Dan Snow's History Hit - Tom Crean: The Unsung Irish Hero of the Antarctic

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

He was one of the last men to see Antarctic Explorer Robert Scott alive and was Shackleton's right-hand man on the Endurance expedition. So why don't more people know the name Tom Crean? He was a steadfast and courageous Irishman whose legendary feats in Antarctica shaped the course of exploration history. Born in 1877, Crean joined the Royal Navy at 16 and his adventures took him to the perilous glaciers of the South Pole as he became an integral member of both Scott’s and Shackleton’s iconic Antarctic expeditions. Crean’s resilience shone in moments of crisis, from daring solo rescues in lethal blizzards to enduring sledge journeys that tested the limits of human endurance. Yet, despite his astonishing achievements, Crean remained grounded, returning to a quiet life in Ireland. Join Dan as he uncovers the incredible story of this unsung hero.Written by Dan Snow, produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.You can discover more about the life and accomplishments of Tom Crean in Tim Foley's book 'Crean: The Extraordinary Life of an Irish Hero'.This is the second episode in our Endurance season running through October & November to celebrate the release of the Endurance feature documentary on Disney+, Hulu and Nat Geo.Other episodes mentioned in this show:Was Scott's Antarctic Expedition Sabotaged? For more Shackleton and Endurance content from History Hit, as well as AD-FREE content, sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

It was 3.30 in the morning. Men were sheltering in the hut, grateful for the protection the wooden walls gave them. It was February, and at that time of year, there's no night, not yet, in the Antarctic, but there's a grey twilight that was deepening by the moment as a blizzard was approaching. The job of the men in that hut was to wait.

They were waiting for news from the south. Captain Scott had led his expedition off up onto the Antarctic plateau and they were waiting for his return. In the early hours of that particular morning, a man approached the hut. He was staggering. He was at the very extremity of life. His feet were sinking through the soft snow that was falling ever thicker. He must have wished he was wearing skis. He was making painfully slow progress.

His eyes were hidden behind goggles. Every scrap of his skin was covered from the biting winds. When the men learned of his presence, they rushed and dragged him inside. Brandy was poured down his neck. He was placed as close as possible to the brazier where he slowly warmed up. And he brought with them, through chapped lips and a dry mouth, an appeal from men trapped on the ice at Death's Door. He'd left them there, a very deliberate decision, knowing that he alone had the strength to go and get help and return for them.

And the gamble had paid off, only just. He was on the point of total collapse, but he had made it. The men would be rescued, they would live. It was one of the epics of Antarctic exploration, or indeed, one of the epics of exploration anywhere in the world. The men owed their life to the tenacity, the strength, the determination of this one man. His name was Tom Crean. He is a Herculean figure, certified granite-hewn legend, a vessel of war, of epic adventures by sea and ice. A man who is chiefly remembered for being Shackleton's great pillar of strength in the Endurance Expedition, but a man who should be known so much more, an unsung hero. who should be known so much more, an unsung hero. So let us sing of him. This is the story of a true hero, a legend of Antarctic exploration. And perhaps one of the reasons he's not so well

remembered is that Tom Crean was different to many of the others. Men like Scott Shackleton, they were shaped by British society, by the British state, by the British education system, to push the bounds of Britannia ever wider. They went to the great schools. They were bombarded with stories of great men who'd sacrificed, who'd suffered. Nelson, Wolfe, Gordon. They'd read their Tennyson. They were raised for the battlefield, or for the summit, or for some miserable high-latitude sledge pull. But Tom Crean wasn't. He was Irish. He was of agricultural worker stock.

He'd been described as a peasant, I think, when he was born. Shackleton, it's true, was also Irish, but he was of the landowning Anglo-Irish class. Protestant, who I think they identified with the British state, and indeed his family family moved to London fairly early in his life, and he attended a prominent private school. Creon was Irish Catholic. He was from a working family. And so at the time, many reserved their admiration for Creon's superiors. And yet, as often in history, the exploits and achievements of those great luminaries were bought with the sweat and the blood and the grit of the men who served under their command. The men that lost limbs, became stooped with age, disappeared from the annals of history

as their commanders booked their slots in Westminster Abbey. So this podcast is a story about one of those men, and he's as great as any of them, greater probably. He's a man without whom the story of Antarctic exploration could have been very different. He's a man really whose name should be on the lips of all those who celebrate his more famous, more notorious peers. Tom Crean.

I don't think I've ever really read accounts of a harder, tougher, stronger, but also good-humoured man. He was a tower of strength, without whom there would have been many more widows grieving in Edwardian families in Britain. Let us go before the mast. Let us put our shoulders to the capstan. Let's raise the anchor and strike out on a voyage alongside one of our greatest maritime heroes.

