Ernest Shackleton's granddaughter has revealed the horrific food the explorer and his crew were forced to eat during their ill-fated Antarctic expedition. Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, Alexandra Shackleton detailed the bizarre and desperate measures her grandfather took to keep his men alive.
After the Endurance was crushed by ice in 1915, the crew became stranded on Elephant Island. With supplies running low, they had to eat penguins, despite some sailors believing the birds contained the souls of lost sailors. 'Some of the men were superstitious and illiterate,' said Alexandra, now 82. 'One of the sailors, originally, wouldn't eat penguins... well they had to because that was all they had.'
The crew also ate their sled dogs as starvation set in. Alexandra recalled asking photographer Frank Hurley about the dogs' fate. 'I remember one particular Hurley photograph... and I asked one of the little girls from the family what happened to the dogs? And the grown-ups would never tell me until I found out eventually when I was old enough to know... they ate them.'
Frank Wild, Shackleton's second-in-command, suffered severe diarrhoea after eating rotting pony meat during an earlier expedition on the Nimrod. Shackleton secretly gave Wild his own breakfast biscuit, an act Wild described as priceless. 'No one will ever know what that meant to me. Thousands of pounds would not have brought me that biscuit,' Wild wrote in his diary.
More than a century later, one of those biscuits was sold at auction for £1,250. The Huntley and Palmers biscuit had survived 102 years, having been left in a hut near the South Pole. Nicholas Lambourn of Christie's said the 'biscuits played their part in the Nimrod expedition'.
