The reassessment of Henry McNish’s contribution, and of the injustice of the Polar Medal decision, has been another form of evolution. In 1959, when Alfred Lansing wrote Endurance and introduced the story to a modern audience, McNish’s role was acknowledged but his exclusion from the medals was not heavily criticized. By the early twenty-first century, the full accounting of what McNish built and what the James Caird crossing required had sharpened the critical view of Shackleton’s decision. McNish is now regularly described as one of the unsung heroes of the survival. A bronze cat, Mrs. Chippy, sits on top of McNish’s grave in Wellington, placed there in 2004 by the New Zealand Antarctic Society — a gesture of restoration for the animal that was killed 89 years earlier.
Percy Blackborow, the youngest person on the expedition, survived his lost toes and lived until 1949. His stowaway beginning and his distinction as the first to land on Elephant Island are the details that tend to appear in popular summaries of the expedition. Less often noted is that he was nineteen years old when the ordeal began, that he spent his twenty-first birthday in the hut on Elephant Island, and that his feet were amputated in that hut by the expedition’s surgeons using whatever instruments and anesthetics were available. He healed. He went home. His employer gave him a job for life.
The story keeps returning to specifics. The four sun sights. The 36 hours. The 134 days. The 3,008 meters. The ship’s name, still legible on the stern. The stories of the 28 men who came home and the 22 who waited and the six who crossed the ocean in a 22-foot boat and the three who walked 40 miles across uncharted mountains in 36 hours and the Chilean naval pilot who took an underpowered harbor tug through the fog to an island at the edge of the world.