Tom Crean. Tom Crean was born around the 16th of February 1877. We don't have an exact date. He was born in Kerry, right on that beautiful, jagged coast, which is beaten so ragged by Atlantic gales. In my experience, it doesn't take long to work out you're in the presence of a Kerry man, because he will let you know. There's a pride that comes with being born and raised in such a special yet remote part of this archipelago. He's born in the village of Anneskool, and perhaps it's a bit of a myth, but the story goes that Anas Kul gets its name from the fact that it's

at the point where the road out to Dingle crosses the river. And the name for that river in English is River of the Hero, because it's believed that the mythical Irish hero, Cahalan, is said to be buried on the side of a mountain very nearby. In this podcast, we have no need of mythical heroes because we are in the presence of one that is all too real. He grew up with his 11 siblings on a small farm. He attended Catholic school, but pretty briefly, it seemed like his help was needed on that farm. And like so many young Irish men, he enlisted in the Royal Navy. Remember, Ireland was part of the United Kingdom alongside Great Britain at that time. And Ireland supplied vast numbers of men to fill British army ranks and the hammocks of the Royal Navy. He enlisted at 16. Perhaps it was a way to escape the drudgery, the hardship of

rural life. Perhaps he had a row with his dad. Perhaps he wanted to see the world. He wanted to explore. and the Navy was definitely the way to do that. The Navy was a lifeline, it was a chance to earn money, a chance to escape, to develop a trade that would definitely set you up for life after you left the Navy. It could be a path to fame and fortune, but it was certainly a path to travel, living a life less ordinary. He became a boy second class, but he would quickly climb through the ranks. His parents sort of had to sign a declaration that he was of good character and he would have served in the Navy for a minimum, I think it was around about 12 years. And then he would go on a

training ship to gain experience before going to sea properly. Some of those training ships were Napoleonic era, tall ships, so they would have learned the traditional skills of setting and reefing sail, of working the yards. He would have absorbed the cumulative experience of generations of sailors that have made the Royal Navy the finest military force in the world at the time. The following year, November 1894, he'd finished training and he was sent aboard HMS Devastation, a rather interesting ship, very different to the Pollyannic ships I just mentioned. This was cutting edge, the first ocean-going capital ship, you know, big battleship, which had no sails, and it carried its entire armament on top of its hull, so on deck like the big gun battleships that you recognise from the 20th century. So the cannon did not poke

through holes in the side of the ship, the big guns were right on top of the deck, and he served on that ship. But only for a few weeks, it seemed, because he was sent aboard HMS Wild Swan, which was sent to South America to join the Pacific Station. He was now a boy first class, you'll be glad to know. First class boy.

His talent had been spotted already. On that journey to the Pacific, he would have gone around Cape Horn, his first taste of that, what could be a high latitude hellscape where gales scream around the base of the planet. It's a circumpolar ocean, a southern ocean. There's very little land to get in the way of the spinning weather system. So you get 50 foot waves, they're not unusual, unrelenting wind, seemingly always howling out of the west, an ocean of waters that will suck the life out of you within 10 minutes

or so. And it's in the Pacific on this cruise, on this deployment, that he gets a real taste for adventure. He's travelled thousands of miles. Quite quickly, he smells the whiff of cordite. There is some action. He takes part in a brief moment of violence that's just forgotten amongst the great volumes of British imperial warfare and conflict of the 18th and 19th centuries. He's sent to blockade Corinto, it's one of the main ports in Nicaragua, and his ship, the Royal Arthur now, and two other ships were tasked with collecting indemnity. There was a fine that the British government wished to levy on the Nicaraguans, £15,000. And it's a fascinating little episode. It really shows us the reality

of British global power in this period. It's sort of humdrum, day-to-day interventions through which the British Empire sought to order the world to its satisfaction. It's a wee bit complicated, this one, but the British had once had a sort of protectorate over a piece of what was now Nicaragua. It's the Mosquito Coast. And they were interested in this part of the world because it was the narrows between the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. They wanted to control a sort of land bridge between the two. In 1860, Britain had signed over this protectorate, the Mosquito Coast, over to Nicaragua. But on the understanding that it would allow the native government some autonomy, the Nicaragans had reneged on this in the 1890s,

there'd been a bit of back and forth, and importantly, some British citizens had been mistreated, and that was a red line for the British Empire. Not acceptable at all, no, no, no. So an indemnity was demanded, and the Royal Navy, the Pacific Fleet, was deployed. You'll have heard the expression, gunboat diplomacy. This could be one of the platonic ideal forms. Ships with big guns approach one of the main ports of a country, Nicaragua, and simply promise to turn off trade like a tap unless the Nicaraguan government conformed to the wishes of Her Majesty's government. The Nicaraguan government had absolutely no answer to the gunboats of the British fleet,

and so they faced little choice. Initially, though, the deadlines slipped. By the 27th of April 1895, they had not paid up, and so a detachment of 400 men from the Royal Navy occupied Corinto without opposition. They declared martial law. This is the kind of thing that happened. The captain of one of the ships, in fact, the captain of Tom Crean's ship, the Royal Arthur, became the governor of Corinto. The British flag was raised over it. And that was that. Corinto was briefly incorporated, I suppose you could say,

into the formal British Empire. But the Nicaraguans pretty quickly agreed to make the payments and the crisis came to an end. The ships headed back out to sea just over a week later, on the 5th of May. We don't know exactly how Tom Crean

was involved in that, but he was highly regarded, clearly, by the ship's officers. He was made an able seaman quite rapidly. And he spent time in Hawaii, San Diego, Seattle. One biographer says he spent Christmas in Honolulu. He's gone a long way from being a kid in Kerry. After a few years in the Pacific, during which time he would have witnessed all sorts of interesting revolts and upheavals and revolutions in various, particularly South American, Central American countries, they headed back to the UK. And then interestingly,

for the next couple of years, Tom Crean spends time largely training ashore. And I think this really reflects just how modern the Royal Navy was as an institution. You don't maintain your position as the best Navy on earth unless you take the business of excellence, well, pretty seriously. And men of talent could progress. There were exams, there were courses, you got your ticket to do this specialism or that specialism. Of course, there's still patronage, there's still politics, there's still, you could say, corruption. But the Royal Navy is leading the way into the 20th century as a modern institution. Men like Tom Crean could get on. By 1899, he's become a petty officer, so kind of non-commissioned officer, increasingly important character aboard ship. In 1900, he is on the cruiser

