Japan also had a heroic explorer dashing to the South Pole 100 years ago ? and he did it on a shoestring
FOR a few weeks in January 1912, Antarctica was teeming with explorers. Roald Amundsen and his Norwegian party had reached the South Pole on 14 December and were speeding back to the coast. On 17 January, Robert Scott and the men of the British Antarctic expedition had arrived at the pole to find they had been beaten to it. Dejected, they began to retrace their steps in what turned out to be their final journey. Just then, a third man with polar aspirations arrived on the scene. Nobu Shirase was a little late but no less determined to cover himself in glory.
In the story of the race to the South Pole, Shirase is the invisible man. A Japanese explorer, his part in one of the greatest adventure stories of the 20th century is hardly known outside his own country. Yet as Scott was nearing the pole and with the world still unaware of Amundsen's triumph, Shirase and the Japanese Antarctic expedition sailed into Antarctica's Bay of Whales in the smallest ship ever to try its luck in these perilous waters. On 19 January 1912, the little wooden schooner sailed up to the edge of the Ross ice shelf and left Shirase and his men to scale the immense wall of ice ready for a daring dash south.
Lieutenant Shirase was a middle-aged army reservist who since boyhood had dreamed of becoming a polar explorer. In Japan, the very idea was startling. When Shirase was born, people were forbidden to leave the country on pain of death. The overthrow of the ruling dynasty in 1868 brought modernisation and new ideas, but they didn't extend as far as polar exploration. Undeterred, Shirase toughened himself up in readiness. He didn't drink or smoke. He spurned the warmth of a fire in winter and refused hot food and drinks. Like Amundsen, he initially set his sights on the North Pole. But after the American Robert Peary claimed to have reached it in 1909, both men hastily revamped their plans. Instead, like Scott, they would aim for the last big prize: the South Pole.
In January 1910, Shirase put his plans before the elected officials of Japan's Imperial Diet. "Within three years," he told the assembled politicians, "I vow to raise our Japanese imperial flag at the South Pole." For many, the question wasn't could he do it but what was the point? It wasn't just about being first to the pole, Shirase said. It was also about science.
The agenda for would-be Antarctic explorers had been set 15 years earlier by the International Geographical Congress. As the last unknown continent, the congress declared, the Antarctic offered the chance to add to knowledge in almost every branch of science. So, like the British, Shirase presented his expedition as a quest for knowledge rather than a bid for personal glory. He would bring back rocks and fossils, make meteorological measurements and explore unknown parts of the continent.
The response was cool. Neither the government nor the public had much appetite for such a venture and the press poked fun at the whole idea. Shirase struggled both to raise funds and to find scientists to accompany him. His supporters accused the nation's scientists of being too keen on home comforts and too cowardly to risk their lives for science. Who needed them anyway, argued one. It didn't take an Einstein to collect rocks or jot down the temperature or wind speed.
A few months later, Japan's former prime minister Shigenobu Okuma came to Shirase's rescue. With Okuma's backing, Shirase scraped together enough money to buy and equip a small schooner, quickly renamed the Kainan Maru, or "Southern Pioneer". He eventually acquired a scientist, too, albeit not one known in the usual scientific circles.
At the end of November 1910, the Kainan Maru finally left Tokyo with 27 men and 28 Siberian dogs on board. Before leaving, Shirase confidently outlined his plans to the press. He would reach Antarctica in February, during the southern summer.
Then, like Amundsen and Scott, he would spend the winter exploring and preparing for his push to the pole the following spring: "On 15 September, when the winter will have ended, the party will proceed to the pole." His men, he proclaimed, would travel more than 1400 kilometres over the ice in 155 days and "return to the rendezvous by the latter part of February 1912".
Things didn't go according to plan. The difficulty raising funds had already delayed the expedition. Bad weather delayed it further. The storm-battered Kainan Maru didn't reach New Zealand until 8 February; Amundsen and Scott had already been in Antarctica a month and were now preparing for winter.
When the ship stopped at Wellington to take on supplies, New Zealand's reporters flocked to the quayside. They were astonished. At 200 tonnes and 30 metres long, the "strange little three-masted vessel" was half the size of Amundsen's ship, Fram, and a third the size of Scott's Terra Nova. True, the hull was reinforced with extra planking and iron plate, but the ship had only the feeblest engine to help force its way through ice. Could it really survive in the unforgiving Southern Ocean?
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