The unveiling of a plaque on the former home of the great explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton tomorrow (10.30 a.m., 35 Marlborough Road, Dublin) is another small step in the journey backwards to reclaim a stolen past. Of course, myopia and amnesia are not uniquely Irish traits; and how much truth does a Frenchman bear to remember of the events which unfolded 60 years ago this month? For all societies, the past is so often a quarry from which we can selectively hew and claw whatever fictions suit our need.
Thus yearly we see the annual tributes to Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown. "We are gathered here today to rededicate ourselves to the struggle he gave his life for. Wolfe Tone would have approved of the armed struggle. Wolfe Tone would have deplored the armed struggle. Wolfe Tone regarded Orangemen as a treacherous intrusion. Wolfe Tone revered Orangemen as fellow Irishmen. Wolfe Tone would have approved of a satellite dish on Mount Leinster. Wolfe Tone was a vegetarian. Wolfe Tone. . ."
Invisible Irishman
Some people are remembered at every turn; others, perhaps more selfless and deserving, but not eminent within the golden thread tradition of Irish historiography, simply vanished. Throughout most of this century, Sir Ernest Shackleton, though celebrated abroad, was an invisible Irishman. He was claimed as an Englishman, though not without some justification - he had lived in England since he was 10, and no doubt would in certain regards have had the manners and mien of an Englishman. No doubt, the long-range British maritime aircraft the Shackleton was named after him. But he was nonetheless Irish, belonging to a Kildare Quaker family which has long prided itself on its Irishness. How odd that a distant kinsman of his (on his mother's side), James Fitzmaurice, should in 1928 have been one of the crew to make the first non-stop west-east transatlantic flight. Is that evidence of a vaguely nomadic, peril-seeking gene at work? The Fitzmaurices, after all, were Normans; was the call of the wild so great after all these years that these two men were impelled to take such risks, within barely more than a decade of one another?
Shackleton was famous for failure; but his failures were triumphs of honesty and humanitarianism over the kind of triumphalist stupidity which was governing human affairs at the time. His first all-conquering failure was when he didn't get to the South Pole in 1909, abandoning his expedition 97 miles short of the destination because "I'd rather be a live donkey than a dead lion." But a donkey is stupid enough to have gone on; a lion, knowing its weaknesses, would wisely have returned home. Shackleton was a lion - shrewd, brave and calculating, as he showed just about the same time as the great change which was to see him (and so many other Irishmen) forgotten in their native land.
Marooned
The month was April, the year 1916, and Ernest and his party of 28 men who had intended to walk across the Antarctic in 1914, before the world went mad, had been marooned in an ice-bound vessel in the Antarctic for over a year. Ernest and five others - two of them Irish, Tom Crean from Kerry and Tom McCarthy from Cork - set off on one of the great improvised epics of exploration history, an 800-mile journey through some of the coldest and most terrible seas in the world in a boat the length of three coffins. Even when they made landfall, they had still to cross the mountains, glaciers and snowfields of South Georgia on foot. Then Shackleton led rescuers back to his still-stranded crew. By unbelievable courage, leadership and will power, the entire expedition was rescued without a single fatality. Even in the year of the Somme and Verdun, right across the world, Shackleton was hailed as a hero - everywhere, except in his native land.
Of the three Irishmen involved, one, Tim McCarthy, returned to duty with the Royal Navy and merely weeks later was killed in action in a skirmish in the cold and narrow waters of the English Channel. Shackleton, the truly great leader of men, who had nearly traversed the southern continent, and who had then led one of the great escape journeys of all time, died of a heart attack in 1922 in South Georgia. Tom Crean returned to Ireland and opened a pub in Kerry called "The South Pole Inn". He died in 1938.
Selective memory
How selective is the national memory which cherished Fitzmaurice as a national icon and which forgot Shackleton, Crean and McCarthy. But was that not natural: weren't Shackleton, Crean and McCarthy serving in the forces of the crown, while Fitzmaurice wore the uniform of an independent Ireland? Certainly; but in 1916, the year of Shackleton's triumph, all four were wearing British uniforms - Fitzmaurice, not yet in the Royal Flying Corps, was an infantryman on the western front, and the others were in the Royal Navy.
Tom Crean, a winner of the Albert Medal for Bravery - almost the equivalent of the Victoria Cross - was reluctant in later years even to admit he had served in the British navy. And Shackleton vanished off the screen of national memory - until recent years, when with a typically Quaker lack of either self-pity or apology, the family fought to establish the name of their illustrious kinsman in the ranks of the national memory. He was, simply, the greatest Irish explorer of the 20th century. Finally, he has been reclaimed for Ireland.