HMS Ringaruma, which is the Royal Navy's Australian, which is part of the Royal Navy's Australian squadron based in Sydney, so he's back to the Pacific. Now, it wasn't all fair winds and following seas for Tom Crean, because we do know in December 1901, he was demoted from petty offices back to Able Seaman for an unspecified misdemeanor. Whatever it was, I'm sure the other fellow was in the wrong. And it was this posting that really got Crean into the Antarctic exploration game. It was in December 1901, perhaps not by coincidence, the same month that Creon was demoted. His ship was ordered to assist the British ship Discovery, which was an Antarctic research vessel,

specially built, specially fitted out, and sent down to the Antarctic, commanded by Robert Falcon Scott, Captain Scott. And it was docked in Littleton Harbour in New Zealand, and it was waiting to depart to Antarctica, and Creon's ship, the Ringaruma, was on hand to give it support. Now, the Discovery Expedition was an official expedition. It was a joint enterprise between the Royal Navy and the Royal Geographic Society, but had a strong naval flavour. So the commanding officer, as I mentioned, was a promising young naval officer, Robert Falcon Scott. And the Navy were happy to release some of their other personnel to the expedition as well. And now it may be that Crean was still smarting from his demotion, and he had a bit of a black market as his name now. So why not take a gamble? Why not pivot? The opportunity to do so certainly presented itself because an able seaman off Scott's ship deserted after he punched a petty officer,

and a replacement was required. And it's very possible that some of Scott's naval men on board, they knew Crean, they actually, I think they'd known him in the Pacific on that early deployment, and they recommended him to fill the space left by the man who deserted. Crean volunteered, and he was accepted. And with that simple swap, his life changed, and the course of history with it. That's what I love about history. A day, a minute, quick decision, boom. The plates shift, everything moves.

The bullet that misses, the chance meeting, the freak storm, and everything is completely different. So Crean clambered over the side of discovery and into the history books. He was an able seaman so he knew the ropes he'd have worked the sails he'd have kept the ship clean he was part of the professional backbone of the crew he would have brought enormous professionalism to this crew and they would have needed it because they were heading into unknown waters, unknown territory. It sailed for Antarctica days later, the 21st of December, and on board alongside Tom Crean was the golden generation of Antarctic explorers,

or the cursed generation, depends how you look at it. Men who would become legends, Captain Scott in charge, a junior lieutenant by the name of Ernest Shackleton, but also men like Frank Wilde, Edward Wilson, William Lashley. It took them seven weeks, but by the 8th of February 1902, discovery arrived in McMurdo Sound, and she anchored at a spot which later designated Hutt Point. And the job now was to establish a base from which they could launch scientific and exploratory journeys. It was the start of what we call the heroic age of Antarctic exploration. The aim was to fill in the vast blank swathes on the map of Antarctica. And what was required to do that was enormous, incredible feats of physical and mental

determination. In that savage, that brutal environment, Crean would come into his own. When you read these diaries and accounts of the time, it seems to me that the main job that they all did was hauling sledges, endlessly moving supplies around. And Tom Crean proved to be one of the most efficient haulers of them all. He spent 149 days in the harness, more than most of them. But he wasn't just physically enormously strong. He had a great sense of humour. He was well-liked by his companions. And this

was a world in which people fell out very easily. The cracks started to appear when you were locked in a stinking shed with someone for months on end. Scott's second-in-command, a man called Albert Armitage, wrote in his book later that Crinn was an Irishman with a fund of wit and even temper which nothing disturbed. And that comes out through all the accounts of his life again and again. He was hard-working, he was strong, but he had a good temper, he had a ready laugh. Men wanted to follow him. He was all you could ask for as a companion when the going gets tough. So again and again, Crean takes sledges loaded with supplies

across the Ross Ice Shelf, which they would have called the Great Ice Barrier. Now that's just a huge, huge chunk of ice that rests on the sea. It's several hundred meters thick, and people have seen videos of tragically huge bits carving off it, but the huge vertical cliff of ice at the front, and that runs for hundreds of miles. You've got to get up on top of that in order to access Antarctica proper. That cliff could be 20 meters, could be 50 meters high. And the reason they're doing all this sledge work is they're laying depots. They're creating supplies of food and fuel so that any group heading further inland, any group going exploring further, doesn't have to take all their own supplies with them. They can stop at these depots and take what they need.

