Visitors may also test their skills by using an interactive sextant that sets their own course for South Georgia. Most veer wildly and console themselves by examining the actual sextant used by Frank Worsley in the 16day crossing. Other artefacts include a tartan shirt from the expedition; the diary of ship's carpenter, Henry McNish; a Primus stove and cooking pot and a copy of Rudyard Kipling's If, one of Shackleton's favourite poems.
Kipling's verse is regarded in this slick age as kitsch literature - the poetic equivalent of a velvet painting. Yet nobody studying the tattered If in the museum smiles, let alone sneers. Quite an achievement for New York. And an indication, perhaps, of what modern America craves and finds in the Shackleton legend. As Anthony Lane recently wrote in the New Yorker, these were men ". . . trying to subsist in one of the last irony-free zones of the 20th century . . . who preferred to challenge their predicament with the uncomplicated humour that accompanies - and assists - the will to live." Shackleton, Lane also observes, ". . . was both a tough guy and a sensitive soul, before those two categories diverged."
Few visitors leaving the museum bother to read Theodore Roosevelt's stirring exhortation on manliness. To most it seems as prehistoric as the dinosaur skeletons keeping it company in the entrance hall. But a stocky explorer who loved Kipling and died in his sleep at the age of 47 may change that.