“Everyone has an Antarctica. What's yours?”

[Dave Monroe]

ELIZABETH RENZETTI

>From Saturday's Globe and Mail

E-mail Elizabeth Renzetti | Read Bio | Latest Columns
October 24, 2008 at 10:52 PM EDT

LONDON — A little more than 100 years ago, Ernest Shackleton sat in an
office on Regent Street in London's West End and interviewed men who
were hoping to accompany him on the journey of a lifetime. Specialist
qualifications were not necessary; if Shackleton liked the cut of
someone's jib, he was on board. Perhaps the man could carry a tune, or
had been to art school with his sister, or, in one case, had just
woken from an interesting dream about ice.

The interviews never took more than five minutes, because the primary
quality Shackleton sought, the one factor that separated potential
teammates from those who would remain in London's choking fog, was
optimism. Because this time, having failed once, Ernest Shackleton was
going to reach the South Pole.

A century later, in a restaurant just off Regent Street, where until
very recently flocks of bankers drank vodka shots at a bar made of
ice, two men are examining the puffy coats they hope will keep them
warm in Antarctica.

[...]

... Mr. Gow is Shackleton's great-great-nephew by marriage. The
chiselled, wind-chapped gentleman with him is Lieutenant-Colonel Henry
Worsley, whose ancestor Frank Worsley famously navigated the lifeboat
that saved Shackleton's shipwrecked crew on another doomed venture –
the 1914 Endurance expedition.

They are about to leave London, accompanied by Henry Adams, the
great-grandson of Jameson Boyd Adams, who was the meteorologist on the
1908 journey. On Oct. 29, exactly 100 years after the great explorer
along with Adams and two other men set off in his bid to be first to
the pole, members of the Shackleton Centenary Expedition will set off
for Chile and then to Antarctica, where they, too, plan to ski to the
South Pole.

The main purpose of the expedition is to raise money for their new
charity, the Shackleton Foundation, but there's a more personal score
to settle – in Col. Worsley's words, "we need to complete some
unfinished family business."

That's because, despite the fame that clings to his name, Shackleton
never reached his most desired target.

[...]

The foundation already has a slogan, pinched, improbably, from Thomas
Pynchon: "Everyone has an Antarctica. What's yours?"

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081024.wcover25/BNStory/International/home

"'Everyone has an Antarctic,' says Hugh Godolphin." (V, p. 241)

http://www.hyperarts.com/thomas-pynchon/v/alpha/a.html

http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=A