As part of that work, Crean actually briefly set a new record for the furthest south a human being had ever got. But that would soon be overtaken because Scott led a group, including Shackleton, further south. Their ship, Discovery, became frozen solid in the ice. They were unable to shift it even through the 1902-1903 summer, and some of the expedition left, including Shackleton, who was ill, left in a relief ship that arrived. But Crean remained with Discovery until they were able to free it in the autumn,

which is February. Obviously, the seasons are opposite what they are in the Northern Hemisphere. So in February, late summer 1904, they were able to free the ship and they were able to return home. late summer 1904, they were able to free the ship and they were able to return home. Crean had established himself as a vital member of the expedition. Scott gave him a glowing report and he was made Petty Officer First Class when he arrived back in the UK. And he rejoined the Navy, a Navy, by the way, a bit of digression, that was undergoing extraordinary change, because the remarkable First Lord of the Admiralty, Jackie Fisher, John Jackie Fisher, was launching one of the most revolutionary ships of all time, HMS Dreadnought, which gave its name to a whole class of warships. Big gunned, powerful, fast-moving, heavily armed battleships. The kind of 20th century battleships that you are

no doubt thinking of at the moment. The Dreadnought, their success as the super dreadnoughts, are the kind of pinnacle, the end point of the evolution of big gunned battleships. They would dominate the oceans until the advent of different types of naval vessels. Submarines, aircraft carriers, ships carrying missiles, all that kind of thing. Anyway, so Creon is watching that revolution. He's got front row seats. But Crean wouldn't serve on dreadnoughts because Captain Scott wanted him for himself. It's a sign of the faith that he had in Crean, the trust, is that he asked for Crean to join him on the various ships that he would command. So Crean followed Scott onto Victorious, onto Albemarle, Essex, Bulwark. And then finally, Scott got the opportunity to return to the Antarctic and Crean

would go with him. In the meantime, before Scott could go back, Shackleton launched his own desperate attempt to reach South Pole. He had failed to do so in the 1907 to 1909 expedition. And Scott, Captain Scott, was with Tom Crean when news of Shackleton's near miss had been made public. So Shackleton had got within 90 miles or so of the South Pole before turning back. And Scott had turned to Crean and said, I think we'd better have a shot next. And so he set about organising the so-called Terra Nova expedition. Crean would go to Antarctica for a second time as a petty officer.

And on June the 15th, 1910, they left Cardiff aboard the ship Terranova, and his reputation only grew and grew. Again, in the early phase of the expedition, his job was to lay supply depots. Back and forth he travelled, hauling sledges, weighed down with supplies. Creon had a brush with death at one stage. He was alongside two colleagues, Lieutenant Henry Bowers and Apsley Cherry Garrard, and they became trapped on the ice. They'd been camping on some ice. The ice floe had broken up. They were stuck on a moving floe with ponies, four heavy sledges, piled, mounded up with supplies, all vital to the success of the expedition. And Tom Crean took it upon himself to rescue them. He jumped from flow to flow, like some sort of superhuman, bounding across the channels of water in between the flows until he got to the barrier edge. At any point, Crean could have slipped or

fallen into the water or flow could have upturned. He'd have slid off into the water. That water's around zero, possibly slightly below zero, because saltwater freezes below zero. And his life expectancy would have been measured in seconds. And that's if the killer whales circling beneath didn't get him first. And then as his colleagues watched, he successfully got to the ice shelf, the barrier edge, and then he scaled the cliffs. He climbed the cliffs hand over hand

and was able to bring a rescue party to get them all scaled the cliffs. He climbed the cliffs hand over hand and was able to bring a rescue party to get them all off the ice. He didn't just save his colleagues, he saved the ponies and all the supplies as well. And that would not be the last time on this expedition that men owed their lives to Tom Crean because the polar party set off the South Pole. So Captain Scott leading the group that would get to the South Pole. But he took a large band of people with him and some of them would peel off at various points of the journey. The so-called supporting parties would return to base.

But Crean stayed with Scott for a long time. And he was in the final group of eight men that marched up onto the polar plateau around just over 150 miles from the pole. But here, interestingly, on the 4th of January 1912, Scott had to make the choice of the final group that would make the dash to the pole. Now, Scott chose Edgar Evans, Edward Wilson, Bowers, and Lawrence Oates. Astonishingly, Tom Crean was sent back, and he'd go back in the company of William Lashley and Edward Evans. We're told that Tom Crean wept when he heard the news. Everyone was confused by it. The surgeon who'd accompanied them part of the way had definitely recommended taking Crean.

Nearly every historian agrees it was a mistake not to take Crean on that final leg. The story of this, by the way, is all told in a recent podcast I did about Scott, and particularly the breakdown in his relationship with his second in command, Evan. Somehow Tom Crean may have been caught up in that. Had Crean accompanied Scott to the pole, well, would the journey back have been quicker? Would he have managed to shepherd Scott and that group back home safe. But he wasn't, and we know what happened. Scott did reach the pole, sadly just after the Norwegians had beaten him to it, but he died just short of safety on his return. Now actually Tom Crean could also have died on his return because they lost their way on the way back to base. There had been recent ice falls,

they had to find a different route down the Beardmore Glacier from the plateau, from the Antarctic plateau back down to nearer sea level. They were desperate, they had no food left and they made the wild decision to just get on their sledge and just point it down the glacier and go for it. They reckon they slid around 2,000 feet, so around 600 meters. They had to dodge crevasses that would have swallowed them up, and they ended up coming off the sledge on a kind of ridge of ice. Evans later wrote, how we escaped entirely uninjured is beyond me to explain.

So that gamble might have succeeded, but they soon found themselves in trouble again. Evans went down with scurvy, and scurvy is a horrific disease, just debilitating. Teeth fall out, old wounds open up, you become listless, apathetic, you can't move. And they, instead of abandoning him, they lashed him to a sledge. And in the words of one chronicler, they eked out his life with drops of brandy. I'm not sure that's medically recommended these days, but it certainly was a Herculean effort. They hauled this sledge with the dying man on it. And Evans said later, when I begged them to leave me,

it was Crean who, speaking for both of them, turned and said to me, if you're to go out, sir, then we'll all go out together. turned and said to me, if you're to go out, sir, then we'll all go out together. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm telling the story of Tom Crean, Antarctic legend. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions

and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. On the 18th of February 1912, they had reached a point 35 miles from the hut, the nearest point of salvation. They only had a day or two of rations left, and it would take them five days to haul the sledge that far. So the decision was taken, the extraordinary decision was taken, that Creon would go on alone. He'd travel light, he'd just take what he'd carry in his pockets, he'd make a fast dash to the hut and get help. he'd make a fast dash to the hut and get help. He took a tiny bit of chocolate and three biscuits with him. And then with no tents, no survival equipment, he staggered across the ice shelf and made it to the hut. It took him 18 hours to cover the 35 miles. And his heels was a terrible

blizzard. He was very lucky to survive. If it had overtaken him, he would have died. And it delayed the rescue party by 36 hours. They just couldn't leave in those terrible conditions. But by arriving, by passing on the news that Lashley and Evans were out there on the ice, they were able to mount an expedition and rescue him. That 18 hour, well, it's almost a double marathon by someone who's already so degraded from lack of food through living in those conditions, trying to survive in those conditions, with no great sustenance in terrible weather, is one of the epics of Antarctic history. That alone would make Tom Crean a legend, but there was more to come. Once he got back to Britain he was awarded the Albert Medal at Buckingham Palace for that particular rescue. The medal was pinned onto his chest by the king

himself. Obviously there was the celebratory mood given the death of Captain Scott and his party. Crean would have felt that loss very keenly. We know he served alongside Scott very closely on several ships and also Crean had lost one of his great friends, Edgar Evans, who shared a huge amount with Creon, and perhaps that's why they bonded. Edgar Evans grew up on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, not unlike the coast of Kerry. They were both hardworking, very capable sailors, and it had been Edgar Evans' ambition to start a pub

on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where he'd been born, when he came back. But he never would come back. He remains down there in the ice of Antarctica to this day. And it would fall to Tom Crean to start a pub on the coast in his place. But we'll come to that later on. Crean went back to the Navy, but he was in high demand. Anyone who was anybody planning an Antarctica expedition, they wanted Tom Crean's name on the crew manifest. He was reliable, he was strong, he was the ultimate team player. He was besieged with requests. And one request proved tempting for Tom Crean. And that was an invitation by Ernest Shackleton to return once again to Antarctica. This time, the prize was not just simply to reach the pole,

it was to cross Antarctica from one side to the other via the pole. It was a trans-Antarctic expedition and Shackleton knew that having Crean by his side would hugely increase his chances of success, of survival. Crean turned down a cushy job in 1914 to join the crew of Endurance. He'd been requested, possibly by the First Lord of the Admiralty himself, Winston Churchill, to serve aboard the First Lord's Admiralty yacht. It's a rather attractive perk of the job. You've got a yacht called the Enchantress,

if you were First Lord of the Admiralty. And Churchill used to go on holidays with his family cruising up and down the coast of Britain, inspecting naval installations and ships wherever he went. And Crean would have served on that as a petty officer had he not taken the job with Shackleton. I imagine Churchill would love to have wheeled Creon out after dinner to regale his guests with stories of the far south.

Instead, he was now going back there to make some more stories. She left Britain as war was breaking out in early August 1914. Shackleton had offered the ship and its company to the navy for wartime service but Churchill had said no crack on head south I think he wanted to be rid of Shackleton it'd make his life a bit easier I think. The Manchester Guardian reported as endurance left Plymouth alongside the skipper and at the wheel was a hero petty officer Crean the man who had saved commander Evans's life now obviously it's very confusing because one Evans had died in Antarctica that was Crean's friend the man who Crean had saved was Edward Evans the second in

command of Scott's expedition anyway the Guardian also reported that as they left the harbour there was a piper on the quayside he struck struck up the wearing of the green, which is an old Irish tune. And the Guardian said, as there are both Ulsterman and Nationalists aboard, they can look forward to keeping themselves warm with argument in the long nights in winter quarters. A joke there about the very delicate political situation in Ireland. A situation that would eventually explode and have a huge impact on Tom Crean's life. But for the moment, he was heading south, away from newspapers and politics, towards the Antarctic. Crean eased his way into the expedition with a bit of gentle heroics.

On the 16th of September 1914, they crossed the line. So they headed across the equator. They all had a tot of rum and perhaps more than one tot. A couple of the crew got way too drunk. And one crew member, unidentified, tried to throw himself overboard, trying to dive off the quarterdeck. And luckily for him, Tom Crean grabbed him by one leg and hauled him back onto the deck. It's an incident that's recorded in a diary of one of the crew members. And that's how I see Tom Crean. Joining in, participating, laughing, but always watching.

Knowing what a member of the crew was going to do before he even did it, and on that occasion plucking someone's ankle as they disappear over the side of the quarterdeck into the sea in a bout of over-enthusiasm. You get a sense of Tom Crean at the time. This exhibition is well documented. There are photographs. Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer, was on board. And Crean comes across. He's a weather-beaten face. He looks immensely strong.

He's in the prime of life in his late 30s. He's got tens of thousands of miles of sailing under his belt. He's been to Antarctica twice. He saves people's lives. He's lost good friends. And he has an astonishing natural authority. You can imagine sailors springing to action upon a gentle request from Tom Crean, a twinkle in his eye, but iron hard beneath it. Endurance, with its full company of men aboard, left from Argentina. In fact, they have a stowaway on board as well, so they had more than their full company of men on board. They left Argentina on the 26th of October 1914, heading for South Georgia.

They arrived there, listened to the advice of the Norwegian whalers in South Georgia, who warned them not to go into the Weddell Sea that year. The ice was super thick and expansive. They ignored that advice, and in December of 1914, they headed off their last glimpse of human civilization, the little huts of the South Georgia whaling station, to their stern. They pushed south and very quickly, sure enough, as warned, they entered a vast pack of sea ice. Endurance hits sea ice, it's able to somehow get through the ice, it's able to keep going, working its way ever further towards the Antarctic coast.

But eventually, endurance found itself stuck fast, totally surrounded by sea ice with nowhere to go on the 24th of January, 1915. They were trapped amidst thousands of square miles of ice. One of the members of the expedition said it was like being a piece of nougat in a chocolate bar. They were completely locked in. January, February is the end of the summer in the southern hemisphere.

So they faced the prospect, unless they could free themselves pretty quickly, they faced the prospect of being caught in the ice throughout the Antarctic winter. They turned Endurance into a base. It was no longer a ship in which watchers were on duty all the time. It became a kind of winter base, as if it was a hut on the land. It was around this time that Frank Hurley, the Australian photographer, took some famous, wonderful pictures of Tom Crean. One shows him looking steely-eyed and determined, a pipe grip between his teeth, the consummate explorer. The other shows him, interestingly,

of a strong man holding three puppies, or pretty big dogs, in fact, by that stage. He was in charge of one of the dog teams, and one of his dogs had given birth. And you really get a sense of this gentle giant as well. He was known for being an animal lover. And I think men like Crean were essentially creating the atmosphere aboard in which morale could be sustained, order could be sustained. Another expedition had spent a winter trapped in the ice of the Weddell Sea, and they had disintegrated into violence and alcoholism and chaos. And the men on endurance, well, they didn't. The ship itself, however, did not. The ice moved. It was constantly being pushed by distant storms, by ocean currents. Waves of pressure, as they would describe it, like shockwaves of pressure would move through the ice.

And they started to crush the ship like an eggshell. In October, Shackleton ordered the crew to abandon ship. A terrible moment for him. And they set up camp on the ice. They waited for the ice to break up. moment for him. And they set up camp on the ice. They waited for the ice to break up. In the weeks after they abandoned insurance, they watched as she was twisted and ripped and torn. And eventually her stern soared up into the air on a day in November 1915. And she slid vertically downwards beneath the ice into the depths of the Weddell Sea. And so there was a very, very difficult few months when it was too icy for the boats, but too watery to stay safely on the ice. So in April, 1916,

they're finally able to get in their boats, strike out, leave the sea ice behind them, and head out to the open sea. They land on Elephant Island. They'd been in open boats on that terrible ocean for about six days. And when they landed, they were really at the very limit of their endurance. Men seemed to lose control. Some wept, one had a heart attack. Some ran around, crazed. It was said like lunatics in the shallows.

They couldn't quite compute that they'd made it through that appalling journey and were now back on dry land. But then that's what's so striking. the shallows that they couldn't quite compute that they'd made it through that appalling journey and were now back on dry land. But then that's what's so striking. Shackleton says that Tom Crean stepped off his boat after sleepless days and nights, after howling Antarctic winds, and he said Tom Crean looked like a man who'd just finished a pleasant day's yachting. They had a problem. No one came by Elephant Island. It was off the beaten track for traders and whalers and fishermen so they still weren't safe so shakhtin made the extraordinary decision to adapt the largest lifeboat by cannibalizing parts from the other two to try and create a boat

in which he could cross really the main body of the southern ocean and reach south georgia go back to the place from which the expedition really had started. Shackton chose the men he wanted to take with him. And now, in most of the cases, they were his best men, true sailors. They were the men you want at your side when the Southern Ocean throws its worst at you, which it would certainly do. And he chose Tom Crean, obviously. They all set off from Elephant Island in this little boat that was never designed to make this kind of journey. This was their last chance of salvation, heading off into a very big, very bad ocean.

And through that hellish experience, Tom Crean was vital. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm telling the story of Tom Crean, Antarctic legend. More coming up. We get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. When he was off duty, he would sit below,

if that's not too grand a word. There was a slim piece of canvas covering the boat, so there was a deck of sorts. He would sit below, he'd sit there facing Frank Worsley, and the two men would use their feet, like chimpanzees almost, to steady the primer stove. They had a little stove on which, Crean, because he was the designated cook, and he would make a hot dish of hooch, they called it, and that was a bit of fat, a bit of pemmican, disgusting stuff, I've tried it, it's absolutely vile, And a bit of biscuit, all mixed in hot water. Not very tasty, but it provided just enough calories, just enough nourishment, and just enough heat going into your core to give them any hope of surviving. So he'd do his cooking with his hands,

and he'd keep the stove steady with his feet. Hot food, hot powdered milk, as you can imagine, essential to maintaining, well, life, but also morale. But he didn't just play a central role there. He was a tower of strength right around the boat. He downplayed their dire situation. He sang away as he gripped the tiller. He employed humorous banter as there was hurricane force winds, as there were giant waves threatening to swallow them up. I think in a very real sense, he kept those men alive and he kept that boat heading towards South Georgia. It took them 17 days. They found a little cove to pull the boat up in and they pulled themselves over the sides onto the gravel shore and gulped down fresh water that trickled down the cliffs. They had survived. It was a miracle. Their ordeal

was not over because they'd landed on the wrong coast, the westward coast of South Georgia. And they had to get around to the east, which is where all the settlements were. The fittest men, Shackleton, Tom Crean, Frank Worsley, they would have to make the 30-mile trek across the islands, glaciers and ridges. They knew that there was no stopping. If they stopped, they would die. They broke trail. They waded through snow. They survived a night high up in the mountains of South Georgia. The weather just about held for them. They took a few wrong turns. They had to go back on their tracks. But about 36 hours later, having, well, not really stopped, occasionally paused for food,

Shakhtin wouldn't let anyone sleep. He knew that to sleep up there was to die. And this weather-beaten trio, finally, on the 20th of May, they clambered down, staggered into this whaling station. Children turned and fled at the sight of the bedraggled men as they came stumbling out of the wilderness their clothes hanging off them in threads filthy dirty starving looking and after that took shakhtan months and about four attempts to go and rescue the other 22 men on elephant island but rescue them he did the endurance expedition was able to return to the UK, no lives lost. One of the most

astonishing feats in the history of exploration. What about Tom Crean? Well, the remarkable thing, of course, about Tom Crean is he was still in the Navy and the First World War was on. There was a manpower crisis in the UK. He was not to be given time off. He arrived back in the UK. There would be no celebrity appearances, no speaking tour. He went to work. He arrived back very late in 1916, and after New Year, he was put aboard the flagship of the North Atlantic cruiser fleet, King Alfred, and they went to West Africa. We're not quite clear what he did in West Africa, but it was an important node for transatlantic trade, Sierra Leone. And it's possible that he served in an anti-submarine role, protecting ships traveling in convoy across the Atlantic and up the coast of Africa.

And then after about six months or so of that, he arrives back in the UK. We know that because he goes to Ireland and he gets married. On the 5th of September 1917, he married Ellen Hurley, And he gets married. On the 5th of September 1917, he married Ellen Hurley, who was the daughter of an Anascool publican. And the wedding took place in the church of Sacred Heart in Anascool. Shackleton didn't go, but he did send a very nice silver tea set. In that part of Ireland, people were known by nicknames. Very quickly, the couple became known as Tom the Pole and Nell the Pole. Tom and Ellen would go on to have three children, Mary, Eileen and Kate. Tom, though, didn't have much time for a honeymoon. He was back serving at sea in late 1918. He joined HMS Inflexible, one of the most important battle cruisers in the Navy. He joined just after the armistice, just in time to escort the German

High Seas Fleet to their internment. They surrendered. The German high seas fleet had been forced to hand themselves over to the allies as part of the ceasefire negotiation, the armistice negotiations. This is one of the most dramatic moments I think in naval history. The German fleet, the second most powerful battle fleet in history on earth at the time, which had only once and slightly half-heartedly taken on the British fleet at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. They'd spent most of the war in harbour. They left harbour, they sorted from their harbour, and they were met in the North Sea by the Allies, the Royal Navy. There were some Canadian ships there, American ships there. And on board in

Flexible, one of those ships was Tom Craney, who'd been promoted to warrant officer, and he was in charge of quarter-deck duties. He was actually the bosun on Inflexible. In a long line, the German ships made their way slowly across the North Sea, and either side of them, with shells loaded, Allied warships escorted them all the way across to Orkney. And if you're a bosun of Inflexible, you are one of the elite. Tom Cream would have watched the greatest assemblage of naval force at that point in history. So British and Canadians, American ships, all shepherding these German ships in. The German guns unloaded, Allied 16-inch guns manned and loaded and laid on their German counterparts. It must have been a very moving day for many of the Inflexible's crew because they'd

had an extraordinary war. They'd been at the Battle of the Falkland Islands, they'd been the Dardanelles Campaign, they'd also been at Jutland, the greatest naval clash of the First World War. She'd rained down blows on her German counterpart, particularly the Lutzau, another German battle cruiser. But in turn, Inflexible had watched as, well, particularly one of her sister ships, Invincible, had been struck by a German shell and that had created a flash fire. It's almost like a, well, almost like a lightning bolt of fire flashed through the ships and detonated in the magazines below and blew the entire ship up. I mean, it just split in two. All but six of the thousand men on board had been

killed. So it must have been such a powerful moment for so many of the British crew on board had been killed. So it must have been such a powerful moment for so many of the British crew on board that day. Strangely, that battle at Jutland had been fought just days after Tom Crean's astonishing hike across South Georgia. But you can see why when he got back, he didn't want to boast, didn't want to show off about what he'd achieved. The men he was serving alongside now had seen the white heat of battle. They'd watched friends obliterated from the face of the sea. Everyone aboard that day had done something remarkable. The following year, 1919, we find Tom Crean in northern Russia. The Brits had, well, intervened really in the Russian civil war that had broken out following the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. And Britain in

particular had pushed supplies and troops into northern Russia using Arctic convoy routes. Tom Crean as a high latitude veteran, Antarctic veteran, was obviously well suited to these kind of roles. And he's active in the North Russia Expeditionary Force. Their job was to keep supply lines open, to support British military establishments ashore, send supplies, aid to Russian troops deemed friendly by the British government. But by the end of 1919, Tom Crean was heading back home. He didn't last much longer in the Navy. He retired on the 24th of March 1920, after 27 years. A couple of conflicts, three expeditions to Antarctica, he'd built himself quite the backstory. And yet after all that, what he wanted to do more than anything else was head back to Anas Kul, his village, where he'd come from. And he wanted nothing more than to run a pub, and who can blame him? But the homeland he returned to was in a state of upheaval.

The Irish War of Independence was raging. Ireland, or large parts of the island of Ireland, were seeking to free themselves from British crown rule. This conflict would divide families, it would test the loyalties of everybody. It must have tested Tom Crean's loyalty. He'd served on British ships, he'd served under British officers his whole professional life. And it's hard to guess exactly how he felt about what was going on at the moment. On the 13th of April, we do know that he joined a number of ex-servicemen as big crowds gathered to protest the treatment of Irish Republican prisoners by the British government. So he's not an unwavering supporter.

He's certainly no unthinking loyalist to the British government at this point. But we can imagine the heartbreak he must have felt in April 1920 when his older brother, Cornelius Crean, was shot and killed in an IRA ambush in County Cork. So his brother had signed up to fight in the Royal Irish Constabulary, signed up to fight for the British government, if you like, and he was killed by the IRA. Tom Crean, his other brother Daniel, and his sister Catherine

were the chief mourners at the funeral. The end of that war didn't bring much respite personally for Tom Crean. Ireland had been partitioned. It was a de facto independent Irish state now in Southern Ireland where Tom Crean lived and had his pub. But there was more sadness for him. On the 15th of September 1924, his mother Catherine died, but perhaps even harder than that for Tom Crean was a mission he set out on, perhaps his last great foreign adventure. Two weeks after losing his mother, he took his second daughter, Kathleen,

losing his mother, he took his second daughter, Kathleen, to Lourdes in France, desperately hoping for divine intervention, desperately hoping he could intercede with God or Our Lady of the Grotto, the Virgin Mary, to end the cycle of ill health that his daughter had been suffering from. Tom took his daughter, believing that the holy water might make her better, but it wasn't to be. They returned to Ireland, and his beloved daughter passed away on the 8th of December, 1924. She was only three years old. Imagine the frustration, the horror that Tom Crean would have felt. He'd been able to save so many lives,

rescue so many seemingly hopeless situations, but there was his own daughter, wasting away in his arms, and there was nothing he could do about it. Some years later, he did open his pub. It would become the South Pole Inn. And you can still stop in there today and have a pint. I strongly recommend that you do. After 10 years of running the pub in 1938, Tom Crean suffered a burst appendix. It should have been a routine procedure to pull it out, but there was no doctor capable of undertaking that operation nearby, and so he was taken 70 miles away to Cork, where his appendix was removed.

But an infection had set in, and after a week in hospital, this hero, this generous, modest, unsung hero, survivor of three major Antarctic expeditions, and much more besides, passed away. It's said that his funeral was the largest Anuskul had ever witnessed, and he was laid to rest close to where he was born, in a family tomb he'd built with his own hands. Atop that tomb, there was a ceramic bowl of flowers that had arrived in a white Rolls Royce, and had been sent by the man whose life he'd saved 26 years earlier, Evans. He had been Lieutenant Teddy Evans when Crean had saved his life. He was now Admiral Lord Mount

Evans. But he owed his life to Tom Crean. He never forgot it. And that ceramic bowl of flowers is still there today. The inscription on the side of the tomb simply reads, Home is the sailor, home from the sea. What a life. Thank you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History. I hope you've all enjoyed this episode on Tom Crean, definitely the most underrated person in the heroic age of Antarctica exploration, and a person whose name should be known better,

and hopefully now in a small way it is. A lot of you actually requested the biography of Tom Crean a few years back when i went on the endurance 22 expedition to find his ship in antarctica and so i'm glad finally belatedly to be able to uh give you what you've asked for i've got to say following in the footsteps of men like tom crean and shackleton down to antarctica to experience not what they went through but just a scintilla of what they endured was one of the most astonishing experience of my life the antarctic is To experience not what they went through, but just a scintilla of what they endured, was one of the most astonishing experiences of my life. The Antarctic is the last great wilderness on the planet. It's a magical place, a place of incredible extremes, a beautiful light of intense darkness, of storms, of stars, of wind and wave, and frozen stillness.

And folks, it's incredibly cold. I just don't know how they survived living for days and weeks on the ice. And that brings me to the next episode of the podcast. Join me on Wednesday for our next In Our Shackleton series as I tell you the incredible story of how we discovered endurance, how the expedition went,

the highs, the lows, some of the behind the scenes that maybe you will not be seeing on the documentary, and how we also, like Endurance, like that wooden ship, how we also got stuck in the ice. Danger is never far away. It's quite a story, folks, so please don't miss it. Hit follow in your podcast player

and check back on the feed for my story of searching for shackleton's lost ship you you